Creationism and the Ancient Mythic Mind

Creationism and the Ancient Mythic Mind

I thought it might be interesting to comment briefly on what it means to be a creationist in our day vs. what it meant to be a creationist in antiquity.  This deals with the difference between the modern ‘rational’ mind and the ancient mythic mind; the key is in understanding what the two best represent and, more importantly, what the two mean when undergoing any critical investigation of Creationism, Intelligent Design, and the account of origins found in ancient literature (in this case, Genesis).

What is creationism?  Before we answer that question I should stress what this short discussion is about.  When it comes down to creationism, what we are really talking about, whether modern or ancient, is myth.  What does it mean when we talk about myth and the mythic mind? Words like myth, and cognates mythic and mythical, do not imply that the subject is false, as a dichotomy of ‘truth’. Categories like ‘true’ and ‘false’ are terms which are too objective and too modern for our short study of myth.  Rather, myth must be understood as something that is neither bound by genre, culture, naturalism, or science.  I know the implications of what I’m saying; but this should not be understood as a statement of faith.  Myth is often not constructed with the intent to replace reality, but to coexist with it as an entity of its own.   This is often true of ancient myth more than it is of modern myth; our news media spins myth daily as a replacement for reality, but most ancient authors did not have that intention while creating or discussing myth.

For the ancient audience, myth was not looked at rationally—at least not in every instance (some naturalists, like Epicurus and Lucretius, did, in effect, consider myth to be in direct opposition to reality). That is to say, in our modern world, if we want to know about a possible “history” behind a myth, we can draw it out by rationalizing myth.  This is something the ancients rarely concerned themselves with.  We, however, focus on the parts of these “histories” that seem “less made up;” when we read the Iliad and the Odyssey we recognize that wars happen regularly, so it isn’t so hard for us to believe that some type of war, in some fashion, did occur between the ancient Mycenaeans and the Trojans. It isn’t a stretch for this part of the narrative of the Trojan War to become the historical kernel of truth that we want to grasp hold of. Cities do exist in 1200 BCE, some historians have suggested, so we might as well assume the conclusion that the city of Troy existed; Hector might be a completely fictional character, but Troy must have existed. All of this seems to make a lot of historical sense when you think abstractly enough about it. The myth of the Trojan War becomes a factual reality for us.   The shame of it is we often rationalize without even thinking about it.

Consider, for example, a maximalist perspective on the conquest of Canaan by the Israelites on their return from Egypt.  The fall of Jericho, according to the Biblical account, was the result of priests blowing their ram horns at the walls and the encircling of the city several times by the children of Israel.  The extraBiblical rationalizing that some maximalists partake in is that the walls came down due to sound waves from the ram horns and vibrations from the marching army of Israel—the truth is quite to the contrary, evidence suggests that natural disaster destroyed Jericho and nothing else, sometime during the 16^th century BCE.  The city was eventually rebuilt and has been continuously inhabited since ancient times.  So why then do we rationalize this myth?  If it was an earthquake which affected the whole region, not simply one city, why do some scholars rationalize the Biblical telling of the story?  Clearly the Biblical authors did not think sound waves tumbled the walls of Jericho—for them, it was the power and will of God.  Moreso, the event itself had never occurred historically, but the authors of Joshua clearly felt it necessary to include it; for them the battle Jericho, as it is expressed in the Bible, was a miracle and a part of their traditional history, even if the story had never occurred as a unique segment of real history.   What does that tell us about the authors?  What can that tell us about how we examine history?

But then we must ask the question which I believe is often neglected: did the Jews, or for that matter the Greeks and Romans, think the way we do? This question must be investigated within its relationship to the ancient mythic mind. The problem, however, is that what literature we have from the past is hardly about historical, rational events. Returning to the example of the Iliad and the Odyssey, we aren’t looking at a rational telling of a war between two opposing economic powers in the ancient world. What one reads is a tale about an entire Greek army sailing across the Aegean to fight another army because the prince of that kingdom stole the wife of the brother of the king. To put this into perspective, it would be as if President Obama decided to invade the UK because the presidents’ brother’s wife ran off with the Queen’s son. As bizarre as that may sound, this is precisely the reason why the composers of the Homeric epics portray the start of the war.  The Iliad does not even mention, even in passing, any other factor for it—unlike the movie Troy, where control over the Aegean and more wealth is the primary motive for Agamemnon (another example of our modern desire to rationalize myth). Alexandros stole Helen from Menelaus and that was all the reason the Greeks needed to fight a ten-year war with Troy. This is hardly historical, regardless of how we rationalize it. Therefore, the story, quite plainly, is about something else other than history. Perhaps it’s about the differences between passion and reason, the steadfastness of honor and heroics, the bonds of kinship, and about the power of the Gods. Homer was no historian. But that is precisely the point, isn’t it? In our world, we quantify reality, we make it tangible and, if we wish to accept myth, we try to bottle it up into our modern, rational, historical mindset by creating a new rational context for it.

The difference between our modern historical mindset and the mythic mind of the ancient Greeks and Jews is that they seem to have cared little, if at all, about historically rationalizing their past.  “There is nothing new under the sun;” the phrase from Ecclesiastes is well known, if not famous, and suggests for us a very peculiar aspect of ancient mythic thought.  Thomas L. Thompson writes:

This ahistorical axiom of ancient Hellenistic thought gives voice to the structures of traditions about the past which were created in the ancient world.  It puts these traditions at odds with the goals of modern historical methods which are rather centered in defining events of the past as unique. (Thompson, 2000)

For the author(s) of this passage, the world was as it should be and the future, along with its past, would be as well.  History, in a Hegelian manner, was predetermined and set long before anyone scribbled down a verse.  For the Greeks, the Trojan War was not only an account of their past, it was datable–even though the story was essentially invented by Homer, from beginning to end. They were not concerned with whether or not Achilles had really been the son of a God; they simply accepted it as a part of a world that existed in the past known to us as the Heroic Age. They lived in a mindset where history and myth were bed fellows.  It might be argued that they just simply did not know that Homer had invented the tradition, but this is a hardpressed argument to make.  At least the educated would have had some large understanding of creating tradition.  Origen, a well educated Christian, knew of the mythical traditions when he wrote his treatise against Celsus in the second century CE:

We are embarrassed by the fictitious stories which for some unknown reasons are bound up with the opinion, which everyone believes, that there really was a war in Troy between the Greeks and the Trojans. (Origen, Contra Celsum 1.42)

All cultures of the ancient past engaged in free tradition adaptation and invention.  The truth is that myth was an acceptable part of history; even if Origen felt embarrassed by it the larger population, even educated individuals, did not.  Tradition was far more important, it seems, than historical truth.  This is perhaps best exposed in a figurative dialogue in Sophocles’ Antigone, where the tragic heroine Antigone and the hereditary new king Creon debate concerning the status of tradition vs. patriotism and citizenship; it didn’t matter that Antigone’s kin had betrayed the city and, along with seven other kingdoms, attempted to burn it to the ground—what mattered was that she wanted the rights to give him a proper burial, as this was traditional.

I tend to like Ambrose Bierce’s definition of myth. He writes that myth is ‘The body of a primitive people’s beliefs concerning its origin, early history, heroes, deities and so forth, as distinguished from the true accounts which it invents later’. This summary definition by Bierce is what this treatment hopes to argue, although with some modifications.

The creation account in Genesis is a great example of how the ancient mythic mind and the modern rational mind conflict and make Bierce’s point a maxim.  For the purpose of this discussion, I will leave out the obvious Intertextual trends between Genesis and other ancient Near Eastern creation myths and “histories” like the Epic of Gilgamesh and for the moment pretend as if the author(s) and later editors of Genesis had not been aware of these narratives.  In the story of creation from Genesis, the author uses clear language; God created (or, perhaps, separated) the heavens and (or, from) the earth.  God then created light and separated it from darkness.  On the second day God created a firmament to keep them separate, and added flood gates to this firmament to allow for the water that existed above to fall to the earth below.  On the third day he gathered the waters under the heavens into one pool of water (one place) and the dry land (earth) appeared. God then called forth vegetation from the ground, which grew (despite the lack of a sun and photosynthesis).  Then the fourth day; God created two lights (the moon isn’t a light, it acts as a mirror, but anyway…), the Sun and the Moon along with the stars (which are also suns—so really God created billions and billions of lights).  With that, the day passed and along came day number five.  On the fifth day, God filled the waters and skies with sea life and birds, and populated the land with animals of all kinds.  Finally, on day six, God creates man.  Then, some time later, he creates woman.  This is precisely how the creation story is laid out in Genesis 1 (and we don’t want to go into the contradictions between Genesis 1 and 2).  It doesn’t matter that the account is completely incomprehensibly flawed according to modern science, objective observation, and common sense; to the ancient mind, this was completely acceptable.  For modern man, this account is a huge problem—they may not always admit it, but there is no way to reconcile this with reason.  So, Creationism and Intelligent Design were fabricated as a means to do away with certain aspects of reason (like the use of real science) while utilizing less stringent methods to frame the story in a postmodern way.

Christian positions of Intelligent Design and Creationism interpret Genesis and recreate it; these positions purport to take the account of Genesis literally, but in fact they distort the account by moving the narrative away from its mythic background while attempting to place it into a rational (and here I use this term tentatively) framework; they attempt to justify the blatantly clear mythic tone by stapling it to pseudoscience and hyperbole.  In a very strong sense, Intelligent Design and Creationism recreate Genesis—they are interpreting it against itself and the modern world rather than understanding it within its mythic mindset.  By recreating the Genesis account, Intelligent Design followers invent a new account of the past.  Like the “rational faith” tactics of theological seminaries and “universities” like Liberty, they spend a great deal of time marketing these positions as fact- or science-based initiatives with their own journals and seminars; they do this while maintaining, almost universally, that the Bible has the answers.

While some might argue that this is, in itself, a unique form of a mythic mind, the difference is that Creationists and Intelligent Design enthusiasts work hard to replace modern scientific investigations with the Bible; they seek to bend natural law and forego factual data and evidence by superimposing the Bible as the authority rather than simply accepting the two as existing mutually inclusively towards one another.  This brand of thought is really nothing short of a contradiction, for something cannot replace science while attempting to claim it uses science.  This flat dichotomy is what, perhaps, most escapes discussion in the debate.  But while this is perhaps the most obvious and possibly least discussed aspect of Creationism and Intelligent Design by both proponents and dissidents, and since the focus on challenging these two nonscientific positions remain ever-presently entangled on the nuances of the contradiction (i.e. on specific flaws in Creationism logic and “science” practices, or on engaging flat out lies in Creationist/Intelligent Design arguments), the discussion misses perhaps the most striking embarrassment to Creationism and Intelligent Design; the complete loss of mythic mind and the role it once served for the ancients who understood Genesis in a way that modern Christianity, in particular, has itself lost sight.

For Tertullian, for Irenaeus, even for Philo of Alexandria who allegorically explained creation according to the Bible, the words of Genesis were not representations of a rational sting of events but, rather, were the words of God, divinely inspired, to explain why things were as they were.  Modern Creationists use the Bible as a template to explain things in a manner becoming a paranormal investigation.  Other cultures, like certain Native American tribes for example, still maintain a mythic mindset—they are not bound to renaissance-period western idealism and, in many ways, post-modern philosophical western idealism.  If you seek out certain Native American shaman, for example, the stories of creation for them are wound up around the same sort of mythology we find in the Genesis account; there is little or no hint whatsoever of neoclassical rationality in the Iroquois tradition of Hah-nu-nah, the turtle, carrying the earth (oeh-da) on its back; there is no pseudoscientific explanation for the two birds flying up to the great tree to bring down Ata-en-sic, the mother of good and evil (the twins Do-ya-da-no, the light and the darkness, sun and moon), to oeh-da.  For traditional shamans, events like these happened according to their own traditions.  They do not create rationalizations for them in order to replace modern scientific understanding; there are no movements to teach Iroquois creationism in school in place of or along side of evolution.  Comparatively, it is the Native American who maintains his own mythic mind while the Christian Creationist is content with doing away with it.

I must reiterate that I am in no way supporting Creationism, Intelligent Design, or even Iroquois mythology; my intention here is only to stress the difference for a modern audience who may not understand or appreciate the irony or the history.  It is easy for the modern critic to say that Genesis is myth, but have no real gain on what implications that statement has.  For the ancient audience, myth was a part of their Genesis because myth coexisted with history and for the modern supporter of Creationism, myth is absent from their Genesis.  The book of Genesis, while relatively unchanged since Late Antiquity, is not the problem and never has been.  The issue for today’s critics of Creationism is not the mythology but the mindset of the Creationist.  It is here that one must pick there battles.

Why I Choose Not to Support Blasphemy Day

As Joe Hoffmann puts it, “this preposterous exercise in how to be religiously offensive is as tactless as it is pointless.”

A few years ago, I helped organize the Blasphemy Challenge.  At the time, it was useful.  We had a target (Christians who never read the Bible).  We had a purpose (to allow atheists to step out of the “closet” and tell the world they were not afraid).  We brought atheism into the media light–even before Dawkins’ book The God Delusion (2006) hit book shelves and took off running.  We challenged preconceived notions about atheism by letting atheists speak for themselves.  This was over four years ago.

While some may say that Blasphemy Day is the same, it isn’t.  There was a message behind the Blasphemy Challenge; it was not meant to ridicule.  It was meant to awaken minds.  Blasphemy Day has no real message other than to say “We’re here, now STFU and watch while I degrade this crucifix!”    America, and the world, has already been made aware of atheists, their large numbers (as referenced by President Obama during his inaugural speech and his discussion on faith before he became president).  What possible point could such a Blasphemy Day serve?

Additionally, my ideals have changed some.  I left activism because I no longer felt I believed in the direction it was headed.  If this is where activism has arrived, I am glad I stepped off the bus when I did.  Secular thought, critical thinking; these characteristics used to be the staple of atheist organizations and at some point (perhaps I am a little responsible for this), it became about ridicule and isolationism.  We are isolating ourselves from other atheist communities, other freethought organizations, other humanist organizations, and now we want to isolate ourselves once again from society.  By participating in Blasphemy Day, we are saying “we’re different” rather than saying “we’re the same” and the rest of the world–who have had spent all that time rethinking what they had thought about atheist organizations–will start to develop those same stigmas about us.  We’re stepping backwards rather than moving forward.

I’m not saying that irrational beliefs do not deserve to be criticized–what I am saying is that irrational beliefs deserve to be criticized.   When someone tells you that the world was created in 6 literal days, its okay to criticize the claim.  Analyze it, discuss it–but ridicule it?  I’m not sure what simply ridiculing a belief will accomplish when the person you’re talking to can not be embarrassed.  If a person believes the earth was created in 6 literal days, they believe you’re the idiot for not agreeing with them.  Ridiculing their beliefs is only going to make them hold on tighter.

You can’t kick the crutch out from under someone who faithfully believes they cannot walk without it.  You need to first show them that the crutch is useless and let them toss it away themselves.  In effect, Blasphemy Day is a thousand people kicking at a few crutches.  There is no doubt in my mind that these people will simply hold on for dear life and, in the end, may even use their crutches to swing back at us.

Of Men and Muses

Well Book 1 is here!  It’s not my monograph, however.  Two more yet to go this year!

Robert Eisenman Adds His Perspective to the Gerd Luedemann Court Decision

Jesus Project fellow Robert Eisenman writes of the Luedemann case that it has a deep roots in the German educational system, going back to the Enlightenment itself:

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“….Allow me to express a last follow-up example from Gerd’s own homeland and this two centuries earlier in the 1780’s when Moses Mendelssohn was wrestling with similar issues under circumstances relating to his nascent and growing Jewish Community in Germany and his own anomalous position concerning issues of ‘faith’ and ‘faithlessness’ which were on the rise and front-and-center in it — namely, the example he cited in Jerusalem, which might have helped Gerd’s case if his lawyers had been aware of it (though I doubt it), and that was the situation of ‘the mohel’ or circumcisor who had lost his faith and whose position and, therefore, the payment of his salary had come into question.

Mendelssohn’s conclusion after a certain amount of argumentation, brilliant as it was, was so simple in its clarity that picturesquely it might have helped in the staid atmosphere of courtroom Germany; and that was, as Mendelssohn put it in his own inimitable way: “A foreskin was cut” whatever the faith of faithlessness of the individual doing the cutting (Paul might have appreciated this one). For him, that was all of the matter a given Community had a right to concern itself with and no more, which was in this case Mendelssohn standing up for Mendelssohn against similar Communal religious authorities demanding like-minded conformity — certainly not the private beliefs of the individual — in Gerd’s case, this would be as long as the courses were taught to the standard of scholarly excellence for which Gerd is known. An example such as this from such an alien source, but still in the Germany of two centuries ago before the tragic events of more recent history, might have really got the Courtroom’s attention; but as they say hindsight is twenty-twenty and in cases, such as this, when a Court is intent on a given decision, as I have personally had occasion to notice, nothing is going to help.

I don’t know if any of this might prove helpful, but it does at least indicate the fellow-feeling one shares against such shallow parochialism and that these kinds of situations actually are not new in Germany, but even can go back several hundred years to the situation of guest communities desperately trying to deal with the challenges of modern intellectual life there.

With all kind regards, I remain

Robert Eisenman

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Sad News for the Academy: German Courts Limit Theological Inquiry

Dear readers,

The following is written by Joe Hoffmann concerning news we, at the Jesus Project, have just heard this morning. Gerd Luedemann has lost his ten-year-long court battle in Germany. The ruling should surprise every critical mind, but it should be of great concern to those in the academy. Gerd writes (in regards to this piece below);

“As for Küng who is always mentioned when people hear about my case, he never went to court but settled with his university. My case is different because for the first time in history the German Supreme Court has issued a full statement on the role of theology in the university and the statement is anti-enlightenment because it plainy states that at German Universities the confession of a church or of any future religion overrides the academic freedom of a professor. That is an intellectial scandel against which the international intellectual community should protest the more so because the University of Göttingen rightly boast of being an enlightenment university (founded in 1737). And this ruling makes truely critical work at German theological faculties – both protestant and catholic – impossible.”

Where the once proud enlightened scholars brought the academy into a new world of theological inquiry, the courts have rules that such inquiry has limits. This is not the first time a scholar has been quieted in German universities because of dogmatic boundaries. And unfortunately, as this case proves, it will not be the last. All of academia should be in an uproar over this incident.

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Gerd Luedemann: Non sine causa…laudatus

Gerd Luedemann, Professor of History and Literature of Early Christianity in the University of Goettingen, has received word from the Federal Constitutional Court in Germany that his appeal against an earlier ruling excluding him from the teaching of New Testament in the University’s Faculty of Theology has been rejected.

The basis for the Court’s ruling hinges on the fact that Professor Luedemann was “reassigned” to a position outside the Faculty offering essentially the same teaching and research opportunities as his previous position. In addition, the Court decided that the confessional teaching of theology is a unique responsibility of the Theology Faculty and that its interest in retaining a distinctive identity outweighed Professor Luedemann’s claim that the reassignment impinged on his academic (“scientific”) freedom.

The tradition of theological education in many European countries, including Germany, differs substantially from the American situation, where ministerial training is largely the province of private and parochial institutions or, in the case of distinguished private divinity schools such as Harvard, Yale and Chicago, subject to the same guarantees of academic freedom that obtain in the university as a whole.

Professor Luedemann’s distinguished work in the study of early Christianity now serves as a test-case for the entrenched and sometimes unnoticed parochialism of the European model, where—in this case–the open criticism of doctrine and theological axioms such as the resurrection of Jesus has been deemed impermissible, precisely in the interest of maintaining parochial identities. One can imagine no other area of serious study in the modern university where such a rule should be permitted to stand, or be used as the basis of a legal judgment. This case throws into bold relief the archaic nature of the marriage between Christian theology and scholarship as it is still protected by law not only in Germany, but in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Switzerland as well.

Rooted in the political compromises of the Reformation, the structure of European theological education should become a matter of concern and a priority for the educational commissions of the European Union. Cases such as Luedemann’s, and earlier Hans Kueng’s at Tuebingen on the Catholic side, suggest that it is feckless to complain about the regressive nature of scholarship in the Arab world when seminal Christian doctrines can prevail over common sense and free inquiry in some of the most distinguished institutions of higher learning in the world.

We congratulate Gerd Luedemann in bearing the torch in this cause–and “fighting the good fight”

R. Joseph Hoffmann, Chair

Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion;

Co-Chair, The Jesus Project

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Please blog this article. Word of this travesty must get out to all and everyone.

The Quest of the Mythical Jesus

This article can be found here.  It’s a great, personal story of how Bob went from historicist to mythicist.   Enjoy.

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The Quest of the Mythical Jesus

Robert M. Price

When, long ago, I first learned that some theorized that Jesus had never existed as an historical figure, I dismissed the notion as mere crankism, as most still do. Indeed, Rudolf Bultmann, supposedly the arch-skeptic, quipped that no sane person could doubt that Jesus existed (though he himself came surprisingly close to the same opinion, as did Paul Tillich). For a number of years I held a more or less Bultmannian estimate of the historical Jesus as a prophet heralding the arrival of the eschatological Kingdom of God, an end to which his parables, faith healings and exorcisms were directed. Jesus had, I thought, predicted the coming of the Son of Man, an angelic figure who should raise the dead and judge mankind. When his cleansing of the temple invited the unforgiving ire of the Sadducee establishment, in cahoots with the Romans, he sealed his own doom. He died by crucifixion, and a few days later his disciples began experiencing visions of him raised from the dead. They concluded that he himself was now to be considered the Son of Man, and they expected his messianic advent in the near future.

From this eminently reasonable position (its cogency reinforced by the postmortem unfolding of the messiahship of Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson) I eventually found myself gravitating to that crazy view, that Jesus hadn’t existed, that he was mythic all the way down, like Hercules. I do not hold it as a dogma. I do not prefer that it be true. It is just that the evidence now seems to me to point that way. The burden of proof would seem to belong with those who believe there was an historical man named Jesus. I fully admit and remind the reader that all historical hypotheses are provisional and tentative. This one certainly is. And yet I do favor it. Why?

I remember first encountering the notion that the Jesus saga was formally similar to the Mediterranean dying and rising god myths of saviors including Attis, Adonis, Tammuz/Dumuzi, Dionysus, Osiris, and Baal. I felt almost at once that the jig was up. I could not explain away those parallels, parallels that went right to the heart of the thing. I felt momentary respite when I read the false reassurances of Bruce M. Metzger (may this great man rest in peace), J.N.D. Anderson, Edwin Yamauchi (may I someday gain a tenth of his knowledge!), and others that these parallels were false or that they were later in origin, perhaps even borrowed by the pagans from Christianity. But it did not take long to discover the spurious nature of such apologetical special pleading. There was ample and early pre-Christian evidence for the dying and rising gods. The parallels were very close. And it was simply not true that no one ever held that, like Jesus, these saviors had been historical figures. And if the ancient apologists had not known that the pagan parallels were pre-Christian, why on earth would they have mounted a suicidal argument that Satan counterfeited the real dying and rising god ahead of time. That is like the fundamentalists of the 19th century arguing desperately that God created fossils of dinosaurs that had never existed.

And, yet, all of this scarcely proved that Jesus had not existed at all. Bultmann freely admitted that such myths clothed and shaped the form of resurrection belief among the early Christians, but he felt there had actually been certain Easter morning experiences, visions that might have given rise to a different explanation in a different age. I now think Bultmann’s argument runs afoul of Ockham’s Razor, since it posits redundant explanations. If you recognize the recurrence of the pagan savior myth in the Christian proclamation, then no need remains to suggest an initial “Big Bang” (Burton L. Mack) of an Easter Morning Experience of the First Disciples.

G.A. Wells, like his predecessors advocating the Christ Myth theory, discounted the gospel story of an historical Jesus, an itinerant teacher and miracle worker, on the grounds of its seeming absence from the Epistle literature, earlier than the gospels, implying that there was no Jesus tradition floating around in either oral or written form at the time Paul and Peter were writing letters. All they referred to was a supernatural Son of God who descended from heaven to vanquish the evil angels ruling the world, then returned heavenward to reign in divine glory till his second advent. Had Paul known of the teaching of Jesus, why did he not quote it when it would have settled this and that controversial question (e.g., paying Roman taxes, celibacy for the Kingdom, congregational discipline)? Why does he seem to refer to occasional “commands of the Lord” in a manner so vague as to suggest charismatic revelations to himself? Why does he never mention Jesus having healed the sick or done miracles? How can he say the Roman Empire never punishes the righteous, only the wicked?

This is a weighty argument, but another makes it almost superfluous. Take the gospel Jesus story as a whole, whether earlier or later than the Jesus story of the Epistles; it is part and parcel of the Mythic Hero Archetype shared by cultures and religions worldwide and throughout history (Lord Raglan and then, later, Alan Dundes showed this in great detail.). Leave the gospel story on the table, then. You still do not have any truly historical data. There is no “secular” biographical information about Jesus. Even the seeming “facts” irrelevant to faith dissolve upon scrutiny. Did he live in Nazareth? Or was that a tendentious reinterpretation of the earlier notion he had been thought a member of the Nazorean sect? Did he work some years as a carpenter? Or does that story not rather reflect the crowd’s pegging him as an expert in scripture, a la the Rabbinic proverb, “Not even a carpenter, or a carpenter’s son could solve this one!”? Was his father named Joseph, or is that an historicization of his earlier designation as the Galilean Messiah, Messiah ben Joseph? On and on it goes, and when we are done, there is nothing left of Jesus that does not appear to serve all too clearly the interests of faith, the faith even of rival, hence contradictory, factions among the early Christians.

I admit that a historical hero might attract to himself the standard flattering legends and myths to the extent that the original lines of the figure could no longer be discerned. He may have lived nonetheless. Can we tell the difference between such cases and others where we can still discern at least some historical core? Apollonius of Tyana, itinerant Neo-Pythagorean contemporary of Jesus (with whom the ancients often compare him) is one such. He, too, seems entirely cut from the cloth of the fabulous. His story, too, conforms exactly to the Mythic Hero Archetype. To a lesser extent, so does Caesar Augustus, of whom miracles were told. The difference is that Jesus has left no footprint on profane history as these others managed to do. The famous texts of Josephus and Tacitus, even if genuine, amount merely to references to the preaching of contemporary Christians, not reporting about Jesus as a contemporary. We still have documentation from people who claimed to have met Apollonius, Peregrinus, and, of course, Augustus. It might be that Jesus was just as historical as these other remarkable individuals, and that it was mere chance that no contemporary documentation referring to him survives. But we cannot assume the truth of that for which we have no evidence.

A paragraph back, I referred to the central axiom of form criticism: that nothing would have been passed down in the tradition unless it was useful to prove some point, to provide some precedent. I am sorry to say that this axiom cancels out another, the Criterion of Dissimilarity: the closer a Jesus-saying seems to match the practice or teaching of the early Church, the greater likelihood that it stems from the latter and has been placed fictively into the speech or life of Jesus merely to secure its authority. Put the two principles together and observe how one consumes the other without remainder: all pericopae of the Jesus tradition owe their survival to the fact that they were useful. On the assumption that Christians saw some usefulness to them, we can posit a Sitz-im-Leben Kirche for each one. And that means it is redundant to posit a pre-Christian Sitz-im-Leben Jesu context. None of it need go back to Jesus.

Additionally, we can demonstrate that every hortatory saying is so closely paralleled in contemporary Rabbinic or Hellenistic lore that there is no particular reason to be sure this or that saying originated with Jesus. Such words commonly passed from one famous name to another, especially in Jewish circles, as Jacob Neusner has shown. Jesus might have said it, sure, but then he was just one more voice in the general choir. Is that what we want to know about him? And, as Bultmann observed, who remembers the great man quoting somebody else?

Another shocker: it hit me like a ton of bricks when I realized, after studying much previous research on the question, that virtually every story in the gospels and Acts can be shown to be very likely a Christian rewrite of material from the Septuagint, Homer, Euripides’ Bacchae, and Josephus. One need not be David Hume to see that, if a story tells us a man multiplied food to feed a multitude, it is inherently much more likely that the story is a rewrite of an older miracle tale (starring Elisha) than that it is a report of a real event. A literary origin is always to be preferred to an historical one in such a case. And that is the choice we have to make in virtually every case of New Testament narrative. I refer the interested reader to my essay “New Testament Narrative as Old Testament Midrash,” in Jacob Neusner and Alan Avery-Peck, eds., Encyclopedia of Midrash. Of course I am dependent here upon many fine works by Randel Helms, Thomas L. Brodie, John Dominic Crossan, and others. None of them went as far as I am going. It is just that as I counted up the gospel stories I felt each scholar had convincingly traced back to a previous literary prototype, it dawned on me that there was virtually nothing left. None tried to argue for the fictive character of the whole tradition, and each offered some cases I found arbitrary and implausible. Still, their work, when combined, militated toward a wholly fictive Jesus story.

It is not as if I believe there is no strong argument for an historical Jesus. There is one: one can very plausibly read certain texts in Acts, Mark, and Galatians as fossils preserving the memory of a succession struggle following the death of Jesus, who, therefore, must have existed. Who should follow Jesus as his vicar on earth? His disciples (analogous to the Companions of the Prophet Muhammad, who provided the first three caliphs)? Or should it be the Pillars, his own relatives (the Shi’ite Muslims called Muhammad’s kinsmen the Pillars, too, and supported their dynastic claims). One can trace the same struggles in the Baha’i Faith after the death of the Bab (Mirza Ali Muhammad): who should rule, his brother Subh-i-Azal, or his disciple Hussein Ali, Baha’Ullah? Who should follow the Prophet Joseph Smith? His disciples, or his son, Joseph, Jr.? When the Honorable Elijah Muhammad died, Black Muslims split and followed either his son and heir Wareeth Deen Muhammad or his former lieutenant Louis Farrakhan. In the New Testament, as Harnack and Stauffer argued, we seem to see the remains of a Caliphate of James. And that implies (though it does not prove) an historical Jesus.

And it implies an historical Jesus of a particular type. It implies a Jesus who was a latter-day Judah Maccabee, with a group of brothers who could take up the banner when their eldest brother, killed in battle, perforce let it fall. S.G.F. Brandon made a very compelling case for the original revolutionary character of Jesus, subsequently sanitized and made politically harmless by Mark the evangelist. Judging by the skirt-clutching outrage of subsequent scholars, Mark’s apologetical efforts to depoliticize the Jesus story have their own successors. Brandon’s work is a genuine piece of the classic Higher Criticism of the gospels, with the same depth of reason and argumentation. If there was an historical Jesus, my vote is for Brandon’s version.

But I must point out that there is another way to read the evidence for the Zealot Jesus hypothesis. As Burton Mack has suggested, the political element in the Passion seems likely to represent an anachronistic confusion by Mark with the events leading to the fall of Jerusalem. When the Olivet Discourse warns its readers not to take any of a number of false messiahs and Zealot agitators for their own Jesus, does this not imply Christians were receiving the news of Theudas or Jesus ben Ananias or John of Gischala as news of Jesus’ return? You don’t tell people not to do what they’re already not doing. If they were making such confusions, it would be inevitable that the events attached to them would find their way back into the telling of the Jesus story. It looks like this very thing happened. One notices how closely the interrogation and flogging of Jesus ben-Ananias, in trouble for predicting the destruction of the temple, parallels that of Jesus, ostensibly 40 years previously. We notice how Simon bar Gioras was welcomed into the temple with palm branches to cleanse the sacred precinct from the “thieves” who infested it, Zealots under John of Gischala. Uh-oh. Suppose these signs of historical-political verisimilitude are interlopers in the gospels from the following generation. The evidence for the Zealot Jesus evaporates.

I have not tried to amass every argument I could think of to destroy the historicity of Jesus. Rather, I have summarized the series of realizations about methodology and evidence that eventually led me to embrace the Christ Myth Theory. There may once have been an historical Jesus, but for us there is one no longer. If he existed, he is forever lost behind the stained glass curtain of holy myth. At least that’s the current state of the evidence as I see it.

Burning the Mona Lisa: Biblical Literalism and Biblical Nihilism

Equilibrium is a movie based in an alternate reality, where World War 3 claimed the lived of billions, leaving those to survive to question the necessity of emotion. A police force was instituted called the Tetragrammaton, of which the Grammaton Cleric is of the highest rank of the order. Their purpose is to enforce the dosing of a drug called Prozium, which closes off the stimuli in our brains to produce feelings, emotion, sensation. Those who go off the dose, the rebels–known as ’sense offenders’–who are caught are brought to a detention center and are later incinerated for their ‘crimes. ‘ The ultimate fear is that sensations lead to jealousy, hate, fear, war, violence, prejudice, and more. For those who wish to see the movie, I highly recommend it. (It’s a great movie, all around)

At the beginning of the movie, the protagonist John Preston (a senior Cleric, master of the gun kata) is at first the antagonist. He is in charge of hunting down sense offenders in the region outside the city walls and disposing of sense-materials (things that induce feelings like paintings, music, colorful objects, decorative furnishings, etc…). He raids a warehouse full of rebels, a gun fight ensues, and after the rebels are wiped out (in a fantastic action sequence) Preston locates the sense-materials. In very iconic imagery, a boarded up hiding place under a rug yields the Mona Lisa, smiling smugly at the cleric, moments before Preston has the famous painting and everything else burned into oblivion. Watching through the flames is Preston’s partner, a sense-offender unbeknownst to Preston at the moment (but which is made clear early on, so no spoiler here).

There are religious and nonreligious themes that run rampant through the film. But the underlining theme is very apparent; extremes lead to bad things. On the one hand, to be completely taken over by emotions can lead to horrible atrocities. On the other, completely ignoring them can lead to atrocities as well (although, the point of the film is that in giving up our emotions we sacrifice another part of ourselves that goes beyond murder; we sacrifice our individuality, our uniqueness, our culture). In light of James McGrath’s few posts on Biblical literalism (and in light of a new book project on it by him), I felt it was time to add the perspective of a metaphysical naturalist on biblical literalism, but also on the opposing perspective–the polar opposite of biblical literalism–of “biblical nihilism.”

At first, allow me to define briefly what it is I mean by both Biblical Literalism and Biblical Nihilism, as both can be construed differently depending on one’s personal ontological or epistemological perspectives. In my understanding, Biblical Literalism is akin to hermeneutics. In accordance with hermeneutics, the idea of inerrancy is allowed to persevere as a legitimate hypothesis and interpretation. On the other hand, Biblical Nihilism is the opinion that the Bible is worthless, unnecessary (even for study), and irrelevant.

Biblical Literalism has led to, among other things, horrible atrocities to be committed upon mankind. Consider just for a minute the reality of the following statements (taken from here):

“Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.” — Hon. Leon Bazile, Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1, 3 (1967)

“The paramount destiny and mission of woman are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator.” — Supreme Court Justice Joseph Bradley, Bradwell v. State, 83 U.S. 130, 141 (1873)

“The slave-trade is perfectly consonant to …Christian Law, as delineated to us in the Sacred Writings of the Word of God” — Rev. Raymund Harris, Scriptural researches on the licitness of the slave-trade, shewing its conformity with the principles of natural and revealed religion, delineated in the sacred writings of the word of God (1788)

Inerrancy and literalism have also spawned violent hate crimes justified by interpretations of the Bible, often by zealots, religious fundamentalists, or maniacs. In current news, with Gaza, Israel’s continued dependence on Genesis 13:14-15, 17:8 (as well as the false perspective that they were there “first”; also that they deserve the land because they had a historical kingdom there even though such perspectives run counter to archaeological evidence) led not only to continued support by our government (ignorantly) but has allowed fighting in the Middle East between Jews and others to persist there for millennia. Interpreting Leviticus 21-25 led many slave owners in America to feel justified in mutilating African Americans, breaking up families, beating some near death (and even to death). Readings of Exodus 22:18, Leviticus 20:27, Deuteronomy 18:10-12, 1 Chronicles 10:13-14, Micah 5:11-12, and Galatians 5:20-21 have led to countless innocent women being burned for being falsely accused of as witches (as if one can really preform “witchcraft” successfully anyway). 2 Samuel 13:1-21 has allowed some men to rape women without fear of God’s wrath. The list goes on.

In many ways, it is this literalism which has caused many apostates to not only fear interpretations of the Bible, but to flat our demonize the book itself. While some may say that this is justified (perhaps in some way it is), I find that there is an extremism to this that is disgusting and needs to be addressed. There are, after all, some atheists who want to see the Bible taken off book shelves and destroyed. I find this to be akin to the imagery associated above with the destruction of the Mona Lisa. And with this statement I need to clarify a few things.

First and foremost, I do not think the Bible is the inspired word of God. It isn’t even “one” book in the sense that it is a collection of books. These books were chosen with intent by men who willfully discarded other religious Christian and Jewish texts. The authors themselves probably did not think of themselves as writing fact, history, the word of God, or otherwise (seeing as they were creating their narratives by modeling off earlier, already available literature). So my reservation about the Bible’s importance does not lie in any spiritual, religious reason. I have no interest in trying to prove the Bible so I have no apologetic agenda. As I have made it clear, I am not a Christian (I’m not even a theist). But my reasons are also not purely academic, either.

There are some who say the Bible is not just literature, but poor literature. “It may be fiction,” some skeptics will say, “but it is poorly written fiction.” But I do not think that, even if this were true (I don’t believe it is), this should warrant its destruction or censorship. I personally think that Charles Dickens’ literary works are terrible but I would never accept the proposition that because I think it sucks, his entire collected works should be destroyed. One might suggest that Charles Dickens’ works never caused anybody to interpret them in a manner that would cause others pain and suffering, but literature (and history) are not short on such examples. Homer’s Iliad and the Odyssey caused Greeks (and later Romans) in some extent to view nonGreeks in a particular way allowed for them to treat nonGreeks as uncivilized or illiterate barbarians. Romans, who claimed to be the heirs of Trojans who escaped the Greeks destruction of their homeland, conquered Greece as if they were avenging their ancestors (and liberating Troy from the Greeks in the process). These are just a few of the instances where classical literature, particularly that literature concerned with religious matters of any kind,has caused harm to other individuals. But I don’t hear cries from anybody to burn the epic poems of Homer. Nobody is suggested that Virgil’s Aeneid be censored and removed from bookshelves.

From an academic perspective, all ancient literature (whether one finds it boring or are simply disinterested) helps scholars develop an understanding, the overall picture, of history. That is not to suggest the Bible represents actual history (it doesn’t), nor does it suggest that the intentions of the authors were to write histories (they probably weren’t) but what it does suggest is that the Bible represents a part of history. As unfortunate as it is, people will abuse anything (including the Bible) in order to achieve control over others, do harm to others; but the Bible has (albeit indirectly, as many Christians have never read even a page of the Bible) also inspired some to be generous and kind (yet, still, they sometimes do so with ulterior motives like pleasing God to make it into heaven or fear of hell). It must always be remembered that the Bible has no mystical power over man. It cannot conjure up demons or send them away. It cannot inspire peace or incite war. The Bible is only a collection of books, which are collections of pages that contain words made up letters. The Bible is no different than any other piece of literature, ancient or otherwise. That also means the Bible has no sense of morality (it’s an inanimate object, after all) and cannot force the reader to do anything. People choose to do what they want and the Bible is a rather convenient excuse to do those things. Just as Aryan Nation advocates and white supremacists use Mein Kampf as an excuse to behave the way they do. While it was written by a genocidal maniac, the book has no power over anybody.

What is true, and something that should be taken quite seriously, is the influence of the written word. A story, regardless of its intentions or origins, can be persuasive. Persuasive stories can be compelling enough for a person to take them too seriously. This is, it seems, what happens more often than naught. Words do not have power, but it is how we interpret those words that give power to meaning. And meaning is based on our own life experiences. This is why Christian fanaticism and fundamentalism is tied into ideas of biblical inerrancy. It is also why hatred stems from literalists and inerrantists. Life experiences have taught them to fear, hate, demonize, and it has taught them that these attributes reflect love (at the very least, they reflect love in the eyes of God because they are doing what God wills from their readings of the Bible).

What this means is that, as a society, destroying literature or censoring it is not the answer. Instead, parents and communities should constantly be reminded of their responsibility to teach their children the right way to think, not what to think.  Instead of indoctrinating your children to be robotic imitations of yourselves, teach them to think for themselves. The ability to think for themselves will free them from being narrow-minded thinkers, allowing them to question their actions, interpretations, and agendas. Those who are most fundamentally-minded are often those who were raised to think in strict, narrow patterns. This is a serious problem and one that instigates literalism in all religions (and even politics) to the point of fanaticism (which spawns wars, violence, genocides, prejudices, etc…).

Another solution that must be taken into consideration is how influential scholarship must be on politics and government. To clarify, this means that scholars need to take more of a stance against fundamentalism in government and politics. Take the current situation in Gaza as an example. The modern day Israelites have no God-given right to that land; there is no archaeological “right” to that land. The Jews of antiquity did not have some grand empire that gave them rights to Gaza, Jordan, etc… It most certainly does not give them rights to commit acts of war against others. Scholars need to be able to stand up and correct public officials, need to stand up and say “wait a minute, if you want to claim that they have a God given right to the land, you need to back up your claims first before we allow you to stand behind what they are doing.” Scholars have a moral obligation to demand that our politicians, apologists, and religious leaders back up their claims over this region with evidence that actually contains some high standard of verisimilitude. If Bush wants to make the claim that God gave the Israelites that land thousands of years ago, he’ll just have to provide the archaeological and epistemological evidence to back it up. And if he cannot, it is up to us to call him, and others, on their ignorance.

I also think that scholars should let go some of their resignations and soap boxes. Elitism is fine… in moderation. The public is important too. Far too often, there are those scholars who never publish a book through a public press. This is a problem. Aside from the fact that most Americans don’t read the Bible (or anything), for those who do decide to read they will only find apologetic material available. Actual scholarly interpretations of religious literature are hard to find, leaving those fanatics to believe that the book they have by Josh McDowell or Luke Timothy Johnson represents actual scholarship (or worse! They may assume NT Wright represents the views of actual critical scholarship)! Having scholarly materials and interpretations, data, and reading resources available to the layman are crucial in stemming Biblical literalism and inerrancy. Biblical nihilism is also made more prevalent when skeptics can only find apologetic interpretations of the Bible–is it any wonder why so many atheists find the Bible irrelevant when they aren’t given adequate reasons to think otherwise? If no sound, rational arguments exist outside of scholarship, where books range into the hundreds of dollars, how is the common woman or man able to afford to educate themselves outide of going to college for it (and not everyone has the temperament for such a career)?

In conclusion, literalism and nihilism are both problematic and represent extreme (although not necessarily fundamental) perspectives. Both of these perpsectives can lead to sour consequences. On the one hand, the subjugation of others is justified and in the other the subjugation of history is justified. The good news is that there are ways (and the means) to correct these perspectives, and in doing so create a brighter, more enlightened world. But it is up to those who are reading this to make that difference. Do we go the way of the Tetragrammaton, or the way of the 3rd World War, or do we take the position of the resistance?

Believe in Zeus? Athena? You’re not alone.

Over the past eight years or so, Greek religious activists have been claiming persecution–and they aren’t Christian! They’re polytheists who (still) believe in the God’s of the classic Hellenes! They have been persecuted (almost ironically) by the Orthodox Greek Catholic church. In this little tidbit of irony, the President of Greek Clergymen says:

“They are a handful of miserable resuscitators of a degenerate dead religion who wish to return to the monstrous dark delusions of the past”

Hm…”wish to return to the monstrous dark delusions of the past?” Sounds a lot like this guy to me:

Latin mass?  Wishes to turn around every sociological and theological decision made by his predecessor?  Looks like Emperor Palpatine?  No, couldn’t be that he is trying to return to the dark delusions of the past.  This, the same guy who said “The church needs to withstand the tides of trends and the latest novelties…”  But enough about him.

Apparently there are some 100,000 expected worshipers of the 12 Gods of Olympus. Full article here.

Believe in Elves? Icelanders do!

I didn’t believe it at first, either.  But it is true.  In Iceland, the majority of the countries inhabitants are not interested in giving up their belief in them.  This is evidence, as far as I’m concerned, that people are often ready and willing to believe in anything without evidence as long as it isn’t boring or if it fulfills a void of ignorance in their lives.  Full story here.  (I know the story is a little dated, but clearly its relevant)