the id, the ego, & the single misfiring brain cell

strobel chapter 4. this is a good starting place for determining the reliability of the gospels.

This was inspired by Chapter 4 of The Case for Christ, by Lee Strobel. Chapter 4 is "The Corroborating Evidence: Is There Credible Evidence for Jesus Outside his Biographies?"* In this chapter, his scholar of choice (Edwin Yamauchi, PhD) provides an overview of specific passages in the works of Josephus, Tacitus, Pliny the Younger, and Thallus, who presumably confirmed the darkness at Jesus' death. I'd like to take a closer look at these.

* What Strobel means is "outside of the gospels," but he doesn't miss an opportunity to stack the deck. Besides...he thinks he has made the case that the gospels are reliable biographies in his first chapter.

Keep in mind that one of the problems of scholarship about the true origins of Christianity is that all of the sources which come to us were copied by monks--the literate class--and thus have not necessarily been handled and "preserved" without interpolation. This doesn't mean that anything was interpolated or forged, of course, but it does introduce reasonable doubt to the proceedings.

First, Strobel misrepresents the atheist argument. He quotes from a fictional book: "There isn't a single word about [Jesus] in secular history," and asks Yamauchi to respond. As it stands, this is a laughably absurd assertion. The actual argument is this (and it is not addressed or even broached by Strobel): We have no contemporary accounts of Jesus. Considering the number of people who were said to witness his miracles, his being mixed up with the Jewish leaders and at odds with the Romans, and the fact that he was said to have risen from the dead...and the number of professional historians of the time (one of whom, Philo of Alexandria, specialized in religions and was in Jerusalem at the time), this may be an argument from silence, but it's an ear-splitting silence--particularly considering what Jesus is said to have done.

OK. Always, and forever, we have...the argument from Josephus, who wrote The Antiquities of the Jews. Josephus was born in 37 CE, which already means that what he was reporting was not from his own experience and more than likely not from "eyewitness accounts," but rather from hearsay. The most popular passage, hands down, is the Testimonium Flavianum. To wit:

Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man; for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles. He was [the] Christ. And when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him; for he appeared to them alive again the third day; as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him. And the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day.

Looks pretty cut and dried, huh?

It isn't. To Strobel and Yamauchi's credit, they admit that most scholars do not consider the entire passage authentic. (Strobel phrases it another way, though: Most scholars believe that "the passage as a whole is authentic, although there may be some interpolations" (79), which says the same thing, but...not really ;).)

Josephus lived and died as a Jew. As such, I cannot swallow that he'd have written that Jesus "was the Christ," which means "the messiah." Also, if he believed Jesus appeared to his apostles again the third day, why did Josephus remain a Jew until he died? And Jesus did "ten thousand other wonderful things"? It doesn't add up. (Again, to Yamauchi's credit, he concedes these points.)

Not to his credit is that he doesn't mention any of the other arguments against the authenticity of this passage (but then, he is Strobel's "witness," in the sense of a court of law; Strobel doesn't want him to say anything that might hurt his case).

First is the problem--considerable, in my opinion--that this passage was never quoted until Eusebius cited it in the 4th Century. Eusebius has, you might say, a reputation (of which Yamauchi has to be well aware). He believed that lying in the interest of saving souls was a good thing; this is called "pious fraud." He even wrote a couple of times suggesting and defending this practice. It's quite unusual that no one, in the interest of Christian apologetics or defense (and there was a plethora of them in the first century; despite what you may have been told, even the first Christians had to defend their belief), ever referenced this obvious PROOF that Jesus did indeed live and die then rise again the third day. Yes, this is an argument from silence, in part, but sometimes, the silence should be listened to. Think about it: Do you find it plausible that in the centuries of persecution and ridicule for their "fantastic" beliefs, no Christian ever pointed to Josephus and say, "There! See?" This combined with Eusibius' reputation makes the entire passage difficult to swallow, in my opinion.

Also, when scholars acknowledge that portions of a passage were clearly interpolated, I'm particularly skeptical about their reasons for accepting the passage in general, but without the obvious interpolations. Some say that the grammar was common to Josephus; others say it wasn't. It's usually pointed out that the passage breaks the flow of the narrative, but it is generally acknowledged that Josephus did this from time to time, anyway. I find it curious that the lesser known (and generally acknowledged to be more authentic) reference to Jesus in Josephus* was quoted by Origen several times (2nd to 3rd C.), while the Testimonium Flavianum didn't show up until Eusebius.

* About the death of James, the brother of Jesus. This one is argued both ways, but there's no reason to assume it is inauthentic in its entirety.

So what does that leave us with? If we clip the obviously interpolated bits, we have this: Jesus, the brother of James, was a wise man who did wonderful works*; Pilate condemned him to crucifixion, and Christians are people who are named after him.

* Miracles and miracle workers were incredibly common in the first century.

Basically, there's a brief explanation about a cult which developed in the wake of a man named Jesus. And all of this, incidentally, is hearsay. Josephus is merely reporting what others seem to believe.

Also, keep in mind that "And the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day" makes much more sense if it had been written in the 4th C. than it would have in the first. ;)

And before I go farther, you should understand that the problem of hearsay in ancient historical accounts troubles me a great deal. History was very different then. I mean, the facts were preserved arm-in-arm with theories and supernatural beliefs, without any real qualification. Consider how Holinshed's History of Scotland, written in the 16th C., presents the "history" of Macbeth (which is how I came to read some of it). The bit about the witches and fortune telling is in the history. So when I read ancient history, like that of Josephus, I reasonably doubt the truth of the claims (unless authenticated by one or more disinterested sources, taking bias into account), and I certainly doubt the truth of supernatural claims.

This is worth remembering: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. In the case of Jesus, what comes to us is admittedly not contemporary OR reliable concerning the facts*; it is reliable only as far as reporting what people believed. None of the secular--not contemporary--accounts we have of Jesus provide anything more than hearsay, including Tacitus.

* Even the letters of Paul, which are our earliest records of Jesus, are admittedly written by a man who acknowledges he never met Jesus. He's merely preaching what he's been told--pretty much like preachers of today. He had a vision which converted him, but then, I have a couple of friends who experienced dramatic conversions in the last ten years (one of them to Islam), so I don't put much store by visions.

Tacitus is interesting, in that he had access to Roman records. However, his commentary about Jesus strongly suggests that his information did not come from the official records. First, he refers to Jesus as "Christ," which was not his name, but a title. We can reasonably expect the Romans would have listed him as Jesus. Tacitus also gets Pilate's office wrong: Pilate was a prefect, not a procurator.*

* I had this discussion with jpholding. He argued that Tacitus was a highly reliable historian and that this detail was "wrong" because his readers were unfamilar with the office of prefect, so he called Pilate a procurator. When I pointed out that Tacitus used the term prefect several other times in his annals, holding pretended I'd not made the point at all.

Thallus' text, which presumably provides pagan authentication of the darkness at Jesus' death, is not extant. We know of it only by virtue of a 3rd C. writer who referenced it. It is problematic in that we do not know what Thallus said, exactly (it's likely he was repeating Christian belief, as belief was generally understood to not differ from actual events), and it's extremely odd that such an unprecedented solar disturbance would not be widely reported by the people of the first century or before, as they were quite fixated upon the heavens and astrology.

And then there is Pliny the Younger, who wrote to Trajan asking what to do with the Christians. This is not testament to Jesus' existence, let alone divinity. It is, instead, confirmation that Pliny was dealing with a new cult and didn't quite know how to handle it.

Again...there are no contemporary accounts of Jesus, which I consider most amazing, considering what is claimed of him. If nothing else, we should find writings from the Jews when he threw the moneychangers out of the temple, or flummoxed the rabbis, or flauted their laws. But this is a person who was said to cure lifelong illnesses, raise people (and himself!) from the dead (which begs the question...if you're dead, how can you do anything?), and walk on water. He worked miracles in front of multitudes, as we are told in the bible. But when it comes to extrabiblical sources, we find...bupkis.

Why is that? If he were an ordinary man, we would expect to find nothing (same as if he never existed at all). But according to the claims of Christians, he was anything but ordinary, and multitudes of people witnessed his miracles. But we have nothing. Perhaps the absence of any historical corroboration is part of God's plan, but really...that's a crappy plan, because one of the tenents of Christianity is the firm belief that Jesus was god on earth, who lived, died, and rose again for our sins. In other words, Christianity depends upon the conviction that the stories are more than myth, but are real.

So it seems like quite an oversight on God's part to give us no reason to believe any of it happened.

d