What's wrong with the picture? If there was a historical Jesus of Nazareth, one of the theories just summarized about Christianity's origin should be approximately correct. Theories are proposed to explain facts, and when multiple theories are proposed to explain the same facts, there are means by which an impartial thinker may decide which is likeliest to be a true explanation. We will not review those means in any detail here. Readers who are unfamiliar with the scientific method can get a good introduction at http://atheism.about.com/library/FAQs/evo/blfaq_sci_method.htm The orthodox theory, compared with the conventional theory, fails the parsimony test, and not only at the outset with its supernaturalistic assumptions. Orthodox Christianity is fraught with logical problems that depend for their resolution on a plethora of ad hoc assumptions about the intentions of the New Testament authors, the knowledge to which the patristic writers were privy, and the integrity with which early Christians verified, preserved, and copied documents bearing material pertinent to their religion's origins, including but not only the books that were eventually canonized. The conventional theory makes fewer assumptions than the orthodox. Since no theory can get by with no assumptions, then unless there is a more parsimonious alternative, we are well justified in believing it. Do we even need an alternative? Strictly speaking, we can never be sure. Science is not about final answers or about absolutely certain truths. It is about finding answers that are probably true, and it allows a constant possibility that some answer not yet proposed is more likely to be true than any currently accepted answer. There are some probabilistic difficulties with the conventional theory. They are trivial compared with the difficulties posed by the orthodox theory, but they bear examining. Here are the major ones.

  1. Of the 27 canonical books, only the four gospels say anything about the life that Jesus might have had before his crucifixion. From the epistles, we learn nothing of what he said or did between his birth and his death. To those authors, his life apparently meant nothing. To them, for all we can tell from what they wrote, Jesus was born to unknown parents in an unknown place at an unknown time, and he died at the hands of unknown assailants in an unknown place at an unknown time.
  2. In noncanonical Christian writings, there are no unambiguous biographical references to Jesus earlier than Ignatius' in the early second century, and his remarks are little more than a bare assertion that Jesus did have an earthly existence. Before Ignatius, with a possible minimal exception in Clement, there are no references to Jesus' ministry, his teachings, his miracles, or anything else he might have said or done prior to his death. There is no reference to his trial by the Romans nor to the role of Jewish authorities in instigating it. No teaching is attributed to him. No document for which there is incontestable evidence of first-century Christian provenance says anything more about Jesus than what is found in Paul's writings. Even through the second century, nothing more substantial than Ignatius' comments appears until after the existence of the gospels is clearly attested.
  3. No non-Christian writer who would have been a contemporary of Jesus, or who was born soon enough to have known someone who was a contemporary, shows any awareness of any religious leader who could have been Jesus of Nazareth. The earliest credible references cited as secular corroboration prove, at most, only that the writers were aware of people called Christians and that those people believed their founder had been executed by Pilate. No secular writer who mentions Jesus was born during his alleged lifetime. No secular writer who mentions Jesus and who could have known a contemporary of Jesus cites a source for what he says about Jesus.
  4. The earliest extant document with an unambiguous reference to writings about the life of Jesus of Nazareth was made in the middle of the second century. A few earlier documents refer to things he said, but none of them hint at any source for those sayings, particularly not to anything besides oral tradition.
Now, ancient documents are like fossils. We're missing most of what we wish we had, and we know we'll probably never have it. However, from what has survived, we can sometimes make reasonable inferences about what else would have survived if it had existed. Absence of evidence sometimes is evidence of absence. The argument for historicity goes something like this. We have the gospels, which even most skeptics agree were written during the late first century, and which tell us about one Jesus of Nazareth who lived in the early first century. This Jesus, according to the documents, was thought by his disciples to be the Christ, was crucified by Pontius Pilate, and was seen alive by his disciples three days later. We also have the book of Acts, written during same period, in which it is reported that those disciples began telling the world, first their fellow Jews and later Gentiles, that they should believe these things if they wished their sins to be forgiven by God. Acts tells us of Paul's conversion and his missionary journeys to the Gentile world. Then we have Paul's own writings, predating the gospels, in which he talks about a Christ Jesus who was crucified and rose from the dead to save the world from its sins. It seems unlikely on the face of it that these documents would have been written unless some Galilean preacher executed by Pilate had made some kind of powerful impression on somebody. Surely the stories were not just invented ex nihilo? A good theory has to account for all the evidence, using plausible assumptions and as few of them as possible. The assumptions cannot themselves count as evidence, though. Only the facts count as evidence. A widely accepted interpretation of certain facts might be persuasive, but an interpretation is not itself a fact. It is not a fact that the gospels were written during the first century. It is inferred, from certain statements they contain and from certain statements made by some of the church fathers, that they must have been written before the end of the first century. However, neither the documents' contents nor the church fathers' comments are inconsistent with the books' having been written during the early to middle second century. Even if early versions had existed during the first century, which might explain a few patrisic remarks that might be allusions to them, the evidence easily accommodates a hypothesis that they were not completed until the middle of the second century. If we don't assume that the scholarly consensus must be correct, what are we left with? We have the seven letters that Paul probably wrote. We have most of the other New Testament epistles, generally accepted as having been written during the four decades after Paul's presumed death in the early 60s. With trivial exceptions countable on one hand, there is no hint of a man who was born and raised anywhere in this world, who attracted a band of disciples, preached to thousands, healed the sick and raised the dead, or who was executed by a Roman official at the instigation of Jewish priests. We do have a divine person of some kind who died and was resurrected, and whose death and resurrection were made known to people not by witness testimony but by revelation. The early noncanonical Christian record is scarcely different. As Doherty observes,

Before Ignatius, not a single reference to Pontius Pilate, Jesus' executioner, is to be found. Ignatius is also the first to mention Mary; Joseph, Jesus' father, nowhere appears. The earliest reference to Jesus as any kind of a teacher comes in 1 Clement, just before Ignatius, who himself seems curiously unaware of any of Jesus' teachings. To find the first indication of Jesus as a miracle worker, we must move beyond Ignatius to the Epistle of Barnabas. Other notable elements of the Gospel story are equally hard to find.

This strange silence on the Gospel Jesus which pervades almost a century of Christian correspondence cries out for explanation. . . . Something is going on here.

http://pages.ca.inter.net/~oblio/partone.htm But what about the gospels? Even most orthodox Christians accept that they incorporate some oral traditions. Conventional skeptics differ only in saying that they incorporate little else. There is evidence, and not only from Ignatius, that some of the stories that made their way into those four books were being told by the late first century. What we don’t have is evidence that they were making the rounds earlier than the 90s, or that they were widely believed at that time, or that those who believed them had read them in any book. For the existence of any such book, the earliest surviving attestation is from the middle second century. OK, so who did the first Christians believe had been crucified for their sins, if not Jesus of Nazareth? We're almost there, but first one more problem with the conventional theory must be noted. That a group of first-century Jews would have deified any man, and then convinced other Jews of the man's divinity, is an improbability approaching impossibility. According to the orthodox theory, they believed because they had seen the risen Christ, which supposedly was enough to convince anybody that he really was God's own son. I have already explained why I'm not entertaining that hypothesis. The conventional hypothesis, though, is almost as hard to believe. In some unspecified way, the man supposedly was just so impressive that his Jewish followers just somehow got it into their heads that he must have been the son of God. The improbability of a real Jesus inspiring the first Christians depends of course on what the first Christians actually believed, and there is a problem with trying to determine that. The first Christians that we know about were the ones in Jerusalem under the leadership of Peter and James, and we have no direct knowledge about them. We know nothing beyond what Paul wrote about them. Their own writings, if they produced any, did not survive. However, we can note that Paul clearly wanted his readers to think that he was in at least some loose agreement with the Jerusalem church except over the applicability of Jewish law to gentile Christians. We do not have to assume much honesty on his part to infer that he was likely being truthful on that point. Considering Paul's usual dogmatism, it seems unlikely he would have tried to create such an impression of concord if he and Peter had disagreed over something as fundamental as Jesus' divinity. If Paul mentions no dispute on that issue, then there probably was none. It appears, then, that the first known Christians were Jews who believed things about the Christ that they would probably never have believed about any man. And if those first Christians did in fact believe that a man from Galilee was God incarnate, just what did he do or say to make them think so, and why don't we know what that was? There is not a hint in the early writings of any argument like "Jesus of Nazareth was surely God in the flesh, and we know this because ______."

The standard response is that the earliest surviving Christian writings were to people who already believed and therefore needed no arguments, but this is a weak explanation for a few reasons. For one, it is not the case that believers never need to be reminded of why they believe. In many of today's churches where doctrine is emphasized, much of the preaching is directed straight at the choir. Any sectarian belief that contradicts any cultural orthodoxy, religious or political, needs constant reinforcement. For another, it is obvious that Paul knew this, because he does spend much of his time reminding his readers of what they were supposed to believe and why they had to believe it. And then too, surely some Christian leaders had or would have made some opportunities to explain in writing to some prospective converts why it made sense to believe that Jesus of Nazareth was God's own son. Surely at least some of those documents would have been preserved or, if nothing else, been referred to by Christian writers whose works did survive.

What we have instead from Paul is: "God has revealed the truth about Christ to me and you'd better take my word for it." And that seems to be all there is to Christian apologetics until the gospels start circulating, at which point Christians are told that they they must believe Jesus was the son of God because the gospel authors said he was. But the gospels themselves don't recport Jesus' doing or saying anything that would have led his Jewish followers to think he was divine. Divinely inspired, maybe, but hardly a god-man.

Well, what about the resurrection? Never mind whether it really happened. If his disciples thought it happened, might that have convinced them that he must have been divine? Just possibly, but then how would they have convinced anybody else? Yes, people are gullible. They will believe anyting -- but they won't believe it for just any reason. No significant number of Jews were going to believe that a recently crucified man was the son of God without some extremely compelling arguments -- way more compelling than a bare-bones declaration that "He is risen."

Furthermore, the disciples' own belief in the resurrection needs explaining. Jesus had to have done or said something that set them up psychologically to experience whatever it was that made them think he had returned to life and was or had become something like a god. The gospels, though, don't give us a clue as to what that might have been. The problem is not that we can't believe everything they say, but that there is nothing remarkable about the parts we can believe, and unremarkable people don't get deified.

In short, considering all the relevant evidence, as well as the relevant gaps in the evidence, the conventional account of Christianity's origin is highly improbable. Lacking a credible alternative, we would have to accept the improbable, but the evidence suggests a there is a credible alternative. Here are some clues:

  1. Paul and other early Christian writers speak of the Christ as someone whose death and resurrection were revealed to humanity, not witnessed by men who had known him. This was part of the problem. It is also part of the solution.
  2. Given what is known of Hellenistic thinking, Paul's references to the Christ's atoning death and resurrection are consistent with his having believed that they occurred in a Platonic spirit world, not the world inhabited by mortal humans.
  3. The existence of spiritual universes paralleling the material world was integral to the Platonic philosophy embraced by many Hellenized Jews of the first century.
  4. No significant element of the gospel stories was without precedent in the mystery religions prevalent in the Middle East during and before the first century.
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      This page last updated on Aug. 31, 2008.