The Magic Self-Authenticating New Testament, Robert Conner
It can be asserted with little fear of contradiction that every literate
adult the world over has a mental image of Jesus of Nazareth. After all, Christianity is the largest religion — an estimated 2.4 billion adherents — and has existed for 2000 years. For centuries, laymen and scholars alike assumed the gospel stories were history and that Jesus and his apostles were verifiably historical characters like Caesar Augustus (Luke 2:1), Herod the Great (Matthew 2:1), or Tiberius Caesar and Pontius Pilate (Luke 3:1-2). However, in the early twentieth century, when German scholars began to question the reliability of the New Testament texts, that assumption came under challenge, particularly after 1909 when the philosopher Christian Heinrich Arthur Drews published Die Christusmythe, The Christ Myth, that claimed there was no reliable independent evidence for the Jesus of the gospels — Jesus, Drews asserted, was a product of the imagination. Could Drews have been right all along?
Whatever one may think of Drew’s claims, one is certainly true: there is no independent evidence for Jesus outside the text of the New Testament. As always, scholars are divided about specifics, including about when Jesus died — assuming Jesus was a real person to begin with. The majority opinion, based on the gospels, favors a date between April, CE 30, and April, CE 33, but as Helen Bond has argued convincingly, the gospel accounts were meant to establish early Christian theology, not to record Jesus’ history.[1] There is little evidence to suggest the gospel accounts contain any eyewitness testimony: the gospel writers never name themselves within their texts, speak in the first person, suggest that they were either observers or participants in the events they relate, or cite their sources. Matthew and Luke clearly depended on the gospel of Mark — Matthew quotes or paraphrases 600 of the 661 verses in Mark and follows Mark’s timeline. Luke followed suit, using about 65% of Mark as his source.
At this point the Christian apologist will typically cite the historian Josephus, particularly the crown jewel of Historical Jesus texts, the endlessly debated Testimonium Flavianum of Antiquities, Book 18, Chapter 3, 3:
“About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man. For he was one who performed surprising deeds and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly. He won over many of the Jews and many of the Greeks. He was the Christ. And when, upon the accusation of the principal men among us, Pilate had condemned him to the cross, those who had first come to love him did not cease. He appeared to them spending a third day restored to life, for the prophets of God had foretold these things and a thousand other marvels about him. And the tribe of the Christians, so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared.”
Two recently published analyses of the Testimonium come to radically different conclusions. Based on a comparison of the Testimonium and the writings of the church official Eusebius, Ken Olson concluded,
“Both the language and the content [of the Testimonium] have close parallels in the work of Eusebius of Caesarea, who is the first author to show any knowledge of the text…The most likely hypothesis is that Eusebius either composed the entire text or rewrote it so thoroughly that it is now impossible to recover a Josephan original.”
Olson concludes that the Testimonium “has its most plausible Sitz-im-Leben in the pagan-Christian controversies of the fourth century.”[2]
On the other hand, Gary Goldberg performed a meticulous comparison of the Testimonium and Luke 24:18-24, documenting “thirty-one ordered content parallels” between the two texts. Goldberg concluded, “…by the simplest estimate (a normal distribution), the probability that the Emmaus-TF correspondences are due to chance is about one in ten thousand…The study shows Josephus closely following a Christian source…”[3]
In short, two close examinations of the text of the Testimonium have concluded that (1) it is a Eusebian forgery invented to bolster the early Christian claim of Jesus’ divine status, or (2) it is a word-for-word paraphrase of the Road to Emmaus story in the gospel of Luke. Quite clearly, the Testimonium is not an independent historical confirmation of the Jesus of the gospels. Additionally, as I have noted elsewhere, “…competent scholars arguing in good faith often reach radically different conclusions based on the available evidence…The evidence, such as it is, is textual; later historians who reported that Jesus had been crucified were repeating what they’d read or been told, not what they’d seen.”[4] The problem of flimsy evidence within the New Testament text, including outright forgery, is now so well documented as to need no further comment.[5] The evidence for Jesus is the New Testament. Full stop.
New Testament scholars are in wide agreement that Mark was the earliest gospel, written around the year 70 CE, decades after Jesus’ death. As if a lapse of 40 years between the life of Jesus and the composition of the first known gospel wasn’t problem enough, according to the church historian Eusebius, “[Mark] had not heard the Lord, nor had he followed him.”[6] On the best evidence, the gospels were not even composed in Palestine where the events they purport to relate took place. It is conjectured that Mark was written in Rome, Matthew in Syria, and John was perhaps composed in Asia Minor.
Even worse for the study of Christian origins, in 66 CE the First Jewish-Roman War resulted in the destruction of Jewish towns in Galilee and Judea which culminated in the destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple in 70 CE. By the time the war ended with the fall of Masada in 73 CE, the Jewish population of Palestine, obviously including potential eyewitnesses to the career of Jesus, had been decimated, scattered, and enslaved. Even assuming Jesus of Nazareth was a historical person, time and circumstances were working overtime to eradicate any evidence of his life and career. What would his soi-disant biographers do to fill this memory hole? A close reading of the gospels suggests they invented their stories.
Unlike history, the gospels are written from the standpoint of an omniscient narrator — like a novelist, the gospel writer knows not only the actions of his characters, but their inner thoughts and emotional state, as well as the content of their private conversations. Matthew, writing an estimated 85 years after Jesus’ birth, ostensibly knows the circumstances of Jesus’ conception, including the contents of a dream. (Matthew 1:20) Not to be outdone, Luke claims that, “Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.” (Luke 2:19) Matthew claims to know the precise event that led the Pharisees to withdraw and begin to plot Jesus’ death, (Matthew 12:14) and John — writing 70 years after the fact — is mysteriously informed that the Pharisees “…said to one another, ‘See, this is getting us nowhere. Look how the whole world has gone after him!’” (John 12:19)
So where did Mark — his true identity is unknown, but following convention we’ll call him Mark — get his information? Decades ago, when I was studying the New Testament at university, the standard answer to “where they got it” was still “oral tradition,” but given the proven unreliability both of memory and oral transmission, scholars have questioned that explanation and suggested a different source: the theology of Paul of Tarsus.
The number of scholars who have proposed this connection is quite impressive and appears to be growing: Pérez I. Díaz,[7] Hollander,[8] Eurell,[9] Smith,[10] Nelligan,[11] and particularly Richard Carrier[12] to name but a few. However, using Paul to get to Jesus presents a problem very nicely summarized by David Madison:
“In the earliest of the New Testament documents, penned long before the Gospels, Jesus of Nazareth isn’t there. That is, the epistles of Paul and others don’t speak at all about Jesus of Nazareth. Their focus is a divine Christ. There seems to be no awareness of Jesus’s preaching and parables, his miracles, his disputes with religious authorities, or even the Passion narratives. It’s almost as if the real Jesus hadn’t been invented yet, which would not happen until the Gospels had been created. The focus of the epistles — with Paul being the giant presence — is salvation through believing in a resurrected Jesus. Inexplicably, they skip over everything else.”[13]
The first person known to have mentioned Jesus is Paul of Tarsus. And regarding the source of his information, Paul is perfectly clear: “visions and revelations from the Lord.” (2 Corinthians 12:1) After his conversion — which he never describes — Paul did not hie himself to Jerusalem to confer with Jesus’ family or followers. His ego on full display, Paul claims,
“…when God, who set me apart from my mother’s womb and called me by his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son in me so that I might preach him among the Gentiles, my immediate response was not to consult any human being. I did not go up to Jerusalem to see those who were apostles before I was, but I went into Arabia. Later I returned to Damascus.” (Galatians 1:15-17)
Paul didn’t need no stinking history: “I want you to know, brothers, that the gospel I preached is not of human origin. I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ.” (Galatians 1:11-12) Unlike generations of New Testament scholars assiduously questing after the “historical Jesus,” Paul declares, “Even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer.” (2 Corinthians 5:16) This is hardly the sort of attitude that would favor the loving preservation of Jesus’ every word and deed.
Paul believed that Jesus had previously existed “in the form of God…but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being made in the likeness of men.” (Philippians 2:6-7) According to Paul, God “…promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures regarding his son, who as to his earthly life was a descendant of David, and through the spirit of holiness was appointed the son of God in power by his resurrection from the dead.” (Romans 1:2-4) When he rose from the dead, Jesus “became a life-giving spirit” and returned to whence he had come: “the second [Adam] is from heaven.” (1 Corinthians 15:45, 47) The earliest Christians believed Jesus had descended from heaven: “He who descended is the very one who ascended higher than the heavens.” (Ephesians 4:10) The man known as Jesus had a previous existence in heaven: “The Son is the image of the invisible God…He is before all things…” (Colossians 1:15, 17)
Paul is certain he and his fellow believers will soon be joined with their Lord, “for the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality.” (1 Corinthians 15:51-53) In short, Paul has precisely nothing to tell us about “historical Jesus.” Paul was convinced that the time remaining until Jesus’ return was so short that married Christians should live as if celibate: “the time is short. From now on those who have wives should live as if they do not…” (1 Corinthians 7:29) Given the urgency of the moment, what possible reason could there be to preserve the details of Jesus’ career, assuming that anyone clearly remembered them?
As noted by Madison, “Proving the Bible’s authenticity by quoting from the Bible is closed-loop reasoning…no matter how high the level of confidence in the Bible in a particular part of the world, no document on the planet can be self-authenticating.”[14] In all likelihood, the Judean church and its members were swept away in the maelstrom of the Roman invasion; like the epistle ascribed to James, Paul’s letters are addressed to believers “scattered among the nations.” (James 1:1) The earliest Christians for whom we have evidence lived in expectation of imminent deliverance[15] and evince no interest in “authenticating” the life and career of Jesus of Nazareth. The stories of the gospels cannot be verified by any contemporaneous sources. Insofar as anyone can confirm, they are pious confections written for the edification of credulous believers. We are left with a stark conclusion: the entire evidence for the life of Jesus is the magic self-authenticating New Testament.
[2] Ken Olson, “A Eusebian Reading of the Testimonium Flavianum,” in Eusebius of Caesarea: Traditions and Innovations, Helenic Studies Series 60 (2013) 97-114.
[3] Gary J. Goldberg, “Josephus’s Paraphrase Style and the Testimonium Flavianum,” Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus, 20/1 (2021) 1-32.
[4] Robert Conner, The Death of Christian Belief (2023), 48, 56.
[5] Bart D. Ehrman, Forged: Writing in the Name of God — Why the Bible’s Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are, 2010.
[6] Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, III, 39, 15.
[7] Mar Pérez I. Díaz, Jesus in the Light of Paul’s Theology, Mohr Siebeck, 2020.
[8] Harm W. Hollander, “The Words of Jesus: From Oral Traditions to Written Records in Paul and Q,” Novum Testamentum 42/4 (2000), 340-357.
[9] John-Christian Eurell, “Paul and the Jesus Tradition: Reconsidering the Relationship Between Paul and the Synoptics,” Journal of Early Christian History, 12/2 (2022), 1-16.
[10] David Oliver Smith, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Paul: The Influence of the Epistles on the Synoptic Gospels, Resource, 2011.
[11] Thomas Nelligan, The Quest for Mark’s Sources: An Exploration of the Case for Mark’s Use of First Corinthians, Pickwick, 2015
[12] Richard Carrier, Jesus from Outer Spance: What the Earliest Christians Really Believed about Christ, Pitchstone, 2020.
[13] David Madison, Guessing About God, 144-145, Insighting Growth Publications, 2023.
[14] Madison, op. cit., 56-57.
[15] Robert Conner, The Jesus Cult: 2000 Years of the Last Days, 7-25, (2022)
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Thanks for being a beacon of wisdom and knowledge in your niche.
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