Who was Jesus Christ and did he exist?
The scholarly debates about who Jesus was and what he said, have raged for centuries. A look at the huge body of literature on this topic shows one thing quite clearly: this question has never been settled, and probably never will. The jury is still out, and shows no sign of returning. So it seems doubtful that I will be able to supply undisputed proof for any argument here. However, I do want to add some arguments here that will hopefully encourage you to investigate this subject further. Here in South Africa we are not used to people contradicting anything that has to do with Christianity. Moreover, most of the people who have doubts about it keep it to themselves. As you research the historical Jesus, please keep a few things in mind.
How reliable is memory?
For Christians, the accuracy of the Gospels is critical. To bolster its accuracy, they often refer to the fact that they were written by eyewitnesses. One thing that may be overlooked, however, is that the earliest Gospels were written at least a few decades after Jesus' death. How reliable can something be, written from memory from 30 to 150 years later? How long have you been out of school, 5, 20, 40+ years? What if you tried to remember, everything, your teacher said back then? How far would you get? Could you swear in court, that what you have written is what was actually said and meant all those years ago? I, for one, cannot quote a single sentence from my high school biology teacher much less all she said.
Alternatively, try this sometime: show a room full of people the evening news. Then have them come back a week later, and write down what was said exactly. What do you think you will get? Do you think they will even agree long enough to write anything down? Even reporters today, with all their modern recording equipment, often misquote people they have interviewed only hours ago. People sometimes have to sue, to get their statements accurately reprinted. It hardly seems likely, then, that people in Jesus day could have accurately recorded what he said, decades after he said it.
Oral tradition
I have also read that Jesus' words were passed on via oral tradition those intervening decades, until someone finally wrote them down. Again, I say try it. Many of us already tried something similar back in grade school. Remember when your teacher whispered something in the ear of the kid at the head of the line, and had him repeat it to the student behind him, and so on, back down the line? By the time it got to the last kid, the message was nothing like the original message the teacher told the first kid. Moreover, who has not heard an Uncle's fish tales that get bigger with each telling? Can we really believe that these problems in retelling information did not exist 2000 years ago?
Three sides to every story
They used to tell me in the army, that there is the right way, the wrong way and the army way. This also applies to life. There are three sides to every story, my side, your side and the right side. In researching Jesus, this means that the truth usually cannot be found in any one historian or scholar's version. Given the subjective nature of ancient history, and the fact that we just do not have all the information and must fill in an awful lot of blanks on our own, biases and assumptions will inevitably colour each account. That is why, to have any hope of constructing a reasonable picture, literature from all sides must be considered. Both evangelical Christian and secular scholars, and everyone in between, offer valuable perspectives that others may not. A few books by Josh McDowell or Shelby Spong cannot possibly paint a complete picture of this difficult and complex subject. We all have agendas. Therefore it would be wise to examine the writers we get our information from, and make sure they represent more than one side of the story, for the truth is usually somewhere in between.
For Christians, Jesus' identity is the shibboleth all outsiders must correctly pronounce. Unless you regard him as God incarnate, come to earth to die for your sins, you have it all wrong. So already, we have it wrong. Nevertheless, many Christians like to know just how wrong we have it, the better to know how high to heat our room in Hell. So here is who I really think Jesus is, the short answer: I do not know. The long answer is similar: I do not know. However, to that I add, we do not know because we cannot know. Rather than create a benevolent imaginary friend that fulfils all our needs, and ascribe all those qualities to a person named Jesus, we find it more reasonable to remain agnostic [always searching].
The Historic Jesus
Did Robin Hood exist? Possibly, there was a person whose exploits were exaggerated over time until the legendary character known as Robin Hood emerged in English folklore, but few people would claim that the Robin Hood in these legends was an actual historical figure who possessed incredible archery skills and went about rescuing Maid Marian and robbing the rich to give to the poor. At best, then, Robin Hood was a quasi-historical person who became the legendary hero of Sherwood Forest through exaggeration and embellishment of his real life accomplishments.
The same is probably true of William Tell, King Arthur, and other famous legendary characters. Through exaggeration and embellishment over time, the lives of exceptional leaders were transformed into the legendary figures we read about in folkloric literature. In recent times, we have seen the same process at work in our own country. Wyatt Earp, Wild Bill Hickok, Buffalo Bill, Jesse James, Billy the Kid, these were frontier marshals, heroes, and outlaws whose names are familiar to all of us. However, their exploits were so exaggerated and embellished by word of mouth, by 19th-century dime novels, and then later by 20th-century movies that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to determine the real historical accomplishments of any of them. In this sense, it would be proper to say that the Wyatt Earp and Jesse James of the dime novels and movies were not real historical characters. Men by these names once lived, but they were not the men portrayed in the many fictionalized accounts of their lives. The real Wyatt Earp and Jesse James have probably been lost to us in a hopeless maze of legendary embellishments.
The same is true of Jesus of Nazareth. A few scholars seriously argue that no such person ever existed, and their arguments are certainly thought provoking and deserving of consideration. Other biblical scholars (many of them professing Christians) acknowledge the existence of a man named Jesus but frankly admit that the New Testament gospels greatly embellished his life and that the actual achievements of the real Jesus were nothing like those, attributed to the Jesus of the gospels. The quasi-historical Jesus may have been born to a woman named Mary, but certainly, she was not a virgin at the time.
This is the stuff that myths and legends are made of, and folklore of the times was filled with tales of great men who had been born to virgins. Even Christians consider those folk tales to be nothing but quaint legends, so by what rule of logic do they insist on making Jesus an exception to the general rule? They have no reasonable answer to this question.
Likewise, the quasi-historical Jesus may have attracted a following, but it is not reasonable to believe that vast multitudes thronged to him in the manner claimed for the New Testament Jesus. Mark said that "a great multitude from Galilee... and from Jerusalem, Idumea and beyond the Jordan, and... from Tyre and Sidon" once followed him to the Sea of Galilee (Mark 3:7-8). So huge was the multitude that Jesus told his disciples to keep a boat ready for him to board, "lest [the multitude] crush him" (v: 9). Matthew claimed that "great multitudes followed [Jesus] from Galilee, and from Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea, and beyond the Jordan" (Matthew 4:25). In the verse before this, Matthew said, "his fame went throughout all Syria" so that the people there "brought to him all sick people who were afflicted with various diseases and torments, and those who were demon-possessed, epileptics, and paralytics."
All of this presumably happened, but no one in Syria, Idumea, Tyre, or Sidon left any record of the mass hysteria that the Jesus of the New Testament created. Only the New Testament gospels mention the huge crowds that he attracted. As Rob Berry points out in his article “The Fivefold Challenge”, historical silence in some matters is quite telling, and such is the case in the matter of public attention that the Jesus of the New Testament presumably attracted. If these gospel accounts are even reasonably close to being accurate, why did no one in the regions from which the multitudes came ever mention the crowds that thronged around Jesus? Why did no one in the places where the crowds gathered (with the exception of the biased gospel writers) mention these huge crowds? The answer is that such multitudes probably never existed, because the quasi-historical Jesus was not nearly as popular with his contemporaries as the gospel writers allege for their Jesus.
The gospel writers claim that Jesus made a triumphal entry into Jerusalem just before his crucifixion. "A very great multitude spread their clothes on the road" and "others cut down branches from the trees and spread them on the road" (Matt. 21:7-8; Mark 11:8; Luke 19:36) and that multitudes went before and after him shouting, "Hosanna to the son of David!" Such vast multitudes as these welcomed Jesus into the city and then just a short time later the crowds was screaming for Pilate to crucify him. Who can believe it? There may have been a quasi-historical Jesus who was crucified during Pilate's administration, but it is unreasonable to believe that this Jesus was welcomed into Jerusalem so enthusiastically by huge crowds only to have mobs demanding his crucifixion just a few days later. In this sense, we can assume that the Jesus of the gospels never existed.
If there was a quasi-historical Jesus who was crucified by the Romans, certainly his execution did not occur as recorded in the New Testament. All three synoptic gospels claim that while Jesus was on the cross, darkness fell "over all the land" from the sixth hour until the ninth hour (Matt. 27:45; Mark 15:33; Luke 23:44). In all three accounts of this event, the word land has been translated from the Greek word “ge”, which can mean "earth", so it is quite possible that all three-gospel writers intended to say that the three hours of darkness covered the whole earth. In fact, the KJV even translates the word as earth in Luke's version: "(T)here was darkness over all the earth."
Whether the synoptic writers intended to say that darkness covered the whole earth for three hours is immaterial, because their language is such that they obviously did not mean that this was only a phenomenon that was localized to the city of Jerusalem. They claimed that darkness covered "all the land" for a period of three hours, beginning at midday. This would have been at least a regional event that would have been noticed and mentioned in the contemporary records of other nations. Who can seriously imagine a three-hour period of darkness happening in midday without references to it being recorded in Egypt, Greece, Syria, Arabia, Persia, and the other nations that would have experienced it? Even if it were merely a regional darkness, we can reasonably expect that other writers of the time would have referred to it. The fact that no such records exist is reason to believe that this midday darkness was simply another part of the legends and myths that evolved as Christianity grew.
We can say the same about Matthew's reference to the "many saints" who were resurrected after an earthquake opened their tombs at the moment of Jesus’ death and who later went into the city and appeared unto "many" (Matthew 27:52-53). Such an event as this would have attracted far more attention than the resurrection of Jesus, because its results would have been witnessed by far more people, but no one else besides Matthew (not even Mark or Luke) mentioned this remarkable event. Rationality, then, requires us to interpret this story as just another legend that developed along with Christianity. A quasi-historical Jesus may have been crucified, but certainly, his death was not accompanied by a mass resurrection. Such an event simply would not have passed unnoticed by historians of the time.
Bible fundamentalists, of course, will contend that these are all arguments from silence, but sometimes silence can scream to those whose minds have not been numbed by religious indoctrination. Suffice to say that there are many good reasons to assume that the Jesus of the gospels never existed.
Some will also dismiss these points as just the ranting of a cynical atheist, but the average churchgoer does not realize that radical revision is taking place in modern Christian thought. Many seminaries teach their students some of the same things that we publish in The Sceptical Review, so it isn't at all uncommon to find Christian scholars who agree that the real Jesus was very different from the fictionalized Jesus of the gospels. After its meeting in Santa Rosa, California, the Jesus Seminar, a group of Christian scholars dedicated to identifying the real historical Jesus, announced their belief that the "story of the historical Jesus ended with his death on the cross and the decay of his body." The group concluded, "Whatever Jesus' followers experienced after the crucifixion, it happened in their hearts and minds, not as a matter of history." Speaking for the group, Stephen J. Patterson, an associate professor of New Testament at Eden Theological Seminary in St. Louis, said, "’God raised Jesus from the dead’, is a statement of faith, not historic fact."
These quotations have been taken from an article from Religion News Service that was published in various newspapers, so their accuracy can easily be verified. That they represent conclusions reached by conscientious Christian scholars rather than atheists and sceptics indicate the transition that is presently occurring in Christian thought. The average church member who doubts the major points in this article has simply not kept up with the latest scholarship.
