[Professor Werther] fails to recognise … that there is a historical content to the Christian faith, not just blind belief.
Emeritus Professor Allan J. Day, Melbourne Age, 11 Aug. 2005

Day made this comment in his contribution to a recent public debate about so-called ‘Intelligent Design’ theory. Many Christians make a similar assertion i.e. that, unlike most other religions, Christianity has a firm historical basis, with an implication that its claims are therefore entitled to special respect. But what exactly do people such as Professor Day mean by terms like ‘historical content’ and ‘historical basis’?

No one doubts that the Christian religion has existed for about 2,000 years, nor does anyone doubt the existence of the institutional ‘Christian church’ (or rather, many competing Christian churches) for almost the same length of time. So Christians must be referring at base to the life, teachings and significance of a historical Jesus.

This question underpins the entire evangelical project: did Jesus actually exist? And if he did, do we have a reliable record of his life from which we can draw firm conclusions about his significance?

If you read 100 books, treatises and articles on this topic, 99 of them will assure you that Jesus was undoubtedly a historical figure and that the Bible conveys an accurate idea of his life and times. As you’d expect, most of this literature is written by Christians who have a vested interest in their subject, but even so it is instructive to compare works by fundamentalists with those of liberal theologians. The former paint Jesus as a miracle-working sky-god, while the latter develop a stupendous array of portraits, both metaphorical and metaphysical in nature.

I’ve read many dozens of these books and have yet to be impressed by a single one of them. It is a commonplace that most authors writing lives of Jesus reveal far more about themselves than they do about their subject, so here I will principally focus on the one in 100 works that reaches a different conclusion. This generally runs as follows: given current information, we cannot know whether Jesus existed or not, but even if he did, we cannot verify anything about him.

Before proceeding further, two words of warning. Firstly, the conclusion that ‘Jesus never existed’ falls into the category of ‘proving a negative’ and is thus unavailable to us. Secondly, think carefully before taking this matter up with Christians as they’re inclined to take a dim view of the suggestion that there may have been no Jesus. More conservative believers will have read little or nothing on the subject and may well consider it blasphemous per se.

Before looking at the evidence for Jesus himself, it’s worth spending a little time on critiques of Old Testament (OT) ‘history’ - actually more ’story’ than history. Two recent books locating the OT in its proper context are Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman (2001) The Bible Unearthed and William G. Dever (2001) What Did the Biblical Writers Know & When Did They Know It? You could also read Richard Elliott Friedman (1987) Who Wrote the Bible? Once you’ve read these books - Dever and Friedman, particularly, are by no means radical - you’ll realise that the correct approach to the Bible as a whole should be one of caution, perhaps bordering on distrust. There were many political and religious agendas at work during the construction of the OT and the provision of solid historical data is often more the exception than the rule.

Although it’s not entirely necessary, you could give yourself an excellent grounding in the New Testament (NT) by reading conservative scholar Bruce M. Metzger’s (1987) The Canon of the New Testament, followed by Bart D. Ehrman (1993) The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture. The point of looking through these books is to convince yourself of how very ‘ordinary’ the scriptures actually are, the chancy and ramshackle way in which they were cobbled together to become the NT itself, and how prone they were to corruption of the original text, whatever that may have been. The political nature of these documents radically undermines their claims to historical accuracy, let alone divine inspiration.

Where the NT is concerned, it’s important that you try to clear your mind of ‘the gospel Jesus’ and focus instead on the role of Paul, who wrote his epistles well before Matthew, Mark, Luke and John appeared. Paul’s ‘Jesus’ is so utterly mystical that you’ll think the apostle was writing about a different person - if indeed you can envisage this Jesus as a person at all! One of my favourite books on Paul is Hyam Maccoby (1986) The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity, still readily available via the Web.

If you want to cut straight to the action, with or without preliminary reading, you’ll need a general text and there are several of them around. Popular guides include Earl Doherty (1999) The Jesus Puzzle and (2001) Challenging the Verdict. These books dispose of the idea that there is any valid extra-biblical information about Jesus, and then systematically work through the gospel evidence, pointing out its manifold inconsistencies and absurdities. More extensive demolition is undertaken by Burton L. Mack (1995) Who Wrote the New Testament? and Robert M. Price (2003) The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man.

To put the icing on the cake, start working through the magnificent series of studies by Professor George Albert Wells, beginning, if possible, with The Jesus of the Early Christians (1971) and concluding with Can We Trust the New Testament? (2004). A good, brief summary of Wells’ basic arguments recently appeared in the Skeptic 25:1 (Autumn 2005), 36-39 - see David H. Lewis ‘Escaping the Gravitational Pull of the Gospels’. No one who reads Wells ever sees Christianity in quite the same way again, and certainly has no time for empty claims about that religion’s ‘historic basis’.

So, did Jesus exist? The most you can say is that some itinerant wonder-worker (or workers, as there were lots of them wandering around ancient Palestine) might have provided a character-model (or models) for Jesus the god, courtesy of a liberal admixture of pagan precedents and Jewish suggestions. And even if such a person (or persons) did exist, the records are so contradictory and so corrupted that we can know nothing about them. Anyone who flatly states that the biblical Jesus is a fact of history is simply wrong. Contra Professor Day, there is no verifiable historical content to the Christian faith and the Bible is a house of cards.

Filed in: Biblical criticism