Times are always tough for scholars of biblical history. At Rice, Dr. Werner Kelber once told us that his scholarship on the Q Document, the lost source of all the synoptic Gospels, had bought him death threats from fundamentalist Christians, incensed by the implication that the Gospels in the Bible may not be inerrant as-now-written, but were rather inspired by an earlier, unitary document. Apparently, in some circles, biblical history is not a proper realm of inquiry. But then again, in the same circles, neither is science.
For people who travel in those circles, this is going to be a doozy. Apparently – per a newly discovered newly researched tablet – the story of the messiah, dead for three days and then reborn, was not original or unique to Jesus of Nazareth, son of Mary, but was rather a persistent theme in turn-of-the-millennium Judaism.
Frankly, if you’ve been paying attention or looked into history at all, this shouldn’t be that surprising. That a story about rebirth and resurrection should crop up while the Roman Republic was reinventing itself, and while its newly appointed Princeps Augustus was touting his reign as rebirth on a national scale, is no coincidence. During the first half of what we now call the first century C.E., rebirth was a common religious theme: mystery cults built around rebirth, like the cult of Isis and Osiris, were cropping up everywhere. New religions always mirror and appropriate temporal events to the divine (look at Mormonism). Christianity is no different, and it’s not immune from history. That the non-uniqueness of the Christian story should be so strikingly and starkly presented by this tablet may be shocking, but that human events beget religious beliefs is an anthropological Law.
What I wonder is whether that should be troubling. No doubt many believing Christians will feel threatened by the discovery that their religion has roots older than the name “Jesus,” and no doubt it proves that religion is always affected (and at least partially inspired) by humans. It may even suggest that it therefore might be fabricated. But if you really believe in the truth of the underlying story – i.e., if you’re truly spiritual and not just religious – that shouldn’t matter. Anything that becomes subject to human inspection must come away with the imprint of the inspector: it’s like Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, applied to the humanities (law people: if you want a laugh along these lines, 212 F.R.D. 110, 116).
Religion, even if divinely inspired, can’t help but acquire traits imputed to it by humanity. While we can disagree on whether all or part of religion is human-made, we surely can’t believe that all of religion is just how whatever God inspired it intended it to be. History happens. If you care about spirituality and faith at a high enough level of abstraction – i.e., if your conviction is far enough removed from the day-to-day life of humanity – the academic facts shouldn’t matter. As Augustine of Hippo posited a long time ago (in De Doctrina Christiana), religion ought to be more than text deep, and if you can’t get past the minor details to come to the big picture of religion, well, maybe you’re just not very religious in the first place. The faith of a fundamentalist, who quibbles over every minor point and is threatened by every divergence from The Word, is shallow and vulnerable indeed.
All this is to say that, while the not-so-shocking revelation that our modern Jesus story has mythical roots may be dangerous and damaging to the religious, it ought not matter to people who care about religion enough to think about their faith.
