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.
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I entirely agree with your general point – tying your faith to a lot of somewhat irrelevant factual claims about the world is both unworkable and unnecessary.
However, if this thing turns out to be what it appears to be (and my understanding is that there’s still a good bit of uncertainty at this point), it ought to be faith-shaking for a lot of people. This isn’t really the sort of thing that can be dismissed by taking the text as a metaphor or by acknowledging that human errors exist in the Bible. This casts doubt on the resurrection, and that Jesus physically died and arose is absolutely central to modern Christianity. Nothing can honestly call itself Christianity while conceding that the resurrection did not physically happen – among other sources, the Bible itself maintains that “…if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.” (1 Cor. 15:14, and it goes on to make very, very clear that it’s talking about physical death and physical resurrection).
Obviously, this piece of evidence doesn’t prove anything, but it’s not a sign of a lack of a faith for a Christian to be deeply disturbed by it. It’s worth noting that, while Augustine was in favor of not trying to read the Bible for literal truth about the world generally, he too saw the physical resurrection as being tremendously important for Christian faith (Book 1 ch 15 of DDC).
Comment by Gotchaye July 6, 2008 @ 2:15 amI would submit that this “ancient tablet” is probably another sensationalist scam, as is clearly indicated by the facts
(1) that no specific information is available on its provenance and
(2) that no details are provided on carbon dating of the ink.
As such, this “news” brings to mind the faked Lost-Tomb-of-Jesus “documentary” designed to make a profit off of people’s fascination with the “real” Jesus, as well as the larger scandal of the biased and misleading way the Dead Sea scrolls are being presented in museum exhibits around the world, with an antisemitic expression appearing on a government-run North Carolina museum’s website. See, e.g.,
http://spinozaslens.com/libet/articles/dworkin_ethicsofexhibition.htm
and
http://blog.news-record.com/staff/frontpew/archives/2008/06/dead_sea_scroll.shtml.
Comment by Museum Ethics July 6, 2008 @ 7:16 pmone of my favorite, most intellectually developing courses in college (i seem to always be dredging up college references in my comments …) was “jesus of nazareth in historical research” taught by scott bartchy:
http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/history/bartchy/
it was so liberating for me, personally, to learn about the likelihood that jesus existed objectively, without the heavy weight of dogma attached. ironically, it helped me understand jesus better, and it helped me be comfortable with my prior move towards atheism.
i’m reading a translation of the bhagavad-gita. christopher isherwood (!!!) translated, and aldous huxley wrote a wonderful introduction. here’s a wee excerpt:
“Worship of the Incarnation and contemplation of his attributes are for most men and women the best preparation for unitive knowledge of the Godhead. But whether the actual knowledge itself can be achieved by this means is another question. … it is necessary to put aside all thoughts of the Incarnation as distracting from the higher knowledge of that which has been incarnated.”
basically huxley is saying the actual “facts” are immaterial … that there is a “Highest Common Factor” across religions that unites humankind.
more irony: when one thinks about it, the “facts”, as packaged by one -ism or -anity are what has divided humankind forever and prevents us from realizing that which unites us.
that being said, i am certain there will be many a homily and sermon during catholic masses and protestant services admonishing parishoners to disregard this new heresy. (i still remember being bombarded with orders to avoid seeing the last temptation of christ. i did avoid seeing it. why sit through the movie when i could read the book? which i DID do. one of my favorite works of literature, the novel helped me like jesus more, too.)
Comment by didionsmommy July 6, 2008 @ 8:58 pmVery interesting article….. history shows us that there were at least 3 people who declared themselves the “Jewish Messiah” long before Jesus inherited that role.
Comment by Ed July 8, 2008 @ 2:07 amI don’t see it as faith shaking at all, even if it is proven to be real. If you look at all the prophecies about the messiah, the death and resurrection was foretold so it was no secret. And Ed is correct is saying that were many people before and since Jesus that claimed to be the messiah and there will be more. None of that takes away from the miracles of Jesus nor His Ministry.
Comment by mwagoner July 8, 2008 @ 12:45 pmI agree with mwagoner. Christianity is Judaism fulfilled, according to Jesus’ teaching in the Gospel of John. I am not sure what exactly should be threatening to Christians. To my thinking, it seems to support the belief that Jesus was who He claimed to be, that His death and resurrection were indeed fulfillment of prophecy.
Comment by The Eighth Art July 8, 2008 @ 5:40 pmClarification: this tablet, if true, doesn’t *predict* Jesus so much as say that the same thing happened, just to a different person, years before Jesus’ birth.
Comment by Ames July 8, 2008 @ 5:45 pmSince hearing about this tablet yesterday, I’m still having trouble understanding why it is supposed to make me question Jesus’ claims about Himself, or His disciple’s claims about Him, or the Bible’s claims. From what little I’ve heard about it, it sounds like an interesting artifact from a very turbulent era, politically and religiously.
I’m not an expert on Judaism but I had been getting the feeling that Jewish scholars were downplaying the idea that Isaiah 57 referred to the Messiah or that the Messiah would be a suffering servant. Now we’re being told that Judaism already had an idea that the Messiah would die and rise again and that that somehow casts doubt on the Christian faith. Maybe I am missing something. Or maybe the folks seizing on this to question the gospels are.
Comment by Andy Christensen July 8, 2008 @ 8:56 pmAgain, it’s because the tablet doesn’t appear to be an attempt at prophecy. It’s not saying “the messiah will die and rise again three days later”. It’s saying “the messiah has died, and he rose again three days later”, and it predates Jesus.
It’s simply about how we consider testimony. Ames is the lawyer, but it seems to me that a witness who maintains that someone performed a miracle is a whole lot more persuasive by himself than he would be if we’d already heard (and discounted the testimony of) other witnesses making similar claims about other people.
I probably worded that poorly, so let’s consider an analogy to investors. Successful casual stock traders (and some professional ones) suffer horribly from a phenomenon known as survivor bias. They came up with a strategy, followed that strategy, and consistently made pretty good money. They know that this sort of thing doesn’t happen often by random chance, so they assume that there’s something to their strategy. What they’ve overlooked is that lots and lots of people tried something similar and lost money. It’s like winning a lottery and assuming that it was because you had a better number-picking strategy than everyone else did. You absolutely have to look at the whole initial sample, and you have to make sure that a successful result was not just an expected statistical outlier. Someone had to win that lottery, after all.
From our vantage point, we can note that, yes, it was pretty unlikely that this particular person would win this particular lottery. However, when we consider that we would have said that about every person who bought a ticket, we see that our observation was guaranteed beforehand.
Something similar can be done here. Assuming that the story of Jesus is unique, we know that we can represent our probability of knowing of it in the present as P = P(j)P(jl) + P(~j)P(fjl), where P(j) is the probability of the Jesus story being true (whatever that may be), P(jl) the probability of the true Jesus story surviving to the present, P(~j) the probability of the Jesus story not being true, and P(fjl) the probability of the untrue Jesus story surviving to the present.
On the other hand, if the Jesus story is not unique, it’s obvious that we could not distinguish the present situation from one in which another, similar story had survived (this is just like when we noted that one person winning the lottery was indistinguishable from another person in advance). So the probability of our knowing of a story indistinguishable from the Jesus story becomes P = P(j)P(jl) + P(~j)P(fjl) + P(s)P(sl) + P(~s)P(fsl), where the ‘s’ represents this other figure and less the conjunction of two surviving stories (though we can assume that this is unlikely, and it will remain higher than the probability given just one potential figure).
Provided that the above adequately describes the situation, and provided that no one thinks that Simon could possibly have been the messiah, it follows from Bayes’ theorem (see Wikipedia) that this evidence makes it more likely than it was before that no one rose from the dead. I think that Wikipedia does a good job of explaining that last bit, but I’d be glad to take a stab at it if you’d like.
Comment by Gotchaye July 8, 2008 @ 10:03 pmOne caveat – I also assume that one isn’t absolutely certain of one’s own belief in the resurrection, but if someone already thinks himself infallible, I suppose there’s no use in talking to him in general, so no harm done.
Comment by Gotchaye July 8, 2008 @ 10:15 pmMath was never my strong point. Please bear with me.
I’m still having trouble understanding how the probability that Jesus rose from the dead is reduced if we find out that there was a 1 cent. BC figure named Simon whose disciples claimed that Gabriel said that he (Simon) would rise from the dead.
I had trouble following the lottery argument. Maybe I am just a little slow.
I looked at the Wikipedia article. Looking at the statement of Bayes’ theorem, it looks like the probability of A will only change (that is, P(A|B) will be less than P(A)) if P(B|A) and P(B) are different. So the probability that Simon’s followers claimed that Gabriel said Simon would rise from the dead given that Jesus rose from the dead would have to be different from the probability that Simon’s followers claimed that Gabriel said Simon would rise from the dead. I have no idea why that would be the case. Maybe I have misunderstood the formula.
Comment by Andy Christensen July 10, 2008 @ 5:05 pmI’ll take another stab at it; for someone that wants to teach eventually, I can be pretty bad at communicating ideas.
The idea at work behind my lottery example is pretty central to the rest of it, so I’ll start there. In essence, the big idea is that lots of technically distinct outcomes are indistinguishable in practice. If Person A that you’ve never heard of wins the lottery, you don’t regard this as being particularly noteworthy, even though it was obviously incredibly unlikely to have happened. This is because, as far as you’re concerned, Person A is exactly like almost everyone else who bought a ticket. Had Person B won the lottery instead, you would have thought about Person B exactly as you would about Person A. It’s unremarkable that Person A won because, in a sense, somebody that you could label as ‘Person A’ was overwhelmingly likely to win that lottery. It was either going to be ‘Person A’ or someone important to you, and people important to you only bought a dozen tickets all together. Similarly, when you roll a 100-sided die, you don’t feel the need to explain the fact that you rolled a ’23′ despite the tremendous improbability of doing so. This is because ’23′ is only meaningful to you as a number, like any other, and you were guaranteed to roll one.
To make the analogy to modern Christianity more explicit, I think it’s clear that Christianity doesn’t depend on the name ‘Jesus’. What’s important (to greatly oversimplify) is that its central figure was the messiah and that he died and arose. That is, supposing that the story of Jesus had died out rather quickly, while the story of this Simon had caught on, stuck around, and become a powerful religion worldwide, something relevantly like Christianity would exist today. It might be different in any number of particulars (just as one stranger who wins the lottery can be an old housewife in Ohio while another is a coal miner in Nevada), but these particulars aren’t important with respect to addressing the single historical question at stake (whether the messiah died and rose).
I think that the explicit probablistic argument is probably just needlessly confusing, and that the rest follows fairly intuitively. The idea is that a religion relevantly similar to Christianity (that is, one based the messiah resurrecting) could have come about in one of four ways. Prior to this, we were only considering two possibilities. If Jesus actually rose, and his story spread, then that explains Christianity. If Jesus did not rise, and a myth spread about his rising anyway, then that also explains Christianity. There’s some probability that the first possibility occurred, and some possibility that the second occurred.
To choose convenient numbers (and not meaning to imply anything about the actual probabilities involved), say that we concluded that there was a 50% chance of Christianity being the result of Jesus actually rising, and a 50% chance of it being a result of a false myth about Jesus. That means that, from our present observation (that Christianity exists), we conclude that there was a 50% chance that Jesus actually rose. However, because our present observation can’t distinguish in advance between Jesus-Christianity and Simon-Christianity, the survival of Simon’s story has to be considered as well. Now, in addition to our first two possible explanations of our observation that Christianity exists, we also have to consider two similar explanations involving Simon. If we assume that everything else is equal, this gives us a 25% chance of Jesus rising, a 25% chance of a false Jesus myth surviving to the present, a 25% chance of Simon rising, and a 25% chance of a false Simon myth surviving to the present. That Christianity is -actually- about Jesus is unimportant, just as it didn’t matter that you’d actually rolled a ’23′. The fact of the ’23′ was unsurprising -because- there were so many other numbers that were indistinguishable beforehand.
However, no one thinks that Simon could actually have arisen. Christians not only believe that Jesus was the messiah, but that no one else could have been the messiah. Nobody thinks “well, someone else could have risen instead”. So, if we’re discounting that explanation for Christianity, we’re left with only three. Each was equally probable before, so they’re equally probable now (even if we didn’t start from equally probable events, they’d remain proportionally similar), and we now conclude from the fact of modern Christianity that there’s only a 33% chance of someone having risen.
Again, I used those probabilities because they were convenient. If you wanted to use 99% for Jesus having risen and 1% for a false Jesus myth surviving, it would become something close to 98% Jesus rising, 1% false Jesus myth, 1% false Simon myth. The point is merely that one’s certainty has to decrease.
The intuitive take-home of all of the above is merely that as the number or likelihood of possible explanations for something increase, the likelihood of any other explanation being correct decreases. This tablet is at least suggestive of other explanations for our observation that modern Christianity (or something indistinguishable from it beforehand) exists, and so other explanations (including that Jesus actually rose) must be seen as less likely.
The whole thing is tremendously oversimplified, of course. In fact, we have to consider interference effects between the two stories and the possibility that this raises that there were other similar stories going around that we haven’t discovered yet, to name a few things.
Comment by Gotchaye July 10, 2008 @ 6:08 pmOK, now I follow you. Thanks for the explanation.
Comment by Andy Christensen July 11, 2008 @ 4:22 pm[...] Ames wrote a really interesting piece on the Messiah tablet and its implications for the faithful over at his Submitted to a Candid World [...]
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