THE JESUS PUZZLE
Was There No Historical Jesus?
Earl Doherty
Reader Feedback and Author’s Response
Set 27: February 2007
Angela
writes:
Thank you so much for writing your book The Jesus Puzzle. I had heard of
the mythic Christ thesis, but didn't honestly think there was much
substance to it. Your book has definitely changed my mind on that
subject. You make a very persuasive case that the Jesus of the Gospels
never existed. You are the first scholar, in my view, to provide a
convincing explanation for the profound silences found in the epistles
on Jesus of Nazareth. It's not surprising that Paul would have
formulated a worship of the Christ drawing upon the mystery cults of
that time.
I have been, at times, a great enthusiast of "historical
Jesus" scholarship. I have read the works of Crossan, Borg, et al.
None, however, have been as incisive and lucid as The Jesus Puzzle. Your book just
seems to cut through all the "noise" and wishful thinking about a
historical Jesus.
I must admit your book has caused me to grieve the loss of
an anti-establishment, "left wing" Jesus, but it is a loss that I am
more than willing to bear in the name of a truer historical picture. I
have also felt a deep pain, realizing that the many atrocities of the
last two thousand years have been carried out in the name of someone
who may have never existed. I am so struck by the deep meaninglessness
of that anguished history.
Thanks again for an amazing book. I think the mythic
Christ thesis is the ultimate antidote to Christian fundamentalism.
I have just
finished reading The Jesus Puzzle
and found it to be the best of the several books I have read exposing
the lack of evidence for an historical Jesus. Your approach contrasting
the epistles and the Apologists vs the Gospels is a completely
convincing scholarly accomplishment.
Nick writes:
My name is Nick and I am writing to you from Athens,
Greece. I recently read your book The
Jesus Puzzle and I want to congratulate you on your work.
Although I am a devout Christian, I have to admit that your arguments
are well established and your case is a strong one. It is difficult for
me to accept that there was no historical Jesus, because that would
undermine all my previous beliefs, but I will keep following your line
of thought. Please keep me informed on any new piece of evidence that
you provide in the future.
Jon writes
I know you
probably hear this a lot, but I want to thank you for all the
work you do. I used to be an evangelical that debated on the Sec
Web. I
was there when you debated Nomad (Brian Trafford) and though I was a
Christian at the time I was somewhat impressed. But I never
really gave
your view serious consideration, because I accepted the standard
Christian
argument: "Even liberals reject the view that Jesus was a myth."
That was
good enough for me. Since then (about a year ago) I've rejected
Christianity and finally stumbled on your website. What an eye
opener!!
Absolutely fascinating. And I'll admit it. I'm
persuaded. I haven't even
read your books yet (I plan on ordering them for my birthday
soon). But
I've learned tons from your website and your continued efforts on the
Sec
Web. I can't believe the amount of abuse you put up with, and
truthfully I
cannot understand why many unbelievers are so hostile about it.
But just
know that some of us do gain insight as a result of your toils.
I get a lot of abuse now myself because I involve myself
in online debates
with Christians. I've admitted that I accept your argument, and
boy, that
gets them riled up. They throw your name around like an epithet.
Alfredo writes (from Japan):
I
learned about you from "The God Who Wasn't There" DVD, read your book
(as well as Robert Price's book, Sam Harris and Alan Dundes' one). I
have visited your website and read some of those articles. Your work
and other scholars' work has helped me clarify issues that were
suspicions which I needed to investigate about. Your work has motivated
me to continue my study and think of ways to do something about
fundamentalism.
While I commend your refutation of Strobel's The Case for Christ
in Challenging
the Verdict, I was transfixed by The Jesus Puzzle. I had
heard
arguments that challenged the historical Jesus before, but I thought
the issue
had been, for the most part, laid to rest by an abundance of voluminous
material from independent contemporaneous historians. Was I in for a
surprise!
I am an attorney living in
Recently, I read anew all of Paul's contributions to the
New
Testament (or what most scholars ascribe to him), looking for
some
reference to an earthly Jesus. Paul's insecurity is
striking.
This is a man who begs and whines. He constantly compares
himself to
the "super apostles," and desperately needs to convert others for his
ego, if not out of guilt for hunting christians. In short, he
needs to be
accepted and believed.
The idea of Paul writing a veritable cornucopia
of persuasive
letters designed to cajole, intimidate, guilt, scare, and
otherwise use
any means necessary to convert gentiles without referencing an earthly
Jesus and hosts of other fleshly beings to substantiate
the
latter's miracles and bear witness to his ministry is absurd.
This
resonates stronger considering Paul's writings are thought to
have
been within 20 to 40 years after the alleged crucifixion, and thus
would
be more likely subject to eyewitness verification. Paul
worked tirelessly at marketing. Why not use your most
powerful sales pitch? He never encouraged anyone to
travel to
the historical settings where the earthly, historical Jesus walked,
ate, slept,
taught, performed miracles, was crucified, or was resurrected.
Paul's personality craved this proof. Clearly, he would
have used
these arguments if they were available. Unfortunately for Paul,
the
gospel writers and other revisionists did not come along for several
decades. I
was a philosophy major in undergrad and am familiar with
the Platonic tradition. Paul is clearly referring to
Jesus
existing in that Greek intermediate realm between Heaven and
earth. The
allegory of the cave has clearly left its imprint on the mindset of the
time.
And a natural reading of Hebrews 8:4 must be
troubling
to those who argue otherwise.
Your book inspired me to read the New Testament from
a new
perspective, unshackled from previous assumptions about Jesus's
historicity. The result was nothing short of an epiphany for
me!
Yes! Yes! Yes! This is it. Finally, a refutation of the historical
Jesus
which combines a critical study of the outside historical record, a
natural reading
of the biblical text itself, the philosophical milieu, and common
sense. By the way, thanks for destroying the credibility of
the writings of Josephus, or at least pointing out that his
original work was almost certainly altered. Fundamentalists
always
throw Josephus at me, and now I am equipped with the rebuttal.
The only tragedy about your efforts is that Strobel is
probably
rolling in dough for giving the people their dose of seemingly
confirming
medicinal gobbledygook and your provocative, sobering books are
blacklisted by
christian-owned (or at least influenced) bookstores. The Rev. T.D.
Jakes just sold his home, less than 2 miles from me, for
approx. 5.5
million dollars. For his sake, I hope the needles in heaven have gaping
eyes or
the camels are awfully diminutive. I've always said,
ironically, "The
only thing that prevents me from selling God is morality." At any rate,
thank you for the books. I'm doing what I can to spread the good
word.
Tom writes:
Thank you for your ideas about a mythical Christ. I have
been studying and meditating on the New Testament (as a layman) for
almost 30 years, and yours is the best explanation I have found for the
different representations there of Jesus. You have convinced me that
once 'the man from Galilee' is dispensed with, the rest of the early
Christian record is much clearer and easier to understand.
In discussing your ideas with others I am struck by how
deeply ingrained is the idea of a historical Jesus of Nazareth. It
seems that many, even non-Christians, feel a need to believe in this
'person'. The recent success of The
Da Vinci Code points to the ongoing confidence people have in
the basics of the Gospel story, even when its orthodoxy is challenged.
I also agree that the history of the church founded on
this literalized myth is a sad, even tragic illustration of how
susceptible to delusion humans can be. People are ready to believe in
miracles and immortality more than the awesome reality of our universe
as we see it around us. I fear that if we as a species remain fearful
and ignorant we will invite a real apocalypse upon ourselves.
[E.D.: I couldn't agree more. As for
the negative reaction even of the non-believer to the idea that Jesus
of Nazareth never existed, part of it, I believe, is an instinctive
aversion to feeling that we've all been conned (even if the 'con'
wasn't really deliberate), that our entire society has been led down
the garden path for two millennia and our history is full of so much
sound and fury and pointless atrocity in the name of a chimera. Keep in
mind, too, that many current non-believers are actually ex-believers,
and it's adding insult to injury that not only were they indoctrinated
into a religious system from which they were forced to liberate
themselves, they are now told that the whole thing was based on a
monumental figment of the imagination. No one likes to be 'had' to that
extent.]
In your article "Who Crucified Jesus?" you wrote, "But most views of
the universe also saw a division of the upper world into several
levels, usually seven, based on the known planets." Which seven planets
are you referring to? Uranus was discovered by William Herschel in
1781. English and French historians are still fighting over who really
discovered Neptune. Astronomers are still debating whether Pluto is
even a planet. And last but not least, before the heliocentrism of
Copernicus, the Earth was not a planet (it was the center of the
Universe). By my count, that leaves five (Mercury, Venus, Mars,
Jupiter, & Saturn) planets known to the ancients.
Response to Javier:
The Seven "Planets" and Biblical Cosmology
Javier is concerned that only five planets
were known by the ancients, but the term "planets" applied to all the
celestial bodies under the stars: namely, the moon, Venus, Mercury, the
Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn (in that order, if I recall correctly).
Each one controlled one of the seven spheres of the heavens, above
which stood the sphere of the "fixed stars" beyond which lay God's own
Heaven and dwelling place. In the ancient Near East, including the
Graeco-Roman era, these "planets" were looked upon as divine entities,
though apparently less so in the Old Testament culture. The biblical
books do not refer to them as such, but some prophets condemned star
worship among the Israelites.
Biblical references to cosmology and the
actual structure of the universe are practically non-existent. The
Hebrews were no astronomers, certainly nothing like the Babylonians. It
is thus difficult to judge the cosmology of the earliest Christians,
how someone like Paul envisioned the activities of the spiritual Christ
in the heavenly world. He speaks of being personally "caught up to the
third heaven" (2 Cor. 12:2-4), so we can assume a layered
universe in his thinking. But he may have subscribed to the
three-layered
heaven we sometimes encounter in Jewish writing and Semitic mythology,
rather than a
seven-tiered one. In a heaven of seven layers, rising to the third
wouldn't strike one as too notable, and in fact, he seems to refer to
"paradise" in verse 4 as though he is still speaking of the third
heaven, though this is unclear. If he was only less than half way to
the top, one wonders what might
have been revealed to him to merit the remarks he makes ("and heard
words so secret that human lips may not repeat them"). Since he never
enlarges on the matter, I suspect that his experience may not have been
as dramatic as he wants to convey; like his having "seen the Lord,"
such things were required dues he had to have paid in order to justify
his apostleship.
As well, no
early epistle writer speaks of the distinction
between a supralunar and a sublunar location, the dividing line between
the corruptible and the incorruptible, though it was pervasive in
ancient pagan writing. However, in one Jewish sectarian
document, the Ascension of Isaiah, despite certain points of
inconsistency which can perhaps be put down to the multi-layered and
erratic editing
process this writing underwent, we are given a seven-tiered heaven and
a distinction between those layers of heaven and the sublunar
"firmament." But it is not unlikely that turn-of-the-era Christ belief
such as in Paul was an amalgam of Hebrew and Greek thought, as Jewish
culture was not immune to Hellenistic influences and Paul operated in
both the Palestinian and Diaspora milieus. Too many modern apologists
and scholars assume an isolation that simply didn't exist, and close
their eyes to the prominent Hellenistic content (especially in regard
to the mystery cults) present in earliest Christianity.
It is both amusing and revealing to note
how a conservative publication like the New Bible Dictionary
(Inter-Varsity Press, England, 2nd ed., 1982) speaks of ancient
Jewish views of the universe, as reflected in the Old Testament.
According to one of its contributors, M. T. Fermer (Stars, p.1144), "a view of the
universe is assumed which is not inconsistent with modern scientific
cosmology...the Bible consistently assumes a universe which is fully
rational, and vast in size, in contrast to the typical contemporary
world-view, in which the universe was not rational, and no larger than
could actually be proved by the unaided senses." It is statements of
utter nonsense like this which render untrustworthy and dismissable any
scholarship in thrall to orthodoxy and belief in a divinely inspired
scripture. To modern astronomy's picture (outlined by Fermer) of a
thousand million stars in our own galaxy, only one of tens of millions
of similar galaxies spread throughout the universe, "the Bible is often
closer...in spirit," says Fermer, than it is to ancient cosmologies. As
well, "the universe of the biblical writers is rational."
As proof of the latter, Fermer appeals to
Psalm 104. There we find that the earth is fixed on a foundation which
is immovable, and that all things in nature take place at the behest of
God. The first thought is in keeping with the pervasive biblical view,
no more enlightened than any contemporary one, that the earth is the
fixed center of the universe (remember Joshua stopping the sun?), while
the second conceives of no natural laws but only the orchestral
conducting of each note of a complex symphony by God himself, a view
which persisted into the 17th century. This sort of thing is hardly
"not inconsistent with modern scientific cosmology." Claiming that the
Bible presents a "fully rational" universe in reputed contrast to
non-Jewish irrationality further turns a blind eye on, for example, the
Stoics, who saw an inherent Reason (calling it the "Logos") in the
cosmos—equivalent to "natural laws"—and who regarded humanity as
sharing in that Reason, enjoying happiness best by living one's life in
harmony with it. Fermer apparently regards this is far less rational
than worshipping and fearing a powerful Overseer in the sky, who
according to biblical accounts could be petulant, punitive and
merciless, genocidal and homophobic, demanding constant animal
sacrifice and dictating misleading and contradictory writings for his
people's edification.
As an example of 'spinning' biblical
passages, few efforts on the part of apologists can top Fermer's case
for arguing that the Bible (through God's inspiration, of course)
conveys a
knowledge of the universe's "awe-inspiring immensity":
In the promise to Abram, God couples the
number of stars with the number of grains of sand. Only c.3000 stars are visible to the
naked eye, so on the face of it this is a feeble comparison. But the
total number of stars in the galaxy is
comparable with the number of grains of sand in all the world! The
Bible is full of such implications of vastness quite beyond the
knowledge of its day.
And what is that biblical passage conveying
such remarkable and unprecedented insight? It is Genesis 22:17, which,
by the way, follows right after God's demand on Abraham that he
sacrifice his only son, this being the test of Abraham's loyalty and
"fear of God."
(Inasmuch as you have done this...) I will
bless you abundantly and greatly multiply your descendants until they
are as numerous as the stars in the sky and the grains of sand on the
seashore. [NEB]
Fermer sees this as a "coupling" of stars
and sands, meant to imply that the number of one is as great as the
nmber of the other. Hardly. This is simply a double element of poetic
extravagance, no more meaningful than if a lover said to his love, "I
would cross the widest ocean and swim the broadest river to be with
you," which certainly entails no implication that the river is as wide
as the ocean. Moreover, if Fermer seeks to be literal and 'scientific'
about this, he might question the accuracy of God's statement. Have
Abraham's descendents really proliferated, or are likely to
proliferate, to the number of stars in the universe, to his own figure
of a billion times tens of millions? There have scarcely been a scant
fraction of that number of human beings on the face of the earth in all
of history, let alone descendants of Abraham, nor could the earth ever
support so many. We would have to populate the stars themselves, and
there is nothing in the Genesis passage (nor in ancient cosmology of
any sort, Hebrew or Greek) which envisions or implies a spread to other
habitable planets beyond the seven heavens. The biblical writers could
have had no such concept and were simply indulging in uncritical
hyperbole.
My point in scoffing here at the NBD's
laughable apologetic antics? To lament the fact that this sort of thing
is traditional and endemic to biblical scholarship, even in the 20th
and 21st centuries, in an attempt to make such primitive writings
palatable to the
modern mind, if not simply to pull the wool over our eyes as to their
outdated and irrelevant nature. It is the sort of thing that continues
to be necessary to preserve reliance and respect for anything scripture
says, Old or New. It is the sort of thing one gets in Sunday Schools,
from pulpits, in books like Lee Strobel's The Case for Christ,
from creationists who take Genesis and other improbable—if not
impossible—biblical accounts seriously and literally.
It is the sort
of thing which has crippled critical thinking in the young, which leads
people to entertain and preserve throughout their lives all manner of
outlandish and insupportable beliefs and attitudes, to offer arguments
and 'proofs' that collapse at the slightest application of modern
knowledge and common sense. This sort of reasoning is endemic to
standard Bible Commentaries written by supposedly intelligent scholars.
It has anesthetized generations of Christian believers into accepting
the Bible as the greatest book ever written, timeless and superior in
every way to the rest of the world's output of thought and science,
when it is simply another product of its time, no more advanced and no
less primitive than the people who lived it and wrote it. We would no
more drive an ancient chariot around the streets of a modern city than
we should let such a book govern our lives, laws, ethics and views of
reality, and it's time we consigned it to a fossil museum and
undergraduate classes
on ancient literature.
Norman Perrin has written at some length about his proposed origin of
the Son of Man sayings tradition. From my reading, this proposed
explanation of the "coming" Son of Man sayings are an apology for the
violent death of Jesus (A Modern
Pilgrimage in New Testament Christology, p.10-22, 57-83). If
such is the case, it seems to be a notable problem in your Jesus-Myth
hypothesis. The need to apologize for Jesus' death seems to preclude (sic, I assume Chris means something like
"require," rather than a word which means to "exclude"): One,
that there was an historical Jesus whose death was embarrassing, and
two, that the Q community knew of this death (see Q 11:30, 12:40,
17:24, 17:26-30). Though these sayings are all Q2 material, I perceive
that they may be problematic nonetheless.
Response to Chris:
The Son of Man Problem
Not having read this particular book by the
late Norman Perrin, I cannot tell whether the idea that the "coming"
Son of
Man sayings are an apology for Jesus' death is stated as such by Perrin
himself, or is Chris' own interpretation of what Perrin has to say on
the subject. Either way, I think this is a good opportunity to
examine the Son of Man question as a whole and to consider what the
presence of the particular Son of Man sayings found in the Q document
have to tell
us about the Galilean phase of Christian origins and the question of
Jesus' existence. Incidentally, all the Q sayings mentioned by
Chris relate to the "future coming" aspect of the expected Son of Man
and give
us no indication that the Q compilers regarded this figure as already
having been on earth or undergone a death. One of the arresting facts
about Q is that it seems to have contained no reference at all to a
death and resurrection; and certain Q features suggest that no such
things were present in the community's thinking about its Jesus. If
Perrin is interpreting some Q Son of Man sayings as implying them, as
Chris seems to be suggesting, I would have to say that he is guilty of
reading them into the document. The one saying often
appealed to—not mentioned by Chris—is 14:27: "No one who does not
carry his cross and come with me can be a disciple of mine." But this
looks to be a reference not to the cross of Jesus but to that of the
prospective
follower; the saying is often regarded as a proverb about enduring
hardship, and crucifixion was a common form of execution. (See The Jesus Puzzle,
p.149 and note 70.)
If there is a prime example of a perennial
difficulty being readily solvable by the Jesus Myth theory, it is the
so-called "Son of Man problem." In his book Jesus the Jew, Geza Vermes begins
his chapter "Jesus the son of man" with this statement:
Shortly before his death, Paul Winter
remarked stoically that the literature on the son of man was becoming more and
more impenetrable with no two people agreeing on anything. At about the
same time, A. J. B. Higgins in an article bearing the typical title
'Is the Son of Man Problem Insoluble?' suggested that the answer 'for
all we know already exists among the widely divergent ones familiar to
workers in this field'. Soluble or not, the problem is held by most
interpreters of the New Testament to be of crucial significance. [p.160]
In the three decades since this was penned,
little has changed. Why is there such a problem created by the
appearance of this phrase in the New Testament? Vermes lists three
"paradoxes" involved. One: despite the fact that it occurs over 60
times in the Synoptic Gospels (Mark, Matthew and Luke), it is never
used by Paul or other
epistle writers. Two: in the Gospels the title is placed only on
the lips of
Jesus. Third: no one around Jesus reacts to its usage, either with
puzzlement or hostility. We will return to each of these points later.
(Vermes virtually ignores the usages of
"Son of Man" in the Gospel of John, where it occurs about ten times,
and I too will set them aside here as not casting any light on the
question. John's usage is not derived from Q or its environment, and
seems simply borrowed from the Synoptic source that gave the Johannine
community an 'historical Jesus' in the first place. The evangelist
employs the phrase as a synonym for his concept of "the Son" who came
down from heaven, sent by the Father. He discards any apocalyptic
connotation and makes him an aspect of Jesus who is destined to be
glorified and "lifted up," yet another example of the free-wheeling
redaction later Gospels performed on the earlier, unconcerned with
historical accuracy.)
The uses of the phrase "the Son of Man"
(always presented in English translations as though a title, although
there are no capitalizations in the Greek) can be grouped into a number
of sets
of contrasting categories. First, the phrase is used,
on the one hand, as referring to a divine, heavenly figure expected to
arrive at the imminent End-time, an apocalyptic judge, as in Matthew
25:31 ("When the Son of Man comes in his glory and all the angels with
him, he will sit in state on his throne..."). On the other hand, it is
used in other cases in a more general sense, as an
elaborate phrase simply for "a man" or "this man" with no obvious
identification with the apocalyptic figure, as in Luke 9:58
("Foxes have their holes...but the son of man has nowhere to lay his
head"). It could be understood in a "generic" sense, as a reference to
"man" in general, or in an "indefinite" sense, as "a man" or "any man,"
or it could be a circumlocution: Jesus' own roundabout or euphemistic
way of saying "I" allegedly for reasons of modesty and supposedly in
keeping with Aramaic idiomatic usage (the latter is debated). It
might also have a combined sense: the speaker referring to "man" or "a
man"
but with an intended focus on himself. ("Can't a guy get any respect
around here?") Scholars have proposed all these possible meanings for
the 'general' sense. (The Gospel of John has none of the general sense
usages.)
So
we have a first contrasting set, the
coming apocalyptic judge called by the seeming title "the Son of Man,"
and the general euphemism for "man" or "this man," sometimes in phrases
that seem almost proverbial (as in Luke 9:58 above, or Mark 2:28: "the
Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath"). A usage of
circumlocution or poetic euphemism for "a/the man" (sometimes
representative of 'mankind') goes back into Jewish scripture, as in
Isaiah 51:12 ("the son of man who is made like grass") or throughout
Ezekiel when God addresses the prophet ("But you, son of man, hear what
I say to you").
In the second set, the contrasting usages
number three, as classified by Rudolf Bultmann. The first relates to
Jesus' earthly activities, such as in regard to forgiving sins (Mark
2:10, "The Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins") and in
the 'proverbial' examples given above. These are non-apocalyptic and
fall into that earlier 'general sense' or
generic/indefinite/circumlocutory category.
The
second relates to Jesus' death and resurrection, in the form of
prophecies about such things by Jesus, as in Mark 8:31 and parallels
("And he began to teach them that the Son of Man had to undergo
suffering...to be put to death, and to rise again three days
afterward"). The third relates to Jesus' future return, as in Jesus'
response to the High Priest in Mark 14:62 ("and you will see the Son of
Man seated on the right hand of God and coming with the clouds of
heaven") or Matthew's scene of apocalyptic judgment presided over by
the Son of Man in 25:31-46.
Vermes prefers a different categorization
formulated by scholars, a third set of contrasting usages: the
relationship of the various Son of Man sayings to the passage in Daniel
7 which seems to have given rise to an apocalyptic association with the
term. We need to look at that seminal passage, responsible for the
development of so much apocalyptic thought in the Jewish (and hence
Christian) psyche from the time of the Maccabean revolt until the
disastrous Jewish Wars of 66-70 and 132-135. Following a
pseudo-prophetic
passage
in chapter 7 outlining in cryptic terms and beastly imagery the history
of the conquests over Israel leading up to the time of the document's
writing (c.168-4 BCE), Daniel's vision moves on to something genuinely
prophetic, something which had not yet come to pass—nor would it ever:
I saw in the night, visions, and behold,
with the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man, and he came
to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him, and to him was
given dominion and glory and kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and
languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion,
which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be
destroyed. [Dan. 7:13-14; RSV]
It is subsequently revealed to Daniel that
this "one like a son of man" represents the righteous of
Israel:
"And the kingdom and the dominion and the
greatness of the kingdoms under the whole heaven shall be given to the
people of the saints of the Most High; their kingdom shall be an
everlasting kingdom, and all dominions shall serve and obey them."
[7:26-27]
The exact nature the author envisioned for
this "one like a son of man" in 7:13, whether a personified human,
an angel or other divine figure as representative or champion of
Israel, is a matter of scholarly dispute, but
it is clear that the motifs of this passage in Daniel entered Jewish
consciousness as a forecast of the End-time and Israel's looked-for
glorification.
The "one like a son of man" underwent a variety of interpretations in
messianic fashion. He
surfaces in 4 Ezra and the Similitudes of Enoch, in rabbinic
literature, in Revelation and the
Gospels, and he is present in the latter's precursor, Q.
For Vermes and others, then, it is
significant that some Son of Man references in the Synoptics are
clearly dependent on the Daniel 7 scene, directly (by quoting it) or
indirectly (using various of its motifs: clouds, glory, kingship,
coming), while
others seem not at all dependent on Daniel and make no reference to it,
direct or indirect. Vermes totals and compares the number within each
category and whether they came from the first Gospel, Mark, whether
they are common to Matthew and Luke (from Q) or part of a residue found
individually in Matthew or Luke (presumably inspired by Mark or Q). He
finds "a real unbalance" between these totals and decides that they
"must mean something" (p.178), though he does not suggest what.
But scholars are creating
unnecessary problems
for themselves, and it is, of course, due to their need to regard Jesus
and his ministry, portrayed in Q and the Gospels, as historical. For
practical purposes (conforming to our third set above), there are two
contrasting categories of Son
of Man sayings: those that show a derivation from the ideas of Daniel 7
and those that do not. (The latter includes references to Jesus'
activities on earth, as in the general/proverbial type, and the
predictions
by Jesus of his suffering, death and resurrection which are found only
in the Gospels.) How to relate those two categories? A prominent theory
has been
that the latter represents Jesus' way of referring to himself (a
circumlocution, presumably influenced by scriptural and Aramaic
speaking habits); subsequently, oral tradition and the evangelists' own
editorializing carried over that phrase into alleged references by
Jesus to his suffering, death and resurrection, and to his return at
the Parousia, but still as a circumlocutory reference; neither Jesus
(if he spoke any of them) nor those who came after intended
an identification with any widely known apocalyptic figure. The problem
is, the dramatic presentation of the coming of the Son of
Man and
the
need to prepare for it, the fearsome expectations
associated
with him, the powerful motifs drawn from Daniel 7, are so strong and
pervasive in
both the Gospels and Q that it is
difficult if not impossible to believe that a messianic-type concept
(no doubt
deriving from Daniel) was not operating in these circles, with Jesus
identified as that figure. The circumlocutory explanation is
simply too weak.
The debate on this score has long centered
around the question of whether there was a widely established and
unified concept of an "apocalyptic Son of Man" in Jewish
circles, to which either Jesus could have attached himself, or his
followers attached him after his death. This is still maintained by
some, but perhaps the bulk of recent scholarship on the matter is that
there was no such widespread, unified concept; rather, a lot of
independent circles used the imagery of Daniel 7 to develop a diversity
of messianic prediction involving a "one like a son of
man." However, the difference is, for practical purposes, little more
than
semantic. Whether there existed one or many manifestations of the idea,
popping up at various times in various guises, both are compatible with
the view that the 'Christian' version
of the Son of Man in Q and the Gospels represents an
End-time figure and expectation, one which had come to be associated
with Jesus.
If this were not the case, it would be
difficult to understand the survival and pervasive use of a merely
generic or circumlocutory mode of expression for Jesus, how it would
have been attached to so much
that oral tradition presumably preserved or came to invent of Jesus'
sayings, so much that was being forecast about his return, and all
references to him speaking of his destined death and resurrection. A
limited use by Jesus of a local Aramaic speaking habit would be a
pretty slim
basis for the riotous development of such a christological terminology.
(That Jesus' use would have to be considered limited and not
requisite, either by himself or by the evangelists,
is shown by the fact that the latter offer sayings—and
even alternate versions of the same sayings—in
which Jesus has no compunctions about using the direct "I" pronoun.)
This would be especially true in
non-Aramaic
settings, such as Q and the Gospels inhabited. The whole question of
an Aramaic basis for the first-century church as revealed in the early
Christian documents is too complex to go into here, but we can note
that former scholarly theories, such as those prominent during the
1960s and 70s, that
an Aramaic root layer underlay the writings and preachings of the early
period, have
been more or less laid to rest. All the known
documents are shown to have been conceived in Greek, despite the
occasional Aramaicism absorbed from a multi-cultural environment (just
as we in an English culture have taken the odd French expression to use
for ourselves, such as "raison d'etre"); most Aramaic expressions used
by the evangelists are explained by
them, showing that their circles were not Aramaic; and even though
Galilee had an indigenous Jewish element—somewhat scorned by Jerusalem
circles as equivalent to our 'hillbillies'—the area also contained a
cosmopolitan gentile element, whose culture seems to have absorbed and
adopted many things Jewish. This being the case, it is difficult to
conceive that such an Aramaic-based quirk, the phrase "the son of man"
used by preachers simply to report Jesus' references to
himself, would be perpetuated so thoroughly and for so long; especially
given the fact constantly pointed out by scholars—including Vermes
himself—that it is an unusual and even awkward
phrase (someone called
it "an inelegant barbarism") when translated
into Greek: ho huios tou anthropou.
How would oral transmission have coped with such a situation, having to
explain the non-Greek generic or circumlocutory meaning? (And it never
is explained,
unlike the elucidations provided for other, direct, Aramaic
expressions.) Why would anyone have bothered? The quirk would have died
out in the face of more convenient and intelligible modes of
expression. There would have been no reason not to simply declare that
it was "Jesus" who would be
coming in glory on the clouds, and it would be a "return"—not simply an apparent
first arrival, which is the manner in which all the Q sayings are
formulated, many still retaining that feature when carried over into
the Gospels.
Vermes himself makes this admission,
remarking that "even at this stage [of a post-Jesus use of son of man as a derivative
application from Daniel 7 and not attributal to Jesus himself] it is
most remarkable that its use as a form of self-designation still
survives" (Jesus the Jew,
p.184). Having thoroughly undercut his basic theory by this comment,
it is a wonder that the idea still survives in his own thinking even a
quarter century later in his 2003 The
Authentic Gospel of Jesus. That this theory did not win
over the scholarly community as a whole (despite
an
initial flurry of support)
is shown
by some three decades of further research on the Son of Man question
which is still as divided as ever.
No, the very survival of the phrase, even
through the evolution that took place in Q itself, can only be
reasonably explained by assuming that for a non-Aramaic audience,
"the Son of Man" in Greek could have a significance beyond a speaker's
idiosyncracy of referring euphemistically to himself. That would be
true
even if it derived
from something in the Jewish scriptures. Those scriptures had assumed
meaning and importance for many beyond the ethnic circles of Jewry
itself,
as the multi-cultural Christian movement as a whole attests. That
significance of the phrase for the circles of Q and the Gospels lay in
the
expectation of a divine apocalyptic figure, originally a "one like a
son of man." He was being
preached by the Kingdom community that produced the Q document, and he
continued to
be preached by the communities which built on Q or Q-type traditions
and produced the next stage: the Gospels. By then, the Son of Man
was being identified as Jesus himself, who would return as this
apocalyptic figure.
Some
have suggested that the disciples misunderstood
Jesus' use of a euphemism, taking it as some kind of self-adopted
titular reference, but there is no record or suggestion in the Gospels
that the disciples did so, that Jesus had to explain himself. And it is
hard to imagine that such a misunderstanding could have continued
throughout the entire ministry and beyond without being corrected.
Besides, the
very
wedding of the two meanings of the phrase, a simple
euphemism for "(this) man" and an expected apocalyptic figure, mixed
together willy-nilly throughout the Gospels and Q—and, one has to
presume, throughout the early church up to the time of the
evangelists—is bizarre in itself if this really
represented an actual
state of affairs in Jesus' ministry and its aftermath. Confusion would
have abounded. Instead, the confusion is
entirely ours, and suggests that all orthodox-based attempts to solve
this so-called problem are misguided. Scholars have struggled over the
generations to try to glean what the phrase meant, which sayings might
be authentic to Jesus, if any, whether Jesus really identified himself
as the Son of Man and what he envisioned by it, did he really prophesy
the Son of Man's
suffering, death and rising, what was the connection between the two
basic types of saying, and so on. What we need is a fresh and decidedly
non-orthodox approach, one that can be supplied by Jesus
mythicism and the essential non-historicity of the Gospels. Bultmann
was of the opinion that of his
three classes of Son of Man sayings in the Gospels, the ones that
related to his future coming represented the oldest traditions. I am
sure he was correct, but for reasons he would not have subscribed to.
This will become clear on looking back before the Gospels, into Q.
Before doing so, let's consider one of the
other "paradoxes" of the Son of Man question as noted by Vermes.
Outside the Gospels, the phrase appears in Christian documents only
three times. In Acts, it appears in the mouth of the
about-to-be-martyred
Stephen (7:56) who sees a vision of the Son of Man at the right hand of
God in heaven; here it is undoubtedly based on the Gospel image. It
appears
twice in Revelation (1:13 and 14:14) where it is undoubtedly not based on the Gospels but
directly derived from Daniel 7's apocalyptic imagery; here it is
not in any way associated with a human historical figure (except by
reading such a thing into Revelation as a whole). This paucity is
another curiosity in itself, but the paradox Vermes is speaking of is
that
this presumed christological formula is
given nowhere in Paul or the other epistles, i.e. in the explicitly
theological expositions of the New Testament.
In other words, in those early writers most
concerned with the nature of their Christ, his titles and roles and
activities for salvation, there is no sign of Jesus as the Son of Man,
no usage of the term at all. If Jesus, or even the early church
speaking for him, had styled himself as the apocalyptic Son of Man, and
given Paul's fixation on the impending end of the world and Jesus'
return (he even borrows biblical motifs in speaking of it, including
Daniel's "clouds" in his 'Rapture' passage of 1 Thessalonians 4:15-17),
why does neither he nor any other epistle writer refer to Jesus
as the Son of Man, let alone discuss it as a christological aspect of
Jesus' nature? Given his contact with the Jerusalem apostles, is it
conceivable that he could not have known of this designation if it had
been an historical reality? Could so many early Christian writers have
been ignorant of it?
There is only one scenario which unties
this perplexing Gordian knot, and it will become clear by a
consideration of the Son of Man in Q. (This, by the way, is a
compelling argument for the existence of Q, and against the claim that
the alleged 'Q' catalogue is simply the invention of Matthew,
subsequently copied by
Luke: the restricted nature of this group of Son of Man sayings.)
I have maintained that, even though only Matthew and Luke show evidence
of possessing and quoting a Q document (perhaps, this being later than
Mark, Q was further along in its evolution and more widely available),
the author of Mark inhabits a Q-type milieu; he is part of
the kingdom-preaching movement represented in Q, centered in Galilee
and extending into Syria. When one looks at the content of Q (which
Matthew and Luke have elaborated on in Son of Man sayings
peculiar to each of them), one
realizes that the expectation of the arrival of the Son of Man is an—if
not the—essential feature of the movement's
preaching. This can be identified
as one of those various manifestations of belief in a Son of Man based
on Daniel 7, "popping up" in this Kingdom-preaching sect, whether
influenced by a wider-established concept across Judaism or being
simply a
case of a new and independent development of the idea. For all we know,
it may have been the earliest, in the early to middle decades of the
first
century;
certainly, none of the other extant manifestations can be dated
earlier. The
day of the Son of
Man is coming, there will be a judgment, the sign given to this
generation is the sign of the coming Son of Man. (Mark has none of the
specific sayings about the Son of Man taken from Q by Matthew and Luke,
but he has those essential features about him, as well as the
expectation of his coming on the clouds in glory; sayings related to
the latter feature Matthew and Luke have taken from him.)
But here is the key consideration. Is this
new sectarian Son of Man, in its original Q form, something associated
with a Jesus? Do we, like orthodox scholarship, have to determine
whether Jesus made the association himself, which sayings were his
product, how
his followers reconciled the apocalyptic Son of Man with the
non-apocalyptic son of man in other sayings, and so on? Or is it really
all much simpler? I suggest that it is, and that the tortured
calculations of scholars, from their diverse and incompatible points of
view which often propose geneses and processes that would hardly make
sense in the real, practical world, can be set aside.
Consider what is said in Q about the Son of
Man and what is not said. First of all, one type of saying in Mark,
taken over by Matthew
and Luke, about Jesus teaching that the Son of Man is destined to
suffer, die and be resurrected, is entirely missing, and it is now a
scholarly
commonplace that these sayings are likely the invention of Mark;
they serve a literary purpose to link the Galilean part of his Gospel
with the Passion, the one looking ahead to the other. In Q, there is no
hint of a death and resurrection at all. (Again in passing, if Q did
not exist, why would
Matthew have developed a new group of sayings—the ones
supposedly copied by Luke—which lack all reference to a death and
resurrection?) In fact, the apocalyptic Son of
Man in Q is an entirely future figure. His advent is not a "return."
Nothing in those Son of Man sayings themselves suggests that this
character is coming back from heaven after previously being on earth.
In fact, one of the most telling units in Q is the preaching of John
the Baptist. Luke/Q 3:16 says:
He spoke out and said to them all: "I
baptize you with water; but there is one to come who is mightier than
I. I am not fit to unfasten his shoes. He will baptize you with the
Holy Spirit and with fire. His shovel is ready in his hand, to winnow
his threshing-floor and gather the wheat into his granary; but he will
burn the chaff on a fire that can never go out."
This is one of the indicators in Q that it
initially contained no Jesus or founder figure, and that the
apocalyptic Son of Man the Q community preached was a
heavenly figure not yet come to earth. This saying attributed to John
(no doubt falsely, being simply a co-opting of the now-dead Baptist by
the
Q
community) identifies the Son of Man with no teacher or miracle worker
presently
walking the
same ground as he, nor does the language or tone imply such a thing.
This fearsome judge is only "to come," in keeping
with all the other Q sayings about the End-time Son of Man. (For other
indicators that no founder Jesus was present in early stages of Q, see The Jesus Puzzle, p.165f.)
The Son of Man in Q is not anyone 'on the
scene.' This means that none of the problems identified with the Son of
Man question will ever be solved by orthodox scholarship because the
pieces cannot be put together in coherent fashion given the
presence of an erroneous premise. The sect represented by Q began its
life as a preacher of the Kingdom, and part of the coming of that
Kingdom would be the arrival from heaven of the Son of Man "who would
separate the wheat from the chaff."
When a founder was added to the community's
view of its past (something not uncommon in sectarian practice
throughout history), in the so-called Q3 layer of material (whether he
was
originally given the name Jesus, we cannot
tell), the sect's teachings and miracle-working were assigned to him,
and the Son of Man sayings were placed in his mouth. This created the
awkward effect (to us) that this Jesus seems to be speaking of someone
else. This effect was carried over into the Gospels, though in several
cases
one or other of the evangelists changed the saying and had Jesus use
"I/me" or "my."
One question may present itself: why did
the Q community, in coming up
with a founder figure, identify him with their expected Son
of Man? One could speculate on a reason, but is the question valid? Is
there such an identification in Q at all, or did that take place only
with the Gospel of Mark? A single saying in Q (Lk./Q 12:8-10)
might suggest such an identification, but here the original wording is
uncertain,
not only because
it differs between Matthew and Luke, but because a much more likely
original could have preceded the later version: the community preachers
themselves saying, "whoever accepts us [i.e. our preaching] before men,
the Son of Man [at his coming] will accept before the angels of God;
but he who rejects us before men, the Son of Man will reject before the
angels of God." This sort of minor revision, usually to do with
pronouns and referents, can be deduced in many places, even in simple
comparisons between Matthew and Luke. That it happened previously
during the evolution of Q is very possible as well, most likely when a
founder figure was incorporated.
Thus we can surmise that Q's founder simply
took up the
preaching of the coming Son of Man as others had before he was
introduced to the scene.
Virtually every apocalyptic Son of Man saying in Q conveys that very
thing, that its Jesus is indeed speaking of someone else, not himself.
(Bultmann advocated that interpretation.)
But if such a linkage between their new
Jesus and their old Son of Man was
present in the
thinking of the Q community, perhaps it was under the influence of that
other, non-apocalyptic category of sayings, a couple of
which appeared in Q. These are the sayings which have "son of man" as a
substitution for "a man" or "this man": Luke/Q 9:58,
"the son of man has nowhere to lay his head," and 7:34, "the son of man
came eating and drinking" (leaving off the capitalization to avoid
conveyance of the titular). Mark has others which may be derived from
the same circles, giving "the son of man" power to forgive sins and
lordship over the Sabbath (2:10 and 2:28, which Matthew and Luke have
taken from him). On the one hand, it is entirely possible that the
presence of the two
categories of saying began as a simple
coincidence. The
non-apocalyptic sayings have the nature of the proverbial, and it is
this proverbial character which could
have been more widely understood and which would have brought them in
and
preserved them within an essentially non-Aramaic milieu. On the other
hand, it
is also possible that the presence of the apocalyptic "Son of Man" in
the community's thinking may have attracted sayings of the other sort,
in a kind of 'catchword' process, even if there was initially no common
identification between the
two, the latter being something that developed only later, either in
Q's evolution or in
Mark (as discussed above). And with the evolutionary step taken by Mark
from the Q ethos to his Gospel amalgamation of the Q Jesus and a cultic
sacrificial
Christ, the Markan Jesus became the
Son of Man incarnated, on earth to teach about his own impending
sacrificial act and resurrection, and his return as apocalyptic judge.
(Mark also brought in the term "Messiah," adding that to
the mix of characterizations of his Jesus, something Q never did. Such
a
title never appears in Q, another peculiarity that would have to be
attributed to Matthew's idiosyncratic catalogue of these sayings if Q
never existed.)
When Q evolved a founder figure, he was
quite naturally associated with
the non-apocalyptic 'son of man' references. After all, those could be
seen as referring to present activities and to the founder himself; the
'proverbs' became personified in him. This may have led eventually to
identifying him with that other "Son of Man," but as I suggested above,
I have a feeling that
Q didn't actually take that step. The sayings themselves don't reflect
it, and the Q Jesus still sounds as if he is talking about someone
else. If this is the case, the
orthodox basis of Q (though not its existence) is completely
overturned. For the Q
community, the Son of Man was not Jesus. Their (imagined) founder and
their (equally imagined) expected divine judge were two different
figures, and the latter arrived in their thinking before the former.
This destroys any idea that these allegedly
early "Jesus people" had any concept of their founder's return at the
End-time; that was a role already filled by the Son of Man. By
corollary, it pretty well destroys any concept that he
had been executed (something Q never mentions anyway), since a
tradition
of such a fate would inevitably have led to imagining his return in
compensatory glory, especially one conveniently linkable to the
glorious Danielic-based Son of Man. This is a natural conclusion,
since we encounter that very thing in the Gospels and in Christian
tradition. But we can go further. We can say that it almost certainly
destroys the reality of a Q founder, no matter what the traditions
about his fate. If the kingdom preaching Q community owed its very
existence, its teachings and miracle-working, its eschatological
expectations, to a prominent founder, it is very unlikely that it would
have centered its preaching around an apocalyptic figure which had no
connection with that founder, or that it would have left such a founder
in the
dimmest of backgrounds during the early phases of the development of
its
foundation document, the root stages of Q.
That, too, is an
acknowledged feature of Q in the scholarly breakdown of the document's
formation over time: the figure and personality of Jesus is virtually
absent in the earliest stratum. Even his name appears only in a set of chreiai which can be shown to be a
later assemblage (see The Jesus
Puzzle, p.162). Only his alleged 'product' is focused on. Even
in the so-called
Q-2 stratum when we encounter the apocalyptic preaching and controversy
elements with the Jewish establishment, Q itself in almost all cases
presented only the
sayings material, without any contexts (these were supplied by Matthew
and
Luke) which would have linked them with a specific Jesus figure in a
specific recorded setting, as
opposed to
simply being a reflection of the activities of the community itself. In
a couple of extended anecdotes, such as the curing of the centurion's
servant and the so-called dialogue between Jesus and John, Jesus
becomes a character in the pericope; but the latter is a later
construction (see The Jesus Puzzle,
p.171), while a certain amount of accommodation of the new founder
would
have been effected by recasting sayings to use his name, or pronouns
like "I" and "he." Thus the Son of Man
situation in Q has further provided support for the Jesus Myth scenario.
In any case, we have solved all of Vermes'
paradoxes, along with the perplexities of the Son of Man question that
have perennially plagued scholars. The Son of Man designation is not
found in
non-Gospel early
Christian documents like the epistles because no such tradition about
their Christ figure (who was not human, in any case) was in
existence. Paul and his cultic circles lay entirely outside the
Galilean kingdom-preaching movement, and a linkage between them only
took place with Mark. They may have shared a certain common apocalyptic
expectation that was 'in the air,' some of it based on Daniel, but it
is significant that for Paul it
is the heavenly Christ who will arrive on the clouds, while for Q it is
the "Son of Man." The Son of Man sayings in Q originated with
the kingdom-preaching movement represented by Q. It is no coincidence
that, as Bultmann notes, it is the "coming" Son of Man who is present
in that oldest tradition, since no earthly Son of Man
was envisioned by them.
The presence of a few proverbial "son of man"
sayings was largely
an incidental feature and originally did not refer to an individual on
the scene,
though it may have stood 'generically' for the community.
Why is Vermes presented with a second
paradox: all of the Gospel Son of Man sayings being found only in
Jesus' mouth? Because such sayings originated with Q, which was
essentially a sayings collection. No matter who first regarded the Q
Jesus as identifiable with the Son of Man, that pool of sayings came
from a milieu which had placed them in his mouth, and the evangelists
did not step outside that system. Mark, in drawing on his own more
limited oral traditions concerning the coming Son of Man (he had no Q
document), fashioned unprecedented sayings about death and
resurrection, but felt no
need to have any other character speak such a designation for Jesus but
Jesus himself. Perhaps the contexts, in his mind, didn't
require it.
Why did the Synoptic evangelists not have
other
characters query Jesus' usage of that
seeming title which identified him with an expected apocalyptic figure?
(John has the crowd once ask, in 12:34, "Who is this Son of Man?" that
Jesus has just referred to, but Jesus gives them no explanation.)
Again, there is a simple answer. First, this is how Vermes puts it:
The third paradox lies in the curious lack
of impact made by the expression on the contemporaries of Jesus. Far
from being treated as a mystery, the most problematic of all New
Testament problems, there is no record in either Matthew, Mark or Luke
of any query concerning its meaning or objection to its use. Among
friends and adversaries it arouses neither enthusiasm nor hostility. [Jesus the Jew, p.161]
No one in Jesus' Gospel audience queries
his usage of the term "son of man" because the Gospel and Q accounts do
not
represent actual history. Q in any case contains very little
in the way of biographical settings, the sayings mostly stood on their
own, so no such reaction on the part of bystanders or disciples would
have come into play in that collection. When we get to the Gospels,
particularly the first one, we need to realize that this was not
conceived as an historical record. It was an allegorization of the
activities and beliefs of the communities that produced them (which is
why later evangelists had no compunction about wholesale reworking of
the earliest one to fit their own communities and agendas; they were
simply 'improving' a literary creation). The
immediate audience for these pieces of "good news," the believing
community itself, knew the meaning of the Son of Man and did not
require any explanation to be incorporated into them. In the
broader society within which these sectarian communities
proselytized, many people may have acquired a familiarity with the
figure the sect was preaching to them and would not need to be
portrayed as puzzled by it;
their
hostility was simply in the form of rejection, as the sayings
themselves indicate. And as noted, by now a certain widespread attitude
toward the Danielic figure as having messianic overtones could have
been in circulation, familiar to much of the Jewish establishment, even
if they didn't subscribe to it. On this 'paradox' we could speculate at
length, but all we have to remember is that it was the evangelists who
controlled their story, not history. It is they who, for whatever
reasons, chose not to incorporate a reaction to their main character's
statements. And the latter simply reflected the symbolism they chose to
give him, a symbolism that did not need explaining to the community
itself, for which these documents, in true sectarian fashion, were
written.
Once we abandon the a priori assumption that the Gospel
Jesus existed, that he preached and may in some way have used the
phrase "son of
man" in designation of himself, that the Gospel scenes are to be
regarded as anything resembling remembered history (other than
symbolizing the faith and activities of the community itself), we
eliminate the
paradoxes
and problems inherent in this most problematic of New Testament
puzzles and open up the way to a solution. We can trace the development
and evolution of the Son of Man
sayings to arrive at the Gospel catalogue. As is often the case, the
adoption of inaccurate or unexamined premises can foil the
solution to a problem. The whole of ancient philosophy and cosmology,
and with it the period's religious constructions, were utterly
divorced from reality, since everything was approached from erroneous
and unverifiable premises about the nature of the universe. Prior to
Darwin, religious convictions, even by major philosophers, were based
on a profound ignorance about the biological development of life
through evolution, which is why evolution has proven so devastating to
those convictions and revealed them, too, as divorced from reality. One
day scholars will come to realize that all their continually debated
and ever changing predications about the Gospel Jesus have been wrong,
simply because of their erroneous (and largely unexamined) premise that
such a man existed.
I have been
reading up lately on the ancient myths of Cybele and Attis. What
'pre-christian' texts are there still in existence to support these
stories? And what parts relate to the Old Testament stories and also
the Virgin birth, death and resurrection?
Response to John:
Cybele and Attis and the Relationship to
Christianity / Resurrection in the Mysteries
Cybele was the Phrygian version (north-west Asia Minor) of one of the most longstanding myths of ancient and prehistoric times, that of the Great Mother, or Earth Goddess, or simply the Goddess, found over the entire Mediterranean and Near Eastern world. As the earth, she was the fount of all life, but in Asia Minor she assumed qualities rather wild and savage, partly under the influence of Dionysos worship in neighboring thrace (north-east Aegean) which was carried into Phrygia and Lydia. In the midst of the dark days of the struggle with Hannibal (2nd Punic War), the Roman Senate decided to adopt Cybele as a national Roman goddess, being assured by oracles and the Sibylline Books that she would bring them victory over Carthage. This move had some justification, since according to legend Rome itself had been founded by Trojans fleeing the fall of their city a millennium earlier. In 204 BCE, the king of Pergamum (near the ancient site of Troy) sent the black meteoric stone that represented the goddess by ship to Rome, where it was installed in a temple on the Palatine. (The very next year Italy was blessed with a record harvest and the withdrawal of Hannibal from Italy, so who knows?) Rites of the goddess over the next few centuries were strictly controlled by the Senate.
In the accounts of this coming of the Great
Mother to Rome there is no mention of Attis. He appears in the
mythology associated with Cybele, some of it earlier than the Roman
adoption, as her only lover, a shepherd boy who raised her jealous ire
by dallying with a nymph or marrying a king's daughter (depending on
the version of the myth). The result was
his death, although the precise nature of that death (by a boar or
castration) and whether it was self-inflicted was not fixed in the
first few centuries of the mythology. When the myth reached its classic
form, it became self-castration in a moment of madness, mirroring the
practice of the priests of Cybele, the Galli, who emasculated
themselves in bloody fashion to better serve the goddess. (A little
more drastic and primitive counterpart to modern Catholic priests who
take a vow of celibacy, and less reversible.) Here we have a probable
example of myth arising from rite; the practice of castration
by the priests of Cybele would have led to the development of the myth
of the precedent-setting castration by Attis who himself had served
Cybele.
While Attis appears in mythology early on
(from Herodotus to Diodorus), the big question is, when did he begin to
be worshipped as a deity in his own right, and when did he become an
actual savior god? The Romans initially seemed to take little or no
notice of him. Eventually, in the third and fourth centuries CE during
the twilight of the mystery cults, he became a solar god, but what his
status was at the turn of the era, when Christianity began, is debated.
Figurines of Attis have been unearthed
from the temple precincts dating from the first century BCE that
indicate 'resurrection' for and worship of Attis, and inscriptions from
the Augustan period refer to hymns to Attis. The emperor Claudius in
the mid first century CE officially reorganized the Cybele cult which
included festivities for Attis commemorating his death and (possibly)
resurrection. The exact nature of the latter is in dispute (and I will
discuss the meaning of the term later). In
the earlier versions of the myth (up to Diodorus in the late first
century BCE, one of which is preserved in the 3rd century Arnobius),
Attis remains dead, or at least he is not resurrected to earth (an
important distinction); and he does not seem to be
regarded as a deity in his own right.
That apparently changed in the early first
century. In the ceiling fresco of a recently excavated building from
the reign
of Tiberius, we see a winged Attis leading someone to Olympus, which
must mean that he is immortal himself capable of granting immortality
to his devotees. Then in the reign of Claudius we have the formal
institution of March festivities for Attis which involved a 'passion
week' celebration quite similar to the Passion of Christ (from which it
was hardly derived at that early a date). But what elements did the
festival contain at that time?
The fully developed festival, as witnessed more clearly in the 3rd and 4th centuries, was spread over some two weeks. On March 15, the "entry of the reeds" (bearers carrying them) seems to have commemorated Attis' youthful induction as a shepherd, and it may also refer to his emasculation which legend has it was done with a broken reed stalk. On March 22 came the "entry of the pine tree," this being the tree under which Attis died after his bloody castration. In some representations, Attis is actually attached to the tree, and borne into the temple. The 22nd and 23rd were days of mourning for the dead Attis. From the beginning of the festival to this point, the faithful fasted and practised sexual abstinence, and on the 24th the priests performed flagellation on themselves and sprinkled their blood on the effigy of Attis on the tree and on the temple altars. Novices who had committed themselves to taking the plunge may have performed the rite of self-emasculation on that same day. The night of the 24th, Attis and the tree were buried and the faithful kept watch over the site.
The 25th of March was known as the Hilaria, the "rejoicing." Firmicus Maternus around 350 CE records the morning pronouncement by a priest of the cult, generally assumed to be the Attis cult, although there is a similar pronouncement in the cult of Osiris:
"Be of good heart, you novices, because the
god is saved.
Deliverance from our sufferings will come for us, as well."
"Sufferings" was probably a reference to
this world in general, and thus the idea of a resurrection to a better
life.
To digress for a moment, the parallels to
the Christian Passion week are evident. Without suggesting that either
one borrowed directly from the other, we can see the natural common
elements that the cultic mind would apply to the death and rising of a
savior god. The festival begins in both cases with a celebratory
entrance, the carrying of the reeds and the strewing of the palms on
Palm Sunday. After several days comes the death of the god, with the
common motif of the tree to which the god is attached. Devotees in both
cases mourn and fast and abstain, as in the Christian Lent. The bodily
suffering of both gods is accentuated, whether through scourging and
crucifixion, or self-inflicted wounds. Another common element is the
mourning of the god by a woman close to him (something almost universal
to the myths of dying saviors), Attis by his lover Cybele, Jesus by his
mother Mary at the cross. Then comes burial, followed by a
resurrection, a period of grief ended by a morning of celebration and
renewal of hope. It is also not a coincidence that both festivals
occurred at the spring solstice, since both myths were ultimately
inspired by the astronomical cycle of the season, when the sun became
dominant once more and the days turned longer than the nights.
We can also make comparisons with the
mystical thought of Paul as applied to his Christ. The death of the god
occurs, followed by his burial, then after a period a resurrection. No
more does Paul need to see those elements of his "gospel according to
the scriptures" (1 Cor. 15:3-4) as a witnessed occurrence in recent
history than the devotees of Attis did (whether they envisioned it on
earth or in a mythical spirit world). And how did Paul's devotees of
Christ share in the mystery of his experiences? First, they joined in
the death of the god Jesus through baptism (Roman 6:3, "we were
baptized into his death"). We can compare this with the taurobolium of the Attis rites,
where the initiate was drenched in the blood of a bull slaughtered
above him. This rite is only attested to from the 2nd century on, so we
cannot say if it was introduced any earlier than the next great surge
of the Attis cult after Claudius, namely in the reign of Antoninus Pius
(138-161). But it was likely preceded by more benign rites of
baptism and rebirth, something common to virtually all cultic
expression of the kind under examination.
Paul also speaks of being "buried" with
Christ (Romans 6:4) and to this we can compare the hint in Clement of
Alexandria and Firmicus Maternus, that during the period of mourning
between Attis' death and his resurrection, the devotees symbolically
"descended" to the womb of the Goddess, referring to myths like that of
Persephone who reigned in the Underworld. Paul's mystical understanding
of dying with Christ thus envisioned accompanying him into burial and
the earth, in parallel with the expression of the mysteries. (This in
itself would be sufficient to explain his reference to Christ being
"buried" in 1 Cor. 15:3, which need not have an historical meaning.)
Since the ceremonies of the mysteries, as noted by Maternus,
involved the symbolic dedication of the devotee to undergo voluntary
death before being permitted to descend into the realm of death
(apparently carried out in the Attis rite through entry into a cave or
subterranean part of the temple), we can see this sort of thing
translated sacramentally into Paul's conception of Christian baptism.
And as the initiates in the mysteries would emerge from this death and
burial in a reborn state, guaranteed salvation, Paul too sees a
resurrection for the Christian devotee linked to the savior's one: "If
we have become united with him in the likeness of his death, certainly
we shall be also in [the likeness of] his resurrection" (Romans 6:5).
There is even an allusion to a rite of
eating and drinking associated with the Attis festival. Both Clement
and Maternus record a formula announced by the initiate: "I have eaten
from the tambourine (associated with Cybele) and have drunk from the
cymbal (associated with Attis)." This may well have referred to a
ritual
meal the initiate undertook before being allowed to enter into the
innermost temple from which he emerged reborn. Whether the elements of
the meal commemorated the passion of Attis is not known, but we can
certainly see a parallel to Paul's "Lord's Supper," which too need no
more have commemorated a recent historical event than did any of the
sacred meals of the mysteries, and they virtually all had one. (The
parallel is also evident with the Gospel "Last Supper," yet another
element in common between the two "passion weeks.") That the
meal of the Attis cult, like that of Dionysos, represented the body and
blood of the god is very possible, since the two cults were linked in
both derivation and geographical location.
These close parallels demonstrate the
intimate connection between the soteriology of the savior god religions
and that of Christianity, and make any denial that both are cut from
the same cloth the ultimate burial of one's head in the sand. It also
justifies regarding Christianity, in the essentials of its rituals and
theory of salvation, its fundamental principle of unity with the savior
deity, as a pagan expression rather than a Jewish one. Judaism shared
nothing with the above discussed features, despite the elements it did
contribute to syncretistic Christianity, such as its scriptural basis,
its messiah and apocalyptic expectations and assorted other traditions.
The critical part of the debate over the connection between Christianity and a cult like that of Attis, much exercised in Christian apologetic circles, concerns the Hilaria, the celebration of Attis' deliverance from death. When did it become part of the March festival? Maarten J. Vermaseren, perhaps the leading authority on the Cybele-Attis cult in the latter 20th century, subjects this question to a close examination in his Cybele and Attis: the Myth and the Cult (see pages 110-123). There are less than a handful of extant texts before the 4th century which refer to the Attis festival, all of them brief and none directly mentioning the Hilaria, although one (by Herodian around 187) may do so indirectly. When Vermaseren adds the archaeological evidence (of which there is almost as much a paucity as the textual), the picture gets a little less obscure. Even before the turn of the era there are representations of a winged and dancing Attis, indicating not only that he is regarded as an immortal (and thus having conquered death), but that his celebration is representative of the theme of the Hilaria, the rejoicing after mourning, the resurrection following death. Vermaseren points in particular to the scene in the unearthed temple mentioned above as demonstrating that the resurrection concept was in existence in the early 1st century. While he admits in summary (p.123) that the scant evidence of both types allows no more than a "hypothesis" about the addition of the Hilaria to the Attis festival, he believes "this hypothesis tends toward a resurrection conception," which arose a good deal prior to the 4th century. He might have added that if such a concept was part of the Attis cult in the 1st century, it is hardly feasible than an observance of it would not have become part of the Attis festival until another three centuries had passed.
It is unfortunate that our evidence is
indeed so scanty, making it
possible for apologists to postulate the theory that the Attis cult of
the later empire consciously mimicked Christian antecedents in an
attempt to win over adherents, including from Christianity itself. This
is unlikely in principle, simply because the Attis cult was part and
parcel of a broad range of savior god mythology which was based on the
dying and rising concept (even if "rising" had a multiplicity of
applications), and the thought of imputing to all of them a deliberate
copying of Christianity is beyond the feasible, let alone the sensible.
More than one Christian apologist of the 2nd and 3rd centuries (such as
Justin and Tertullian) argues
against the current accusation of borrowing in the other direction,
with no intimation that Christianity is alone in its concept of the
savior conquering death. Celsus, writing around 170, having made
himself quite familiar with the details of the Christian faith, makes
no bow toward a major feature like resurrection as a unique aspect of
Christ, and in fact accuses the Christians in blanket fashion of
outright plagiarism from the Greek traditions.
A. T. Fear ("Cybele and Christ" in Cybele, Attis and Related Cults,
ed. E. N. Lane, 1996, p.39-50) goes so far as to style the cult of
Attis in the 4th century a "created religion" designed to "confront
Christianity on its own ground," since it was supposedly clear to the
pagans "that
Christianity had fundamentally changed the religious agenda of their
society." While fearlessly giving voice to that favorite apologetic
fantasy that the similarities between Christianity and the mysteries
can be put down to pagan copying, Fear's theory is entirely
speculative, which his own language admits:
We can see therefore how the changes in
the [Attis] cult might not have been merely mutations which took place
unconsciously over time to ensure the cult's survival in the religious
marketplace of antique polytheism [a
scenario, certainly a sensible
idea, which he has earlier admitted "could be"], but could
rather have
been a deliberate attempt to produce a rival to Christianity. [p.44]
This speculative proposal requires that the
extant record, as discussed above, must be interpreted as meaning that
anything not directly stated in the record of the earlier centuries
must not have been current, but was only introduced at the time when it
is
clearly found, namely in the late 3rd and 4th centuries. It means
ignoring the indicators that Vermaseren sees as indicative of a
"resurrection conception" as early as the reign of Tiberius. There is
probably no doubt that the cult of Attis underwent a surge of attention
in pagan circles in the early 4th century when Christianity shot to the
top of the heap at the command of Constantine, who virtually turned it
into the state religion; and this surge was no doubt in response, to
try to counter the new upstart. But that hardly means that the Attis
cult was reworked from the ground up (pun intended), introducing
overnight under the machinations of some backroom conspirators dramatic
new concepts such as resurrection and the addition of the Hilaria, where none existed before.
The populace would well have known that such ideas were not traditional
and ancient. A few decades later, Julian the Apostate, no ignoramous
he, did his best to give an acceptable philosophical and allegorical
veneer to the Attis cult, and it is hardly likely he would have been
taken in by so recent an overhaul of a fundamental aspect like
resurrection (which he allegorized, in the case of Attis, as the ascent
of the soul). One is reminded of the dubious attempts of
those earlier Christian apologists to explain away the close
similarities between Christianity and the cults, but at least Fears
doesn't suggest that it was the demons who did it.
Now, it has become crucial to make an
important clarification here, one I have mentioned before, including in
The Jesus Puzzle (p.115-116).
On both sides of the perennial question concerning the similarities
between the pagan and Christian salvation cults, there have been
excesses. Apologetic websites countering claims that everything in the
Jesus story has previous parallels in the mysteries, down to the moles
on his skin, are proliferating, and poor old Kersey Graves [Sixteen Crucified Saviors] has
become a punching bag. At the same time, less informed skeptics
continue to circulate these detailed comparisons between Jesus and
savior gods like Osiris, Attis and Mithras, presenting the former as
nothing more than a plagiarized mirror of the latter. The battle
centers particularly on the idea of the god's "resurrection." Yes, on
this score the historians of the History of Religions School of the
early 20th century may have gotten carried away, although I think it
was more in
the nature of a semantic miscalculation than a 'factual' one. Both
sides need to nuance their focus and stop presenting straw men.
When we speak of a "resurrection" or
"resuscitation" in the pagan mysteries, we are not (or should not be)
speaking of a return to earth by the god, in flesh, to resume his
former life or remain for a time on the material plane. Apologists, and
even some mainstream scholars, exercise themselves needlessly over this
point, anxious to show that the gods of the mysteries did not rise from
their graves to walk the earth again in the way that Jesus is portrayed
in the Gospels. This is certainly true. Osiris was not reassembled by
Isis to stand on the banks of the Nile once more. Attis did not return
to earth after the period commemorated by his mourners; the Hilaria was not a rejoicing to
celebrate Attis' return to the fields to tend his sheep and play his
pipe. One of the versions of the Attis myth (the one recorded by
Arnobius)
expressly has Zeus refusing to restore him to his previous life.
But no religion has ever celebrated death
per se, and certainly not death as a finality. It may be a departing of
this world, but the great majority of humanity has always hoped for an
afterlife, and preferably a happy one. Osiris and Attis, perhaps the
two most prominent 'dying and rising' savior gods of the ancient world,
did not need to return to earth. They conquered death to set up shop in
the next world, where they welcomed the souls of those who were joined
with them and to whom they had shown the way. The future lay in the
next world, not in this one, and it was generally regarded as a future
in spirit only, the body (which pagan philosophers regarded with little
love) shed forever.
In ancient Egypt, only the Pharaohs and the
nobles could afford to undergo the rites of passage (including proper
embalming) that would guarantee survival in the world of the dead. The
masses simply perished into oblivion. The mystery religions as a social
phenomenon arose in part so that ordinary individuals could take their
eternal fates into their own hands and achieve salvation through being
initiated into the rites and knowledge that would open the door to the
afterlife. Through being linked with the savior, they could join him in
a resurrection to a new existence. It was not in flesh and it was not
on earth, and thus it did not require that the god be resurrected in
that sense as a precedent.
To some extent, the Jews saw things
differently. Though there were a variety of viewpoints about what, if
anything, happened after death, Hebrew thought was not strong on
afterlife concepts until a couple of centuries before the turn of the
era. When the idea of survival after death became popular, it tended to
expect God's (or a Messiah's) arrival to set up a Kingdom of God on a
transformed earth. Sectarian expressions sometimes deviated from this
and saw a heavenly messiah-figure as guaranteeing an ascent to heaven
of the righteous where they would assume "thrones and crowns" and
"garments of glory" (as in the Ascension of Isaiah and the Similitudes
of Enoch). Paul has
a foot in both worlds, which is fitting since Christianity as
originally formulated was a syncreticism of the Hellenistic and Jewish.
United with the god Christ Jesus through baptism and faith, the devotee
is guaranteed resurrection into the kingdom of God, where "we will
always be with the Lord" (1 Thess. 4:17); but not in flesh and blood,
for "flesh and blood cannot possess the kingdom of God, and the
perishable cannot possess immortality" (1 Cor. 15:50). As he says in
that passage, Christ himself constitutes the prototype for the
resurrected believer's new spiritual body.
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