I find Raphael Lataster's article in the Summer number of Think entitled ‘It's official: we can now doubt Jesus' historical existence’ an amazing piece of fantasist writing. As a historian I would like to challenge the article on the following grounds.
Lataster mentions no less than nine times that the scholars he quotes are secular. This reliance on specifically ‘secular’ scholars is suspicious. Does he mean that ‘religious’ scholars aren't to be trusted but ‘secular’ ones are? If so, this indicates straight away ideological bias. Such exclusion from the fraternity of scholars relates to the ‘peer reviewed’ process which is also appealed to several times in the article. This is supposed to give assurance of academic integrity, but it can easily become a form of recycling of currently fashionable ideas.
Of course, just because historians have an agenda – that they do their work from the basis of a world-view to which they are already cognitively and emotionally attached – does not mean that all their research is useless. The notion of complete neutral un-bias really is false, yet – despite having an agenda – the search for truth, knowledge and understanding can and does go on. A detective investigating a murder may have mostly subjective notions of whodunit, but the search for hard evidence remains the object of his/her enquiry. This is what really intrigues and keeps him/her going. So whilst acknowledging bias is important, it does not capsize the endeavour to be a sound historian.
In fact the history of biblical interpretation and criticism since the early nineteenth century bears out the ideological underpinning, whether for or against religion, of most of the criticism. Undoubtedly most Christian scholars were anxious to save their faith and therefore were looking all the time for ways of answering objections raised by Enlightenment scholars. But to regard only Christian scholars as biased and having an agenda, whilst ‘secular' scholars were and are squeaky clean, neutral, balanced and open without any agenda, is special pleading. It constitutes a logical fallacy, and I note that on page 70 Lataster positions himself as ‘someone who understands the basic axioms of logical reasoning’.
Secular scholars are as much human beings with strong emotional attachments to a world-view as religious scholars. That is why Lataster can lay into the gospels with such force on the grounds that they constitute ‘terrible’ evidence – a term he uses of them three times. He doesn't say why so ‘terrible’ but presumably it is because of their references to God, which, if you are quite sure that there is no God, renders the gospels beyond the pale. However, the validity of that judgement on the gospels depends on the validity of the atheist presumption for which he nowhere argues. If there is certainty that God does not exist, then the gospels have indeed to be rewritten. I was asked only last week for a properly scientific look at the gospels getting rid of all ‘puffs’. It remains the case, however, that historicity doesn't depend on ideological perspective but on historical evidence.
Certain basic rules have evolved regarding what counts as historical evidence which include the following:
(i) Acknowledging that such-and-such has survived from the past and therefore constitutes basic evidence which needs to be explained. As an obituary in The Times on 8 July 2016 of the distinguished Anglo-Saxon historian James Campbell put it: ‘he liked to recall that of an estimated 18 million discharge certificates given to soldiers of the Roman empire, only seven had been found’. The fragility of what happens to survive from the past gives it a special, indeed precious, value. The gospels happen to have survived, and even if forty years elapsed between the events they describe, this still constitutes remarkably good evidence for the ancient world. I shall return to this matter of the late dating of the gospels below.
(ii) Accepting that benefit of doubt should be given to the evidence unless there is strong evidence to the contrary, the onus probandi lies with the critic. If a historical source is regarded as dubious, it cannot just be dismissed; historical evidence is needed to account for why the source was invented. Thus if the gospels are regarded as a late fictitious compilation, there must be historically plausible reasons given for how and why and when this work of fiction was made up. An obvious point to consider is: why include mistakes and contradictions in material drawn up to forward a cause? That doesn't make sense. In fact the presence of mistakes and contradictions indicates real human source material! That is exactly what historians weigh up carefully.
(iii) A proper use of empathy, imagination, common sense, etc. is essential in seeking to interpret historical evidence and accounting for what is claimed to be fictional. Why should such ‘terrible’ evidence as the gospels have been composed? The historian arguing for the fictional status of the gospels must account for the strangeness of what was imagined. The message of a crucified leader as triumphant is more likely to be seen as pure nonsense from both a human and a religious perspective.
The article therefore left me completely unconvinced because it fails to answer three specific questions:
1. How do we account for the very existence of Christianity? There is the simple fact – and few would contest that – of Christianity's existence and flourishing over millennia. The gospels and the letters of Paul offer an elegant, clear and straightforward explanation. But where is the evidence for the widespread belief in a pre-Christian Jewish Celestial Christ which Lataster considers is where Christianity originated? Where are the utterly reliable documents from the right period which state unambiguously that the Celestial Christ is a good idea to believe in? And how does this connect with the idea for impressing this faith on the world through a strange rabbinic character called Paul making up the story of a non-existent person alive in Palestine a few years back who happened to get himself crucified and thus became the head of the movement?
2. Why indeed is the reading of Paul skewed in such a peculiar way as to suggest that he invented Jesus? The remarkable chance survival of letters he happened to write does not warrant such an extraordinary interpretation, because those letters refer to his actual experience. In fact they constitute powerful unconscious historical evidence. If it be objected that he was totally self-deluded, where is the evidence for that? He had remarkable gifts of intellect and was capable of rising to astonishing heights of intellectual and progressive genius, way above racism, imperialism and sexism, as in the famous passage from Galatians (‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus’) – an extraordinary vision for humanity far beyond what the twenty-first century seems capable of approaching. This hardly indicates someone totally self-deluded.
3. Is the late dating of the gospels uncontested? It is indeed the case that most scholars, religious or secular, accept the priority of Mark, but they also acknowledge that this is far from being proved. Lataster gives the impression on page 66 that Mark is the earliest of the gospels, and heavily influenced the later Matthew and Luke. Yet two pages later he correctly notes a level of uncertainty in a comment about ‘four unreliable gospels, which probably really stem from one: Mark’ (p. 68). Yet he uses this late dating as a reason for demoting the gospels from being considered primary sources (pp. 66, 71). To use an apparently uncontested fact as the basis for further argument is a sign of logical weakness.
Moreover the late dating of Mark tends to rest on the reference to the destruction of the temple in Mark as showing that the gospel was compiled after that event. But there is another obvious possibility. It is not unknown that people of wide perception can envisage what might happen in the future in general terms. Plenty of people feared terrible destruction if Hitler got to power. It is not at all implausible that an astute analysis in the early first century ce of the way that a section of the Jewish population was behaving towards the Romans would at some point lead to the collapse of the temple. To fail to consider the possibility of this interpretation actually exemplifies another logical fallacy – that of imposing an unneeded either/or.
In Appendix B of Anthony Flew, There is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed his Mind (2007) N. T. Wright expounds a view of Christian origins based on close historical scholarship. Flew never became a Christian, but he conceded that this was the best presentation of the Christian case he had ever read. I would be interested to know how Lataster would refute it.
