Has the Church Turned Jesus Into a Myth?
8 January, 2018 // in The Coffeehouse Cleric // by Alex Rowe.
I was pleasantly surprised to see that the National Geographic decided to feature as its main piece in its December 2017 edition an examination of the life of Jesus. The front cover reads: “The Real Jesus: What Archeology Reveals About His Life.” Inside, Kristin Romey, a self-described archeologist turned journalist, offers an articulate and well-balanced distillation of much academic scholarship, and her piece should be celebrated as a model of how a discussion of religious issues, potentially sensitive, ought to look. As Susan Goldberg, Editor-in-Chief, says, “How gratifying, in this season of goodwill, to see the scientific and the spiritual coexist.”
Romey’s piece takes it for granted that there really was a person called Jesus who lived in first-century Palestine. But this is not universally agreed. Seeds of the idea were floated some two centuries ago that the Jesus worshipped by Christians was merely a mythic construction, the product of a religious imagination compounded over nearly two millennia. But the so-called “Mythic Jesus,” argued for by the likes of J. S. Reimarus and D. F. Strauss, has itself now been shown to be a ruse, the construction of a recensionist history whose inaccuracy was driven by an atheistic agenda.
Yet the skeptic view has recently gained more attention. Though this small minority has grown only ever-so-slightly larger, their rhetoric is louder and more influential than their scholarly prowess (or lack thereof) should permit. One such dissenting voice is Richard Carrier, who writes extensively on this subject. Carrier was brought to my attention by Larry Hurtado, a scholar of international repute, an expert in Christian origins (and admittedly a believer), who on his own blog is not afraid to call out Carrier’s work for what it is. The quotation below is taken from the first of a series of posts that Hurtado wrote in December (others are here, here, here, here, here, and here).
“Despite Carrier’s evangelistic prophecies that the scholarly world will come to see that he, though now a voice in the wilderness, is correct in judging Jesus of Nazareth to be a mythical invention, there is in fact no sign of fulfillment. He is a paid advocate of his views (having been hired to produce these books), not a disinterested or dispassionate assessor of things. He is not expert in the very subjects on which he writes in these books, and his mishandling of the evidence shows this all too clearly. I conclude that, in so far as scholarly judgment of the matter is concerned, Carrier’s often-strident efforts will be judged as the last hurrah of the ‘mythicist’ claim, although internet die-hards are likely to remain doggedly committed to it.”
The prevailing scholarly consensus is that there really is at the centre of Christianity an historical figure called Jesus. Any good historian will say so. Even some atheists are becoming frustrated, growing wearing of the argumentation of their fellow atheists. Bart Ehrman, for example, is a biblical scholar well-known for his movement away from (perhaps fundamentalist) Christianity to atheism, yet he has written a book disputing the “mythicist” position. Or take self-professed atheist Tim O’Neill, whose blog History for Atheists challenges the “bad history” of the New Atheists.
For all the historical intrigue caused by that which archeological investigation brings to the surface, we cannot relegate Jesus of Nazareth to the past. Indeed, Romey observed that there was something quite unique about the archeology in and around Jerusalem, a strange mixture of science and the sacred. She says of other places: “Most archeological sites are cursed with a sense of romantic sterility…They may be alive with curious visitors, yet their relevance feels as distant to modern life as far-flung stars.” But not so in Jerusalem. There, the enduring significance of these ancient sites is seen not only in the presence of academics, but also the pilgrims keen to pay their respects and pray.
Despite all that I have said above, my guess is that the “mythic Jesus” of Carrier is not the source of the general misconception that Jesus was not real. Probably instead it is a result of the growing secularism of the modern West and with it a decline in religious literacy. People are unaware. People are misinformed. And for that reason, Jesus is often reduced to a character in a fairytale. Nicholas Lash, a theologian, says, “We underestimate at our peril the comprehensiveness of the ignorance of Christianity in contemporary Western cultures.” Reflecting on how this ignorance came about, though he appreciates the recent influence of secularism, Lash lays the blame — and the challenge — with the church:
“…I do think that some of the deeper reasons are to be sought in a systemic failure of the Christian churches to understand themselves as schools of Christian wisdom: as richly endowed projects of lifelong education.”
Christianity is very much alive and kicking. Its estimated 2.4 billion adherents around the world make it the largest and most diverse of religions. We cannot ignore the importance of its founder. But if the Christian faith is to continue to be meaningful in Britain, the church must heed Lash’s warning. The church — in its preaching and teaching, in its liturgies and traditions, in its community service, in its midweek lunchtime lectures (let’s start these!) — must make greater efforts to speak its wisdom into the culture and society in which it finds itself. Jesus was a real historical person. But unless the church endeavours to present him to the world, all that the world will say is, So what?
Thank you for reading. The Coffeehouse Cleric is a Medium publication dedicated to asking the big questions of life. It features writing on three main areas: minimalism, spirituality, and learning. If you enjoyed this piece, please do share it with friends and family on social media.
