Jesus is a Jew
April 16, 2021 12:30 PM Subscribe

Conservative commentator David Brooks is the latest to make this declaration. He was proceeded in recent times by people like Howard Jacobson and Schmuley Boteach. Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler have even published The Jewish Annotated New Testament. The roots of this discussion are, however, fraught.

According to Susannah Heschel, the affirmation of the Jewishness of Jesus began with Jewish scholars of the late nineteenth/early twentieth century:

By affirming Jesus's Jewishness and demonstrating the irrefutable parallels between Jesus's teaching and those of the rabbis of his day, Jewish historians sought to sever the connection between Christianity and the New Testament: the New Testament was a Jewish book, and Christianity was merely a collection of subsequently imagined dogma about it.

Heschel also documents the Christian pushback against the increasingly obvious Jewishness of Jesus and the New Testament:

The German nation could not be represented through a Jewish Jesus, who was both Jewish and mortal, but only through a historically transcendent, unique Christ. German nationalists' representation of Germany in terms of the Christ story grew stronger in the twentieth century. Some divorced Christ from the Jesus of the Bible, making him instead an "eternal idea" not limited by biblical history, just as they presented the German nation as a transcendent idea unbound by political conventions.

This gave rise to various representations of Jesus as an non-Jewish myth. This view has been discarded by scholars. It persists, however amongst fringe atheists and anti-Semites.

posted by No Robots (146 comments total) 32 users marked this as a favorite

Kinda feel like Jay and Silent Bob figured this out a long time before David Brooks.
posted by delfin at 12:42 PM on April 16, 2021 [14 favorites]

Heck, it came up in Avenue Q.
posted by jenfullmoon at 12:46 PM on April 16, 2021 [1 favorite]

the New Testament was a Jewish book

Actually, a Greek book, at least in language. Paul, of course, would have written from Jewish tradition, but still wrote in Greek, and the Gospel of John shows the influence of Plato and others.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 12:52 PM on April 16, 2021 [19 favorites]

Tangentially related, saw this fascinating article/photo essay in the Washington Post yesterday: The Emerging Jews of Colombia: Why are so many Christians in this South American country converting to Orthodox Judaism?
posted by gwint at 12:56 PM on April 16, 2021 [2 favorites]

Wasn't one of the first schisms in Christianity between those who thought that Jesus' teaching was only for the Jews, and those, like Paul, who wanted to preach to and convert Gentiles as well? I recall that being a big thing in a historical novel about early Christianity that I read years ago (The Kingdom Of The Wicked, Anthony Burgess)
posted by thelonius at 12:56 PM on April 16, 2021 [9 favorites]

As an outsider, I'm sure it's also pretty well established that Jesus being someone who actually lived isn't so very well established?
posted by alex_skazat at 12:58 PM on April 16, 2021 [11 favorites]

From Leo Baeck's "The Gospel as a document of the history of the Jewish faith":

[T]he Gospel, which was originally something Jewish, becomes a book—and certainly not a minor work—within Jewish literature. This is not because, or not only because, it contains sentences which also appear in the same or a similar form in the Jewish works of that time. Nor is it such—in fact, it is even less so—because the Hebrew or Aramaic breaks again and again through the word forms and sentence formations of the Greek translation. Rather it is a Jewish book because—by all means and entirely because—the pure air of which it is full and which it breathes is that of the Holy Scriptures; because a Jewish spirit, and none other, lives in it; because Jewish faith and Jewish hope, Jewish suffering and Jewish distress, Jewish knowledge and Jewish expectations, and these alone, resound through it—a Jewish book in the midst of Jewish books. Judaism may not pass it by, nor mistake it, nor wish to give up all claims here. Here, too, Judaism should comprehend and take note of what is its own.

posted by No Robots at 12:59 PM on April 16, 2021 [2 favorites]

As a jewish person I can say that every christian I’ve ever met who was really hyped on a jewish Jesus totally weirds me out. Some part of me just wants to say, can’t you just let us have this to ourselves? Judaism is different from mainline US christianity and reading backwards from new testament to tanach negates tanach as its own book. There’s no such thing as an old testament if you are jewish, it’s just the torah, ok?
posted by Lawn Beaver at 1:04 PM on April 16, 2021 [58 favorites]

Roses are Reddish
Violets are Blueish
If it wasn't for Jesus
We'd all be Jewish
posted by lalochezia at 1:05 PM on April 16, 2021 [12 favorites]

As an outsider, I'm sure it's also pretty well established that Jesus being someone who actually lived isn't so very well established?

gee, are you questioning "biblical history"???

I agree, there is very weak primary source or related evidence for a historical Jesus, but that is not truly relevant to this...cultural? analysis of who 'owns' Jesus/Christ. As someone who was raised RC, I had always thought that Jesus the man was born a Jew. those who came later created Christianity out of his legacy (or something).

this is very interesting. but yeah, anti-Semitism.
posted by supermedusa at 1:09 PM on April 16, 2021 [3 favorites]

As an outsider, I'm sure it's also pretty well established that Jesus being someone who actually lived isn't so very well established?

Historians Josephus and Tacitus on Jesus, who was executed by order of Pontius Pilate.
posted by Iris Gambol at 1:10 PM on April 16, 2021 [24 favorites]

Historical Jesus is the contrasting hypothesis to the mythical Jesus among scholars, and much more widely accepted as I understand it. The most interesting aspect of the theory, dumbed down, is that the certain elements of the the gospels and other contemporary narratives strongly suggests the actual existence of a Jewish figure around 30 A.D. who was actually baptized by some earlier influential figure, and was later crucified. The resurrection and deity ideas are not part of the scholarly hypothesis.

It's pretty interesting, the general idea is that certain parts of the story that are common to pretty much every surviving narrative, and only make sense if they were included to explain actual events. Jesus' baptism by John the Baptist for example, is thought not to be an idea people would make up on their own, since it suggests that John the Baptist was the teacher, and Jesus the student. And the big one, the crucifixion, since that was a shameful and ignominious way to die, and not something his followers would have made up.
posted by skewed at 1:18 PM on April 16, 2021 [18 favorites]

Also raised RC, , had the same beliefs as Supermedusa, Jesus was Jewish, Paul and other followers created Christianity as we know it. Also never thought the Jews killed Jesus, obviously it was the Romans. But my Catholic parents were not anti-semitic nor were they fanatically religious.
posted by mermayd at 1:21 PM on April 16, 2021 [10 favorites]

As an outsider, I'm sure it's also pretty well established that Jesus being someone who actually lived isn't so very well established?

I don't know if there's any major consensus on it, but for the most part modern historians actually do accept that a popular rabbi going by something like Yeshua ben Yosef existed and was executed by the Romans. Even the Talmud very strongly suggests he existed, if only as another in a long line of promised messiahs that ended up failing to liberate the Judeans. This has been a sore point for Christians (to put it lightly) for the better part of two millennia, and is one of the sources of Christian antisemitism through the years.
posted by Glegrinof the Pig-Man at 1:21 PM on April 16, 2021 [13 favorites]

"Wasn't one of the first schisms in Christianity between those who thought that Jesus' teaching was only for the Jews, and those, like Paul, who wanted to preach to and convert Gentiles as well?"

Yeah, it's a big plot point in the Book of Acts, resolved at the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15 (considered the first ecumenical council and a model for church governance even into the 21st century).

They're often called the Hellenizers and the Judaizers (with s's instead of z's, if you're British) in academic work, if you want to Google. For reasons I don't quite remember, when I was in seminary I once wrote a piece of alternative history where the Judaizers won the debate, set in the 19th century in the British Isles, but they were ruled by uptight Victorian Vikings because Christianity never got there? There may have been wine involved.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 1:22 PM on April 16, 2021 [28 favorites]

I love telling this story:

My brother-in-law and his wife were having an argument about religion, I can't remember the specifics. She had always claimed that she knew more about the Bible than he did, that because he had stopped believing in God he didn't know what he was talking about w/r/t religion, ever. But at one point in this specific argument he said to her, "Well, Jesus was Jewish!" and she said, "SINCE WHEN??" Um, since always?
posted by cooker girl at 1:25 PM on April 16, 2021 [5 favorites]

The Ancient Greek professor where I went to grad school liked to say there was more textual evidence for the historical existence of Jesus than for the historical existence of Homer.

As I did not study Ancient Greek, I have exactly zero idea how much evidence there is for the historical existence of Homer, but that was the benchmark he liked to give, whether that makes you feel that it's more likely or less likely that Jesus was a historical person. (Although I think his larger point was that people liked to spend entire class periods derailing the class into bickering over whether Jesus actually existed, but nobody ever did that about Homer, and he was just trying to teach some Greek, yo.)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 1:28 PM on April 16, 2021 [21 favorites]

Thanks Eyebrows, I was hoping you would speak to my q.

You might like the Burgess novel. I think he wrote two others about Rome as well. The funniest scene was when they get to Athens. Paul and his assistant, or whatever his title would be, had been spending years getting thrown in jail, stoned by crowds of angry people, scourged out of town, all that. In Athens, when they get to the agora, the philosophers are happy to hear them out and debate them! They start poking all kinds of holes in the sermon at once and their consensus is that the whole thing just won't hold water. The evangelists leave Athens and vow to never return. So while there is some pure fiction in it, I didn't think he'd invent a controversy like Hellenizers v. Judaizers, it's too important.
posted by thelonius at 1:30 PM on April 16, 2021 [6 favorites]

Yes, I think it's pretty well accepted by most historians of the period that Jesus existed. Somebody, I forget who, pointed out that there's about as much documentary evidence for Jesus as for many other ancient figures that we generally accept as real, e.g. Socrates. That isn't an endorsement of the Gospels being 100% accurate, of course.

I think modern skepticism/backlash against Christianity tends to fuel the desire in some quarters to completely deny the existence of the historical Jesus. There's an endlessly circulated compilation of supposed parallels between elements of the Gospels narratives and various myths and legends from Near Eastern cultures that's popular with people of this bent, but I understand that many of the claims are not all that strong from a scholarly standpoint.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 1:32 PM on April 16, 2021 [11 favorites]

(I see Eyebrows McGee made my first point already while I was writing my post.)
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 1:32 PM on April 16, 2021 [1 favorite]

As usual, Evangelicalism is making this creepy. Multiple Evangelical friends were talking about Passover on Facebook this year. The blowing of shofars is getting out of hand.
posted by clawsoon at 1:33 PM on April 16, 2021 [10 favorites]

I think I'll just stick with the Jefferson Bible...
posted by jim in austin at 1:43 PM on April 16, 2021 [5 favorites]

I was raised in a household that subscribed to Biblical Archaeology and have never questioned Jesus's Jewishness, on faith, as it were. Not that I spent much time on the issue, but even in the atheistic historian circles I later came to frequent, the historical existence of Jesus the Jew in some loosely-corroborated way seemed only slightly less documented than say, that of Shakespeare. Which is to say, not particularly well, but good enough for the idly curious without an ax to grind.

But as a different kind of article of faith: If David Brooks believes it, it's probably wrong.
posted by aspersioncast at 1:44 PM on April 16, 2021 [31 favorites]

There's an endlessly circulated compilation of supposed parallels between elements of the Gospels narratives and various myths and legends from Near Eastern cultures that's popular with people of this bent, but I understand that many of the claims are not all that strong from a scholarly standpoint.

They're not entirely wrong, as there are some fairly clear links to Zoroastrianism, which may have been a major influence in the Israelites first elevating what was up until then a regional demigod kind of figure to the king of their pantheon, and then abandoning Canaanite polytheism altogether. However, at most that might debunk the actions (wine into water, healing leprosy, and so forth) of the mythological Jesus, who historians consider a completely different, and fictional, person than the historical Jesus.
posted by Glegrinof the Pig-Man at 1:49 PM on April 16, 2021 [7 favorites]

Speaking of people with worrying politics cosplaying Jewishness, there's a Twitter thread of excerpts from Julie Burchill's memoir about wanting to be Jewish, and it's, well, pretty unique.
posted by acb at 1:54 PM on April 16, 2021 [12 favorites]

The resurrection and deity ideas are not part of the scholarly hypothesis.

I just wanted to repeat that for the joy of savoring the sentence.
posted by nickmark at 2:00 PM on April 16, 2021 [9 favorites]

The blowing of shofars is getting out of hand

Andre Antunes is on it
posted by flabdablet at 2:05 PM on April 16, 2021 [4 favorites]

If it wasn't for Jesus
We'd all be Jewish.

Well, it was Constantine who essentially forced Christianity on everyone, so the most likely other option would have been his alternate choice:sun-worship, i.e. Sol Inviticus.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 2:13 PM on April 16, 2021 [3 favorites]

Well, it was Constantine who essentially forced Christianity on everyone,

Not exactly. A good pagan, he nonetheless credited the Christian god of his mother (St Helena, who found the true cross in Jerusalem) for his victory at the Milvian Bridge which put him in charge of the western empire (AD 312). He decriminalized Christianity (Edict of Milan AD 313). He himself was a death bed convert (AD 337).
posted by BWA at 2:33 PM on April 16, 2021 [8 favorites]

For a readable yet scholarly take on the question, may I recommend Jesus the Jew by Géza Vermes, who continued writing on the subject in many other books.
And yes, people do still argue about whether Homer existed: as one person, two, or a plethora. I don’t think anyone has been killed in those debates, though.
posted by homerica at 2:38 PM on April 16, 2021 [2 favorites]

Andre Antunes is on it

That scanned as "autotune" for a minute, and I wondered what sort of auditory nightmare you were foisting on us.
posted by mhoye at 2:54 PM on April 16, 2021 [7 favorites]

I agree, there is very weak primary source or related evidence for a historical Jesus

On the contrary, I'd say compared to what you'd expect there's a wealth of info. We have 4 surviving accounts written within a century of his life. One of them (Mark) was written well within living memory of the man, as well as a second (hypothetical and not surviving Q) that was a source for two more. We also have the second hand information by Paul within two decades of his death confirming that his cult was active. This wouldn't be considered an open question at all if it weren't for all the baggage associated with being a foundational figure in a world religion; he'd come up in histories as an anomalously well documented splinter-sect figure in the first century Levant.

Which is not to say that historians do or would take this all at face value; I mean the surviving accounts are all by people who thought he was a god. Still, it's better documentation than for many kings. (It was amazing to me when I started reading more serious histories how many notes on sources for famous events or people have things like "the primary source was a hagiography written a century later to establish the provenance of the monastery's relics . . . ")

I say this as an atheist, but it the hypothesis that Jesus wasn't a historical figure seems to require hypothesizing a conspiracy to found a religion, using a made-up person and attributing acts and events to him that people would have known didn't happen. Even if 90% of the acts were made up, it'd still be more parsimonious an explanation to assume they were attached a real person.

As I did not study Ancient Greek, I have exactly zero idea how much evidence there is for the historical existence of Homer

There is none, other than the poems themselves, attributed to Homer by tradition. (I actually just listened to the 12 hours of Homer content on the excellent Literature and History podcast, after seeing it on an FPP here.)
posted by mark k at 2:58 PM on April 16, 2021 [31 favorites]

Brooks... ugh. He spends most of the column making the point (who denies it that matters?) that Jesus was Jewish. But he's eager to tell us that Jesus was better than all the rest:

But ultimately he stands apart from these figures. Jesus is not presenting himself as just another kind and learned rabbi. There is a story he tells about his own person that is different, more powerful and bizarre. [...] There is no Son of God without God, who is the God of the Israelites. [...] Jesus is amid the muck and armed with the Word, and yet emerges as a figure ultimately alone—a vortex of spiritual forces converging in one person, no one else quite like him.

This is annoying, because it's like a simulacrum of interest in Jewishness: Brooks is willing to look around at 1st century Judaism, not unappreciatively, but then he goes out of his way to say that Jesus is better than the rest, and "Son of God" to boot.

Stuart Rosenberg made the point that Christians are not engaging in interfaith dialog until they are willing to let Judaism be. They can't hope or expect Jews to convert, or to acknowledge Jesus as better than other Jews.
posted by zompist at 3:03 PM on April 16, 2021 [28 favorites]

Speaking of people with worrying politics cosplaying Jewishness, there's a Twitter thread of excerpts from Julie Burchill's memoir about wanting to be Jewish, and it's, well, pretty unique.

Holy cow. I mean, she's been entirely off the shits for a very long time, but...that's impressive.
posted by BlueNorther at 3:04 PM on April 16, 2021 [3 favorites]

According to Susannah Heschel...
For those who aren't familiar with her, Dr. Heschel is the daughter of perhaps the foremost theologian of the Conservative Jewish movement, Abraham Joshua Heschel. She has followed in the social justice minded footsteps of her father, and among other things, is the origin of the widespread addition of an orange to the Passover seder plate to show support for LGBTQ rights as well as those of other marginalized groups like women more generally. She's one of my new heroes :)
posted by Flight Hardware, do not touch at 3:05 PM on April 16, 2021 [20 favorites]

As a jewish person I can say that every christian I’ve ever met who was really hyped on a jewish Jesus totally weirds me out.

As an agnostic, I can assure you I feel the same way about anything David Brooks gets worked up about.
posted by mhoye at 3:10 PM on April 16, 2021 [11 favorites]

I wondered what sort of auditory nightmare you were foisting on us

perhaps one of these would be more to your liking
posted by flabdablet at 3:38 PM on April 16, 2021 [1 favorite]

I am startled by the number of people in this and another thread who don't think Jesus was an actual person. Pontius Pilate was too, in case you're wondering. We even have an inscription and coins.

The ancient Roman world was packed with holy men and different cults. Some of them get lives, some less so, but I can't think of one who has turned out not to have existed at all.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 4:01 PM on April 16, 2021 [19 favorites]

(that sounded rude, but I just thought the information that Jesus actually existed as a holy man of some sort was a thing people generally accepted and knew that there was evidence for.)
posted by lesbiassparrow at 4:04 PM on April 16, 2021 [4 favorites]

>who don't think Jesus was an actual person

eh, not like we an identify any impact on history he had if & when he was alive.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 4:04 PM on April 16, 2021 [2 favorites]

"But ultimately he stands apart from these figures. Jesus is not presenting himself as just another kind and learned rabbi. There is a story he tells about his own person that is different, more powerful and bizarre"

🎵 Somebody hasn't read his first-century apocrypha and contemporary local literature! 🎶
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 4:13 PM on April 16, 2021 [30 favorites]

Well the Romans thought he was enough trouble to crucify, so I figure he must have had some immediate impact before Mark turned whatever was in Q into a Greek narrative...
posted by lesbiassparrow at 4:13 PM on April 16, 2021 [1 favorite]

This stuff about Jesus being Jewish... Look, the Lost Tribes of Israel weren't Jewish and they wound up in Britain, among other places. Jesus was English. Just as you might expect.
posted by CCBC at 4:17 PM on April 16, 2021 [3 favorites]

. We have 4 surviving accounts written within a century of his life. One of them (Mark) was written

yes. the historicity of Jesus is interesting in as evidence of his existence. I had this debate with a friend who was an atheist and his sister, Christian, pretty well versed so to say. I asked him to posit the first premise: did Christ live what evidence etc. my response was debate over as the is no primary evidence. there is secondary evidence therefore there can be no debate on the question. He wanted scrolls or a Roman docket, a wall inscription, something.
It went on to to many suppostions, gospels, Roman history, narrative, personality. It is interesting that the land was occupied, factionalism...that at least someone should advocate the very thing that was in short supply, love. That is not to say familial love. Empire does not issue love but demands it.
The overall scenerio boiled down to the over turning of tables at temple. As a parable, story, narrative, it's strong. But say it happened what good what it do to keep a record. Pilate washed his hands, his existence is established as most likely Caiphas....and it becomes a circular puzzle.
posted by clavdivs at 4:30 PM on April 16, 2021 [2 favorites]

In my experience, many Jews today know very little about Jesus.

Well, David, in my experience, many Christians know very little about Jesus. The fact that your column seems to be written entirely for Christians who apparently know next to nothing about his life can be entered as exhibit A.

Exhibit B will be the thousands of Christians who would be willing to swear that Jesus didn’t like abortion or homosexuality, or who would have no idea what ‘the miracle at Cana’, which Brooks mentions, even is.
posted by bq at 4:35 PM on April 16, 2021 [26 favorites]

When I was in my Catholic high school religion class, we had a class discussion one day about how Jesus was Jewish. This was junior or senior year and we took religion class every year, so the fact of Jesus' Jewishness seemed to me like something everyone knew and why were we even discussing this? But then during the discussion a few of my classmates lost. their. shit. I was so surprised! How could they be so disbelieving and so upset? It was incomprehensible to me. Until...I realized that this was a lead-in to a lesson on anti-Semitism.

That was a long time ago, but I still haven't lost my WTF.
posted by medusa at 4:52 PM on April 16, 2021 [16 favorites]

medusa: But then during the discussion a few of my classmates lost. their. shit.

What did they think he was? Like... how do you come to any other conclusion? Is there some secret non-Bible knowledge that's passed along in anti-Semitic families about the ethnicity of Jesus?

Did they think the same thing about King David and Moses?
posted by clawsoon at 5:02 PM on April 16, 2021 [2 favorites]

Metafilter: There may have been wine involved.
posted by Reverend John at 5:08 PM on April 16, 2021 [8 favorites]

The Frontline Documentary “From Jesus to Christ: The First Christians” (pt-2) is brilliant stuff. It looks at the current scholarship around Who Jesus was.

Importantly, it shows how, when you lay the Gospels in parallel and look at them in the order they were written, you can see how Jesus goes from being incredibly Jewish in Mark, to John, which was written in the context of the Jewish Revolt against Rome, wherein Jesus’s Jewishness is really downplayed.

The author of Mark wrote “the mob” called for Jesus’ execution. By John , it’s “the Jews”. The date of the Passover dinner shifts depending on which Gospel you read. When you look at the Gospels side by side, the way the narrative shifts and what story the writer wants to tell comes to the surface.

Highly recommended, especially if the Jewsihness of Jesus is of interest.
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 5:15 PM on April 16, 2021 [20 favorites]

I had a discussion with one of my brothers years ago about Jesus being Jewish. It is my memory that as a kid this was just accepted fact (Episcopal) however, my brother stated that no, Jesus was in fact the first christian. This could not possibly have anything to do with the fact that my brother was both an antisemite and some flavor of evangelical christian. I seem to remember he argued that only he could be right because I was a professed atheist and therefore would have to be wrong. Unfortunately for him, I started laughing and said yes, he follows himself like a dog chasing his tail. I'm pretty sure we stopped talking about religion.
However thanks to this discussion, and CCBC's reply in particular I actually came to post this.
posted by evilDoug at 6:26 PM on April 16, 2021

As I did not study Ancient Greek, I have exactly zero idea how much evidence there is for the historical existence of Homer, but that was the benchmark he liked to give, whether that makes you feel that it's more likely or less likely that Jesus was a historical person.

It depends on what you count as evidence. For instance, the historian Herodotus wrote around 430 BCE. The oldest known copy of his work is a scrap of papyrus dated to the 2nd or 3rd century CE with 13 lines from one of his works. It is a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy made 500-600 years after the original was written.

Josephus, the contemporary historian often cited as mentioning Jesus wrote in 75 CE. The earliest surviving copy of a copy of a copy of his work dates to the 10th or 11th century. A thousand years later. (He's quoted in works for which we have manuscripts dating to the 4th century and there's a Latin translation that goes back to the 5th century, so only 500 years later.)

The earliest manuscripts (again, copies of copies, not originals) we have of the Gospels are fragments that are maybe as close as 100-200 years to the originals. That's astonishingly close to the original compared with most of the surviving literature from that period. And yet 3-6 generations removed from the lifetime of Jesus.

Basically nothing written has directly survived from the time of Jesus. We don't have a lot of evidence that he existed, but we have extremely patchy evidence that anyone existed from the first century, and the Gospels, sketchy as they may be, give us much more than we have about almost anyone else.
posted by straight at 6:27 PM on April 16, 2021 [11 favorites]

I've always thought the "Jesus didn't exist" camp comes from not being able to separate the deity from the humanity- 'Jesus is God' + 'God isn't real' = 'Jesus isn't real'

Ugh the creepy appropriation of Jewishness by conservative Christians is something else. I'm so sorry.

I did use it to my advantage with my mother in law though- we had them over for dinner and I thought, with new baby, I'd make a one pot meal, and I felt like making Shashuka, so I did. Now, my in laws are meat & potatoes farmer types, and I knew this would challenge them a little. "What are we eating?" "Shashuka- it's an Israeli dish" I said, eliding that it's also common across the middle east. "Oooh" she said appreciatively. My poor father in law struggled a bit and didn't go back for seconds, hahaha.
posted by freethefeet at 6:30 PM on April 16, 2021 [6 favorites]

Shashuka

Looks great. Come for the Jesus, stay for the recipes.
posted by No Robots at 6:40 PM on April 16, 2021 [5 favorites]

Regardless of how pale or dark-skinned we see him depicted, why do we associate visual depictions of Jesus of Nazareth with a beard and long hair?
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 7:02 PM on April 16, 2021 [11 favorites]

Basically nothing written has directly survived from the time of Jesus.

The important exception to this is engraved stone and clay tablets. This is why we have contemporary evidence that Pontius Pilate exists. And of course there’s a lot of linguistic scholarship that can help date a copy of a text.
posted by bq at 7:07 PM on April 16, 2021 [6 favorites]

Well the Romans thought he was enough trouble to crucify

They paid an execution squad about enough for a glass of wine for doing a crucifixion. They weren't slow to order them.

Remember about ten years ago, Fox News and, at that time I guess, what was left of the "right-wing blogosphere" made a big cause out of a book called Zealot? It was a fairly conventional survey for the general reader, rounding up what is known about the historical Jesus, what the issues about the various Gospels are, and also making some speculations about Jesus' life based on what is known about Galilee at the time. Why did they do this? Because the author, Reza Aslan, is an Iranian-American scholar of Christianity who is a Muslim.

Anyway. Aslan says that simply preaching the return of the Kingdom of David was more than enough to get you crucified. The Romans didn't care at all about Jewish politics in the region, but they cared very much about anyone starting anything that looked like a political rebellion, and implying that God is to restore the kingdom looks a lot to them like saying the Romans have to get defeated and thrown out first. Even if the point was actually that the temple priest class was to be unseated - they didn't really care.

There is a tradition in apologetics, or at least in old-timey religion sermons, where they kind of seem to think that the Crucifixion was a unique nadir of human torture, and that Jesus willingly endured suffering far greater than anyone has before or since. But this is not so. Crucifixion was a common punishment for slaves, non-Roman citizens, and, I am sure, other groups of low status in their society. Romans ruled territory by co-opting existing elites to help maintain the peace in exchange for limited power and wealth, and by brutally crushing dissent and terrorizing occupied populations; the spectacle of crucifixion was ideal for this.
posted by thelonius at 7:14 PM on April 16, 2021 [33 favorites]

For all his vague allusions to politics and turmoil I found Brooks’s careful lack of interest in talking about Palestine troubling.

To take a small example: if you wanted to pick a population that most closely resembled the historical Jesus physically, why wouldn’t you turn to the people who have actually continuously inhabited Jerusalem and it’s environs since classical times—the modern-day Palestinians? And if we wanted to think about which part of modern-day Jerusalem a firebrand protesting imperialist force used to violently crush dissent might come from, well, I have my guesses.
posted by rishabguha at 7:33 PM on April 16, 2021 [12 favorites]

Huh, I thought he was more established then that.

Which lead me to reading up on what is suspected to be Jesus's brother's coffin (which was dropped and broken in Toronto XD)

It is either a very good forgery, a very old forgery, or authentic and no one has been able to prove it beyond a doubt one way or the other from the sounds of it, at least not yet.
posted by Canageek at 7:43 PM on April 16, 2021

"why do we associate visual depictions of Jesus of Nazareth with a beard and long hair? "

This is delightful, definitely worth your 15 minutes. It hit every high point I would expect, and I saw a few pieces of art I've never seen before and learned a few new things! (I've seen the sella curulis in Imperial Roman art and would have identified it as Imperial Roman, but I didn't realize it a) had a name and b) was the Emperor's specific chair!)

My only complaint was going to be "but where's the oldest extant Christ Pantocrator -- oh, never mind, there it is." You will hear from Eastern Orthodox Christians sometimes that that icon is what Jesus "really" looked like, because of the history of icons being modeled on other icons, and then painted over and over on the same panel for hundreds of years; the idea is someone who actually knew Jesus later on painted him, and then that portrait was preserved with fidelity via the icon process. Scholars don't accept that story (obviously, I guess), but that icon is suuuuuuuuuuuper influential for what Jesus looks like in Orthodoxy, and somewhat influential (via cultural exchange) in Western Christianity as well. (Also it's neat b/c of the half-and-half thing, and because it survived the iconoclastic controversies.)

(Modern photorealistic Northern European Jesus with bright blue eyes is such a white supremacist flex, it's very gross, and it's very deliberate iconography making a very deliberate statement.) (Also Jesus probably consumed around 1400 calories a day, 1/4 of them from beer, so while he may have been whipcord-strong from the fishing or carpentering or whatever people are on about this week, he was not stacked, and he was not 21st-century hot.)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 7:43 PM on April 16, 2021 [16 favorites]

To take a small example: if you wanted to pick a population that most closely resembled the historical Jesus physically, why wouldn’t you turn to the people who have actually continuously inhabited Jerusalem and it’s environs since classical times—the modern-day Palestinians?

Over the past two millennia, Palestine has been home to continuous communities of Palestinians, Jews and, interestingly, Samaritans, who maintain a stand-alone religious status to this day.
posted by bq at 8:26 PM on April 16, 2021 [8 favorites]

It is well known that Pontius Pilate was born and raised in the Scottish village of Fortingall.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 8:37 PM on April 16, 2021 [3 favorites]

Ah, Rhodes scholar.
posted by clavdivs at 8:42 PM on April 16, 2021

I just wanted to repeat that for the joy of savoring the sentence.

Let me try! "Also Jesus probably consumed around 1400 calories a day, 1/4 of them from beer, so while he may have been whipcord-strong from the fishing or carpentering or whatever people are on about this week, he was not stacked, and he was not 21st-century hot."
posted by thelonius at 8:49 PM on April 16, 2021 [1 favorite]

Great discussion, folks.
Thanks for the interesting post, No Robots.

I now have a lot of reading and watching to do.....
posted by Gadgetenvy at 9:01 PM on April 16, 2021 [1 favorite]

I think the reason so many atheists are on the “there was no Jesus” wagon is because Christians take the evidence of a historical Jesus and ipso facto, the Bible is real.

Which, no.

Arguing against the divinity of a real person forces a nonbeliever to argue every. single. line. of the gospels. Denying Jesus even existed means you can just wave the whole thing away as bullshit and spend the rest of your day doing something more enjoyable.
posted by Big Al 8000 at 9:09 PM on April 16, 2021 [8 favorites]

I have exactly zero idea how much evidence there is for the historical existence of Homer,

My favourite argument on this subject (not kidding): "The Iliad and The Odyssey were not written by Homer, but by someone with the same name."
posted by ovvl at 9:34 PM on April 16, 2021 [6 favorites]

My usual go to comparison for Jesus is Gilgamesh: he existed, he did stuff, but I am pretty solid on that none of that stuff included going to the underworld, etc.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 9:56 PM on April 16, 2021 [1 favorite]

I now have a lot of reading and watching to do.....

I very highly recommend watching Pasolini's pissed-off Marxist Jesus, he's the best Jesus that I've ever seen.
posted by ovvl at 9:59 PM on April 16, 2021

I knew pastors who had "my boss is a Jewish carpenter" bumper stickers on their car, not sure what is the issue here. Although it always took folks a minute to figure it out.
posted by greatalleycat at 10:25 PM on April 16, 2021

Also: I remember an old Archie Bunker line where Meathead says "Jesus was Jewish" and Archie says indignantly "Only on his mother's side!"
posted by mark k at 10:39 PM on April 16, 2021 [13 favorites]

Also I kind-of can't believe I passed this by on first David Brooks pass, but "Jesus is not presenting himself as just another kind and learned rabbi. " -- WHAT GOSPELS IS HE READING? Presenting himself as "kind" is very deeply not in Jesus's top ten concerns. Like, what about Mark 7:27, when he mocks the woman with the disabled child like he's a Mean Girl in a high school cafeteria? What about going batshit on the moneychangers in the temple? (I mean, deservedly, IMO, but it isn't "kind.") How does Brooks think OTHER rabbis are presented in the Gospels? Because it's NOT AS KIND AND LEARNED, YO. (Especially not in Matthew.)

This is so deeply a piece by someone reciting half-digested pop Christianity (and not even the interesting pop Christianity, like Elaine Pagels) who has not ever deeply engaged with what's actually in the Gospels but just with what he's been told they say and mean. Like, I'm sure he's read them, but just in the skimming way that most people read the Bible, where they already "know" the stories, and "know" what they mean, and so don't read the actual words, and completely skip over the parts where JESUS IS A JERK. Or where Jesus is deadass hilarious. Or where Jesus makes no sense. (Or where Mark's Greek is so bad that it clearly comes through in any decent modern translation and you're like, "wait, what?") WHYYYYYYY does this guy get to be a nationally-syndicated columnist who's though to have deep insight when he seems to mostly be humblebragging about having traveled to Israel? (I know why, you don't have to answer, but UGH.)

And where Brooks says "There is a story he tells about his own person that is different, more powerful and bizarre" -- that's true, to a point. Jesus DOES tell a very strange story about himself, one that is quite a disconnect from traditional Jewish stories until recently-to-him. But what I almost said in the thread where we were talking about Revelation was, Daniel and Revelation are really hard to read and understand. Apocalyptic literature of about 150 BCE to 150 CE in the Jewish (and then Christian too) world is deeply and profoundly weird and disjoint from what came before. Rolling in with all the tools of literary analysis that worked really great on the Torah and the Nevi'im and most of the Kethuvim gives you NOT A WHOLE LOT to work with. The same tools, with a helping of Greco-Roman literary norms on top, make sense of most of the Gospels and Letters. But those all fall apart in Daniel and Revelations, because apocalyptic literature is WEIRD and HARD and it's the literature of a culture sea-change. Both the Jewish and Christian canons are being solidified during the period apocalyptic literature was popular, and both groups are starting to understand themselves as people of specific, written texts that form a canon. The Roman world is in a lot of ways very different from anything that came before. Crashing into apocalyptic literature is like you grew up reading Dickens, and suddenly everyone is communicating in 2021 memes. Like, there's a throughline? But it depends on massive cultural and technological change, and standing atop Dickens it's VERY hard to understand the memes. Like, if Dickens is most of the Hebrew Bible, then Hemmingway is most of the New Testament -- it's different, it has some new and startling modes of communicating, but it's fundamentally the same sort of storytelling. Daniel and Revelations are straight-up 21st century memes and require totally different tools and knowledge to even BEGIN to approach. And they are very much the literature of Jesus's time, so we should expect Jesus to be hard to understand and PRETTY WEIRD when we compare Jesus to our traditional toolset/literary expectations.

But more to the point, from about 150 years before to about 150 years after Jesus's alleged birth? THERE ARE A LOT OF EXTREME WEIRDOS running around the Ancient Near East, closely or loosely affiliated with Judaism of the era. Including a bunch of failed Messiahs (Simon Bar-Kokhba was my college roommate's favorite), but also people like John the Baptist (who is TOTALLY weirder than Jesus), and the whole panoply of people we today class as Essenes and Gnostics. And we have a LOT of sources for those groups, from extra-Biblical literature that's been extant since the time of Jesus -- some preserved alongside the Bible canon as "valuable-but-not-canonical" (antilegomena, particularly), some from non-religious sources, some outright rejected by religious authorities but still transmitted over the centuries, or else lost-but-refound among the Dead Sea Scrolls (or other recent finds). It is almost impossible to overstate how weird some of the literature contemporary to Jesus that did NOT make it into the canon is. The best-known weird stuff is mostly about Jesus -- the Infancy Gospel of Thomas where Jesus is just striking playmates/birds dead for no apparent reason, the Second Treatise of the Great Seth where Jesus switches places with Simon of Cyrene, turns invisible, lets Simon get crucified while invisible Jesus laughs in the crowd, and then rockets up to heaven -- but there's lots and lots that isn't about Jesus and is just deeply, impossibly weird. Some of it you read (including the Second Treatise of the Great Seth, tbh, that guy was nuuuuuuuuuuts) and you're like, "there is no way someone wrote this without being extremely high on something" (although as a scholar of religion I am forced to admit that "extremely high on spiritual experiences" is a valid option although not in the "embrace high school!" evangelical 21st century way, but in the "prayed until I literally hallucinated and God told me some weird shit" way).

ANYWAY. If you, like David Brooks, think Jesus in the Gospels is as bizarre as the first century gets in its Judaism-related religious literature? YOU HAVE NOT READ VERY MUCH FIRST CENTURY JUDAISM-RELATED RELIGIOUS LITERATURE, because it gets way, way, way, way weirder. And I say this as someone who thinks Jesus is literally revelatory and busts open the gates of hell and whatnot. But Jesus is not HALF as bizarre as a bunch of other religious stuff going on in that era, and "JESUS IS SO WEIRD, THAT'S WHY WE SHOULD BELIEVE IN HIM, ISN'T HE SO WEIRD?" is a terrible, terrible theological claim to make, but also a terrible literary claim to make, because DUDE IT GETS SO MUCH WEIRDER THAN THE GOSPELS.

Brooks's whole article kind-of makes me want to barf.

"I’m always amazed by how many people who have dedicated their lives to Christ have never actually been to Israel. " -- honestly, fuck you, dude; this is a religion with a preferential option for the poor.

"His ministry begins with lost sheep within the house of Israel" -- shut the fuck up; the vast majority of Christianity declared the Mission to the Jews closed after WWII, there are no "lost sheep within the house of Israel" you astonishing antisemitic white supremacist.

"many Jews today know very little about Jesus." -- U R thinking of yourself and are very confused sir.

"If you were within this covenant, it must have felt completely self-enclosing. The pressure must have been intense. " -- I feel like you could actually ask Jews today about that? And/or read some frickin first-century Jewish literature? Like, you don't have to just IMAGINE.

"They saw relations between nations not just as the normal jostling of peoples but as the running tally of divine judgment: Are we favoured or are we punished? Is the covenant betrayed or fulfilled? God shapes history to teach us hard lessons." -- *SCREAMS IN THEOLOGIAN* *gets really angry that he hasn't read any 20th century theology* *pants with rage* *SCREAMS IN THEOLOGIAN AGAIN*

"Minor-league revolutionaries were perpetually rising up and getting crushed." -- OH U MEAN LIKE JESUS?

"Jesus would have been treated as something of an outcast from the beginning—though obviously he was not barred from the synagogue for it." -- this makes literally no sense

"When he began his adult ministry, Jesus would have cut a familiar figure. He fit the pattern of miracle-working prophets like Elijah and Elisha." -- OH MY GOD DO YOU READ NOTHING (Also, next few sentences, congratulations on googling when some Talmudic sages lived.)

"There’s one final truth that becomes clear about Jesus when you see him through the Jerusalem lens: He was a total badass." -- *infinite barfing*

"When you see Jesus from the perspective of Jewish history of that moment, you see how many power structures he was simply circumventing. " NO! NO, YOU DAFT MORON! NO!
Okay I had to stop there before I gave myself a sentient ulcer.

posted by Eyebrows McGee at 10:59 PM on April 16, 2021 [67 favorites]

...I bet he's a commie, or even worse yet a Jew...
posted by St. Oops at 11:08 PM on April 16, 2021 [1 favorite]

Basically nothing written has directly survived from the time of Jesus.

Have you searched archive.org? They surely must have crawled it at some point.

(sends resume to NYT opinion page editor)
posted by flabdablet at 11:09 PM on April 16, 2021 [4 favorites]

"God shapes history to teach us hard lessons."

I am still so angry about this I can't go to bed; when people say this bullshit to me, I ask if the SS was part of God's plan, and why God kills children using cancer to teach adults moral lessons. Like, that is a very FUCKED UP kind of God that literally nobody should believe in, if God is busy "shap[ing] history to teach us hard lessons." YOU CANNOT SAY THAT SHIT AFTER THE 20TH CENTURY. Saying this shit means you believe God used the Holocaust to teach other people "hard lessons" and NOBODY SHOULD BELIEVE IN YOUR MASS-MURDERING, GENOCIDAL GOD because that is extremely fucking fucked up. Brooks should be ASHAMED of himself for saying such a stupid, moronic, Nazi-excusing thing, and ANY HALF-EDUCATED PERSON who gives half a shit about ANY religion or theology WOULD KNOW THE FUCK BETTER than to say this absolute genocidal garbage. It's a fucking travesty that a nationally-known commentator has the FUCKING GALL to say something like this in public, and nobody had the sense to tell him to STFU.

*LITERAL SCREAMING INTO THE VOID WITH RAGE*
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 11:13 PM on April 16, 2021 [55 favorites]

Oh dear... is it bad to enjoy somebody else's rage this much?
posted by inexorably_forward at 11:49 PM on April 16, 2021 [11 favorites]

I don't know, but it is magnificent. I tip my hat to Eyebrows McGee .
posted by lesbiassparrow at 12:09 AM on April 17, 2021 [8 favorites]

My favourite argument on this subject (not kidding): "The Iliad and The Odyssey were not written by Homer, but by someone with the same name."

Perhaps it was the talk of history as providential above that reminds me of this, from Borges, The Immortal:

In Aberdeen, in 1714, I subscribed to the six volumes of Pope’s Iliad; I know I often perused them with delight. In 1729 or thereabouts, I discussed the origin of that poem with a professor of rhetoric whose name, I believe, was Giambattista; his arguments struck me as irrefutable.
posted by thelonius at 12:17 AM on April 17, 2021 [4 favorites]

To say that God shapes history to teach us hard lessons need not be enraging, given an appropriate referent for the word "God".

If the referent for the word "God" is taken to be the same as that for the phrase "everything in the universe that's beyond my control", many of the things said about God become much easier to interpret as metaphor.

God's plan, under this interpretation, is a metaphor for all the things that have actually happened and are actually going to happen (as distinct from all the things that might be going to happen but don't actually turn out to). In particular, since everything in the universe that's beyond my control does not necessarily constitute an entity with anything even vaguely resembling a consciousness or any kind of moral agency, there's no implication that God's plan is desirable. It's not even intentional; merely inevitable.

On this interpretation, although the Holocaust was certainly part of God's plan (because it was a thing that certainly happened), and although it certainly has many valuable lessons to teach us such as the dangers of cozying up with fascists, the moral responsibility for it rests with the evil fucks who perpetrated it, not with God. And children dying of cancer is straight-up horrible with no moral lessons attached whatsoever.

But when somebody who clearly does conceive of God as conscious and moral and intentional wheels out the standard line of crap about God's plan "being for the best" in some deeply mysterious infinity-dimensional chess playing fashion that mere humans are simply not made to comprehend, or tries to claim that the purpose of God's plan is moral instruction for human beings?

They can fuck off.
posted by flabdablet at 4:43 AM on April 17, 2021 [6 favorites]

Janet McKenzie’s Jesus of the People (from an art initiative for the turn of the millennium) exposed racism and sexism...which is not a surprise, it’s consistent with anti-Semitism. I’m less surprised by people with bad reactions, ignorance and denial because it is people who cannot/refuse to grasp the fullness of humanity.

As far as weight...there are a whole lot of meals going on throughout the gospels, so the historical Yeshua ben Josef probably had a little extra fuel.

On preview-I totally agree with Eyebrows McGee.
posted by childofTethys at 4:55 AM on April 17, 2021 [1 favorite]

I always thought that the existence or not of historical Jesus was a moot point. It's not like if someone some day conclusively proved that there was no such person that Christians would be like "well damn guess I'm giving up this faith". I mean the existence of God can't even be proven yet here we are.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 4:58 AM on April 17, 2021 [2 favorites]

For example, all Jews speak of abba, the Father.

What? No. Has Brooks ever met anyone Jewish? That's a rhetorical question, of course he has, but this is just weird.

Look, when I was like ten I thought Easter was when Jesus was born, Christmas was when he died, and crucifixes were a symbol of Christianity because his death was a big deal and that's how you mark graves. But in my defence, I was 10, my knowledge of Christianity largely came from the Narnia books, and I wasn't an internationally-syndicated columnist. This is the level of Judaic knowledge Brooks displays.
posted by Joe in Australia at 5:23 AM on April 17, 2021 [7 favorites]

To simplify matters, many of Christianity's mythological motifs rest upon ancient precursors. I cannot address Judaism's development since I know nothing about it. We are talking about Mystery or Mysteries that defy intellection.
posted by DJZouke at 5:40 AM on April 17, 2021

What's even more embarrassing is that Brooks was actually raised Jewish, and even attended Hebrew school (if only briefly). His first wife converted to Judaism after they were married, and they attended synagogue for years. It wasn't until he married his much younger assistant he'd been shtupping that he became interested in Christianity.
posted by Glegrinof the Pig-Man at 5:40 AM on April 17, 2021 [11 favorites]

For example, all Jews speak of

Well that could only be said by someone that has only met a single jew, if he'd met even two he'd know there were at least three differing opinions. ;-)
posted by sammyo at 5:50 AM on April 17, 2021 [16 favorites]

Like, that is a very FUCKED UP kind of God that literally nobody should believe in, if God is busy "shap[ing] history to teach us hard lessons."

I could, if I were at all religious, believe in this kind of god. What I wouldn't do is worship him.
posted by srboisvert at 6:05 AM on April 17, 2021 [6 favorites]

Some years ago I did a lot of listening of Robert M. Price's podcasts The Human Bible and The Bible Geek, which treat the Bible as if it were not a divine document (necessary if one really wants to understand its history), and he presents fairly good arguments against the historicity of Jesus. Everything I say is from memory, and we know how far that goes, but he talked about how three of the Gospels share accounts to such a degree that many think they were derived from an earlier book, known as 'Q' (no relationship to recent horrors) and the best guess, unlike what mark k says, was that our Gospels date, at the earliest, to third or fourth century AD. If a lot of what they're saying come from the same source, it makes sense not to consider them unique accounts at all.

Given how widely considered among non-Christian scholars the existence of Q is, I'm surprised its possibility doesn't play a larger role in this thread, but again, nearly all of what I'm saying comes from podcasts I heard around six years ago.
posted by JHarris at 6:05 AM on April 17, 2021

Well that could only be said by someone that has only met a single jew, if he'd met even two he'd know there were at least three differing opinions. ;-)

I wouldn't necessarily be surprised if there were Jews who use "abba" to mean the father as opposed to their father, but I've never heard of them. For most modern Jews, it just means "dad," or if you're small, "daddy." Which is kind of funny now that I think about it, I'd love to watch Christians just start chanting "Our Daddy, who art in Heaven" all the time.
posted by Glegrinof the Pig-Man at 6:09 AM on April 17, 2021 [2 favorites]

Matthew and Luke are rewrites of Mark. This is pretty obvious.

Mark doesn’t include many sayings of Jesus, but Matthew and Luke do; many of these sayings are consistent with one another, which leads scholars to think Matthew and Luke got their sayings from some pre-existing collection of teachings (Quelle, or “Q”).

John is a whole other thing. Possibly a couple of whole other things.

List of earliest manuscripts.
posted by Huffy Puffy at 6:19 AM on April 17, 2021 [5 favorites]

David Brooks is a hack, and he deserves all the criticism he gets, but I don't read this as a theological interpretation. More as the musings of a man of a certain age trying to come to terms with the discrepancy between the reality of Jerusalem (and the rest of the world) and his beliefs.
Both Trumpism and Netanyahu have clearly been a huge challenges for Brooks.
While I have stopped reading Friedmann's columns ages ago, because he is always wrong, reading Brooks has been quite interesting because he has openly shared his struggles with the reality of the 21th century. If I were his therapist, I'd say he is not doing it right. I'm not defending him, I'm just saying that it probably doesn't make sense to have a huge theological debate about or with a NYTimes hack who has read one (or maybe two) book(s) about Jesus.
Contemporary Jerusalem is a very strange and fraught place to be. It is not really nice. Before Trump, many conservatives would say it is the true state of mankind, always angry, paranoid, at arms, on guard, divided. Now the Brooks segment of conservatism have realized that it has gone too far. We can't have Jerusalem all over the world, and we can barely have it in Jerusalem.
Brooks projects this Jerusalem onto the Jerusalem of Jesus, which is probably not good history, but he does it with the purpose of imploring Christians to be more Jesus-like, more radically loving. Like most things Brooks writes, I don't think it works, and maybe it doesn't work because both the history and the theology is bad.
But I think it is more relevant to tell him he needs to give up on conservatism than to tell him he is a bad theologist.
posted by mumimor at 6:56 AM on April 17, 2021 [12 favorites]

Some years ago I did a lot of listening of Robert M. Price's podcasts The Human Bible and The Bible Geek, which treat the Bible as if it were not a divine document (necessary if one really wants to understand its history), and he presents fairly good arguments against the historicity of Jesus.

I am not saying this as a religious person, but there are no good arguments against the historicity of Jesus. It is not something scholars of antiquity have any doubt about. Details of his life, issues about what languages he knew, social status, etc are debated, but not that there was someone out there. It is a basic fact unlike most of our evidence about early Rome or Sappho's life or a range of other things.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 6:57 AM on April 17, 2021 [4 favorites]

Just a note about 'the Jews killed Christ'...
If the Jews had killed Christ, the Christian symbol would be a rock, not a cross.

As far as the beard, I used to listen to Garner Ted Armstrong on the radio in my friend's car when we were in high school. (not sure why...maybe to make fun)
Anyway, I remember this kind of argument:

There is no doubt that Jesus wore a full, yet neatly trimmed and well-groomed beard. (It would be almost impossible to argue around the fact that Isaiah’s prophecy said He “gave his cheek to those who pluck the hair” by alleging it was only a day and a half’s growth to which they applied pinchers or tweezers.) Beards were the custom of the time, and there is no reason to assume that Jesus appeared smooth shaven.

And as to the blowing of shofars, I've been told that's why limousine drivers like Passover. (Ba-dump)
posted by MtDewd at 7:03 AM on April 17, 2021 [1 favorite]

medusa: But then during the discussion a few of my classmates lost. their. shit.

What did they think he was? Like... how do you come to any other conclusion? Is there some secret non-Bible knowledge that's passed along in anti-Semitic families about the ethnicity of Jesus?

I know. As far as I can tell, the logic is just "I'm a Christian anti-Semite and I need Jesus not to be Jewish so he's not." Anti-Semitism is so logical!
posted by medusa at 7:18 AM on April 17, 2021 [5 favorites]

Literalism is another "ism" I try to avoid as much as possible. It is the teachings and parables that I pay attention to whether from Christ, the Torah, the Buddha, Mohammed, Krishnamurti et al.
posted by DJZouke at 7:51 AM on April 17, 2021 [1 favorite]

Apocalyptic literature of about 150 BCE to 150 CE in the Jewish (and then Christian too) world is deeply and profoundly weird and disjoint from what came before. Rolling in with all the tools of literary analysis that worked really great on the Torah and the Nevi'im and most of the Kethuvim gives you NOT A WHOLE LOT to work with. The same tools, with a helping of Greco-Roman literary norms on top, make sense of most of the Gospels and Letters. But those all fall apart in Daniel and Revelations, because apocalyptic literature is WEIRD and HARD and it's the literature of a culture sea-change

Eyebrows, my friend, this is a fantastic comment, and I am indebted to you. You've made me re-think not just the biblical historical context, but our present day situation and what's often referred to dismissively as "millennial humour" by the people struggling and failing to deal with it. Memes as an Apocalyptic Literature, "weird and hard" because it's the literature of a cultural sea change! Amazing. I made this a while ago, mostly in jest but I had a sense that there was a larger point there worth making, and you've tied that up in a bow for me in a way that I absolutely love. Brilliant. Thank you.

(put differently, I suppose: I;m thinking about thos memes)

(Also, Brooks making you want to barf is the right reaction, that is absolutely correct.)
posted by mhoye at 9:08 AM on April 17, 2021 [6 favorites]

This is absolutely right in my wheelhouse for summer reading.

I have had Sarah Ruden's translation of The New Testament on my summer reading list, too.
posted by NoThisIsPatrick at 10:07 AM on April 17, 2021

We had this thread on the nature of ancient historical evidence pretty recently. By the standards of ancient history, there's good evidence that Jesus existed. You can't expect the ton of evidence you would get in modern history for any commoner in the ancient world.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 10:07 AM on April 17, 2021 [3 favorites]

I think the reason so many atheists are on the “there was no Jesus” wagon is because...

Well, I'm not. The (non) existence of Jesus is entirely orthogonal to whether god is real and the question is kind of a pointless distraction from what has turned out to be an interesting conversation.
posted by klanawa at 11:08 AM on April 17, 2021 [3 favorites]

The Nation magazine used to run an ad in its back pages (for YEARS), that had a crude drawing of Josephus and the words "PROOF POSITIVE: JESUS NEVER EXISTED" and if you shelled out five bucks, you could get a pamphlet explaining it. I was torn about paying the money: on one hand, I was pretty sure the argument was that the paragraph mentioning Jesus in Josephus was a later interpolation by Christians who were disturbed that Josephus HADN'T mentioned Jesus (and this is possibly true, since the paragraph is strange and stilted); on the other hand, I was curious about these tireless zealots and their hopeless quest. But I never did mail in the five bucks.

Jesus surely did exist, as did many travelling preachers and healers at the time. What amazes me about Christianity is how unlikely it is: he was a guy with a handful of followers, a mild firebrand about Jewish religious orthodoxy (plucking grains to eat on the Sabbath), who was a follower of another firebrand (John the Baptist). He had criticisms of Judaism, thinking of himself as a sort of prophet ("the Son of Man") who would intercede directly with God for you, particularly if you didn't get much respect from regular priests (you're a woman or a tax collector), but he considered himself Jewish. He believed the end of the world was so imminent that those who heard him would see that end occur. He got in trouble and was killed in a completely ignominious way. The end of the world didn't come. That should have been the end of his influence, but Paul couldn't convince many Jewish followers, preached to heathen, and now, many years later, there are millions of Christians who worship him without understanding him. Like David Brooks.

I always felt sorry for John the Baptist. Today he has only a few thousand followers.
posted by acrasis at 11:24 AM on April 17, 2021 [6 favorites]

I can't work out if the consistent drum roll of Jesus not being a historical figure (which is not the same as calling him the Christ) against all the evidence being given time and time again is a general rule people apply to all religious figures, or just unique to this one case.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 11:26 AM on April 17, 2021 [2 favorites]

I find this article (and others like it) utterly baffling. If one believes that Jesus was real and the son of God, died for our sins, enabled humanity to be redeemed by accepting him as savior, etc - then he literally was not Jewish. He may have been born "Jewish," but his death/resurrection/etc literally created a new non-Jewish religion called Christianity.
posted by davidmsc at 11:29 AM on April 17, 2021

(As to why Christianity spread so fast, one argument was that it was unique as a mystery cult - which were very popular in general- in that you didn't need a temple or a special location to worship in. Everything else revolved around spaces, but Christianity was uniquely portable. That and it got to use the existing networks of Judaism to move around.)
posted by lesbiassparrow at 11:29 AM on April 17, 2021 [4 favorites]

he talked about how three of the Gospels share accounts to such a degree that many think they were derived from an earlier book, known as 'Q' (no relationship to recent horrors) and the best guess, unlike what mark k says, was that our Gospels date, at the earliest, to third or fourth century AD.

Your dates are way off. Q is generally dated to the mid-first century. The four canonical gospels are generally dated to between 40 and 140 AD.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 11:49 AM on April 17, 2021 [4 favorites]

Wikipedia has a handy chart of estimated dates for the books of the New Testament. The general range is mid-first century to early second century.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 11:50 AM on April 17, 2021 [4 favorites]

A common fallacy that appears in any debate over the existence of a human Jesus is the majority consensus among so-called scholars, many of whom accept the inserted forgeries in Josephus as real, which is ridiculous. If these scholars are eliminated (who all write for a Christian audience) then the consensus melts away.

This is just grossly inaccurate, and has been since at least the 1980s, if not all the way back to the first half of the 20th century. The research and discussion of the historicity of Jesus crosses multiple academic disciplines and includes scholars writing for (and coming from) non-Christian audiences. In fact, several of the most prominent proponents of the historical Jesus theory are Jewish, and a lot of the archaeological studies used by historians to support their theses comes from Jewish Israeli scholars, nearly all of whom have themselves been working to determine the historicity of Jewish religious texts alongside Roman and early Christian ones.

It also means that belief for his existence is accepted on faith and commonly held to be denied in bad faith, which is reversing our historical standards. Abraham has also been academically listed as a non-historical figure without as much debate.

This sounds like Dawkins-esque nonsense, and the comparison to Abraham is ridiculous. The early Jewish figures have no little to no connection to any sort of historical evidence, contemporary or otherwise, and there is nothing to tie them to a specific time period or geographical location. By contrast, Jesus lived in a time where there was a relatively high amount of both primary and secondary historical accounts, and can be tied to Jewish and Roman historical context that has near-unanimous support among researchers. If anything, those arguing for a completely mythical Jesus are on the fringe, and have often made outlandish claims (Price's claim that Nazareth didn't exist during Jesus' life, for example) that are easily debunked.
posted by Glegrinof the Pig-Man at 12:03 PM on April 17, 2021 [15 favorites]

Nobody, I think, seriously argues that there was no such person as John the Baptist or the other religious rebels mentioned in Jewish sources. If Jesus never existed, wouldn't proto-Christianity have formed around one of those guys, rather than a fictional construct?
posted by Joe in Australia at 12:49 PM on April 17, 2021 [3 favorites]

this is a bit like the discussion over in the thread about the Iroquois influence on the suffragettes.
The context of Jesus was the Roman Empire and Israel within that. Not Israel as it is today or as it was centuries before. Jesus was speaking within that context.

I sometimes wonder wether the historical Jesus was speaking to Jews or to a broader public. We can't know, because whatever he said was edited by Paul and others. Just like Socrates was edited by Plato.

If he were not a Jew, I can't see why the Torah would have played such an important role in Christianity. But feel free to explain, if you have an idea or a theory.
posted by mumimor at 12:56 PM on April 17, 2021

From the website:

The Jesus Seminar was organized in 1985 to renew the quest for the historical Jesus and to report the results of its research to the general public, rather than just to a handful of gospel specialists. Initially, the goal of the Seminar was to review each of the sayings and deeds attributed to Jesus in the gospels and determine which of them could be considered authentic...

Among the findings is that, in the judgment of the Jesus Seminar Fellows, about 18 percent of the sayings and 16 percent of the deeds attributed to Jesus in the gospels are authentic.

The Jesus Seminar comprised three phases:

Phase 1, Sayings of Jesus (1985-1991)

Phase 2, Deeds of Jesus (1991-1996)

Phase 3, Profiles of Jesus (1996-1998)

Much of the JS scholarship shows up in the “From Jesus to Christ” links upthread.

NOTE: Y’all want weird Roman era apocalyptic preachers thick on the ground in ancient Judea, it is ON THE MENU.
You want arguing Jewish sects talking shit about each other and how the other group is fucking it up, it is ON THE MENU.
You want “The Jesus Movement” (as an offshoot of apocalyptic Judaisim) evolve into “Christianity”, which comes from the Greek word “Χρίστος“ annointed, which was how the notion of a Jewish “Messiah” (who is ritually anointed with oil) was translated... all that is on the menu.

FJTC is an eye opener and well-worth the watch. It is full-on “EYEBROWS-MCGEE-GRADE-WEIRD” in the best way.
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 12:58 PM on April 17, 2021 [12 favorites]

My secondary school RE teacher told us on the last day of school that there was more evidence for Jesus' historical existence than there was for Julius Caesar's. Black Grape were big at the time, so Kelly's Heroes was duly blasted from the back of the classroom.

Jesus was a Black man.
No, Jesus, was Batman.
No, no, that was Bruce Wayne!
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 1:09 PM on April 17, 2021 [1 favorite]

I’m not sure I understand the point about Homer. For one, he lived several centuries before Jesus, and so our expectations about concrete evidence ought to reflect that. Second, the question of whether or not Jesus was real takes on special importance when a third or so of humanity reveres him as a god. Maybe the professor was just pointing out that it’s the writings that matter, regardless of who exactly wrote (or inspired) them. A fairer comparison might be Jesus vs the Buddha, although there is still a substantial time and cultural gap impacting the available hard evidence.
posted by simra at 1:14 PM on April 17, 2021 [2 favorites]

But is a historical Jesus still a historical Jesus if it's a composite of two or three preachers, none of whom were the son of God and/or miracle workers?
posted by acb at 1:59 PM on April 17, 2021 [2 favorites]

A kind of Jesus of Theseus, if you will?
posted by flabdablet at 3:12 PM on April 17, 2021 [8 favorites]

Jesus Seminar Fellows also came to consensus on the following:

Jesus of Nazareth did not refer to himself as the Messiah, nor did he claim to be a divine being who descended to earth from heaven in order to die as a sacrifice for the sins of the world. These are claims that some people in the early church made about Jesus, not claims he made about himself.
At the heart of Jesus’ teaching and actions was a vision of a life under the reign of God (or, in the empire of God) in which God’s generosity and goodness is regarded as the model and measure of human life; everyone is accepted as a child of God and thus liberated both from the ethnocentric confines of traditional Judaism and from the secularizing servitude and meagerness of their lives under the rule of the empire of Rome.
Jesus did not hold an apocalyptic view of the reign (or kingdom) of God—that by direct intervention God was about to bring history to an end and bring a new, perfect order of life into being. Rather, in Jesus’ teaching the reign of God is a vision of what life in this world could be, not a vision of life in a future world that would soon be brought into being by a miraculous act of god.

The first one really breaks the back of the ol' "so you're saying Jesus was either a liar or insane" move beloved of campus preachers (did that come from C.S. Lewis? He should have known better, if so; that's a dilemma so false that it is silly to argue about it). I suppose that the Seminar concluded that the passages such as the one where Jesus tells an audience that many of them will still be living when the big show ends were later interpolations.
posted by thelonius at 3:49 PM on April 17, 2021 [2 favorites]

Everything else revolved around spaces, but Christianity was uniquely portable. That and it got to use the existing networks of Judaism to move around.)

Uniquely portable and emerging at the same time as the world’s first well-managed multinational, content-neutral network: Roman roads.
posted by mhoye at 6:36 PM on April 17, 2021 [2 favorites]

But is a historical Jesus still a historical Jesus if it's a composite of two or three preachers, none of whom were the son of God and/or miracle workers?

Just one holy man. They were surprisingly good at keeping them apart, although that makes sense if you realize everyone was trying to promote their holy person as unique.

But looking just as Jewish holy men only gives you half the picture, as there wandering holy philosophers like Apollonius of Tyana who also did miracles and fought vampires. Luke in particular is clearly working in and out of Greek biographical traditions as well as the historical narrative.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 6:41 PM on April 17, 2021 [5 favorites]

It's an obvious but important point that we simply do not know who wrote the books of the Bible, or when. The same is true of their supporting documents. We don't have autographed copies: the canonical gospels don't even make any direct claim they were written by any one particular person. We have placed names on them, names that have stuck by convention, but the books contain no evidence that they were written by people who had met Christ: in fact, they are filled with contradictions and errors. Even the letters of Paul - in which he makes it very clear that he never met Christ as a living human being - are compilations, half of which are ascribed to "Paul" by scholars, and half to others.

What we have are translations of copies of translations of copies several times removed, recounting what most likely originated as an oral tradition. The earliest text we have - a tiny fragment of Mark - is dated between 150 and 250 CE. Even at the most generous of estimates, that's more than 100 years after the purported life of Jesus.

Were gospels likely written before this date? Of course. But we don't have any physical evidence for them.

It's also important to note that at every point in history there have been redactions, additions and mistranslations of the text that has reached us. Entire books, such as the Infancy Gospels, have been added and then removed.

The same is true of supporting documentation. The central testimony of Josephus, mentioned above, is based on the earliest surviving copies from the 11th century containing this single paragraph:

Now, there was about this time, Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man, for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many Jews and many of the Gentiles. He was [the] Christ; and when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him, for he appeared to them alive again the third day, as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him; and the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at
this day.

The book that this appears from, The Antiquities of the Jews, was written several generations after the purported death of Jesus. As evidence, it is immediately contradictory: in all of his statements, across several books, Josephus presents himself as an observant Jewish priest, someone who would have believed Jesus to be a heretic. There's no reason for Josephus to present Christ as a supernatural being.

The most likely explanation for the passage, coming as it does between a story of how Pontius Pilate suppressed a Jewish riot against the construction of an aqueduct and another of how Roman citizen seduced a matron through the help of the priests of Isis, is that it is a whole-cloth insertion by a Christian scribe, probably in the 4th century.

At the end of the day, there may well have been a man who preached and was crucified in 1st century Judea. But the endless revisionism of the documentation gets us into a Ship of Thesus contradiction: the tentative nature of the evidence leads to a relationship of that person with the being we think of as Christ being so strained that the two have, for all intents and purposes, no connection to each other. Jesus becomes an idea, not a man... and no less powerful for that.

At a less technical level, I've often wondered how many of those scholars who claim that that Christ was an actual historical figure are Christians themselves. To my mind, no amount of professional detachment could sooth the cognitive dissonance between having faith in Christ while not believing in his historical existence.
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul at 6:42 PM on April 17, 2021 [6 favorites]

Everything I say is from memory, and we know how far that goes, but he talked about how three of the Gospels share accounts to such a degree that many think they were derived from an earlier book, known as 'Q' (no relationship to recent horrors) and the best guess, unlike what mark k says, was that our Gospels date, at the earliest, to third or fourth century AD. If a lot of what they're saying come from the same source, it makes sense not to consider them unique accounts at all.

So Artifice_Eternity already covered part of this, but the 50-100 AD dates for composition of the first 3 gospels are the consensus among secular historians. (In addition, Q is broadly considered only a source for Matthew and Luke; it's hypothetical composition is contemporary to Mark and the non-synoptic gospel of John didn't reference it. How this ties to "unique" accounts is complicated, but doesn't change the fact that four separate narratives is a huge entry in the historical record.)

I think you're remembering something like "oldest existing documents" and applying it to composition. If so, that's related to what I was talking about: Historical techniques that are completely standard on other questions seem to be misremembered/ignored/misunderstood. You don't date composition based solely on surviving manuscripts, but on what's present or absent in the text and how other sources seem to interact with it.

To compare this with Homer, the consensus is that it was composed in the 700 BCE timeframe, IIUC fragments show up at best a half-millennia later and manuscripts maybe 1500 years later.

On preview: I'd apply a some of these comments to Bora Horza Gobuchul's comment above; I don't get the emphasis on physically dated manuscripts as the primary way of understanding composition. That's just not how historians normally approach things!
posted by mark k at 7:00 PM on April 17, 2021 [6 favorites]

It's an obvious but important point that we simply do not know who wrote the books of the Bible, or when. The same is true of their supporting documents. We don't have autographed copies: the canonical gospels don't even make any direct claim they were written by any one particular person. We have placed names on them, names that have stuck by convention, but the books contain no evidence that they were written by people who had met Christ: in fact, they are filled with contradictions and errors. Even the letters of Paul - in which he makes it very clear that he never met Christ as a living human being - are compilations, half of which are ascribed to "Paul" by scholars, and half to others.

What we have in the New Testament is a curated canonized selection of works that were all travelling around the ancient Mediterranean, all of which gave differing accounts of Jesus' life. This collection, the NT, comes into existence as an entity in the 300-400s as a result of a series of councils called by various emperors to sort out squabbles between various Christian churches. (I really don't know much about the details of the various councils, but I am wondering if this is where the belief that the canonical Gospels had their texts fixed only then is coming from?)

But their texts were fixed long before then, and the 3 earliest gospels are extremely consistent, and they have Aramaic quotes that are most likely the closest thing we have to the literal words of Jesus, a very short lived holy man who got a little too troublesome. Why is the Aramaic most likely the closest thing to his literal words? Because according to the principles of ancient magic and miracles you wanted to have the person's exact wording and people took efforts to keep those words and copied them down.

This is a region that has many highly literate individuals in Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic. These people kept records, wrote things down because they were record keeping societies (how else could the Temple run, lineages be kept, taxes be assessed and so forth). Jesus was surely illiterate but he attracted a diverse group, and early Christians were far more economically mixed and wealthy than I think the traditional presentation is, and that means literate. The record keeping is why we have the Acts of the Apostles, which is chock full of information of how early Christians were dealing with losing their holy man. And Christians attracted enough enemies that people were attacking the accounts of Jesus' life very early. Life of Brian has nothing to with what some people said. So very early on people were digging into his life and the issues in the Christian accounts.

I can't think of a single reputable scholar who works on the region and period from any discipline (classics included) who doubts the historical existence of Jesus. It's not a mad modern Christian belief. It's just standard historical fact.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 7:29 PM on April 17, 2021 [6 favorites]

What we have are translations of copies of translations of copies several times removed [...]

In most cases we have the non-translated works. I don't think anyone suggests that the Biblical texts we have in Hebrew and Aramaic were composed in another language; the Synoptic Gospels may (IMO likely) have some Aramaic substratum, but they were almost certainly composed in Greek. As for Josephus, he claims to have first written The Jewish War in Aramaic, but the Greek version we have is at least his own translation, if not an original work. I don't think Josephus suggests his other works were first composed in anything other than Greek.
posted by Joe in Australia at 7:41 PM on April 17, 2021 [1 favorite]

This is just grossly inaccurate, and has been since at least the 1980s, if not all the way back to the first half of the 20th century. The research and discussion of the historicity of Jesus crosses multiple academic disciplines and includes scholars writing for (and coming from) non-Christian audiences. In fact, several of the most prominent proponents of the historical Jesus theory are Jewish, and a lot of the archaeological studies used by historians to support their theses comes from Jewish Israeli scholars, nearly all of whom have themselves been working to determine the historicity of Jewish religious texts alongside Roman and early Christian ones.

Most approaches these days examine the internal evidence. The last major scholarly work on the historicity of Jesus to be published, to my knowledge, was this one. I don't know his religious beliefs, if any, but if it matters to you then I think you are favoring apologetic sources. I should quote one relevant reviewer's take on the book I linked (see JH89). They did not agree with the author, called it flawed, but they conceded this much: Carrier convincingly shows how little reliable evidence we have for the historical Jesus. We have almost nothing. We can basically dispense with almost all of the evidence for the historical Jesus.
posted by Brian B. at 8:02 PM on April 17, 2021

So I first want to say that as a theological matter I find Jesus kinda boring, and did not focus my studies on the New Testament (give me the Hebrew Bible any day!). I mean, I have a graduate-level survey class in the New Testament under my belt, and I have a handful of specific areas of expertise (Galatians, Paul's theology of baptism, and I'm particularly fond of Mark but mostly for his terrible Greek). Like, I can summarize the outlines of a lot of major academic controversies around the New Testament, but I don't really feel comfortable making strong declarations on them unless they're in Galations or have to do with baptism. But as a cosmic thing I know WAY more about the Book of Numbers (deeply fascinating!) than the Gospel of John (snore, by far the boring-est of the Gospels for my money).

"We don't have autographed copies: the canonical gospels don't even make any direct claim they were written by any one particular person. We have placed names on them, names that have stuck by convention"

Right, but -- we know a fair amount about the authors, and textual criticism that's used on every other ancient text from the same era lets us pick out really a fair amount of later editors and/or tag-on authors. (Mark 16:9-20 is clearly a different author; even the Greek is wildly different). We don't know that Luke was a gentile physician convert named Luke -- that's just tradition -- but we're pretty clear that Luke-Acts is the work of a single author, and we can make some educated guesses about what sort of person he was (for one thing, fluent in Greek, unlike Mark; and not nearly as knowledgeable about Judaism as Matthew) and what sorts of things he knew.

"What we have are translations of copies of translations of copies several times removed, recounting what most likely originated as an oral tradition."

Yes, and there is excellent scholarly work about Acts of the Apostles that talks about hints of that oral tradition and its transmission in Acts.

"But we don't have any physical evidence for them."

We don't have physical evidence for a lot of ancient texts. We don't have physical evidence for much more recent texts! Courts in Canada accept oral traditions from First Nations tribes in real property disputes, because oral traditions often preserve things really well! Archaeologists have been turning to oral traditions in Australia and Alaska and other places finding them well-attested in archaeology.

"It's also important to note that at every point in history there have been redactions, additions and mistranslations of the text that has reached us."

Any decent modern translation of the Bible has two sets of footnotes: One that explains things, and the other one (often in letters rather than numbers) that tells gives textual notes and tells you exactly which words have been found in exactly which manuscripts from exactly what years and archaeological finds and traditional transmissions. These are often given in an alphabet soup of citations (there will be a key at the front or the back giving all the abbreviations), but even competent translations for laypeople have these notes, let alone academic translations that people actually study from. I can look up any verse in Isaiah in my Oxford Annotated New Revised Standard Version (which you can get for $32 on amazon probably), and tell you exactly which extant manuscript the main translation is pulled from, and every single word that appears in ANY other form (even just a misspelling or blot) in ANY other extant manuscript. If there's a difference in words that possibly changes the meaning of the verse, annotations will be more extensive. I can go pull out a mass press copy of the Dead Sea Scrolls that has the Hebrew, and English translation, and a scanned copy of every single individual bit of text. People love to dismiss the Bible saying, "Oh, it's all in copies and translation" but DUDE good copying and translation of the Bible is one of the oldest theological disciplines that absolutely predates Christianity.

And if you just want to look at widely accessible versions to the modern reader, the KJV translators did a bomb-ass job. They wrote so much backwards, awkward English because they were trying to preserve the Hebrew syntax, and they tried to consistently use the same English word for the same Hebrew word, even if it turned out awkwardly in translation. The English is tricky for the modern reader, but AMAZING for the modern Biblical scholar because it's so easy to track it back to the Hebrew. In the days before online single-click-and-get-a-dozen-translations-at-once Bibles, so, so many of us would use our NRSVs, and then look up the verse in the KJV and the BHS (standard Masoretic version for scholars, Biblica Hebraica Stuttgartensia), and use the KJV to find the Strong's number (Strong's is keyed to the KJV), and use Strong's to find the words in the BDB (Hebrew lexicon), and then work through the KJV and BHS simultaneously. Luther's German translation is also really, really good (honestly astonishing for being the work of a single man). These are 400-500 years old, but you can see the sort of inherited Biblical scholarship they had 400 years ago and how it works as a progenitor for modern lit crit and scholarship.

"Entire books, such as the Infancy Gospels, have been added and then removed."

I am not aware of this and would love to see evidence of the temporary inclusion of an Infancy Gospel in the canon, because the Infancy Gospels are all dead-ass amazing.

In other notes, the Jesus Seminar is great and their work is super-provocative. But it was controversial even at the time, and keep in mind that these days it's 30-40 years out of date. When I was in grad school (20 years ago), there was a particular archaeological discovery related to Galatians that I cannot now remember in detail but I will retell the gist of it as an American story. There was a bit in the timeline of Paul that was disputed, where he was thought to be wandering around the Midwest, but suddenly announces he's going to Springfield. Well, the only known Springfield is in Massachusetts! Which he visited in a later set of travels, a decade later. Which created a big dispute about how to date a couple of particular letters that mentioned Springfield, and whether those were LATE Pauline letters from his later travels, even though they CLEARLY had early Pauline theology, and it'd be pretty weird if he jumped back to that a decade later. ANYWAY archaeologists digging on a random site pulled up a bunch of stones that said "SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS" and suddenly everyone was like, HOLY SHIT, THERE'S A SPRINGFIELD IN ILLINOIS? and if THAT'S where Paul was (which seems correct, based on further excavations that showed evidence of the establishment of a Christian community in a "house church"), the letters snap into a much more sensible timeline and do not require Paul to have teleportation powers.

In the late 1990s, the Dead Sea Scrolls were still in the process of translation -- as an undergrad, two of my professors were working on the translations of books of the Bible they were expert on (Isaiah was one, I forget the other). They had these amazing facsimiles of the pages and were working on deciphering the Hebrew and comparing it to every other ancient texts they had -- they'd bring the facsimiles to class and let us look at them, it was amazing. A big new cache of Dead-Sea-type-scrolls was just discovered in March! When they finish getting cataloged, translated, and logged, we all get to buy new editions of our annotated Bibles and new editions of early manuscript facsimile collections! (And let me tell you, I am AMPED.)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 8:28 PM on April 17, 2021 [25 favorites]

The last major scholarly work on the historicity of Jesus to be published, to my knowledge, was this one. I don't know his religious beliefs, if any, but if it matters to you then I think you are favoring apologetic sources.

Um, so, I'm going to charitably assume you don't know this, but Richard Carrier is not only considered a fringe scholar whose work isn't academically defensible, but he defends Hitler and Hitler's theology ON THE REGULAR, and claims people arguing against Hitler are reading bad translations, and if they just read BETTER translations of Hitler, they'd accept Hitler's version of Christianity. He's a really terrible person to cite to unless your goal is to promote Hitler and neo-Nazi ideology.

Cite to Bart Ehrman, who's a respected Biblical scholar who's an atheist with major doubts about the historicity of Jesus. And is not a fan of Hitler.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 8:34 PM on April 17, 2021 [8 favorites]

One comment removed. Quoting someone's own web page to explain why their defense of Hitler isn't actually so problematic isn't gonna work. Leave the Carrier stuff be, period.
posted by cortex (staff) at 9:15 PM on April 17, 2021

textual criticism that's used on every other ancient text from the same era

This is a really important point: being appropriately sceptical of religious claims is one thing; having a different (and almost impossible) standard for those claims is quite another. The quantity and quality of evidence for many historic figures — even quite recent ones! — is often unsatisfactory, but we have to do the best with what we have. There were a bunch of unusual religio-political figures in 1st century Judaea, just as there frankly have been at every time and in every place, even here and now. The stories in the Gospels must have originated somewhere; if it wasn't with Jesus it was probably some other Judaean mystic of the same name.
posted by Joe in Australia at 4:27 AM on April 18, 2021 [5 favorites]

Most approaches these days examine the internal evidence. The last major scholarly work on the historicity of Jesus to be published, to my knowledge, was this one.

No, Macdonald is not "the last major scholarly work," his scholarship (such as it is) on the subject is considered to be meandering, poorly-researched, and sometimes just flatly incompetent in both in the studies of Jesus and Homer. There has been plenty of exemplary research from a number of scholars over the years without the taint Macdonald's has, and the evidence continues to be examined and discussed in scholarly works even now.

I don't know his religious beliefs, if any, but if it matters to you then I think you are favoring apologetic sources.

Look: I'm a Jew, and not a religious one at that. I'm a skeptic of religious texts, and like many Jews, I've had lots of bad experiences with Christians and scripture. I have heard accusations that "my people" stabbed Jesus in the back and that's why we've been chased out of damn near every country we settle in. I've seen people, like those in medusa's class upthread, who resort to antisemitism to refute the mere concept of Jesus being Jewish.

I say all this so that you understand that I mean it when I say that I have less than zero reason to depend on "apologetic sources" for the historicity of Jesus.

I should quote one relevant reviewer's take on the book I linked (see JH89).

Really? You're lecturing us about evidence and textual references, and your pullquote is an anonymous comment by some rando in a book review of a Hitler stan?
posted by Glegrinof the Pig-Man at 4:56 AM on April 18, 2021 [2 favorites]

There's more than a little of the All-Wise Tourist in Brooks's piece here:

I’m always amazed by how many people who have dedicated their lives to Christ have never actually been to Israel. They have money to travel, and go off to Europe and such places, but they haven’t directly experienced the clashing confrontation of faiths, powers, and tribes that marks Jerusalem today and was just as present in Jesus’s own lifetime. They haven’t given themselves the chance to appreciate how misleading it is to associate the faith with the serenity of a church pew or the reasoned domesticity of a Bible study.

Eyebrows McGee and others above have already side-eyed the assertion that an international pilgrimage is somehow necessary for a deeper understanding of Christianity;* I want to point out that, even with the suffusion of history in the present location, standing on a sidewalk in a given city later can only tell you so much about what the world was like in that place 2,000 years ago. Standing in the Zocalo in Mexico City, and listening to the bustle of the crowds, and understanding the swirl of contemporary Mexican politics, does not in fact give me much more insight into the world of Moctezuma or his Tenochtitlan. As a tourist, I want to think I understand something more about Mexico and its history from doing this, but I still know far, far less than someone who has never left Tokyo, but has studied and read primary and secondary sources of the time and place.

And that's just on the historical knowledge. In much of the rest of the piece, Brooks is trying to make the argument for a need to understand the cultural context of Jesus in order to understand his teachings (aside: fine, but Brooks doesn't seem to understand the study of history). But this statement here mistakes the practice of a faith with a scholarship of it; it presumes that "dedicating [one's] life to Christ" means being a scholar, or at least a student, of Jesus' biography. Which seems at odds with my understanding of most forms of Christianity, where the message to the adherents is to live by the principles set forth in scripture and exemplified by Jesus and other holy figures, not, necessarily, to obsess over biographical minutiae like an ardent fan of a pop star.

From lesbiassprarrow's comment above:

(As to why Christianity spread so fast, one argument was that it was unique as a mystery cult - which were very popular in general- in that you didn't need a temple or a special location to worship in. Everything else revolved around spaces, but Christianity was uniquely portable.

Which is why it seems so odd to claim to need a plane ticket to really be Christian. But of course, Brooks's ideas of what it means to be Christian have as much to do with his conception of Americanness as they do with Yeshua ben Yosef of Nazareth.

Brooks's appeal to study the Jewishness of Jesus looks like a direct parallel to American conservatism's obsession with originalist interpretations of the US Constitution--that the best way to apply the Constitution is according to what its authors meant at the time. If the object of US law today were to divine and enact the will of Thomas Jefferson et al., that might be more convincing. But we're not trying to cosplay as a slaveholding English colony; welcome to the present, we're running a real nation. None of that renders unimportant the work of historians and scholars of 18th century America, but to claim that one needs to be that, or to ape it, Dunning-Kruger-style, in order to practice law, or even abide by it, is to try to exclude people from the system through the kind of gatekeeping that is obsessed with the "authentic" and "original."

It's also not a coincidence that trying to link authenticity with specific places, and particular ideals with specific cultures, has been an obsession of the American right, and of ethno-nationalists everywhere. David Brooks has, of course, had loads to say about how Chinese people (as a whole! as a "culture") think, based upon a cocktail-party recounting of a study that doesn't remotely resemble his account as published int he NYT. To "really understand" a movement, a people, a country, the thinking goes, you have to take into account the sort of observations I've been able to make, apply boldly the stereotypes that others less brave than I might dismiss as lazy racism, and essentialize a specific historical figure with assumptions about a universalized vision of Jews today. If anything, one of the weirdnesses about the piece is that, in claiming to try to understand Jesus via Judaism, he makes sweeping statements about Jews today, extrapolating from his (clearly limited) understanding of Jesus. (Christ, what an asshole.)

David Brooks continually presumes that his experiences are far from universal--as an American, as a Christian, as someone with friends who are afraid of panini.

* Has Brooks done the whole "clash-of-civilizations" BS that was trending as the genteel version of Islamophobia in the W era? Is this Muslim envy?
posted by pykrete jungle at 6:49 AM on April 18, 2021 [10 favorites]

Really? You're lecturing us about evidence and textual references, and your pullquote is an anonymous comment by some rando in a book review of a Hitler stan?

It was all I could link from the book link, and the fairest quote for this discussion, I felt, had disagreement but a helpful synopsis. As for Hitler, "MacDonald" proved he was essentially mainstream protestant against the popular claims of being atheist, which is basically accusing him and settling a question for atheists withstanding stupid accusations of being like Hitler.
posted by Brian B. at 7:06 AM on April 18, 2021

As for Hitler, "MacDonald" proved he was essentially mainstream protestant against the popular claims of being atheist, which is basically accusing him and settling a question for atheists withstanding stupid accusations of being like Hitler.

We're talking about Carrier here, and as the mod note indicates, this isn't the place for defending the accusations against him.
posted by Glegrinof the Pig-Man at 7:28 AM on April 18, 2021 [3 favorites]

Relevant definition of the movement or structure surrounding historicity.
posted by Brian B. at 7:31 AM on April 18, 2021

I'm deeply fascinated by all of the comments detailing what we know, how we know it, and the context of this era in history. If I wanted to find out more, but did not want to read a book by a Nazi sympathizer -- what books should I pick up?

In these cases for other subjects I usually suggest things like the Routledge Handbooks or Encyclopedia series. They are scholarly and tend to summarize all the various debates, don't expect you to know the languages, but are scholarly enough to be peer reviewed and have citations.

But there are a number of blogs dedicated to discussing debates over particular fragments or dating issues. I know Eyebrows McGee mentioned Bart Ehrman, and that is a blog I read when NT questions around early fragments start raging or new potential fragments appear,
posted by lesbiassparrow at 7:48 AM on April 18, 2021 [1 favorite]

And you also might find the various discussions of the Museum of the Bible's collecting practices and how they acquired both forgeries and stuff stolen from various collections in their most intense collecting phase interesting, and relevant for understanding how scholars date things and what can happen there when you are talking about millions of dollars.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 7:52 AM on April 18, 2021 [1 favorite]

A good place to find more research is AskHistorians on Reddit. They have a section of their FAQ specifically regarding the historicity of Jesus that links to several discussions, or you could just search the subreddit's archives for "Jesus" and sort by your chosen criteria. The great thing about AskHistorians is that all top respondents are required to cite their sources, no matter their qualifications, which should give some really good starting points for those interested. FWIW I've seen Ehrman's A Brief Introduction to the New Testament described as more accessible to casual fans of history, as well as a wealth of information about additional sources.
posted by Glegrinof the Pig-Man at 9:06 AM on April 18, 2021 [4 favorites]

For a solid historical approach to the issues that have been raised in this thread, start with a copy of Bart Ehrman's textbook, A Brief Introduction to the New Testament, which I assigned during the years I taught a survey New Testament course. The link takes you to the current, 5th edition but if you are a little short of cash you would do just as well with an earlier edition. He is very good at both presenting complex material in an approachable way, and in ensuring that scholarly (not theological) alternatives to his conclusions are included. I'd also recommend his How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee, that illustrates how and why the traditions of Jesus' early followers developed into the credal beliefs that Jesus was a person of a Triune God.

Though there are parts of Brook's commentary that I'd argue with, much of what he wrote draws upon an area within New Testament historical studies that is undergoing a renaissance by both Jewish and Christian scholars, and is best illustrated by the work of DR. (not simply "Jewish writer") Amy-Jill Levine, University Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies, Mary Jane Werthan Professor of Jewish Studies, and Professor of New Testament Studies at Vanderbilt Divinity School, Graduate Department of Religion, and Department of Jewish Studies. One of her books, The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus, specifically addresses the de-Judaization of Jesus in Christian theology. The significance of The Annotated Jewish New Testament, mentioned above, is that all of its annotations are written by contemporary Jewish scholars of the New Testament, including Dr. Mark Nanos (Paul Within Judaism studies), Dr. Adele Reinhartz (Gospel of John), Dr. Shaye Cohen (Second Temple studies), and dozens more.

Finally, Dr. Levine has recently published The Bible With and Without Jesus: How Jews and Christians Read the Same Stories Differently. Written with a sympathetic approach to both theological traditions--what Dr. Levine calls choosing to read shared texts graciously-- at the same time it addresses the stereotypes that make their way, even now, into Christian preaching: that the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament describes a God of wrath versus a New Testament God of love (nope), or that Jesus nobly disregarded Jewish purity laws when, according to Mark 5:24b ff. (and the parallels in Matthew and Luke) he healed the woman suffering from a twelve-year long issue of blood (nope, Jesus wasn't going to "catch" ritual impurity from her). These are just two examples of mainstream Protestant interpretation that I've heard in the last couple of months, from pastors I know personally that should know better--but their focus is not on historical research and analysis, but on preaching, to the best of their knowledge, what they theologically proclaim makes Jesus "special" (and therefore distinct from Second Temple Judaism). It's misusing and misstating history AND what the texts themselves say.
posted by apartment dweller at 1:35 PM on April 18, 2021 [20 favorites]

For me the debates about proto-Christianity that are the most fascinating are the ones about how fast and to where first it moved. I have a great interest in riots and expulsions of groups from the city of Rome, and knowing if followers of Jesus were in Rome and using the Jewish communities to proselytize in the 40s would answer some questions about the expulsion of Jews from the city in the late 40s CE.

If we knew more about the very early spread of beliefs around Jesus it would also give us incredible information on how fast other movements and ideas could travel.

But for the man himself compared to people like Alexander the Great or Spartacus we have a plethora of reliable primary sources on him from very shortly after his death. If you want someone with source problems for his life, Alexander is the classic example of someone very famous we don't actually know for sure much about as an individual.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 7:40 PM on April 18, 2021 [2 favorites]

Cite to Bart Ehrman, who's a respected Biblical scholar who's an atheist with major doubts about the historicity of Jesus.

I'm not even a well-read layperson in this area, but I'd gotten the idea from watching this debate that while Ehrman does not believe in a divine Jesus, he also does think there was a real historical Jesus, not merely an amalgam of myths.

(Also that he has specific issues with Carrier, and vice versa).
posted by weston at 8:05 PM on April 18, 2021 [1 favorite]

Jesus was Jewish, until He became the Chuck Yeager of the L-XXIV ("Raptured Up") Program.
posted by kirkaracha at 10:14 PM on April 18, 2021

most likely other option would have been his alternate choice:sun-worship, i.e. Sol Inviticus.

"I never said I was a golden god."
posted by kirkaracha at 10:26 PM on April 18, 2021

Bit of a tangent, but I just wanted to poke my head in and say that this thread title gives me an earworm every time I see it. All these years later I can't recall who it was, but there was a pair of comedians back in the 80s/90s who had a country-style song on this subject. The only two lines I can remember are:

"Jesus was a Jew--don't you forget it
He had him a menorah and he lit it"
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 6:23 AM on April 19, 2021

Are there Jews or Christians in the Bible?
posted by Billiken at 8:13 AM on April 19, 2021

Mr. Bad Example I remember this! Although my favorite 80s "Jesus was Jewish" comedy sketch is the Kids in the Hall's Dr. Seuss Bible.
posted by aspersioncast at 10:10 AM on April 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

Speaking of people with worrying politics cosplaying Jewishness, there's a Twitter thread of excerpts from Julie Burchill's memoir about wanting to be Jewish, and it's, well, pretty unique.

That is so totally batshit.
posted by BibiRose at 10:26 AM on April 19, 2021 [2 favorites]

There’s no such thing as an old testament if you are jewish, it’s just the torah, ok?

I wish I could remember the name of this memoir I read. It was by a Jewish man who grew up in England. His sister had a crisis of faith, and he talked about how it was gradually resolved and how the rabbi gave her a book. He specifically said the title of the book, a gift from a rabbi, was "The Old Testament." I thought no, it wasn't. I can't even imagine how that sentence was published.
posted by FencingGal at 1:56 PM on April 19, 2021 [3 favorites]

This thread is the most interesting thing I’ve read in months, if not years. Lesbiaparrot, Joe in Australia, Eyebrows McGee, and others, thank you for

your learned and thoughtful contributions.

I was raised catholic but left it long ago. Yet still I am fascinated the historic matters. My mom read about the archeological record/historical Jesus back in the 1970s. As a tween in the 1980s , I pointed out to my mom (during mass, of course) that the priest’s statement that “Mary was a Christian” was inaccurate. As an adult atheist, I picked up to Zealot at my parents house when it first came out, and was interested about the various men running around the area at the time claiming to be some sort of prophet or messiah.

I don’t have the time or energy to into the minutiae like many of you, but deeply appreciate your insights and links to resources.

THIS IS WHAT I COME TO METAFILTER FOR. I don’t know any other internet resource that is both so accessible and thought provoking.
posted by Measured Out my Life in Coffeespoons at 6:40 PM on April 19, 2021 [7 favorites]

Judaism to me is a living tradition, carried as best we could into diaspora, surviving dispersions, expulsions, wars, plagues, famines, forced conversions, pogroms, and attempted genocide; we persist. We survive.

Thus the question of if Jesus was Jewish maybe comes up in the context of people trying to persecute us, or sometimes when clueless folks axe us about it, from my experience. His teachings, while there are similarities, never became part of our religious traditions or rabbinical scholarship.

Jesus is thus as relevant to Judaism as Santa Claus or Muhammad is. And Brooks, at least to me, talks about us like an abstract aesthetic or academic concept, a tool or lens by which to view Jesus, instead of a living breathing people. We did not precede Jesus as Brooks suggests. Jesus split off from us, and we continued on our way.
posted by gryftir at 1:42 AM on April 20, 2021 [10 favorites]

Tom Cantor Seems Like a Loser and a Moron:

Earlier today, I received in the mail an unsolicited autobiography by Tom Cantor titled Changed, which is a recounting of Cantor's decision to accept Jesus (though he insists he's still a Jew and not a Christian)... using examples from the book itself, I hope to prove three things.

1. Tom Cantor is a loser.
2. Tom Cantor is a terrible partner.
3. Tom Cantor is a moron.

posted by TheophileEscargot at 1:12 AM on April 21, 2021 [1 favorite]

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