All I knew about a man named Kenneth Humphreys is that he is regarded as the clear loser in a debate with Christian apologist Gary Habermas.  He enjoys this reputation not because a bevvy of evangelical zealots cheered Mr Habermas to victory on the topic of Jesus’ Resurrection (Yes: people are still talking about that) but because his own cheerleaders found him badly prepared, inarticulate, and just not up to the job.  Intrigued, I wondered if Mr Humphreys was not just having a bad night so I decided to find out more about him.

It is difficult to find out much about Mr Humphreys.  –Apparently even for the sponsors of the debate.  This is what his side provided for a curriculum vitae:

“Some people want to know where I’m coming from: I’m an ex-college lecturer, ex-photographer, ex-computer salesman – but not an ex-Christian, Jew, Moslem or Nazi! I had a religion-free childhood and from the youngest age acquired an interest in history. In turns I was both fascinated and appalled by the history of the ‘Christian Faith’ and have made its legacy and crimes a life-long study, not because – as Christian apologists often imagine, I was ever ‘hurt’, abused, or rejected by the Church or Christians – but because humanity’s fate has for so long been held captive by this pernicious creed. But all religion is inherently dangerous.”

Like some of the pernicious New Testament figures—or rather figments—Mr Humphreys likes to discuss, the literary evidence for his existence is therefore pretty scant. He says he is on a mission to rescue people from the clutches of imaginary friends.  And if you ask me, that is a significant thing to want to do.

Of course, in an important mission like this, even insurgency and misinformation are justifiable. A visit to Mr Humphreys’ panoramically rich and colourful website welcomes the superstitious masses with the amusing  greeting “Welcome to Enlightenment!”

Here in a carnival of choice you will find answers to the questions Pastor Bob never asked.  The sample menu:

• Christianity was the ultimate product of religious syncretism in the ancient world. Its emergence owed nothing to a holy carpenter. There were many Jesuses but the fable was a cultural construct.

• The nativity yarn is a concatenation of nonsense. The genealogies of Jesus, both Matthew’s version and Luke’s, are pious fiction. Nazareth did not exist in the 1st century AD – the area was a burial ground of rock-cut tombs.

• With multiple authors behind the original gospel story it is no surprise that the figure of “Jesus” is a mess of contradictions. Yet the story is so thinly drawn that being a “good Christian” might mean almost anything.

• The 12 disciples are as fictitious as their master, invented to legitimise the claims of the early churches. The original Mary was not a virgin, that idea was borrowed from pagan goddesses. The pagan world knew all about virgins getting pregnant by randy gods: The Mythical “Virgin Mother”.

• Scholars have known all this for more than 200 years but priestcraft is a highly profitable business and finances an industry of deceit to keep the show on the road.

• “Jesus better documented than any other ancient figure”? Don’t believe a word of it. Unlike the mythical Jesus, a real historical figure like Julius Caesar has a mass of mutually supporting evidence.

• The case for a mythical Jesus – Nailing Jesus.

Nailing Jesus.  Lol.  Scholarship is a dry and thankless business.  I see nothing wrong with sexing it up a little, and nothing (except maybe the NaturallyNaughty Toy Store) is as sexy as Mr Humphrey’s salvation emporium.  Try this:

“The trail-blazing Christian missionary and apostle, St Paul, appears nowhere in the secular histories of his age. Ironically, though supposedly in Jerusalem at the right time, he can give no witness to a historical Jesus. But was Paul himself a genuine historical figure? Viewed without the rose-tinted spectacles of Christian faith, the first voyage of Paul is as fanciful as the first voyage of Sinbad….” 

Still, for all his enthusiasm and a menu that rivals Zabar’s Online for variety, I am a little unhappy with Mr Humphreys.

Our modest project called the Jesus Process has got his attention and he seems to think it doesn’t answer any of the questions he has already answered with different answers.  He is understandably annoyed and has gone to a lot of trouble to bring the subject back to Jesus and Paul never having existed–and of course, the conspiracy that keeps the fiction alive and the yahoos on their knees.

First we are told that “Alarm bells have sounded in the ivory towers.” I am a pretty light sleeper, yet I have heard nothing.  But granting that Mr Humphreys may be referring to mythical bells, I am somewhat worried about what fire escape to use when the forces of reason, as Mr Humphreys assures us they will, drive the priests from our temple. I’ll say one thing though: it is a good thing that Mr Humphreys is an ex-lecturer and got out while the getting was good.

Mr Humphreys then goes on to quote me and my colleague Maurice Casey as saying,

“One of the most remarkable features of public discussion of Jesus of Nazareth in the twenty-first century has been a massive upsurge in the view that this important historical figure did not even exist.” – Maurice Casey

“The endorsement of amateurs by amateurs is becoming a rampant, annoying and distressing problem for biblical scholarship … The disease these buggers spread is ignorance disguised as common sense … the popularity of the non-historicity thesis … now threatens to distract biblical studies from the serious business of illuminating the causes, context and development of early Christianity.” – Joseph Hoffmann

I apologize for my error: I should have known better—and I do.  Buggers do not spread disease.  Probably an autocorrect for ideas.

Jesus of Nazareth: Self-portrait, 32 CE

But Mr Humphreys is not through with me yet.  When you are fighting against people who believe in ghosts and apparitions, say what you need to say because, after all, the Truth will set you free.  Before letting me off the hook after a long time out of the water, just to keep the metaphor, Mr Humphreys notes that I am, in no particular order

(a) Opposed to the tactics and rhetoric of the new atheists (true–or rather, guilty).  Nothing is more important to my scholarship than this bit of information, which makes it possible for me to move seamlessly from being pro-God to pro-Jesus;

(2) A lapsed Catholic (guilty again, depending on what lapsed means: does it mean I have acquired the self-confidence to snigger through my father’s funeral Mass?);

(3) A fan of Alvin Plantinga, or maybe Alvin Plantinga or even William Lane Craig,  based on a reposted review of Plantinga’s recent book by Chris Tollefsen,  and a quote therefrom which I did not write but which is positioned, curiously enough, as though I said it.  In this battle, one depends on the philosophy of “dynamic representation” rather than real quotations–I get it (but false: I am not Alvin Plantinga).

(4) Finally: that I have been indecisive about the existence of Jesus. I think Mr. Humphreys likes the term “flip-flop”, but that would involve turning over and over without purpose, and I am pretty one-directional in this regard, having moved from diffidence in Jesus outside the Gospels to mild skepticism to the view that there is no reason to think Jesus did not exist. But as to the charge, true!–to the point where I would enjoy reading a coherent and convincing argument from mythicists that would challenge the standard view in place of the twittery and absurdity that in my flipfloppy way I regard as useless and unintelligible.  I am not saying Mr. Humphreys’ arguments and research are absurd.  I haven’t really had time to check them, since I am busy working on my finely nuanced, fully loaded views.  But I have high hopes that when I look at them my mind will be changed in a flash, a little like the figmentary Paul’s mind was changed about the non-existent Jesus in the road to Damascus.

And there is this, which I find somewhat puzzling–that “having lived with Jesus as man and boy, Hoffmann, like Ehrman, finds it’s too difficult to dismiss his beloved Jesus for good.” I am from a small family and I would have noticed if Jesus had been at Thanksgiving dinner.  I can’t of course speak for Bart Ehrman, but I would be surprised if this isn’t also true of him.  Besides, pre-lapsed Catholics knew where to find Jesus: in the tabernacle on the altar at St Mary Immaculate on Broadway. Lapsed Catholics may have noticed that the church is now a restaurant.

I am not quite sure what the word “dismiss” means. But it seems to mean dismissing the idea that Jesus was a real human being rather than dismissing the belief that Jesus was God. Many of the people I cutely refer to as mythtics think that the latter entails the former, though for the life of me I can’t see how what third and fourth century Christians believed makes the existence of a first century Jesus improbable.  This is the kind of thing I am going to learn when I read Mr Humphreys in more depth.

Or maybe it means believing what Mr Humphreys believes in his massively construed 510-page revised edition of the self-published Jesus Never Existed! Tipping the scales at around 5,000,000th at Amazon.com. I cite this statistic not with malice but because Mr Humphreys has written that

“Hoffmann has long flip-flopped between believing there was a Jesus and believing there wasn’t. No crime there. But he wants to project something masterful and profound about his enduring uncertainty by using obscure language, tortuous argument and an avalanche of complex, pretentious sentences. Someone should tell him that people have stopped listening.”

I am grateful for this warning because it will save me a lot of trouble.  I can now choose whether to work on my complex, pretentious sentences or buy a bigger sound system.  But the warning does worry me,  because if my books are doing a little better after so many years on the cart–not as well as Bart Ehrman’s but then who’s counting?–who is listening to Mr Humphreys, the man with the real answers?  On the other hand, he can be cheered by the fact that he has proof Christianity didn’t spread quickly. Unchristianity can be expected to spread even more slowly, I reckon.

Sadly, there isn’t much I understand in the redlined sections, meant to be the substantive portion of  Mr Humphreys’  blog, which follow directly from the therapeutic sections (is he an ex-lecturer in psychology, I wonder?) when he gets around to it.  He has clearly thought much more seriously about how Christianity really began than I have. –One of the problems living in an ivory tower is that you don’t meet the right people, on the ground as it were.  I will have a long hard look at what I have written, especially the meat of his suggestion that

“Paul’s ‘lack of interest’ in a historical Jesus is quite bizarre support for the existence of a historical Jesus. Perhaps Paul’s lack of interest – and he was ostensibly in the right place at the right time – was because there was no Jesus of Nazareth to be interested in! Hoffmann’s “finely nuanced” argument here will be lost on most of humanity – as it surely should be – but my guess is that our irate academic grand master doesn’t give a damn and even remains unaware that his ambivalent and tortured message is not passing through to his confused readers.”

Damn–the ambivalent and tortured message-thing again.  But (and I am embarrassed to say so) I am slightly confused.  I especially want to know why this explanation is nuanced and the explanation bizarre.  I guess what I need to know is why something as well known as Paul’s neglect of the Jesus of history can only be explained as there being no Jesus of Nazareth to be interested in, when Paul was clearly interested in something called Jesus.  A real Paul would have been a jealous Paul, competing with real apostles for the palm of authority conferred by a real Jesus.  Naively, to me, that is what comes through in the letters. Even in the gospels. It shows you how, even though my sentences are ‘finely nuanced’, they are really contrived to hide my utter confusion about these things.

Also, it shows what clever forgers and charlatans the gospel-writers were when they invented Christianity, and how smart the inventor of Paul was, throwing him into the mix just to confuse us. It would never have occurred to me, based on a straight reading of Galatians and the Corinthian letters,  that Paul is a figment  interested in a figment who went by the name of Jesus.

But I can’t know everything, and even if I did I couldn’t squeeze it into 510 pages.  Thank God for a sane, straightforward approach to puzzles that have perplexed me for a long, long time.  As Mr Humphreys says, “Welcome to Enlightenment.”

“Born of a Woman”: Paul’s Perfect Victim and the Historical Jesus

by R. Joseph Hoffmann

One of the more absurd aspects of Christ-myth studies is the suggestion that the “neglect” of  the historical Jesus by Paul is at least indirect proof that Jesus never existed.  This absurdity is sometimes compounded by the suggestion that Paul did not exist, creating a kind of literary dittograph of Russell’s famous teapot argument  as it is sometimes argued in the philosophy of religion: If the fate to be avoided is Aquinas’ infinite regress as it applies to finite causality, then What created God?  In this case the question has to be,  Who created Paul, and why?

Implicitly the answer would be, So that “Paul,” in a singular act of farsightedness, could create Jesus (who might have lived at any point in time except when he is supposed to have lived), who would then precipitate the mischief or malice of gospel writers, who may have thought (or not) that he really existed, thus causing the church.  All of these figments live together in a little crooked house.

The myth theory does not get more cowboy than this, shooting at anything that comes across its path with the unarguable logic of a bullet. Mythicism is not so much a conspiracy theory as a mass of cobbled  improbabilities that can only be compared to explaining the existence of a discovery by postulating that the scientist credited with  formulating it was really created by a mad scientist who invented the first and a  third who created the one who created him.  This is comparatively easy to do when all you have is the theory and an opinion about it.  After a dozen mad scientists have been postulated, however, you must ask where reality lies.  For mythicists, it seems, it doesn’t really exist anywhere. It certainly doesn’t exist anywhere near where the evidence points, and to think otherwise sullies your credentials as a skeptic.

In a previous and more formal contribution to the Jesus Process, I gave what I consider to be the strongest reason for Paul’s imputed “silence” concerning the historical Jesus: namely, Paul’s psychological predicament. He is a man obsessed with the death and resurrection of Jesus, not his life and teaching.  That is clear from his earliest letters:  “When I came to you, brethren, I did not come to you proclaiming the mystery of God in obscure words of wisdom.  For I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified.” (1 Cor 2.1-2.; cf 1 Cor 1 cor 1.23).

It is superficially clear that Paul understands this crucifixion as a real event, not as an historically ambiguous “moment” that happened once upon a time—his time, or someone else’s time.  Insofar as Paul cares anything about real time, it is God’s time in relation to a historical event he cares about, the pleroma tou kronou (Gal 4.4-7).

As far as we know, or he tells, Paul himself was not affected directly by the death of Jesus.  It was not an event of his biography. When he enters the picture—perhaps as early at the 40’s of the first century—interpretation and meaning have replaced anxiety and disappointment.  So has a rudimentary and developing church structure replaced the informal network of followers and believers.  A rationalized eschatology that borders on uncertainty—and in some cases trespasses on uncertainty–has already arisen in various Christian communities (1 Thes 4.13ff.)

One effect of this is that resurrection has replaced the urgent eschatology of the first several years following the unanticipated death of Jesus, and the “hope” of resurrection has been extended to include a belief that is not highly developed in the gospels:  that all believers who believe in the saving effects of the death of Jesus will experience a resurrection like his ( 1 Thes 4.16; 1 Cor. 15. 1-58; but cf.  Mt 27.51-53).  It is clear that belief in the fate of a believer being linked to belief in the resurrection of Jesus is Paul’s distinctive and appealing contribution to Christian theology.

In effect, eschatology has been turned on its head between the writing of the earliest of Paul’s letters,  which sees Jesus returning in a flurry to finish his messianic mission, and the belief that resurrection of the dead “in Christ” will bring  all those who have died to a new life. Put bluntly, while Paul does not say that the coming of Jesus is not to be expected (cf. 1 Cor. 16.22, Gal 4.1-11 ), the primary expectation is not that but the coming of the resurrection (1 Cor 15.51f).  The “historical” return of Jesus is not what he would prefer to talk about, even if it is on the minds of his (and other) congregations (1 Thes 2.19; & cf. 2 Ptr  3.4)

Paul is obsessed with this “problematic”— something which both theologians and New Testament critics used to emphasize more than they do currently.  The promise of resurrection is the bright side of the threat of judgment, but the death and resurrection of Jesus typifies both (Rom 6.5-11). There is nothing within the gospel tradition, such as it was in his day, that could have solved the problem for Paul–and nothing “biographical” concerning Jesus that would have served his political purposes in relation to the wayward congregations he is trying to keep in tow.  He is reticent to use the phrase logos tou kyriou and when he does (1 Thessalonians 4:15, for example) it seems to refer to dominical tradition rather than to Jesus himself.  The question is not Why does Paul not quote Jesus more?, but whether Paul quotes Jesus at all.

Paul does not exactly “invent” the idea of a general resurrection of the dead—Pharisaism and its outgrowth, rabbinical Judaism,  floated the idea in conjunction with belief in a messianic age—but as far as we know he is the earliest writer to use the belief as a mechanism for shoring up the flagging faith in the immediate return of Jesus, such as we find it expressed in the “half way return” concocted in 1 Thessalonians 4.13-18, a peculiar blend of traditional apocalyptic based on an otherwise unattested word of the lord (4.15) and equivocation (5.1-8), but bolstered by the belief that “Jesus died and rose again” (4.14), which is for Paul an unshakeable historical occurrence.

Paul says all anyone might expect a man with a special agenda to say about a man he knows only by report, considering (a) his evangelical purpose–to interpret the gospel in his own way and  (b) his professional agenda, to defeat the interpretations of others (who may or may not have lived through the events described eventually in the synoptics).  It is not at all clear what more he might say if we grant his own admission that he did not know Jesus according to the flesh, that it is not important to have known Jesus according to the flesh, on his interpretation, and that the saving significance of Jesus’ death and resurrection must necessarily transcend the need to know Jesus according to the flesh. Paul’s disuse of historical tradition while deliberate rather than passive or uninformed, leads him to criticize both the temporal and geographical limits placed on the movement by the superior apostles (Gal 5.12; 2 Cor 11.13ff.)  For Paul the focus is almost entirely on the next performance, not the drama as it was performed the previous evening.

ii 

In my previous essay for the Process I said that Paul’s neglect of Jesus is motivated by a more sinister reason: jealousy.  Jealousy is a human emotion. Its normal coordinates are older-younger, wiser-less wise, power-powerlessness, and precedence-dependence. Those coordinates could easily be a map of Paul’s motifs in the authentic letters.

Paul’s jealousy is not a well guarded secret:  He is transparently jealous of his missionary rivals, who may or may not have known the historical Jesus (but there is no reason to suppose they did: Gal 1.6-10); obviously antagonistic towards those who “were apostles before [him]” (Gal 1.17); spiteful towards what he perceives as the precedence and subsequent hypocrisy of Cephas (Gal 2.6-10; 11-14); and bitter towards the “men from James” who “spied out his freedom” (which may or may not have been rubber-stamped by the superior apostles (Gal 2.12; 2 Corinthians 11.5-20), and even eager to say his preaching is not especially impressive: 1 Cor 4.10; 1.20, apparently directed at his more consequential opponents.  No one who was not really suffering under a yoke of inferiority could have produced such exquisite rancour as the Paul of 2 Corinthians, and it is difficult to imagine why anyone would want to manufacture a record of this fracture in the (later) vaunted unity of the apostolic community as it appears, originally, in Acts.  As if these were not thorns enough to bear, the apocryphal tradition about Paul  was that he was ugly to boot,  “[He was] a man of middling size, and his hair was scanty, and his legs were a little crooked, and his knees were projecting, and he had large eyes and his eyebrows met, and his nose was somewhat long” (Acts of Paul and Thecla).

The mythicist opinion concerning Paul’s “silence” crumbles before the apostle’s puling self-defense of his mission and right to be an apostle on the same terms as those who followed Jesus according to the flesh.  The Paul of 2 Corinthians is at the end of his rope, suspicious of competitiors, insistent on his role, his legitimacy and the specifics of mission—and obvioiusly aware of where the trouble is coming from: the vaunted, self-aggrandizing, intrusive, men of so-called repute in Jerusalem who cause Paul to resort to “boasting”:  “Are they Hebrews? So am I; are they Israelites? So am I. Are they descendants of Abraham? So am I. Are they servants of Christ? I am  a better one” (2 Cor 11.22-23).

It is a general trait of mythicism to cry foul (or interpolation) in those few instances when they cannot prove a point by silence or misuse of analogy.  If this requires overturning by random fiat or uneducated guesswork the conventional wisdom of two centuries of critical study, all the better.  We have already explored the passages where mythicism breaks its bones on the rock of texts that show, beyond any serious doubt, that Paul was aware of the life of Jesus, as much as he was aware of his death (Romans 6.5-6), the manner of his death (1 Cor 1 .23; 11.23-24) and reports and visions of the risen Christ (1 Corinthinas 15.5ff), which he uses strategically to insert himself into the tradition—but within an explicitly historical context that includes Peter, the eleven, and James.  It makes infinitely dim sense to explain that Paul was not aware of an historical Jesus but was at war with those he knew were relations and followers of Jesus and witnesses to his teaching.

Despite the enhancement of the story of Paul’s “conversion” by the author of Acts (9.3-6, 22.4-16; 26.9-18), the conversion itself marks the transition—at least in Paul’s mind and language—between history and meaning (Gal  1.15-16). This “bifurcation” is not especially novel:  Just as there would be no pressing reason to discuss the biography of Plato in order to discuss his ideas, it is not unusual that Paul chose interpretation over details to discuss Jesus–except insofar as the choice to omit the details was forced on him by his own historical situation, by the jealousy he felt, and by a certain petulant quality that made him, probably, one of the most active early missionaries.

I am not suggesting therefore that Paul’s silence means “nothing” in terms of the historical Jesus but that  it means something significant.  Paul’s jealousy, his need to protect and defend his mission, his contempt for rivals and intruders, and finally his verdict on the “ historical” apostles and claims of Jerusalem are not hidden in his letters.  The sheer density of Paul’s theology has tended to obliquate these personal struggles and  their historical derivation.  For mythicism this has made it possible to focus merely on what Paul doesn’t tell us with a resounding and repetitive “Why not?”  For traditional theology, it has meant something nearly as unimpressive: that all we need to get from Paul is his message of faith, grace, love and salvation—or, on the Catholic side, how these things are made available within the Christian church and the sacraments, especially baptism and the eucharist. Paul’s real-life struggles are inconvenient to the former camp, as it brings them to a reckoning with the immediate followers of a historical Jesus, and embarrassing to the latter because Paul’s theology, instead of inspired and authoritative, begins to look contrived, petulant, and exceedingly personal.

iii

Mythicists have special antipathy for Galatians 4.4:  ὅτε δὲ ἦλθεν τὸ πλήρωμα τοῦ χρόνου ἐξαπέστειλεν ὁ θεὸς τὸν υἱὸν αὐτοῦ, γενόμενον ἐκ γυναῖκος, γενόμενον ὑπὸ νόμον, since there is no serious suggestion that it is interpolated or “unoriginal” to the letter.  Its reference to the mother of Jesus as “a woman” (γυνή) rather than a virgin is tantalizingly removed from the nativity and virgin birth legends of the gospels of Matthew and Luke, which seem to have been unknown to the writers of John and Mark; indeed, in John 2.4, Jesus addresses his mother as “γύναι” –“Woman.”  As it is generally agreed that Paul has no special interest in arguing any particular doctrine about the birth of Jesus, this single phrase is unparalleled in his genuine letters.  The question is, Why does he mention it at all?  It will take until the time of the fourth gospel in the late first or early second century before the birth of Jesus acquires theological stature as the “incarnation” of God. With Paul, we are probably two generations away from that shift in thinking.

But we are not far removed from another  theme that would have been relevant to the finer points of Paul’s sacrificial view of the death of Jesus as a “price” for sin.  “Sonship” is on Paul’s mind in Galatians 4, so he seems to permit himself a digression on the birth of Jesus as he knows it.

By the fifties of the first century, Paul’s Jewish opposition included the well-known slander that Jesus himself was illegitimate, that his mother had been a prostitute.  I discussed some of this tradition a number of years ago in a small anthology (primarily designed for the convenience of undergraduates) called Jesus Outside the Gospels.  In even shorter form, the core of the report is contained in  Rab Shabbath, 104b, repeated in almost identical words in Bab. Sanhedrin, 67a. The report reveals confusion over the parentage of Jesus and a bowdlerized tradition that he had been known as “one who had gone astray” (or the son of one who had gone astray from the teachings of Judaism), as the son of an adulteress and a gentile known simply as “Panthera.”

Ben Stada was Ben Pandera. Rab Chisda said: The husband was Stada, the lover Pandera. (Another their own said): The husband was Paphos ben Jehuda; Stada was his mother’ (or) his mother was Miriam the women’s hairdresser; as they would say at Pumbeditha, S’tath da (i.e., she was unfaithful) to her husband.

In JOtG I remarked that clues concerning the “multiple Mary” conundrum of the gospels might be found in seeing the confusion as an effort to write around (or write out) the tradition that it was Jesus’ mother rather than a woman acquaintance—Mary Magdalene—who had the scarlet reputation (keeping in view that the floating tradition of the woman taken in adultery, usually assigned to Luke, is unnamed).   Miriam, “the women’s hair-dresser,” seems to be simply another name-play of the Ben Stada and Ben Panthera variety as we know it from the rabbinical sources.  Miriam, “the women’s hair-dresser,” is in the original Miriam, “megaddela nesaiia”; and Miriam Megaddela, or Mary Magdalene seems to derive  from this murky tradition.

For a Jew the combination “Miriam of Magdala” was equivalent to saying Miriam the harlot, as Magdala Nunayya (near Tiberias and the  sea of Galilee) was notorious  for the looseness of the lives of its women. As far as rabbinical tradition goes, it is likely that we have in the symmetry between the Magdalene and Megaddela tradition the origin of the otherwise strange combination Miriam the women’s hair-dresser and Mary the mother of Jesus.

While the references to this tradition are scattered and at times linguistically ambiguous, our earliest gospel makes no reference to Jesus’ father, and Paul does not mention the name of the mother—if he knew it. Matthew on the other hand seems to struggle against reports that Mary’s pregnancy is a source of scandal and humiliation (1.18), a tradition he obviates by saying that before the couple consummated their marriage Mary was pregnant ‘by the holy spirit,’ but that Joseph was (naturally) skeptical of her story; and that divorce was only averted by a vision that ensured Joseph she was not promiscuous.   Luke turns this scenario, whether independently or not, into a Hellenistic tale of a virgin birth, without any trace of scandal or suspicion.  While Matthew’s focus is on pedigree and legitimacy, Luke’s is on divine sonship.

It is my view that Paul is referring to this contentious tradition in  Galatians 4.4.  Jesus is born of a woman, according to the law ἐκ γυναικός, γενόμενον ὑπὸ νόμον.  This also establishes the  identity of Jesus as a Jew, a fact necessitated by Paul’s distinctive view of the atonement.—What the effect of the death of Jesus is on the power of sin and death depends on his legitimacy and the role of the law. But for this calculation Paul requires a spotless victim, and for that reason it becomes necessary that Jesus is born according to the law, untainted by “unusual circumstances.”  In effect, it is not Matthew or Luke who create the paternity of God, but Paul when he writes “In the fullness of time God sent forth his son.”

But the crucial thing for Paul is to dispose of the historically inconvenient tradition that Jesus was born outside the law–a tradition that would have made his entire theological enterprise suspect:  Only a victim who was born according to the law could die in accordance with the scriptures (1 Cor 15.3; Romans 12.1-2; Rom. 5:12-21), erase the encumbrances brought on by “the first man” and serve as a model for the “resurrection life.”

This almost spasmodic reaching into and beyond history for meaning is one of the more difficult aspects of Paul’s theology, but it seems to me that there is no other explanation for why the “birth” of Jesus intrudes, in just the way it does,  into his letter to the Galatians.

Far from being ignorant of the Miriam-tradition, Paul needs to deal with it.  It is possible, in fact, since he does not reflect anything like a developed apologetic stance toward the polemical Jewish tradition, that the only bit of historical information he knows is the Jewish side.  Paul, in this case, becomes the inventor of the “fatherhood of God”-motif later exploited in the gospels   This however is sufficient to explain why Paul refers to Jesus’ legitimacy “under the law” as a fact believed by Christians, denied by Jews, but absolutely vital for his theological agenda.   If I am right, it means that the notion Paul knew “nothing” about the historical Jesus tradition is false; it means that not only did he know a strongly antagonistic tradition that remained a live issue for the gospel writers, but that his early theology pivoted on sweeping it aside. It is also rather explicit proof of the way in which Paul could dispose of problematical historical tradition in the interest of getting on with his work.

Movement Humanism (2011)

by rjosephhoffmann

I will blog about this at length: But I do find it amusing that the mythtic fringe seem to have no trouble defending an emperor known to exist as a god and want to deny simple existence to a Galilean outlaw who achieved the same status without a Vergil or a Plutarch to influence the vote.

This, I am made to believe, is because (wait for it) the gospel writers wrote fiction but the Roman historians were models of sober and scientific reporting.

Hmmmm.  I wonder what they used to buy bread.  Did it look anything like this?

This is the kind of coin that Jesus used to make his point about giving to Caesar what is owed to Caesar, and to God what is owed to God. The Latin around the head (Tiberius) reads TI CAESAR DIVI AUG F AUGUSTUS, or Tiberius Caesar Divi Augusti Filius Augustus, in English, Augustus Tiberius Caesar the Son of the Divine Augustus, so the son of god.

I do wonder why the mythtics don’t talk more about context–real, verifiable, in your face, you can bite it because it’s a coin context. Maybe this coin doesn’t exist. Maybe Tiberius is made up.  Certainly certain things about him are made up.

They seem instead to be wedded to their own myth of Christian beginnings.  And this includes the belief that the Romans didn’t believe extraordinary things about historical persons.

[Reprinted from Public Discourse, by Christopher Tollefsen]