If Jesus wasn’t magic, where did the Bible even come from?
Well, if you make the assumption that Jesus existed and behaved as described in the New Testament, this reduces to Lewis’s trilemma. The criticisms section of that page outlines some of the possible responses.
The option I personally find most compelling is that there’s plenty of room for distortion and myth-making between Jesus’s ministry and the writing of the earliest Christian works we know about: at least four decades [ETA: got this wrong earlier; see downthread], possibly more depending on how generous you’re being. Knowing what we do about how myths form, that’s more than enough time for the supernaturalism in the Gospels to have accumulated. Look at it this way and it’s no longer a question of “lunatic, liar, or Lord”; rather a colossal game of Telephone played between members of a fragmented and frequently persecuted sect, many of whom would have had incentive to play up the significance of the founding events. There are more recent religious innovations that you can look at for comparison: Mormonism, for example, or Rastafarianism.
Some have even used this to argue against the historicity of Jesus, although I don’t think doing so is necessary to a secular interpretation of the New Testament.
How do you get “between a hundred and twenty and two hundred” years? The standard story puts the death of Jesus around 30 B.C.E., and dates the composition of the earliest gospel to around 70 B.C.E. Admittedly, the standard story is certainly not beyond question[1] but I’d be interested if you had any specific reasons for advocating a different timeline. Of course, 40 years is more than sufficient for pretty much unlimited distortion and mythmaking anyway.
[1] The chain of reasoning for dating the composition is, sadly, too often along these lines: we know that A was certainly written before date X, because A must be before B. We know this because B contains a vague reference that kind of looks like it refers to A, and it doesn’t look all that likely that B was tampered with by later scholars to insert the reference. B must be before C for similar reasons, and C before D, and D before E, and E actually contains some fairly specific references to being written around date Y which we again don’t think are all that likely to have been tampered with by later copyists. It is unlikely at each stage that the next writer acquired and made use of the text as soon as it was written, so we subtract a few years from Y for each stage for the transmission of the text and arrive at X as the latest possible date for A to have been written.
My mistake, I was thinking of non-Christian references to the life of Jesus (and didn’t have the dates quite right there either; Tacitus wrote in the early second century and Josephus late in the first, although both references are rather brief). As best I can tell, you’re right about the chronology of Christian writings; Mark is thought to be the earliest of the surviving Gospels, and that was probably written around CE 70. The hypothetical Q source may have come somewhat earlier, but seems to have been a collection of sermons and proverbs rather than a gospel as such, if its projected influence on later works is anything to go by.
Edited to correct. But yes, forty years is a large enough gap to explain a lot of drift.
Ugh. Why’d I write “B.C.E.” when I meant “C.E.”? Oh well, I guess it didn’t confuse anyone. Anyway, besides a handful of people who question the usual gospel dating and try to argue that it was really considerably later, I know there’s also a tiny minority of scholars who date the life of Jesus much earlier, as much as a century or more before what the standard story reports. Hence, I’d wondered if you were a subscriber to one of those theories. It means having to assume some of the references to contemporary events in the gospels are just wrong, but honestly the standard story also has to do that; it just has a different set of mistakes it needs to explain away. Still, it’s a pretty tiny minority theory, and I haven’t really investigated what the evidence for it is supposed to be.
Well, if you make the assumption that Jesus existed and behaved as described in the New Testament, this reduces to Lewis’s trilemma. The criticisms section of that page outlines some of the possible responses.
The option I personally find most compelling is that there’s plenty of room for distortion and myth-making between Jesus’s ministry and the writing of the earliest Christian works we know about: at least four decades [ETA: got this wrong earlier; see downthread], possibly more depending on how generous you’re being. Knowing what we do about how myths form, that’s more than enough time for the supernaturalism in the Gospels to have accumulated. Look at it this way and it’s no longer a question of “lunatic, liar, or Lord”; rather a colossal game of Telephone played between members of a fragmented and frequently persecuted sect, many of whom would have had incentive to play up the significance of the founding events. There are more recent religious innovations that you can look at for comparison: Mormonism, for example, or Rastafarianism.
Some have even used this to argue against the historicity of Jesus, although I don’t think doing so is necessary to a secular interpretation of the New Testament.
How do you get “between a hundred and twenty and two hundred” years? The standard story puts the death of Jesus around 30 B.C.E., and dates the composition of the earliest gospel to around 70 B.C.E. Admittedly, the standard story is certainly not beyond question[1] but I’d be interested if you had any specific reasons for advocating a different timeline. Of course, 40 years is more than sufficient for pretty much unlimited distortion and mythmaking anyway.
[1] The chain of reasoning for dating the composition is, sadly, too often along these lines: we know that A was certainly written before date X, because A must be before B. We know this because B contains a vague reference that kind of looks like it refers to A, and it doesn’t look all that likely that B was tampered with by later scholars to insert the reference. B must be before C for similar reasons, and C before D, and D before E, and E actually contains some fairly specific references to being written around date Y which we again don’t think are all that likely to have been tampered with by later copyists. It is unlikely at each stage that the next writer acquired and made use of the text as soon as it was written, so we subtract a few years from Y for each stage for the transmission of the text and arrive at X as the latest possible date for A to have been written.
My mistake, I was thinking of non-Christian references to the life of Jesus (and didn’t have the dates quite right there either; Tacitus wrote in the early second century and Josephus late in the first, although both references are rather brief). As best I can tell, you’re right about the chronology of Christian writings; Mark is thought to be the earliest of the surviving Gospels, and that was probably written around CE 70. The hypothetical Q source may have come somewhat earlier, but seems to have been a collection of sermons and proverbs rather than a gospel as such, if its projected influence on later works is anything to go by.
Edited to correct. But yes, forty years is a large enough gap to explain a lot of drift.
Ugh. Why’d I write “B.C.E.” when I meant “C.E.”? Oh well, I guess it didn’t confuse anyone. Anyway, besides a handful of people who question the usual gospel dating and try to argue that it was really considerably later, I know there’s also a tiny minority of scholars who date the life of Jesus much earlier, as much as a century or more before what the standard story reports. Hence, I’d wondered if you were a subscriber to one of those theories. It means having to assume some of the references to contemporary events in the gospels are just wrong, but honestly the standard story also has to do that; it just has a different set of mistakes it needs to explain away. Still, it’s a pretty tiny minority theory, and I haven’t really investigated what the evidence for it is supposed to be.