Atheists: "Jesus is a myth."

 

I recently watched an online discussion of Jesus' Resurrection. The discussion included Derek Lambert, a former Christian, former heroin addict, and current atheist. You can see the discussion here.

Derek Lambert brought up the "Jesus is a myth" concept and I felt the need to vent. My vent is below.

 

Derek Lambert replied. He said that I was just saying what I said because I'm a Christian, and Christians say whatever they have to say to support their false belief. He also told me that I should "think."

 

In other words, he didn't read what I wrote, and no one heard my vent.

 

I know it's a waste of time trying to talk about this, but I needed to get it off my chest.

 

Believe in God; don't believe in God; I don't care. But I do care when atheists repeat falsehoods and they repeat those falsehoods to naïve people who believe their crap.

 

My vent about the Jesus-is-a-myth claim is below.

 

Dear Derek Lambert,

 

The atheists who believe that Jesus was, in whole or in part, a mythical figure, often talk as if there is this well-kept secret, known only to select scholars of mythology, that proves that Jesus was mythical, and this secret is kept from the grubby masses, who are too primitive to accept it.

 

That idea is itself a myth. There is no such well-kept secret among myth scholars.

 

Folklore, like the rest of academia, is very left-wing. If there were some folklore scholarship secretly proving that Jesus never existed, folklorists would shout it from the mountaintops.

 

Rather, folklore scholarship has moved past the "Jesus was a myth" concept.

 

Why?

 

Before I answer that, I'll mention four reasons historians typically give for believing in the historicity of Jesus. Those four reasons are attestation, behavior change, extra-biblical mention, and genre.

 

* attestation. Jesus is the best-attested figure from the ancient world. Attestation is an objective criterion, proved through numbers. There are more documents, created and dated closer in time, place, and cultural milieu, attesting to the existence of Jesus, than of any other figure from the Ancient world. Those who created the documents were not court hagiographers catering to powerful men wielding power over life and death, but freelancers writing about a dead Jewish peasant. They had less reason to embellish their claims than did court hagiographers inevitably writing with political agendas.

 

* behavior change. Those who proclaimed Jesus' existence dramatically changed their behavior. That doesn't prove their narrative true, but it suggests their belief in their narrative.

 

Derek Lambert mentioned a claim that Asclepius, the Greek god of medicine, provided eyeballs to someone who lacked them. This is perhaps a reference to the Epidaurian miracle inscriptions, aka "iamata." Iamata are "cure inscriptions collected and set up in the sanctuary of Asklepios at Epidauros in 350 BC, some of which date back to c. 450 BC." There is a great deal of scholarship on these iamata and I am not familiar with it so I cannot comment on Asclepius' eyeball gift.

 

I would though like to say a word about "belief."

 

Some years back, some claimed that they believed that the world would end in 2012. They attributed this belief to pop culture understandings of the Mayan calendar. Some of my students said, yes, they believed that the world would end in 2012. I replied, "You are not telling the truth. You do not believe that the world will end in 2012. If you believed that, you would not be in my class, on a beautiful spring day, reading books you don't want to read. You would be partying on the beach."

 

In other words, people can say that they believe something. They can even believe that they believe something. These beliefs often wither in the face of any challenge.

 

Similarly, when I lived in a remote village in Nepal, my fellow teachers told me that they were taking off school to visit a nearby village, where Vishnu, in the form of a snake, was sleeping with a young girl.

 

I knew my fellow teachers to be intelligent people so I pulled one aside and asked, sotto voce, "Do you really believe this?"

 

The teacher looked bored and shrugged and said, "Of course I believe. And, hey, it's a day off from school and everyone else is going."

 

In other words, the teacher voiced the socially acceptable belief, but also indicated in subsequent comments that the entire affair was not literally true.

 

In short: there is distance between what people say they believe and what they believe.

 

What makes Christianity different?

 

Behavior change.

 

An excellent quote about behavior change: "The triumph of Christianity is actually a very remarkable historical phenomenon. ... We begin with a small group from the backwaters of the Roman Empire and after two, three centuries go by, lo and behold that same group and its descendants have somehow taken over the Roman Empire and have become the official religion, in fact the only tolerated religion, of the Roman Empire by the end of the 4th century. That is a truly remarkable development, and a monumental historical problem, trying to understand how this happened … historians would like to find other explanations for the triumph of Christianity and indeed, ever since Gibbon wrote his famous history, historians have been trying to understand what it was exactly that pushed Christianity to the top. I can't fully answer that question myself."

 

The speaker is Shaye J. D. Cohen. He's Samuel Ungerleider Professor of Judaic Studies and Professor of Religious Studies Brown University, not a Christian apologist.

 

It's all well and good to cite iamata that attribute a miracle to Asclepius or Apollo. But what did that belief accomplish in the real world? Precious little. Asclepius puts eyeballs in a head previously lacking eyeballs; 2,000 years later, Vishnu arrives in the form of a snake and sleeps with a girl. Pagan gods predictably cater to wishes, respond well to flattery, and lash out at insults, but they don't change their own behavior or the course of history.

 

Witness, for example, the Plague Martyrs of Alexandria. As Christians, they were persecuted. Facing persecution and a plague, they ministered to the dying, and often died themselves. That is a miracle more impressive than popping eyeballs into a head – because one is historically attested and the other is not.

 

Similarly, Rodney Stark reports that one reason Christianity triumphed was because Christians did not practice female infanticide and Christians allowed girls to mature before undertaking marriage and childbirth, and thus were more likely to survive childbirth and produce healthy offspring. The Asclepius-worshipping Ancient world practiced female infanticide as a matter of course.

 

Read Hilarion's notorious first century letter to his wife Alis, instructing her to kill their baby if it is female, but raise it if it is a boy. The legal code attributed to Romulus, founder of Rome (753-716 BC), stipulated that citizens of Rome should rear every male child and every firstborn female child. In the records recording the families of one city of c. 220 BC, there were 118 sons and only 28 daughters. A Greek comedy from the third century BC records, "Everyone, even a poor man, raises a son; everyone, even a wealthy man, exposes a daughter."

 

With the arrival of Christianity, the Ancient world turned on a dime and suddenly became a place where females were allowed to live. That *behavior change* writes Christian belief in bold-faced type. I see no such behavior change associated with eyeball-popping Pagan gods. To this day, as one can see from sex ratio maps, females have a higher chance of living a full lifespan in countries under Judeo-Christian influence than in non-Judeo-Christian countries.

 

For more on how Christian belief has affected human history, please see Tom Holland's book "Dominion," which I review here.

 

Continuing with reasons historians believe Jesus to have been a real person, rather than a mythological figure.

 

* Extra Biblical mention. See here.

 

* GENRE

 

I type genre in all caps because for scholars immersed in literary study, the question of genre is very important, and for those who don't spend a lot of time immersed in literature, the question of genre may be hardest to grasp.  

 

When I used to teach this topic to undergrads, I recognized that "genre" might be hard for them to grok, as it is an abstract concept. I made it as concrete as possible.

 

"If I say to you, 'Knock knock,' what comes next? Or 'How many Polaks does it take to screw in a light bulb'? or 'There was a man from Nantucket'" They immediately recognized these genres, and knew what to expect. After "knock, knock," you say "Who's there." For light bulb jokes, you respond, "How many?" Nantucket will inevitably be rhymed with the f-word.

 

"When you and your boyfriend or girlfriend go to the movies this weekend, what will the girls want to see and what will the guys want to see?" The girls would want to see romantic comedies, or movies with dance, and the guys would want to see action adventure or superhero movies.

 

We talked about formulas specific to each genre. I wrote a formula on the blackboard. "Imagine you heard this on the news," I said. "Famous name comma who – a description of the famous person's most famous life event" what two words will follow?

 

Eventually some students would be able to fill out even this formula. "has died." As in "Gilbert Gottfried, who performed comedy for thirty years, has died." "Betty White, who starred in 'Golden Girls,' has died." "William Hurt, who won an Academy Award, has died."

 

I then would ask students, "What if someone came up to you at your father's funeral and said, "Knock knock." Would that be appropriate? "No!" they'd shout. "What will they say?" I asked. "Thoughts and prayers!"

 

Even us modern folk, no less than first century Jewish villagers, are awash in genre, and each genre's formula. We recognize that it is an unforgettable faux pas if someone mixes up genres and deploys the wrong genre at the wrong time.

 

This is even more true in traditional villages. Traditional villagers deploy genre and formula with religious precision. In Nepal, after you arrive somewhere, someone says, "You have arrived?" And you must reply, "Yes, I have arrived."

 

Bronislaw Malinowski, who lived with Trobriand Islanders, wrote that villagers would not allow genres to be deployed outside of their given space and time. Legends were told under some circumstances, myths under other circumstances, and fairy tales under still other circumstances, and no one told a myth when a fairy tale was called for, or vice versa. To do so was a serious faux pas.

 

Linda Degh, a Hungarian folklorist, talks about her informant, Mrs. Palko. Her fairy-tale telling was reserved "for winter occasions, usually when people gather to perform some work in common, or at family meetings, especially when they gather to keep vigil at a wake. On such occasions, Mrs. Palko starts telling her tales at 6 p.m. and goes on till the next morning"

 

Mrs Palko would not tell fairy tales under any other circumstances.

 

Marcel Griaule was a French ethnologist working with Dogon wise man Ogotemmeli. Griaule began to ask himself, "How sophisticated was Ogotemmeli? How literally did he intend his myth?" Ogotemmeli was describing a celestial granary with many animals on it, too many to fit if the myth had been intended literally.

 

Griaule came right out and asked Ogotemmeli, "How could all these animals find room a step one cubit wide and one cubit deep?" Ogotemmeli carefully explained, "All of this has to be said in words, but everything on the step is a symbol. Symbolic antelopes, symbolic vultures, symbolic hyenas, any number of animals could find room on a one-cubit step." "For the word 'symbol' he used a composite expression, the literal meaning of which is 'word of this lower world.'"

 

Ogotemmeli was recounting a myth. Myth is believed, but believed symbolically, not literally. Ogotemmeli had that genre distinction clear in his mind as he spoke, as would his audience.

 

The folk have to take genre tremendously seriously. In an oral culture, speech is the major means of communication. There are no libraries. There are no internet, telephones, telegraph, mass media. There is just speech. Traditional narrative is the library of information needed *to survive.* To survive physically, as in "Red touch black, safe for Jack. Red touches yellow, kills a fellow," a proverb devised to help differentiate between similarly colored snakes, one venomous, the other non-venomous. To survive socially, as in fairy tales about mean girls who are punished. To survive spiritually, as in rituals that appease the powers that be.

 

The Gospels are not myth, and only someone who doesn't understand genre and doesn't read myth would think that they are.

 

Please, if you are tempted to believe that the Gospels are myths, please read some actual myths. No, not popularizations of myths by Edith Hamilton or Disney. Read the best translations of raw myths. I recommend Barbara Sproul's compilation "Primal Myths." Please sit down and read ten, twenty myths in their entirety, and get back to me.

 

My students found these narratives almost impossible to get through.

 

If you are not one of the initiated, these myths will be impenetrable to you. They will be boring. They will make no sense. You will find them to be unbearably repetitive or too truncated to have any explanatory power at all.

 

You may find them grotesquely and offensively violent and amoral, with an inordinate emphasis on penises and dismemberment, see, for example, Zoroastrianism's Ahriman sodomizing himself, Egypt's Khepera masturbating and impregnating himself, and Djanggawul marking Australia with his giant penis. His sisters, with whom he has sex, have giant clitorises. Clitorises like termite mounds appear in a Dogon myth, one justifying FGM. There's also lots of chopping and dismemberment in authentic myths. Marduk chops up Tiamat.

 

Read all 58 pages of the Kumulipo, here. And tell me how that is like the Gospels. Go ahead. Please. Or read the Tibetan Book of the Dead, here. Or the Egyptian Book of the Dead, here. Or the Popol Vuh here.

 

Nothing in these authentic myths is comparable, stylistically, to the Gospels, in which a human man, who is born and dies, eats as we do, sleeps as we do, and has conversations as we do. Someone not initiated into Tibetan beliefs would not be able to make it through The Tibetan Book of the Dead, but the Gospels are comprehensible to people around the world.

 

Read enough authentic, unedited myths and you will recognize the truth of CS Lewis, who said,

 

"I have been reading poems, romances, vision-literature, legends, myths all my life. I know what they are like. I know that not one of them is like this. Of this text there are only two possible views. Either this is reportage - though it may no doubt contain errors - pretty close up to the facts; nearly as close as Boswell.

 

Or else, some unknown writer in the second century, without known predecessors, or successors, suddenly anticipated the whole technique of modern, novelistic, realistic narrative. If it is untrue, it must be narrative of that kind."

 

Not only are the Gospels different from myths in style. They are different from the popular narrative that was circulating in the Ancient world in substance. Please read Collected Ancient Greek Novels by BP Reardon. After you've read all 848 pages of that book, the difference between the New Testament and its Pagan literary environment is vast. In the Ancient novels, youth, nobility, physical attractiveness, and power are all. Slaves aren't fully human. Galatians 3:28 is revolutionary.

 

Derek Lambert said he was troubled by a line in Acts 9:4 in which he, Derek, hears an echo from 1 Samuel 26:18. I don't see the parallel Derek does here. That these two verses sound alike suggests to Derek that Acts is a myth, or at least mythologized.

 

In any case, Catholic Bibles note parallels in footnotes. For example, after Matthew 27:46, the New American Bible provides this footnote: "28 [46] Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?: Jesus cries out in the words of ⇒ Psalm 22:2, a psalm of lament that is the Old Testament passage most frequently drawn upon in this narrative. In Mark the verse is cited entirely in Aramaic, which Matthew partially retains but changes the invocation of God to the Hebrew Eli, possibly because that is more easily related to the statement of the following verse about Jesus' calling for Elijah."

 

These parallels are mirrored in everyday life. For example, after being betrayed by a friend, a person might say, "Et tu, Brute?" an allusion to Julius Caesar. People similarly make allusions to pop song lyrics, Monty Python routines, etc. Not a cause for concern.

 

As for the Atheist conspiracy theory that once upon a time, in a remote, undisclosed location, there was this brilliant folklorist who proved the Jesus was a mythical figure.

 

If you press the people who believe this, the best name they can come up with is Lord Raglan and the so-called "hero pattern" common to all folklore.

 

Or maybe Sir James Frazer, and dying and rising gods.

 

No. Wrong. Here's why. Folklore is infinite. Every day new myths, legends, fairy tales, jokes, songs, proverbs, latrinalia, games, riddles, etc, emerge.

 

"Hero pattern" scholars do not *discover* patterns. They *invent* patterns by *cherry-picking* elements from incomplete material gathered from many sources.

 

There is no better proof of cherry-picking and agenda-driven invention than this: there is no one hero pattern, and there is no one hero pattern scholar.

 

Rather, there are many hero patterns and many hero pattern scholars, who disagree with each other. The hero patterns are mutually exclusive.

 

Scholars who worked on, or who are cited in hero pattern arguments, include, but are not limited to, Johan Georg van Hahn, Otto Rank, Joseph Campbell, Lord Raglan, Alan Dundes, Sir James Frazer, and Carl Jung. It almost goes without saying that many of these scholars' work has since been denounced for various crimes, including imperial contempt for the people whose lore they addressed, and inaccuracies. Campbell was especially notorious for not using any complete narratives, but cherry-picking episodes from diverse cultures to support his own constructs.

 

Alan Dundes was my teacher and I have the greatest respect for his brilliance, but his hero pattern article about Jesus is the single worst thing he ever wrote. If you are going to argue that Jesus was a myth, you really need to read and defend Dundes' article "The Hero Pattern and the Life of Jesus." On page 196 of that article, Dundes insists that Jesus' life is eerily similar to a Javanese legend about a ship at sea. In fact, though, the Javanese legend bears no relation to Jesus' bio. Dundes closes by insisting that Jesus is a penis.

 

Again, Dundes was, when he was alive, the best folklorist in the world, and one could say, truly, that Dundes published an article arguing that Jesus was a penis. But it isn't enough to end there. One must also acknowledge that this article was roundly criticized by Dundes' fellow scholars. That criticism was published in a lengthy document I can't summarize here. Similarly, if one is going to cite the hero pattern, one must cite the conflicts between the several different hero patterns, and the fall from grace of men like Frazer and Raglan.

 

And one must mention this: folklorists *mock* the hero pattern idea. See, for example, "Lincoln Wasn't There" by Francis Lee Utley. Utley uses the hero pattern to prove that Abraham Lincoln never existed. Utley was a real folklorist, not an imperialist dilettante.

 

See Samuel Sandmel's "Parallelomania," which begins, "I encountered the term parallelomania, as I recall, in a French book of about 1830, whose title and author I have forgotten, in a context in which there were being examined certain passages in the Pauline epistles and in the Book of Wisdom that seem to have some resemblance, and a consequent view that when Paul wrote the Epistle to the Romans, a copy of the Book of Wisdom lay open before him, and that Paul in Romans copied generously from it.

 

Three items are to be noted. One, that some passages are allegedly parallel; two, that a direct organic literary connection is assumed to have provided the parallels; and three, that the conclusion is drawn that the flow is in a particular direction, namely, from Wisdom to Paul, and not from Paul to Wisdom.

 

Our French author disputes all three points: he denies that the passages cited are true parallels; he denies that a direct literary connection exists; he denies that Paul copied directly from Wisdom, and he calls the citations and the inferences parallelomania. We might for our purposes define parallelomania as that extravagance among scholars which first overdoes the supposed similarity in passages and then proceeds to describe source and derivation as if implying literary connection flowing in an inevitable or predetermined direction."

 

Read Tryggve Mettinger on so-called "Dying and Rising Gods."

 

Read Dorothea Wender's "The Myth of Washington," a very, very funny take-down of hero pattern thinkers who insist that Jesus was a myth, or a penis, or whatever. Wender "proves" that George Washington never existed.

 

I've spent way more time on this note than I thought I would, and I have hardly scratched the surface of the scholarship with which one ought to be familiar before one starts saying that Jesus was a myth, or was mythologized.

 

But as someone who has spent years of my life studying and teaching folklore, though, and indeed studying folklore under Alan Dundes, a scholar I was proud to pass on to my own students, it bugs me no end when people who aren't familiar with the scholarship make uninformed and intellectually irresponsible statements about Jesus and myth.

 

Please forgive my impatience, but truth and intellectual responsibility matter.

 

Derek, as your video closed, you mentioned that you were a heroin addict and that God did not rescue you.

 

I'm sorry to read this. My heart goes out to you and I wish I could take away your pain.

 

There's more to be said, though.

 

April 10 marked the seventh anniversary of my beloved sister's death. I was rubbing her feet as she died. She had two young daughters who really needed her, and a husband who mourned her death deeply. Her death devastated me. I will almost certainly never again be as close to anyone as I was to my sister, and I will live the rest of my life in the loneliness that those who have lost their closest human companion feel.

 

After she received the diagnosis of a terminal brain tumor, I prayed for her healing every single day for the two years she had left on earth. Every day, when I prayed for her, I heard, gentle but emphatic, the word "No" spoken aloud inside my head. I kept praying for two years, every day, begging for that "No" to change to "Yes." It never did.

 

My sister's death was especially hard on me because my brother, when he was only 23, again, a married man with a son, was killed on my birthday. And then another brother died a few short years later of cancer. And then another brother died of cancer. So far, none of my siblings has lived a normal lifespan.

 

And this is all exacerbated by my own cancer diagnosis. The diagnosis I received seemed to guarantee death within five years of diagnosis. It's now ten years later and I am still alive, though I did receive another cancer diagnosis in the interim.

 

One night, before surgery, I had turned off all the lights, and was walking, absentmindedly, upstairs to bed, as I had done thousands of other times. I was on step three, my mind was blank, and, again, I heard that internal voice, and it told me quite clearly that there would be a miracle. After surgery, the surgeon, a veteran and top doctor, walked into my operating room and asked me, "Who told you that you had cancer?"

 

Why am I alive and why is my sister dead? I asked God to take me in her place. She was married and had kids; I am alone. I knew she would be missed in a way that I would not be.

 

I don't know the answer to that.

 

I don't know why God did not heal you of your addiction, even while I do know, personally, others who attribute their healing from addiction to God. I don't know why God healed David, and not you.

 

I do know this. Miracles are signs, and, like highway signs, they are for there all of us, not just the healed. They tell all of us, "There's more here than meets the eye."

 

I also know that the wasteland where no miracles occur is also a sign for all of us. Father Walter Ciszek was imprisoned in the Soviet Gulag for many years. Richard Wurmbrand underwent unspeakable torture in Romania. Maximilian Kolbe was tortured to death in Auschwitz. Bernadette Soubirous had cholera, asthma, and tuberculosis. Therese of Lisieux died at only 24 of TB. These people, who went through Hell, without any miraculous delivery, are also signs.

 

The dark night of the soul is another sign. Great souls like John of the Cross, Bernadette Soubirous, and Mother Teresa have experienced the Dark Night of the Soul, when they "troubled deaf heaven with their bootless cries" and received no response.

 

In spite of their dark nights, they soldiered on, "acting as if" (a phrase from 12 Step). "Act as if you believe." Their witness *in spite of* their dark nights is a sign for us, every bit as much as miracles are a sign for us.

 

And I know that God bids me to care about you, and I do no matter what you believe.

 

But, please, do some more reading on the Jesus myth hypothesis, including the works I mention, above.

 

Thank you.