The Antichristian Phenomenon

One of the things that shook my faith so terribly that I never recovered was when I discovered that the historicity of [tag]Jesus[/tag] had been in question for centuries. For the never-have-been-Christians among us, if you’ve seen the vox-pops from The God Who Wasn’t There, then you’ve got a decent impression of what the average Christian knows about first century religion: nothing beyond what the Bible states (or what their pastors state the Bible states).

The average Christian likely believes two things in error due to the manner in which they’re taught about Jesus’s life: that his ministry as described was unique and that we have eyewitness testimony of it. In reality, there were many messianic figures of the period and no-small number of miracle workers. The National Geographic documentary The Rivals of Jesus (part 1 of 5) presents the case for a few of these other messiahs and also for an alternative vision of Jesus based on the Dead Sea Scrolls. For the second point, the gospels were written decades after the life of Jesus, which we know to be fact because of events they mention and that we can trace the synoptic gospels back to two sources (one of which we have in The Gospel of Mark). And for those Christians who still believe in Biblical inerrancy, we can do this in part based on disagreements between the Gospel accounts.

The Gospels themselves do not always match what we know about history either. If you take two Biblical dates for the birth of Jesus as fact, then you have to believe Mary was in labor for at least a decade. Criticism of the Gospel accounts comes in two flavors: from those attempting to reconstruct a historical Jesus and from those attempting to reconstruct a mythical Jesus.

The Wikipedia entry on the Historical Jesus is an excellent introduction to some of the issues, as is the article on the Historicity of Jesus. As is routinely done for any historical figure, these researchers attempt to reconstruct who Jesus was, what he did, and what were the immediate effects of his ministry from the varying accounts of his life and our knowledge of the period. Examples of the debates that historians are engaged in can be found in the Infidels.org library.

The search for the mythical Jesus proceeds from the belief that the historical evidence does not even support a historical Jesus. This research attempts to demonstrate how the first Christians believed only his spiritual existence, as followers of Mythras and other savior figures. The central evidence comes from both the similarities to other mythical figures and that the earliest writings about Jesus (in the epistles of Paul) do not describe Jesus’s ministry on Earth, which one would think would still have been of great importance at the time.

What does this mean for us? First and foremost, our own education. But also for realizing that Christians are under informed on their own religion. I think that ultimately, the more people are encouraged to think about their own religion in relation to history, etc, the more they will have to lose some of the assurance with which they make claims. I think it would be an excellent idea for us to dedicate some part of this website to encouraging Christians to ask tough questions about their faith in a non confrontational way. History is about the process and theory of uncovering truth as much as it is about cold hard facts. Just as we don’t want Christians to believe they have all the answers, it would be a good idea to demonstrate that the reason we think they’re wrong isn’t because we have all the answers but more because there’s good reason to doubt theirs.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, July 1st, 2007 at 1:13 am and is filed under Religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.