Jesus denial and the Holocaust

The first time I debated anyone about the existence of Jesus, I said to my opponent that this issue had the clearest answer of any that we had ever debated. He was surprised at such a statement, and asked me to produce one single reason why he was wrong about Jesus. I was a little stumped, and only later did I realize the problem with the tactic he had used. I found it described in Denying History, a great book about Holocaust denial and the nature of historical knowledge. It was co-authored by Michael Shermer, the founder and publisher of Skeptic Magazine.

I should stop right here to say that I see many differences between denying Jesus and denying the Holocaust. I don't regard Jesus denial, for one, to be anti-Semitic. I see its conclusion occasionally welcomed by anti-Semites such as the Aryan Stormfront, but I don't think that my debating partner, Ryan, is any kind of anti-Semite. I regard Holocaust denial to be more bigoted, because anti-Semitism, more than merely welcoming it, actually produces it. Holocaust denial is also less rational, because the Holocaust is a modern event of huge size, at the center of a civilization given to documentation and historiography, while Jesus' ministry was briefer, far smaller, long ago, recorded only by ancient technology, and distant from the documented cultural and political centers of the time.

It also must be said that there is nothing wrong with merely asking what is the evidence for Jesus or the Holocaust. Curiosity is an inexpressibly good thing, and asking questions one of the most necessary. Nor is anything wrong even with skepticism about these things, for instance by wanting to be skeptical about any story that includes miracles. Without skepticism there is no science. As a scientist you must try to overthrow your own theory, and one of the best things to come out my debate with Ryan was a long essay in which I tried to disprove the existence of Jesus; my theory that he lived, like any good theory, survived that test. Questions are not a problem, nor are doubts; they are necessary, and useful to both scientific knowledge and faith in the most basic sense. Assertion, however, must be met in turn with its own skepticism. Assertion in a non-scientific manner, moreover, raises serious questions, as does persistently holding to a theory without evidence or against evidence. Shermer does us a useful service, in this vein, by defining pseudo-history as "the rewriting of the past for present personal or political purposes." Persisting in Holocaust denial originates in feelings about Jews, while persisting in Jesus denial originates in feelings about Christianity.

And other similarities appear between the denials of Jesus and the Holocaust, most conspicuously the demand for a single proof. Shermer tells us about Robert Faurisson, a senior lecturer in literary criticism who denies that any gas chambers were used for mass murder of Jews. In a private half-hour conversation with Shermer, Faurisson demanded "one proof, just one proof" that a Nazi gas chamber was used in such a way. Asked repeatedly in turn what he would consider proof, Faurisson gave no answer (p. 60).

As Shermer writes, "The Holocaust is not a single event that a single fact can prove or disprove. The Holocaust was a myriad of events in a myriad of places and relies on myriad pieces of data that converge on one conclusion. Minor errors or inconsistencies here or there cannot disprove the Holocaust, for the simple reason that these lone bits of data never proved it in the first place" (p. 33). Leaving the Holocaust aside, "We know about the past through a convergence of evidence.... The historical theory of evolution gains confirmation by many independent lines of evidence converging on a single conclusion.... Creationists demand 'just one fossil transitional form' that shows evolution. But a single fossil cannot prove evolution" (p. 32).

Essentially, asking for a single proof is the same as saying that you will believe what it pleases you to believe unless someone can force your mind to give it up. Since minds are impossible, or at the very least extremely difficult, to force, the demand for a proof is meaningless.

I might have asked Ryan to give me in turn one single proof that women are equal to men. Physical proof is generally regarded as the strongest, yet when it comes to that, all my eyes can see is that women are smaller than men. You get into absurdities when you try to boil any large question down to a narrow standard such as one single proof. If proof is what you want, the best thing I can see doing is to define what you will consider proof, and then let your theory stand or fall on the answer. You will see instantly that, rightly so, you don't want to put your entire theory, and a great part of your knowledge, at the mercy of one single question. It is not fair to do so, nor does it follow the scientific method, which requires that any question be submitted to more than one test.

Sometimes we wonder how people can persist in Holocaust denial against physical evidence, and we ask, for instance, how they can deny the famous films of piles of emaciated bodies being studied by Allied troops who liberated the concentration camps. It makes no sense that such a thing could be denied, and so we sometimes think of Holocaust deniers as merely "crazy" people who cannot or will not see what is placed in front of their eyes. Indeed, someone who sees a car drive by and says that no car drove by is crazy in a sense, which is to say, they're a candidate for schizophrenia or another condition. Such a person deserves our compassion and care, not our contempt. The Holocaust denier knows all about the films, and has seen them. But he tends to say that this is what happened to the Jews -- if those bodies are conceded to belong to Jews -- in the last days of the war due to the privation and destruction caused by American and British bombing. Holocaust deniers, and neo-Nazis, are not crazy. Like Faurisson, they hold jobs requiring real skills, and make friends quite easily apart from their beliefs (as well as making friends who share their beliefs). Even speaking generally, Nazis are no more crazy than Communists, who killed far more people; and it's well conceded that Hitler, like Nazi Germany, had intelligence, skills, culture and determination. All it takes to deny something well-known is a little intelligence, enough knowledge of your subject matter to form alternative or obscure explanations, and a good amount of impudence. Against that, no single proof will ever suffice.

The rest of Holocaust denial is likewise accomplished in clever ways that would surprise us. Most of us think that Holocaust denial means saying that none of the 6 million died, and that Hitler did nothing with the Jews or against them. But again, deniers do not deny that the car drove by. They do deny the widely accepted definition of the Holocaust, described by Shermer as "the systematic bureaucratically administered destruction by the Nazis and their collaborators during the Second World War of an estimated six million Jews based primarily on racial ideology" (101). They say that Jews died in the hundreds of thousands, due to Allied bombing, or while in the protection of Germans who marched them in the dead of winter, under bombs, away from the camps at the end of the war. Physical evidence means almost nothing when you can rationalize it. That is why Holocaust denial is not what most of us think it is. Some who deny the Holocaust say that in the above-described fashion, even as many as 1 million or 2 million Jews died. But that counts as denial of the Holocaust. The death toll remains high, but the event is no longer recognizable; numerically and otherwise, it is so shorn of its meaning that we can speak of it as being substantially, centrally, essentially denied.

There is, however, no fault incurred in denying that the Holocaust was the worst event in human history, or some similar claim. While such claims mean a lot to those who make them (and I agree that the Holocaust was a unique evil in more than incidental ways), we are now in the gray area normally referred to as "debatable." In truth, all questions are debatable, and no question should be shouted down. But we say "debatable" because we mean that there are certain gray questions that cannot be proved or disproved with the kind of certainty that may be said about the Holocaust's occurrence. Similarly, it is one thing to deny that Jesus was the Messiah or the Son of God, or to debate any number of meanings given to his life or ministry. It is another thing positively to say that he did not exist, or that he was not a teacher of substantially Jewish ideas who suffered capital punishment at the hands of enemies. That is the "core", I think, of what we can say about Jesus, though it must be kept in mind that to deny this core is not as irrational as denying a modern event like the Holocaust, and that Jesus denial is not the same as Holocaust denial.

And in any case, when I have spoken of Jesus denial, I've been referring to those who deny that any man, Jewish or otherwise, executed or otherwise, exists behind Christian testimonies. I know of no one who conceded his existence but denied that he was substantially Jewish or that he was executed. My concern therefore has centered around the claim that Jesus Christ is a thorough fabrication. The equivalent in Holocaust denial does not exist, for it would mean saying that no Jews lived, suffered or were maliciously killed during the Second World War. While Holocaust deniers do deny that such iconic figures as Anne Frank lived, and they play games with the demographic count of Jews living in wartime Europe, they cannot wholly deny the existence of 9 million European Jews, or wholly deny the deaths of at least thousands of Jews. Largely because of physical evidence like what appears in films, no one today can deny that Jews lived and died during that war. All that's left is to deny the process (such as Hitler's intention), the total numbers, and the meaning. With the life of Jesus, an ancient and marginal event, no one needs to say that there was an execution, or even a life. Ancient evidence is so much thinner that people can plead to be blinded by fog.

For the existence of Jesus, we have converging lines of evidence from writings by Christians (the New Testament and other texts), Jews (Josephus), and Romans (Tacitus, Seutonius). To what degree the Jewish and Roman writings represent independent witness is debated widely, but the Christian writings in themselves are not one single block; there are independent traditions within the New Testament that we don't usually call independent because, ironically, the Church fathers gathered them later, in the desire to bring together what they concluded were eyewitness accounts from people who knew each other (a conclusion now widely doubted in biblical scholarship), and called them parts of the New Testament. To judge all Christian literature as a single independent witness is no more legitimate than saying that two Jews who witnessed the same ethnic cleansing in Poland are not independent just because they're both Jews and they both believe what they witnessed. It is, rather, relevant to ask whether the witnesses knew each other. In the New Testament, some witnesses seem to know each other but some clearly do not, while some have copied independently from a document now lost; and all those who are independent provide uniquely remembered but similar material on more than one aspect of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection. Those witnesses that seem genuinely not to know each other are either agreeing on the facts of Jesus' existence and his interactions with famous local figures (some still living when they wrote), or are independently arriving at the same basic outline of Jesus' life and his interactions -- besides, of course, lying outright, if Jesus did not live. By this last point we mean more than that the authors were stating falsehoods; we also mean that they wrote stories which were false but nevertheless sound real to our ears, two thousand years later -- for instance by admitting that the early leaders of the Church behaved like slow-witted dullards and cowards; that Jesus made prophecies proven untrue shortly after his death, or that he admitted not knowing the future; that the Messiah met a horribly shameful death and did not return to save his people; or by making specific, falsifiable statements about who Jesus met in his lifetime; etc.

Moreover, we have no surviving record indicating doubt in Palestine or the wider world about the existence of Jesus or his crucifixion under Pontius Pilate, though there is often doubt (even in the New Testament!) concerning the Resurrection. The theory that no man existed behind Christ requires the assertion that the Church, powerless as it was in the first three centuries, suppressed all such evidence, either then or when it came to power. As stated by many historians, the theory of fabrication requires miracles comparable to those recorded in the New Testament. But the New Testament's miracles, if one chooses to disbelieve them, do not disprove the life.

The primary sets of evidence for the Holocaust, per Shermer, are these five things: written documents, eyewitness testimony, photographs, the remains of the camps, and inferential evidence (like population figures). For Jesus, we're missing three of the five: no photographs, no comprehensive demographic figures that can tell us more than indirect things about the likely fate of an individual, no remains of the place where his life expired. We have many written documents purporting to transmit earlier eyewitness testimony, though none seem to contain written records composed in his lifetime -- a completely natural thing in the mostly illiterate ancient world, whose records are now in any case lost to us because of time and the perishability of ancient manuscripts. The record is actually extraordinarily good, because Paul's first surviving letters appear just 20 years after the crucifixion. Only famous statesmen and military leaders, and only a few of them, have left behind records composed in their own lifetimes. At any rate, we have a good sense of the difference between denying Jesus' existence and denying the Holocaust.

I would list these parallels:

1) Both deny that centrally important individuals lived. Jesus and Anne Frank, because they are iconic figures whose personal characteristics are often smothered in universalist meaning or interpretation, are said not to have lived. Others are often denied, such as Paul, or early Church Fathers like Tertullian; and the number of Christians in the second-century Roman Empire is said necessarily to be smaller by many millions than what historians say, just as Holocaust deniers argue that the usually accepted numbers of Jews in Europe before and after the war are wrong.

2) Both are conspiracy theories. Both argue that evidence for their theory does not exist because it's been suppressed, while evidence against their theory exists only because it's been fabricated.

3) Both require arguments from silence. This is more true for Jesus deniers, who try to say that everyone from Jewish to Christian to Roman writers were silent about Jesus, when in fact most would not have heard of Jesus or would have found him irrelevant to the topics they wrote about; while those who would have taken interest actually did mention him, in exactly the proportions of interest that we would expect from their places in geography and time. Holocaust deniers depend less on this tactic, but they place a great deal of weight on the fact that no single directive from Hitler to kill the Jews has been found -- despite the fact that immoral things are often suppressed. I am not aware of Holocaust deniers using the wartime silence of the Allies about the Holocaust to bolster their case, but they probably could do so easily.

4) Both demand "one single proof" of the thing they're trying to deny.

5) Both set great store on the "normal confabulation and confusion that occurs in all eyewitness testimony" (Shermer 41).

6) Both attempt to place the focus of the debate on peripheral issues which even experts and eyewitnesses may not have good answers for. This tactic is used more by Holocaust deniers, for instance when they make hay out of the wartime rumour, still widely believed among survivors and their friends, that Nazis were making soap out of Jewish victims. Any movement, like that to remember the Holocaust, makes mistakes, and contains little things that mean a lot to its members. Attacking these things is no more legitimate than saying, as I once heard from Ryan, that the U.S. would never have gone to war with Iraq after the invasion of Kuwait if not for the story, now largely discredited, that Iraqi soldiers stole incubators from Kuwaiti hospitals with babies still in them; one false story does not make huge phenomena just go away. In Jesus denial, it used to be typical for someone to base their argument that Jesus of Nazareth did not exist on the archaeological and largely technical issues surrounding the remains of the town of Nazareth. This is a peripheral issue, certainly, but it is no longer widely used because evidence continues to be found, much of it disproving the idea that Nazareth did not exist in the first century (in contrast to the discredited stories about soap and incubators), or else admitting of more possibilities around this issue than Jesus deniers had ever been willing to admit.

7) Both reject the mythology, theology, and politics surrounding the things they want to deny, and try surreptitiously to throw out the things themselves. Holocaust deniers reject Judaism, Zionism, and the goodness of Jews, from which their conclusions flow naturally. Jesus deniers reject theism, theology, Christianity, and/or mythology, and pretend that these things can be thrown out along with all the things they speak about. As such, both are excellent examples of what Shermer calls pseudohistory, "the rewriting of the past for present personal or political purposes" -- as distinct from necessary historical revisionism based on new evidence or knowledge.

8) Both depend heavily on moral equivalence. Ancient Jews and Christians, who suffered immensely at the hands of Roman power, are said to be no better than the Romans, who are often portrayed as representatives of a refined, tolerant, scientific society. Just as surely, the Jews were not the victims of World War II, Germans were not the perpetrators of genocide, and the Allies were just as brutal as Germany, if not more so.

9) Both seem especially determined to deny the suffering around the events in question. The Holocaust is whitewashed, and the thousands of crucifixions of Jews under Rome are minimized or barely heard of, while early persecution of Christians is minimized or denied. It is often also heard that figures such as Moses did not exist, and that Jews were not slaves in Egypt. Shermer asks, "How, indeed, can a people answer the charge that it has imagined or invented its greatest tragedy?" (Foreword, xiii). He is speaking of the Jewish experience in the Holocaust, but a similar statement might be made about the Jews when speaking of their long enslavement in Egypt (a shameful experience to admit, thousands of years before humanity began to condemn slavery and to extend regard to its victims), or to some extent about Christians when speaking of the crucifixion and other suffering during their first three centuries.

10) Both are against traditional religion. Holocaust deniers and Jesus deniers alike reject Judaism and Christianity. Both, however, decline to throw anything like the same criticism at the practice of worshipping leaders like Hitler or the Roman emperors (as in ancient paganism), though of course Holocaust deniers do not say that Hitler was divine; they just idolize him as if he was.

11) Both say prejudiced things. Christianity appears in the statements of Jesus deniers without any good or mitigating qualities, as do the Jews in the statements of Holocaust deniers. The latter tell lies about Jews that are well-known, such as the statement that Jews are in control of the world's media or economies.

Michael Shermer's own opinion about Jesus I do not know, but at Skeptic Magazine's website he has offered wholehearted endorsement of The Secret Origins of the Bible, by Tim Callahan, who serves as his site's Religion editor. Callahan tends to receive more compliments from Christian apologists than most skeptics, and his works sound even-toned and balanced; but he does not know any Biblical languages and is not a specialist in a Biblical field, except perhaps one; he is often described as a longtime student of Biblical prophecies about the end-times. Callahan does not deny the existence of Jesus or his crucifixion, though he argues that Jews were not involved in the death of Jesus. He also argues that most of the Christian story about Jesus can be attributed to the Old Testament and to pagan myths.

Let's leave aside for the now the fact that the early Christians tried in their scriptures to depict Jesus in Old Testament terms, and tried later to depict their most distinctive beliefs as similar to older pagan rites that the Romans respected (a comparison that became easier as those rites began borrowing from Christianity as freely as they had borrowed from one another).

Here I want to finish with one last question related to the Holocaust. Is it not possible to wipe away most of Hitler's wartime career by noting how similar his conquests are to Napoleon's, and to wipe away the rest of his life by finding parallels with some of the billions of people who lived before the Second World War? Because some Jews talk about Hitler by drawing parallels to the Pharoah from the Book of Exodus, just as the New Testament drew parallels between Jesus and Old Testament figures, could I not conclude from this that Hitler's life is mostly invented?

Bede's Library

I've alluded before to John Meier's A Marginal Jew as the definitive treatise on the historical Jesus, though it does not spend any time directly tackling the theory of nonexistence. I've found one collection of essays on this issue (the best single collection I've seen), at Bede's Library: see http://www.bede.org.uk/jesusindex.htm. That page has one very telling essay on the judgments of secular and atheist historians on this issue. The statement by James Hannam on the home page describes my sentiments very closely, though it does not describe my life: "The aim of Bede's Library is [to] show how a person from a scientific background came to Christianity and has had his faith strengthened rather than weakened by argument and reason." My own story might say something rather about an intellectual who gave his heart as a child to science and faith, and has found inexpressible joys as an adult by practicing these things, often on unexpected paths.

Except when life is at stake

My church stands for life. That being so, it is within reach of this self-consistent philosophy outlined below, one that I've put together after serious and sorrowful reflection on the Terri Schiavo case. This philosophy is not necessarily mine in all particulars; but I hope and pray that my Church can teach it.

Except when life itself is threatened:

1) Contraception is wrong. Life is being extinguished, however, by AIDS in Africa and elsewhere.

2) Stem cell research is wrong. Life is commonly ended, however, by those diseases which stem-cell research could fight.

3) Abortion is wrong. As the Catholic Church teaches already, abortion is permissible only when the life of the mother is threatened.

4) War is wrong. As the Church already teaches in its just war doctrine, war is permissible only as an action against a state, never a people, that is already waging or launching a full-scale war. Smaller offenses, not committed by a state or short of war, call for proportionate responses.

5) Suicide is wrong. As the Church already teaches, giving up your life for someone else is not only permissible, it is the highest possible love.

6) Euthenasia is wrong. The Church makes no exceptions here with regard to the "life at stake" principle, because it is difficult to imagine a case where killing the infirm, injured or aged will actually save someone else's life. If such a situation were to obtain, the Church would affirm the possibility of weighing one life against another, as it does with abortion when the mother's life is endangered. The only true exception in the Church's stance against euthenasia is this: when someone is dying and they cannot be saved, and artificial treatments (i.e., a respirator, or radiology, but not the giving of food and water) promise only to prolong suffering, the person dying incurs no moral blame in deciding to forego the treatment. Suffering need not be prolonged needlessly by artificial means; science should be used only to save life or relieve suffering.

7) Capital punishment is wrong. The Church used to make its standard "life at stake" exception here, by allowing that the death penalty could be warranted in the most severe cases of crimes against society; the thinking was that some room ought to be allowed for the death penalty, perhaps, to deter life-taking crimes. But the death penalty does not seem to deter, as demonstrated in study after study. And Sister Helen Prejean (of Dead Man Walking fame) wrote to John Paul II in 1997, saying that governments always claim that the instances in which they take life involve the most severe cases of crimes; that moved him to edit the catechism and remove the loophole, so that the Church now stands firmly against this taking of life, without exceptions. See Sister Prejean's recent Op-Ed in the New York Times, "Above All Else, Life."

All these actions noted as wrong, except contraception, directly take life, so I would normally include contraception in another category of less urgent ethical acts that the Church prohibits, like divorce or extramarital sex -- but contraception, unlike these things, can prevent actual death. True, unlike the other actions in my list above, it is not the only thing available that could save the life in question. To save life when an invading army is extinguishing it, and not merely to attempt to save it but to do so successfully, I will almost surely have to take up arms. But when AIDS kills people, contraception is not the only thing that could save them; technically, so can abstinence.

So that becomes the crux of the issue. Many Catholics in traditional regions of the world, which included most of the U.S. until as late as the Kennedy presidency, take the Church's prohibition against artifical contraception seriously and consequently decline to use condoms, resulting in large Catholic families. But while they also take the Catholic teachings on celibacy, moderation and sexual fidelity seriously, they find they cannot change their sexual desire and behavior with nearly the same success. Declining condom use during sex is often actually pleasant, and even if the consequences are difficult, it continues; men still have more power than women, in the bedroom as in other places, and it is they most often who choose to go without condoms. This is especially the case in Africa, where the refusal to use condoms, though supported by emotional deference to the Church, can hardly be said to arise from it. If deference to the Church were truly the engine of human behavior, sexual moderation and monogamy would rule.

No, the sex urge -- and sexism -- are more dominant aspects of human behavior. People often do genuinely try to change their sexual habits, not least because they often suffer from their sexual patterns, whether as women who are used or dominated sexually, or as people generally who suffer the pangs of infidelity, STD's, and all their long consequences. But how easily do they succeed in ordering their sexual patterns along the lines they might wish? You can ask people to change, and teach them how to do so, but you also have to have a good idea of the size and strength of what you're trying to change.

Imagine you wanted to see an increase in your nation's economic productivity over the next year. Nations tend to have growth rates, when they're lucky, that hover around 2 or 3 percent. That is natural growth. If you want to change that in any unique way, you're going to have to expect that nothing else but major changes, or extraordinary good fortune, will produce exceptional wealth. Even so, the growth will then be measured around 5 or 6 percent, rarely higher. But for Africa to combat AIDS through abstinence and moderation alone, imagine the changes that will have to take place in the sexual economy. Africans already infected with HIV number in the tens of millions. These will have to stop having sex. Many African men have multiple wives; if any one in the household currently having sex already has HIV, that person must become abstinent. Today, a large fraction of all adults in the household either have HIV or are being exposed to it; and it will be a long time before Africa's medical infrastructure, and the people's knowledge and free agency, will become such that the typical African family will know exactly who has the virus and who does not. Where uncertainty reigns, action must be taken widely. Condoms can do that; abstinence will not prevail. Over time, abstinence can increase in a society, but even so, like any other cultural change, it will not be instantaneous, and will increase only in single-digit percentages over the short run; meanwhile millions are literally going to the grave. Moreover, we all want modernization for Africa, and though the Church does not want exploitative and material capitalism reigning there, we have to admit that modernization often does change cultures in ways that glamorize promiscuity. If sex were to increase in a society where women were still not empowered and people were not educated (for these are always painfully slow processes), the epidemic will be strengthened. All these things must be taken into account by anyone wishing to stand for life.

The analogy between the non-sexual and sexual economies is particularly apt because the Church has always stood against Communism. It has always understood that command-control economies do not produce wealth but rather constrict it. If you wanted to see growth in your nation's economy over the next year, you could not possibly command it from a centralized position; the changes required would all be along the lines of giving people more freedom and knowledge so that they can produce the wealth. Africa seems to me to have a capitalist sexual economy, where sex is not inhibited, but those with enough power exploit those without the means to seek sex on their own terms. If you wanted to increase celibacy or moderation, and to decrease the amount of sex being engaged in, then perhaps the best way to attempt it is from a centralized location like the Vatican; but Communism was never able to stamp out what it wanted to inhibit. It just went underground. And stamping out anything that is not violent is obviously not the needed answer. What you need is to empower those who do not have power; then you have a free economy that is both just and safe.

At this point in history, the Church needs to teach people that if they value their lives, or simply their health, they will protect it from STD's. Even a Church man would have a hard time saying, to pick a most extreme example, that a woman about to be raped, with no hope of escape, cannot beg for her attacker to use a condom. But rape is far from the only issue to deal with. As noted, the sex drive is terribly, terribly difficult to inhibit without the best circumstances and the best support; even clergy have failed in large numbers recently to keep their vows, which calls into question even more imperatively the idea that the distant Vatican could change the African sexual economy significantly and for the better; married people have temptation facing them in a way that clergy do not; and monagamy does not rule, not merely because people are promiscuous, but because they have multiple wives, in non-Catholic marriages. The Church may teach that those marriages need to be dissolved in favor of monogamy and all the rest; but any sane authority will know that such changes, if they occur at all, will take time -- and in the interim millions will die and millions more will become infected. To stand for life is to take this into account.

There is no reason why the Church cannot say, "Protect your life and your health if you value these things," and say nothing to put the spiritual teachings about contraception and the sanctity of natural reproduction above that crucial issue of life's survival, but continue to teach the good health of sexual moderation. There is simply no false either/or choice here. Life itself cannot afford it.

Muhammed denial

In my first post I speculated about whether anyone had begun actively denying that Muhammed was a real person. As it turns out, I did not have to look far. His life is being denied on the website of the organization, American Atheists, whose president had argued on Larry King's show against the existence of Jesus. On the home page there is a little statement defining American Atheists as a nationwide movement working to protect the civil liberties of nonbelievers, and there are links to sections about two religions, Christianity and Islam. The latter section has an essay called "Muhammed," which is actually a transcript of a radio talk given in 1969 by the founder of the movement, Madalyn O'Hair; it offers a respectful full-length biography of the Prophet. There is a very long section on Salman Rushdie, and one remaining essay by Frank Zindler, the onetime professor of biology and geology, now a science writer, who wrote the essay denying Jesus an existence. Zindler argues that Islam should properly be called by its traditional name in the West, Muhammedanism, since its adherents are, for all intents and purposes, followers of Muhammed. The essay was posted in January 2002 and could very well have been composed in the months after 9-11. Its title is "An Atheist's Guide to Mohammedanism."

Zindler concedes only this much in his essay: "Even if Mohammed did exist, we can know nothing about him from the existing sources. He might as well have been a myth." Almost exactly the same words used often to deny Jesus. But Zindler does go farther. His central premise is that because he cannot find sufficient ancient attestation to the name of Mecca, then Mecca did not exist, and "the debunking of the Mecca of Muslim tradition makes it now seem likely that Mohammed of Mecca will soon be joining Jesus of Nazareth, the Wizard of Oz, and Peter Pan as a resident of Never-Never Land."

Zindler explicitly denies the desire of Muslims that they not be called Mohammedans. Islam may be the only one of the world's great faiths whose adherents named their own religion (I first saw this argument in a terrific book I read in college, The Meaning and End of Religion, by Wilfred Cantwell Smith). Christians were given their name by others who lived in the ancient city of Antioch (see Acts 11:26), while "Hindoo" was a functional term used by Muslims, after they arrived in India, to describe all religious beliefs in that country apart from Islam. Buddha certainly never wanted to make himself a divinity at the head of a religion, and many Buddhists today continue emphasizing the degree to which followers of Buddhism should not worship a divinity so much as practice meditation; but the community left behind by Buddha came in due course to be named after him. The same holds for Confucianism, and for many of the Protestant sects: it was the enemies of Calvin, for instance, who called all those who listened to his ideas "Calvinists."

And so on. Islam is the exception to this cycle because it named itself -- but Zindler will not allow this one religion not to be named and defined by its enemies, even though he admits at the outset that Muslims do not want to be called Muhammedans.

The man I named in my first post, Ibn Warraq, who wrote Why I Am Not A Muslim, turns out to be Zindler's first source. Zindler's other sources are three Soviet scholars who attempted to deny Mohammad's existence in the 1930s. Let me quote this part in full, not to give it credence, but to illuminate how this idea about Muhammad got started:

... a number of Soviet scholars have been able to argue quite coherently that the historical Mohammed is as unreal as the historical Jesus! N. A. Morozov, for instance, propounded the theory in 1930 that Mohammed and the first caliphs were mythical figures and that Islam was a form of Judaism until the time of the Crusades. In the same year, Klimovich published 'Did Muhammad Exist?' and argued that all our information on Mohammed is late and that his life was a necessary fiction springing from the euhemeristic notion that all religions have to have had a founder and that all the gods were once men. Yet another Soviet scholar, S. P. Tolstov, compared the myth of Mohammed with the deified shamans of the Yakuts, et al. and argued that the practical purpose of the Mohammed myth was to prevent the disintegration of a political block of traders, nomads, and peasants which had helped a new feudal aristocracy come to power.

You need to do no research to hear the Marxist tone in this description: it comes as no suprise that the Soviet Union would target Islam as having been the linchpin behind the feudal aristocracy that the Bolsheviks finally overthrew in 1917. It should also go without saying that no study could get published in the Soviet Union that did not toe the Party line, which was, of course, official atheism. And even a passing acquaintance with Islam sinks the speculation about an old belief that all religions had founders and all gods were once men: Islam states explicitly that its Prophet is not a god but a man, while the God of whom Islam speaks, Allah, is never claimed to go back to a man. Apply minimal skepticism to the Soviet claims and they crumble. But a little research reveals more.

The Soviet Union was formed after the Bolshevik Revolution, during which the Muslim nations of Central Asia -- Azerbaijan, Chechnya, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan -- tried to escape from Russia's rule, though ultimately their independence was crushed. The old Russian rulers had been despotic Christians, but the new rulers, of course, were despotic atheists, many times more murderous. (How striking that American Atheists should be promoting scholarship sponsored by a tyrant who committed so much violence in the name of atheism, and that this organization says nothing to distance itself from such historical movements). Mosques were destroyed and shut down, while millions were killed in Moscow's efforts to crush independence, outlaw religion, and collectivize the peasants. Kazakhstan alone suffered more than 1 million dead in the early 1930s, when collectivization brought on famine as well as widespread arrests and executions of those who resisted or tried to escape the famine (this was at the same time that 5 million were deliberately starved to death in the Ukraine). It was only with the Soviet Union's dissolution in 1991 that these nations, except Chechnya, regained their independence.

The first Soviet scholar mentioned above, Nicolai A. Morozov, like Zindler, was a scientist of the hard sciences. If you Google him, he turns up at a page, http://www.world-mysteries.com/sci_16.htm, where a new chronology is being proposed for human history. The underlying premise is that ancient writings come to us only in the form of copies made later "under suspicious circumstances" and therefore cannot be trusted. The page reports that Morozov used the "latest discoveries in mathematics, astronomy, linguistics, philology and geology" to establish that all of the history that we know actually took place after the year 300; nothing that we regard as historical took place before then. To my mind, this intellectual project resembles the destruction of identity and memory described in Orwell's 1984.

It may be worth noting here how old our Biblical records are. Manuscripts discovered in 1947 and known today as the Dead Sea Scrolls contain copies of the Jewish Bible, and date to before the time of Christ. The oldest surviving fragment of the New Testament contains a few verses from the Gospel of John copied in the year 125. But all of this should go without saying against such nonsense.

Why are there such theories about our great religious figures, theories so desperate that they must be constructed on foundations of this kind? Prejudice is not off the mark as an answer. Need it be racism? In the case of Muhammed, maybe. In the case of Jesus, who was both Jewish and nonwhite, perhaps racism can also be invoked. Maybe hatred. But any description of human beings, according to some collective identity, which only condemns them and fails to say even one positive thing about them, or simply treats them as a collective without individuals, faces, or names worth keeping, is a prejudice in my book. Whether the victims of the prejudice are identified according to their skin color, religion, creed, party, nationality, wealth or other status matters to some degree, but it does not matter centrally.

I would want to leave this topic to Muslim apologists, for they would know far better than I how to handle, for instance, the question of ancient witnesses to the name of Mecca. And it will have to be Muslim or other religious apologists, because there are no "neutral" observers when it comes to our great religious figures. These men and women were not just historical figures, so when they're denied or affirmed, it will come from those who either wish to deny or affirm the religion. It cannot be otherwise. That two men named Jesus and Muhammed lived is by itself of very little importance -- what is really significant is what Christians and Muslims say that these men did. There are, to be sure, many historians who are skeptical of Christianity and look on the Jesus-myth theory as a fringe idea well beyond the data -- for instance, Greco-Roman historian Michael Grant, as well as a famous history professor and skeptic, Morton Smith -- but the fact remains that secularists generally do not care enough about Jesus or Muhammed to be first in line to debunk these theories. The task falls, actually, to those who do have a religious interest -- and yet that should be no strike against them. That a Catholic priest is responsible for the definitive work on the historical Jesus, an admirably non-dogmatic work called A Marginal Jew, should cause no more suspicion than if a NASA employee challenged the theory that the U.S. never landed on the moon. Of course a NASA employee will never look at the facts competently or honestly; of course a committed Christian or Muslim would never look at the facts competently or honestly; of course we never went to the Moon, anymore than we ever met Jesus or Muhammad. It's all so obvious. And so wrong.

Pope Benedict XVI

I have been quite disappointed with the choice of Cardinal Ratzinger as our new Pope. There are many things to say about an event like this, though it's probably healthy to start with the obvious one: we don't know what's coming. No man or woman is a static thing, defined without reference to time and to their ongoing choices. No one is the sum of their past, either. Everyone responds in a living, breathing way to events, many of which we can't foresee. And I can be happy about the fact that the Cardinal stands to the left of mainstream Westerners when it comes to poverty and the other ills of our capitalist societies. But on the basis of the cardinal's past on most other issues, I am not encouraged.

On the one hand, I am willing to imagine that Cardinal Ratzinger drew to himself the common portrayal of intellectuals as cold, or closed to any human appeal that is not intellectually strong enough to win his respect. As an intellectual or brainy type myself, I know that my warm side is sometimes difficult to detect but real, and that I respond openly to more than just intellectually perfect appeals. Those years when I was not so much reading books as practicing and teaching yoga are the only time I did not have trouble conveying these sides of myself. On the other hand, it's still true that intellect can get in the way of many things, including the heart, the gut, and the spirit. A powerful intellect can do all these things that much more.

I have heard that Cardinal Ratzinger is a supremely warm man, though not a publicly warm or charismatic one. I can believe that his heart is alive and well. Nor does his intellect seem to get in the way of his gut: he does not seem like an indecisive intellectual. His mind and his gut are unified; self-contradition within, though it probably exists as it does within everyone, seems to have been resolved. And does his mind get in the way of his spiritual practice? From all reports, he seems a man drawn to strong contemplative practices, as many heady people tend to be. In the Eastern meditative traditions that produced yoga, as well as in Christian contemplative traditions (such as the Benedictines, after which the new pope is named), you will often hear that the mind must be subdued and disciplined, or else it will stand in the way of spiritual practice; and I have found myself that too much book-learning can dry up the spirit. But that does not seem to be the danger here.

What concerns me more, actually, is his mind. It seems clear that he is a good person, and that his mind does not dominate the rest of him in an unhealthy or repressive way. But to what extent does his mind draw from the rest of him -- from internal and external experience? I know that his mind does draw from experience, and surely enough to produce a healthy human being. But I'm asking about more than health. I'm asking about suffering.

Let me go back to John Paul II to explain what I mean. Our deceased pope, Karol Wojtyla, was a charismatic, warm, intelligent, athletic man -- actor, poet, theologian, evangelist. Some of his doctrinal ideas were truly radical, while others were conservative. I think it's safe to say that any of his words, whether radical or conservative, could not help but include some worthy contribution worth listening to. But it's equally clear where he forced the Church to grow and change, and where he asked it to remain as it was. He proposed speaking of Jews as "our elder brothers and sisters in faith", something that an older Church could not imagine doing. He visited and prayed in synagogue and in a mosque, again something that at one time was unimaginable. He reached out to the Eastern Orthodox churches and dared to suggest, however informally, that even the primacy of the pope's office (the chief obstacle in any discussion between Latin and Eastern churches) was open to discussion, so keenly did he long for a healing of the rift with the Eastern Churches; and this was unthinkable in former times. He apologized for sins of the Church toward all these groups and toward science and women -- sins that, of course, the Church did not once consider sins. In many ways, John Paul II pushed the Church in places where it once did not want to go and was not necessarily eager to go even in his own time.

I feel as many do, that his personal experience under Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism pushed him toward his personal and greatest contributions, particularly his deep-set courage in describing communism truthfully and sparking courage in those victimized by it. My personal feeling is that this intimate acquaintance with tyranny and violence moved him, made him especially open, to rejecting in his gut the political violence committed by the Church. That he personally saw Jews, some of his own friends, being taken away never to be heard from again, surely played a role in his great sympathy to the Jewish people (a sympathy which, incidentally, is all the more striking because it did not include, as it so often does among conservatives, choosing Israel's side in its conflicts with Arab neighbors). He saw suffering up close and experienced it within himself, so to speak, by losing friends, working under harsh wartime conditions, being forced to live in secrecy, all during the war, then living for many years behind the Iron Curtain. All these things, he took into himself not through books, but through his own body and its internal and external experiences (pain and emotions). When you feel pain, you question, you push within for deeper answers, you pray with your fullest self present -- and out of all this, something quite deep indeed may be lifted out of you.

To say nothing else, what you produce will often be personal and original. And because it is personal, which is to say human, it is ALIVE and responsive. It responds to what happened and what is happening. Karol's mind, heart, and spirit responded in that original, personal, warm, living way to international problems -- not in an ideological or intellectual way, but with the warmth and intelligence that wishes to alleviate suffering. That is why he could never affirm Western individualism either, for he saw how capitalist, materialist societies exacerbated poverty and caused deaths in their own way.

Now, if you go to those doctrines of Karol's which we do not think of as innovative, I think you'll find that they have to do with things, or fields of human experience, in which Karol did not suffer exceptionally, or witness exceptional suffering. He was not, to be clear, merely saying that Church teachings about sex needed to be transplanted as literally as possible from the past without response to the modern world; and it's something of an unknown and delicious irony that he co-wrote a book championing, among other things, the female orgasm. But if we ask where Karol demanded innovation and pushed the Church to do things once regarded as unthinkable or even heretical, we have to name his contributions to international politics first, and to such domestic matters as capital punishment (something he had seen on a mass scale in Poland), before we mention the teachings on sexuality: divorce, extramarital sex, masturbation, contraception, homosexuality, abortion, and the priesthood with regard to marriage or women's ordination. If we do mention his innovation in those fields, it cannot be without ultimately agreeing that he was basically pushing in the other direction, against change, for the teachings to persist in their basic form.

There are no indications in Karol's biography that he suffered due to a sexual matter. What Karol did understand on a primary level, which is to say in his body, was celibacy. He understood, therefore, just how powerful the sex drive could be, and therefore he must be heard when he cautions us as to how destructive it can be. Were our society's only sexual problem to be sexual addiction, John Paul II would be as fine a teacher as we could ask for. Except that even here, the finest teacher of all would be someone who had battled sexual addition and overcome it. No sign that John Paul II had this problem. And our society's problems with regard to sex are varied and profound. I have felt, in reflecting upon his sad passing away, that his greatest responsiveness was not in this field of human experience. He did not suffer it, and as is the case with celibate clergy, he witnessed it less than people in the outside world can.

I say all this cautiously because his teachings on sex cannot, in my view, be rejected wholesale, at least not without accepting death. I feel that the Church too often takes issues in which its spiritual teaching is basically correct, but in which life and death are not at stake, such as contraception, and puts them in front of human life, as we watch AIDS extinguishing life in Africa and elsewhere on such a massive scale. Yet I feel that abortion is a life-and-death issue, and that the Church in this case has stood for life, often without listening or responding properly to women's concerns, but has nevertheless chosen to speak an unpopular truth about the issue. And again, among all the sexuality issues, in abortion (as with euthenasia) we have the closest approximation of that to which John Paul II was most sensitive -- the taking of life in large numbers, with the sanction or encouragement of the state.

So I do find the stance on abortion to be basically correct, though not without its problems. The stance on contraception often seems to me to be anti-life, as I noted in relation to Africa. The stance on homosexuality is not an embrace of death, but I think it is the only one of the sexuality issues on which the Church is doing no more than embracing tradition, and has no spiritual teaching to offer that will stand the test of time. That goes also for the prohibition against female priests and married priests, with the qualification that the tradition of celibacy is worth nurturing in some way. Divorce, extramarital sex and masturbation are all complicated questions, though in each case the Church's teaching does promote spiritual health; judgmental attitudes, and inflexibility arising from THAT, seem to me the greatest problems here.

The one sexuality issue that I have not mentioned is rape; sadly it is a revealing key in all this. The basic Church teaching on rape is not problematic; and traditional Biblical morality contains much that finds it immoral. Yet what has happened recently? Boys have been raped in great numbers. The suffering is theirs; and horribly, as John Paul II said, churchmen were the perpetrators. He called it a grave sin and a crime, without closing the door to the genuine possibility that perpetrators (such as criminals on death row) might change. Yet none of the Church teachings on sexuality, apart from this condemnation, seemed to help or stop this suffering. Disturbingly, the Church's stances, not the spiritual core of the teachings but almost surely the inflexibility, seemed either to fuel these crimes or to permit them. How can anyone be inflexible, to take just one example, about even discussing the prohibition on married clergy, after atrocities like this?

Someone from the West, who had suffered in some intimate way from the West's sexual pathologies, in his or her personal experience (which includes both one's personal body and one's relationships), would understand the sexuality issues in a living, compassionate way such as John Paul II brought completely to other issues, and only incompletely to sexuality. I sometimes feel that we should elect to the papacy one of the boys who was abused, when he has grown and come through his trial. From him you would get innovative yet challenging thinking on the sexuality issues. From our Church, in recent years, we've had too much stasis on these issues -- and most grievously, the declaration that these things are not open to discussion. How calamitously different from the Church's vigorous dialogue with other religions and unhesitating commitment to talk about human rights, war or poverty.

Whatever may be said for the teachings, stifling of discussion is just wrong. It is wrong for the victims, for those who have suffered less, and even for the Church hierarchy. After all, how else do our leaders expect to plant, nurture, and teach their teachings except by raising them in discussion?

I felt yesterday, upon Cardinal Ratzinger's election, that under his papacy we might not even see married priests, which is an innovation that John Paul II did not embrace, but also one which he did not condemn from a moral point of view; he was simply preserving a Church tradition, and upholding the general tradition of celibacy. But celibacy was made mandatory only a thousand years ago in the Church, so that priests would not leave their inheritance to sons outside the Church; and the practice has often been widely set aside by priests who openly marry, even today (for instance in Africa, where priests are sometimes widely respected for sticking to just one wife). And with the terrible shortage of priests, you would think this one stance could be modified. I'm not so sure now.

What are Pope Benedict XVI's experiences with suffering? Time will tell.

Jesus denial

I created this blog 11 months ago without writing anything in it until now. Yesterday I heard from some friends about Larry King's recent show, "What Happens After We Die?" Larry had invited an evangelical Protestant, a priest, a Muslim scholar, and a rabbi. He also had included Marianne Williamson, a wonderful lecturer and teacher of the Course in Miracles -- a modern spiritual teaching in which Jesus Christ appears as the central figure, though the teaching relies less on figures and more on a path of enlightenment similar to that found in Buddhism. Rounding out his panel was Ellen Johnson, president of American Atheists, an organization based here in New York. Ellen apparently argued on the show that Jesus Christ never existed.

So I went to the web yesterday and found a site actually called Jesus Never Existed. Its subheading: "Uncompromising exposure of the counterfeit origins of Christianity and of the evil it has brought to the world." The site was created by one Kenneth Humphreys in the autumn of 2002, a few months after I finished a debate with a co-worker and friend, Ryan, about the existence of God -- a debate in which he argued that Jesus did not exist, and introduced me to that idea. I wrote him at least 60 pages in all, and after several weeks he conceded that I was probably right about Jesus' existence. Very few subjects have inspired me more than this one. In fact I wrote Humphreys a letter confronting him with his site's egregious misquotation of the Church Father Justin Martyr, who is made to say words implying that Jesus' existence was in doubt in the ancient world. That website is one of the more bigoted I've ever seen. It means to prove with a vengeance the concluding statement on its home page: "Christianity is the worst disaster in history," meaning the most murderous.

For a while I've suspected that this fringe idea about Jesus was, like Holocaust denial, becoming more popular. When I told my friend Kate about my debate with Ryan, she said to me that I'd given the theory of nonexistence too much credit, that is, more attention than it deserved. This suggested to me something very reasonable, that such ideas die by themselves if left alone. But the theory kept turning up in the popular media. In May 2004 the Skeptical Inquirer put out a critique of Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" in which Joe Nickell, a onetime professor of technical writing and stage magician, seemed to be arguing that Jesus was a figment of imagination; so I wrote to the magazine just to say that as professional and professed skeptics they were buying into a conspiracy theory. In his book, The Disinformation Guide to Media Distortion, Historical Whitewashes and Cultural Myths, Russ Kick affirms the theory as expounded by one of its chief proponents, who goes by the Indian-sounding moniker Acharya S. (Kick uses another Christ-myther and former evangelical, Dan Barker -- the author my friend Ryan used in our debate -- to attack the Resurrection in his book, Abuse Your Illusions: The Disinformation Guide to Media Mirages and Establishment Lies). There are signs that the whitewashing of Jesus is firmly esconced, in our Republican-dominant times, on the left, and may be rising in popularity now as part of a passing arrangement of politics; but I'm not sure.

[I have since learned that the nonexistence theory was raised in scholarly circles many decades ago, back when some historians of the New Testament world still argued that Jesus was a pastiche of pagan myths. The theory that Jesus did not live never left the fringes of scholarship and was refuted decisively by historians, including atheists and agnostics, but it has since returned in newer forms. It is being argued this time by writers who are not fully trained historians or New Testament scholars, and is appearing on the Web and in the popular media. Because relevantly trained scholars long ago stopped paying much attention to the nonexistence idea in any form, refutations of its newer incarnations are usually to be found in essay format on the Web, often by non-scholars. My own blog is an example. - July 20, 2005].

I've called the movement Jesus-denial, not in the sense that it denies that Jesus was divine, or indeed that he had any particular attribute at all, but simply that he breathed and lived. I have found startling similarities between this denial and Holocaust denial -- the parallels coming to mind especially after reading Michael Shermer's book about Holocaust denial, Denying History. I mean, for instance, the claim that Anne Frank was not a real person; that ancient Christians were not as numerous as usually believed; that these Christians really were not persecuted in the numbers or in the manner that is usually believed. Overall, however, I do consider Holocaust denial more truly bigoted, more prevalent (even in those places where it was thought to be dying), and less rational.

I found another website called Positive Atheism, promoting the theory that Jesus did not exist. I read the transcript of Larry King's show at CNN.com, and went to the American Atheists website, where Ellen Johnson, as president, introduces the worldview of atheism -- not entirely in an unappealing manner. This site was, in that sense, different from the others. I went to the section on Christianity and found essays by Frank Zindler, a former professor of biology and geology who claims that Jesus did not exist. And I began composing a long letter to Ellen, in which I referred to my few years as an atheist and described at length what was wrong with the theory that she had promoted on Larry King and was promoting on her site.

I looked up the phrase "Jesus never existed" on Google. There were 3,770 hits. The first was Kenneth Humphreys' site of that name. A good number came from ordinary postings on discussion boards. Many of the rest came from mainstream sites about history or religious history in which the article entitled "Jesus" would include in its bibliography, as one of a full variety of viewpoints, the Humphreys site. None of these latter bibliographies quoted his theory approvingly, but the very fact that his site was now commonly listed as part of the bibliographical literature thought to be worth listing struck me. It meant to me that the theory of non-existence had found a higher level of respectability-- albeit still the minimal respect of a fringe theory. Larry King's show is certainly a marker of mainstream culture, so Ellen Johnson's on-air argument against the existence of Jesus represents, to me, a kind of marker in this movement.

I Googled phrases for other world religions. "Buddha never existed" turned up 75 hits. None or very few of them, as far as I could tell, were open arguments to that effect; mostly I seemed to be turning up casual references to the idea that Buddha never existed, without affirmations of that idea. In fact the first hit was by a Christian who wondered if people of other faiths also had to put up with their religious figures being argued out of existence. It was a page about Jesus' existence.

"Muhammad never existed" turned up only 36 hits. The first came from a 1996 Daniel Pipes essay at the website of American Atheist, a different site from Ellen Johnson's organization. I have only read a few brief pieces by Pipes, but I gather that he is a right-wing author with an axe to grind against Islam, and that many of his writings support the idea that Islam is an inherently violent religion. This particular piece was a review of Why I Am Not A Muslim, a book by an ex-Muslim named Ibn Warraq. Here is an excerpt from the review:

Ibn Warraq draws on current Western scholarship to make the astonishing claim that Muhammad never existed, or if he did, he had nothing to do with the Koran. Rather, that holy book was fabricated a century or two later in Palestine, then 'projected back onto an invented Arabian point of origin.' If the Koran is a fraud, it's not surprising to learn that the author finds little authentic in other parts of the Islamic tradition. For example, he dispatches Islamic law as 'a fantastic creation founded on forgeries and pious fictions.' The whole of Islam, in short, he portrays as a concoction of lies.

I quote all this at length because the arguments are astonishingly close to what is said about Christianity when Jesus' existence is denied.

Some of the other sites quote the Pipes article, as well as a different and more recent article by Pipes. In this one, a retired CIA agent relates that in the 1950s the CIA spread misinformation around the Middle East to the effect that the Soviet Union was promoting scholarship arguing that Muhammad never existed. As for the other hits, I could find none that explicitly argued against Muhammad's existence.

This is important to me because one thing I discovered in debating Ryan was the degree to which no religion was safe if even one was attacked. I found the Jesus-as-myth theory, in other words, to build its entire foundation on the premise that religion is made up of myths, forgeries, lies, coercions, and no other history worth speaking about. I found that those who tried to "vaporize" Jesus out of existence also were saying extremely negative things about other religions, without consulting the scholars of those religions: and I don't mean Islam here, I mean the pagan Roman cults that Christianity eclipsed. So I didn't see Islam or Buddhism attacked per se in these writings; but I felt that they would be next, so to speak, if Christianity were allowed to "fall."

And I found that phenomena which had their own discrete meanings in the non-Christian religions were being distorted and forced into Christian categories. What I mean is that when someone says that Jesus did not exist, and that Christ was a pastiche of pagan cults or goddess religions, which had their own virgin births and resurrections, I found that all this evidence came from the 19th century, when the West knew very little indeed about religions other than Christianity. Archaelogists and ethnographers were Christian in background, so everything they discovered in the historical record, they interpreted as a parallel to Christianity. It's as if you're a Christian and you visit a Native American ceremony, and everything you see you try to relate to what you know: "This is their version of Mass; this is their communion; this is their bishop; etc." And no doubt, the world's religions do have many common elements with different names. But these elements also often have different and autonomous meanings, not so easy to discover even after decades of work. Certainly the old European attitude about it, where religions would be studied like mice under a microscope, could not penetrate the heart. Many mistakes were made. People discovered texts or artifacts and said, "That looks to me like a Last Supper outside of Christianity," or "this must have been a virgin birth." From there it was a short jump to conclude that Christianity was nothing original.

But the terrible conclusion, of course, is that those other religions were not original either. Worse, they were now no more than precursors to Christianity. One of the greatest mistakes of traditional Christianity has been to treat the Jewish scriptures as if they were no more than a precursor to the New Testament; yet here was the same mistake being made by secular scholars. Every religion, when you argue the non-existence of Jesus, is made into a pale copy of Christianity; and Christianity is made into an unoriginal, destructive bandit. This is no way to affirm religion or to respect people's beliefs. And I wonder how many people today, when they easily accept various forms of the theories that Christianity was preceded by many virgin births or resurrections, really contemplate what they are doing, and ask themselves whether they are genuinely making that difficult entry into other worlds and other ways of thinking, or just working out their own issues concerning the faith of their childhoods.

In my research it was common for me to find statements to the effect that Krishna was crucified, or that Buddha came to earth to redeem humanity. My years practicing yoga and studying Hinduism and Buddhism paid off here, because I knew these Eastern traditions were being perverted. How many Indians died resisting British culture, including Christianity, only to have someone in ignorance state that the cross was a common feature of Hinduism? How many times do Buddhist teachers have to tell us that Buddha did not come to redeem humanity but simply taught us about suffering and ways to overcome it, before we know enough to call ignorant claims what they truly are?

If it comes to pass that Muhammad is attacked, I want to help my Muslim brothers and sisters. I have made two Muslim friends in the past few months, and have visited and prayed at a mosque; I intend to visit again. I find myself learning from them, though I'm not pulled away from my own faith. Right now, I do not see that Muhammad or Buddha (a somewhat more meaningful figure to my beloved wife, Dess) are being attacked. There is no reason, objectively speaking, why they cannot be in the future. The evidence for those figures is roughly the same as it is for Jesus: religious scriptures copied some years after the central figure's death are the earliest witnesses, along with testimonies by enemies or co-religionists, followed in due course by witnesses from "secular" historians not belonging to the religion and its environment; none of the great figures left behind, as did the Pharoahs or similar leaders, physical evidence. If Jesus alone is being attacked by secular forces (not, it should be noted, by other religions), it is probably because Christianity has had the most contact with such forces.

Here I wish to give a simple summary of why the theory that Jesus did not exist is both false and pernicious. I have 10 basic reasons.

1) It is a conspiracy theory. It says that a grand fiction has been hoisted on the world by secretive and powerful Christian organizations. It argues that all evidence pointing to invention has been suppressed, and that all evidence pointing to Christ's existence is fabrication -- all of it, from the New Testament to Jewish writings to Greco-Roman annals. It takes all the evidence from Christian, Jewish, and pagan writers and dismisses it by arguing that it all amounts to invention by reactionary power. In that it is not too different from Marxism, which regarded religion as a reactionary, counter-revolutionary opiate. But the theory is not Marxist in origin. It is, quite simply, a conspiracy theory tailored for Western audiences skeptical of religion. Like any conspiracy theory, it relies on evidence that is not there (because it is purportedly suppressed), and denies all the evidence that is there (because it is purportedly fabricated).

2) It leaves all religions open to attacks from those who, like one Christ-mythologist, regard religion as "mental illness." Many of these people are harmless on the surface, but Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong believed the same thing about religion, and destroyed both shrines and lives by the tens of millions.

3) It represents a monumental step backward in our understanding of other religions and the relationships Christianity has had with them. Calling Jesus a myth requires saying where the ideas for the myth came from. Sometimes it is said that the ideas for such a Savior figure came from the Old Testament and from Judaism, but since this makes the historical break between Christianity and Judaism impossible to explain, an alternative and more desperate course is to say that Christ came out of pagan myths. When this is argued, the Roman cults, and occasionally Buddhism and Hinduism, are named as primary influences upon Christianity. These religions are romanticized, or they are made to seem like Christianity, which is a mistake in itself, but is particularly pernicious because the type of Christian religion referred to here is one that is totally destructive and immoral. Those who say that the cross had antecedents in other religions, and in the next paragraph denounce Christianity for being a bloody religion focused from the start on an instrument of torture, do not realize that they are essentially saying the same thing about the pre-Christian religions of the past or the non-Christian religions of today. They don't say so openly, but that is the fullest consequence of their arguments.

4) It is un-scientific. Any conspiracy theory, of course, fails to embrace the scientific method, which requires a relaxed, open mind and the willingness to try to overthrow your own theory, so that it can be tested thoroughly. There are many further ways in which this point could be made. You could say quite correctly that the theory of Jesus' non-existence is overly complex; it creates special explanations, circumstances, and standards for everything encountered, thus breaking the rule known as Occam's razor, which states that entities are not to be multiplied unnecessarily and that all things being equal, the simplest theory is the best. You could point out that the theory tries to prove a negative, an extremely difficult thing to do according to the principles of logic, and a goal that requires extraordinary evidence, not merely the "absence" of evidence. You could describe another no-no of scholarship, known as special pleading, which happens when the theory of non-existence says that things do not appear as common sense would dictate because of special reasons, such as suppression of evidence, and forgery. Many good theories, of course, ask you to suspend your common sense. The earth revolves around the sun, as common sense would not tell you. But notice, that is said to be a common mistake made by all people in all historical epochs. What we have with Jesus-denial is the charge that some people knew then, and know now, what most people have not known. That is very different, and it requires historical proofs, none of which are forthcoming. The only thing offered is suspicion without consummation. No experiments are run; nothing falsifiable is said; no science is therefore done.

5) It is ignorant. It comes from people who have degrees in English, German, biology -- anything but graduate degrees in history, antiquity, religion, ancient languages or Biblical studies. When it does quote scholars from those fields, it goes back to 19th century work, and avoids all recent 20th century advances in biblical studies, archaeology, ethnography, etc. It avoids scholars of non-Christian religions, too, and quotes only people who study other things, so that when, for instance, the god Mithra is said to be Christ's precursor, with a virgin birth and the like, no Mithra scholars are consulted, and only non-Mithra scholars are quoted. As such, the theory has remained on the fringes, always just outside mainstream work; before the World Wide Web, it was hard to find without looking for it specifically. I majored in Religion and attended a year of seminary; in later years I read the definitive works on the historical Jesus, and consulted those works even as an atheist; but I had never heard of a fully articulated theory of non-existence, because when you study history and religion, you don't come across the proponents of the theory; they always have training in something else. Yet they push their opinions about one of history's central questions. I am no linguist, but if you asked me to overthrow the mainstream theories about the origin of English, and told me I could not consult any scholars of English except to note where they can be debunked, you can imagine the quality of what you'll get from me.

6) It is arrogant. The only way to test ideas is to come into dialogue with other ideas, chiefly those constructed by people with knowledge of the subject. Often good theories are complex, and require a lot of reading and hard work to sift the evidence. But the theory of non-existence holds mainly that evidence can be judged, not according to its content, but according to who wrote it. Therefore, the Bible can be dismissed; Biblical scholarship can be dismissed. In this the theory betrays its ignorance of Biblical scholarship, which is full of agnostics and even some atheists. It seems entirely unaware of what current scholars, secular and biblical, are saying, but it nevertheless relies heavily on a very dangerous phrase, "Most scholars believe that" (fill in the blank: Jesus was a myth-figure, he said nothing of what's in the Gospels, etc.) A true scholar can get away with summarizing his or her field; but if you're not in the field, forget it. Even so, most people who rely on common sense know that the vast majority of scientific work on the ancient world, its scriptures, languages, archaeology and beliefs, has been done in the 20th century. Biblical scholarship has incorporated all that work and is now typically based upon it. The definitive works on Jesus are not apologetics, and they openly defy religious or church dogma; but skeptics have long since stopped listening, and they operate on the assumption that the only options on the table are Biblical literalism or Biblical atheism. Basically the attitude is, "I do not need to read those who are trained, because they are biased; I do not need any special training myself, and I have no relevant biases." Well, Copernicus dared to believe that everything he'd been taught on a certain subject could be wrong; but he was a master practitioner in that field. Tell that to those who think they are following in Copernicus' footsteps: you will simply be told in reply that you love your subject and therefore cannot be trusted to know it well.

7) It is extreme. No secular and relevantly credentialed historian holds the theory, for at least one very simple reason: there was too little time. Myths are told about people who lived far away, in another time and place ("a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away"); no one living in the local area can contradict the myth, and the imagination can let loose. Christian writings started surfacing only 20 years after Jesus "purportedly" lived, so the question comes up: why didn't anyone contradict the claim that Jesus lived and interacted with famous local figures? Well, they did, according to the theory, but their testimonies were destroyed by the Church; or in a variation, they didn't speak up, because the Romans killed them all off in the war 40 years after Christ's "purported" lifetime. No historian has produced a comparable example of a myth that overcame all historical objections so quickly. But Christ is said to be such a myth. And people -- reasonable, well-educated people (but not well-educated about religion) -- are finding such arguments reasonable in rising numbers, I fear. Why is evolution being disbelieved these days in favor of creationism? Because our schooling in science, our scientific literacy, is abysmal. Why, then, with our commonly abysmal education about religion, do we not exert more skepticism toward the things we hear and say about religious topics?

8) It is radically partisan and self-contradictory. The destruction of Christianity's root beliefs always takes precedence over consistent and fairly applied standards. Logic is always sacrificed to the goal. This one can only be explained at length by diving deeply into the content, so I will leave it for another post. But see John Meier's multi-volume work on the historical Jesus, A Marginal Jew, which systematically lays out the logical criteria needed for this kind of work.

9) It is denial, and not history. History describes what happened. Denial is concerned to say that such-and-such did not happen. It does not say that things happened in an alternative or under-appreciated way, only that they did not happen. It is not a positive description; it offers no positive alternative -- and by positive I don't mean happy, I mean simply a map of events rather than non-events. The only events described are writings, or acts of forgery, often by no-names ("Christian scribes") working in the dark. Actual events, other than writing, go without much description or investigation for their own sake; they are brought in only for the conspiracy theory. Individuals contributing anything are said to be mythical beings invented by the true agency, the collective cult with its need for survival and power. Individuals are cut out of history entirely, and shorn of their personal names, except occasionally for individuals who did have a certain genuis at forgery: those are the only people named, dated, and described at length. Bodies are taken out of history, and men such as Christ become disembodied ghosts or ideas -- a terribly unhistorical project, even an Orwellian one. Any piece of evidence that the theory does not like goes down the "memory hole." And of course, in this case what is being denied is not merely neutral, but something that is all too often denied: suffering. The rejection, torture, and capital punishment of an innocent individual is pushed out of existence or otherwise shorn of its meaning. To deny history is always to deny pain and suffering.

10) It is bigoted. It is committed to destroying or defaming Christians, of course, and is sometimes especially hostile to Roman Catholicism. But it is necessarily exploitative of other religions, even those it nominally champions. Moreover, it always denies the deep relationship between Judaism and Christianity, and seeks to overturn mainstream biblical scholarship's deep and healing dialogue with Judaism, by making Christianity exclusively a pastiche of non-Jewish religions which the Jewish people, historically, despised -- not least because paganism oppressed them so cruelly. In many ways, the theory represents anything but progressive scholarship shedding light on victims, whether they be Jews or Gentiles; the only oppression it recognizes is that committed by Christianity. Its conclusions are welcomed, disturbingly, by anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic bigots.

That's enough for now. I'll be returning to this subject.

Peace,
Kevin