Letter to David Merrick regarding the historical
claims for Christ • 10-8-2017
David,
I can’t tell you how much I enjoy talking to you.
I look forward to our next “first Saturday” already.
Regarding Christ’s claims to being divine Savior,
you ask, as many have, “He was a madman, a consummate liar, or in fact the One
Savior: So which is it?”
The far more obvious assumption, which better
satisfies Ockham’s razor, is that there were many Christs. First century
Judea was teeming with spiritual adventurers eager to cash in on the prophecy
of an imminent savior of the Jewish nation, which faced an existential crisis
in the first century. The common name “Christ” alone opens up the field for any
John Smith, to say nothing of Eesa, Eashoa, Joshua, Yahshua, Yehoshua, Yeshu,
Hoshea and Eesho M’sheeka, which are all plausible cognates. But
more decisively, how else to explain the many contradictions in the utterances
and life of the Christs? Was he born in Bethlehem or Nazareth? Was his
father’s name Jacob, or was it Heli? Did he go to
Egypt as a child, or not? Was his first sermon on a mount, or was it on a
plain? Did he raise the daughter of Jairus from the dead, or merely heal her?
Did he cast out a demon from a Canaanite woman, or was she a Syrophoenician?
Consider: He was in favor of the sword, and he was not; he told men to love
their enemies, and advised them to hate their friends; he preached the doctrine
of forgiveness, and called men a generation of vipers; he announced himself as
the judge of the world, and declared that he would judge no man; he taught that
he was possessed of all power, but was unable to work miracles where the people
did not believe; he was represented as God and did not shrink from avowing, “I
and my Father are one,” but in the pain and gloom of the cross, he is made to
cry out in his anguish: “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” And how
singular it is that these words, reputed as the dying utterance of the
disillusioned Christ, should be not only contradicted by two Evangelists, but
should be a quotation from the twenty-second Psalm! The answer to all these
either/or questions regarding historical statements of Jesus is “yes, both”
only if there were many Christs. Every third-party claim
for a historical Jesus is inconclusive, not just because of the many cases of
interpolation, but because the proliferation of numerous Jesuses did not seem
remarkable even in Jerusalem, much less to contemporary historians.
So the question then becomes, “Were they
madmen, consummate liars, or in fact the Multiple Saviors?" And the
answer is: None of the above. They were products of the historical crisis
facing the Jews in the first century, who all knew of a prophetic Savior who
would deliver them from annihilation. In spite of the cherry-picking by Church
Fathers from the assortment of available Jesuses to get a barely theologically
cogent Christ, the contradictions in the historical record remain.
My primary inspiration for this idea is Did Jesus Really Live? by Marshall J. Gauvin. However, Gauvin only suggests this
alternative, and I find no other scholar explicitly advancing this idea, as
plausible and forceful as it seems to me.
One day we’ll make it to my ultimate response to these questions, which to state briefly is:
Even if Christianity is historically false, it may yet hold an architectonic
truth that makes it indispensable.
Terry