James Patrick Holding’s
The Impossible Faith or,
How Not to Start an Ancient Religion
http://www.tektonics.org/lp/nowayjose.html
Reviewed
by Robert M. Price
Internet apologist James Patrick Holding (as he
chooses to be known) has thus far seen fit to by-pass the pages of published
books, though one can only imagine numerous evangelical publishers would love to
have him. He maintains a website containing a whole raft of apologetical essays,
most of them aiming to refute unbelievers and biblical critics, all of whom he
considers to be enemies of the faith. He is amazingly prolific and erudite as
well, though he seems to me sometimes perversely to misread his opponents’
arguments and to reduce them to strawman status. In the essay to be addressed
here, Holding sets forth a wide-ranging version of an old argument one hears
more and more these days from fundamentalist apologists: that the initial
success of Christianity defies sociological common sense and demands a
miraculous explanation. The sheer scope of the argument, as well as its
increasingly common use in debate, make a critical review of it advisable.
Holding here attempts “to put together a
comprehensive list of issues that we assert that critics must deal with in
explaining why Christianity succeeded where it should have clearly failed or
died out” like many another messianic cult. For example, that of Sabbatai Sevi
in the seventeenth century. Holding deems it unlikely, first of all, that
Christianity could have begun with the hoodwinking of a sufficient number of
gullible dupes. Imposture is no basis for a successful religion, a notion
asserted as if self-evident by many apologists past and present. And yet it is
easy to show how Mormonism started with a hoax, though, given the
paradoxes of human psychology, we cannot for that reason dismiss Joseph Smith as
not also being a sincere religious founder. But a hoax it was, and here
today, look at it: it is a thriving world religion in its own right. So such
things can happen. On the other hand, I believe the parallels to Sabbatai Sevi
are important and show how some of the greatest challenges facing early
Christianity may have been overcome, especially the crushing defeat in the wake
of Messiah's death. It also illustrates the thinking that led to retrospective
claims of "passion predictions" and scriptural prophecies, as well as the
framing of atonement theories as after-the-fact rationales of an embarrassing
death. Plus resurrection appearance- and miracle- rumors. Most devastating of
all, as I show in Beyond Born Again, the rapid, contemporary formation of
legends, and that against the attempts to the Apostle (Nathan of Gaza) to
prevent miracle-mongering, utterly destroys the apologist's claim that such
legendary embellishment could not have taken place in the case of the Jesus
tradition.
Holding argues that “Christianity
‘did the wrong thing’ in order to be a successful religion” and that thus “the
only way Christianity did succeed is because it was a truly revealed faith --
and because it had the irrefutable witness of the resurrection.” Here he
serves notice that we will be asked to "admit" that miracles are the only way to
account for the rise and success of Christianity. In any other field of inquiry
this would be laughed off stage. I am thinking of a cartoon in which a
lab-coated scientist is standing at the chalkboard, which is full of integers,
and he is pointing to a hollow circle in the midst of it all, saying, "Right
here a miracle takes place." Appealing to miracles as a needful causal link is
tantamount to confessing bafflement. But in fact, there will be no need for
this.
Cross Examination
Citing 1 Corinthians 1:18 (“For the preaching of
the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is
the power of God.”), Holding asks rhetorically, “Who on earth would believe a
religion centered on a crucified man?” He contends that crucifixion was so
repulsive and degrading a punishment that no one could have taken a crucified
man seriously as a religious founder. On top of that, no one could have
envisioned the notion of a god stooping to undergo such treatment. “This being
the case, we may fairly ask… why Christianity succeeded at all. The ignominy of
a crucified savior was as much a deterrent to Christian belief as it is today -
indeed, it was far, far more so! Why, then, were there any Christians at all? At
best this should have been a movement that had only a few strange followers,
then died out within decades as a footnote, if it was mentioned at all. The
historical reality of the crucifixion could not of course be denied. To survive,
Christianity should have either turned Gnostic (as indeed happened in some
offshoots), or else not bothered with Jesus at all, and merely made him into the
movement's first martyr for a higher moral ideal within Judaism. It would have
been absurd to suggest, to either Jew or Gentile, that a crucified being was
worthy of worship or died for our sins. There can be only one good explanation:
Christianity succeeded because from the cross came victory, and after death came
resurrection! The shame of the cross turns out to be one of Christianity's most
incontrovertible proofs!” This is completely futile and does not begin to take
into account the religious appetite (in many people) for the grotesque and the
sanguine. Just look at the eagerly morbid piety of Roman Catholics and
fundamentalist advocates of "the Blood" who wallow in every gruesome detail of
the crucifixion, real or imagined. Consider the box office receipts of Mel
Gibson’s pious gore-fest The Passion of the Christ. In ancient times,
think of the Attis cult which centered upon the suicide of its savior who
castrated himself and bled to death. Street corner celebrations of such rites
invariably attracted bystanders, even initially hostile ones, swept up in the
music and chanting, to castrate themselves and join the sect on the spot!
And even if one stops short of the Christ Myth
theory, one must still reckon with the possibility, as advocated by Bultmann and
others, that the crucifixion of Jesus would still have been readily embraceable
as a means of salvation because of the familiarity of the dying and rising god
mytheme. It was a familiar religious conception, and no less so because of
Hellenistic Judaism's martyrdom doctrine as glimpsed in 2 and 4 Maccabees, where
the hideous deaths (much more fulsomely dwelt upon than the crucifixion is in
the gospels) are set forth as expiations for the sins of Israel. See Sam K.
Williams, The Death of Jesus as Saving Event.
Finally, crucifixion was not a taboo
subject, as witnessed by the frequent occurrence of crucifixion in dream
interpretation manuals, where dreaming of being crucified was typically taken as
a good omen of impending success.
Good Jews, Bad News?
Holding thinks that “Jesus' Jewishness…was also a
major impediment to spreading the Gospel beyond the Jews themselves. Judaism was
regarded by the Romans and Gentiles as a superstition. Roman writers like
Tacitus willingly reported… all manner of calumnies against Jews as a whole,
regarding them as a spiteful and hateful race. Bringing a Jewish savior to the
door of the average Roman would have been only less successful bringing one to
the door of a Nazi.” This is ludicrous. There were Roman anti-Semites aplenty,
though this seems to have prevailed mainly during periods of Jewish revolt
against Rome. But in fact, Judaism was quite attractive to Gentiles in general,
Romans in particular, as witnessed by the number of conversions and the
unofficial adherence of Gentile God-fearers (like Cornelius in Acts 10 and the
Lukan Centurion who bankrolled the synagogue). It had the appeal of an
"Oriental" religion as well as the sterling teaching of Ethical Monotheism to
recommend it.
“The Romans… believed that superstitions (such as
Judaism and Christianity) undermined the social system established by their
religion – and… anyone who followed or adopted one of their foreign
superstitions would be looked on not only as a religious rebel, but as a social
rebel as well.” No, Judaism was considered a legitimate religion and for that
reason Jews were exempt from military service. The Roman attitude seems to have
been that an ancient religion was okay, even if silly by the standards of Romans
like Juvenal, who felt the same way about the religion of Isis and Osiris,
Cybele and Attis, etc. But these, too, were legal and quite popular. It was only
new religions, like Christianity or the Bacchanalia (new to Rome), that aroused
suspicion. (Holding will acknowledge this fact later, when it seems to prove
useful to him.)
This Accursed Multitude
Furthermore, says Holding, “Christianity had a
serious handicap [in] the stigma of a savior who undeniably hailed from Galilee
-- for the Romans and Gentiles, not only a Jewish land, but a hotbed of
political sedition; for the Jews, not as bad as Samaria of course, but a land of
yokels and farmers without much respect for the Torah, and worst of all, a
savior from a puny village of no account. Not even a birth in Bethlehem, or
Matthew's suggestion that an origin in Galilee was prophetically ordained, would
have [de]tached such a stigma: Indeed, Jews would not be convinced of this, even
as today, unless something else first convinced them that Jesus was divine or
the Messiah.” I cannot imagine anybody would have been this snobbish. Romans and
other non-Palestinians could hardly have drawn much of a distinction between
Galilee and Timbuktu. But even if they had been so choosy, does Holding
seriously imagine that any such blue-nosed scoffer would have been convinced
only by the miracle of the resurrection, as opposed to the assertion
of the resurrection? They would no longer have been in a position to be
convinced by the real thing, though they might have found the preaching of
the resurrection emotionally or spiritually compelling, as many still do. It is
foolish to argue in effect that "They were convinced by it, so it must have been
convincing. So you, too, should be convinced."
Again, “Assigning Jesus the work of a
carpenter was the wrong thing to do; Cicero noted that such occupations were
‘vulgar’ and compared the work to slavery.” Must early Christian preaching have
won over the worst sort of snobs? No one, not even the special pleading Crossan,
argues that Jesus was one of the Untouchables or Outcasts. Don't tell me there
weren't plenty of people then as now who would not have relished the notion of a
faith started by a rustic carpenter. But I think the identification of Jesus as
a carpenter, a la Geza Vermes, was an early error, a Gentile misunderstanding of
the Jewish acclamation that he was an erudite rabbi, skilled in scripture
exposition. At any rate, it did not seem to hinder the fantastic success of
Stoicism that one its most beloved sages, Epictetus, had been a slave, even less
classy, one might suppose, than a carpenter.
“Placing Jesus' birth story in a
suspicious context where a charge of illegitimacy would be all too obvious to
make would compound the problems as well. If the Gospels were making up these
things, how hard would it have been… to take an "adoptionist" Christology and
give Jesus an indisputably honorable birth (rather than claiming honor by the
dubious, on the surface, claim that God was Jesus' Father)?” Tell that to all
the myth-mongers who ascribed divine paternity to their saviors and heroes! Must
these miraculous nativities be factual, too?
Let’s Get Physical
Holding ventures that a fabricated religion such
as he supposes critics imagine Christianity to have been, would never have
chosen a version of exaltation for its hero that entailed a physical
resurrection since many ancients are on record as finding the whole notion
repugnant, preferring Platonic soul-survival. Indeed, many rejected the idea:
Sadducees, some philosophers, even pagan Arabs in Muhammad's day. Does that mean
no one else liked it? We never find denunciations of a belief that no one holds.
I find fundamentalism grossly repugnant, but that doesn't mean everyone else
does.
Holding knows that many Jews did
share the Christian belief in a physical resurrection, but he says this would
not have facilitated their belief in Jesus’ resurrection, since Jews supposedly
restricted resurrection to the end of the age (John 11: 23-24, “Jesus said to
her, ‘Your brother will rise again.’ Martha said to him, ‘I know that he will
rise again in the resurrection at the last day.’”) Holding, like all evangelical
apologists, claim that belief in a man rising from the grave before the time, in
the midst of “this age,” would have been unthinkable. Hence on the one hand, it
cannot even have occurred to Christians as a possibility unless they knew Jesus
had actually arisen. And on the other, it would have struck the ears of other
Jews as the rankest heresy. But think of John the Baptist, transformed into a
miracle-working entity by virtue of resurrection, according to the belief of
many (Mark 6:14). Of course Mark makes it a false opinion, but the point is that
such a belief, closely paralleling the resurrection kerygma of Jesus himself,
was readily available in the immediate environment of early Christianity
according to the gospels themselves.
As for the venue of the Gentile Mission, “what
makes this especially telling is that a physical resurrection was completely
unnecessary for merely starting a religion. It would have been enough to say
that Jesus' body had been taken up to heaven, like Moses' or like Elijah's.
Indeed this would have fit… what was expected, and would have been much easier
to ‘sell’ to the Greeks and Romans.” But this only means the early Christians
didn't concoct Christianity like a bunch of network execs fashioning a sitcom
according to focus group surveys. The question is: where did they get the belief
in resurrection that they were shortly (if not from the first) "saddled" with?
It might have been because of a real resurrection, sure, but they might
simply have inherited it from an environment more friendly to the idea.
Too New to be True
Holding first argued that Judaism was repulsive
to Romans, but now he has to switch hats. He says, correctly, that Romans paid
grudging respect to Judaism because it had an ancient pedigree. “Old was good.
Innovation was bad.” Thus a new faith like Christianity should have failed.
Should we then conclude that no new religions ever started or were accepted on
their appearance in the West? You just can't take the opinions of the
intellectual caste as definitive for what everyone would have thought.
Especially since the very expression of such opinions presupposes a regrettable
(to these snobs) prevalence of precisely such "superstitions" as the snobs were
condemning. Such faiths famously could and did succeed--even to the extent of
becoming the official religion of Rome: Mithraism and even Baalism, for example.
Holding argues as if the success of Christianity couldn't happen and so it must
have taken a miracle for it to have happened. The scientific approach, taken by
Rodney Stark (The Rise of Christianity) and others, is to take as
established that it did happen and then explain it, not piously
refuse to explain it and claim "It's a miracle!" With that utter abdication of
the scientific method, we would still be in the Dark Ages.
Of course, no one denies there were persecutions
of the Christian faith and, before that, the Isis and the Dionysus cults. They
were occasioned by the fact that many, many people did like these
religions and practiced them. That is why Juvenal has occasion in the first
place to ridicule them, why Plutarch warns young matrons against them--because
they were so prevalent, even among the aristocracy. Their husbands didn't like
it, but they couldn't ultimately stop it.
Novelty was in large measure responsible for
official distaste for the new faith. But as always, many people are looking for
something new, however much the establishment hates and forbids it. And even
they may eventually succumb: they yielded to Mithraism as the official state
religion, and similarly later to Christianity. Hurdles are meant to be jumped,
and hardy religions have jumped them. Christianity had much going for it, many
noble features, just as Judaism did, and they won out.
Raising the Bar
Where, Holding wonders, would have potential
converts have derived the wherewithal to repent of their nice, cozy sins to
swallow the bitter pill of early Christian abstinence, if the whole thing were
simply a matter of joining one more man-made religion? Can he ignore the fact
that all the (very popular) Mystery Religions called their recruits to an
initial stage of repentance and purification, too?
And neither must we suppose that all Christians
were heroic cross-bearers. The whole crisis of a second repentance seen in the
Shepherd of Hermas and witnessed in Constantine's deferral of baptism to
his deathbed attests to the general mediocrity of Christian lay behavior as the
rule. They were all no doubt good folks, just not heroic like Jesus or the
martyrs. As Stark (The Rise of Christianity) shows, the growth rate of
Christianity seems to have matched that of analogous modern "new religions" like
Mormonism and the Unification Church. One reason it expanded was its narrowness.
Unlike other faiths, it insisted that theirs was the only way, so if you joined
Christianity you left your other affiliations behind, whereas others could and
did belong to several movements at once, with naturally watered down devotion to
any one of them.
Another way it grew was that
Christianity provided a constant safety zone for assimilating Hellenistic Jews
who wanted to slough off parochial Jewish ethnic markers like circumcision
(already Paul is telling the Corinthian men not to undertake the epispasm
operation to “undo” circumcision—ouch!) yet without abandoning the biblical
tradition. Yet another growth factor was Christianity's opposition to abortion
and infanticide, both quite common among pagans. This meant there were many more
Christian women surviving to adulthood, perforce marrying pagan men and
converting them. And of course the sterling conduct of Christians, ministering
to the sick and destitute in times of plague and famine while pagan priests
headed for their countryside villas, like Prince Prospero in Poe's Masque of
the Red Death, must have attracted many of those helped--and justifiably so!
Christianity has much to be proud of in all this. But we don't need any overt
miracle to explain it.
And as for the unlikelihood that a
great number should have welcomed a new faith that offered moral guidance and
discipline--I don't see a problem, unless one already takes for granted a
doctrine of total depravity.
Intolerance of Intolerance
Christianity began in the Hellenistic age of
cosmopolitan tolerance. It was common for members of various religions to regard
all the gods as the same, just wearing different names from nation to nation.
Even some Jews, like the writer of the Epistle of Aristaeus, regarded
Jehovah and Zeus as the same. One result was that anyone might join several
different religions or cults simultaneously. So mustn’t Christianity have
disgusted Roman society because of the new faith’s exclusivism? Mustn’t the
preaching of Jesus as the only way to heaven have appeared a piece of tasteless
bigotry? Surely no one would have found such a faith attractive, would they?
Actually, it was a mixed bag. As I have just said, a la E.R. Dodds (Pagan and
Christian in an Age of Anxiety) and Rodney Stark, exclusivism was also a
factor accounting for Christian expansion, not necessarily making it unlikely.
The same thing is evident in the modern day in Dean M. Kelly's famous book,
Why Conservative Churches Are Growing: people feel they are getting the red
meat of authentic Christianity with evangelicalism, not the vapid tofu of
liberalism, so they flock to the clear notes of the fundamentalist/orthodox
trumpet.
On the other hand, what Holding notes
about the guardians of the social order being enraged by this, or even some of
the people, is true too: there were plenty of lynch mobs before Diocletian and
Decius declared open season on Christians. But not everybody reacted the same
way. And much of the reaction was conducive to Christian growth--even the
persecutions! For, as Tertullian said, the blood of the martyrs was the seed of
the church. And then what if significant elements of the establishment embrace
the new faith? Things change rapidly.
“Jews, too, would be intolerant to
the new faith. Jewish families would feel social pressure to cut off converts
and avoid the shame of their conversion. Without something to overcome Roman and
even Jewish intolerance, Christianity was doomed.” But Christianity appealed to
Hellenistic Jews and to Gentile God-fearers precisely because it offered Jewish
morality, added to something like Mystery Religion salvationism (and this
independent of the question of whether its symbolism and soteriology were
borrowed from these faiths. Let's assume for the sake of argument that they
weren't), and freedom from what Gentiles and assimilating Jews regarded as the
burden of the Law. As Stark (chapter 3) shows, Hellenistic Jews found
Christianity a bonanza!
No doubt Ebionite Jewish Christianity did
eventually dry up on the vine for the reasons Holding gives: Non-Christian Jews
came to associate the name Jesus with what appeared to them a new Gentile cult
and wanted nothing to do with Torah-Christianity, either. The plaintive pleas of
the latter, "But we're not like them! We're like you!" fell on
deaf ears. Meanwhile, Gentiles faced with the choice of Law-free Christianity or
Torah Christianity would surely choose the former, not so much because they were
lazy, but because it seemed less inauthentic for them. Why should you have to
adopt alien cultural markers to become a Christian?
An Omniscient Public
Holding next cites Acts 26:26, “For the king
knoweth of these things, before whom also I speak freely: for I am persuaded
that none of these things are hidden from him; for this thing was not done in a
corner.” Here Paul is making his defense before King Herod Agrippa II. “The NT
is filled with claims of connections to and reports of incidents involving
‘famous people.’ [For instance,] Herod Agrippa [I]… ‘was eaten of worms’ as Luke
reported in Acts 12:20-23. Copies of Acts circulated in the area and were
accessible to the public. Had Luke reported falsely, Christianity would have
been dismissed as a fraud and would not have ‘caught on’ as a religion. If Luke
lied in his reports, Luke probably would have been jailed and/or executed by
Agrippa's son, Herod Agrippa II… because that was the fellow Paul testified to
in Acts 25-26… And Agrippa II was alive and in power after Luke wrote and
circulated Acts.” No, sorry. For one thing, Luke’s account of the first
Agrippa’s death sounds remarkably like that in Josephus (Antiquities
19:8:2) as well as the tale of the worm-devouring death of Antiochus Epiphanes
in 2 Maccabees 9:9. For another, there are many reasons to think that Acts stems
from the second century, and many scholars think so. Merely mentioning that
opinion does not make it true. It does mean, however, that the reader is not
entitled to take Holding’s assertion of Luke’s contemporaneity with Herod
Agrippa II for granted either. To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, Agrippa "was dead and
couldn't blow the gaff." It is typical of the Hellenistic novels to have
fictional heroes interact with famous historical figures, just as in such novels
today. Does Holding imagine that the spurious letters between Paul and Seneca
must be authentic because otherwise somebody would have definitively put the
hoax to rest? Look how hard it is to lay the ghost of Nicholas Notovitch's bogus
Unknown Life of Jesus Christ which keeps getting revived after the public
has forgotten both it and the refutations it garnered in earlier generations.
"People outside the area of Lystra may not have
known enough about what happened in Lystra, or wanted to check it, but
Christianity was making claims at varied points across the Empire, and there
were also built in ‘fact checkers’ stationed around the Empire who could say
something about all the claims central to Jerusalem and Judaea -- the Diaspora
Jews.” Thus Acts’ stories must be true. But this is unrealistic and
anachronistic--fact checkers? No doubt there were local skeptics who, as in the
case of Sabbatai Sevi's miracle reports, denied anything was really going on,
but who listens to them? Not the true believers. Like Holding himself, they will
mount any argument so as not to have to take threatening factors seriously.
Rastafarians refuse to belief Haillie Selassie died. Premies refuse to believe
their Satguru's mom fired him. Also, does Holding expect us to accept that the
temple of Diana in Ephesus collapsed at the preaching of John because it says so
in the Acts of John?
“The NT claims countless touch-points that could
go under this list. An earthquake, a darkness at midday, the temple curtain torn
in two, an execution, all at Passover (with the attendant crowds numbering in
the millions), people falling out of a house speaking in tongues at Pentecost…--
all in a small city and culture where word would spread fast.” Word spreads
fast—word of what? Events and non-events. Rumors spread as fast as facts, faster
even. And besides, a little event called the fall of Jerusalem supervened
between the time described and the writing of the gospels and Acts. Any
witnesses pro or con were long dead and unavailable. “In short,
Christianity was highly vulnerable to inspection and disproof on innumerable
points -- any one of which, had it failed to prove out, would have snowballed
into further doubt, especially given the previous factors above which would have
been motive enough for any Jew or Gentile to say or do something.” Oh please! If
such claims were even made in the time of apostolic contemporaries, we have no
way of knowing they were not as thoroughly and adequately refuted as the claims
of Joseph Smith were. Christian tradition and documents would hardly inform us
of the fact. And once Jerusalem fell, as it had before the New Testament was
written, all hope of corroboration is sheer fantasy.
Sticks, Stones, and Names
Holding mounts a version of the argument from
martyrdom that is slightly more nuanced than the usual one, and for that we may
give him credit. He admits that we have no reliable information as to the
possible martyrdom of any specific early Christians. Most of the supposed data
comes from apocryphal, legendary sources like the fanciful Acts of Paul.
But, following Robin Lane Fox, Holding widens the scope of social ostracism to
which early Christians were subjected: “rejection by family and society,
relegation to outcast status. It didn't need to be martyrdom -- it was enough
that you would suffer socially and otherwise.” But this sword cuts both ways, if
you are trying to determine its likely effect on the growth and consolidation of
membership in a new religion. Such ostracism, when not spontaneously forthcoming
at the hands of outsiders, is famously cultivated (even simulated) by "cults"
who seek to cement the loyalty of new members by isolating them from natural
family and old friends so they will bond more strongly with "brothers and
sisters in the faith." This is why cult deprogramming was such a waste of
time--it only drove the victim into the arms of the cult more deeply than ever.
But as for outright persecution, e.g., lynchings,
seizure of property, just observe how the censured and persecuted Mormons
reacted to such hardships--by succeeding fabulously! “It is quite unlikely that
anyone would have gone the distance for the Christian faith at any time --
unless it had something tangible behind it.” Or, unless they believed it
did, which no one doubts, and which is all Holding can ever show.
Monolithic Monotheism?
Holding has already expressed his reluctance to
credit any ancient believing in a crucified god. But what about the general
belief that Jesus was God incarnate? Would that notion have proven so repugnant
to ancient Jews and Gentiles that none of them could have seriously entertained
it—unless either irrefutable evidence for the resurrection (how is this a proof
for the Incarnation?) forced one to accept it? But Holding, like C.S. Lewis and
so many others who use the same argument, is stuck on the discredited notion
that something like second-century rabbinic orthodoxy prevailed or even existed
in the first centuries BC and AD. A lot of weird stuff was going on in the Holy
Land and elsewhere that would later be forced out under the post-70 hegemony of
the rabbis. One might as well ignore the diversity of theologies in Islam and
conclude that the Fatimid Caliph al-Hakim was Allah incarnate, as the Druze
maintain, or that Ali already was God in the flesh, as many Shi'ite sects
believe today. How could such beliefs have arisen in the context of absolutely
and fiercely monotheistic Islam? Well, it turns out it wasn't so monolithic, and
neither was first-century Judaism.
“And it would be no better in the Gentile world.
The idea of a god condescending to material form, for more than a temporary
visit, of sweating, stinking, going to the bathroom, and especially suffering
and dying here on earth -- this would be too much to swallow!” But exactly such
was believed of the various demigods, like Asclepius, Pythagoras, Apollonius.
Besides, many early Christians did not believe in a genuine incarnation, but
were docetists, and it is far from certain that Paul was a real incarnationist,
with his talk of Christ taking on the likeness of human flesh, the
form of a servant, etc. I for one do not take for granted that orthodox
definitions of incarnation can be assumed for the earliest Christians.
Armchair Radicalism
“‘Neither male nor female, neither slave nor
free.’ You might be so used to applauding this sort of concept that you don't
realize what a radical message it was for the ancient world. And this is another
reason why Christianity should have petered out in the cradle if it were a
fake.” It is a notorious matter of debate even among “literalist” evangelicals
whether statements like the one Holding quotes meant any more than that all the
listed categories had equal access to salvation, or whether they also denoted
the abolition of traditional social distinctions among Christians. We don’t know
how progressive a face early Christians presented to their contemporaries.
Besides, some of the pre-Socratic Sophists had already preached male-female
equality, as did the Pythagoreans and Stoics. And Christians were by no means,
except for Marcionites and Gnostics, quick to implement texts like Galatians
3:28, as the Pastoral Epistles show.
“Note that this is not just to those
in power or rich; it is an anachronism of Western individualism to suppose that
a slave or the poor would have found Christianity's message appealing on this
basis.” On the contrary, part of the appeal of such "cults" is that they offer
esteem and honor to someone in the eyes of his brethren that he cannot achieve
in the secular world. A slave could be a Christian leader.
“Christianity turned the norms upside down and
said that birth, ethnicity, gender, and wealth -- that which determined a
person's honor and worth in this setting -- meant zipola.” This is
characteristic of all sectarian movements in their infancy. It is partly "Know-Nothingism,"
because education is disparaged, partly true egalitarianism, of course. But
hardly unusual for a new religious movement. Buddhism, too, repudiated caste and
succeeded. Is it the only true religion, too?
“The group-identity factor makes for
another proof of Christianity's authenticity. In a group-oriented society, you
took your identity from your group leader, and people needed the support and
endorsement of others to support their identity… Moreover, a person like Jesus
could not have kept a ministry going unless those around him supported him. A
merely human Jesus could not have met this demand and must have provided
convincing proofs of his power and authority to maintain a following, and for a
movement to have started and survived well beyond him. A merely human Jesus
would have had to live up to the expectations of others and would have been
abandoned, or at least had to change horses, at the first sign of failure.” This
is outrageous special pleading. What about the Buddha, John the Baptist, Martin
Luther King, Gandhi, and many others who were let down temporarily or
permanently by their followers? And if there were anything special about such
persistence, you needn't posit an incarnation. It would be adequate to say Jesus
was strengthened by God. Were the indefatigable Paul and Peter God incarnate,
too?
“If Christianity wanted to succeed, it should
never have admitted that women were the first to discover the empty tomb or the
first to see the Risen Jesus. It also never should have admitted that women were
main supporters (Luke 8:3) or lead converts (Acts 16).” Similar traditions stem
from the ritual mourning of women devotees of Tammuz (Ezekiel 8:14), Attis, Baal
(Zechariah 12:11), etc. They are not supposed to be "evidence for the
resurrection" any more than the Oberammergau Passion Play is. And plenty of
Mystery cults gave leadership roles to women. That's part and parcel of
sectarianism and its first-generation rejection of mainstream norms.
Holding appeals to the bumpkin status of Jesus,
John, and Peter (Acts 4:13), and even of the early Christians generally, as
another factor militating against the success of the new faith. On the contrary,
the supposed illiteracy of prophets and founders is part of apologetic rhetoric,
used of Jesus, Peter and John, Muhammad, and Joseph Smith so as to argue they
must have been incapable of making this stuff up--"Flesh and blood hath not
revealed it to thee, but my father in heaven." It is a common, predictable, and
fictive topos, much like the common rhetorical trope that Paul uses in 1
Corinthians 2:1-2, the claim to have renounced or to be inept at clever
rhetoric, to throw readers off the track and set them up to fall for it.
Besides, how would Christianity's
being "real" or "fake" as to miracle claims have anything to do with the success
or failure of its progress in society decades later? Wouldn't we have to look to
the strengths of the movement at the time? Or are we to picture the Holy Ghost
hypnotizing people as they heard the gospel? If instead Holding means they found
ancient Christian apologetics so compelling, then he must reproduce them for us
to be convinced by. He can't adopt the approach of the Catholic Church, a call
for "implicit faith," second-hand faith in the faith of the early
Christians.
Standing Up for Jesus
Bruce “Malina and [Jerome] Neyrey note that in
the ancient world, people took their major identity from the various groups to
which they belonged. Whatever group(s) they were embedded in determined their
identity. Changes in persons (such as Paul's conversion) were abnormal. Each
person had certain role expectations they were expected to fulfill. The erasure
or blurring of these various distinctions… would have made Christianity seem
radical and offensive.” Right! Of course! That's what happens when people join
new or different religions. Not everyone has the guts to do it (though many have
long felt alienated, and have silently waited for some new option to present
itself). Holding seems to be arguing that no one converts to new religions
except by a miracle of God.
Holding, then, insists that ancient people, much
more part of a group-mentality than we are, would not have been likely to break
with family and convention to join a new sect. I doubt this, in view of the
cosmopolitan character of the Hellenistic Roman Empire when it would have been
scarcely less difficult than it is today to run into members of other religions.
There was already beginning to be what Peter Berger calls a “heretical
imperative” to choose for oneself. But this was probably less true for
Palestinian Jews. And yet some did break with their ancestral creeds to joining
Christianity. Or did they? Remember, Christianity would have begun among Jews.
“Faith in Jesus” may not even have amounted to a sect allegiance any more than
did Rabbi Johannon ben-Zakkai’s controversial belief in the messianic claims of
Simon bar-Kochbah.
But let us admit that the earliest Christians, as
well as other venturesome souls who went out on a limb and joined a new
sectarian group, had a lot of guts. All honor to them! But is this miraculous? I
know Holding is ultimately trying to say that the evidence for the resurrection
must have been pretty darn compelling to prompt such wrenching changes. But it
isn't in our day, nor is it even the reason most people give for such
conversions. And even supposing there were a few eyewitnesses of the
resurrection, assuming it happened, how many of the early conversions can they
have accounted for? And then, once you look at the next generation of second-
and third-hand converts, the air is out of the tire. "Hey Crispus! I heard this
really convincing guy talk about a vision he had!" That is lame. "I guess you
had to be there." I see early conversions as motivated by something else than
clincher apologetics. "Have you believed because you have seen? Blessed are
those who have not seen yet believe" (John 20:29). "Without having seen him you
love him; though you do not see him now, you believe in him and rejoice with
unutterable and exalted joy" (1 Peter 1:8)
Every Idle Word
In the ancient world, we are told, everybody kept
an eye on everybody else. Little escaped a neighbor’s scrutiny. Surveillance and
gossip were rife—much like today! “So now the skeptic has another conundrum. In
a society where nothing escaped notice, there was indeed every reason to suppose
that people hearing the Gospel message would check against the facts --
especially where a movement with a radical message like Christianity was
concerned.” All salvationist sects required repentance and new birth.
Jews required righteousness. What was so radical about it? “The empty tomb would
be checked.” Maybe it was, and maybe it was found occupied, and maybe Christians
with their will to believe found it as easy to ignore it as Creationists do the
fossil record. Many people, after all, did not come to faith. Maybe this
is why. We, at any rate, are in no position to check it out. And Holding begs
the question by supposing that the earliest Christians even told such a story. I
agree with Burton L. Mack (A Myth of Innocence: Mark and Christian Origins;
The Lost Gospel: The Book of Q and Christian Origins; and Who Wrote
the New Testament?) and others who suggest that the empty tomb story is a
late addition to the preaching.
“Matthew's story of resurrected saints would be
checked out.” Two generations later? Not likely. Besides who would be
reading/hearing this story but the members of Matthew's church in Antioch? “Lazarus
would be sought out for questioning.” What, sixty or seventy years after event?
He would be dead again by that time, supposing he was ever a historical
character at all, and not just borrowed from the Lazarus of the Luke 16 parable.
“Excessive honor claims, such as that Jesus had been vindicated, or his
claims to be divine, would have been given close scrutiny.” By whom? It is a
safe bet Malina and his Social Science colleagues do not mean to depict the
ancients as mirror-image apologists as Holding does.
“And later, converts to the new faith
would have to answer to their neighbors.” How many hearers of the resurrection
preaching, which may not at first have included the empty tomb anyway, would
have been in any position at all to "check it out"? "Master, I'd like several
months off so I can travel over to Palestine and see if I can verify a story I
heard from some street corner preacher, that a man rose from the dead over there
fifty years ago. I'm hoping I can find his tomb, or maybe somebody who saw it a
few days after the execution." And if we are thinking of hypothetical hearers of
empty tomb claims in AD 34 or so, what makes Holding think they would be any
more inclined to "check it out" than anybody in our day who heard Oral Roberts
claiming he had witnessed a King Kong-sized apparition of Jesus in Tulsa one
night?
Besides, Holding's whole argument is
misguided, as if one could adjudicate historical questions of what did
happen by appealing to general tendencies of ancient temperaments and what
would have happened. You can't just squeeze history out of peasant
sociology, as Crossan does. He and Malina and the crew all tend to reduce Jesus
to a mere instantiation of current trends, mores, etc.
“I Believe Because it is Absurd”
“Scholars of all persuasions have long recognized
the ‘criteria of embarrassment’ as a marker for authentic words of Jesus. Places
where Jesus claims to be ignorant (not knowing the day or hour of his return;
not knowing who touched him in the crowd) or shows weakness are taken as honest
recollections and authentic (even where miracles stories often are not!).”
Surely, Holding reasons, the framers of a merely concocted religion would take
more care to make their imaginary savior deity look good! Hence no one would
take the gospel Jesus seriously—unless they had to. As usual, Holding grossly
oversimplifies the historical situation. As John Warwick Montgomery observed,
every gospel saying must have been offensive to somebody here or there in
the early church. What offended Matthew (Jesus declining to be called "good,"
for example) did not offend Mark, and we may be able to suggest reasons Mark
would have created it. At least no criterion of embarrassment will shield it.
Other embarrassing sayings may yet be damage control, fending off something yet
more embarrassing. Certainly Schmiedel was naive in thinking no Christian would
ever have fabricated Mark 13:32, where Jesus says he does not know the time of
the end. Obviously the point is to correct the impression of the immediate
context that he did claim to know and that he was wrong, as C.S.
Lewis (“The World’s Last Night”) admitted. For Jesus to disclaim knowledge was
better than having him mistaken.
Junior Detectives
“Encouraging people to verify claims and seek
proof (and hence discouraging their gullibility) is a guaranteed way to get
slammed if you are preaching lies. Let us suppose for a minute that you are
trying to start a false religion. In order to support your false religion, you
decide to make up a number of historical (i.e., testable) claims, and then hope
that nobody would check up on them. What is the most important thing to do, if
you have made up claims that are provably false? Well, of course, you don't go
around encouraging people to check up on your claims, knowing that if they do so
you will be found out!” Once a student in a class of mine insisted that the CEO
of Proctor and Gamble had admitted on the Donahue TV show that he was a
Satanist and that the corporate logo was Satanic symbolism as well. I told my
student that this was an urban legend. Next time he brought in the crudely
copied hand-bill he had read. It offered a New York City phone number and urged
the reader to call and ask for the transcript of the show for so and so date. I
called it. There was no connection at all with Donahue. The hoaxer had
evidently assumed that the mere provision of this (fake) information would be so
convincing as to deceive the reader into thinking just as my student did and
just as Holding does. When the reader of 1 Corinthians 15 reads that Paul
challenged him to go and ask the 500 brethren about their resurrection
sightings, something Paul knew well the Corinthians would never have the leisure
to do, he may be impressed, but Paul was taking no risks. The mere challenge in
such a case functions as sufficient "proof." Note that he provides no clue as to
the names or locations of these supposed witnesses. In the late Syriac
hagiography, The Life of John Son of Zebedee, the apostle similarly
invites his hearers to check out the story of Jairus’ daughter, resurrected by
Jesus. The idea is that the reader will understand that once upon a time the
facts could have been checked out, even though it is too late for him
personally to do so. This all proves nothing and indeed invites suspicion of
imposture where it might not have arisen otherwise.
Holding imagines, with the eye of faith that
calls thing which are not as though they were, that “Throughout the NT, the
apostles encouraged people to check seek proof and verify facts: 1 Thessalonians
5:21 [says to] ‘Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.’” But this text
refers, in context, to prophetic utterances which should not be dismissed out of
hand but scrutinized, as in 1 Corinthians 14:29.
“And when fledgling converts heeded
this advice, not only did they remain converts (suggesting that the evidence
held up under scrutiny), but the apostles described them as ‘noble’ for doing
so: Acts 17:11[says,] ‘These were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that
they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures
daily, whether those things were so.’” But this is only a much later description
of a dubiously historical scene and in any case means only "See? The smart
people agree with us!" And if Luke means us to take as representative the
fanciful scripture "proofs" he has the apostles offer elsewhere in the book, we
can hang it up right now.
Stigma and Dogma
“Christianity, as we can see, had every possible
disadvantage as a faith… I propose that there is only one, broad explanation for
Christianity overcoming these intolerable disadvantages, and that is that it had
the ultimate rebuttal -- a certain, trustworthy, and undeniable witness to the
resurrection of Jesus, the only event which, in the eyes of the ancients, would
have vindicated Jesus' honor and overcome the innumerable stigmata of his life
and death. It had certainty that could not be denied; in other words, enough
early witnesses (as in, the 500!) with solid and indisputable testimony (no
"vision of Jesus in the sky" but a tangible certainly of a physically
resurrected body).” Finally we are reduced to this: It was plenty convincing to
those in a position to know the inside story, so you ought to be convinced, too!
Sorry, but I can only look at the meager fragments of evidence that survive, and
they do not look promising.
If Holding deems the evidence for the
resurrection to be so strong, then what is the point of all this business of
“disadvantages” and so forth? Why beat around the bush rather than getting to
the real business at hand? It is not as if he is shy to discuss the evidence in
its own right, but the argument considered here is not only fallacious; it is
wholly superfluous even if he is right in his other arguments for the
resurrection.