What were Jesus and early Christians like?

[TimOneill]

I agree with everything you said here, Tim. Excellent post.

Thanks.

I think part of the initial attraction to mythicism for many people, at least it feels like one of its strengths to me (which I don't presume to be many), is that it dissolves one of the issues I can only make modest sense of: granted Jesus was crucified in front of his followers, at least a handful, and presumably all of them knew he died, and considering that these are Jews who have pretty clear ideas about who and what the Messiah is supposed to be---death on a cross definitely not part of the equation until OT passages are reinterpreted to fit the fact afterward---what motivates them to start claiming that he is bodily risen?

I can understand how it would have this appeal, but I don’t think it actually does a very good job of explaining how this idea arose in a parsimonious way. If there was evidence of a pre-Christian expectation that the Messiah would die and that this death would be somehow sacrificial and so salvific, then I’d be much more open to the idea that the whole story arose without any actual dead Messianic claimant at its core. But, despite some failed efforts by Carrier to claim he’s found evidence of such a tradition, there doesn’t seem to be anything that would explain how this idea arose. On the contrary, what we find is both Paul and the gospel writers having to go to some lengths to convince people (and, I get the impression, themselves) that this strange turn of events was actually what was meant to happen all along.

The whole crucifixion element makes this even more difficult for them. To the Jews, anyone “hung on the tree” was accursed and abandoned by Yahweh. To the gentiles, it was simply the most shameful and humiliating death for anyone, one reserved for rebels, slaves and the lowest of the low. Again, there is no tradition or expectation of a crucified Messiah before Christianity and they have to work extremely hard to turn this (to use Paul’s word) “scandalous/absurd” idea into something people could accept – Paul’s way of dealing with this has an element of “so crazy it must be true!” to it.

The idea of people rising from the dead, on the other hand, definitely was around at the time and was something of a theological hot topic in Jewish circles. And stories of apotheosis, people being taken up into the heavens leaving an empty tomb and other parallels were also in the air. Add to this the fact that seeing a loved one who has died suddenly is actually a very common phenomenon amongst bereaved people and it doesn’t take much at all to get from a sudden traumatic death, visions of the dead Jesus and a belief that he was, in some sense, risen. Studies of how cults react to the failure of a prophesied event shows this is actually how people react –they find a way to reinterpret the failure into a success, or into a soon-to-come success. And then they get right back to believing as before.

I don't think this question poses such a problem that one must deny the historical core of certain events in the Gospels in order to construct a (highly speculative) natural explanation for this strange development, but it is something that probably drives a lot of people towards the one extreme of a resurrected Christ, on the one hand, and a completely mythical story on the other.

I have found over the last 15-20 years of debating Mythicists that the idea does tend to appeal most to people who have a rather binary way of looking at things – a sort black and white, all or nothing view of the world. Not surprisingly, a large number of them are also former fundamentalists who have gone from one form of absolute belief (“Jesus is Lord!”) to the other extreme (“Jesus didn’t exist!”). The idea that a historical Jesus on whom the later stories were based did exist but was very little like their Jesus of their religious upbringing just doesn’t seem to work for them. Too nuanced and too vague. Unfortunately ancient history is usually nuanced and often vague.