Problems of Early Christianity

The Historicity of Christ

A Letter of January 6,1981

Today is Epiphany Day on which, according to the New-Testament legend, the Magi, the Wise Men of the East - perhaps "Parsis" like me, since "Magi" originally meant Persian highpriests - brought gifts to the infant Jesus. The occasion is appropriate for me to reply to your many-faceted letter, expressing doubt about the historicity of Christ.

I am surprised that my article in the Mother India of last December - "Augustus Caesar and the Birth of Jesus" - has revived your scepticism. It accepts the historicity of Christ as much as that of Augustus Caesar. And it would not have done so if Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had anywhere been uncertain. In that very issue you will find on the opening page the Mother's sentence: "Jesus is one of the many forms which the Divine has assumed to enter into relationship with the earth."

In Mother India's issue of December 1977 (p. 842) I have collected some words of the Mother to make a feature, "What Christ was and taught", from which I may quote a few points. "When Christ came upon earth, he brought a message of brotherhood..." - "I heard Sri Aurobindo himself say that Christ was an emanation of the Lord's aspect of love." -"... the death of Christ was the starting-point of a new stage in the evolution of human civilisation. That is why Sri Aurobindo tells us that the death of Christ was of greater historical consequence than the death of [Julius] Caesar. The story of Christ, as it has been told, is the concrete and dramatic enactment of the divine sacrifice: the Supreme Lord, who is All-Light, All-Knowledge, All-Power, All-Beauty, All-Love, All-Bliss, accepting to assume human ignorance and suffering in matter, in order to help men to emerge from the falsehood in which they live and because of which they die."

What you quote about Vivekananda's dream during his voyage back from America to India is not determinative. Ac-

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cording to you, a man appeared to him one night mentioning Crete as the land where Christianity had begun and going on to say: "I am one of the Therapeutae who used to live here. The truths and ideals preached by us have been given out by the Christians as having been taught by Jesus; but, for the matter of that, there was no such personality of the name of Jesus ever born. Various evidences testifying to this fact will be brought to light by excavating here." You say that Vivekananda woke up, rushed to the deck and asked the captain their whereabouts just then. The answer was: "Fifty miles off Crete." I may comment that the writers of Vivekananda's biography record: "Whatever doubts the Swami may have had on the matter, the dream did not make him yield a whit in his love and adoration of the Son of Mary."¹ How could it when the dream went against the experience of his master Ramakrishna? Once Ramakrishna had a most vivid vision of Jesus, a figure of great beauty and holiness who embraced him and disappeared into his body, causing an ecstatic trance. Later he asked his disciples what the Bible had to say about the physical features of Jesus. They replied: "Sir, we have not seen it written in the Bible anywhere; but born a Jew, he must have been very fair in complexion with long eyes and aquiline nose to be sure." Ramakrishna answered: "But I saw that the tip of his nose was a little flat; I don't know why I saw him like that."² If we have trust in so great a Yogi as Ramakrishna, we cannot ever be sceptical about Jesus' historicity. That small unusual touch about the nose seems to render the vision all the more authentic.

I may add that the mention of Crete in Vivekananda's dream is rather odd. The Therapeutae are historically known to have been a religious group of Jews akin to the Qumran Essenes. The authoritative account of them in ancient times is The Contemplative Life (I.2, cp. II.10-11) by the famous Philo of Alexandria (a contemporary of Christ). He locates them not in Crete but in Egypt. However, there is some truth in another part of the dream-man's declaration to Vivekananda. A later authority on the Therapeutae is the Church historian Eusebius

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(third and fourth century). His Ecclesiastical History (II.xvii, 3-23) shows how struck he was by the likeness of the Therapeutae to Christian monks of his own day. He even thought they might have been Christians and that their founder's writings to which Philo had referred might be the Epistles and Gospels of the New Testament.

The Telugu book to which you refer was obviously penned by someone who was very much of an ignoramus. In contradiction of his statements as numerically tabulated by you, let me make the following points:

(1) The author says that the Roman Governor who ordered the crucifixion of Christ sent no report of the same to his superiors. If this is true, how is it that Tacitus, the Roman historian who wrote his famous Annals in about 115-120 A.D., deals with Nero's persecution of the Christians in 64 A.D. thus: "Christ, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of the procurator Pontius Pilate; and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular" (XV.44)?

(2) Your author asserts: "No historian of the time made any mention of the phenomenon of Christ, except in one case where there is a line about Christ, which line is a clear interpolation." The only first-century historian whose works are in our hands is the Jew Josephus. He has left two books: The Jewish War and Jewish Antiquities. The former recounts Jewish history from 170 B.C. to A.D. 73, the latter extends from the creation of the world to A.D. 66. The Jewish War has nothing to say on our subject. Jewish Antiquities has two passages. One in Book XVIII.6,4 is a long paragraph in the section concerned with the procuratorship of Pilate. It is highly favourable to Jesus and his followers. But we first meet it in a quotation by Eusebius who flourished in the fourth century, whereas Origen who wrote in the third century refers to Josephus as "not believing in Jesus as the Christ". This shows that the

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paragraph was not in his copy and was clearly an interpolated forgery made after his time. However, there is in Antiquities (XX.9,1) another reference. Here Josephus, relating the events of A.D. 62, says that the high priest Ananus or Nanias caused "the brother of Jesus who was called Christ, James by name, and some others" to be stoned as breakers of the law. If, as seems certain, Book XVIII did carry an account of Jesus, an originally hostile one which was later displaced, the mention in Book XX which is merely factual is very likely to be genuine. So a historian of the period can be taken to have mentioned "the phenomenon of Christ".

(3) We are told by your author: "When Christ was crucified, it is said, it became all dark for a number of hours. Such a natural calamity was nowhere noted by any scientist." A hypothesis has been put forward by the scholars Robert Eisler (The Messiah Jesus and John the Baptist, pp. 297-99) and Maurice Goguel (Life of Jesus, pp. 91-93, 185, 540) on the strength of a quotation made by the ninth-century Byzantine chronicler, George Syncellus, from a third-century Christian historian Julius Africanus, that the darkness at the crucifixion was due to an eclipse of the sun: Syncellus alludes to a possibly first-century historian named Thallus for the report. But this Thallus is a very elusive and uncertain quantity. A Thallus seems to be mentioned by Josephus as a money-lender to Herod Agrippa in A.D. 35: there is not even a hint that this financier was also a historian. So it is dangerous to build upon him. And there is no need to do so. For, the Gospels contain, as is now admitted by all scholars, a lot of fiction or else symbolic matter. But this does not make the whole of them false. History and myth are combined in them. The trial and crucifixion of Jesus are undoubtedly historical. Some other events have also the stamp of reality: e.g., the baptism and a few details of the ministry. Then there are the sayings. The Mother has held that "the writers of the Gospels have tried to reproduce exactly what Christ taught and they have in a certain measure succeeded in transmitting his message" (Mother India, December 1977, p. 842).

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(4) "Two of the Gospels make no mention of the crucifixion and the resurrection, although they should be the outstanding events of Jesus' life." The man who said this does not know his New Testament at all. The crucifixion is common to all the four Gospels. The resurrection is recounted in three -Matthew, Luke and John. Only Mark stops short of it. His own identifiable ending does not go beyond 16:8. The present "long ending" of verses 9-20 was tagged on some time in the second century A.D.

What the writer should have listed was not the crucifixion but the virgin birth, about which you have expressed reservations in the closing part of your letter. The virgin birth of Jesus is neither in the first Gospel - Mark's - nor in the last -John's. It occurs only in Matthew's and Luke's Gospels. I may add that the earliest Christian documents, the several Epistles of Paul, do not breathe a word of it and the rest of the New Testament too has no sign of it. Hence it is only two documents out of the twenty-seven constituting the New Testament that speak of a miraculous nativity. Sri Aurobindo regards it as a symbol of the Avatar's direct derivation from the Higher Spiritual Nature - Para-Prakriti, Para-Maya, the Supernature that is the Divine Shakti, the creative Goddess-Power which is ever pure, the Virgin Mother of all beings and things. He says: "In the Buddhist legend the name of the mother of Buddha [Maya-Devi, Maha-Maya] makes the symbolism clear; in the Christian the symbol seems to have been attached by a familiar mythopoeic process to the actual human mother of Jesus of Nazareth" (Essays on the Gita, Centenary Edition, p. 153, fn. I). A growing number of Christian theologians, both Catholic and Protestant, believe that the story of the virgin birth is an "his-toricising" of the theological concept that Jesus was the Son of God in a unique sense, on whom the fact of human paternity has no bearing, even though he had a human father. They also declare that the virgin birth is not in the least necessary for Jesus in order to be the Son of God. According to them, Mark's, Matthew's and Luke's accounts of the baptism and the transfiguration plus the Pauline and Johannine doctrine of

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the pre-existent Christ are enough to substantiate the idea of Divine Sonship.³

(5) If Herod's order to massacre the "innocents" is not historical, we should not be upset and start casting doubt on all that the Gospels relate. Most of the incidents connected with the alleged virgin birth are folkloric legends.⁴ As to Herod living in B.C., historians say that he died in 4 B.C. and that if Jesus was born before Herod died the birth-date of Jesus must be at the latest 4 B.C. The present Christian calender was made by a sixth century Scythian monk who committed a number of mistakes in calculation. Jesus' birth-date was most probably 7 or 6 B.C.

(6) Why does your author declare that the manuscripts of the Gospels should have been in Hebrew? The mother-tongue of Jesus having been Hebrew or rather its dialect Aramaic does not necessitate the Gospels getting written in the same language. They were written from thirty-five to fifty or sixty years after Jesus' death and at that time and even before it the general language of the Roman Empire was Greek. If the Gospels were meant to be widely read, Greek was the right tongue to be written in. Their composition in Greek does not at all "point to the suspicion that they might have been made up".

(7) Yes, there were "other Gospels" than the ones we have. Parts of them still exist. All of them were later writings and are called "apocryphal". They were adjudged unreliable and fantastic and therefore omitted from the official canon. You have only to read them to see the wisdom of omitting them. Some of them, like the Protevangelium of James, were influential in spite of their dubious nature and have coloured quite an amount of popular belief.

(8) The statement - "It was only centuries later that the Gospels were given the present form" - is not quite accurate. In the time of Irenaeus, c. 180 A.D., the four canonical Gospels were in existence, for he cites them all by name. Evidence for individual Gospels is found even before. Thus Ignatius of Antioch (c. 110 A.D.) knew the Matthaean tradition. So, even if

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the present manuscripts are of a later date, the existence of the original versions is surely much earlier. Some changes, however, may have occurred in the course of time. For instance, in the major manuscripts in our hands today Mark 6:3 reads: "Is this not the carpenter, the son of Mary?" Origen, who lived in c. 185-253 A.D., records that the original reading was: "Is this not the son of the carpenter and of Mary?", which is practically the same as Matthew 12:46.

(9) The "utterly diabolical methods" used in the propagation of what may be dubbed "Churchianity" rather than "Christianity" make no odds to the historicity of Jesus and his teachings or to the value of the latter.

(10) The proposition that "a sect, known as Christians, was there in Egypt long before Jesus and this sect assumed the present proportions by their machinations and manipulations" is utterly foundationless. Apart from Josephus and Tacitus, we have only the early testimony of Pliny the Younger and of Suetonius about the existence of Christians - that is, testimony independent of the New Testament. Pliny was governor of Bithynia in Asia Minor from 111 or 113 A.D. His correspondence with the Emperor Trajan includes a report on the proceedings against the Christians. It describes the Christians as in the habit of meeting on a fixed day before dawn and singing a hymn to Christ as to a god, after doing which they separate and meet once more for a common meal. In about 120, Suetonius, secretary to the Emperor Hadrian, wrote Lives of the Caesars, ranging from the great Julius to the infamous Domitian. In the section "Claudius", XXV.4, he tells us that the Jews were expelled from Rome by the Emperor Claudius because they "constantly made disturbances at the instigation of Chrestos". Claudius reigned from A.D. 41 to 54. Orosius, a later writer, informs us that the expulsion of Christian Jews by Claudius took place in the ninth year of that emperor's reign, i.e., A.D. 49. The fact of this expulsion is corroborated by the New Testament's Acts of the Apostles (18:2) in which Paul finds, when he comes to Corinth from Athens, "a certain Jew named Aquila, born in Pontus, lately come from Italy, with

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his wife Priscilla because Claudius had commanded all Jews to depart from Rome". Suetonius, in the section "Nero", XVI. 2, also mentions Nero's punishment in about 64 A.D. of the Christians, "a class of men given to a new and mischievous superstition". Note the word "new". Suetonius's "Chrestos" (the Greek for "good") is merely the Greek-speaking world's easy alteration of the unfamiliar "Christos" (the Greek for "anointed"). Indeed the latter's derivative "Christiani" was frequently spelled "Chrestiani".

There is no evidence of Christians before Jesus. The Mother's saying that what is known as Christmas was really "the festival of light" which had been observed before Christ does not mean that before the birth of Jesus it was already called "Christmas" and that therefore there must have been Christians before Jesus. The fact is simply that Christianity in 354 A.D. or a little earlier fixed 25 December as Christmas Day - that is, the day of Christ's birth - in order to coincide a Christian religious holiday with an old Roman festival and thereby both placate the converted Pagans and wean them from old associations to those of their new religion. The term "Christian" came into vogue in about 41 A.D. when Paul and Barnabas were in Antioch in Syria. Acts 11:26 runs: "For a whole year they were guests of the Church there and they instructed a very considerable number of people. And it was at Antioch that the disciples first received the name of Christians." "Christiani" was a nickname and means "belonging to the party of Christ". The Antiocheans took the title "Christ" ("anointed") for a proper name.

I think the author from whom you have drawn arguments was misled by a term applied to the Christians in very early days. From Acts 24:5 we learn that a Jew employed the word "Nazoraeans" or "Nazarenes" to designate the religious group to which Paul belonged and which at that time was looked upon as a sect of Judaism. The later part of the Talmud, which developed between 220 and 500 A.D., refers to Jesus - almost always pejoratively - as "ha-Nozri" (the Nazarene). The popular notion is that "Nazarene" comes from the description

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"Jesus of Nazareth". Not that the etymology is quite at fault. Philologists like Albright, Moore and Schaeder vouch for its possibility. But actually there appears to have been no "city" such as Matthew (2:23) and Luke (1:26; 2:39; 4:29), writing in c. 80-100 A.D., speak of. Neither the Old Testament nor the Talmud nor Josephus mentions any city of that name. Josephus was especially in a position to know of it if it existed. In A.D. 66, when war broke out between Rome and the Jews, he was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the whole Galilee area by the Roman emperor Trajan. He fortified all the important cities and named each of them in his history. If in his day a city called Nazareth had stood at the location where it later came to be, he would inevitably have referred to it, particularly as he reported several skirmishes in the immediate vicinity of present-day Nazareth. Unfamiliar with Hebrew-Aramaic and with the topography of Palestine, Greek-speaking Christians of Matthew's and Luke's time traced to an imaginary city the word "Nazarene". In passing, it is worth remarking that no other instance is known of a sect being called after the home of its founder. The place where a sect is founded may dictate the sect's name: e.g., "Plymouth Brethren". But nobody, for instance, dreams of identifying Mohammedans by designating them "Meccans" from Mohammed's birth-place Mecca.

Outside of the Gospels, only a fifth-century Jewish love-poem yields for the first time the name "Nazareth" for a city. Most probably the word "Nazarene" derives from the Hebrew "nazar" meaning to "keep" or "observe" and labelling the observers of certain religious usages. From a late tradition maintained by the Mandaeans of Syria who relate themselves to John the Baptist and call themselves nasorayya, "Observants", we may conjecture that the early followers of John the Baptist who announced the coming of a Saviour and whose baptising of Jesus started the latter on his ministry were also known as "Nazarenes". Since passages like Acts 1:21-22 and John 1:35-43 suggest that some of Jesus' Twelve Apostles were formerly disciples of the Baptist, it is quite on the cards that their transition was made easier because Jesus himself belonged to

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the same sect as the Baptist. John 3:20, 26 even gives one to think that Jesus imitated the Baptist's mode of ministry and that he did so because he identified himself with the latter's movement so far as to become temporarily his disciple. The sect of Nazarenes, to which Jesus no less than the Baptist seems to have adhered, had - according to Epiphanius, the fourth-century Christian writer against heresies - flourished in the pre-Christian period under that very name. No wonder, then, that some scholar should imagine this sect to be Christian before the age allotted commonly to Christianity and look upon the followers of Christ as a continuation from the past. But here is a mistake and, although Christianity may have and does have affinities with religious beliefs and practices which are pre-Christian, particularly with the Dead-Sea denomination of ascetics named Essenes, Jesus started a distinctive movement. He was a real historical personage and his movement alone can be termed Christianity.

Those who try to prove Jesus to be a myth overlook an objection which seems final and unanswerable. The opponents of the early Christians never raised the issue of his existence. They only questioned whether he was the Son of God and they criticised the practices of his followers. If it had been true that he did not exist, the denial of his historicity would have been an obvious and immediate rejoinder to their private ardours and their public propaganda. Celsus the Platonic philosopher, Tacitus the pagan historian, the Jewish rabbis - all of them had harsh things to say about him and his religion but none called him a mythical figure - as they certainly would have if there had been any plausibility of it.

Then there is the fact that all the three synoptic evangelists - Matthew (10:23; 16:28; 24:34), Mark (9:1; 13:30), Luke (9:27; 21:32) - report Jesus prophesying the advent of the Messianic kingdom before the generation which he addressed would pass away. The first Christians believed in the prophecy implicitly. Evidently, it was originally communicated by those who belonged to the generation addressed - the generation of Jesus himself. These people must have been alive at the

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time they quoted Jesus and, to be able to quote, they must have known him. Under no other circumstances could they have circulated so specific and so curious a prediction and assurance. None except still living men who could remember a real Jesus could have supplied the matter for the relevant texts in the synoptic Gospels. The prophecy was falsified, but only those who were directly acquainted with Jesus could have reported it with the natural certitude of its fulfilment.

Archibald Robertson was the first to draw attention to these texts in The Rationalist Annual, 1928 ("The Historical Jesus: Some Suggestions" under the pseudonym "Robert Arch"). He has yet to be genuinely answered. We may confidently close with some words written by him 24 years later: "It may reasonably be urged that no Christian in his senses would have fabricated a prophecy that Jesus would return in the lifetime of people who had seen him if Jesus had never lived and nobody had seen him, or if he had lived so long ago that nobody who had seen him could possibly be alive."⁵

References

1. The Life of Swami Vivekananda by his Eastern and Western Disciples (Almora: Advaita Ashram, 1949), p. 458.

2. Sri Ramakrishna the Great Master by Swami Saradananda, translated by Swami Jagadananda (Mylapore, Madras: Sri Ramakrishna Math, 1956), p. 296.

3. For recent Catholic and Protestant opinion, see the Roman Catholic priest Raymond E. Brown's book, The Virginal Conception and Bodily Resurrection of Jesus (New York: Paulist Press, 1973), p. 24 with fn. 26 and p. 42 with fn. 52.

4. Ibid., pp. 54-55.

5. Jesus: Myth or History? (London: The Thinker's Library, Watts Co., 1946), p. 101. For some of the points made in my letter this book has been of substantial help.

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