Note: I'm going to kick off a periodic rant I call "Being Reasonable," which is my effort to write a little column that looks at a topic from a reason-based perspective.

Being Reasonable: Mel Gibson and the Real Culprits at Calvary

I'll just come out and say it: the Jews killed Christ. That is to say, the splinter group of Jews--soon to be known as Christians--who put together the most compelling myth in human history killed Him. And when I say "killed," I really mean "killed off," the way the writers of a modern TV drama might kill off a leading character in the final year of his contract and then creatively manipulate his memory over the next three seasons of the show in order to draw viewers.

The debate over Mel Gibson's movie, The Passion of the Christ, has made for some strange bedfellows. Evangelical Christians who might normally decry the idolatrous slant of such a Catholic-colored treatment of Jesus have mostly agreed that the end justifies the means--the end in this case being a tidal wave of moviegoers, both secular and otherwise, brought before a gripping exposition of the basic value proposition of Christianity.

Meanwhile, Jewish leaders and other sympathetic students of history, familiar with the thin pretexts that have fueled anti-Semitic cataclysms for millenia, have banded together to protest Gibson's movie. Their claim is that the portrayal of Jesus's fellow Jews and their role in His execution is anti-Semitic. In an effort to plumb this and other debates over the movie's claims to authenticity, a popular debate has arisen around the subjects of Jesus, His family, His disciples, the Jewish Sanhedrin, Roman centurions, Roman administrators, and Jewish mobs. Sympathic articles in Newsweek and Time Magazine breathlessly pursue The Real Jesus. Even the Pope has declared, through a carefully-leaked statement, that Gibson's movie "is how it was."

In the midst of all of the furor, it seems to me that the most important questions here go mostly unasked: is this how it was, really? How can reasonable people know? Why is it relevant to us today?

The answers to these questions are: "no," "we can't," and "because we need to come to grips with the inherent dangers of modern fundamentalist religious thought and plot a course of slow, safe transition." Somewhere in the midst of that transition, exclusive dogma must turn into respectful culture. And--though we can't be certain--that respectful culture is very likely to end up as comfortable myth. See Babylonia, Greece, Rome, Tenochtitlan, et al.

Being reasonable, I acknowledge that there can be no absolute certainty about the validity of a set of religious beliefs; reason cannot trump faith. However, even the most faithful Christians often seem eager to explore apologetic arguments for the historicity of Biblical events. Faith alone may be enough for an individual, but rational evidence that offers a paradoxical "reason to believe" has become an indispensable tool of the modern evangelical. Thus armed, apologists can seemingly go toe-to-toe with modern scientists in such varied arenas as archaeology (the Dead Sea Scrolls, the James ossuary), geology (evidence for the Flood), and biochemistry (Intelligent Design). Time will tell if these apologetic theories persist. As a rationalist, I welcome the debate, so long as we as a society defend our right to accept as tentative fact the best available explanation for a given phenomenon and to transmit that information to our children as a starting point for their own exploration.

Returning to the questions posed above, let us again ask how reasonable people can know who killed Christ. Any Christian can tell you that we know the answer to that question because the Bible tells us. However, any reasonable observer will insist that we need to turn to non-Biblical sources if we are to have any hope of an objective answer. What do the newspapers, the official records, the history books of Christ's day have to tell is?

The answer? They tell us nothing. The absolute best evidence that Christian apologists can produce as a testimony to Jesus and his deeds is the following single paragraph from the great (and voluminous) history Jewish Antiquities, written by first-century Jewish historian Josephus around A.D. 93-94:

Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man; for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles. He was [the] Christ. And when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men among us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him; for he appeared to them alive again the third day, as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him. And the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct to this day.

What's the problem here? The problem is that 50% of historical scholars agree that this paragraph is a pure interpolation--that is, written much later by someone other than Josephus and crudely introduced between two authentic paragraphs. The other 50% of these scholars must comprise a group of extremely dedicated Christians, because I can attest to what a shocking experience it is to read Josephus and run aground on this Jesus paragraph, so different in style, substance, and intent than anything that precedes or follows it.

When you remove the Josephus underpinning, you are left with no credible, extra-Biblical corroboration dating from anywhere near the time of Christ. This fact runs parallel to the many rational (but superfluous) arguments rebutting the supposed supernatural events of Christ's life. And, while reasonable people can marvel at the success of Christianity as a popular movement (much as we marvel at Islam or Mormonism), there is no compelling reason to treat it as anything more than a myth--perhaps Based on a True Story, but perhaps indistinguishable, in its origins, from the multitude of independent mystical Jewish salvation movements that were active around the time of Jesus. With this mindset, one is free to question not only the meaning inherent to the question "who killed Jesus," but in fact the meaning of any statement that is in some way dependent on the notion of a historical Jesus, as depicted in the Bible.

Where does this leave us? Well, the Jews killed Christ, but only after a splinter group invented Him and set Him up for a fall. In my mind, this idea should form the context of the debate currently surging around The Passion of the Christ, serving as a jumping-off point for the larger debate on the future of fundamentalist religious philosophy in modern society. Instead, we are left with a familiar, interminable debate among numerous incompatible ideologies over events that have no basis whatsoever in historical fact. Feh!
- posted by John @ 7:35 PM