So What if Jesus Wasn’t Real?
What happens to Christianity if the Gospels are myth?
RELIGION
What happens to Christianity if the Gospels are myth?
In the 2001 film The Body, archaeologists in Israel discover remains that appear to be those of Jesus Christ. The Vatican intervenes, sending a Jesuit priest named Father Gutierrez (played by Antonio Banderas) to try to refute the scientists’ findings. After all, if the body really is Jesus’, that would mean that he did not, in fact, rise body and soul from the dead.
But Gutierrez fails, and as the evidence that the remains really are Jesus’ mounts up, Gutierrez’s colleague Father Lavelle (played by Derek Jacobi), takes his own life. Lavelle simply could not go on living with the realization that his faith was a lie.
It’s an interesting premise for a story, but it does make you wonder: so what if Jesus didn’t rise from the dead? What if he didn’t exist as a historical person at all? Should that matter?
Mythicism, the view that the Jesus of the Gospels is largely (and maybe purely) myth, has been around for at least two centuries. Early proponents included the German writers Bruno Bauer, Albert Kalthoff, and Arthur Drews.
Though largely dismissed by mainstream historians for most of that time, mythicism has recently enjoyed a bit of a renaissance. Richard Carrier’s 2014 book On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt provides the most comprehensive and compelling argument to date that Jesus probably wasn’t a historical person.
(If you don’t have time to read Carrier’s tome, which clocks in at over 700 pages, you can check out this breakdown of his main theses here.)
Now, my point here is not to argue for or against mythicism. My point is to ask, so what? Let’s assume Carrier is right. Does that make Christianity false?
Is the story of the boy who cried wolf false? Does it matter if there really wasn’t a boy who got eaten by a wolf because he told so many lies that his fellow villagers didn’t believe him when he really was in trouble? Or does the truth of the story depend on something other than its having literally happened?
To quote Pontius Pilate, “What is truth?”
In his book Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment, Robert Wright makes the argument that Buddhism’s ethical teachings and meditative practices (if not their supernatural justifications) are “true” in the sense that they are supported by what we know about human psychology.
Buddhism’s central teachings revolve around the insight that our desires and attachments are ultimately what cause us to suffer. We can be freed from suffering only by learning to let these go. Meditation is believed to help our attempts at self-discipline.
And indeed, psychology teaches us that humans almost never get as much pleasure from obtaining certain goals as we believe that we will, and this disconnect is responsible for a lot of the depression and disillusionment that haunt the lives of even very privileged people.
This theme, of the ultimate emptiness of worldly goals like wealth and fame, is a common trope in art and literature, seen in films like Citizen Kane or poems like Richard Cory. And Wright’s contention is that Buddhism shows why (at least some) imagined goods fail to deliver the happiness they promise. That is the “truth” of Buddhism.
So what I want to ask is, even if Jesus never lived, died, and was resurrected, even if everything in the Gospels is fiction, is there still something “true” about Christianity?
And let me be clear. I’m not raising this question because I’m an atheist. I am an atheist, but I’m also a humanist who was educated by Jesuits and believes that there is a great deal of value to be found in all religious traditions.
I could cite you Christian sources who have also raised this possibility and made the same point that I am making. Take the Reverend Paul Tillich, for example. In Dynamics of Faith, he argues that
The most ordinary misinterpretation of faith is to consider it an act of knowledge that has a low degree of evidence…. If this is meant, one is speaking of belief rather than faith.
Confusing faith with belief is what Tillich calls “the intellectualistic distortion of the meaning of faith.”
Faith is more than trust in authorities, although trust is an element of faith…. The Christian may believe the Biblical writers, but not unconditionally. He does not have faith in them. He should not even have faith in the Bible. For faith is more that trust in even the most sacred authority. It is participation in the subject of one’s ultimate concern with one’s whole being.
In other words, Tillich is saying that the truth of any faith (including Christian faith) isn’t an empirical matter. It’s an existential one.
As a humanist, I completely agree. The humanist philosopher John Dewey also believed that there was an inherent tendency to try and justify faith by reducing it to a question of empirical truth, and like Tillich, he felt that this necessarily led to an “intellectualistic distortion” of faith’s genuine meaning.
In A Common Faith, Dewey writes that
Any activity pursued in behalf of an ideal end against obstacles and in spite of threats of personal loss because of conviction of its general and enduring value is religious in quality.
But sometimes, those obstacles appear insurmountable, and we allow doubt and despair to tempt us. What is the nature of that temptation? It is the transformation of moral conviction into beliefs about the history and structure of reality.
What we ardently desire to have thus and so, we tend to believe is already thus and so…. [W]hen conditions are adverse to the realization of the objects of our desire… it is an easy way out to assume that after all they are already embodied in the ultimate structure of what is, and that appearances to the contrary are merely appearances.
Both Tillich and Dewey agree that the danger of the “intellectualistic distortion” of faith is that, by transforming the ethical into the metaphysical, we relieve ourselves of the responsibility for realizing ethical values in daily life. Indeed, we may eventually become convinced that human attempts to realize ethical ideals are futile, even sacrilegious.
All of that is to say that a slavish devotion to the “truth” of the Bible, including the belief in the historicity of Jesus, may be a misguided conflation of faith with belief. It still leaves unanswered the question that prompted this essay: what about Christianity would still be true even if Jesus never existed?
Well, as I’ve argued before, the concept of the Trinity was a very interesting, and in my view much needed, improvement to traditional monotheism. That’s because the concept of the Trinity taps into the idea that value, as we experience it, comes in three distinct flavors: epistemic, ethical, and aesthetic.
But more broadly, I think that Christianity itself deserves some credit for popularizing the ideals that lay at the foundation of ethical humanism. Though obscured today by the intellectualistic distortions of Biblical literalism and fundamentalism, there has always been a strain of Christianity that agrees with the humanist claim that
Faith in the continued disclosing of truth through cooperative human endeavor is more religious in quality than is any faith in a completed revelation.
In a previous essay I have called this the distinction between the theology of dynamic revelation and the theology of static revelation. It is the difference between “God has spoken” and “God is still speaking.”
I believe that these two insights — the tripartite nature of Value and the dynamic processes by which our collective efforts reveal it —are true, perhaps the deepest truths that Christianity can claim to have contributed to human thought.
And so far as I can tell, they owe nothing to the historicity of Jesus. Indeed, as with the example of the boy who cried wolf, reading the Gospels as myths may actually make it easier to grasp their philosophical importance.
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