CHAPTER TEN

HYPOTHESIS

I will, then, apply what I called "psychological contextualism" to the documents of the New Treaty, beginning with the letters of St. Paul, which are the first documents we have dealing with Jesus and "the Way." The object of this investigation is to find out whether the texts make more sense on the assumption that they are reporting as factual events (i.e. as the kind of thing you see, not as something "true" in the sense of "meaningful") the fantastic things about Jesus, or whether the more reasonable sense to take them is that the fantastic events are ways of describing something that was not originally witnessed as described.

This second alternative is the one which I would like to eliminate, because clearly it makes it a waste of time to try to examine the texts to find out about what the Kingdom would have been like and whether the problem of evil has a solution along the lines I suggested. But it must be eliminated only if the only sensible reading of the texts is incompatible with it. That is, the more plausible interpretation, given "Occam's Razor" is the explanation that needs fewest unobserved causes, and so is the one to be preferred unless it can be shown that it can't be held without distorting the texts out of all recognition.

But how can we do this? If we suppose that either alternative is true, then certain things follow from it, and so we can predict some things about the texts. If these predictions are not verified by a sane reading of the texts, then we can take it that the alternative in question is false, and the other one is what the writers intended, and is a description of what you would have seen if you had been there with Jesus.

What the second alternative implies, then, is this: If Jesus was a wise and enigmatic, powerful speaker and mysterious and compelling personality, but did not literally walk on water, raise dead bodies back to life, heal the sick with a touch, still the wind by a command, and come back from the grave, then these actions attributed to him must either be (a) lies or (b) delusions, or (c) legendary accretions, based on rhetorical ways of illustrating his power of speech and forceful personality.

If (a) they were lies, then presumably the perpetrators had some reason for lying: power, perhaps, prestige, or financial gain. But as to power, they were, as Paul's letters show, contradicted at every turn and forced to defend their positions (Paul was even driven out of Corinth in disgrace by the Christians there), and as for prestige, they were constantly reviled and persecuted, and all but one of the original Emissaries was killed for what he claimed was true, and killed in the most painful and disgraceful way. And even the Emissary who was not a martyr, John, wrote at the end of his life a letter telling how the Christians he was to visit tried to block him from coming to speak to them. Nor is there any evidence that any of them made any money from what they were doing. Paul, again, speaks of how he worked to earn money precisely because he did not want to take money for his preaching.

And what I say here is based on letters written by the Emissaries themselves, not a tradition that stems from them, as the Reports of the Good News (the Gospels) are sometimes held to be. So I think that we can rule out deliberate lying; if they were telling what did not happen, then the ones who were telling it were deluded. But (b) if the original witnesses themselves were deluded, the Reports do not make a great deal of sense, since they show that these witnesses were skeptical, and needed convincing before they would believe. "You skeptic! Why did you doubt?" Jesus tells the Rock (Peter). "Have you anything to eat?" the risen Jesus says to the unbelieving Eleven, and then eats fish in front of them. "I won't believe [that Jesus has come back to life]" says Thomas, "unless I see the holes in his hands, and put my finger into the holes." And at the lakeshore later, "No one dared to ask him who he was, since they knew it was the Master." And even after forty days, "There [on the mountain] they saw him and gave him worship, though some did not believe it was he." At least based on the Reports, the original witnesses, particularly of the Resurrection, were anything but gullible naifs, ready to accept anything that would lessen the blow of the crucifixion.

But this suggests alternative (c), which is by far the best hypothesis about how the belief in the fantastic events came about: that the major texts, the Reports of the Good News were later documents (as they certainly were, but how much later?), written down after years of oral retelling about Jesus, with rhetorical embellishments not recognized as such, but taken as facts.

Testing this hypothesis, however, by drawing out its implications, it would necessarily follow that the fantastic stories about Jesus would not be in the earliest information about him. The "historical Jesus" was, on this view, a wise, forceful, and enigmatic man, full of new and strange sayings. His earliest followers, therefore, would be deeply impressed mainly by what he said and secondarily by the manner of his acting; they would be most interested of all, of course, in the actual words, especially the enigmatic ones, since he was first and foremost a religious teacher; and so they would be trying to get across to others the strange sayings of Jesus, reinforcing this with accounts of how compelling his actual personality was.

In other words, if Jesus was a sage in a way analogous to Socrates, Confucius or the Buddha or Muhammad, then the earliest accounts of Jesus would be something like writings we have of these personalities: collections of sayings, together with eye-witness descriptions of how wise, noble, and just the sage was, with the main focus, as it is in these cases and similar ones of wise men throughout history, on what was said. It is interesting that we have the Koran and the Analects and other writings of this nature (which don't pretend to be anything but the wisdom of the sage) to guide us in what the earliest accounts of Jesus would undoubtedly have been like, before he was called God and before the supernatural events were attributed to him to try to reinforce this deification which took place in order to stress the majesty of his thought for people who weren't there to be influenced directly by Jesus' personality.

But we must now take into account the psychological context in which the earliest accounts of Jesus would have been made. The story about his sayings would have been told first to Jews, because presumably the "historical Jesus" (if he was the Great Rabbi, which we are supposing for the argument here) was speaking in a Jewish context to Jews. And we know several things about the mentality of Jews of the time: (1) They held fiercely that God was not at all like the pagan gods, who went around making pretty mortals pregnant. (2) They had enormous, even fanatical, respect for the Law and all of its commandments. (3) They considered themselves set apart and "chosen," not like the Gentiles at all.

If Jesus were a wise man who was trying to wean the Jews away from (2) and (3) (as reports of what he said seem to indicate), then clearly he would be more or less in the position of Socrates, and would be strongly opposed by those in power; and so you could predict that the accounts of the crucifixion would probably be factual.

In this case, the earliest reports about Jesus (presumably oral, since none have survived) would be something like what Plato did in the Apology and in the early dialogues about Socrates: spreading the wise teaching of the master and keeping his memory alive because of his wise teaching. (It is to be noted, however, that as Plato himself continued writing, in later years he almost certainly put in "Socrates'" mouth his own philosophical reflections--which shows at least one kind of embellishment an original character can undergo by those who followed him.)

In Jesus' case, the "embellishment" theory accounting for the Reports assumes, not new doctrine (unless you count Paul as the Plato to Jesus as Socrates--but that is another story), but more and more attributions of miraculous powers rather in the manner the stories about Elijah and Elisha. But the point at the moment, however, is that the earliest accounts, before these embellishments, would almost certainly not have anything to do with a denial of the uniqueness of YHWH [number (1) above], calling Jesus a Son of God, since the best way to alienate any Jew was to turn your hero into some kind of Achilles or Hercules, the son of a god who had sex with a woman. This would be to reduce YHWH to just a pagan god, and no Jew would stand for that for an instant. If Jesus was called the Son of God, then this could only come much later, after the original Jews had been converted and had weaned themselves far enough from their Jewishness that they could entertain notions about Jesus that they would certainly have called blasphemous previously. This would have to be led up to by ascribing more and more miraculous powers to Jesus. And they would have to be really significant; after all, no one thought of Elijah as a god or as YHWH's son, even though he held back the rain, brought fire down from heaven, fed a family for a year on a little oil and flour, and brought a corpse back to life--according to what the documents say about him.

So the prediction from the "Jesus of history/Christ of faith" hypothesis is that the earliest teaching about Jesus was teaching what he said and how noble he was, and only after years and years and years of rhetoric, thinking of him as God's Son who walked on water and rose from the dead.

The alternative hypothesis supposes that the fantastic events of the Reports were actual events, and that Jesus claimed that in fact he was the Son of God and came back to life to back up the claim. What we could predict from this is that the earliest accounts would be something like what we find reported in Acts: that there would be a concerted attempt to make out a convincing case that Jesus did claim to be God--the Hebrew YHWH--that he claimed that he could prove this by performing supernatural feats, that he was killed precisely for making the claim, and that he predicted this, showed that it was prophesied of the Prince, and predicted that the ultimate proof of the authenticity of the claim was that he would return to life on the third day after his crucifixion--and then actually came back to life.

(Of course, the fact that Acts reports this settles nothing, since Acts was clearly written down later, by whoever wrote Luke's Report--and in any case not by someone who was himself an eye-witness of Jesus--and so it could easily, on the other hypothesis, have been infected with the embellishments.)

Hence, on the supposition that the Reports were factual, then the earliest focus of the community would be mainly on the resurrection of Jesus, and on what that implied with respect to our sins, rather than on what Jesus taught in discussing how to live our life. That is, if the original Way was not a mode of living outlined by the great guru but essentially the way the mess you had made of your life could be undone, then niceties about how to live perfectly would take a back seat to letting people know that they had been saved and didn't need to worry any more. Only afterward, when the basic good news had been told, would people wonder about what kind of person Jesus was, what he said, and how he wanted us to conduct ourselves in this new life that had been given to us until he reappeared to lead us in person once again. They would also, of course, be interested in seeing more detailed evidence indicating that the original account was not just a mistake based on superficial observation of a few events.

With these two alternatives in mind, then, let us consider the texts.

First, there are theories that say that there was in fact a document (or documents) called "Q" (Quelle, source), which formed the basis of the similarities between Luke's and Matthew's Reports. But first of all, there is not the slightest manuscript evidence for such a document, nor is there any testimony from the members of the early Christian community that there ever was such a thing, except possibly Papias' statement in 130 that Matthew compiled the Master's sayings in Hebrew--which some have thought referred to an Aramaic version of Matthew's Report, and which in any case couldn't be Q, because Matthew was supposed to have used Q, not written it. The "existence" of Q is purely and simply a supposition, which is supposed to explain why Luke's and Matthew's Reports are textually similar to each other, on the prior supposition that Luke never saw Matthew's Report, and Matthew never saw Luke's. The idea is that the textual similarity on this supposition would have to be that both were independently using another manuscript, each editing parts of it, to be sure, but leaving enough identical to account for the similarities. The real reason for this is that it makes no rational sense to say that Luke actually saw Matthew's Report and edited it into his version.

I have written a whole book on this particular issue: The Synoptic Gospels Compared, which goes through all the texts of the three "Synoptic" Gospels, Mark, Luke, and Matthew, and shows (conclusively, I think), that the "Q-hypothesis" simply does not work. Scholars, based on textual identities and similarities, are in almost universal agreement that Luke (or the author of Luke) and Matthew knew and used (edited) the text of Mark. But a major stumbling-block to the Q-hypothesis emerges from this. In their emendations of Mark's text, the changes they make are very often identical, in ways that cannot be due to mere coincidence or "what any good editor would do." But Q was supposed to account for textual similarities in Luke and Matthew that were not based on Mark. Was each using Q to correct Mark, and did each use Q in the same way? But there are enough differences in the revisions of Mark to rule that out also.

But with the sayings of Jesus that are in Matthew and Luke and not Mark (which are the evidence that there was a Q behind them) there seems to be somewhat more freedom--which is odd, when you think of it, because if they are quoting Jesus, then is when you would expect people to try to get things verbatim, especially if they are using a textual source. Further, the ancients were very good at memorizing--look at Homer and the rhapsodes--and you would expect that if people cared about what was being said, even an oral tradition wouldn't come up with the considerable differences between such important, not to say fundamental sayings as Luke's and Matthew's versions of the Master's prayer. Granted, Luke's version is almost verbatim in Matthew; but there are significant interpolations in Matthew that look as if he's got another source for what he has written down. That looks mighty suspicious to me. Some scholars suppose that there are two Q's. But then why the commonality?

Well, if you want to go into the intricacies of the problem, you can read the book I wrote. It's easy enough to sustain some theory like the existence of Q if you pick and choose among the texts, but when you take all of them, you can't make sense of them using it; it raises more questions than it answers. Later theories have even supposed the existence of one or more additional manuscripts that Luke and Matthew were using.

But, as my book points out, there is a simple solution to this problem, which was not explored at all in all the 250 years that the controversy has been raging: that Matthew wrote the last of the Synoptic Gospels, and was re-editing Mark's Report in the light of Luke's revision of it. All the byzantine complexities suddenly vanish on this hypothesis, and with them the need for Q or any early manuscript for which there is no evidence whatsoever.

Actually, however, my final problem with the Q idea is that it really rests on the supposition that the "historical Jesus" was the wise guru. As I mentioned, if this is true, then it would demand that the earliest writings be the sayings of Jesus. But this predicts that these writings would be the things that would be most carefully preserved, since they would be closest to the ipssisima verba of Jesus himself. But since Mark, Luke, and Matthew in fact did preserve a number of sayings of Jesus, then there would be absolutely no reason for thinking that the more precious, earlier sayings would be destroyed because these superseded them. (Actually, Luke's Report was supposed to supersede Mark's; but evidently the early community did not want Mark's to be lost, and so preserved it). The early community was not eager to throw out writings about Jesus; not if the letters of Paul were so carefully preserved from a time no later than twenty-five years after Jesus died, including such inconsequential things as the letter to Philemon asking him to free his slave Onesimus.

So we may take it as by far the most reasonable hypothesis that Q is a fabrication, not a reasoned conclusion from the evidence of the texts or early testimony. The evidence for it seems stronger than it is only because if the real Jesus was actually the wise guru, then something like Q would have to have existed first. But that begs the question; it clearly can't be used as evidence for the supposition which is the only evidence for it; and so we can discard it for our purposes.