Was Jesus made up by the Romans?

October 16, 2013 • 5:13 am

I guess this “news” has been circulating for over a year, but it’s been off my radar screen. We all know about the squabbles dealing with the existence of Jesus: was he really a divine, wonder-working son of God (WIlliam Lane Craig), an apocalyptic preacher who wasn’t divine at all (Bart Ehrman), or was there simply nobody who ever existed who could even form the nucleus of the Jesus myth (Richard Carrier, Ben “Intenstines” Goren)?

Now there’s a bit of publicity about evidence for the last possibility: a claim that the myth of Jesus was fabricated by Roman officials as a kind of “psychological warfare” to pacify  militant Jewish sects in their Empire.  Jesus, says Biblical scholar Joesph Atwill, was made up to promulgate a Judaism resting on a peaceful Messiah, thereby quelling Jewish dissent.  As PRWeb notes:

“Jewish sects in Palestine at the time, who were waiting for a prophesied warrior Messiah, were a constant source of violent insurrection during the first century,” [Atwill] explains. “When the Romans had exhausted conventional means of quashing rebellion, they switched to psychological warfare. They surmised that the way to stop the spread of zealous Jewish missionary activity was to create a competing belief system. That’s when the ‘peaceful’ Messiah story was invented. Instead of inspiring warfare, this Messiah urged turn-the-other-cheek pacifism and encouraged Jews to ‘give onto Caesar’ and pay their taxes to Rome.”

Was Jesus based on a real person from history? “The short answer is no,” Atwill insists, “in fact he may be the only fictional character in literature whose entire life story can be traced to other sources. Once those sources are all laid bare, there’s simply nothing left.”

Atwill, who will be presenting his theory in London this Saturday, claims to have evidence for his notion:

Atwill’s most intriguing discovery came to him while he was studying “Wars of the Jews” by Josephus [the only surviving first-person historical account of first-century Judea] alongside the New Testament. “I started to notice a sequence of parallels between the two texts,” he recounts. “Although it’s been recognised by Christian scholars for centuries that the prophesies of Jesus appear to be fulfilled by what Josephus wrote about in the First Jewish-Roman war, I was seeing dozens more. What seems to have eluded many scholars is that the sequence of events and locations of Jesus ministry are more or less the same as the sequence of events and locations of the military campaign of [Emperor] Titus Flavius as described by Josephus. This is clear evidence of a deliberately constructed pattern. The biography of Jesus is actually constructed, tip to stern, on prior stories, but especially on the biography of a Roman Caesar.”

How could this go unnoticed in the most scrutinised books of all time? “Many of the parallels are conceptual or poetic, so they aren’t all immediately obvious. After all, the authors did not want the average believer to see what they were doing, but they did want the alert reader to see it. An educated Roman in the ruling class would probably have recognised the literary game being played.” Atwill maintains he can demonstrate that “the Roman Caesars left us a kind of puzzle literature that was meant to be solved by future generations, and the solution to that puzzle is ‘We invented Jesus Christ, and we’re proud of it.'”

Well, this sounds like a pretty thin conspriacy theory to me. (Note that Atwill is also peddling a book about his theory, as well as a movie, “Caesar’s Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus“).  The main problem for me is the unlikelihood of a Roman government confecting a religion and successfully selling it to people of another faith without convincing evidence of its central figure.  Now religions can be invented out of whole cloth, and even catch on: Scientology and Mormonism are two examples.  But more telling is that Atwill seems to have bypassed the scholarly review system for his claims.

Even more telling is Richard Carrier’s dissection and demolition of Atwill’s claims in one of his characteristically long posts (you might want to read it if you’re one of Carrier’s avid fans who span the globe), and appears to demolish Atwill’s claims on the grounds of both low prior probability and distorted or unbelievable evidence—in other words, poor scholarship. It seems to be a deliberate tour de force.

If anyone is so moved to attend Atwill’s symposium on the theory this Saturday at London’s Conway Hall from 9:15 to 5:00 p.m., which includes a free screening of Atwill’s movie, let me know how it goes. I’m guessing the man is a crank—the symposium includes only one speaker besides Atwill—but I’d like to hear more.

h/t: Bradley

Baptist explains why freedom of religion requires public prayer

October 15, 2013 • 10:13 am

Russell D. Moore, identified by PuffHo as the “newly-elected president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, the moral concerns and public policy arm of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination,” has a new take on the First Amendment.

In a piece at PuffHo called “Why public prayer is about more than culture wars,” he carefully explains that preventing public prayers is, in fact, preventing freedom of religion.

His inspiration was the White House’s surprising and distressing siding with the defendants in the case of Town of Greece [New York] v. Galloway, in which the town is being sued for opening city council meetings with prayers. This case, which will be heard this year by the U.S. Supreme Court, is pivotal, for if that conservative court allows such prayers, it will overturn decades of precedents preventing public prayer as a violation of the First Amendment.

In his wisdom, Brother Moore tells us that the reverse is true: freedom of religion requires public prayers:

In fact, most of us support voluntary public prayer not because we oppose the separation of church and state but because we support it.

After all, at issue in this dispute, is the supposed “sectarian” nature of these public prayers. Few suggest that any invocation at all is unconstitutional — especially since invocations have been going on in such forums since the Founding Era. The problem is that these prayers are specifically Christian or specifically Jewish or specifically Jewish or specifically Wiccan, or what have you.

But that’s precisely the point. A prayer, by definition, isn’t a speech made to a public audience but is instead a petition made to a higher Being. For the government to censor such prayers is to turn the government into a theological referee, and would, in fact, establish a state religion: a state religion of generic American civil religious mush that assumes all religions are ultimately the same anyway. To remove the “sectarian” nature of prayer is to reduce such prayers to the level of public service announcements followed by “Amen.”

Really? An absence of religion is a “state religion”? That’s reminiscent of the argument that atheism is a religion.

In fact, I suggest that any invocation of god at all is unconstitutional, and that’s been the case for public meetings for a long time.  And it doesn’t matter if the prayers are Jewish, Christian, or Muslim: they’re prayers to a deity, and that presumes, as Moore implies, the existence of a deity.  Well, lots of Americans don’t accept that, and that’s precisely why the government should remain absolutely neutral on the issue of religion, i.e., no prayers at government meetings.

Moore’s piece is in fact the best example of religious doublespeak I’ve seen in a while. Have a gander at this:

Evangelicals pray in Jesus’ name not because we are seeking to offend our neighbors, but because we’re convinced that through Jesus is the only way we have access to God. We can’t do otherwise. Likewise, a Muslim shouldn’t be expected to speak of God as “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” because one who could do so isn’t a Muslim at all.

When we allow evangelicals to pray as evangelicals, Catholics to pray as Catholics, Muslims to pray as Muslims, Jews to pray as Jews, we are not undermining political pluralism in our democracy, we’re upholding it.

That’s why these prayers are not an establishment of religion. The clergyperson offering the invocation isn’t an extension of the government. His or her prayers aren’t state-written or state-approved.

It doesn’t matter whether the prayers are state-written or specifically state-approved.  If they’re uttered in public, the institution of public prayer becomes state-approved, and if the founders intended anything, it’s not that we should call on God—whichever God is on tap at the moment—in public meetings.  Or will people like Moore allow atheist “prayers” that specifically call on our humanism and decry the existence of God? Here’s one: “Oh humanity, give us the rationality and access to the facts to make our decisions with wisdom, for there’s no God up there to help us.”

I doubt that would be approved! In fact, I’m not in favor of any invocations at all. Why can’t they just start the damn meeting without words of piety? And why, oh why, do religious people like Moore insist that they be allowed to parade their beliefs before public meetings? Isn’t it enough for them to pray in church, or on their own? The faithful just can’t help themselves from trying to share their Good (But Untrue) News with everyone else.

The infliction of religious beliefs on others who may not share those beliefs is unnecessary and offensive. It’s also divisive. The only divisiveness we need here is a stronger wall between church and state.

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Special illustration by reader Pliny the in Between

Predation: don’t blink or you’ll miss it

October 15, 2013 • 8:35 am

Matthew Cobb sent me this video of a leopard killing an impala (WARNING: the kill is not that grisly, but if you don’t want to see nature in fang and claw, don’t watch). It’s all over quickly, and shows how fast a big cat can go from sleeping to nomming. The video is repeated in slow motion beginning 46 seconds in, so you can see how fast the leopard goes into kill mode.

Here’s the information on YouTube:

Saturday 29 September 2012 — We were on a game drive when we spotted a female leopard on the left hand side of the road not five metres from us. On the opposite side was a herd of Impala. The wind was making the Impala very skittish, but they failed to see the leopard.

Something spooked the Impala, we’re assuming it was the wind, as they ran towards her, she leapt up at great speed and snatched a young impala mid-air!

The kill was quick and the leopard immediately dragged the impala off into a nearby donga.

The barking impala continued to ring out through the bush.

Tanya Luhrmann tells us for the gazillionth time that faith is HARD (but useful)

October 15, 2013 • 5:44 am

Okay, I’ll confess some possible sour grapes here: a while back I had the bright idea of writing a New York Times op-ed on the old canard that “science, like religion, is based on faith”. That, after all, has been a misconception promulgated not infrequently in the Times‘s own columns, but one never answered in the same paper.  I wrote the op-ed editor with my idea. He wrote back asking for a precis of what I wanted to discuss, and I responded with what I thought was a pretty good (and detailed) proposal, including a rationale for why such a discussion was necessary, giving the list of NYT pieces that had previously argued that science was based on faith, and showing how my discussion would make new points not discussed by scientists or New Atheists.

I never heard back—not even a “no.”  When I inquired, after a few weeks, about what they had decided, I still got no response. How rude can you get?

But of course we know that the New York Times—unlike the Washington Post, which regularly publishes anti-religious op-eds—spends a lot of time osculating the rumps of the faithful.  One would think that strange in one of the few papers that still has a “science” section, but I suspect that there’s more sympathy for faith at the end of section A.

Well, there are other venues, some that even have more readers, and readers who might benefit from reading about the “faith” canard. Perhaps I’ll try those places.

But it’s especially galling to see, time after time, accommodationist Tanya Luhrmann publish columns on religion in the Times—all of them sympathetic and most of them trivial.  Today’s piece,  “Conjuring up our own gods“, is especially notable for saying virtually nothing new.  In essence, here’s its message:

1. Most Americans believe in supernatural or paranormal phenomena.

2. Such belief appears to be “hard-wired,” which I interpret as “instilled in our brains by natural selection.”

3. Pascal Boyer and others think that religious belief stems from an evolved adaptation to believe in agency (you’ll know this if you’ve read Boyer’s Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origin of Religious Thought).

4.  It may be in our brains to believe in agency, but a sustained religious belief, in which you walk and converse with God, takes work.

There is nothing here that hasn’t been said before.  And Luhrmann’s argument is neither dispositive nor coherent.

First, just because a belief is widespread does not mean that it’s “hard-wired”.  Many people, including most Scandinavians, have managed to shake off their belief in God.  Did they unwire themselves?  Or did they experence reversed natural selection? For millennia most people were xenophobic, and men thought women inferior. Were those ubiquitous beliefs hard-wired, too?  Ubiquity of belief is no evidence for genetics, and, in fact, the very topic of Steve Pinker’s last book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, was how fast we’ve discarded our inimical beliefs over the last few centuries.  Change occurring that fast simply cannot reflect alterations in the frequencies of genes. Such change must be mediated by culture alone, and Pinker gives several explanations.

If religion is in any sense hard-wired, then in my view it’s a byproduct of other evolved aspects of our brain, and not necessarily the need to believe in agency.  It could, for instance, simply be an evolved credulity, so that kids tend to believe what their parents tell them. (That would be adaptive.) Start with some parents who believe in the supernatural for any reason at all (and there are, by the way, some religions, past and present, in which God wasn’t an active agent on Earth), and religious belief gets promulgated culturally. (I’d say as a “meme,” but I don’t like that concept.) When people ask me about Boyer’s theory, or another theory about why belief in God was adaptive, my response is always, “Well, maybe, but religion originated so long ago that we just don’t know. I have no idea where it comes from.”  I’m an evolutionist, but I don’t even have a strong opinion on the matter. There are, of course, many other theories about how religion came to pass.

Nevertheless, without mentioning alternative theories, Luhrmann presents Boyer’s (and Justin Barrett’s) as the best explanation:

One interpretation of these data is that belief in the supernatural is hard-wired. Scholars like the anthropologist Pascal Boyer, author of “Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origin of Religious Thought,” and the psychologist Justin L. Barrett, author of “Why Would Anyone Believe in God?” argue that the fear that one would be eaten by a lion, or killed by a man who wanted your stuff, shaped the way our minds evolved. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors were more likely to survive if they interpreted ambiguous noise as the sound of a predator. Most of the time it was the wind, of course, but if there really was danger, the people who worried about it were more likely to live.

That inclination to search for an agent has evolved into an intuition that an invisible agent, or god, may be there. (You can argue this theory from different theological positions. Mr. Boyer is an atheist, and treats religion as a mistake. Mr. Barrett is an evangelical Christian, who thinks that God’s hand steered evolution.)

Note how she a). elides from presenting one among many theories into the tacit assumption that that theory is right; and b). doesn’t present other theories for the origin of religion.

But then Luhrmann draws a distinction between “intuitive plausibility” and “sober faith”.  And, as always, she trots out her old Bucephalus, the idea that having “sober faith” is hard—very hard. That, of course, was the topic of her last book, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God. (See my note about that book here, and search the site for “Luhrmann” to see my many posts on her subsequent columns and talk shows.)

Luhrmann then relates the story of a man called Jack, who made up an imagined animal—a fox—as a “thought form” (“tulpa” in Buddhism) to help focus his meditation and calm him down.  But in order to keep that calming fox in mind, Jack had to concentrate. Otherwise the Meditative Fox would slip away, presumably hunting Meditative Hares.

And that brings us to Luhrmann’s tedious lesson: that having real faith—imagining God as walking by your side and communicating with you—is HARD. You have to work at it, but if you do, God will eventually show up. (Read God Talks Back to see this thesis in extenso.):

The mere fact that people like Jack find it intuitively possible to have invisible companions who talk back to them supports the claim that the idea of an invisible agent is basic to our psyche. But Jack’s story also makes it clear that experiencing an invisible companion as truly present — especially as an adult — takes work: constant concentration, a state that resembles prayer.

It may seem paradoxical, but this very difficulty may be why evangelical churches emphasize a personal, intimate God. While the idea of God may be intuitively plausible — just as there are no atheists in foxholes, there are atheists who have prayed for parking spots — belief can be brittle. Indeed, churches that rely on a relatively impersonal God (like mainstream Protestant denominations) have seen their congregations dwindle over the last 50 years.

To experience God as walking by your side, in conversation with you, is hard. Evangelical pastors often preach as if they are teaching people how to keep God constantly in mind, because it is so easy not to pray, to let God’s presence slip away. But when it works, people experience God as alive.

Secular liberals sometimes take evolutionary psychology to mean that believing in God is the lazy option. But many churchgoers will tell you that keeping God real is what’s hard.

And many churchgoers will probably tell you the opposite!

Luhrmann’s conclusion is, I think, conditioned by her work with the Vineyard, an evangelical Christian sect. And in some cases those people do have to practice before they imagine that they hear God speaking to them. It’s not all that easy to adopt a delusion. But it’s not so clear that everyone who finds consolation in God has to work that hard. And, anyway, so what? And why does Luhrmann need to write a column saying exactly what she said in her book, but adding on unproven assertions about the origin of faith?

Some of Luhrmann’s defenders argue that she’s a nonbeliever and is merely an anthropologist reporting how faith works in America.  Maybe so, but then why call her book “When God Talks Back”?  And why write so many columns defending faith?

Lurhmann was, of course, funded by Templeton, and in their report on her work, Templeton elides from “reporting about people’s belief in God” to “reporting how people experience God.” The latter, of course, sort of assumes that God exists. Here’s a bit from the Templeton Foundation report on Luhrmann’s work:

As an anthropologist, Luhrmann is clear that her job is not to assess the veracity of people’s experiences, but she concludes that believers are genuinely changed. Further, the work it takes to experience God in this way enables people to hold onto their beliefs in the face of the skepticism of the secular world.

That’s how you put a Goddy spin on what purports to be pure anthropology.