Can the Jesus of History Support the Christ of Faith?

The latest issue of The New Yorker includes an essay by Adam Gopnik, “We’re Still Not Done With Jesus,” on the scholarly debates about the origins of Christianity. In the piece, Gopnik positions himself as a nuanced balancer between two serious schools (though he tilts toward the first): a school that holds that the early Christians mythologized and invented, but on the basis of some set of true events; and a school that treats the historical core of Christian faith as illusory and inaccessible and the books of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John as pure literary-mystical inventions.

Entirely absent is any meaningful treatment of the arguments for taking the Gospels seriously as what they claim to be: eyewitness accounts, or syntheses of eyewitness accounts, with a straightforward claim to basic historical credibility. This absence is not exactly surprising to a longtime reader of Gopnik’s work. But I will admit that I had been hoping — wishcasting? — that we were finally moving past a cultural landscape in which the only interpretations of Christian origins offered to inquiring readers of secular publications were those bent, as Gopnik puts it, on “rehabilitating aspects of Christianity on terms that a secular scholar can respect,” while taking for granted that “nothing happened quite as related.”

To be clear, I would not expect a non-Christian writer to simply embrace the thesis that events in the New Testament did mostly happen as related. But readers who look at the headline of Gopnik’s essay and its implicit questions — We aren’t done with Jesus? Why aren’t we? — deserve a fuller answer than you can get from just considering the range of perspectives he presents. They deserve an explanation of how the persistence of Christianity is connected not just to the Gospel story’s moral or mythopoetic power, but to the enduring plausibility of its historical claims even in the face of so many determined debunking efforts.

To illustrate this point, I’m going to offer a response to just one passage in Gopnik’s essay. Here he glosses a theory from the religion scholar Elaine Pagels that tries to explain how, if the Gospel accounts are later mythologizations, the early Christians might have moved from an initial spiritual belief in Jesus’ continuing presence in their lives to the frankly supernatural claim about a literal resurrection:

Pagels, rightly but audaciously, likens the evolving belief in Jesus’ Resurrection to that of the followers of the Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson in our own time. During his life, many devotees of the Brooklyn rebbe believed he was the Messiah, a conviction that he encouraged without ever explicitly confirming — much like the Jesus of the Gospels. After Schneerson’s death, in 1994, only a small portion of believers insisted that he remained physically alive, but others continued to experience him as an enduring presence, a guide still available for inner light and intercession, as Jesus was for Paul.

In times of catastrophe, such beliefs tend to harden into certainty. If the Lubavitcher community had been struck by something on the scale of the Judeans’ loss of the Temple and their enslavement, what are now marginal, hallucinatory visions of the rebbe would almost certainly take on a more declarative, redemptive form. “Long live the Rebbe, King Moshiach forever!” — the Lubavitcher slogan seen on New York street corners — is, in essence, no different from “Christ is risen.” Both trace the same arc from comforting spiritual presence to asserted physical reality.

So this is a framework that casts the catastrophe of the Jewish-Roman war that began in the year 66 as the crucial instigator of Christian belief in Jesus’ literal resurrection from the dead. I don’t want to say that this is an impossible framework to maintain, since scholarly debates about the proper interpretation of ancient texts are never-ending. But it’s a very peculiar one if you just follow the consensus of secular scholarship, which does tend to date the Gospels to a period after the catastrophe, but assumes that Paul’s letters to the early communities of Christians (the letters that secular scholars consider genuine, at least) predate the wars of the 60s, the destruction of the temple, and everything that this theory casts as instigating the shift from the spiritual to the literal in Christian faith.

In Paul, as in the Gospels, you don’t have Jesus portrayed as a source of “inner light” who is glimpsed after his death through “marginal, hallucinatory visions.” No: You already have Christianity in a recognizable form, a missionary faith that preaches a messiah crucified and raised on the third day, with the same kind of specific claims about Jesus’ appearances after death that are featured in the Gospel accounts, the same kind of specific witnesses invoked.

You can argue about whether this early Christianity’s understanding of Jesus’ identity — is he God himself or a human being raised to supernatural kingship? — is identical to later Christian orthodoxy, as you can argue over a variety of other questions about Paul’s personal beliefs. But the idea of Christianity as a religion that only becomes obsessed with the risen Christ after the trauma of the mid-60s is a highly implausible supposition, unmoored from what we actually know about the most influential pre-60s Christian preaching. And what practicing Christians typically believe about the origins of their faith — that “Christ is risen!” was essential from the start — seems much more likely to be true.

This isn’t a heterodox argument or Christian special pleading; I’m just following the conventional scholarly consensus about how to date the various New Testament books. But now I will go a little ways into heterodoxy: Every consensus contains within it minority reports, and I think the minority reports on the dating of the Gospels — which place them, like Paul’s letters, closer to Jesus’ life and death — have a lot going for them, in ways that would also make something like Gopnik’s theory of Christian origins impossible.

One key example: The Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles, which carry the story of Jesus’ followers forward after his alleged resurrection, seem to have the same author, and the consensus position is that this Luke-Acts author was working after the destruction of the temple, sometime in the 70s, if not much later.

But there is also another theory, by no means just confined to scholars with conservative theological commitments, which holds that Luke-Acts was probably completed by the early 60s or late 50s, much closer in time to Paul’s actual journey, and crucially before the major events of that decade — not just before the Jewish-Roman war but before Paul’s own martyrdom, the death or execution of other crucial figures in the early church, and the first Roman persecutions of Christianity.

The strongest support for a later dating is that the Gospel of Luke includes passages in which Jesus predicts the destruction of the temple, which themselves seem to adapt passages from the Gospel of Mark. To credit an earlier dating is to potentially credit Jesus with a supernatural gift of prophecy, which secular scholarship is not inclined to do.

But against that reading you have to set the deep strangeness of the Luke-Acts author, supposedly writing decades after his main character’s martyrdom and a massive, epochal trauma in the life of Christianity, Judaism and the Roman Empire, deciding to just cut his story off in the early 60s with Paul still alive and preaching in Rome, with no clear indicator in the text of what was coming next, both his death and the subsequent political-religious upheavals.

Instead, the larger narrative told about Paul’s ministry seems rhetorically tailored for the landscape that existed before the Jewish revolt and Neronian persecution: a world with an influential Jewish community spread throughout the empire, in which Christians were trying to justify their own message and mission to the Gentiles in terms familiar to Judaism while simultaneously seeking the friendship of Roman authorities, whose persecution they didn’t yet have reason to fear. To the extent that Acts reads propagandistically in any way, its propaganda seems aimed at a landscape that existed while Paul was traveling and preaching, and that vanished soon thereafter.

Which means that there is a very straightforward reading of Luke-Acts that explains why it doesn’t include Paul’s martyrdom or any reckoning with everything that followed. It’s because those things hadn’t happened yet, the books were completed by the early 60s at the latest — and as such provide further evidence that a fully supernaturalist Christianity, Gospel narratives and all, was off and running before the traumas of war, persecution and exile intervened.

This is a gloss on a complex debate that doesn’t address all the possible counterarguments. But I offer it because it’s just one example of why so many Christian believers who engage seriously with their religion’s origins don’t feel like the reasonable and historically minded person is required to choose between Gopnik’s two disenchanted options. They think that the best evidence, the most serious reading of history, still makes the original interpretation as plausible as ever, and the mystery not disenchanted but intact.