Salon.com's Remarkably Stupid Historical Jesus Article

A Muslim friend showed me this  viral article about Jesus by Valerie Tarico entitled, “9 Things You Think You Know about Jesus that are Probably Wrong.”

In this post, I don't care about convincing anyone to be a conservative evangelical.  I’m mostly here to spank Salon for playing with the loaded gun of history like a 7 year old in a 3:00 AM government ad. Weather permitting, we may even cut a line or two about the importance of integrity in media.

No Historical Jesus scholar, ultra-liberal to conservative could read through the article without laughing, yet, it has blackened social media like an oil spill.  I'm also ticked these Da Vinci Code myths are eternally being slayed only to reincarnate for sequels like a mummy in a Brandon Fraser franchise.

The screenshots of Tarico's claims are followed by responses:

It would be sooo unusual if Jesus was celibate, he must have married:







Tarico’s source is a psychologist who wrote a Huffington piece. He gives no sources for his claim.  Bart D. Ehrman, the most famous American New Testament historian alive (and probably the most disliked by evangelical believers), ain't amused with this position:

Bart Ehrman: "Yes, my house does contain many leather bound books and smells of rich mahogany."

Sometimes it is argued—for example, in The Da Vinci Code—that Jesus must have been married... [T]his claim, as plausible as it sounds, is in fact wrong. We do know of Jewish men in the first century who were single and celibate. Strikingly, they are men who shared a religious perspective similar to that of the historical Jesus… The like-minded Essenes before Jesus and the like-minded Paul after him—all of them apocalyptic Jewish men—lived life as single and celibate. It is not at all implausible that Jesus did as well.  [1]

Ehrman also points out that Jesus taught there would be no marriage in the kingdom of heaven and regularly implied that we should seek to model the kingdom on earth: “On these grounds, my best guess as a historian is that Jesus was single and celibate.”[2]

I’m not just picking the view of one idiomatic scholar.  Anthony Le Donne has recently written the most significant study on the possibility of a Mrs. Jesus in the English language and concluded the same thing as Ehrman:  Jesus probably wasn’t married...Sorry if that's boring.

No Salon article containing the word "Jesus" could exist without also containing the word "gay" at least once.  It's just one of those laws of nature. Since I’ve said Jesus likely wasn’t married, I’ll provide two reasons why it is utterly unlikely Jesus was gay:

1) Every source we have has him declaring the Hebrew Bible authoritative and it was the Hebrew Bible that every second-Temple Jewish text that makes a judgment on homosexuality was informed by when they monolithically pronounce homosexuality sinful. (That was a long sentence.) Second-Temple Jewish writings take a “univocal stance against homosexual conduct.”[3] Jesus never brings the specific subject up in the gospels for the same reason I rarely go around teaching people pedophilia is wrong in my 21^stcentury American context.  It wasn’t a matter of moral controversy for the Jewish context of his ministry.

2) Galatians is an undisputed Pauline in which Paul swears he hung out with Peter fifteen days in Jerusalem and with Jesus’ brother James. Later, him and the muchachos (including John) met to bust theological kneecaps at the Jerusalem council. Weird his friends forgot to forward him the memo about Jesus being the only member of Judea’s rainbow initiative--especially since homo-sex had him constantly fighting off a room full of angry wet cats in his Corinth church plant. 

The Gospel of Philip *sigh*:

Ah! Yes! Those boring four Gospels composed within the 1st century with earlier independent sources and Aramaic allusions are pronounced by Tarico to be a hopeless historical mess.  "Only a set of hunches and traditions." Who cares about them anyways? Your grandmother? The kids want explosions!

But fear not reader! You need a gospel more spiritually auuuthentic--like those Sanskrit tattoos Angelina Jolie has.  And preferably one allegedly suppressed by a male Catholic conspiracy. The uber-sexy 3^rdcentury, spiritually abstruse, Gnostic Gospel of Phillip--written by someone with no historical contact with Jesus or his followers--has donned his tights and will deliver the Historical Jesus to us like a damsel in his rippling biceps; This Jesus has a Hollywood crush on, get this, Mary Magdalene (who I assure you was a pale, redhead fox).  Is there no end to the sexiness of this formulaic forbidden-love movie pitch?

Unfortunately, reality is much more boring.  The big name New Testament scholar Craig Blomberg writes, “Philip is dependent primarily on Matthew’s Gospel for his information about Jesus...he reveals next to nothing about the pre-Synoptic stages of the Gospel tradition.” [4]

I should point out, the Philip manuscript doesn’t read Jesus used to kiss Mary "on her mouth." That reading must be supplied by the imagination because there is a physical hole in the manuscript.[5] We can’t be certain the original read “kiss her on her mouth” unless we discover more textual-critical evidence.  Tarico is aware of this complicating factor but has omitted the detail in this article.

We as modern readers immediately associate the kissing in this text with sex, but there are good reasons to believe Philip’s ancient audience wouldn’t. Christian kissing has a long history in the early church and Philip has an entire mystical interpretation of it that is applied to all the disciples.[6]

In Ehrman's opinion, “When Jesus kisses Mary, then, it is not a prelude to sex. It is a symbolic statement that she received the revelation of truth that he conveyed to his disciples.”

A wedding? 

Tarico's evidence from the canonical gospels that Jesus and Mary were hitched is exegetical voodoo. These are literally “clues” we must “decode.”  She holds a seance with the dead ghost of the Da Vinci Code then channels its moldy words into pixels so it can haunt a fresh audience again. She speculates John 2’s report of a wedding is actually Jesus’ wedding to Mary.  If this is true can someone please explain to me why Jesus had to be “invited” (ἐκλήθη) to his own wedding (2:2)?  Also, who goes immediately to stay with momma after their wedding ceremony (2:12)? And why is Mary always distinguished from the other Marys in the gospels by the fact that she was from Magdala?  Why didn’t the gospel writers just say Jesus’ wife (or at least the ancient Greek equivalent for Boo Thang?)  I’m sure it’s all just part of the international Catholic misogynistic conspiracy.

Jesus' Celestial Posse:

Odd Tarico thinks it’s an open case whether Jesus had 12 disciples.  I specifically recall the specialist in Christian origins John Dickson at Macquarie University listing the 12 disciples as a point most historians agree on during an interview.  Professor of New Testament Scott McKnight confirms, “that Jesus associated himself especially with twelve of his followers is a datum firmly established by good arguments across a broad spectrum of modern Jesus studies.”[8] In 1994 J. P. Meier concluded in the Journal of Biblical literature: “When one draws together the arguments...one position emerges as clearly the more probable: the circle of the Twelve did exist during Jesus’ public ministry.[9]

The gospels imply Jesus was making a theological statement about renewing the twelve tribes of Israel.  Why does Tarico think this is astrology and not history? If you follow her link for this source it takes you to an interview on her blog by a Dr. Tony Nugent.  In that interview Nugent includes the twelve tribes of Israel and 12 disciples in a list of things that “have their roots in [the]…twelve signs of the zodiac…”

This thesis is impossible because the zodiac wasn’t reduced into the twelve constellations until the 5^th century BC by the Babylonians.[10]  The twelve tribes of Israel are reported far earlier.  Secular dating of the Genesis sources have the twelve tribes mentioned earlier than the ninth century BC.[11]  It's tremendously anachronistic to say allusions to the number twelve in the Hebrew Bible are taken from the zodiac.

 Off topic, but believe it or not, it’s actually true that the origin of eggs being sold by the dozen goes back to astrology.


Hunches shrouded in the fog of history?

Tarico’s attitude is that our historical grasp of Jesus is the epistemological equivalent of chasing a greased, ghost pig naked in a skating rink. (I'm bad with metaphors lately.)  Every time we extend our noetic clutches, the greasy, ectoplasmal sow of history flits through our grapples leaving us with little more than a haze of hunches. (That was an elegant sentence.  I think I'll make it into one of those cursive, sidebar-quote things.)  In reality, it's extremely popular for scholars to date the history-bursting creed in 1 Corinthians 15 to the mid-to-late 30’s. Just to be obnoxious I'll plunder 13 big-name examples from Habermas' doctoral dissertation.

I'm told lists like this bore readers, but it's full of German umlaut dots that are supposed to impress you.

Oscar Cullmann (University of Paris); Reginald Fuller (Virginia Seminary); Pannenberg (University of Munich); Wilckens (Berlin Theological College); Hengel (University Tübingen); Marxsen (Westfälische Wilhelms University); Conzelmann (University of Göttingen);Hans-Ruedi Weber; A.M. Hunter (University Aberdeen, Scotland) Raymond E. Brown (Union Theological Seminary); Norman Perrin (University Chicago); George E. Ladd (Fuller Theological); Neufeld (‎University of Waterloo).

We have a written record of a crucified, risen, messianic figure who was believed to have appeared to great numbers after his death within less than a decade after his execution.  Ehrman’s book on Jesus’ Existence illustrates how the synoptic sources can be grounded in sufficiently early Aramaic culture.  The celebrated scholar Richard Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses argues the gospel sources link us with eyewitness testimony.  There are huge doubts about certain elements and logions of Jesus’ career, and I’m not interested in regurgitating the banal apologetics party lines here.

Nevertheless, Tarico’s position ain't reflective of modern Historical Jesus studies. Michael Bird, who has written a survey of the state and direction of the current situation, writes: “The dominant view today seems to be that we can know pretty well what Jesus was out to accomplish, that we can know a lot about what he said and that those two things make sense within the world of first-century Judaism.”^[12]  Craig Evan’s assessment of our current place in historical Jesus studies concludes the same, “the persistent trend in recent years is to see the Gospels as essentially reliable.” 

You know that hopeless frustration you get when a creationist tells you there isn’t a shred of evidence for evolution?  Now you know how New Testament scholars feel when your friends parrot the idea that Jesus may not have even existed.


This is not something the field considers itself uncertain of.  Thanks to the ubiquity of this internet myth, I happen to have several dozen quotes by New Testament scholars on hand refuting it.  I’ve narrowed them down to seven for brevity:

William Lane Craig who did his dissertation in historical Jesus studies under the celebrity German theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg states:“[The position that Jesus never existed ]…this is a position which is so extreme that to call it marginal would be an understatement.  It doesn’t even appear on the map of contemporary New Testament scholarship.”[13]

Before he went on to write his book explaining why we know Jesus existed, Bart Ehrman once said in interview, “I don’t think there is any serious historian who doubts the existence of Jesus...we have more evidence for Jesus than we have for almost anybody from his time period.”[14]

Paul Maier professor of Ancient History at Western Michigan states in interview: “Anyone who uses that argument [that Jesus never existed] is simply flaunting his ignorance. I hate to say it but it’s about that bad.”[15]

Gary Habermas who I reference because his dissertation surveyed the positions of critical historical Jesus scholars among a variety of topics states, “With very, very, few exceptions virtually no scholar doubts or denies that Jesus existed.”[16]

Graeme Clarke Senior Lecturer at the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Western Australia has been quoted stating, “Frankly, I know of no ancient historian who would ever twinge with doubt about the existence of Jesus Christ. The documentary evidence is simply overwhelming.”[17]

John Dickson Senior Research Fellow with the Department of Ancient History at Macquarie University has become so annoyed with this claim that he wrote:

Head of New Testament Studies at the Swedish University of Gothenburg Gunnar Samuelsson writes:

(Someone is going to get mad after reading the above quotes and ask why I haven't even mentioned Carrier and Price.  So there, I mentioned them.)

I'm tempted to continue my tantrum over the link in the article that leads to Tarico’s website.  It claims most scholars hold certain positions that most scholars emphatically reject. For example, Tarico says the gospel story about the women at the tomb is believed by most scholars to be a mythological fiction based in earlier myths.  In reality, this element of the gospel sources is considered one of our most reliable according to Gary Habermas who surveyed more than 1,400 scholarly publications on the historical Jesus in German, French and English. (The testimony of women was so repudiated in the first century that this embarrassing element in the sources wouldn't have been contrived by Christians.) [20] Modern scholars don't interpret the mystery religions into the gospels because there was little footing for them in 1st century Judea unlike Alexandrian Judaism.

Conclusion:

 Some of Tarico’s points in her click-bait article are generally accurate.[21]  Despite these, the article contains so much historical puerility and so many allusions idiomatic to sensationalist conspiracy writers that I would rather it not be read at all. I'm aware my words have been harsh, but I deem them appropriate considering Tarico's ideas have been spotlighted by Salon, Huffington and Alternet.  I'd like to think Salon and Alternet would update corrections to this article they are "proud to feature."

Update: Salon.com and Alternet made no significant corrections to the article (7/15/2015)