The Crucifiable Jesus
Steven Brian Pounds
Thus, with regard to the un-crucifiability of the Cynic Jesus, this observation supports the general critique of Christiopher Tuckett cited in the introduction: “it may be a difficulty for some 'Q-1' based Jesuses that the resulting picture is so unpolemical, and inoffensive, that it becomes all the harder to envisage why such a Jesus aroused such intense passion and hatred.”812
The issue of crucifiability can also be considered in one final negative assessment. Though not within the academic mainstream, the mythicist view of Jesus of Nazareth has gained some ground in popular culture within the last few decades.813 Yet, one must ask why a Roman crucifixion would have been fabricated for a mythical and later historicised royal messiah figure. The self-defeating nature of the combination is obvious. The crucifixion itself is thus a falsifier of this position.
Footnote.
813 The nearest example to a scholarly work is Richard Carrier, On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2014); In a review, Daniel N. Gullotta points specifically to the fact of Jesus’ Roman crucifixion as a rebuttal of the mythicist view. – “On Richard Carrier’s Doubts,” JSHJ 15 (2017): 331-334.
Below is part of Carrier's response to Daniel N. Gullotta on the crucifixion issue.
Is a Crucifixion Too Political to Invent?
Richard Carrier.
Gullotta also makes a strange argument about how Jews couldn’t have imagined Satan crucifying Jesus. I demonstrate in OHJ (as Gullotta is begrudgingly forced to admit) that many mythical gods had revolting and embarrassing deaths or fates, so we can’t appeal to a crucifixion as evidence one of them was real. Inanna was murdered and hung naked from a nail (before rising from the dead triumphant on the third day: OHJ, pp. 45-47). Does that then mean there must have been a real Inanna actually crucified in hell, because no one would make that up? It’s an illogical argument that I dispatch quite thoroughly in OHJ (pp. 610-16). Gullotta’s response is to say that I do “not reckon with the normality of crucifixion within ancient Palestine” and that that “depoliticizes early Christianity.” It actually doesn’t. I fully center Christianity in its political context (OHJ, pp. 153-63).
It’s not as if humiliating people by crucifying them, stripping them naked and publicly hanging up their corpses, was not just as common and just as “political” in other ancient kingdoms such as the Sumeria that Inanna’s myth was born in. That’s in fact why that happens to her: it was the most humiliating form of death then known to the Sumerians. So her triumph can be elevated by the depths of her seeming defeat. And that’s why both Hebrews and the Ascension of Isaiah say everything on earth has copies in the firmament: Satan would use in the sky the same worst form of execution then known on earth. It is precisely because that was the worst form of death then known, that it would be the very death imagined for Jesus to suffer. That doesn’t get us to evidence it happened. Any more than it does for Inanna.
But more importantly, Gullotta evidently missed this: on pp. 61-62 of OHJ, I cite and summarize Gunnar Samuelsson’s Crucifixion in Antiquity: An Inquiry into the Background of the New Testament Terminology of Crucifixion (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011), who demonstrates that in fact our understanding of “crucifixion” does not exist in ancient Greek vocabulary. The words Paul uses for the crucifixion of Jesus also referred to Jewish execution (as also demonstrated by D.J. Halperin and J.A. Fitzmyer, whom I also cite on this point), and many other forms and methods of death under several known kingdoms of the time, and are identical to the words used even for executions referenced and performed in the Old Testament. In other words, Gullotta is anachronistically assuming Paul and his Christians meant a Roman crucifixion. He is arbitrarily politicizing what Paul says. There actually is no clear evidence that that even occurred to them at the time. Their language and descriptions are never so specific. And to the contrary, Romans 13 suggests Paul could not have even imagined the Romans crucifying Jesus. That would have refuted his entire argument in Romans 13! (So had that been true, he either would have had to make a completely different argument in Romans 13, or else have anticipated and answered this rather obvious rebuttal to it that the letter’s recipients would have leveled at him.)
So, again, Gullotta’s argument here makes no logical sense.
Gullotta similarly spirals into the most illogical reasoning when he argues that “Jesus’ crucifixion by Romans is depicted in every one of the earliest narrations of his death” and subsequently we see “a widespread reception of Jesus as a crucified man.” Um.
There is only one source for Jesus being crucified by Romans: the Gospel according to Mark. All other references to his being so killed derive from that Gospel. Citing a thousand xeroxes of an urban legend is not evidence that legend is true. Citing people who read one of those xeroxes is not evidence that legend is true. Citing people who wrote a new version of the legend after reading one of those xeroxes is not evidence that legend is true. What Gullotta is doing is simply insane as a historical method. It has no place in history. It is so illogical an argument it only belongs to apologetics (“there are thousands of manuscripts of the Bible, and thousands of people quote it, therefore what the Bible says is true!”). I cannot fathom how Gullotta, who is supposed to be getting a Ph.D. in history, can have written such an argument without vomiting. At any rate, I dispatched it already in OHJ, Ch. 7.1.
Ultimately, Gullotta concludes that “
Given our sources concerning Jesus’ death and knowledge about his executed contemporaries, the reality of a crucified Jesus as another failed messianic pretender from Palestine is remarkably more likely than a demonic crucifixion in outer space.” But he never explains why it’s more likely. Much less why it’s “remarkably more likely”; assuming he thinks that means something different from “merely more likely,” which then gets us to asking what then does he mean by remarkably more likely, which again gets us to that realization I started with: Gullotta really needs to buckle down and learn some math, before he can even understand what his own words mean. Much less why they are true. His evidence doesn’t increase the probability of his proposal in any discernible way. “Everyone borrowed, learned of, and riffed on Mark’s tale of a Roman execution” does not increase the probability of the crucifixion any more than the resurrection, or Mark’s account of the blotting out of the sun, or rending of the temple curtain, or literally any other claim in Mark. That everyone copied and expanded on it, is not evidence it’s true. Not even a little bit. Likewise all his other arguments here, which simply make no sense. How do they raise the probability of historicity? I cannot see any logical way they could.
Now, I could do his job for him, and actually convert all his arguments into one that’s actually logically coherent at least:
he should be asking why, within a century, Mark’s fable eclipsed all others that may have existed. Like, for example, the version that appears to have been in the original Ascension of Isaiah, where Satan kills Jesus. Or whatever version the Christians who called Mark’s version a “cleverly devised myth” were advocating in its place, whom 2 Peter was forged to “refute” by fabricating an eyewitness encounter with a historical Jesus. That’s at least getting to a coherent argument. I can’t understand why it never occurs to Gullotta to attempt it. Because it’s the only sensible version of the arguments he clumsily does attempt here instead. It’s especially mysterious that he didn’t think of it because…it’s in my book! That’s right, I devote an entire section to describing and answering exactly this argument: OHJ, pp. 349-56 (and see also: pp. 275-77).
What remains is a fact: We have no reason to believe Jesus’s execution by Satan wouldn’t be imagined a crucifixion; and we have no more reason to believe it had to be historical because it was a crucifixion, than we have to believe Inanna’s death must be historical because it was a crucifixion. And the fact that all references to Inanna’s death evoked her crucifixion, would not increase the probability that it really happened, even by a single fraction of a percent. These just aren’t logical arguments. So why is historicity being defended with them? In a peer reviewed journal no less? If this really is the best there is to defend historicity with…isn’t historicity doomed?
On the Historicity of Jesus: The Daniel Gullotta Review
https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/13573
Carrier misses the point - to invent a Roman execution carries with it the very real possibility of being exposed as false. Defamation - charging the Romans with a crime would have placed the gospel writers in a
precarious position. Paul is not the answer here - his crucifixion story does not cancel the gospel crucifixion story, a story that relates to a King of the Jews - a seditious charge under Roman occupation of Judaea. (As history testifies to the last Hasmonean King proclaiming himself King without Roman authority.)
The gospel story 'sold' because it contains a historical truth - not because the gospel writers invented an earthly crucifixion for Paul's mythical, intellectual or philosophical crucifixion story. The gospel crucifixion story relates to history, it relates to Hasmonean history - long before the time of Pilate and Tiberius. The gospel story, in and of itself, is not history. It reflects, it remembers, history relevant to the story the gospel writers want to write.
The Crucifiable Jesus
Steven Brian Pounds
4 Final Conclusion
Over the course of this dissertation, we have seen that a criterion of historicity related to Jesus’ crucifixion has been too often employed in a cursory manner. It has been over-used as a rhetorical tool by scholars to polemicise against rival portraits of the historical Jesus. Many of the claims made related to a criterion of crucifixion or the language of crucifiability have digressed into pure rhetorical flourish. To label the Jesus of a given reconstruction as un-crucifiable, within the span of only a sentence or two, without further substantiation is thus unwarranted.
Each reconstruction of the historical Jesus is a hermeneutical circle made up of numerous points of assumed or reconstructed “facts”. Most of these hermeneutical circles have their own historical explanations of how Jesus was crucified and have connected the dots between Jesus’ life and death. Only rarely, as in a couple of the cases cited immediately above, is not at least a cursory attempt made at offering basic cause for Jesus’ death. Thus, with regard to internal coherence, most scholars have at least on the surface produced a crucifiable Jesus. It can only be by challenging the assumed “facts” or points that connect Jesus’ life and death that the crucifiability of a given Jesus can be called into question. This was the case in our assessment of the use of the temple incident as a sole cause in certain reconstructions and with the doubt that Pilate ordered Jesus’ crucifixion.
A noteworthy and ironic phenomenon that is observable over the course of our study is the tendency of certain advocates of a crucifable Jesus to dismiss one another’s reconstructions on the basis of crucifiability. Richard Horsley dismisses the apocalyptic Jesus, who is often associated with a messianic acclamation, as uncrucifiable.814 Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza uses the crucifixion as a criterion to rule out Jesus’ Jewish conflicts.815 N. T. Wright, who emphasises Jewish religious conflicts, dismisses Horsley’s Jesus as uncrucifiable.816 This circular back and forth between these scholars appears to demonstrate that they implicitly assume their own emphasised points of conflict to have solid historical footings whilst they consider the conflicts emphasised by those scholars they critique to have faulty footings. Implicitly these scholars suppose that the points in their own hermeneutical circles are historical “facts” or data, whilst the points of those they critique are no historical data. In contrast to the circularity of these mutual critiques, we found historically plausible points in all three of the reconstruction types examined. Moreover, we found that these sets of conflict – based respectively on Torah violation, economic critique, and messianic acclamation – are not mutually exclusive and offer plausible components in the overall reconstruction of a crucifiable Jesus.
Much of this dissertation has undertaken the task of unpacking and qualifying many of the related assertions and assumptions made by scholars in using the rhetoric or criterion of crucifiability. In the future, at a bare minimum the issues examined in chapters six through eight need to be noted and considered in any claim related to crucifiability. As we have seen, other historical considerations not strictly related to crucifixion come into play strongly when determining the plausibility of an historical reconstruction of Jesus’ death. On this point, our conclusion concerning the criterion allies to some degree with the recent relativisation of other criteria of historicity in Jesus research. Our findings have demonstrated that the criterion of crucifiability cannot be applied as an absolute arbiter of historicity on the atomistic or global level of reconstruction without further qualification or support. In the future, rather than using the language of “criterion” in connection with Jesus’ crucifixion, it would be more advisable for scholars to use the language of historical “control”. The fact of Jesus’ crucifixion can indeed serve as a control of historical reconstruction. Moreover, in certain cases, it is indeed justifiable to critique an historical reconstruction of Jesus as “incomplete” because it fails to reconstruct conflicts from the life of Jesus that may have materialised in his Roman execution. In sum, crucifiability can be a useful departure point and control for reconstructing the historical Jesus, but it is a poor criterion when applied in an isolated manner and without further historical justification.
(all formatting is my own)
So - bottom line in understanding the gospel crucifixion story ? ''
use the language of historical ''control'',
''historical justification''.
That the gospel writers used their imagination in creating their Jesus story, that they used the OT as a source, that they used theological ideas - does not include making a false charge against Rome during the time of Tiberius and Pilate. That their charge stood, that it went without Roman denial, is testimony to an historical event prior to the time of Tiberius and Pilate - an historical event the gospel writers deemed relevant to their story. The only King of the Jews executed by the Romans (Marc Antony in 37 b.c. in Antioch) was Antigonus II Mattathias.
Antigonus II Mattathias
