Blogging through Doherty’s book – Interlude I

I’ve made it through the first couple of chapters of Earl Doherty’s book, Jesus: Neither God Nor Man. I’m delighted that Earl Doherty himself, as well as some other mythicists, have taken the time be part of the conversation taking place around the posts on this subject.

The book continues to promise that treatment of important questions will come later. We’ll see. But for a reader used to interacting with academic arguments which provide detailed evidence and which are to be faulted if they fail to take account of important work relevant to their own thesis, this book does not offer the sort of thesis that would be likely to get passed as a dissertation, or make it past peer review with an academic publisher.

Obviously mythicism is unlike the various forms of creationism in that it is saying “Somebody did it” and not the much more scientifically/historically/academically/intellectually problematic “God/aliens/an Intelligent Designer did it.” But as always, that has not been the point of my comparison. Doherty’s mythicist “case” is like that of creationists in more important ways. It offers a “solution” to unsolved historical/scientific mysteries that is not completely satisfying, and at best “possible” without clearly being preferable. But in the process, it leaves major evidence more puzzling than the unanswered puzzles that provided the justification for entering the discussion in the first place. In the case of mainstream biology, the various forms of creationism may say “See, we have God to explain this unanswered question.” And setting aside the matter of the inappropriateness of such an answer in a scientific context, that is not the only problem for such an answer. The proposed “answer” also raises the question of why all the evidence makes it look as though evolution has occurred. A “solution” that makes everything that seemed clear become unclear in order to explain one piece of the puzzle is not a “solution” at all. But Doherty’s treatment of the early Christian evidence does precisely that. It offers a non-historical Jesus as the “solution” to why Paul doesn’t quote Jesus more regularly/explicitly, but in the process has to turn references to Jesus’ birth, descent from David, status as anointed one, blood and death into puzzles.

And so even if one treats mythicism generously and sympathetically, one is still left feeling that the proposed “solution” only “solves” the puzzle by making other parts of it even more puzzling. And a solution to a puzzle that has to discard more pieces than it can assemble is perhaps not rightly called a solution at all.