As it happens, in chapter 5 of his book, Earl Doherty presents a fair amount of information that is simply mainstream scholarship and perfectly accurate. He provides some information about Judaism in the Hellenistic age and apocalyptic literature that is found in most books on the subject, and although he doesn’t give credit to any of them, I assume that Doherty would, if pressed, acknowledge his debt to the work of scholars. But to spend time applauding what he gets right, and which has no real bearing on his mythicist case, only delays the more important point, which is that most of this chapter is attempt at deception, an attempt to get the poorly-informed and uncritical reader to accept a claim based on verses that are quoted, with the hope that they will not be aware of other verses that might leave one with an overall different impression. This is a common tactic of conservative apologists, and no one who understands what mythicism is will be surprised to find that although the case being made differs, the tactics used by mythicists are the same. Both Christian apologists and mythicists attempt to give the impression that they are engaging in a scholarly discussion of evidence, but both ignore or dismiss evidence that contradicts the assumptions of their framework of interpretation.
A case in point: Doherty emphasizes the many places where Paul looks forward to the “coming of the Lord” as a future event, and that despite the widespread language of “second coming” used today, Paul does not speak about this anticipated coming as a second coming. And so, he writes, “If readers can free themselves from Gospel preconceptions, they should find that these and other references of the same nature convey the distinct impression that this will be the Lord Jesus’ first and only coming to earth, that this longing to see Christ has in no way been previously fulfilled” (p.53).
What is not being mentioned is that Paul and other epistle authors use not only the future language of an expected coming in the future, but also the past tense came in reference to a Jesus who, in Doherty’s scenario, did not previously come. Here are a few examples:
Galatians 3:24 “So the law was our guardian until Christ came that we might be justified by faith.”
1 Timothy 1:15 “Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the worst. “
Hebrews 10:5 “Therefore, when Christ came into the world, he said: ‘Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but a body you prepared for me…'”
1 John 5:6 “This is the one who came by water and blood—Jesus Christ.”
But perhaps most striking is Galatians 3:15-29, where it refers to Christ as the offspring or seed of Abraham, which itself implies human descent (not because we can verify there was a historical Abraham, but because this is how Jews viewed themselves and thus Paul is placing Christ in this human lineage), and the whole argument depends on his having already come. And let us not forget Galatians 4:4, which contains the reference to God having sent his Son in the past, as well as his having been born of a woman and born under the Law.
As you can hopefully see, what Doherty has done is to present some verses, to ask if they do not give a certain impression when taken on their own, in the hope that by the time you are made aware of the other relevant things said about Jesus in the same epistles, you will be ready to dismiss them as irrelevant. But they are not irrelevant. They are indications that something is amiss with Doherty’s reading of the epistles.
It is certainly appropriate to ask why Paul, for instance, doesn’t write some of the things that Doherty and other modern readers would have expected him to about Jesus. But a “solution” that leaves those verses that refer to a coming of Jesus in the past or those few details of his life that Paul mentions unaccounted for or interpreted in a way that seems forced or problematic should not be accepted. To replace an interpretation that makes sense of what Paul wrote but leaves us puzzled about what he left out, with an interpretation that has Paul writing things he didn’t mean, is not progress.
To put it another way, Doherty’s view of Paul’s letters might well have seemed plausible if Paul had only written the verses Doherty has tended to focus on, and not the other ones the discussion of which he has thus far ignored or postponed until later. It is always possible to draw an inaccurate conclusion when one is judging a matter based on partial evidence.
In this chapter, Doherty also does with the language of salvation much the same thing he does with the references to a future coming of Christ. He focuses on the language in future tense, neglecting the present tense verbs related to salvation and the accomplishment of redemption in the past in connection with Jesus’ death.
Doherty actually makes a good point toward the end of the chapter – when he is restating common scholarly reasoning. After discussing the traditional Jewish view of two ages, and the traditional way that scholars understand early Christians to have reformulated that viewpoint, he writes, “If this was indeed the scenario faced by the first few generations of Christian preachers and believers, we would expect to find two things. First, a significant recasting of the two-age pattern; the coming of Jesus would have been seen as a pivotal point in the ongoing scheme of redemption history. Second, that very failure of expectation would have required explanation. For no one could have anticipated – and no one did – that the arrival of the Messiah would not be accompanied by the establishment of the kingdom. We would expect to find an apologetic industry arising within the Christian movement to explain this strange and disappointing turn of events” (p.55). So far, so good. Doherty rightly accepts what some other mythicists I have interacted with deny, namely that there were some widespread expectations about the nature of the coming Messiah (at least, if the Davidic Messiah is in view) and that the arrival of this Messiah was inseparable from the arrival of all that the kingdom of God was expected to entail.
So where does Doherty go wrong? In the next question he asks: “But do we find either of these two features in the epistles?” (p.55). If addressing these matters was crucial to making sense of the coming of a historical Jesus, and making sense of his death occurring rather than the expected arrival of the kingdom of God, then that effort to make sense of these events had to be undertaken immediately, and the results had to be shared with those to whom this information was proclaimed in order to persuade them to become Christians. Expecting Paul to engage in the thought process described or to present these arguments as if for the first time when he was writing to those who were already Christians seems an odd thing to expect. If the mainstream historical scenario is correct, then for people to be Christians, which the recipients of Paul’s letters were, they would already have had to accept the arguments offered to interpret the coming of Jesus and the failure of the kingdom to arrive yet. And so what we should expect to find in Paul’s epistles are not these arguments and lines of reasoning themselves, but things which assume that these arguments and interpretations are part of the shared set of core Christian assumptions for Paul and his readers. And that is exactly what we find. He talks about the ends of the ages having come upon us. He talks about the resurrection having begun with Jesus and ending soon with himself and his readers. He takes for granted the making sense of the death of the Messiah by interpreting his death as sacrifical, but more than that, he also makes the death and resurrection of Jesus the turning point for the shift between the two ages, so that Christians are described in language that implies that they are caught at the juncture between the two, having died with Christ to the present age, but not yet having been raised into the life of the age to come. That eschatological tension is precisely what we find in the relevant New Testament sources.
Let me return now to a point with which Doherty began his chapter. Doherty emphasizes frequently the need to avoid reading the Gospels back into the letters. The question is whether at some point the refusal to allow the Gospels to shed light on the letters actually hinders rather than helps the effort to understand what Paul wrote. A case in point is 1 Thessalonians 4:15-17, which is mentioned on p.51. It reads,
According to the Lord’s word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever.
Scholars have long noted the similarity with Matthew 24:30-31:
And then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven: and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And he will send his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of the heavens to the other.
When Paul speaks about a Jesus who was born and died and a human, and says that he is offering a “word of the Lord,” at what point does it become appropriate to acknowledge that the similarity between what Paul offers and what we find in the later Gospels is legitimately explained in terms of Paul having known some teaching attributed to a historical Jesus, teaching that also later makes its way into one or more of the later Gospels? At what point does not allowing the Gospels to shed light on the epistles cease to be an expression of caution about anachronism, and become an axiom of faith that in fact unnecessarily divides and separates literature from the same movement which, when forced apart, are rendered harder to make sense of than necessary?
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