Thursday, July 27, 2017
WHAT IS SCARIER THAN CRAZY? NOTHING
How do you write rationally about
the irrational? How do you clearly explain and describe the irrational thinking
that we prefer not to know about it? And what do you do when the irrational
becomes normalized? How do you make people see what is going on? When crazy
ideas are taken as normal and acceptable, the deck is stacked against anyone
who tries to expose that. If you criticize the normalized crazy, you are accused
of being crazy yourself because you are objecting to the normal.
We will acknowledge crazy people
and crazy things happening beyond the borders of our world and our thinking,
but when some of that craziness seeps into our world and intertwines itself with
the rational, we are less likely to pay attention. In order to write rationally
about the irrational, to expose it and defeat it, you first have to identify
and describe it. You have to explain how it uses bits of reason as a cover to
make the crazy appear sensible. That’s a hard pill for many to swallow.
A case in point is the way
historical Jesus scholars have treated Josephus’s passage on Jesus. Most scholars realize that the Greek version
which has come down to us could not have been written by Josephus, not in the
way it currently appears. Josephus would never have categorically proclaimed
that Jesus was the Messiah and that he rose from the dead, which is what the
Greek text says. That much is a rational assessment. Thus, it follows that
someone altered what Josephus wrote.
But were these sentences slightly
altered from whatever Josephus originally wrote, or are they entirely later
insertions? Many scholars opt for the second. Here is where a little bit of
irrationality starts to creep in. They never consider that Josephus might have
said something about the Messiah and the resurrection which was then slightly
altered. For example, he could have said that Jesus’s followers believed he was
the Messiah and that they reported that he rose from the dead. That kind of
thing is plausible as coming from Josephus.
Is there any evidence that this
is what Josephus originally wrote? Actually, yes. There is some support from
Jerome who has Josephus saying Jesus “was believed to be the Messiah.” It makes
plenty of sense that Josephus could have written that. But there is an even
more important source from Agapius, an Arab Christian in the 10th
century. He preserved in Arabic what Josephus wrote about Jesus. (My discussion
of Agapius is based on the work of scholar Shlomo Pines.) The Church was
keeping a close eye on anything written in Greek or Latin, but it was probably
not paying much attention to Arabic writings. It is very believable that
something displeasing to the Church could have slipped through in Arabic.
The Agapius version says that
Jesus was perhaps the Messiah, but since his Arabic text was based on a prior
Syriac text, he may have slightly mistranslated the Syriac “He was thought to
be the Messiah” or “it seemed he was the Messiah.” Whatever it was exactly, whether
“perhaps” or “thought to be” or “seemed”, in this version Josephus clearly does
not categorically affirm Jesus as the Messiah. That makes sense. On the
resurrection, the Agapius text has Jesus’s followers reporting this. This too
makes sense.
Here is where the irrational
creeps into scholarly analysis big time. Most scholars never discuss the
Agapius text, despite the fact that it is clearly something Josephus could have
written and does not have the problems we all see in the Greek text. Why do
they ignore it? It is because of another major difference between the Greek and
the Arabic versions. In the Greek, the text says that Pilate crucified Jesus at
the instigation of, or upon an accusation of, Jewish leaders. Josephus could
not possibly have written that, but scholars refuse to admit this. Josephus
gives no other examples of Jewish leaders cooperating with Rome to prosecute a
Jewish troublemaker. If Josephus had
written such a sentence, he would have commented on how unusual this was and
made some attempt to explain it. The Greek version offers nothing but silence
on this.
And what does the Arabic text
say? Nothing at all about Jewish leaders. It merely states that Pilate
condemned Jesus to be crucified. Jewish leaders are never even mentioned. That makes much more sense and is consistent
with everything else Josephus tells us about Jewish-Roman relations. This is
unbearable to most scholars. They have made “Jesus surrounded by Jewish
enemies” their first principle. Their
second principle is that any evidence which appears to give Jesus Jewish
enemies is admissible, while any evidence that tends to exonerate Jewish
leaders is inadmissible. “Jesus surrounded by Jewish enemies” is an insane
first principle to work with—because so much evidence contradicts it and that
includes evidence in the Gospels (my books go into this in great detail). The point
is that scholars use their irrational point of view to erase Agapius from
history. Most scholars will not even acknowledge the existence of this
evidence. They have made Jewish enemies doing in Jesus appear to be a normal
idea, so they don’t feel how they are distorting the historical record to make
it appear true.
The Agapius text is an excellent
piece of evidence. At the very least it should be debated. But if you pick up
20 books on the historical Jesus, you would be lucky if you found one that mentions
Agapius let alone discusses his text at any length. Scholars have made Jewish
culpability in Jesus’s death such a normal idea that any evidence to the contrary
becomes offensive and must be eliminated. Isn’t this a kind of insanity?
Whenever ideology rules over the evidence, we are dwelling in the land of the
irrational.
Here is what is genuinely crazy
about historical Jesus scholarship: Scholars pride themselves on being
skeptics, yet they have forbidden everyone from being skeptical about the
complicity of Jewish leaders in Jesus’s death. That is one idea that can never
be challenged. When it comes to everything else in historical texts, scholars
will express skepticism about it all. Almost every line in any ancient text
about Jesus has been subjected to doubt and scrutiny by scholars, except for one thing. Every line in the
Gospels is scrutinized. Every line in the Greek Josephus on Jesus has been
doubted. Except anything that imputes
guilt to Jewish leaders. That is never doubted. Doubt all, but never doubt this,
that Jesus was done in by Jewish leaders.
How is it possible to be
skeptical about every single thing about Jesus but nary a doubt about Jewish
guilt? What kind of crazy world have scholars created here? No debate is
allowed on this one point. The details of the meeting between Jewish leaders
and Jesus in the Gospels are not consistent with a hostile Jewish procedure
against him, but they are consistent with a friendly, informal meeting intended
to help Jesus. Yet scholars will wax furious if you dare to suggest such a
thing. Why is Jewish culpability so sacred to scholars? How did this irrational
commitment become the standard norm? It is exceptionally difficult to fight
this kind of crazy.
© 2017 Leon Zitzer
