Can the Jesus of History Support the Christ of Faith?

The latest issue of The New Yorker includes an essay by Adam Gopnik, “We’re Still Not Done With Jesus,” on the scholarly debates about the origins of Christianity. In the piece, Gopnik positions himself as a nuanced balancer between two serious schools (though he tilts toward the first): a school that holds that the early Christians mythologized and invented, but on the basis of some set of true events; and a school that treats the historical core of Christian faith as illusory and inaccessible and the books of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John as pure literary-mystical inventions.

Entirely absent is any meaningful treatment of the arguments for taking the Gospels seriously as what they claim to be: eyewitness accounts, or syntheses of eyewitness accounts, with a straightforward claim to basic historical credibility. This absence is not exactly surprising to a longtime reader of Gopnik’s work. But I will admit that I had been hoping — wishcasting? — that we were finally moving past a cultural landscape in which the only interpretations of Christian origins offered to inquiring readers of secular publications were those bent, as Gopnik puts it, on “rehabilitating aspects of Christianity on terms that a secular scholar can respect,” while taking for granted that “nothing happened quite as related.”

To be clear, I would not expect a non-Christian writer to simply embrace the thesis that events in the New Testament did mostly happen as related. But readers who look at the headline of Gopnik’s essay and its implicit questions — We aren’t done with Jesus? Why aren’t we? — deserve a fuller answer than you can get from just considering the range of perspectives he presents. They deserve an explanation of how the persistence of Christianity is connected not just to the Gospel story’s moral or mythopoetic power, but to the enduring plausibility of its historical claims even in the face of so many determined debunking efforts.

To illustrate this point, I’m going to offer a response to just one passage in Gopnik’s essay. Here he glosses a theory from the religion scholar Elaine Pagels that tries to explain how, if the Gospel accounts are later mythologizations, the early Christians might have moved from an initial spiritual belief in Jesus’ continuing presence in their lives to the frankly supernatural claim about a literal resurrection:

So this is a framework that casts the catastrophe of the Jewish-Roman war that began in the year 66 as the crucial instigator of Christian belief in Jesus’ literal resurrection from the dead. I don’t want to say that this is an impossible framework to maintain, since scholarly debates about the proper interpretation of ancient texts are never-ending. But it’s a very peculiar one if you just follow the consensus of secular scholarship, which does tend to date the Gospels to a period after the catastrophe, but assumes that Paul’s letters to the early communities of Christians (the letters that secular scholars consider genuine, at least) predate the wars of the 60s, the destruction of the temple, and everything that this theory casts as instigating the shift from the spiritual to the literal in Christian faith.

In Paul, as in the Gospels, you don’t have Jesus portrayed as a source of “inner light” who is glimpsed after his death through “marginal, hallucinatory visions.” No: You already have Christianity in a recognizable form, a missionary faith that preaches a messiah crucified and raised on the third day, with the same kind of specific claims about Jesus’ appearances after death that are featured in the Gospel accounts, the same kind of specific witnesses invoked.

You can argue about whether this early Christianity’s understanding of Jesus’ identity — is he God himself or a human being raised to supernatural kingship? — is identical to later Christian orthodoxy, as you can argue over a variety of other questions about Paul’s personal beliefs. But the idea of Christianity as a religion that only becomes obsessed with the risen Christ after the trauma of the mid-60s is a highly implausible supposition, unmoored from what we actually know about the most influential pre-60s Christian preaching. And what practicing Christians typically believe about the origins of their faith — that “Christ is risen!” was essential from the start — seems much more likely to be true.