THE GOSPELS

The Gospels according to. . .

H. R. TREVOR-ROPER

When I accepted an invitation from the Editor of the SPECTATOR to review Dr Dodd's life of Christ, I did not think that my critical examination of that book would provoke such an outcry. I had fondly supposed that an age of reason would allow, from a historian, arguments which have all, so far as I know, been advanced by Christian and clerical scholars. If I now return to the sub- ject, it is not to answer those correspondents who ascribe to me views which I neither ex- pressed nor hold, or who accuse me of 'basic howlers' because I do not abandon the evidence and follow them into their un- documented speculations. Nor is it to argue with those who do not know the first prin- ciples of reasoning. It is simply to clarify the methods which I have used to reach my harmless and (as far as I am aware) entirely unoriginal conclusions.

First of all, as a historian, I consider that the same basic rules of evidence apply equally to all historical problems. In history there are no reserved areas in which the ordinary laws of evidence may be suspended, no documents which are exempt from the ordinary rules of source-criticism. If there were such privileged areas, or documents, how would we define them? If the laws of evidence are to be suspended in first-century Palestine, where Christianity began, on what grounds can we refuse to suspend them in sixth-century Arabia or nineteenth-century America? If we grant special terms of credibility to the imaginary drafts of the Gospels, how are we to withhold it from the imaginary 'reformed Egyptian' text of the Book of Mormon? The same applies to the laws of probability. If we do not believe that virgins conceive by holy ghosts, or the dead rise again and ascend to heaven, in twentieth- century England, why should we—unless the evidence of fact is irrefutable—believe that such things happen anywhere else?

Unless the evidence is irrefutable . . . But what is the evidence for the life of Christ? There are two layers of evidence. First, there is the subjective belief of the early Chris- tians. (I say 'subjective' because we do not know the objective evidence, if any, on which they based their belief.) Undoubtedly they did believe that Christ, a saviour god, had lived, had died, and had risen from the dead. But their belief proved nothing. Some people can believe anything, and believe it very strongly. That does not make it true.

Secondly, there are the Gospels. The Gospels, on the face of it, are far more useful. They give us details of Christ's life. Unfortunately these details, as all scholars agree, are late 'recollections'. Some of them are improbable, some self-contradictory, some historically impossible, some childish and absurd. Before we can even admit them as historical evidence we have to question the authonty of the sources, just as if they were secular sources. We have to apply the same tests that we should apply to any other 'recollections'.

Now once we do this, we must begin by

admitting that the Gospels (to say the least) are very unplausible. Their unplausibility, where they can be checked against objective evidence, inevitably damages their credit where they cannot be checked objectively, or where they can be checked only by common sense. The credibility of a witness of fact is indivisible. This is recognised in the law- courts, and it is recognised by historians. If a secular historian told us (for instance) that an army of 5,000 men had gorged themselves on five loaves and two fishes, and that twelve hampers were needed to carry away the scraps, we should be very sceptical about anything else that he told us; even if he insisted that he had been there at the time.

Anyway, were the evangelists there at the time? By all the evidence, they were not. It is impossible to date the Gospels accurately, but it is generally agreed that they were written after AD 70 and although there are references to them, and one minute scrap of papyrus text, in the middle of the second century, there is, I think, no evidence that they had anything like their present form much before AD 200 (the date of the two substantial papyri). For the sake of argu- ment, I would concede that they may have been in circulation, in their present form, as early as AD 120. I would also concede that our present texts of the synoptic gospels argue the existence of earlier material. But earlier than what? Deductions from texts can only proceed from known texts and the plain fact is that the earliest recognisable form of our known texts comes from the end of the second century and nobody yet knows how or when they achieved that form.

Moreover there is an argument from silence. St Paul, in his epistles, which we assume to have been written in AD 50-65, shows no sign of knowing the Gospel Christ. To him, our earliest witness, Christ is simply a saviour God who was crucified and rose from the dead. St Paul knows neither Christ's miracles nor his teaching nor the details of his trial and crucifixion. To the author of the Book of Revelation, who is generally agreed to have written in the following generation, perhaps as late as AD 90, Christ is similarly a purely divine figure who controls the cosmological process and is about to return to the earth. The Gospel story was unquestionably developed within the Judaeo-Christian churches for which Paul and 'John' wrote, but these writers seem to be quite unfamiliar not merely with the Gospels but even with the biographical 'recollections' out of which the Gospels are said to be composed.

On this basis, the most that we can say about the Gospels is that at some time after the founding of the first Christian churches, probably after the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70, perhaps later still, alleged sayings and miraculous details of the life of the founder began to circulate; and that in the course of the second century AD selected versions of

these sayings and these details (for there were many other versions circulating at the time) were accepted by the Church as the officially approved biographies of the founder. It was for these reasons that wrote that the Church created Christ; for the Church, by selection and rejection, decided what should be 'the Gospels': what sayings, what miracles should be ascribed to Christ, what image he should present in order that Christianity could compete with all those other religions which pullulated, generating (and swapping) their literature of initiation and salvation, in the spiritual California of

middle Roman Empire.

If the Church, in this sense created Christ, The Church also, by its continuing re- interpretation, maintained Christ, adding and subordinating to him such other Christs as might rise independently of it, or in op- Position to it, but whom, in the end, it would either crush or absorb. For it is not the message (authentic or not) of the founder Which sustains a religion : it is the living social function of his Church. A vigorous, well organised missionary Church can absorb and transform even the most im- probable founder. Some founders have been demonstrable impostors, and their Churches nevertheless flourish; others have been true saints whose name no Church perpetuates. And there are cannibal Churches who devour rival founders, or at least take over their assets and goodwill, as the Christian Church devoured the rival religions of Isis and Mithras and took over pagan gods and cults, all the time quietly transforming the image of Christ, to keep it permanently alive and fresh, even if that continuing vitality and modernity would divorce it more and more from the historical reality which it was leav- ing behind.

Behind this palimpsest of missionary pro- paganda, which has created the Gospel im- age of Christ, can we ever penetrate to the Personality of the real Christ? Did he even exist? In my review I did not feel called Upon to offer my own answer to this ques- tion. But as it is a legitimate historical ques- tion, I am prepared to face it. In order to face it, we have to go back, if we can, behind the Gospels, to the contemporary evidence: that is, from the Judaeo-Christian Churches of the cosmopolitan Roman Empire after the destruction of the Temple to the very different world of early first- century Palestine.

Here at once we find ourselves in difficulty. We have to begin by admitting that there is absolutely no objective contemporary historical evidence, Jewish, pagan or Chris- tian, of Christ's existence; that all the retrospective evidence comes, directly or in- directly (I refer to the evidence of Tacitus), from the missionary propaganda of the Church; and that all this propaganda is com- patible with the assumption that Christ did not exist at all but was the imaginary em- bodiment of an ideal teacher-saviour to Whom certain Jewish sects looked forward in the first century BC and to whom, thus no- tionally embodied, another Jewish sect, in the first century AD, looked back. This, basically, is the argument of Mr G. A. Wells in his new book, which I have read and found fascinating. However, I do not myself go the whole Way with Mr Wells. In the absence of direct evidence we must guide our reasoning by the balance of human probability; and just as I believe it to be more probable that the evangelists were mistaken than that men Were raised from the dead and water turned !0 wine, so I believe it to be more probable that these myths were annexed to a real than

imaginary person. At least I believe

at if Christ had been an imaginary saviour- god, like Dionysus, Isis or Mithras, he would snil_°re probably have been attributed, like .,"iem, to a remote or unspecified past than to

,sPecific time and place within, or almost 'within, human memory.

_ Moreover, there are certain concrete re4sons which confirm me in this view. We suspend belief in anything that the i?ospels tell us directly about Christ, but, !k. e any other document, they give us in- oirect information: information about

themselves, about the purpose and method and difficulty of their own composition; and this indirect evidence seems to me to show that the evangelists, or their precursors, did not have an entirely free hand. However inventive they may have been, they were wrestling with certain obstinate facts: facts which they themselves, for their pro- pagandist purpose, were trying to transform but to whose reality, by the very unsuccess of those efforts, they nevertheless, unwillingly and therefore convincingly, bear witness.

Most scholars would agree that the Gospel story is an attempt to identify Christ as the Jewish Messiah, to fit him into Jewish history and cosmology as the ultimate realisation of Old Testament prophecy. It is not a narrative of objective facts, bound together by a personal life. It is a recapitula- tion of Old Testament examples and an application of Old Testament prophecies, providentially re-enacted or fulfilled in one person, specifically called into being for that purpose. In order to fit Jesus into this pat- tern, it was thought necessary—wrongly, it seems: for the word is a mistranslation of the Hebrew—to supply him with a virgin birth. It was also thought necessary to place this birth in Bethlehem. In order to do this, the evangelists tie themselves into very curious knots. Having satisfied one prophecy by deriving Jesus, through his father Joseph, from David, they then, to satisfy another prophecy, pretend that his father was not Joseph at all, but the Holy Ghost; and in order to bring his mother to Bethlehem for his birth, Luke invents a non-existent census, and absurd means of carrying it out, at a wrong historical date. Again and again we can see the evangelists contorting themselves to present the life of Jesus as the realisation of the prophecies of the Old Testament.

Now if Christ were an entirely fictitious person, some of these contortions would be unnecessary. It would have been simpler to dispense with an earthly father, to derive his mother from David, and to domicile her con- veniently in Bethlehem. Matthew adopts this last expedient, but then has to think of an argument for transferring the family after- wards to Nazareth. The very fact that the evangelists find themselves obliged to think up these explanations suggests to me that they were writing about a real person who was known to have been the son of a carpenter and to have lived, inconveniently for their purposes, in Galilee. On these and such grounds, it seems to me, on the balance of present evidence, more probable that Jesus was a real person than that he was retrospectively invented to fulfil a spiritual need and arbitrarily assigned to a particular time and space.

If we allow that Jesus was a real person, we must allow that his crucifixion, the basis of his cult, was also real; and since crucifix- ion was a Roman form of execution, we must assume that he was condemned on a charge of sedition. We also know that his disciples believed that he had risen from the dead—which shows the extent to which they had invested their hopes in him. In a similar way there were Greeks who refused to believe the death of Nero and Portuguese who continued, for nearly a century after 1578, to believe that King Sebastian had not been killed at the battle of Alcazarquivir in Morocco. What precisely were these hopes, we cannot say; but we know that the first Christians expected to see the triumphant se- cond coming of Christ in their own time, and to be themselves (if faithful) the beneficiaries of it, and that this expectation, being a badge (almost the only badge) of Christianity, must have had some relation to Christ's teaching or at least to their interpretation of his role in history. It was on this evidence—the pre- Gospel evidence—that I described Christ as a radical millenarian Jewish prophet.

Then, in the second century, Christianity is translated into a new world. After the destruction of the second temple, Judaism is discredited and Christianity is gradually de- judaised. Millenarian hopes by now are wearing thin. The generation of Christ's disciples is dead or dying without having seen his second coming, which must therefore be postponed. Throughout the Empire new mystery religions are widening their appeal. Philostratus will write the life of Apollonius of Tyana, Lucian the life of Apollonius's quack disciple, Alexander of Abonutichus. Apuleius is initiated into the mysteries of Isis. The 'authentic' writings of Hermes Trismegistus and the 'prophetic' answers of the Sibylline oracles begin to circulate. So do the Christian gospels. No doubt those gospels incorporate earlier matter. They are still clearly Jewish documents. But they bear the signs of their time. Christ is now being presented to a new, non-Jewish world, in which Judaism is ex- pendable and Rome must be cultivated. So Rome is no longer Babylon. The Pharisees, those purists of Judaism, are now the whip- ping-boys. Tribute must be paid to Caesar, and a Roman governor must not be found guilty of the murder of a God. As Dr Winter wrote, 'the stern Pilate' (Josephus has declared his tyranny) 'grows more mellow from gospel to gospel. In Mark he is greatly astonished and offers to release Jesus in whom he can find no guilt. In Matthew he renounces responsibility for the execution which he nevertheless orders. In Luke he repeats three times his assertion of Jesus's in- nocence, yet he gives in to the will of the Jews. In John he hands Jesus over for ex- ecution to the Jews themselves.'

In this changing context the public image of Christ changes: from the millenarian saviour, embedded in Jewish cosmology and the social circumstances of first-century Palestine, he has become the universal ethical teacher, the Man of Sorrow, the Sermocinator of the Mount. Perhaps he was all this too. I only observe that this pic- ture. so appropriate to later circumstances, is not discernible in the earliest Christian writers, and that to start from the later sources, at the expense of the former, without first testing their authority and con- sidering their different contexts, is anachron- istic and a wrong historical method.