From the archive: In late 2021, the historian John Dickson (now a professor at Wheaton College in the United States) published an essay in ABC Religion & Ethics arguing that historians have good reason to accept the historicity of Jesus. I responded in January 2022, less because I doubted that Jesus existed than because I disagreed with Dickson’s somewhat broad claims about how historians establish what happened in the past. Dickson replied, and I responded again.
I’ve brought my two contributions to the exchange together here because the disagreement was ultimately less about Jesus than about what historians think they can know about the past.
On Historians and the Historicity of Jesus
Just before Christmas John Dickson published an opinion piece in these pages that commented on a surprising finding: fewer than half of living Australians believe Jesus to have been a real historical person. Rather, a majority of us apparently now either accept a statement that he was “a mythical or fictional character” (22%) or else do not know if he was real or not (29%).
The survey dispirited Dickson and understandably so, especially on account of its release just before Christians celebrate Christ’s birthday. Dickson linked the survey’s findings to regular expressions of unbelief in the media. The sceptical attitude many journalists exhibit towards the gospel narratives is now matched amongst the general population it seems.
Dickson contends that such scepticism is “bad news for historical literacy” in Australia, for it flies in the face of “the overwhelming consensus of university historians specialising in the Roman and Jewish worlds of the first century” who do not share it. He relates a “cheeky bet” he first made on Twitter (and later for the ABC) in which he promised to eat a page out of his Bible “if someone could find a full Professor of Ancient History, Classics or New Testament in any real university in the world who argues that Jesus never lived.”
“My Bible has been safe these last seven years,” he notes with mischievous pride.
Deconstructing the Consensus
I am neither an Ancient Historian nor (alas) a full Professor. However, I do have an interest in this subject and an expertise to bring to bear on the question at its heart.
I do not wish to cause Dickson to have to eat his Bible. But, equally, I want to speak out on behalf of colleagues in Classics, Ancient History, New Testament, and Religious History (my own discipline) because I feel Dickson’s article misrepresents where many of us stand. And, in so doing, it does a slight disservice to important areas of scholarship.
Dickson’s argument is problematic in the first instance because it is an argument from authority. His evidence for historical consensus is that apparently authoritative works of reference – he cites the Oxford Classical Dictionary, the Cambridge Ancient History, and the Cambridge History of Judaism – all accept an historical Jesus as a premise. The Cambridge Ancient History, for instance, has a sizeable chapter on the birth of Christianity. Several chapters of the Cambridge History of Judaism mention Jesus in passing “as an interesting figure of Jewish History.”
All this may be true, but it is not itself evidence that Jesus ever existed. It is evidence only of a scholarly consensus in favour of not questioning the premise that he did. And we all know that expert consensuses of this kind can easily be wrong or misguided. Moreover, there are good reasons why such a consensus might have emerged completely autonomously of any assessment of the strength of evidence supporting it.
One such reason is that belief in Jesus’s historicity is not a variable independent of the decision of those who study his life or legacy to do so. Christian faith – which, except very eccentrically, must surely include a belief that Jesus was a real person – has often been a motivating factor in individuals’ decisions to pursue a career in the sorts of academic fields under scrutiny here. In other words, belief in Jesus’s historicity has come a priori of many scholars’ historical study of him and the argument that their acceptance of the ability to study him historically proves his historicity is mere circularity.
Just as significantly, the existence of a critical mass of scholars who do believe in Jesus’s historicity will almost certainly have shaped the way that all other scholars write about the subject. Unless they are strongly motivated to argue that Jesus was not real, they will not arbitrarily provoke colleagues who do believe in his historicity by denying it casually. After all, as academics, we ought to want to advance arguments that persuade our colleagues – and getting them offside by needlessly challenging a point not directly in contention will not help with that.
Sources for the Life of Jesus
I should declare an interest here: my major field is in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European History. The evidence base for Jesus’s life has always seemed rather limited to me compared to those for the figures whom I mostly study. When younger, I studied quite a lot of Ancient History under the tutelage of the brilliant Australian expatriate, now Master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, Christopher Kelly (Kelly’s Ruling the Later Roman Empire remains seminal to my thinking as an historian). But, ultimately, I found Antiquity unsatisfying. The source base just is not big enough to sustain answers to many of the questions I would want to ask.
A range of Christian sources attest the historical Jesus but how much credence one places in them depends on wider priorities of interpretation. Paul, the earliest writer to mention Jesus, gives only a thin sketch of his life. The gospels, both canonical and apocryphal, recount rather more of the story albeit in slightly contradictory fashions.
But only a small number of non-Christian texts from the first century even mention Jesus. The Jewish historian Flavius Josephus (c.37–c.100) provides the most famous reference to him in his Antiquities of the Jews. Yet Josephus is not exactly effusive in his description. And none of the references to Jesus in Josephus or any other near contemporary non-Christian text has been accepted by all scholars without its meaning or authenticity coming under scrutiny.
Those in favour of an historical Jesus argue that, even on their own, such resources nevertheless still constitute an enormous body of evidence for a figure who flourished so deep into Antiquity. And such scholars have a point: it is hardly reasonable to ask for extensive Roman records to corroborate such accounts when no similar records have been shown to exist for any comparable figure.
Historians and the practice of History
I thank John Dickson for replying to my critique of his article which claimed that “99 per cent of professional ancient historians” would agree with the view that “Jesus was a real person”. His rebuttal will no doubt interest the ABC’s readers. However, it labours under a fundamental misapprehension about the nature of our disagreement.
As Dickson notes, he and I are not really at odds over the question of whether “Jesus was a real person”. Rather, our dispute concerns what it means to write History.
The question is an important one in Australia in 2022. History, as a discipline of study, is imperilled in this country. Funding for student degrees has been slashed. Academic posts are being retrenched at an alarming pace. Ministers openly question the value of what historians do.
In such circumstances honesty about the nature of our practice, and of its value to our fellow Australians, is important.
I wrote originally because I feared Dickson’s cavalier approach to historiography was counterproductive. And I sense that he still does not quite grasp where the professional majority stands on the points in contention.
I offer the follow additional remarks which address what is at stake in Dickson’s response and in matters arising from it. At the heart of Dickson’s response is a presumption that I am unsympathetic to the study of Ancient History. Not so. I am unsympathetic only to those who would claim History, Ancient or Modern, to be some sort of “fact checking” exercise in which questions like how we prove Jesus’s historicity are of primary interest.
Contra Dickson
Dickson’s response to me contains three substantive elements. First, it plays down his original claim that all ancient historians accept Jesus’s historicity: “The thrust of my piece was merely to note the striking mismatch between public opinion and scholarly opinion on the matter of the historical existence of Jesus”. Dickson accepts my contention that the fact “that secular specialists, by an overwhelming majority, accept the historical existence of Jesus does not amount to actual evidence of Jesus’s existence”. However, he critiques my claim that the apparent consensus around Jesus’s historicity is simply an unspoken agreement not to challenge an assumption.
Second, Dickson offers some quibbles about my comprehension of debates surrounding ancient sources. And, third, he reiterates the multiplicity of ancient sources that attest to Jesus’s life. For Dickson, this multiplicity is of itself persuasive.
These latter two points are minor and not worth dealing with in detail. I note only 1) that Dickson presents merely the most prevalent explanation for how the Gospel sources are related to each other. My original phrasing tried to indicate that the academy also advances other explanations (I do not comment on the different explanations’ relative merits). And 2) I reiterate my observation that the number of sources for Jesus’s life may indeed be suggestive but that historians will never agree how many are enough to demonstrate his historicity. The more so when the provenance of those sources, like the nature of their interrelation, is so easily contested.
But what to say about Dickson’s main argument? First, it might be noted that he does not address the substance of my complaint, which is that “in merely noting the striking mismatch” he compares apples and oranges. The “public opinion” he cites was a controlled survey in which people were asked an explicit question. The scholarly opinion he assesses, by contrast, is not the product of responses to a similarly specific prompt.
This difference in the nature of the things under comparison matters. The public survey contrasted two perspectives: Jesus was historical or is mythical. Most historians do not accept the premise of such a dichotomy, so it misleads to portray them as “historicists” within its frame of reference.
What Dickson in fact shows in his original piece is that many ancient historians assume the existence of Jesus in their writing. Only in very few cases do they assess the evidence for Jesus’s historicity actively. And the literature on this subject is – at the risk of sounding slightly ungenerous to those who research the topic – somewhat niche. It is not, in most cases, written by distinguished post-holders at well-known universities nor is it published by major university presses.
Moreover, Dickson considers only those scholars whose writings either affirm or deny Jesus’s historicity explicitly, which commits a further fallacy: he assumes that the far more numerous group of scholars who have said absolutely nothing at all on this subject hold no views on it.
Most ancient historians of my acquaintance, like historians of Christianity in other periods, have research interests and expertises that could be brought to bear on questions about the historical Jesus if they wished to investigate such questions. Yet they (and I include myself here) choose to occupy their time examining other things. Why?
It might be that they agree with Dickson that Jesus’s historicity is incontestable. But it is far more likely that most of them do not believe the matter can be resolved within the normal parameters of historical study. Pursuing it would thus constitute an unproductive use of their valuable research time.
The Practice of History: Ancient and Modern
Let me turn next to what we might term the more personal element to Dickson’s response to me. Dickson alleges I am motivated by a “certain dissatisfaction with the study of Antiquity”. Indeed, at the start of his piece he claims that: “To a significant degree, his argument stems from a complaint that my discipline of Ancient History is not more like his, Early Modern European History”.
“It would be wonderful if researchers of Emperor Tiberius, Pontius Pilate, and Jesus of Nazareth had the wealth of sources available to experts on Galileo, Henry VIII, and Martin Luther. Sadly, we do not”.
I agree, it would be gratifying if ancient historians had access to the same depth and range of sources as historians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries do. However, once again, Dickson misses the central point.
I hold that the study of Antiquity is not a categorically separate discipline from the study of any other historical period. It employs the same methods of historical study. However, it presents so few surviving sources that scholars must read every one they deem relevant as closely and carefully as possible. It also follows that the conclusions that they draw from those sources will necessarily be more tentative and doubtful than if they had a wider range of sources to support their positions.
Personally, I prefer to work on later historical periods because I seek a higher degree of confidence in major paradigm-setting conclusions than the study of Antiquity usually permits. Moreover, I am not by temperament attracted to the intense scrutiny of the precise meaning of surviving texts, and the meticulous comparison of such texts, which working with ancient sources necessarily requires.
But this prefigures no animosity towards those sources, nor to the societies that gave rise to them, nor to the historians who work with them, nor to the questions those historians ask.
Apropos of these observations, I should like to note a trifling infelicity in Dickson’s initial article which it seemed churlish to point out until he suggested my quarrel with ancient historians is that they “are not as critically aware as they should be”.
Dickson’s fourth paragraph claims to cite the Apostles’ Creed, a fifth-century statement of faith: “Jesus was a real person, ‘crucified under Pontius Pilate’, the fifth governor of Judea, as the Apostles’ Creed puts it.”
Actually, the Apostles’ Creed says Jesus “suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried”. Dickson’s line is from Rufinus’s version of the Old Roman Symbol, a text which slightly predates the Apostles’ Creed. This misquotation is unfortunate for it hardly demonstrates the accuracy of reading for which ancient historians are rightly renowned.
What does Dickson believe?
All this brings me to my most acute objection to what Dickson wrote. History is, at root, an interpretative discipline. Historians seek to understand past societies: their beliefs, their values, how their members lived. We do that through a process of argumentation in which we construct theses from evidence. These theses are necessarily interpretative: we aim not merely to establish but to explain.
Dickson, however, just doesn’t seem to see things that way. And he is a touch disingenuous when he claims that his original piece sought only to highlight the mismatch between public and scholarly opinion: “At no point was I even hinting — as Pattenden seems to imply — that ‘this historical person was unequivocally equivalent to the biblical Jesus’”.
Dickson very much does make such a claim in his original article and his purpose in citing texts such as the Cambridge Ancient History and the Cambridge History of Judaism would certainly appear to have been to invoke their authority in support of it. In paragraph two he makes his claim indirectly, offering a series of statements attacked in the “secular media”:
“Each year as Christmas approaches, the faithful are used to reading stories in the “secular media” providing a take-down of our beloved story. The star of Bethlehem never happened. The three wise men are inventions. And the virgin birth is a typical trope of ancient myth. But such scandalous claims are usually interpreted in church circles as clickbait scepticism, and not representative of mainstream Australia”.
By characterising these episodes in the life of the biblical Jesus as “our beloved story” Dickson hardly projects indifference as to their historical truth. More significant, however, is this extended quotation from his fourth paragraph (part of which I mentioned above):
“One of the unique selling points of the Christian faith — in the minds of believers — is that it centres on real events that occurred in time and space. Christianity is not based on someone’s solitary dream or private vision. It isn’t merely a divine dictation in a holy book that has to be believed with blind faith. Jesus was a real person, “crucified under Pontius Pilate”, the fifth governor of Judea, as the Apostles’ Creed puts it [sic]”.
These lines clearly assert that the Jesus Christians worship was a real historical person: in “the minds of believers” his story is one of “real events that occurred in time and space”. Now, it’s just possible that Dickson intended merely to describe the thought processes of believing Christians here rather than to offer his own heartfelt perspective. But since Dickson is a very public Evangelical Christian – and therefore also a very public believer – I do not find such a distinction credible.
It is hard to believe anyone would read these words and come to any conclusion other than that Dickson was indeed asserting the historical truth of the biblical Jesus, not merely the historicity of some putative “historical” person lacking in further characteristics beyond a sole foundational aspect to his identity.
And, in fact, Dickson does qualify a further basic criterion for “Jesus” to be the historical Jesus: he must be not merely a man with the name “Jesus” but one who was “crucified under Pontius Pilate”. Yet what does this statement mean if not that Dickson seeks to ground identification of the historical Jesus in the Gospel narratives? And, frankly, why bring a much later source, such as the Apostles’ Creed, into a discussion of Jesus’s historicity at all?
I can fully understand why it might be uncomfortable for a believing Christian to confront the paradox that Jesus is Antiquity’s most consequential figure and yet is not treated as a proportionately serious subject of historical study by professional academics. All Christians must ultimately confront that paradox, though many will respond to it quite differently to Dickson.
“We can believe what we choose”, wrote John Henry Newman in 1848. “We are answerable for what we choose to believe; if we believe lightly, or if we are hard of belief, in either case we do wrong”.
First published by ABC Religion & Ethics, 19 January and 8 February 2022.