Constitutional Law
Part 2: “What Were They Thinking?”
Digression: “A History of Government in 6 Revolutions: From the Paleolithic to Philadelphia”
122. Inventing God and Law: The Rhetoric of Monotheism
TITLE: Part P: The Rhetoric of Monotheism
Panel 1: A well-fed elite Yehudan man, dressed in green robes, pantaloons, and slippers of Persian style, reclines on luxurious pillows and bolsters.
ELITE MAN:
It’s simple:
We kill the pantheon.
-=-
Panel 2: Narration box.
NARRATION:
Monolatry had always been a political policy.
Government officials follow policies. Everyone else lives by principles.
Yehud needed a new principle.
Yehudites needed to believe that no other gods were worth worshipping… and that doing so wasn’t just incorrect—it was wrong.
Only then would they begin to worship only Yahweh.
-=-
Panel 3: An elite man dressed in purple, holding a scroll, stands on a stage to harangue a very large crowd on all sides. In the foreground, a man and a woman in the crowd turn to speak to each other.
NARRATION:
To accomplish this, Yehud’s religious leaders started employing the rhetoric of MONOTHEISM
ELITE SPEAKER 1:
There are NO other gods!
MAN IN CROWD:
Rhetoric? More like gaslighting.
WOMAN IN CROWD:
Oh hush.
-=-
Panel 4: Against a dark night sky, a gray-bearded elite man in rich garments holds aloft a flaming wooden idol of some deity or other. He is preaching to another crowd that is not shown.
NARRATION:
New scriptures and teachings proclaimed:
ELITE SPEAKER 2:
OTHER GODS AREN’T REAL!
They’re just imaginary stories about magical sky beings!
Their idols are man-made trinkets. You can burn ‘em in a fire, and nothing will happen to you.
Did the gods of mighty Babylon and Assyria save them from destruction?
NO! Because their gods weren’t real!
By worshipping other gods, the people of Isra-El guaranteed their own destruction.
Why?
Because those gods were never real!
-=-
Panel 5: A nighttime rally, lit up almost like a music festival. On the far stage, another elite speaks to a massive audience. In the foreground, the same man and woman from before turn to speak to each other.
ELITE SPEAKER 3:
But Yahweh? Sure, he may have to teach us a lesson now and then. Even so, once we come back to him, Yahweh always saves us.
We know he’s real!
Besides, don’t we already know that he has no father, no wife, no offspring? Don’t we already know that he created the universe all by himself? Don’t we already know that Yahweh alone is supreme?
So isn’t it obvious that Yahweh is the only god?
And that you are his only chosen people?
MAN IN CROWD:
You know? That does feel true!
WOMAN IN CROWD:
I feel it in my heart.
-=-
Panel 6: An illustration of Daniel in the Lions’ Den. The rocky ground makes a kind of bench that Daniel sits on, human bones strewn at his feet. A sleeping lion and a lioness lay their heads in his lap, while he rests his arms around their shoulders. Another lioness lies sleeping against the lion. On the rocks above Daniel, another male lion lies as sleeping, with one eye opened to look at a shaft of light coming from above. A young lion cub is crawling down from there to join the others with Daniel, who is also looking up at the shaft of light.
NARRATION:
Applying our superpower of story, the vivid tales of the new scriptures turned all this rhetoric into truth.
-=-
FOOTNOTE:
You’ll have to forgive the anachronism in that last panel. The story of Daniel in the Lions’ Den wasn’t added to the scriptures until about 150 B.C., long after the time period we’re talking about. But I already did the Moses epic, Noah’s Ark, and Jonah and the Whale a couple of pages back, and the Daniel stories do still fit the theme.
You’ll also have to forgive me for compressing a much longer process into a single page. First, scriptures told stories of the other gods being Yahweh’s servants (e.g., Deuteronomy 33; Psalms 89, 103, 293). Others included the powers of other gods in Yahweh’s powers, or re-defined earlier references to gods in general (“elohim”) as referring specifically to Yahweh. Another early approach was to refer to other gods as mortal, and even dying (e.g., Psalm 82, Jeremiah 10).
Next came stories mocking gods and idols as man-made and imaginary—and mocking those who thought their gods existed (e.g., Isaiah 44-45, First Kings 18, Second Kings 19, Chronicles 32). At the same time, other stories asserted that Yahweh was the only divine being—so if you wanted, say, divination, then Yahweh was the only one who knew the future (e.g., Isaiah 40-48, Deuteronomy 4, First Kings 8).
Eventually, texts were written (or revised) to reflect a universe where other gods were simply absent. There was no need to deny them or deride them, because of course there is only the one god. Genesis 1 is a good example, but you see this all over the final version of the Old Testament.
The rhetoric of monotheism was part of a very fluid process, involving many different tactics. And it took place over many generations. And it was only one of several things driving the writing of the scriptures. (Some Old Testament scriptures were still being written when Jesus was alive!) So for me to suggest that it was a single event, reflecting a single ideology, is a godawful oversimplification. But all we need to know here is that this was a thing that happened.
Anyway, what’s more interesting (for our purposes) is what happened next.
That last panel looks cozy. Cuddly big cats!
What could be more cozy than a cuddly cat?
Daniel’s just lion around with his friends.
omg
That’s just purrfect
Still, the mane thing to remember, is that it’s more than just a furry tail.
Multiple cuddly cats, of course!
“Some Old Testament scriptures were still being written when Jesus was alive!”
Granted, I’m not a scholar in… well, pretty much anything, but I am a frequent visitor to the Ars Technica forums, where folks who have more knowledge on these topics tend to have discussions (Usually in a tangent to whatever the article they are commenting on was about. Ars covers a range of topics, but usually one that intersect with technology in some manner).
Anyway, those who tend to approach the topic from a historical view rather than a theological one tend to argue against there being an actual historic Jesus in much the same manner/and with similar arguments) as you have against there being a historical Moses, David and Solomon – lack of administrative records of such a person, most of the scriptures being written well after the period being documented, etc.
Was this shorthand for saying “Some Old Testament scriptures were still being written in the first century AD, as Christianity was forming”, of do you have sources for a historical Jesus?
The short answer is that my wording is an attempt to use surprise to more effectively make the point—that the Jewish scriptures weren’t a fixed ancient text. Most people reading this, whether Christian or not, generally have a notion that there was a guy named Jesus around two thousand years ago, that the Christian religion arose because of him, and that the Old Testament was written and finalized long before Jesus lived. To such an audience, saying the Old Testament was still being written and rewritten during Jesus’ life is bound to be surprising. And surprise is (so I’m told, anyway) one of the most effective teaching strategies when presenting something contrary to ingrained deeply-held beliefs.
As for whether there was an actual historical Jesus, that’s not as easy to answer. It’s certainly not as easy as whether there was an actual historical Moses. With Moses, it’s not that there’s no evidence that such a person ever lived, but rather that there’s solid evidence that no such person ever lived. (I believe I went into that in mind-numbing detail in another comment a couple pages back.) But with Jesus, on the other hand, it’s that we don’t have direct evidence that he was a real person, but there’s still a good amount of circumstantial evidence that he existed. And any good trial lawyer will tell you that circumstantial evidence is just as valid as direct evidence. (A common example is that direct evidence is seeing it’s raining with your own eyes, and circumstantial evidence is seeing people come inside shaking the rain off their clothes and umbrellas. In both situations, you can be pretty certain that it’s raining.)
We don’t have direct evidence that Jesus (or rather, Yeshua ben Yosef, as he would have been known) existed. We don’t have any official records mentioning Yeshua ben Yosef in Judea at the time. There’s no record that anyone by that name had any interactions with authority, much less that he was executed in Jerusalem somewhere around 30 A.D. Aside from official records, there are zero contemporaneous written accounts that mention him in any way whatsoever. There’s nothing directly attesting to his existence.
But indirectly? Sure. There’s actually a decent amound of circumstantial evidence, from which we can be reliably certain that there was a real Yeshua ben Yosef. Shortly after 30 A.D., there was a Christ cult in Jerusalem, and its followers seem to have all remembered a guy named Jesus whom they now called the Christ. The local Jewish authorities tried to make life hard for them. It’s hard to imagine a number of people not only agreeing to pretend some fictional character had been a real guy they’d all known, but to keep doing so when it got risky. Also, this cult was headed by two men: one is the Peter from the New Testament, and the other a guy named James (Ya’akov). Paul, a contemporary who actually wrote several of the letters attributed to him in the New Testament, wrote of personally meeting a couple of times with Peter and James to make sure he was preaching the correct story—and both times he refers to James as Jesus’ brother. A little later, when the Roman official in charge of Judea had died but his replacement hadn’t arrived yet, the Sanhedrin took advantage of the power vacuum and ordered James and some of his followers to be stoned to death. In his chronicle, Josephus made passing reference to this, calling James the brother of the Jesus they were calling Christ. And after the stoning we have the “James Ossuary,” a recent archeaological find that appears now to be authentic, which contained the bones of “Ya’akov ben Yosef, brother of Yeshua.” It’s highly unlikely that such disparate and unrelated sources would go out of their way to invent a brother of Jesus named James, especially when the existence of such a brother would be somewhat problematic for the gospel stories. So we can take all this as fairly reliable direct evidence that this guy James actually existed, and pretty good circumstantial evidence that he had a brother named Jesus. And they were both sons of a guy named Joseph. There’s probably some other stuff that’s slipped my mind. But the point is, there’s quite sufficient circumstantial evidence to conclude that there was a real person in that time and place named Jesus, and that he’s the guy the early Christ cult was venerating.
But that is all it proves. It doesn’t prove that any of the Bible stories about Jesus actually happened. It doesn’t prove that Jesus’ mom was a virgin. It doesn’t prove that he was an itinerant preacher with a following of disciples. It doesn’t prove he performed any miracles. It doesn’t prove there was a last supper. It doesn’t prove that Jesus was executed. It doesn’t prove that he returned from the dead. More than that: like the Moses stories, not only is there no evidence that the gospel stories really happened, there’s pretty strong evidence that they didn’t. (Although it wouldn’t be surprising if Jesus truly had been executed. The Romans were quick to execute would-be messiahs attracting a following. But usually they killed all the followers, too, so just killing the one guy would indicate that they didn’t think he had much of a following.)
What kind of evidence proves that the gospel stories were entirely fictional? It would take volumes to go into it all. Off the top of my head, here’s a few. Paul, for example, wrote his letters during the early years, long before the gospels were written. His account of Jesus, the one he fact-checked with Peter and James, doesn’t mention most of the important gospel stuff. Doesn’t even hint at it. Neither do other contemporary letters between the early Christian churches. That’s because that part of the Jesus mythos hadn’t been invented yet. The gospels wouldn’t get written until well after the people who’d founded the cult were probably dead, between 36 and 80 years after Jesus would have died. A lot changed in the meantime, and Christianity started to evolve from local cults and sects of Judaism into a nascent religion. The stories told in those gospels don’t correspond with the actual historical record, and in places are flatly contradicted by the historical evidence. (Of course, history wasn’t really a thing back then, and everyone who might have remembered differently was dead, so it was easy to pull that kind of thing off, as we’ve already seen in the comic.) Most of the gospel stories are adapted from the mythologies then-current in their authors’ world: Jewish scriptures, of course, but also Greek and other pagan myths, the Jewish apocalyptic movement, and so on. The symbolism of all that mythos was now put to work telling this new story, which much like the Moses stories, was being invented to serve a new contemporary purpose.
There are plenty of sources out there, if you’re interested. I imagine if you just go on Google Scholar and search for “evidence” and “historical Jesus” you’ll find more than enough. An excellent starting point, however, is G. A. Wells, The Historical Evidence for Jesus, Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1988. It’s old, but thorough to the point of exhaustiveness. IIRC, notwithstanding the book’s title, Wells concluded that there was no historical Jesus, and that the character was pure fiction, an entirely mythical creation. In more recent years, he’s joined the growing consensus that there probably had to have been a real person, though the gospel stories are mere myth.
Just as with the historicity of the Jewish scriptures, however, you have to do your research with quite a large grain of salt, because so much ostensibly objective scholarship just takes it as a given that the Bible accounts are historically accurate. It can get somewhat frustrating when you’re reading along and then suddenly they’re talking like the Jews really did escape slavery in Egypt, that there really was a unified kingdom of Israel under David and Solomon, and that Jesus really was crucified but then his tomb was found empty. Like, guys, please, come on!