Kosher Jesus is Crank History

I have recently picked up Shmuley Boteach's book Kosher Jesus. In this book, Shmuley re-invents Jesus in a way that is more like the Jesus of Islam than the Jesus of history.

Historical Method
History is not simply the practice of figuring out what happened in the past. It would be nice to do that, but the past events of which history talks are not directly observable. So we have to treat history more like a crime scene. We see pieces of data currently available to us, and the challenge is to come up with the best possible explanation for our current data.

The discipline for how history is done is called historiography, and one of the most important books in that field is Justifying Historical Descriptions by C. Behan Mccullagh. In this book, McCullagh explains what criteria historians use to determine what counts as the "best" explanation for historical data. The explanation must have great explanatory power and scope, must cohere with already accepted beliefs, should preferably have the power to predict new pieces of evidence, and should not be ad hoc.

Ad hoc-ness to a historian, is what happens when you posit something that has little or no independent support. If I say that the airplanes that hit the World Trade Center did not cause it to collapse, but that thermite bombs planted inside the building did, I am now positing that there were thermite bombs inside the building. Without strong independent evidence that there were such bombs, the explanation is an ad hoc move.

Often, one has to posit unknowns in order to explain something. If I read about a patient who comes to his doctor complaining about a fever and stomach pains, I have to come up with an explanation for what seems to be the most plausible cause. If I suggest that the patient came down with a cold, and that the patient was also a martial artist who took a kick to the stomach, such an explanation is more ad hoc than saying that the patient has appendicitis. I am positing two unknowns rather than one to explain the symptoms.

Conspiracy theories generally suffer terribly from ad hoc stipulations. 9/11 truthers have to posit thermite bombs to take down the buildings, special advanced thermite that no one has seen to explain how thermite bombs could cut that much steel, a cruise missile to explain the damage to the Pentagon, communication between United States personnel and groups like Al-Qaeda. Moon landing hoaxers have to posit advanced video technology to explain how we got a live feed of slowed-down video, cranked at much too high a frame rate for cameras at that time. They also have to posit additional probes sent to the moon in order to explain the moon rocks. Black helicopter theorists have to posit all sorts of advanced technology, such as magic helicopter fuel to explain their theory. In short, these theories can explain the historical data as well as the official story, but they require positing additional entities for which we do not have independent evidence.

The Data to be Explained
In Kosher Jesus, Shmuley has a daunting task ahead of him. He wants to argue that Jesus was an observant practitioner of Orthodox Rabbinic Judaism, who hated the Roman Empire, and was caught and killed by the Romans for it. On Shmuley's view, Jesus never claimed to be God, never accepted worship, never thought of himself as more than a wise teacher, whose death was not instigated by Jewish authorities, and who never was raised from the dead.

Shmuley has a lot of hard data to explain. The 4 Gospels and the writings of Paul are accepted almost unanimously among historians as having been written in the first century. We have ample manuscript evidence that the copies we have have less than 1% variance from what the original document said. There is also strong archaeological corroboration that the people and places described in the New Testament are described rather accurately.

Shmuley appears to accept most of this, and now has to explain the passages by either accepting them as historical and interpreting them in a certain way, or coming up with explanations as to why they were fabricated. On a side note, Shmuley does claim that the New Testament documents were altered in an effort to placate Rome, even though all manuscript evidence points to the contrary.

Shmuley also gives explanations for the following data:

• Why the Gospels say that Jesus accepted worship
• Why Paul keeps calling Jesus "God"
• Why Paul and the Gospels have stories of the resurrection of Jesus
• Why Judas is mentioned
• Why Paul converted
• Why Peter and James went along with Paul in proclaiming the resurrection of Jesus

Shmuley's Explanation
Shmuley explains this pretty concisely in the introduction.

He states that the residents of Galilee had yearned to overthrow Roman rule. Jesus emerges on the scene and says that the Jews can overthrow Rome if they just keep all of God's commandments. Jesus then becomes convinced that he is to lead the people of Israel to overthrow Rome through force, and gathers his disciples to storm and overtake the Jerusalem Temple. The Romans catch Jesus and execute him.

With Jesus now dead, the movement disappears, and only a few disciples remain, meeting in secret, and longing for freedom from Rome. Paul then arrives, sent as an agent of Rome, but turns and claims to be on the side of Jesus. Paul then completely twists the teachings of Jesus to the shocked disciples, making up the doctrines we think of as Christian. Paul invents the deity of Jesus, the resurrection and the purpose of Jesus' mission as one of spiritual redemption. He also invents that the death of Jesus led to nullification of the law.

The disciples then banish Paul, but Paul disseminates his view of Jesus among the gentile Romans, and sells the idea that you can have the benefits of the God of the Jews without having to follow the stipulations of Torah. As Paul brings more followrs to the church in Jerusalem, the original disciples of Jesus protest, but Paul slowly wins them over. They do this because Paul has brought new life to the movement, and most importantly, Roman gold.

Shmuley also says that Paul was a Sadducee and a convert to Judaism. Peter abandoned the kosher laws based on a dream, which was a type of wish fulfillment.

A Quick Look
A few of the ad hoc stipulations required for Shmuley's theory:

• Paul's conversion to Judaism
• Paul as a Sadducee
• Paul as mentally unstable, and prone to manic extremes
• Paul's intentions to deliver the Jews from obedience to the Jewish Law
• Paul as a pathological liar
• That Peter and James were initially opposed to (and not just afraid of) Paul
• That there was a separate set of Noahide laws for Gentiles during the Second Temple era
• Jesus' secret meeting with his disciples, planning an attack on the Jerusalem Temple
• Paul changing the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday
• Paul's claim that he was sent by Gamaliel to hunt down the church
• That the apostles' treasury was nearly empty before Paul arrived and then overflowing with Roman gold after Paul joined
• That the disciples were impressed by increased wealth, and impressed enough to let all the other apostles be bullied by Paul into accepting his radically changed theology

 In order to support this view of Paul as a convert, Shmuley says that the Ebionite documents record this. Unfortunately, there are no Ebionite manuscripts available to us. The only clue we have that such a manuscript existed is that Epiphanus wrote a short passage about it in the Panarion.

Nor are they ashamed to accuse Paul here with certain fabrications of their false apostles' villainy and imposture. They say that he was Tarsean—which he admits himself and does not deny. And they suppose that he was of Greek parentage, taking the occasion for this from the (same) passage because of his frank statement, 'I am a man of Tarsus, a citizen of no mean city.' They then claim that he was Greek and the son of a Greek mother and Greek father, but that he had gone up to Jerusalem, stayed there for a while, desired to marry a daughter of the high priest, and had therefore became a proselyte and been circumcised. But since he still could not marry that sort of girl he became angry and wrote against circumcision, and against the Sabbath and the legislation.

 The Panarion was written in 375, and therefore long after the events described in the New Testament. It contains legendary material, such as a passage that Peter abstained from eating meat, and that he underwent daily baptism. According to Epiphanus, the Ebionites also rejected the Pentateuch, and embraced some sort of Gnosticism. Legendary writings about Jesus, Paul, and the other apostles were quite plentiful by the late 4th century, and involved all sorts of wild legend and inventions. In short, this document comes far too late to provide any historical support for Paul being a convert to Judaism.

And this is the problem with Shmuley's other stipulations, he either asserts them without evidence, or what he claims as evidence is far too weak to substantiate any of these claims.

There are also plenty of other questions. For one, if Paul was so fiercely opposed by Jesus' original apostles, why do the church fathers only say good things about him? Paul was not the last apostle to die, nor was he the only apostle to be executed. Why did the other apostles go to their executions for such a blatant falsehood, when they could have saved their skins by denouncing it? Why did Paul travel so frequently from Jerusalem, enduring hardship and poverty, and repeatedly receiving lashes, beatings, stonings, being shipwrecked, undergoing starvation when he could have been like most cult leaders and enriched himself in Jerusalem? How did the story in Mark arise with women followers as the discoverers of the empty tomb? If Paul was a Sadducee, why pretend to be a Pharisee and risk getting called out?

Silver Bullets
The conspiracy theorist's approach to arguing is what I call the "silver bullet" approach. In this kind of argumentation, you argue that if some fact is observed, then it is impossible for the official explanation to be true. For example, young earth creationists will point to soft dinosaur tissue and say that such evidence makes it impossible for these dinosaurs to live millions of years ago. After making that argument, they will claim that the official explanation can now be taken off the table while we look for the real explanation.

That is not how history or forensic science is done. Any explanation for the current data will have problems in it. It will require us to posit one or more things for which we don't have independent evidence. It will fail to explain some features. There will be questions it cannot answer. Neither of these is a disproof of the official theory, but simply a reminder that our knowledge of any past event is limited, and that we have to search for the best explanation, since we might not have access to a perfect explanation. So it's better to go with a cumulative case approach rather than letting one argument serve to completely dismiss a theory.

We need to subject conspiracy theories to the same scrutiny that we give the official explanation. When we do this, the official explanation tends to look a whole lot better than the alternatives. The degree of ad hoc-ness in Shmuley's theory shows why it never gained traction among historical Paul scholars (even atheists), either now or back when Maccoby advanced the same theory back in 1986.