Truth
A Critique of “Runaway World” by Michael Green 1
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Thursday, August 23, 2001
Christian Belief
A famous Phibber was the Reverend E M B Green who was the principal of the London School of Divinity, and a popular Christian author. He was a clever man with several degrees, so what do you imagine he was doing writing a book which purported to answer questions like:
Is Christian belief escapism—running away from reality? Or are the escapists really those who won’t face up to the evidence for Christian belief?
Since Michael Green is a clever man, he knows there is no evidence for Christian belief, as Dr Barnes, the Bishop of Birmingham, freely admitted. So how can Green think that some people will not face up to it? Would you say he was self-deluded or trying to delude others? Few people will happily accept the loss of their jobs through redundancy and we have to expect that the same is true of the clergy. They will frown on those who make admissions that might endanger their earthly job, whether they really believe their own heavenly propaganda or not.
So, God does not come into it. The clergy are no less selfish than other humans and many are more so. Michael Green wants to argue that nearly everybody, but only a few Christians, are escapists! Green admits that Christianity is predicated on the historical fact that the son of God actually came to earth and was crucified. Christianity is not primarily an ethical system but is “Good News” about this singular revelation of God as man. Proof is his “matchless teaching,” the “moral miracle” of his sinless life, and his “well-substantiated” resurrection from the dead. Obviously, if Green believes all this he is either not intelligent or not sane, but since he seems to be neither, we can only conclude that he is writing as a cynical Christian hack to encourage the delusions of the flock.
Green rcognises that Christian history is remarkably like the nature worship of several eastern religions that were based on the annual cycles of the year as expressed in its seasons of birth, maturity, death and resurrection. Yet he audaciously says that Christianity was different because the Christian claim was that this mythology actually happened to a known human being. “That is what makes Christianity so stark and so challenging.” You have to agree that it is a stark insult to the intelligence and a challenge to reason to pretend that the Christian myth is not a fictional allegory of a long held belief.
Now note this. Green is adamant and emphatic that it all depends on the Jesus of history.
Remove him from Christianity and nothing distinctive is left. Once disprove the historicity of Jesus Christ and Christianity will collapse like a pack of cards.
The historical incarnation of God in human flesh is the essential foundation stone of Christianity which will fall in a heap if the claim is not well founded. It is nonsense. The claim has never been well founded but Christianity continues. The argument is virtually the opposite in reality. Christianity exists and that proves it is sufficiently well founded for Christians, but it does need a foundation story. Green is therefore determined to prove to us that the foundation story is sound. He apparently has to succeed, having admitted that nothing distinctive remains if God did not commit himself to life and death as a human, but he is secure that the religion implies the story so will continue anyway. It is more Christian dishonesty.
He begins by apologising that “an obscure peasant teacher in an unimportant frontier province of the Roman empire” would not be expected to make a great mark on the world. He wants you to forget immediately that this obscure peasant teacher was putatively the God of the whole universe appearing on earth with a crucial message to all human beings about the salvation of their immortal souls. Suddenly he is merely a peasant teacher who could not expect attention from literate people of the time. So the first part of Green’s apology does not match the assertion that the peasant was really God, and the second part, that Palestine was unimportant to Romans is manifestly utterly wrong, as any historical scholar of the period will tell you—unless they are Christian.
Pliny
Nevertheless, Green hopes to show the hand of God at work by citing several upper-crust Roman writers who noticed God appear as a peasant teacher. He cites Pliny the Younger who wrote to Trajan in 112 AD asking the emperor how to deal with the local fad in Bithynia for Christianity. Green hopes to mislead again, despite his educational credentials, by telling his dewey-eyed readers that Bithynia was a remote province on the edge of the Roman world, implying that Christianity had already spread into remote corners. He omits to say that Bithynia had a considerable Jewish population, had been greatly influenced by Persian religion for over 500 years, and was close to the towns and provinces in Anatolia that Paul had first evangelised. In short, its remoteness from Rome, even if that is a fair description, did not mean it was remote from the roots of the Christian religion. There could hardly have been better soil for it to grow in.
Now, although Green describes Pliny’s letter in a comprehensive paraphrase, he leaves it to the reader to deduce that it is evidence of a historical Jesus. It is not. It is evidence that some people carried out certain practices according to certain beliefs. If the people he questioned had been Druids, would we deduce that Lugh had appeared incarnate on earth and had been hung on an oak tree? If they had worshipped Hercules, would we have to believe that he too was an incarnate god? Green leaves it incomplete, so that the believers he expects to be reading his book will think it is some sort of proof that Jesus was historical.
Tacitus
Next Green turned to the words of the Roman historian, Tacitus. Tacitus seemed to despise the Christians, and Green has to reassure his flock, in a footnote that Tacitus was unjustified in his contempt. Tacitus explained that Christians were blamed for the burning of Rome in 64 AD, and were called after a man called Christ who was executed in the reign of the “Procurator” Pontius Pilate. Again we have a report of the beliefs of the Christians themselves rather than an independent confirmation. What is more suspicious is that Tacitus gets the title of Pilate wrong calling him the Procurator, and leading to the belief for centuries that Pilate was indeed Procurator. He was a Prefect as we now know from an inscription. At the very least, this proves that Tacitus did not use any official records in describing the origins of the Christians. At the worst, it suggests that the piece might have been a forgery, on the assumption that Tacitus, as a historian, ought to have been able to get the story right less than a century after the event.
Elsewhere, as Green admits, Tacitus says the Christians began as a sect of the Jews, and Titus thought that the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70 AD would destroy the root of both Christianity and Judaism. This can only sensibly be read as meaning that “Christianity” was Jewish until 70 AD and therefore that the people Tacitus spoke of were messianic Jews rather than Christians as they are now understood. Christians believed Jesus was the messiah but there were many Jews who rejected the idea that the messiah could have been crucified and they still expected the messiah to appear. Christ is simply Greek for messiah so messianic Jews of any kind could be called “Christiani.” Thus the Christians persecuted by Nero need not have been the Christians imagined by sobbing clappies but could have been Jewish opponents of them. Green concludes by this, again selectively presented evidence, that Jesus was historical.
Thallus
Green now tells us that there is even more astonishing testimony—testimony from the very century that Jesus was crucified. It turns out to be the testimony of a third century Christian, Julius Africanus, not a first century one. Christians take it to be the testimony of a first century Samaritan historian called Thallus, because that is how Africanus presents it—and Christians do not disbelieve other Christians! Yet all Africanus is doing is citing the opinion of Thallus that the darkness at noon was the result of a solar eclipse. Africanus says Thallus was actually “explaining away” the darkness, as he must have been because an eclipse of the sun cannot happen at Passover when the moon is full. One might say that this was evidence that the story of Jesus was known in Rome around 52 AD when Thallus was supposed to have been writing, but we have to accept that Julius Africanus, two centuries later, had got the correct story himself. If Thallus had anything significant to say about Jesus and it was still extant in the third century, one wonders why it was not preserved as part of the testaments. Julius Africanus was himself a librarian!
The darkness at the crucifixion is probably itself an assimilation of the Roman legend of Romulus, deified as Quirenius, when the heavens darkened as the man died, and ascended to heaven as a god. The setting of this event was about 800 BC, and the legend must have preceded Christianity by several centuries at a minimum. To the rational mind, it shows how even a historical Jesus was given the trappings of a classical god in the Rome of the first century.
An Inscription at Nazareth
An inscription found at Nazareth warns that the theft of bodies from tombs was a captial crime. This is unsurprising in Roman times because the Romans had a high regard for the dead, and, as John Dominic Crossan has pointed out most recently, the worst aspect of crucifixion for Romans was that the corpse was deliberately left unburied to be picked by crows and snatched at by wild dogs. Green takes it to be a response by Claudius to Pilate’s report of the crucifixion and resurrection, when, even accepting it refers to Jesus, it is no more than a notice that the body had disappeared, not that it had been resurrected. In fact, no such monument could have been erected over the disappearance of the body of one crucified felon. It is evidence of a spate of tomb thefts. You will recall that Green began his apology by telling us Jesus was a “peasant teacher” and Palestine an unimportant country, but now Jesus and Palestine were important enough to merit a personal report by Pilate to the emperor, and an astonishing response by the leader of the known world! Apparently utterly unaware of what he had written just a few pages before, Green now writes:
It is difficult to imagine that Pilate could have avoided making a report to Rome. After all, Jesus had been executed as a political pretender, and such people were of very special interest to the emperor.
Suddenly when it suits the Christian apologist, the obscure peasant teacher is not so obscure. He turns out to be of “very special interest” because he was a rebel king. Green goes on to tell us that a well known Christian lawyer, Tertullian, of the second century, insisted that even then the report was in the imperial archives. Sensing this is dangerous territory for the sheep in the flock, Green hastily warns them not to take Tertullian too seriously as “he was prone to exaggeration.”
“Exaggerating” is simply a Christian euphemism for lying. Green cannot accuse Tertullian of lying so he is simply “prone to exaggerate.” Exaggerating does not, he knows his flock will accept, imply untruth. When Christians want to use the words of Tertullian, they will not normally remind the reader that he is “prone to exaggeration.” In any court of law, a witness shown to be “prone to exaggeration” will be discounted. No one knows when the witness is exaggerating and when he is not, so their evidence is worthless. Tertullian is a crucial witness to much of the history of Christianity in the first two centuries, notably of its persecutions, and so cannot be discredited. In fact, Green has done it, but Christians do not notice.
The monument was dated to the time of Claudius, yet Pilate reported to Tiberius. When Claudius became emperor in 41 AD, Pilate had been fired for five years and banished to Gaul. Moreover, it was eight years after the event that was supposed to have initiated it, taking conventional Christian chronology to be true. Roman were rarely so inefficient.
And why erect it in Nazareth when the event occurred in Jerusalem? Doubtless the Christian answer would be that Nazareth was the home of Jesus, but no one denies that Nazareth in the first century actually was obscure. Many scholars do not believe it even existed then, but accepting that it did, it could only have been a tiny hamlet, and what purpose could have been served by erecting such a warning in such an unpopulated place? Jerusalem would have been the sensible place for such a warning. It would have been seen by everyone since regular pilgrimages to the temple were required by all Jews, and, at first, by Christians. The mother of Constantine, Helena, in her role as the primordial Christian pilgrim, put names to places like Nazareth in the fourth century. So, the monument is probably a later forgery meant to be what it is taken as—an indirect reference to the resurrection of Jesus.
Suetonius
Green makes another reference to a text by Claudius mentioning the fomenting of a “universal plague” by “certain other Jews in Egypt,” but whatever the speculations of gullible Christians might be, the “plague” is most likely to be related to the unrest that eventually led to the Jewish War. Messianism was integral to this, including that of the Christian sect that remained at this time Jewish and evidently was considered by Titus to have been anti-Roman along with the Jews in the war.
Claudius was soon having to handle messianic riots in Rome, described by Suetonius, a court official under Hadrian, and annalist of the Imperial House. In the Lives of the Twelve Caesars, Suetonius mentions the disturbances in Rome instigated by Chrestus. Suetonius obviously thought Chrestus was the person present in Rome instigating the riots, but Christians have always claimed it was a reference to Christus, a man who was already dead and ascended into heaven. The outcome was that Jews were expelled from Rome so, the riots were Jewish riots.
The association with Christus, assuming that Suetonius got the spelling wrong, must have meant the riots were messianic riots. They might have been riots between Christians and other Jews, but are more likely to have been riots over the claims of some other, perhaps local Jew, to messiahhood. Inasmuch as Jewish Christians were in Rome at the time, they might have been involved in these riots on the side of those opposing the claimant, since they already had their own messiah.
What Suetonius says does not show in any convincing way that Christians were already an influential group in Rome in about 49 AD, as Christians like to think, but it does show that Jews were still excitable and expectant of the prospects of a messiah in the run up to the hostilities in Palestine. That Aquila and Priscilla (Acts 18:2) were evicted, presumably among the eviction of the Jews, simply shows that Christians were still Jews, not that the evicted Jews were worshippers of the crucified Galilaean. Green has to point out that they were “Jews by birth but Christian by belief.” Perhaps some were.
Remember too that Suetonius was not a contemporary of the events but was writing about them as a historian about 80 years later. He was not even sure of the proper name of the “instigator” of the riots, and thought he was alive then! So, he is not telling us anything about the historical Jesus. The best that the Christians can claim is that Christians might have been prominent in Rome only twenty years after the death of their founder, but it is more likely that the riots were caused by the messianic expectations of the Jews of Rome, and inasmuch as Christians were involved at all, they were involved as Jews. The important point missed by all Christians is that Jesus was one messianic claimant. Christians think he was the only one, or if they know better, conclude that he was the only genuine one. In short, they confirm Jesus as messiah from the success of Christianity, not the other way round.
Pliny, Tacitus, and Suetonius, Green tells us, were writing about events that took place only about 30 years before they were born. The events he means are those of the career of Jesus, though only Tacitus mentions him. He uses the birth of these men to make the events of Jesus’s career seem so close to the lives of these men that they should have been immediately familiar, but ask anyone what they know even of events that were only 30 years before they were born. they are unlikely to have become aware of them until a half century had passed, and whatever happens before anyone was born might as well have been a millennium before. Ask any modern youth what they know about Ike—General Eisenhower. Few will know much, yet at one time Eisenhower was never out of the news as a great general and then a two term president of the USA with his slogan “I Like Ike.” Green is being dishonest. He wants to trick the unwary reader into thinking that these reporters must have known about Jesus.
Green also wants us to believe that, as officials, they must have had access to the archives. If they had, they did not think it important enough to look them up. It is not surprising. They took the Christians who were the subjects of their reports to be troublesome fanatics. That is why they barely disguised their contempt of them, inviting Green’s protective footnote. Roman annalists saw them as mobsters but they were really sweet pacifists happy to be eaten by lions, Christians tell us. Shortly there was to be a long and violent war between Jews and Romans. It is plain that the people being written about by the Roman reporters were not pacifist. They were Jews who still believed a supernatural warrior king would lead them to be rulers of the world—the Christ or messiah.
Jewish Evidence
Green now seeks to persuade us with Jewish evidence which he first warns us is “understandably sparse.” You have to accept that this Christian God, greater than the universe itself, did not plan out His campaign of salvation too well. The God who is more powerful than a million super-novae lets the most astonishing thing he ever did pass unreported or only “sparsely” reported. “It was to test our faith,” says the Christian, although why faith should be a criterion of salvation by the compassionate God is not clear. “To test gullibility” might be a better explanation in view of God’s many earlier warnings in Isaiah about other saviours and in Deuteronomy about false prophets. In this case, of course, those who believe are the ones who are not saved because they were taken in by a ruse, contrary to all of God’s warnings in the Jewish scriptures. That is probably why Christianity became a gentile religion. Jews knew of God’s warnings and generally did not heed the claim that a man was a saviour. Gentiles had not read them and believed. By the time they had ready access to the Septuagint, the religion was already established and the warnings were read too late.
Anyway, Green tells us that the Jews resented the Christians for not helping them in the Jewish War, even though he has already told us that the Roman general, Titus, who concluded the war with a Roman victory, thought he had been fighting both Jews and Christians. Are the Jews ignorant of this, or was Titus wrong to suppose that the temple was important to both Jews and Christians?
The truth is that the Jewish War was largely a messianic war, and the Christians, who were still Jews, were classed, as their name shows, among the messianists. Christians, believers in Jesus as messiah, will have seen the Jewish War as the culmination of the battle of the forces of Good and Evil that would end with the coming on a cloud of Jesus leading the heavenly armies of God to set up God’s kingdom. It was Essenes and Nazarenes who were the most fervent messianists (Christians). Pharisees tended to be skeptical about messianic claims, but would have felt an obligation to take a nationalistic position in the face of the invading legions. After the war, the Pharisees eventually cast of messianism all together and set up the contemplative, scholarly religion of the rabbis that we now understand as Judaism.
Yet Green, in the typical Christian fashion that they claim has no bearing on anti-Judaism, says the Jews were “jealous” of the new faith’s “meteoric rise.” In this, of course, he echoes the “word of God” in the New Testament that blames the Jews for the death of the Christian God. That this was published just after the end of the Jewish War should surprise no one except Christians.
Then again, this god for whom the universe is but a footstool, has appointed the Jews as “His Chosen People” for a millennium or so, then abandons them all together in favour of those who would break His previous orders not to be fooled by human pretenders as prophets or saviours. Instead He actually appears on earth in the form of a human being, contradicting His earlier instructions, and expecting people to know He really is the saviour God merely pretending to be human. God foresees all, of course, so feeble humans do not need to understand Him—they say—though, if that is what God thinks, it is not surpriosing that most clever people who are also honest are never Christians. Anyway, as Michael Green says: “There is not much about Christ in the Jewish writings and what there is is not complimentary.”
Now, God has a Chosen People that he has abandoned, according to Christians—though Jews do not think so—and He has a saviour of the whole human race, or rather those who believe he is the saviour—the Christians—and His Chosen People certainly do not believe in this particular saviour. Not only that, but God had told His Chosen People that the law of Moses was the closest possible to the rule of heaven on earth, and when He appeared as saviour, He reiterated that not a jot or tittle of it would be changed, and then—Christians say—He changed his mind and repealed the whole lot! No one who is clever and honest could believe that a God of Everything could be so contradictory. Crooks and frauds however, are rarely anything other than contradictory because it is hard for more than one of them to invent a consistent story.
Josephus
Christians like to quote the historian Josephus, favoured by the Roman emperor Vespasian, as upholding the accuracy of the New Testament. What they do not tell people is that no one is sure whether the New Testament gospels depend upon Josephus or not. Green tells us that many of the gospel characters are confirmed in Josephus, even John the Baptists, James the Just and Jesus himself. Green cites Josephus’s testament about Jesus that appears at Antiquities 18:3:3 (Whiston), saying that it is “surprising testimony to find in the pages of one who is not a Christian.” Quite so! But “all attempts to impugn its authority can be said to have failed.” They can and are said by many ignorant or dishonest Christians “to have failed,” but most scholars, including Christians, have disputed the passage on firm grounds. Indeed, it would have been more honest of Green to have written the opposite—all attempts to prove its authenticity have failed.
Green says it is in all the manuscripts, a fact that would have been surprising if it were not true, since Christians had charge of all editions of Josephus for over a thousand years. Nevertheless, Green has to note that it is a surprising inclusion for someone who was not a Christian, and that alone being true would be sufficient to arouse suspicion in the mind of an honest scholar. Green, who is a clever man but a Christian teacher of divinity, claims the passage is “independent” testimony to the historical reality of Jesus of Nazareth, though he knows that Christians had every opportunity for hundreds of years to add or remove whatever they liked to Josephus. In fact, Eusebius in the fourth century is the first to cite this important evidence for Jesus. No one had thought to quote it before! It gives a pronounced clue to who composed it for the first time and when.
Green even concludes his paragraphs on this passage in Josephus by saying that Josephus had the strongest reasons for omitting it even if it were true. The reason is that Josephus was a Roman captive. The Flavian family favoured him, but could have and would have withdrawn their support if Josephus had propagated ideas against the Romans. Jesus, remember, had been hung as a terrorist and pretender to the throne of Judaea. For Josephus to contradict this in such a bold way would have been the end of him. It is inconceivable that Josephus who had used remarkable cunning and human insight to preserve his own life when captured by the Romans and even inveigled his way into a privileged position as a historian of the War would risk it all with a paragraph favouring a Jewish rebel. It does not matter whether Christians believe Jesus to be the son of God and the Christ, the Romans had hung him as a rebel and that is what they considered that he was. Josephus would have been joining the queues for the lions.
Christians say Josephus was a secret Christian, but if he was he is proof that Christians fought in the Jewish War on the side of the Jews. In truth, Christians made him one of them by adding this paragraph favourable to Christianity after his death. It is a ploy they have often used since.
Talmud
Moving to the Mishnah and the Talmuds, Green immediately calls the Jewish sages scandal mongerers for Jesus was surnamed Ben Pantera, implying that his father was called Pantera, a popular name for black Roman soldiers. Green thereby succeeds in racially insulting Jews and blacks in one sentence. Unless you believe the Christian fairy tale about the universal God impregnating a virgin, the explanation that the Greek “parthenos,” meaning “virgin,” was a deliberate change from “Pantera” is more convincing and likely. Green mentions that even Mark’s gospel calls Jesus a bastard when it calls him the “son of his mother” (Mk 6:3), a Semitic way of saying bastard, through the implication he had no known father. Joseph is scarcely mentioned in the gospels, and is not mentioned in Mark, the earliest gospel. The Essenes accepted waifs and strays and the most likely explanation is that the destitute unmarried mother of Jesus turned him over to the sect for protection, and probably joined it herself. So, it is quite feasible that Jesus was ben Pantera, the bastard son of a black Roman, brought up by the monkish Jewish sect that he came to lead and die for. His gentile bishops, however, had to explain Pantera as being “parthenos,” so Jesus had a virgin as a mother and a God as a father in the accepted way of Greek semi-gods.
Green cites Rabbi Eliezar describing Balaam, another Jewish euphemism for Jesus, claiming to be God and leading the whole world astray. Rabbi Eliezar quotes scripture:
God is not man that he should lie… And, if he says he is God, he is a liar and he will decieve, saying he is departing and will come again at the End. He says it but he will not perform it.
Rabbi Eliezar expects the God of Everything to be honest, unlike the Reverend Green. He notes that God has warned people not to believe any man who claims to be God. Yet Christians say God himself, despite His warnings, appeared as a man. Rabbi Eliezar prophesies that Jesus will never return because it is all a deception. Christians of every generation since have expected Jesus to return “soon!” After 2000 years they are still waiting and echoing the same inane chorus. Soon! Soon! Soon! Who was right? Green dismisses it as Rabbinic opposition to Christianity, utterly ignoring the scriptures that are still supposed to be God’s word. Green takes Rabbi Eliezar as confirming Jesus’s own claims, but he knows that these Rabbinic traditions were written down only centuries after Jesus, and are more likely to be refutations of the claims of Christians, than of Christ.
Green then races through other Jewsih mentions of Jesus, but the same criticism is true of them all—Rabbinic traditions are much later, and are repudiations of Christian claims, not necessarily of Jesus. When more specific facts emerge, they do not properly support the Christian story. He was hanged all right at Passover, but at Lydda. He had disciples but only five not twelve. He performed miracles, but under demonic power, not God’s. Green’s purpose is to show that Jesus was a historical person. This Jewish evidence tends to confirm that he was, but much is different, and if there is any genuine tradition, one might expect it to be in Jewish sources, rather than gentile ones.
