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Jesus in History: Transition from New Testament Studies to Hebrew Bible Studies (Announcement)

Now Finishing the Transition

For those of us who were part of it at the time around 2012, The Christ Myth Theory blossomed as a topic of interest for at least 3 important reasons.  On the one hand, Bart Ehrman published his famous book defending the historicity of Jesus against the mythicist claims of writers like Doherty and Price.  Also, James McGrath did his blog series on Doherty’s book on the then Exploring our Matrix website, which later became the Religion Prof Website.  Finally, R Joseph Hoffmann posted his famous “Mythic Pizza” blog post which had a massive comment response.

The mythicist theory never caught on in academia, most New Testament experts teaching at accredited secular universities thinking the paradigm a tortured reading of the evidence, as I’ve noted in previous posts in this series.  And so, to transition to a discussion to Genesis, I’d like to point out some Genesis imagery in the Gospel of Mark that seems to flatly contradict the Christ Myth Theory.

There seems to be Genesis imagery in the Gospel of Mark.  In the Gospel of Mark, we have the image of the naked young man at the arrest who seems to reappear later clothed in heavenly garments inside the tomb.  The imagery seems to be that the naked young man was as guilty as the naked Adam in the eyes of the world for following the criminal Jesus.  Jesus seems to be thought guilty of blasphemy according to the Jewish elite, and sedition to the romans, as that was why romans crucified people.  We similarly have Jesus ben Ananias being referred by the Jewish elite to Rome for more severe punishment than they were allowed to give in Josephus.  But, just as through the resurrection God showed the world was wrong and Jesus was innocent in His eyes, so too was the young man as his follower holy.

Our reading of the naked young man in Mark is a thoughtful and well-attested line of interpretation in Markan scholarship. The two appearances of the neaniskos (young man)—fleeing naked in 14:51–52 and sitting clothed in a white robe inside the tomb in 16:5—are widely seen as deliberately linked by the evangelist.

The literary and symbolic connections

Mark alone records the flight of the young man who was wearing only a linen cloth (sindōn) over his naked body; the others seize him, he leaves the cloth, and flees naked. The same Greek term neaniskos reappears only once more in the Gospel, for the figure the women encounter in the empty tomb, now “dressed in a white robe” and seated on the right.

Scholars have long noted the clothing motif that bridges the two scenes:

The sindōn abandoned in Gethsemane is the same word Mark uses for the linen shroud in which Jesus’ body is wrapped for burial (15:46).

The white robe of the young man at the tomb recalls the dazzling white garments of the transfigured Jesus (9:3).

A common narrative-critical reading is that the garment of shame is, in literary terms, taken up by Jesus in death, while the garment of glory is given to the restored figure who announces the resurrection. The naked flight dramatizes total abandonment and exposure; the clothed presence in the tomb signals restoration and heavenly vindication. We can connect this to the post-Fall nakedness and shame of Adam in Genesis 3, where nakedness marks vulnerability and guilt before the world (and before God). The young man’s association with the “criminal” Jesus makes him appear guilty by association in human eyes, just as the disciples as a group have failed. The empty-tomb scene then reverses the verdict: what the world judged shameful is shown, through the resurrection, to be holy.

Other complementary readings exist (baptismal symbolism of stripping and reclothing, a Joseph typology from Genesis 39, or a representative of the Markan community’s own failure and hoped-for restoration), but they all turn on the same transformation from shame/nakedness to glory/clothing.

Jesus, the charges, and the parallel with Jesus ben Ananias

Our point about the dual charges against Jesus is historically accurate. The Sanhedrin scenes emphasize blasphemy (claiming divine prerogatives); the Roman trial and the titulus on the cross emphasize sedition / claiming to be “King of the Jews.” Crucifixion was the standard Roman penalty for rebels and those who threatened public order.

The parallel we draw with Jesus ben Ananias (also rendered “Jesus the son of Ananus/Ananias”) in Josephus, Jewish War 6.5.3, is apt in structure. Around 62 CE, this peasant prophet began crying out doom against Jerusalem and the Temple. The Jewish authorities arrested him, flogged him, and handed him over to the Roman procurator Albinus for more severe punishment. Albinus had him scourged; when the man continued his oracles without resistance or self-defense, the procurator concluded he was mad and released him. He continued prophesying until he was killed by a Roman projectile during the siege. The pattern—Jewish leadership referring a troublesome apocalyptic prophetic figure to Roman authority for punishment beyond what they themselves could legally impose—mirrors the Gospel accounts of the apocalyptic doomsayer Jesus’ transfer from the Sanhedrin to Pilate. The Gospel of John states that the Jewish leaders were not allowed to execute anyone in John 18:31. When Pontius Pilate tells them to take Jesus and judge him by their own law, the Jewish elite reply, “We have no right to execute anyone.”  In both cases the human authorities treat the figure as a threat or a nuisance; in the Markan narrative the resurrection functions as the divine reversal of that human verdict.

In short, the imagery we describe is not forced onto the text like Christ Mythicism is. Mark’s carefully chosen vocabulary, the unique double appearance of the neaniskos, the shared sindōn, and the movement from naked shame to white-robed proclamation invite precisely the kind of Genesis-tinged reading of guilt-in-the-world’s-eyes versus innocence-and-holiness-in-God’s-eyes that we outlined. The resurrection is presented as the definitive divine judgment that overturns the world’s (and the authorities’) assessment of both Jesus and those associated with him.

In the end, the Christ Myth Theory was a shocking thesis and gained notoriety because of it, like the DaVinci Code did popularizing a certain reading of the Gospel of Philip.  In Canada my late friend Tom Harpur’s mythicist The Pagan Christ became the bestselling nonfiction book the year it was published, and the mythicist documentary The God Who Wasn’t There brought the theory to a wide audience.  Richard Carrier published his peer reviewed mythicism defense On the Historicity of Jesus in 2014 by the same press that published Thomas Brodie’s mythicist autobiography, but Carrier famously did not pass peer review with his follow up volume.  In response, Carrier went online with a few scholars who were very sympathetic to the largely mythic nature of Jesus to argue his book should have passed peer review.  I find Carrier’s books to be wrong, but particularly noble because it tries to peer behind our historical probability judgment to try and justify why we claim what we do.  As a teacher I also am very concerned with how to justify the modifiers (qualifiers and quantifiers) I use to assess and evaluate student work.  I’m just not persuaded by Carrier’s application.

As I transition from focus on Jesus to focus on Genesis, I just wanted to show a connection between the two that points us to a fuller triangulation toward a Jesus of history that I’ve argued for in these posts.