Religious dispositions are not so much viewed as one’s subjective set of beliefs for the faithful but rather the way they experience the world, like how the world might appear/present itself to a schizophrenic in a conspiracy saturated way.  The religious details seem woven into the fabric of reality itself for the believer. Young writes:

Let’s say you prefer, benefit from, or just feel comfortable with a particular institution (e.g., your mosque, church, or synagogue), set of values (e.g., no sex outside of marriage), social hierarchy (e.g., men in authority over women), or even collection of categories for thinking about your world (e.g., everyone is either a man or a woman). You may then gravitate toward narratives in which these things are not your preferences because you inherited or benefit from them. No, instead they are universal and foundational, part of the fabric of reality from the beginning. For an example of such a narrative, “Men are more naturally leaders because God made men bolder and women more emotional from the beginning.” In this way a social hierarchy with men at the top transforms into an expression of “just the way things are,” and it gets attached to a variety of other norms. This contested hierarchy thus becomes seemingly natural through the strategy of depicting its social arrangements as divinely established in our origins.

Through the reappropriation of the religious ideas of one’s tradition, as we see with haggadic midrash in the New Testament (e.g., Matthew’s Jesus recapitulating the story of Moses), a figure reinterprets the tradition to focus on himself and thus uses his hearers religiousness for his own ends. Young writes:

Jewish sources beyond Paul’s Letters likewise feature self-authorized mythmakers. To offer a few examples: in his Jewish Antiquities, Josephus writes of “a certain imposter” (goēs tis) who “persuaded the majority of the masses to take up their possessions and to follow him to the Jordan River. He stated that he was a prophet and that at his command the river would be parted and would provide them an easy passage” (A.J. 20.97 [Feldman, LCL]). We lack further evidence for Theudas beyond this passage in a hostile source. It is plausible to speculate that his claims about parting the Jordan drew on Jewish mythological lore relating both to the exodus and the entry into the promised land through the Jordan River (Josh 3–4), which itself is a reuse of exodus myths. In this way Theudas adapts the exodus and promised-land-entry myths in ways that further resonate with mythology about a divine warrior with control over the sea and waters who may share that authority with his human agent. Similarly with the so-called Egyptian, according to Josephus’s discussion in his Jewish Antiquities, he called himself a prophet and led his followers to the Mount of Olives outside Jerusalem, where he claimed that at his command the city’s walls would fall (A.J. 20.168–172; the account of the Egyptian in B.J. 2.259–263 lacks the material about Jerusalem’s walls). The impression is an eschatological reuse of Israelite conquest mythology.

As Dennis MacDonald notes contra the Christ myth position, it makes little sense for Jesus to be presented by Matthew as the new and greater Moses if he was essentially and originally a vague celestial savior figure since such a being was not an innovator and authority on the law and so would have no authoritative impact on Matthew’s listeners.  This recycling and reinterpreting old myth would also reflect the pagan traditions, as Dennis MacDonald and Robyn Faith Walsh have noted since the New Testament writers were the product of Greek education. Young writes:

As Robyn Walsh emphasizes, the writers of New Testament Gospels were literate men who wrote within Greco-Roman literary cultures wherein knowledge of Homer and other foundational texts in educational practices (e.g., Hesiod, Euripides) were basic in the literate repertoire. It is thus unsurprising that interpreters elucidate all manner of reuses, resonances, competitive allusions, and engagements with Homeric and other Greco-Roman myths in the gospels.

One thing I note in my “B’ Robyn Walsh essay is the anti-Jewish polemic in the gospels from the corrupt trial of Jesus (e.g., the supreme Jewish council meeting on Passover eve) to the Jewish crowd turning on Jesus.  This sort of thinking reflected how historically one Jewish group would express animosity toward another thinking they perverted the Jewish tradition and religion. Young writes:

As numerous interpreters have shown, the significance of the good news here resonates with a series of Jewish myths about God’s long-term imperial plans and with royal ideologies of kings who administer theocratic empires on behalf of gods who appointed them. This is not a Jesus who “subverts” imperial ideologies, but one who mobilizes them on behalf of his God’s own imperial and theocratic empire. In Mark 4:10–12, Jesus presents his enigmatic teaching as an enactment of Isa 6:8–10, as though his God is fulfilling a prophesied threat through Jesus. Jesus casts himself as a significant actor in a Jewish eschatological scheme that draws on ethnic mythological lore about Elijah and the Son of Man in Mark 9:12–13. His temple tantrum in Mark 11:15–18 mobilizes Jeremiah 7 to present his actions in terms of God’s judgment on temple leadership. And Mark 12:10–11 has Jesus reusing material from Ps 118 about God’s temple to frame the significance of what’s happening when competing Jewish leaders reject him. Jesus combines novel adaptation of mythic materials (presenting his presence as the fulfillment of a return from exile and Christos myth from Isa 61) with demonstrations of literary expertise involving a sacred book in Luke 4:16–30.40 A thread running through many of these passages in which Jesus wields Jewish mythological resources is competitive polemic against his fellow Jewish opponents: Jesus naturalizes his expertise, movement, and teachings about Israel’s God by positioning himself as a prophesied actor in Jewish eschatological myths. This necessarily delegitimizes his opponents (more on them below) since, according to Jesus’s competitive rhetoric, they do not understand their ancestral deity’s plans and laws, ultimately oppose him, and thus do not credibly represent God… Jesus polemically delegitimates the Pharisees as hypocrites who reject God in favor of their own interests and greed. Unlike Jesus, they do not really understand their ancestral God, his laws, or eschatological plans. These gospels also depict a clash between Jesus and dominant Jewish figures with institutional position: the Sadducees and priests. In this case too, Jesus contests their authority and institutional legitimacy through attacks on their disinterest (e.g., Mark 11:27–33). Throughout these narratives Jesus naturalizes his expertise, often against his competitors, via the strategies available to independent experts: displays of interpretive and ethnic-historical expertise, works of power, claims of divine authorization and revelation, esoteric enigmatic teachings, and reuse of established myths. Some, many, all, or none of these passages may reflect events that took place during the life of Jesus. The key point for the Next Quest, however, is that our earliest narratives about Jesus, despite their often competitive differences, conspicuously present him as a kind of myth-wielding expert that would have been recognizable or understandable to their readers. This image of Jesus is not incidental in these gospels.

In fact, this all may trace back to the disputed claim in 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16 where Paul claims the Jews killed Jesus.  This is sometimes seen as a later addition to Paul’s text, though the idea was tabled by eminent Pauline scholar Benjamin White at Ehrman’s recent second New Insights Into The New Testament conference that Jewish Paul here may simply have been engaged in polemics against rival Jews, and so the passage may be authentically Pauline.  Mythicists like Carrier have bent over backward to argue the passage is an interpolation, since if the Jews killed Jesus he was an historical figure.  The authenticity of the passage certainly reflects the dystopian theme that the Jews turned on God’s especially beloved Son (agapetos), and is present throughout the gospels such as with the idea a prophet is without honor in his hometown.

Benjamin White is one of the top and most respected Pauline scholars in the world. White’s talk is about how mathematics is used to help decide which of the New Testament letters are authentically written by Paul. I would like to highlight one point he makes about 1 Thess 2: 14-16. This passage reads:

14 For you, brothers and sisters, became imitators of the churches of God in Christ Jesus that are in Judea, for you suffered the same things from your own compatriots as they did from the Jews 15 who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets and drove us out; they displease God and oppose everyone 16 by hindering us from speaking to the gentiles so that they may be saved. Thus they have constantly been filling up the measure of their sins, but wrath has overtaken them at last. (1 Thess 2: 14-16)

This is an important text for mythicists to dismiss as an interpolation because it says the Jews killed Christ: SEE CARRIER HERE.  The claim is further that references to destruction in the verses identify the destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70, and so is post-Paul.  Either it was an interpolation, or it was original to 1 Thessalonians which makes that entire letter inauthentic.  Mythicists argue the anti Judaism in the text reflects something the movement later grew into over time. 

White disagrees and does not find reason to dismiss it as an interpolation.  Paul seems to be a first century apocalyptic Jew navigating through other Jews like the pharisees, Essenes, he says he is not of the “Super Apostle” Christ group, etc., and we know from the Dead Sea Scrolls these groups were always going after one another as to who the true people of God are.  It is certainly possible for Paul, speaking among gentiles, to speak badly of Jews he thought killed Christ.  I would note too Paul thought the apocalypse was underway, he says the resurrected Christ being the first fruits of the general resurrection harvest of souls at the end of the age, so he thought the judgment of the enemies of God had begun, and so need not refer to post-70 CE destruction of Jerusalem.   Relatedly, in a later presentation in the conference Dr. Joel Marcus points out that Paul says the Jews are beloved by God because they come from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but enemies of God for rejecting Jesus and his message (Romans 11:28)

Returning to the idea of religious writing as encapsulating one’s religious disposition, we see a Pauline perspective of Mark vs a re-Judaized gospel of Matthew to reflect their respective experiences of the world. Young writes:

To offer one example, I align with a group of scholars who think the Gospel of Mark does not require adherence to Jewish laws among (gentile?) followers of Jesus, whereas a key goal of the writer of Matthew was to usurp, redirect, or otherwise competitively rewrite Mark’s position on this and other matters. If one follows this line of thought, it matters that Mark 7:19’s katharizōn panta ta brōmata seems to interpret Mark 7’s story about Jesus’s legal competition with Pharisees and scribes about ceremonial washing to mean Jesus set aside some of his ancestral dietary laws.53 The writer of Matthew, conversely, not only deletes the katharizōn panta ta brōmata interpretation of Jesus’s action in his rewriting of the story (Matt 15:1–20), but also—and uniquely in the New Testament Gospels—has Jesus proclaim the permanence of the law while polemicizing against anyone who teaches others they can relax even the smallest of its commands (Matt 5:18–19). Matthew 28:20 even concludes the Gospel with Jesus’s imperial instructions that involve teaching future disciples “to keep all which I commanded you,” which, as the writer has already made a point of emphasizing, includes all parts of Jewish law. Some interpreters venture further and explain that the Gospel of Mark was “a biographical expression not just of concepts central to Paul, but of Paul’s own persona … Mark primes audience expectations to Paul’s advantage … [and] was quite deliberate and consistent in forging such connections” whereas the Gospel of Matthew was a polemical rewriting of Mark because its writer opposed Pauline influence. In any version of these scenarios, the writers of Mark and Matthew (re)wrote narratives about Jesus that made their competing positions simply expressions of or obedience to their divinely appointed founding figure: Jesus. Mark and Matthew are thus themselves forms of mythmaking about Jesus that naturalize the social hierarchies, values, and understandings of God their writers preferred.

And so, we see the writers’ mythmaking as they rewrote the stories about Jesus in their own image.  Ehrman notes in his course on Jesus vs Paul that Mark had a Pauline bias of emphasizing crucifixion resurrection theology, but that he still included traces of an historical Jesus who taught the Kingdom of God, not himself.  Jesus begins his mission in Mark saying salvation comes through repentance, and in the story of the rich young man Jesus teaches salvation comes through following the Law and giving everything to the poor.  This is also reflected in the story of the sheep and goats in Matthew.  It was obviously a problem for Mark that the disciples got violent with the arresting party, since this suggests Jesus’ death/resurrection was not on anyone’s radar or taught by Jesus, and so Mark made the clever literary invention that Jesus did in fact repeatedly predict his death and resurrection, but his witless disciples didn’t understand.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Young, Stephen. Myth and Mythmaking in Crossley, James; Keith, Chris. The Next Quest for the Historical Jesus (pp. 272-297). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition (2024)