Discovered! The DNA of Jesus!
Skeptics sometimes complain that Christians who cite the Bible to prove their faith are guilty of "circular reasoning." This is why people argue about whether there is any evidence for the life of Jesus outside the New Testament, even though references to Jesus in Josephus and Tacitus, while (mostly) genuine, are little crumbs off the giant cookie of historical evidence.
The assumption behind this sideline is that the Bible itself is Christian propaganda, so you can't take it as evidence for who Jesus was and what he did. It probably wouldn't be fair to expect non-Christians to meekly admit everything the Bible claims about God or the work of Jesus.
But one must not forget that the New Testament is itself is, among other things, an extraordinary cache of 1st Century evidence.
The more we learn about the world, the more places we find evidence, and the more kinds of evidence we find. Fingerprints used to be just inconvenient smudges on the windowpane: now they are marks that uniquely identify you. Your retina used to be part of the equipment by which you saw the world: as we studied the eye, it became one way by which the world recognizes you. Look closely, and evidence can be found in small places: fingerprints on a piece of glass by a murder scene, DNA that proves your parentage.
What if the Gospels also contain a unique pattern of evidence for Jesus, similiar to DNA? . I maintain that they do. I think the Gospels contain a pattern as distinct as DNA or fingerprints, a "life pattern" that sets Jesus apart from anyone else else, and that this pattern can be used as definite and powerful evidence that Jesus was and is real, as the Gospels claim.
Richard Dawkins offers an analogy that makes this argument even more piquant. In his book The Selfish Gene, he drew a famous an analogy between genes and what he calls "memes," tunes ideas, ways of doing things:
"Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperm or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation." (192)
Is it not true that, just as we can identify a unique human being by his or her DNA, we can also identify a unique person by the unique nexus of ideas and ways of thinking they exhibit?
I made a detailed case that Jesus can be so identified in my book, Why the Jesus Seminar can't find Jesus, and Grandma Marshall Could. There I described 50 separate characteristics that distinguish the Jesus of the Gospels, unique in known human history, many of which are difficult to explain by any naturalistic hypothesis. I show that Jesus shares these traits in all four Gospels, though other books that are often compared to the Gospels -- the so-called "Gospel of Thomas," the Iliad, Apollonius of Tyana -- turn out, when compared this way, to be entirely different kettles of fish.
Here I will begin by focusing on just one of those characteristics, then nurse out some of the implications of this argument.
I. Jesus and Women Recently, an atheist calling herself Sarah posted the following criticism of the Gospels in a Internet forum:
"Given that the entire NT has only one woman prophet (Anna) and she has no quoted words, it seems that the NT authors were working throughout time to eclipse the women characters."
This is not a unique complaint. The authors of the New Testament are often accused of having it in for women. Elaine Pagels complains that the "orthodox" see God as solely masculine. Tucker Malarkey says that when biblical Christianity won out over the Gnostics, "half of humanity was obscured from view." Karen King has traced an elaborate process by which she supposes women were obscured in the Gospels themselves. Dan Brown sold millions of books based on the premise that orthodox Christianity has it in for women. . But within this criticism, there is I think hidden the germ of a powerful argument for the historical truth of the Gospels. Consider an observation by Jesus Seminar member Walter Wink:
"Through the lens of feminist exegesis . . . we can see that in every single encounter with women in the four Gospels, Jesus violated the mores of his time . . . his behavior toward women . . . is . . . astounding, and was without parallel in 'civilized' societies since the rise of patriarchy roughly 3000 years before his birth." (Engaging the Powers, 129)
What does Wink mean by "the rise of patriarchy?" He is noting the fact that women were treated as second-class citizens in most ancient civilizations. Things would get worse for most before they got better -- doctrines like widow-burning, footbinding, and fear of witches, would take hold in great civilizations in the later centuries. But the trend was already clear. The Gnostics, for example, didn't mind having a female deity rebuke the (male) Creator, but saw child-bearing as an evil act, because it brought children into the "filthy mud" of material existence. They warned believers to "flee from the madness and bondage of femaleness, and choose for yourself the salvation of maleness."
Strong advice, if you can follow it!
Sarah hints that the authors of the Gospels are also misogenistic. Given the times, one would expect them to have been.
So what can account for the fact that they record such revolutionary actions on the part of Jesus? How likely is it that they would make up stories about Jesus that flagrantly contravened their prejudices, and consistently run uphill against their cultural conditioning?
Follow Jesus as he talks with a broken woman by a well, and nurses her crushed spirit to life. Listen to him tell Martha that Mary had "chosen the better part," because rather than simply serve the men, she wanted to study Rabbi Jesus' teaching with the male disciples. Observe how he saves an woman caught in adultery from stoning, at some risk to his own life. . Wink argues, in effect: this one fact alone sets Jesus apart from any teacher in the ancient world that I know of.
With East Asian tradition in mind, I can't think of any really strong parallels, either. (Though the 13th Century Japanese monk Nichiren did at least back off on the usual Buddhist idea that a woman needed to become a man to attain enlightenment.)
Two facts seem to best explain the remarkable stories of Jesus and women in the Gospels: (1) Jesus was really like that, and (2) The people who wrote the Gospels were close enough to know the facts, and were fundamentally honest to record facts that conflicted with their own views.
II. Piecing together the DNA
If you want to identify a specimen, mark the characteristics that set it apart from other specimens. If your sample is DNA, you need to make allowance for the phenomena of identical twins, who share entire genomes. In general, people or animals who are closely related will share DNA and phenotypes. But when it comes to memes, one twin brother may become a communist who plays soccer and eats raw eggs, while the other becomes a Baptist preacher who plays baseball and eats Eggs Benedict. Because human habits can be even more complex than our genetic coding, especially when it comes to our most brilliant thinkers (and obviously Jesus was, at least, one of them), it should be possible to identify such character by personality traits, ways of speaking, social habits, teaching methods, and fundamental beliefs, as by some physical marker like DNA.
Let us suppose that Walter Wink knows enough about 300 ancient teachers, to compare their treatment of women with that of Jesus. Let us suppose I know an additional 200.
If that is so, this one characteristic alone would mark the Jesus described in the Gospels with a specificity of at least 1 in 500. (Probably a person able to transcend his culture to the extent Jesus did is actually far rarer than that, but let us start with this number.)
Each new independent trait that differentiates Jesus from other ancient teachers would then multiply the uniqueness of this "memetic signature."
That's the power of genetic or memetic identification. When traits are independent of one another, the improbability of each unique trait randomly appearing can be multiplied by the improbability of other traits, so that the improbability of the whole signature becomes enormous.
Some of the characteristics I describe in Why the Jesus Seminar can't find Jesus are fairly common (teaching by means of Q & A, for instance), while others are highly unusual. The parables of Jesus, for example, are almost uniquely brilliant; at least, only a few parallels, like Kafka and Zhuang Zi, seem available in human literary history. His miracles are, I have argued, seemingly unique in the ancient world -- claimed parallels fall apart when you look at them closely.
If you multiply these numbers, it quickly becomes evident that the Jesus described in the Gospels is unique. That uniqueness shows, I think, that the person the Gospels describe is genuine.
But couldn't the Gospel writers have just decided to make up a person like that, and then copied one another?
The reason this is not a credible response, is that most of the characteristics I described in the Gospels (41 of 50) are not overwhelmingly relevant to "Christian theology." Most are not traits that would be intentionally preserved by an early church eager to prove "the Gospel."
This is demonstrated by the Gnostics (as I argue in The Truth About Jesus and the 'Lost Gospels.') Gnostic texts also make use of "Jesus" as a heroic figure to preach their theology. Yet all the most interesting and unique "memetic DNA" of the real Gospels are almost totally absent from these works. The real personality of Jesus simply did not transfer.
All of this is to argue for what ordinary people often recognize with analyzing it like this. "No one has spoken as this man," the crowds around Jesus observed. With 2000 years more of surveying human teachers, also of reading phony Gospels manufactured to prove some theological point, it has become increasingly clear that the disciples couldn't have make Jesus up if they tried.