For Joyce, the story does not stop with the admittedly hearsay evidence supplied by an anonymous “professor” who disappears along with all of the evidence for his claims, never to be heard from again. After asking where the scroll could have disappeared, Joyce postulates that there is one country in the world which would especially like to discover its contents — Russia! When he arrived in Delhi, India he remembered that the “professor” had also said he was going to Delhi. Therefore, Joyce felt that he had verified his thesis when he spotted a Russian plane at the airport, although he apparently never questioned the presence of planes from various other countries at such an international airport. Russia had to have sent the plane to pick up the “professor” and his valuable scroll!77
To make matters worse, Joyce claims further evidence for his thesis in that a Russian official held a conference with the Vatican’s Pope Paul in 1967. Although there was never a hint of what transpired at this meeting, Joyce is sure that they were talking about the “professor’s” scroll! Russia was putting pressure on the Vatican, presumably with world revelation of the scroll hanging in the balances. And after all of this, Joyce states that the still unknown professor is probably a very respected scholar who is no longer free or perhaps even dead, thereby intimating that the Russians have him, so that his story will never be told!78
Such illogic is also carried over into Joyce’s treatment of the life of Jesus. This happens often, but we will recount just one example here. In Luke 8:1-3, we are told that several women supported Jesus and his disciples financially. Joyce declares this to be “quite certain” evidence that Jesus was married.79 Such a train of illogic hardly needs a comment, but it is certainly an example of how such hypotheses must really be strained to put together such a “case” for the life of Jesus. It is also typical of the assertions made in Holy Blood, Holy Grail, from which many examples could also be adduced.
It is held that since Jesus and his mother are called to a wedding in John 2:1-11 and since they play a major role, it must therefore automatically be Jesus’ own wedding. Apparently no one can play a major role at anyone else’s wedding, even if he is able to do miracles!80 In the account of the raising of Lazarus in John 11:1-46, it is asserted that, since Martha ran out to greet Jesus upon his arrival while Mary waited in the house until Jesus asked for her (vv. 20, 28), Mary must be Jesus’ wife! The authors even admit a non sequitur argument by such reasoning.81
It is obvious that, oftentimes in such theses, conclusions are arrived at only by taking out of the Gospels and even adding to them what one would like to find. In this case, the authors even admit this procedure. After stating that they sifted through the Gospels searching for the specific points which they needed, they confessed that “we would be obliged to read between lines, fill in certain gaps, account for certain caesuras and ellipses. We would have to deal with omissions, with innuendos, with references that were, at best, oblique.”82 One instance of this arbitrary methodology occurs when they admit that they are utilizing such a procedure in order to find evidence for Jesus being married, which is obvious from the above examples on this subject. Another instance follows an attempt to make John the most historical of the four Gospels. The authors assert that modern scholarship has established this point, when such is simply not the case. But the authors’ motives are exposed when they specifically acknowledge that they used John the most in an attempt to support their hypothesis!83 Thus, we again see examples of illogic being used to support a case for one’s own desired results. One is reminded here of Louis Cassels’ evaluation of such attempts to “explain away” the facts.
The amazing thing about all these debunk-Jesus books is that they accept as much of the recorded Gospels as they find convenient, then ignore or repudiate other parts of the same document which contradict their notions.84
The trustworthiness of the Gospels, the failure of the swoon theory in all of its forms, the lack of a valid historical basis, and the decidedly illogical lines of argumentation demonstrate the failures of these theories. This is not even to mention their hopeless contradiction of one another as well.
Summary and Conclusion
There have been many popular attempts to discredit the Jesus of the Gospels. Even in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries these attempts were prevalent. While they have been rejected almost unanimously by careful scholars, especially those who remember similar attempts disproven long ago, they still receive widespread attention among lay people. There have even been strictly fictional, novelistic attempts to deal with these subjects.85
It is because of this attention among the general populace that we have considered these popularistic “lives of Jesus” in this chapter. Accordingly, we investigated hypotheses involving swoon, Qumran connections, perversions of Jesus’ message, and theses involving Jesus as an international traveler. Each was refuted on its own grounds by a number of criticisms.
Louis Cassels responded rather harshly to such “debunking” attempts:
You can count on it. Every few years, some “scholar” will stir up a short-lived sensation by publishing a book that says something outlandish about Jesus.
The “scholar” usually has no standing as a Bible student, theologian, archaeologist, or anything else related to serious religious study.
But that need not hold him back. If he has a job — any job — on a university faculty, his “findings” will be treated respectfully in the press as a “scholarly work.”86
Although such satirical comments remind one of Schweitzer’s similar remarks concerning the “imperfectly equipped freelances” who composed the “fictitious lives of Jesus” from 130 to 200 years ago,87 these statements cannot fairly be applied to all of the writings in this chapter. Yet they do remind us of characteristics that are true of many. Accordingly, while all of the theses surveyed in this chapter are refuted by the facts, some of them are additionally to be viewed from the standpoint of fictitious attempts to avoid the Jesus of the Gospels.
1Hugh Schonfield, The Passover Plot (New York: Bantam Books, 1965).
2Ibid., pp. 37-38.
3Ibid., pp. 112-115.
4Ibid., pp. 153-161.
5Ibid., pp. 160-161.
6Ibid., p. 165.
7Ibid., pp. 166-172.
8Ibid., p. 6.
9Ibid., p. 165; cf. pp. 171-173.
10J.A.T. Robinson, Can We Trust the New Testament?, p. 15.
11Donovan Joyce, The Jesus Scroll (New York: New American Library, 1972).
12Ibid., pp. 106-110, 118.
13David Strauss, A New Life of Jesus, vol. 1, pp. 408-412.
14Schweitzer, Quest, pp. 56-67.
15Ibid., cf. pp. 161-166 with 166-179, for example.
16Eduard Riggenbach, The Resurrection of Jesus (New York: Eaton and Mains, 1907), pp. 48-49; James Orr, The Resurrection of Jesus, p. 92.