Dan Barker and William Benjamin Smith's Pre-Christian Jesus

William Benjamin Smith (1850-1934)

Mythicists do not, as a general rule, "play well with others," and so they usually don't interact much with current scholarship on the Historical Jesus.[1] Instead they tend to copycat one another and recycle the outdated material of older Mythicists. As a result, their books generally have the musty feel of Old Curiosity Shops specializing in scholarly rags and bones, kitschy, period-piece intellectual objets d'art, bundles of keys, darkened by oxidation, to doors and locks that no longer exist, heaps of damp, moldering, deservedly out-of-print books, and long-discounted notions. 

One such discounted notion Mythicists sometimes recycle is William Benjamin Smith’s idea of the Pre-Christian Jesus.

So, for example, in one of his books, Dan Barker, the angry atheist ex-pastor who built a career around detailing the bad behavior of the God who doesn’t exist, tosses out the following claim as one of his proofs that Jesus didn’t exist either:

W. B. Smith thinks there was a pre-Christian Jesus cult of gnosticism. There is an ancient papyrus which has these words: “I adjure thee by the God of the Hebrews, Jesus.”[2]

As is typical of Barker, he doesn’t say who W. B. Smith is, nor where or when he expressed this idea.  Nor does he provide any information regarding the identity, the date, or the source of the “ancient papyrus” referred to in support of Smith’s claim.  And even though he includes a bibliography at the end of the chapter in one of the books. W. B. Smith isn’t in it.

It may be that in each case Barker wasn’t able to say because he didn’t know the details himself.  Perhaps, as we said earlier, he was just copycatting what some other Mythicist said.

William Benjamin Smith (1850-1934) was a mathematics professor at Tulane University, and also a Mythicist.[3] He argued that there was a pre-Christian divine figure named Jesus but no historical first-century man called Jesus of Nazareth.[4]

The statement quoted in support of his claim— “I adjure thee by the God of the Hebrews, Jesus”—comes from the Great Paris Magical Codex, Bibliothèque Nationale, No. 574, Supplément grec., ll. 3019-20.

Here it is as it appears in the original papyrus:

The Greek text reads as follows: “horkizō se kata th[eo]u tōn Hebriaōn Iēsou”[5]

Today Bibliothèque Nationale No. 574, Supplément grec. is usually referred to as PGM IV, and this passage as PGM IV. 3019-20. The whole text of the document can be read in English in Hans Dieter Betz’s standard work The Greek Magical Papyri (1992) where we find the crucial line translated as follows:

“I conjure you by the God of the Hebrews,/Jesus.”[6]

Smith made his appeal to this passage in support of his strange thesis in a book published in German in 1906, entitled Der vorchristliche Jesus (“The Pre-Christian Jesus”).[7]

Smith’s “quite gratuitous hypothesis,” as Frederick Cornwallis Conybeare described it back in 1914, was not well received by the scholarly community.[8] Their response was as predictable as it was well deserved.

The reason Smith’s hypothesis was not embraced by scholars was that it really was “gratuitous,” in the full sense of the term as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary: 

Done, made, adopted, or assumed without any good ground or reason; not required or warranted by the circumstances of the case; uncalled-for; unjustifiable.

The problem with Smith’s use of the PGM IV quotation making Jesus the God of the Hebrews, was twofold.  

First, PGM IV is much too late to provide meaningful evidence for what Smith wanted to make of it,

and

Second, it came from magical papyri, which follow rather predictable patterns that caused Smith's thesis to be less plausible than other explanations.

PGM IV is usually dated by scholars to the early fourth century of the Christian era, which, as Shirley Jackson Case already pointed out back in 1912, “puts the document out of court as first-hand testimony for customs in the first century B.C., especially when we recall how easily magical formulas gathered to themselves all sort of accretions quite regardless of rhyme or reason. The word “Jesus” is here evidently a pagan supplement made by a copyist who did not distinguish between Jews and Christians.”[9]

The phenomenon Case is referring to in reference to magical formulas was their tendency to include names the magicians somehow came to imagine could be used to leverage the powers. And they did so at times without even knowing what the names meant or who they referred to, as the mid-third century Christian writer Origen of Alexandria reports:

Many also of those who give themselves to the practice of the conjuration of evil spirits, employ in their spells the expression “God of Abraham”... And yet, while making use of the phrase “God of Abraham,” they do not know who Abraham is![10]

The great German scholar Adolf Deissmann's classic work, Licht vom Osten (Light from the Ancient East), came out in 1908, that is to say, two years after the publication of Smith’s Der vorchristliche Jesus.

When discussing the passage in question, Deissmann doesn’t mention Smith, but expresses the same view of the value of the passage as Case: “The name Jesu as part of the formula can hardly be ancient. It was probably inserted by some pagan....”[11]

After the second edition of Der vorchristliche Jesus appeared, which repeated unchanged its appeal to the phrase calling Jesus the God of the Hebrews, Deissmann expanded the original footnote quoted above to include the following statement: “It is to be regretted that the passage is still uncritically made use of in William Benjamin Smith’s Der vorchristliche Jesus.”[12]

It should be noted that Smith himself was aware of the fact that he was appealing to a fourth century AD text to support his idea of a pre-Christian Jesus. He makes clear in his original edition of Der vorchristliche Jesus that he does not dispute this accepted early-fourth century date for PGM IV: “Der Papyrus selbst sheint aus der ersten Hälfte des IV. Nachchristlichen Jahrhunderts zu datieren.”[13] But then he goes on to insist that nevertheless the material is “sehr viel älter,” that is to say, much older. And it is here that scholars very properly abandon him, since the very fact that the name of Jesus is present in the passage, suggests that the document is not pre-Christian.

All of this raises an interesting question for Dan Barker. In one of his writings, Barker dismisses the possibility of Josephus’ providing credible information about Jesus on the grounds that his testimony, “dates from more than six decades after the supposed death of Jesus.” Yet if Josephus is not a credible witness to Jesus sixty years out, how can Barker treat PGM IV as credible when it stands three or four centuries out? Now as we said before, it may be that Barker never knew any of this, that he had no idea who Smith was, nor where he had gotten his quotation about Jesus being the God of the Hebrews.  Given the general quality of his historical work, such a supposition seems entirely possible. But rather than making things better for Barker, it would actually make them worse.  It would mean that at the same time as he goes around the country presenting himself as this critical thinker who will not accept anything that doesn’t commend itself to his intellect, he shows himself to actually be anything but critical when it comes to tossing stuff out there that he thinks might prop up his own case, even if he has no idea how credible it is or even where it came from! 

[1] There are a few exceptions including, to a certain  some degree, Robert M. Price and Richard Carrier.

[2] Dan Barker, Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist (Madison, WI: Freedom from Religion Foundation, 1992), 375.  The statement is repeated verbatim in Barker's Godless: How an Evangelical Preacher became One of America's Leading Atheists (fwd. Richard Dawkins; Berkeley, CA: Ulysses Press, 2008), 272.

[3] See, e.g., William Benjamin Smith, Ecce Deus: Studies of Primitive Christianity (Chicago: Open Court, 1913), 205: “There are no texts in the Gospels that indicate that Jesus was a man.”

[4] Smith, Ecce Deus, 257: “the purely human Jesus of the critics is denied and the Divine Jesus of Proto-Christianity is affirmed by every form of consideration that has yet been adduced.”

[5] As edited in Adolf Deissmann, Light from the Ancient East: The New Testament Illustrated by Recently Discovered Texts of the Graeco-Roman World (2nd ed.; trans. Lionel R. M. Strachen; New York & London: Hodder & Stoughton, [1910], 252. To me the last word in the original text looks more like Iēson than Iēsou.

[6] The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation: Including the Demotic Spells, Vol. 1 (2nd ed.; ed. Hans Dieter Betz; Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 96.

[7] William Benjamin Smith, Der vorchristliche Jesus: nebst weiteren Vorstudien zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Urchristentums (fwd. Paul Wilhelm Schmiedel; Geizsen, DE: Albert Töpelmann, 1906), 54.

[8] Frederick Cornwallis Conybeare, The Historical Christ; Or, An Investigation of the Views of Mr. J. M. Robertson, Dr. A. Drews, and Prof. W. B. Smith (Chicago: Open Court, 1914), 41.

[9] Shirley Jackson Case, The Historicity of Jesus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1912), 112.

[10] Origen, Against Celsus 1.22 (ANF 4.405).

[11] Deissmann, Light, 256 n. 4. Adolf Deissmann, Licht vom Osten. Das Neue Testament und die neuentdeckten Texte der hellenistisch-römischen Welt (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1908), 186 n. 14: “Der Name Jesu ist in det Formel schwerlich alt. Er dürfte von einem Heiden eingesetzt sein....”

[12] Adolf Deissmann, Light from the Ancient East: The New Testament Illustrated by Recently Discovered Texts of the Graeco-Roman World (4th ed. Rev.; trans. Lionel R. M. Strachen; New York and London: Harper and Brothers, 1922), 260 n. 4.

[13] Smith, Der vorchristliche Jesus, 37.