A Review of 'Is Atheism Dead? By Eric Metaxas

I'll begin with an acknowledgement that this book was obviously not intended as a deep or academic exploration of atheism or religious belief, and that any attempt to pick it apart in detail (as I shall attempt to do shortly) is probably fated to come across as a little excessive and self-indulgent. Plainly this book was intended as a kind of spiritual bromide for people who already consider themselves to be Christians, and there is probably little that I or anyone else could say which is capable of undermining its effect in that regard. Neither this book nor this review is going to change anyone's mind about anything, and so I sympathise with anyone who comes to the conclusion that I'm wasting my time by attempting to engage with it at such length. Nonetheless, the fact that this book has received glowing reviews and plentiful across conservative media outlets, and the fact that it currently has an average rating of 4.57 on goodreads, was enough to motivate me to read it and to contribute, in my own small way, to a discussion which until now appears to be dominated by people who happened to join that site at around the same time this book was published.

To start with the obvious, this is not a good book. At its absolute best this book is bland and inoffensive, at its absolute worst it is mendacious to an extent that I can only describe as shocking, but for the most part it is most aptly described as shallow and lazy. Anyone who has been exposed to conservative, Evangelical apologetics will doubtless already be familiar with most of the arguments in this book, and Metaxas is not skilled enough as an author or nimble enough as a thinker to present or elaborate upon these arguments in any meaningful or interesting way. Rhetorically, Metaxas depends heavily on implicature and question-begging, assuming (perhaps correctly) that since the bulk of his readers already share his mindset, there is little reason to bring any of his arguments to full term, leaving the book littered with ideas that can most charitably be described as ill-formed and underdeveloped. This frequently takes the form of using rhetorical questions in lieu of any explicit argumentation, as exemplified by the following barrage addressed to his mental construct of Richard Dawkins in chapter 25:

On the one hand he says we are essentially robots, amazingly constructed by chance through natural selection. On the other hand we are able to create and appreciate things of ineffable beauty and mystery. But if scientific knowledge is the only kind of knowledge, how are we to appreciate the aforementioned artists? What is art that Dawkins should be mindful of it? And the creators of that art, that he should praise them? And what is Socrates’s much-vaunted ideal of “self-knowledge” but unscientific fluff borne to us by Zephyrus from the myth-filled world of pagan antiquity? And what is that invisible thing called “wisdom,” hailed by millennia of human beings, if not a mere hardware glitch yet to be naturally selected by some genetic Mengele for death? Shall not such things be reckoned worthless and disposable because they dare to exist beyond the gleaming palisades of “science”?"

The tacit logic appears to be that these questions are so incisive that they can permit no coherent answer at all, but it speaks volumes to Metaxas' lack of intellectual curiosity that he does not appear at all interested in pursuing how atheists can and have addressed such topics throughout history, and to address himself to those specific claims instead. At no point does Metaxas exhibit even the most cursory knowledge of the ideas and philosophies that atheists have espoused over the centuries, much less does he attempt to seriously or sincerely engage with them. In fact, despite devoting long, indignant swathes of his book to "the New Atheists", he appears to be distinctly uninterested in what any of them have actually had to say. At no point, to my knowledge, does he ever directly reference any of the major works produced by the so-called "Four Horsemen" (God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens, The End of Faith by Sam Harris, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, or Breaking the Spell by Daniel Dennett) and his chapter-long denouncement of Dawkins appears to be based entirely on a 14-page essay written by Dawkins in 2007. That is not to say that "the New Atheist" literature is particularly enlightening or challenging fare, nor that it should be taken as representative of atheistic thought, merely to say that if you're going to spend a third of a book explicitly attacking the ideas of certain people, you should at the very minimum be familiar with what those people have actually said.  

Consequent to his lack of intellectual curiosity and egregious lack of research (which we will get into shortly), we should not be surprised to find that most of his arguments appear to be addressed to a vague and amorphous "they", a loose collective of ideological opponents who appear to lack any distinctive purposes or convictions. Across all three parts of the book, those authorities - archaeologists, scientists, philosophers etc. - who do not share Metaxas' view that there exists overwhelming evidence for the existence of God are conflated into a single hive-mind marching under the banner of 'New Atheism'. He, for instance, hand-waves away cosmological speculations about the existence of the multiverse as being motivated by the conviction that "the idea of a world fine-tuned by some Creator was simply too unpleasant to consider", resulting in "the New Atheists... [fleeing] into that realm of pseudo-philosophy we call wishful thinking" (chapter 3), as though string theory and brane cosmology were just invented by Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris on a whim one day. 

On the other hand, he predictably cites sympathetic authorities with unbounded credulity and an often deceptive lack of transparency about their credentials. Those 'authorities' whom he cites as brave, independently-thinking experts invariably turn out to be unqualified ideologues upon even the most cursory of examinations. For example, most of his arguments from Chapter 7 - which is focused primarily on the supposed 'impossibility' of non-theistic origins of life - are taken from the work of Dr. James Tour, a supposedly well-credentialed scientific authority on the subject. It should surprise none to find out that Dr. Tour is an Evangelical Christian who is intimately involved with the Discovery Institute (an organisation founded to advance the cause of creationism and its various offshoots), and whose scientific work - so far as I have been able to establish - has nothing to do with biology, or even with organic chemistry. 

Similarly, in chapter 18 he presents the case for what he sees as the historic destruction of Sodom at the hands of God, with all of his evidence for this claim coming from the work of a single 'archaeologist', Dr. Steven Collins. What he of course fails to mention here is that his intrepid 'archaeologist' received his doctorate from an unaccredited Evangelical institution of higher education, and that he is currently the dean of another unaccredited Evangelical institution of higher education. Metaxas also fails to mention that Collins' theories have won virtually no support from other archaeologists, and that he has been accused of a number of academic malpractices, including photoshopping images from the sites and operating without proper permits. My point is not to suggest that ideologically committed people cannot be right about anything ever, merely to highlight the double-standard that Metaxas repeatedly succumbs to: people who agree with him are all ideologically compromised sheep who only say what they do out of hatred God, whereas all of those who agree with him are unimpeachable, clear-thinking authorities who have been unfairly sidelined in scientific discourse.     

The book itself is divided into three parts. The first part covers 'scientific' evidence for the existence of God (primarily devoted to so-called 'fine-tuning' arguments), the second part covers 'archaeological' evidence for the veracity of the Bible, and the third part is a grab-bag of resentment and innuendo directed loosely at 'atheists', where this book really begins to plumb the depths of sleaze. I will not attempt to 'debunk' the arguments he presents here (though some debunking is unavoidable), but rather attempt to restrict myself to critiquing the kinds of arguments and strategies that Metaxas employs. 

Part I

The first part of the book, as we have said, attempts to marshal contemporary scientific evidence for the existence of the God, with most of the heavy-lifting being done by 'fine-tuning' arguments, which suggest that many of the fundamental values of the universe are so precisely configured to support the emergence of life (or, at least, those cosmic structures upon which life depends) that they could only the product of a divine creator. Or, at least that's what fine-tuning arguments should be about. In Metaxas' treatment of the issue, we don't have 'arguments' so much as we have a paean to Metaxas' own sense of incredulity and scandalisation over the low probabilities of certain universal values which are necessary for the emergence of life (let us say, the weight of a proton) being what they in fact are.

Without seeking to debunk 'fine-tuning' arguments more generally, I will start by saying that merely pointing to the 'improbability' of something happening does absolutely nothing, in itself, to strengthen the case for the existence of God (much less a specifically Christian conception of God). Overwhelmingly improbable things happen every day and we do not ordinarily view them as evidence for divine intervention. If you go to a random number generator and generate a 100 digit number, the odds of that particular number being generated are astronomically small (far smaller than most of the odds discussed in this part of the book), yet there does not appear to be anything about that number existing which demands a supernatural explanation. 

Moreover, even if we do accept the central conceit of fine-tuning arguments (that the occurrence of a truly improbable event really does demand a supernatural explanation), there is still no a priori reason to assume that this 'ultimate explanation' must resemble traditional theistic conceptions of divinity. In fact, all we could really say about the 'supernatural force' necessitated by fine-tuning arguments is that this force just happens to be particularly good at creating universes like the one we live in for some reason: it tells us little else about what kind of properties this force might have. It might be a blind, dumb, impersonal supernatural force (e.g. something like 'karma' or the 'tao' might be sufficient to explain why our universe is the way it is, even though I don't think such concepts are typically employed in a cosmological context) or it might be even be totally a natural force (e.g. the multiverse theory appears to do a good job of accounting for universal 'fine-tuning' without resorting to the ostentatious metaphysics of theism). Of course, further arguments can be added to the fine-tuning arguments to show why a theistic explanation is superior to explanations which depend on karmic cycles or multiverses, but these arguments must actually be made, not merely implied.  

Metaxas, predictably, doesn't bother supplying these arguments. Part I of this book is therefore little more than an extended tribute to 'the God of the Gaps', where scientific uncertainty and any putative gaps in scientific knowledge are presented as de facto proof for the existence of God. Metaxas does nothing here but cite his personal incredulity about the improbabilities of various facets of the physical world, with the understanding that the target audience will abduct to the inference that 'God' - according to their own idiosyncratic understandings of that floating signifier - must be responsible. But no attempt is ever made to define this being, nor does Metaxas ever explicitly spell out for the reader the kind of being that the 'evidence' purportedly demonstrates. This book exists purely to salve theistic consciences, not to change minds. 

Consider chapter 6, where Metaxas subjects the famous Urey-Miller experiment on abiogenesis to scientific scrutiny. As he correctly point out, many of the assumptions undergirding this experiment (e.g. the kinds of elements which were present in the Earth's early atmosphere) proved to be mistaken, and there are therefore some doubts about how much it can tell us about how life may have first formed. However, Metaxas presents this 70 year-old study as the final and definitive word on abiogenesis, as though nothing else on the topic of abiogenesis has been published since. One more, the mere existence of scientific failure or scientific ignorance is just posited, without commentary or elaboration, as indirect proof for the claims of conservative Christianity. This deification of lacunae is not merely an impoverished view of science, but an impoverished view of divinity. 

In some cases, the fetishisation of improbability and coincidence is taken to absurd extremes. Take in, if you can, this discussion of eclipses in chapter 3:

"How is it that the sun and moon happen to fit over each other so very precisely during these eclipses? Why do they match up as though they were made to do that? When one knows the circumstances and details of all the other planets in our solar system, the whole thing seems even stranger. Nothing close to this happens on any other planet. So if one aspires to be a dedicatedly rational person, one can’t help suspect that perhaps this isn’t mere coincidence. It just seems too perfect and too strange. But there it is. Who can help but wonder whether these things are not accidental or coincidental? Can it be that this outlandish and happy oddity was actually intended—and just for us?"

All of Metaxas' deficiencies as a writer and thinker are on display in this passage. Rhetorical questions, rather than explicit argumentation, do all the heavy-lifting. Personal incredulity is projected into the heavens and hypostastised as a fairly crude instance of divine agency. Arguments are half formed - the relative sizes of the sun and moon "are not accidental or coincidental", apparently, but how else Metaxas wishes us to understand these facts (as a divine sign of... something?) is never made clear. Only those who wish desperately to be impressed by this kind of argumentation could ever find themselves impressed by this kind of argumentation.

Part II

Part II is where this book is most consistently able to reach the dizzying heights of being bland and inoffensive. Metaxas here focuses on archaeological evidence for the Bible, with most of the text devoted to recounting stories of how certain archaeological discoveries were made. These accounts, so far as I can tell, are relatively unembellished and true to history, so if you're interested in knowing the stories behind the personalities who discovered the Dead Sea scrolls, or who first started excavating Hittite sites in the 19th century, then this part of the book is almost competent enough to serve that purpose. I will stress the word "almost" there, though, because most of the issues I've discussed which plague the rest of the book also crop up here.

Once more, Metaxas frames the field of Biblical archaeology as a Manichean theatre of struggle between mendacious, ideologically compromised skeptics, who are simply desperate to dismiss any evidence which might appear to suggest that any part of the Biblical text is true, and brave, plucky truth seekers, who have successfully revealed Earth-shattering truths to the world despite their ongoing oppression at the hands of snooty academics. It should not surprise anyone to learn that this is the exact opposite of the truth (it is only comparatively recently that Biblical archaeology has managed to graduate from being a branch of Jewish and Christian apologetics - with uncredentialed men running around the desert "with a trowel in one hand and a Bible the other" - into a serious discipline) but it is a fiction that Metaxas is required to maintain, here moreso than anywhere else in the book, for two main reasons.

The first reason is that most of the archaeological findings he 'reveals' here are relatively banal, lending credence only to obscure and peripheral aspects of the Biblical text, and do nothing to support any of its more extraordinary claims. As such, Metaxas is pressed into inventing a cabal of Biblical denialists who found themselves very much scandalised and embarrassed by the archaeological revelation that there was indeed a King Omri who reigned in the northern kingdom of Israel in the 9th century BCE, just as the book of 1 Kings said there was (see chapter 9). But for the vicarious little thrill he gives his more credulous readers at seeing imaginary opponents tripping up on their own hubris, most of the content of this part of the book is fated to come across as underwhelming at best, as pathetic and desperate at worst (such as Metaxas' crowing in chapter 17 about how the archaeological discovery of Ur shows us that the Bible is "an accurate historical record of the events, people, and places it depicts", based solely on fact that this city is referenced in the narrative of Abraham).

The second reason Metaxas needs to invent a narrative of 'snooty skeptic' versus 'intrepid truth seeker' is because otherwise he would have no way of explaining why some of his more extraordinary claims - such as his claim that we have discovered evidence of the city of Sodom meeting a fiery doom, or Jesus' house being unearthed - have not been accepted by mainstream archaeologists, or more widely publicised. We have already discussed the 'controversies' (to put it as euphemistically as possible) surrounding the 'discovery' of Sodom, but consider here how he frames the publication of the archaeological study which, in Metaxas' telling, succeed in excavating Jesus' house:

An article about it appeared in Biblical Archaeology Review in 2015, although that itself was oddly tentative. Even so, nothing more was said on the subject since, as though the discovery of the actual home where the Holy Family lived wasn’t worth looking into or was a subject too embarrassing for serious archaeologists. Only in late 2020 did Dr. Dark publish the book containing the findings of his continued excavations since 2006, but the book cannot help but strike one as almost calculated to hide the discovered pearl of great price, instead bizarrely focusing on the nesting wooden boxes in which the superlative pearl had been found.(Chapter 16)           

Here, the fact that archaeologists working on excavations in Nazareth failed to claim that they had discovered Jesus' house is explained as a "calculated" bid to suppress an embarrassing finding, rather than as a consequence of the more obvious possibility that the archaeologists didn't have any solid scientific reason to believe that they had discovered the home of Jesus in the first place. As with most of his conservative brethren, when the facts of the matter don't line-up with his preconceptions, Metaxas simply casually declares the existence of some grand conspiracy and moves on as quickly as possible to the next talking-point before anyone is able to ask "how" or "why". 

Elsewhere, he attempts to lean on the Biblical text itself as evidence for God, but his ignorance of Biblical scholarship ensures he once more falls flat on his face. He insists, for example, that the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls validates the integrity of the Biblical text owing to the fact that "what we possess today as our own Bible is precisely the same as what existed then" (chapter 11). He predictably inflates the significance of this fact once more to a self-parodying degree:

Never in human history has an observed absence of change so instantly and dramatically changed everything. This discovery within the larger discovery was the earth-shaking bombshell of the whole affair. Despite the unfounded but stubborn rumors that the Bible 'had been changed' over the centuries, this unexpected evidence at last proved the opposite. As anyone could see—and as clearly as anyone might have hoped—the ancient Hebrew Scriptures had been copied with a perfectly extraordinary faithfulness over the centuries.

Firstly, it should not escape our attention that this is untrue: the texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls do differ from other textual traditions. Secondly, the claims that the Bible "had been changed" over the centuries, is - unfortunately for Metaxas - more than just an "unfounded and stubborn rumor", and is in fact fairly well-known and easy to demonstrate. In the case of the OT, there exist two manuscript families referred to as the 'Masoretic Text' (MT) which has been preserved in the Hebrew language, and the 'Septuagint' (LXX) which has been preserved in the Greek language, and each of these manuscript traditions differ greatly at some points. What we have today as the Old Testament in English is essentially a compromise between the two traditions, in which scholars attempt to reconstruct what they believe the original text to have been by deciding, on an almost passage-by-passage basis, whether the MT or the LXX are more likely to have preserved the original tradition. In the case of the New Testament, the situation is probably worse. Bart Ehrman notes that we possess thousands of different manuscripts of books from the NT and that no two are identical, and that - in fact - there are probably more differences between the manuscripts than there are words in the NT. Contrary to Metaxas' considerable bluster, the Bible has actually changed a lot.     

In other places, he attempts to defend the accuracy of the Bible by employing his dependable, fall-back tactic of appealing to his personal sense of incredulity and then just sort of abandoning the argument halfway through, as though he just got bored of the argument and wanted to move as quickly as possible onto something else. He, for example, suggests that Jesus'prophecy about the destruction of the Temple must be a genuine, divinely-inspired prediction of the future because "anyone who has read the gospels realizes that for many reasons they simply cannot have been written after the Destruction of Jerusalem" (chapter 11). Obviously, he never attempts to elaborate on what these "many reasons" are. In chapter 12, he suggests that the story in John 21 about Peter and Jesus capturing 153 fish must be true, because Metaxas can think of no reason why the author would have used the number 153 unless that was the exact number of fish that Peter and Jesus had actually caught that day. (Does he think Peter and Jesus sat there and counted them all, so that the true number could be reported in the Gospel of John 60 years later?) He then suggests that the enigmatic story of boy in linen fleeing naked from Mark 14:51-52 must be a reflection of eye-witness accounts because there is no other reason for Mark to have included this detail - I mean, what?     

Part III

However, it's in the third part of the book (with its apropos title of "What is Truth?") that Metaxas' lazy flailing begins to lose all its charm, and starts to become offensive. 

It starts off inconspicuously enough with a litany of routine apologetic fare. Chapter 19 is a cliched and unoriginal attack on 'new atheism' (or, rather, a cliched and unoriginal attack on Metaxas' imaginary conception of what 'new atheism' must be) in which all of the old, worn-out favourites are trotted out in print one more time. We learn that atheists promote "absolutely nothing... even nihilism"; that if the atheists are right and "there really is no God, then it surely follows that there is no order or meaning in the universe... what does any of it matter?"; and that "atheists are so unaccountably tortured by even the possibility that there might be a God that they cannot so much as admit the possibility". Ho hum.

In chapter 20 we finally get around to the argument that Nazism, communism etc. are evidence of the intrinsic evil of the atheistic worldview. "Once you get rid of God," he writes, "you get rid of the idea that human beings have any inherent dignity or worth. It’s unavoidable, and what happens in places where those ideas disappeared amounts to perhaps the most monstrous evil in all of human history." In a way, I almost admire his restraint in waiting 20 chapters to compare all atheists to Hitler and Stalin - but what about all of those religious people who have acted in deference to evil throughout history? "[T]hose acting in the name of religion at least ostensibly took human life so seriously that they rarely did the worst of what they did in the indiscriminate way that atheists did. Even the most evil actors 'in God’s name' were somehow restrained." I'm sure the victims of ISIS will be much reassured that their oppressors were "somehow restrained" while embarking on their spree of apocalyptic violence.

In chapter 24, we encounter the common apologetic technique of insisting that everything that cannot be exhaustively explained through a reductionist, scientific worldview must, pro tanto, be attributable to the existence of God. "[Dawkins] must realize 'beauty' and 'being moved to tears' can have no part in a life dedicated to a strict materialist atheistic philosophy," Metaxas writes. He never bothers to explain why he believes this to be the case, though, so I'm not sure it's worth my explaining why it certainly isn't the case. In chapter 26, he insists that "science as we know it arose only in Western Christendom in the late Middle Ages and flourished in the early sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in what we now call the Scientific Revolution." He, of course, fails here to explain why nothing particularly like the scientific method emerged in the first 1600 years of Western Christendom, or why proto-scientific thought emerged in Classical Greece, imperial China, the so-called "golden age" of Islam, or as far back as the ancient Babylonian astronomers and mathemeticians. I suppose that such a discussion might be too interesting for someone just needs to churn out a book as quickly and effortlessly as possible in order to make a quick buck.

It's in chapter 21 that the banality finally gives way to something more insidious, though, as Metaxas strives to show us that many so-called atheists actually repudiated their atheism and "found God" at some point in their lives, usually when they were on the verge of death. Firstly, I've always found this genre of narrative to be a very strange preoccupation of apologeticists. Even if people like Anthony Flew really did repudiate their atheism, how is that any more evidence for the existence of God than the millions of people who fall out of faith every year are evidence for atheism? Secondly, it should not surprise anyone to learn that most of the accounts here are blatantly untrue. I will especially focus here on his account of the renunciations of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, since these two men happen to be intellectual heroes of mine, and my interest was very much piqued when a read in an internet review that this book contained some startling revelations about the two existentialists' hidden faith. Might there have been some key aspect of their lives which I had either overlooked, or which all subsequent existentialist scholarship had suppressed out of embarrassment?

No.  

His account of Albert Camus' journey into religious faith reads like the hackiest of hack fiction, as it more or less parallels the plot of "God's Not Dead". Camus, a life-long atheist, is presented as a man plagued by doubts, and as struggling to find meaning despite his public professions of the ultimate "absurdity" of our godless universe. During this time, he befriends a pastor and begins attending his sermons. Metaxas says that Camus explained himself to the priest as follows: 

"I’m almost on a pilgrimage—seeking something to fill the void that I am experiencing, and no one else knows. Certainly the public, and the readers of my novels, while they see that void, are not finding the answers in what they are reading. But deep down, you are right. I am searching for something that the world is not giving me…"

By 1959, one year before Camus' untimely death (you can probably see where this is going), Camus apparently confided these thoughts in his new friend:

"Since I have been reading the Bible I sense that there is something—I don’t know if it is personal or if it is a great idea or powerful influence—but there is something that can bring meaning to my life. I certainly don’t have it, but it is there. On Sunday mornings I hear that the answer is God…. You have made it very clear to me on Sunday mornings, Howard, that we are not the only ones in this world. There is something that is invisible. We may not hear the voice, but there is some way in which we can come aware that we are not the only ones in the world and that there is help for all of us."

 The two made provisional plans for Camus to be baptised, with Camus apparently insisting that "I want this. This is what I want to commit my life to," and "I am going to keep striving for the faith." Sadly, according to Metaxas:

Camus would never be baptized nor have the time to write about what had transpired in his heart and mind, because only a few months later—on January 4, 1960—he was riding in the passenger seat of his publisher’s Facel Vega sportscar, speeding toward Paris... [when] on a long and wide stretch of road the car veered into a plane tree. He was killed instantly, at the age of forty-six.

Now, all of this would be a pretty big deal if it were true (the religious stuff, I mean; not the car crash) so what sources can Metaxas provide to back-up this earth-shattering revelation? Just one: the memoirs of the pastor from the above narrative. The memoirs (entitled Albert Camus & the Minister) were written in the year 2000, some 40 years after these conversations had supposedly taken place, and when the pastor (whose name was Howard Mumma) was 90 years old. Not a single other person close to Camus ever reported on his supposed nascent faith, and there is no evidence to suggest that Mumma ever met Camus, much less that he had been successful in convincing him to be baptised. The book is shot through with basic inaccuracies about Camus' life and obviously there is absolutely no independent corroboration for any of the claims Mumma makes in the book. Of course, Metaxas never makes any of this dubiousness clear in his breathless and utterly credulous recounting of the narrative, for which he deserves to be condemned: to report such self-serving hearsay as bald fact is one step removed from lying.

Do not despair, though, for Metaxas takes that final step into unambiguous, bald-faced lying when recounting the "conversion" of Jean-Paul Sartre. According to Metaxas, in the last year of his life (1980), Sartre "found God", on his deathbed "confessed his sins and came into the Church", and declared fairly unequivocally to the world that:

"I don’t feel I am the product of Chance, a speck of dust in the universe, but someone who was expected, prepared, prefigured. In short, a being that could be here thanks only to a Creator. And this idea about a creator is referring to God."

 In an uncharacteristic bout of scholarly panache, Metaxas here provides us with two sources for Sartre's conversion. The first is an interview Sartre conducted with his assistant, a young Marxist by the name of Benny Lévy, and the second we will get to in a moment. With respect to the first source, that interview certainly happened, and it certainly was noteworthy for the fact that a then ailing, blind and tired Sartre, just weeks from death, appeared to relay some diffidence and even outright cynicism about his earlier political and philosophical commitments. Unfortunately for Metaxas, the interview almost never touches on the topic of religion (apart from Sartre making a brief aside about his admiration for the revolutionary zeal of Jewish apocalypticism) and certainly never repudiates his own atheism. In his recounting of this narrative, Metaxas slyly attempts to conflate the (real) scandal of Sartre's last interview with the (unreal) scandal of Sartre's finding God, but properly the two have nothing to do with one another. So where does the idea of Sartre "finding God" come from if not from his last interview?

I mentioned a second source, and this is where you'll probably need to take a seat. I want to remind you before I continue that this is a book that has been published by a real publisher, and which was presumably reviewed and edited before being committed to print, and that the publisher has an address which can presumably be readily found by lawyers representing the estate of Jean-Paul Sartre. Ready? Metaxas' sole source for the incredible conversion of one of history's most famous atheists to the Catholic faith - and which he proudly cites in one of his footnotes - is a comment made on a random Catholic blog post from 11 years ago. Not even a blog post, mind: a comment made on a blog post. Even by the low standards Metaxas has evinced throughout the rest of the book, that is fucking appallingly lazy and dishonest.

But it gets worse. The above quote in which Sartre says that he is "not the product of chance" appears to have been made up out of whole cloth by Metaxas himself. The footnote he appends to the quote suggests it comes from the above blog post, but it certainly doesn't appear anywhere there. A quick google search tells me that the quote, in fact, doesn't appear anywhere in the universe except in this book. He made it up. He lied. One of the most sensational, noteworthy aspects of his book and it's just total bullshit. What a clown.

And now that I've spent more time writing this review than Metaxas spent writing this book I'm finally done. I've had enough. All in all, this book sucks and I recommend it to no-one.

Did Jesus Really Exist? A Brief Defence of the "Historical Jesus" Theory

The problem with studying ancient history is that the sources we have for any given individual or event are invariably fragmentary, late (that is, penned many years after the fact) and ideologically compromised. This problem even exists in the ancient cultures that were relatively meticulous record-keepers, including those of ancient Egypt and Rome. The problem is even more exaggerated for the most part when studying the events of Roman Palestine, since almost everything we know about it comes from a single historian, Josephus, whose major works date to the latter part of the first century. Although Josephus does mention Jesus twice in passing (one of these passages is contested in terms of its authenticity), this leaves us with very little external, objective evidence with which to appraise the origins of Christianity.

As the "Jesus mythicists" will happily tell you (and I should emphasise that such individuals lie very much outside the boundaries of mainstream scholarship) this leaves us with only the gospels and other early Christian writings to work with. Because such works are the products of a particular theological mindset and for the most part lack even the pretence of historical objectivity, this leaves us with virtually no incontestable evidence for Jesus Christ or the early years of the movement which bore his name. For the mythicists, this lack of evidence proves decisive: if there is no unambiguous evidence for Jesus, then epistemological prudence must push us to the position that either Jesus did not exist, or - at best - that we cannot say he existed with any confidence at all. While those claiming such a position are undoubtedly correct about the paucity of quality evidence available to us (and you would do well to keep this in mind every time Jesus is discussed in this thread), I think the conclusion they have reached is a little extreme and ultimately ends up raising more problems than it solves.

In the first place, our demands for hard, incontrovertible evidence cannot be as strict in the study of ancient history as they are in the study of modern history. The reason, simply, is that - barring the occasional chance archaeological find - hard evidence for the events of the ancient world usually haven't been preserved down to the modern day. Even events that have been meticulously documented by quality historians - the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, for example - must be treated with a skeptical eye, leaving us with comparatively little that can be said with absolute certainty about events of even this magnitude. The reason such accounts must be treated skeptically is because the standards of modern historiography - with the need for meticulous sourcing and the drive for objectivity - just weren't an active concern for ancient historiographers. Thucydides, for example, would invent speeches out of whole cloth for dramatic effect (we know this because he tells us). Herodotus - the father of history - believed strongly in the influence of the divine over the progress of history, and would attribute the incidence of many events to the intervention of the gods. In the Roman world, Tacitus was as much a moralist as a historian, happy to engage in rumour and innuendo if it would better serve his ends.

And so on and so forth: no matter where you look, no matter how important an ancient event was, we usually only know about it today through the lens of an ideologically compromised ancient historian or two... and that's if we're lucky. If paucity of evidence were enough to make dubious the people and events of ancient history, we could probably compress everything we know with absolute certainty about the ancient world into a single book. If we can dismiss the existence of Jesus on such grounds - a figure whose public life played out in perhaps the space of a year or less, in an obscure, undocumented part of the world in front of perhaps a few dozen followers - we should probably dismiss the existence of Pythagoras, Socrates, Hannibal and whole host of other ancient figures as well.

With respect to Jesus, it is clear that virtually everything we know about his life is to be found in the gospels. These books obviously cannot be read with naive credulity, as though they were written with the aim of faithfully transcribing actual historical events, but that is not to say that they do not contain nuggets of reliable history that can be mined from the text if we would only use the appropriate methodological tools. Just as we can't dismiss everything Herodotus has to say because he believes in divine intervention, or everything Thucydides has to say because he has a penchant for making things up, we shouldn't dismiss everything the gospels have to say simply because their construction was heavily influenced by the theology of their authors. I won't go into detail about the kind of historical-critical tools we can use to distinguish fact from fiction in the gospels (here is something I wrote earlier if you want such detail), but it can be admitted that we aren't left with much we can say about the historical Jesus with any certainty once these methods have been applied. In my opinion, we can say that Jesus was an itinerant prophet, preaching an eschatological message in Palestine in the first century. He was likely born in Galilee, was likely a disciple of John the Baptist, and he likely ended his ministry in Jerusalem. Here he attracted notoriety (perhaps due to his sacking of the Temple), was apprehended by the Romans (possibly with the assistance of the Jewish authorities) and sentenced to crucifixion by Pontius Pilate. For me, that is about all that I would assert about the life of Jesus with any confidence: everything else I have to say about the man comes with a big asterisk next to it.

On the other hand, it's still something. These facts go a long way to explaining the shape and nature of early Christianity as preserved in the writings of Paul and others. And this is the important fact I want to emphasise to the mythicists, or those who find their arguments compelling: it's all very well and good to assert that there is no direct evidence for Jesus, but it cannot be denied that there was a movement which existed in his name barely two decades after the putative date of his death. If you wish to deny the existence of Jesus, then it is surely incumbent upon you offer some coherent explanation for how this body of belief and literature could have possibly grown up in his name in such a short space of time. This is not an easy prospect, and I'm yet to encounter any compelling alternative theories to the one that Jesus of Nazareth existed as a flesh-and-blood human being.

Now, at this point most mythicists will play the usual denialist game of throwing up their hands and saying "hey man, just asking questions!", but I think this tactic is a little intellecually dishonest. It's easy to attack, with simply untethered skepticism, a historical theory that is working with necessarily fragmentary evidence, but it's much more difficult to posit alternative theories for the evidence available that are more probable and less convoluted than the original theory. The parallels here between Jesus mythicism and other denialist movements like those of the "climate change skepticism" or 9/11 truthers are pretty easy to identify, much as it may gall the mythicists. All denialist movements are ultimately ideologically motivated, and all involve the highly selective use (and criticism) of the available evidence. More importantly, as valid as denialist criticisms of the prevailing theory may occasionally be, their ability to present an alternative theory - which better explains the evidence, with a minimum of superfluous pluralities - is generally laughable. The mythicist case is no different.

Basically, regardless of the details, the rejection of a historical Jesus necessitates the positing of some other historical origin for the early Christian movement. This, for most mythicists, necessitates the claim that Christianity was actually created by Paul, who by this logic believed in a purely heavenly Jesus, and that the flesh-and-blood Jesus of history was a mere literary contrivance of the four subsequent gospel authors. Now I can't detail all the problems with this assumption, because we'd be here all day, but a few difficulties off the top of my head would include:

• What was Paul's motivation for creating these beliefs? Where did he get the idea of a heavenly messiah, beaten and crucified in heaven to atone for our sins, when such beliefs had no precendents in either Jewish or Hellenic thought?
  
• Why does the most natural reading of Paul appear to strongly suggest that Jesus was someone who walked on the face of the Earth, with not a single unambiguous indication anywhere in his letters of a belief a pre-resurrection heavenly Jesus?
  
• What happened to such beliefs as time passed? Why does not a single Christian in the first two centuries of Christianity - or any time since then - profess belief in a Jesus who never walked the face of the Earth? How did Paul's theology get so thoroughly garbled and misunderstood so quickly?
  
• Where did the gospel authors get their historical details concerning the life of Jesus from? Why would they have been motivated to situate a heavenly redeemer on the Earth if they didn't believe that to be the case? More to the point, if the gospel authors were merely inventing historical details to furnish the theology started by Paul, why (with the possible exception of Luke) do they show so little awareness of Pauline thought?
  
• Why did none of the early critics of Christianity - who left almost no area of the faith immune from criticism - make no mention of the idea that Jesus never existed? Surely this would have been a useful polemic for them to use if it had ever existed in the cultural millieu of the time?

Now note that these are entirely contrived problems, unique to the theory of Jesus mythicism. The only inherent difficulty with the historical Jesus theory I can find concerns the lack of solid evidence, but the mythicist theory also has this problem (as I said, not a shred of incontestible evidence that a single Christian ever believed in the purely heavenly Jesus of the mythicist theory!) in addition to the problems listed above. So really, I can only ask which seems more plausible: the idea that there was an itinerant prophet called Jesus - the man that the early Christians wrote about - or the contrived and convoluted jumble of illogic found above? Even if we presume that the evidence for both claims is equal (something that I would dispute), which explanation is the most parsimonious, requiring the smallest number of pluralities and presumptions to explain the data? Without pre-empting your answer, I think it's telling that the mythicist explanation requires so many more leaps in logic or unfounded presumptions than the supposedly tenuous theory it seeks to replace. So, when someone asks me why I believe that there was a historical Jesus, this is the answer I give them: it's simply by far the most probable explanation for the available evidence that we have. Perhaps the day will come when a better alternative explanation offers itself, but until then the "Jesus as historical figure" theory is the only one to explain the data without resorting to fantastic assumptions or contorted chains of logic.

The History of the Bible: A Brief Overview

1500-1200 BC: Settlement

In the second half of the second millennium BC, the land of Canaan (a region comprising modern Israel, Palestine and parts of Syria, Lebanon and Jordan) was comprised of a series of loosely affiliated city states, distantly overseen by the Egyptian Empire. The culture was relatively homogeneous, and closely related culturally to other ancient near-Eastern polities. At some time in the 13th century BC, the entire region was thrown into chaos by a series of migratory movements originating (likely) somewhere to the north-west. Exactly what caused this upheaval of population is not known for certain, but we know from Egyptian records that a mass of immigrants (deemed "sea people" by the Egyptians) landed periodically all around the Mediterranean coast sometime in the 13th century BC, attacking many key Egyptian outposts - as well as key centres of other empires - in the process. The on-going battle between the Egyptians and the sea people needn't concern us further, but the importance for Israel and the subsequent Biblical narrative lies in what happened as a consequence on the modern day Gaza strip.

The "sea people" who landed here immediately embarked on a wave of destruction and displacement, a pattern attested to today by the archaeological record. This period marks a severe decline in the size and strength of the greater empires in the region (especially Mesopotamia and Egypt) and allowed for the emergence of smaller states. The sea people came to settle the Gaza strip (and became known to subsequent generations of Israelites as "Philistines") and the previous settlers were forced off this relatively fertile land by the coast into the more desolate, arid, mountainous region to the east. The land appears to have been largely uninhabited prior to this, so the new settlers - refugees from all over the Levant - were able to create settlements with relative ease. At this early stage we can't yet properly speak of an "Israel" (though we know from Egyptian records that there existed a people called "Israel" by around 1200) because the material culture of the region was still indistinguishable from the wider Canaanite material culture. Well, indistinguishable it so happens with one important difference: the almost total absence of pig bones in the proto-Israelite sites.

1200-1000 BC: Tribes and Judges

Little is known for sure about this part of the region's history. We know that the Egyptians were forced to withdraw their influence from the region due to their on-going battles with the "sea people", various states and other internecine conflicts, so we can imagine that the loose coalition of city states that existed in Canaan likely fragmented during this time. According to the Biblical accounts, this was a period of general lawlessness, violence, and competing tribal chiefs (or "judges" in the Biblical terminology). Although the historicity of most of the narratives in Judges have long been questioned by scholars, we can probably say that the Biblical account probably has more than an element of truth to it: as closely related as all the "tribes" in the region were (in terms of religion, language and culture) there can be little doubt that this was a period in which they jostled violently for land and power in the vacuum of Egyptian influence.

With respect to religion, we know that these proto-Israelites continued to believe in at least aspects of the Canaanite pantheon of gods: namely in El (the "head" god) and his 70 children. That El was integral to the religious culture of the proto-Israelites can be determined by his presence in theophoric titles (Isra-el, El-ijah etc.) and that it continued to be the name of "God" in the northern kingdom for centuries later. In the part of the Torah that is suspected to have been penned in the northern kingdom (that is, the E Source"), "Elohim" is the name used for God in the narrative until he reveals his name to be "YHWH" in Exodus (in truth, this appears to be a later attempt to conflate two different gods under the same name: even relatively late Biblical texts appear to suggest that YHWH was originally a member of a divine council of gods (elyon) - Dt. 32:8-9). In the south, however, the use of theophoric titles involving the name YHWH from a relatively early date suggests to us that YHWH was the patron god of Judah from the very beginning.

We are told that the land (or at least, it's northern part) was ruled by a man named "Saul" in the later part of this period, though exactly what territory he might have laid claim to is not clear. The Bible tells us of the continued presense of foreign tribes in the land nominally claimed by Saul, and we also know from Egyptian records that the land was terrorised during this period by large, well-organised groups of bandits known as "Hapiru". So, if the legitimacy of a state truly rests in its capacity to impose a monopoly of violence in the region under its control, we probably can't yet call the Israel of Saul a true state just yet. Scholars once tried to make a etymological link between the word "Hapiru" and the word "Hebrew" - which would raise the possibility that the Hebrews entered the land originally as marauding bandits - but this explanation seems to have fallen out of favour.

1000 BC - 930 BC: David and Solomon

Sometime in the late 11th century BC, it appears that a tribal chief named David achieved prominence in the southern regions, uniting enough of the population to take over Jerusalem and to establish a state there known as "Judah". According to the Biblical accounts, he was once in the employ of Saul, and after Saul's death found himself in control of a "united monarchy" - that is, both the northern and southern parts of the region (or Israel and Judah). Exactly how seriously we can take these Biblical accounts is unclear, and a matter of acrimonious debate among scholars. At one end there are those who suggest the Biblical account is almost entirely trustworthy, and the other end are those who would deny David ever existed (although the latter are now in shorter supply after the discovery of the Tel Dan Stele). I'm obviously not qualified to resolve this issue here, so I'll give you the facts as I see them and let you make your own mind up.

In the Biblical account, it has long been noted that David comes across as a very flawed and (consequently) a very human figure. Despite the reverence with which he was treated in later periods, the Biblical accounts are scarcely unequivocally positive in their descriptions of him. One potential explanation is that the material (in the Book of Samuel anyway) comes from two different sources: one from the north and one from the south, that were later redacted into a single narrative. The southern account is predictably more positive, because this is where David was based and where the majority of his support came from. The northern account is rather less effusive in its praise because there may have been a residual tendency to see David as something of a violent usurper: he did, after all, apparently murder Saul's son to end the northern monarchy and to stake his claim to the entire region. If this interpretation of the Biblical texts is correct, then it would seem to lend some support to the general historicity of the accounts because they have been preserved down two independent sources. That this is the case, though, is far from clear.

What we do know is that David was remembered for (firstly) siding with the Philistines against Saul and then fighting off and subduing the Philistines. Again, there is no inherent reason to suspect the truth of these accounts. Kings and states do not just appear from thin air: generally in history, the rallying of a people around a central leader - and their granting him the authority and resources to lead them - doesn't happen for no reason. Frequently, such centralising tendencies can occur in response to perceived threats, as happened in Greece, Rome, China and doubtless many other places. The emergence of David as the sole leader of once disparate groups of people may well have been a response to the perceived threat which emanated firstly from the northern kingdom of Saul and - subsequently - from the Philistines. That David switched allegiances should also not be a surprise: this was a frequent tactic employed by kings in the ancient world (to side with the more powerful force, regardless of past relationships with other powers) and it happened frequently in the subsequent history of Israel and Judah. The Biblical account has the benefit of explaining the emergence of a monarchy in the southern region and its subsequent history, so again, I see no reason to doubt it.

One question mark lies with just how "unified" the northern and southern parts of the kingdom were under King David. In fact, many scholars will deny (quite credibly) that there was ever a unified kingdom of Israel at all. They would argue that it was merely a work of theologically inspired propaganda created by later Judahites to justify their claims to the northern lands after the fall of Samaria in 722 BC. This might be taking it a little too far, but what can probably be said with confidence is that the south simply didn't have the resources to bring the north reliably under its control. Archaeologists put the population in Judah at the time of David at perhaps no more than a few thousand, and given the relatively poor agricultural conditions in the region it seems difficult to believe that Judah could have produced the economic surplus necessary to produce an army capable of subduing and occupying the much larger, much wealthier region to the north. In other words, whatever claims David might have had on the northern kingdom were surely somewhat tenuous, and the idea of a unified kingdom may well have been more an ideological claim than one realised in practice. That the unified kingdom lasted no longer than 70 years (according to the Biblical account) would surely be evidence of this.

Solomon is another enigmatic figure. In the Bible he was remembered for producing books of great wisdom (i.e. the Book of Proverbs) and incredible building feats, but it now seems likely that he produced neither. The Biblical wisdom literature probably dates (for the most part) to the post-exilic period (that is, four centuries after Solomon at the earliest) and the major building projects in the northern kingdom that the Bible attributes to Solomon were likely built during the time of the divided kingdom, when the the northern half was comparatively rich and powerful. The possibility remains that Solomon constructed the first Temple in Jerusalem (as tradition maintains), but the relevant archaeological site currently lies under the Al-Aqsa mosque so it is not possible to confirm for sure. What else we can say about Solomon with any certainty is unclear, but what is apparent is that after his death whatever fragile unity there was between the north and south fractured, and the next period of history is one that of the "divided monarchy".

930-734 BC: The Age of Israel

After the fracturing of the (potentially) once united kingdom of Israel, the two kingdoms went down quite separate paths. The northern kingdom (Israel) grew rapidly, developing a rich and relatively advanced material culture, as well as developing strong military and economic ties with neighbouring powers. Beginning perhaps with the great king Omri in the early 9th century BC (foreign powers referred to the northern kingdom as "the House of Omri"), the archaeological record tells us that this was a period of exorbitant building projects and extensive trade for Israel. We also know from the rather severe admonitions of the prophets active at the time - such as Isaiah, Hosea and Amos - that such plenitude also produced gross inequality and economic exploitation in the kingdom. The influence of foreign trade and diplomatic ties also brought the unwelcome (for these prophets) influence of foreign religious practices. The accounts of the northern kingdom in the Book of Kings (written by unsympathetic southern scribes some centuries later) paints a picture of abject moral depravity in the region at the time. Whatever the truth, the population in the north may have been as much as 8 times greater than that in the south, and the wealth of the regions are almost incomparable.

In the south at the time, this marks a period of almost total obscurity and lack of development. There is little evidence of literacy in the region (which would be a sign of economic development and a strong central state) and the land was likely populated almost exclusively by small, marginal agriculturalists and nomads. Although it seems that Judah was able to remain an independent state during this period - and there is no indication that they were required to pay tribute to their northern neighbours, despite the late attempt by the north to enforce one - there is simply no doubt that Judah was the little brother in this partnership. But for the intervention of foreign powers, it likely would have stayed this way, and Judaism, Christianity and the Bible - at least in any recognisable forms - would never have had to chance to emerge.

734 - 592 BC: Assyria and The Fall of Israel

At the peak of their strength, the Israelites made the ill-fated decision to stand with the city of Damascus against the now powerful Assyrian empire. The Assyrians - led by the infamous King Tiglath-Pileser III - reacted swiftly in anger, invading Israel, deposing the king and replacing him with a leader of their own choosing. After the death of King Tiglath-Pileser III, Israel again rebelled, hoping to use the resultant power vacuum as a chance to pursue their freedom from the empire. Again, though, the Assyrian response was swift and brutal. After a prolonged siege of the capital Samaria, Israel finally fell in 722 BC. The royal house of Omri was completely destroyed, and its population was either sent into exile or forced to flee for safer territory in the face of the advancing Assyrian army.

For many of those who took flight, Judah was the most logical destination. They shared nearly identical cultures, afterall, and Judah - under its king Ahaz - had signed a suzerain treaty with the Assyrians, sparing them from direct conquest in exchange for the provision of onerous tributes. (It's worth mentioning that in the decade or so before the fall of Israel, this technically made Judah and Israel enemies at war.) And the refugees did indeed flood into Judah in great numbers: the archaeological record suggests that the population of Jerusalem may have increased almost 12-fold in little less than a century. Quite apart from the population boom in Judah that this migratory influx obviously caused, there were a number of other important effects as well. Firstly, the religious traditions of Israel and Judah - which had been diverging for at least two centuries by this point - were brought back into contact. This may well have been when the J/E conflation took place (i.e. the penning of the majority of Genesis and Exodus) as religious scholars sought to reconcile the sometimes minor differences between the two mythical traditions.

Another important effect was the rise of literacy in Judah during this period, another fact attested by the archaeological record. Normally literacy only enters a society once a certain level of economic complexity has been reached, thus necessitating the creation of more complex forms of accounting and record keeping (it does appear that the majority of the earliest instances of written language performed exactly this function). Judah, prior to this point, was an almost entirely rural region, with very little (it seems) in terms of political centralisation or urbanisation, and literacy therefore was not a pressing need prior to the 8th century. Israel in the 8th century, by contrast, was a large, heavily urbanised society that engaged routinely in foreign trade, thus necessitating an institutionalised scribal culture to keep track of trades, contracts, inventory and so on. After the fall of Israel, these scribes - and other instruments of complex government - were brought south to Judah and would have made possible the creation of texts used in religion and government. In other words, it is probably at around this time that we can finally imagine that the material and intellectual resources necessary for the construction of complex texts finally arrived to Judah, and it is probably around this time that some of the Biblical texts we are familiar with today were first penned.

Perhaps the most important development during this period was the ascension of King Josiah, who - with the exception of King David - is probably the most important king in the history of Judah and the religious traditions it came to produce. He came to the throne as an 8 year old in 640 BC, and in approximately 622 BC introduced a serious of religious and social reforms that would forever shape the nature of the Hebrew religion. His most important move here was in the centralisation of the religious faith, so that all religious practice would now be centred on the Temple in Jerusalem, and all other outlets of religious expression - the so called "altars" and "high places" - would be destroyed, their priests slain and their practise forever suppressed. 2 Kings 23 gives us some great detail about just how thorough, violent and wide-spread the enforcement of this edict needed to be. The shear scale of the "abominable" religious practices present in Judah prior to Josiah's reforms should, however, give us a clear indication of just how pluralistic and variable Judahite religion was prior to Josiah, and puts lie to the fact that the Hebrew religion was ever an inherently monolithic / monotheistic one.

Another important move made by Josiah during his reign was the empowerment of the priestly caste (specifically the Levitical caste) and the reduction in the power of the King. Penned some 1800 years before the Magna Carta, the book of Deuteronomy represents an extraordinary concession of power on behalf of the King of Judah, including the promise to follow piously the "Laws" of scripture (i.e. the king was now a follower of law rather than a prescriber of it) and to not "exalt himself above other members of the community" (Dt. 17)! This diminishing of the power of the king and the strengthening of the power of the priests would have a number of important consequences in the post-exilic period and future of the Hebrew religion.

592 BC - 539 BC: The Exile

After the fall of the Assyrian empire at the hand of the Babylonians in the late 7th century BC, Judah was faced with a problem. To the north they now had the Babylonian Empire, one that was probably more aggressive and expansionist than the Assyrian Empire they replaced. To the south they had the still large (though perhaps declining) Egyptian Empire. To make matters worse, the two empires were open enemies, leaving Judah in the middle and needing to choose one side to protect it from the other. For a period of two decades, it seems as though the kings of Judah vacillated almost capriciously from one side to the other, as the fortune of each empire grew and waned. Eventually, though, after abandoning a recently-penned treaty with Babylon to side with the Egyptians, the Judahites were left to face the full brunt of the Babylonian army. They expected the support of the Egyptians, but the Egyptians never arrived. In three successive waves of invasion, concluding in 582 BC, Judah was smashed by the Babylonians: its cities were destroyed, its population scattered and its elite members carried off into exile.

The human scale of this drama is preserved in unnerving detail in the Bible. The siege of Jerusalem in 587 BC was, like all other military sieges in history, a event which imposed almost imaginable strains on endurance and suffering. With access to outside food sources closed off by the Babylonian army, the people of Jerusalem were "pierced by hunger", the "women... boiled their own children":

Even the jackals offer the breast
and nurse their young,
but my people has become cruel,
like the ostriches in the wilderness.

The tongue of the infant sticks
to the roof of its mouth for thirst;
the children beg for food,
but no one gives them anything.

Those who feasted on delicacies
perish in the streets;
those who were brought up in purple
cling to ash heaps.

In truth, the aftermath was little better for those who stayed behind. Agricultural production ground to a halt, cities were abandoned and many fled the land permanently, Egypt becoming a particularly popular sanctuary. Those who were carried into exile (including the royal court, the priests and members of the aristocracy) bemoaned their fates in moving Psalmic elegies for their lost land, the most famous being that of Psalm 137 ("By the rivers of Babylon..."). In truth, the conditions faced by those exiled to Babylon (exact numbers are difficult to gauge by the way, but 10% of the Judahite population would be as good a guess as any) were perhaps not so bad: they were, after all, apparently free - at least in certain cases - to continue their religious practices, to perform trades and to marry into the local populations. In addition to certain Psalms, important prophetic works such as Ezekiel, Jeremiah and deutero-Isaiah were likely written (at least in part) during the exile, the first two notable for their almost complete lack of hostility towards the Babylonians, and their correlated disdain towards those Judahites who remained in Judah or (much worse) who had fled to Egypt.

Theologically this marks an important time for the Hebrews, so much so that many scholars use the terms "pre-exilic" and "post-exilic" theology to denote the significant changes the forced exile imposed. Firstly, the Jerusalem Temple - literally the dwelling place of their God - had been destroyed, leaving serious questions about their proper mode of worship and practice in its absence. Secondly, the unimaginable suffering heaped on the Judahites so soon after the enactment of the supposedly pious reforms of Josiah was difficult to explain: why was God so angry at us? The first problem likely contributed to the growth of belief in a universal deity (that is, a deity who could be with one even in a foreign land) and - eventually - unequivocal monotheism (the first unambiguously monotheistic Biblical passage was likely written during this time: Isa. 44:6). It also contributed to the centrality of the Law in the Hebrew religion, because it could still be followed even where the possibility of worship and sacrifices - the central praxes of the old religion - were no longer possible. The second problem was explained by the reality of deferred judgement - that present-day generations could be punished for the inequities of past generations. This was an important development in the conception of sin, and would eventually lead to the idea of "original sin" so important to later Christian theologians.

539 BC - 323 BC: The Persian Period

Following the over-running of the Babylonian Empire by the Persians, the Judahites in exile were finally free to return to their homeland. For his role in this - and his relatively tolerant and liberal attitude towards the expression of religion - Cyrus was deemed to be a "Messiah" by the author of deutero-Isaiah (Isa. 45:1). In truth the return to Judah was little more than a slow trickle initially: the archaeological record seems to indicate only a slow growth in population during the century or so after the fall of Babylon. In reality, it's not difficult to understand why: the majority of the Hebrews living in Babylon had never seen Judah, had their own families and trades in Babylon, and there was little to go back to in the now destitute and economically backward hinterlands of Judah. But they did make their way back slowly.

The first to come (including Zerubbabel, the governor and Haggai the prophet) were shocked by the conditions they found there. The so-called "people of the land" had fallen into a state of apparent moral degradation, abandoning the religious practices instituted by Josiah (and further refined by the Babylonian exiles), adopting gods and wives from neighbouring tribes. The land was destitute and unproductive, the cities lay in ruins, completely undeveloped from the time of the Babylonian invasion more than four decades prior. The first task involved the rebuilding of the Temple, a project that seems to have run into many difficulties along the way. (These interruptions are blamed partly on the Samaritans - refugees from the Assyrian invasion of the northern Kingdom who had returned along with the Judahites. This enmity between the Hebrews and the Samaritans would continue until the time of Jesus, hence the "Good Samaritan" story.) It was eventually built, though, and this period through to 70 AD is therefore referred to as the "Second Temple Period". Strangely, while many facets of pre-exilic life were resumed in Judah during this period, the re-establishment of the monarchy doesn't seem to have been one of them. While members of the royal court form part of the narrative in the earliest period of the return, they henceforth disappear without explanation, with royal titles, ceremonies and functions passed onto the high priest. The Davidic monarchy was never to be restored, the powers of government now resting for the majority of the Second Temple period with the priests and governors appointed by foreign powers.

It was during this period that the texts of the Hebrew Bible reached essentially their modern form - few of the major texts from the Tanakh can be dated reliably to after this period, though the texts themselves did continue to evolve. The Torah and the Deueronomic histories (that is, the first 9 books of the Bible) were likely edited / composed into their definitive form during the 5th century BC (perhaps by the prophet Ezra) and the theology of the time is perhaps best represented by the "Priestly (or "P") Source" within the Torah. The theology of this source evinces evidence of the universal god developed during the exile (in contrast with the more parochial god of earlier texts) and the centrality of assiduous priestly procedure to the religion, in keeping with the realities of post-monarchical Judah.

323 BC - 63 BC: The Hellenistic Period

This was an extremely complex time politically in the region, so it will be difficult to do justice to it in just a few paragraphs. It started with Alexander the Great's defeat of Persia, and the transfer of the lands of Palestine into the hands of his armies. With Alexander's death in 323 BC, however, the inheritance of his nascent empire was fought-over by his generals, a squabble which took a long time to reach a definitive conclusion. The land of Palestine was contested between Ptolemy I and his neighbouring rival Seleucus, with the former eventually laying definitive claim to the land in around 301 BC. Almost immediately he set about Hellenizing the region, introducing a complex governing bureaucracy and other cultural institutions in line with Alexander's earlier desire to introduce homonia (that is, a universal Hellenistic culture) to the lands he brought under his control.

As a consequence of Ptolemy's reforms (and those of his successors), the period marks one of relative peace and prosperity in the region, as evidenced by the growth in populations, agriculture and trade in the region. It wasn't however, a happy period for everyone. Those in the upper-classes tended to benefit more from Hellenism than the rural classes did, so they tended to adapt to Greek thought and institutions much more readily. As a consequence, an internal rupture emerged among the Jews (and it is here that the word Jew first came into use: it was a Greek title for the population of Judea) during the Greek and Roman period. Generally, we can now speak of the privilaged classes (merchants, priests, royalty etc.) supporting (or at least acquiescing to) the occupiers and patronising their institutions (including gymnasia and so on), with the less privileged classes rebelling against the imperial forces and holding zealously to their religious traditions. The latter would eventually become radicalised, and it is in such an environment that the ministry of Jesus - and subsequent developments in the history of Judaism must be understood.

The Ptolemies eventually lost control of the region to the Seleucids in 223 BC, and this marks the beginning of a period of great instability. The Seleucids were involved in ongoing conflicts with the growing Roman empire, and needed to extract higher and higher tributes to support their war efforts. This involved further exploitation of the already disenfranchised rural poor and the raiding of the sacrosanct Jerusalem Temple for its treasures. When the Seleucid king Antiochus IV (with the help of his lackey high-priest) established an "abomination" (namely Pagan worship) in the Jerusalem Temple in the year 167 BC, and outlawed certain other Jewish practices, the impoverished population revolted under a religious banner in an event known as the "Maccabean Revolt". After 3 years of often gruelling guerilla warfare, the Maccabeans emerged victorious and established an independent Jewish state for the first time in over four centuries, an event celebrated down to the modern day in the festival of Hannukah. This new Hasmonean dynasty struggled to definitively secure a grip on power, however, due predominantly to Roman influence and internecine conflicts, resulting in a century of further relative instability. The independence of the kingdom was officially ended when Pompey invaded in 63 BC and established the territory as a Roman client Kingdom.

The restlessness of this age gave rise to some relatively new ways of thinking within Jewish circles. For the impoverished and disenfranchised, the dismay they felt over their constant subjugation at the hands of foreign powers was channelled into eschatological thought: namely, the idea that God would shortly intervene to put an end to the evils of the present age. This is most prominently displayed in the Book of Daniel and the books of Enoch / Ezra. This is another important indication of the influence that historical events can have over the trajectory of theology. Many other people - particularly in the upper-classes - were heavily influenced by Greek thought during this period, as demonstrated in the Book of Ecclesiastes and other so-called "Wisdom" literature. This also marks the first point at which we can identify a belief in the afterlife (or resurrection, more specifically) amongst some of the Jewish population. It seems to have emerged in reaction to the perceived iniquity of the fact that those who died gloriously during the Maccabean revolt would not live to see its fruition. All of these new theological developments would be important in the development of early Christian thought.

63 BC - 70 AD: The Early Roman Period

The early periods of Roman rule were overshadowed by developments in Rome, including the battles waged between Pompey and Caesar, and later between Antony and Octavian. The Romans did stamp their authority on the region, however, with the installation of Herod the Great as a puppet king in 37 BC. Herod was a prolific builder - most prominently his massive additions to the Temple complex - and enjoyed a close relationship with the Romans, neither of which ingratiated him to the local population. He is remembered as a brutal and capricious ruler by later authors, though much of this reputation can probably be attributed to the politically motivated polemic of his later detractors. Matthew's claim that he killed every firstborn child in Judea (as the Romans called it) can be safely dismissed as theologically-driven fiction. Shortly after Herod's death, Judea went from being a client kingdom to being absorbed as a Roman province.

As in the earlier Greek period, the Jews of the Roman period found themselves split between those who acquiesced to the Roman occupation and those who actively opposed it. On the pro-Roman side, we have the Sadducees, those of the ruling priestly caste who ran the Temple and actively co-operated with their Roman overseers. On the other side we have the Pharisees, a distinct priestly caste who were legal traditionalists and enjoyed a much closer relationship with the Jewish people. Finally we have the Essenes, a shadowy group about whom little is known. It seems that they were originally a disaffected priestly caste, who left (or were excluded from) their regular priestly duties at some point in the Hellenistic period, perhaps due to disagreements with the occupying powers. It seems they produced strange, almost unclassifiable religious literature (including likely the Dead Sea Scrolls) and lived an ascetic lifestyle at the fringes of society.

Groups like the Essenes likely gave rise to movements such as those of John the Baptist in the Roman period, who preached an eschatological message and railed ceaselessly against the powers-that-be. Jesus, likely originally a disciple of John, can be placed in the same category. Although the Gospel authors tend to soften any potentially obvious anti-Roman sentiments in their texts, Jesus is best understood in the historical reality of Roman Judea: that is, one of imperialism and social disenfranchisement. The Romans (and their backers among the Jewish ruling classes) imposed often onerous taxes on the rural population of Judea, and many of the latter were left destitute as a consequence. Many could no longer turn to traditional religious sources for consolation, because those who represented such sources (namely the Sadducees) were seen as being complicit in the Roman occupation. Many therefore turned to more exuberant and rebellious religious alternatives, which generally promised liberation from the strife of the present period in the form of some future cataclysmic act of divine intervention, which would deliver the world from the hands of the powerful into the hands of the downtrodden. Such eschatological beliefs were the basis of Jesus' teachings.

Others had different solutions to the problems of Roman occupation, however, and organised themselves into militant groups. Most prominent among these were the "Zealots", who could apparently count one of their number among the disciples of Jesus. The Zealots aggressively targeted Greek and Roman interests in Judea, using tactics that would probably be described as "terrorism" in the modern parlance, including the targeting of otherwise innocent Greek and Roman civilians. Perhaps even more bold were the "Sicarii", named for the daggers they carried, who terrorised those Jews who dared to co-operate with the Romans. Such movements emerged, Josephus tells us, at least partly in response to the tax reforms enacted by the Romans at the beginning of the 1st century, though religious factors must surely have been a pertinent factor as well.

Such divisions were in some way mirrored in the early Christian sects. The only surviving Christian texts we have from this period are those of Paul, and much of his writing is devoted to attempting to bridge the gap between the Jews, Gentiles and their various subgroups in the nascent faith. The duties one faces to the empire, the concern for the poor and the eschatology of marginal Jewish groups are also major pre-occupations of Paul, which all serve to place early Christian theology firmly as a continuation of late-Second Temple Judaism. Until 70 AD, Christianity was just one of its many branches.

After 70 AD: The Late Roman Period and Diaspora

Eventually, the militant groups described in the previous section led a fateful revolt against the Romans in 66 AD. The violence was initially ad hoc and indiscriminate, before gradually escalating into a full-blown war against the Roman Empire. After 4 years of fighting - including another horrific siege of Jerusalem - the revolt was quashed and the Temple was destroyed, creating a crisis within the Jewish faith. The Temple had for so long stood at the centre of Jewish religious practice, and its absence created the need to innovate new theological solutions to keep the faith going. Essentially, from the first century onwards Judaism became a faith centred around the Torah (that is, "the Law") and its scholarly exegesis. With the Sadducees dislodged from power, the opportunity fell to Pharisees (or, at least, their successors) to lead this reinvigoration of the faith and they came to produce what is now known as Talmudic Judaism (derived from the name given to the body of scholarly interpretation produced by Rabbis), a critical step in the development of the Judaism with which we are familiar today.

Within Christianity, the fall of Jerusalem likely marked the first of its many significant fractures with Judaism. To begin with, the Jerusalem Church - hitherto probably the centre of the Christian missionary movement - simply disappears from history. The apostles at the head of this church - most notably James, "the brother of the Lord" - were extremely important in maintaining the Jewish influence within the early Christian movement, and insisted upon the continued observation of dietary laws and circumcision. For this position they ran into constant arguments with Paul and other early evangelists who insisted that gentiles should not be required to observe these central requirements of Judaism to be admitted into the faith. With the destruction of the Jerusalem Church (or at least its inability to retain its earlier influence) the gentile-friendly Christianity of Paul and his successors became dominant, and would remain normative for the rest of Christian history. While Jews previously tolerated the evangelising of proto-Christians in synagogues, the crisis caused by the destruction of the Temple created a rather less tolerant attitude and these proto-Christians now found themselves excluded from synagogue services. This situation is anachronistically depicted in the Gospel of John, which - together with the anti-Jewish polemic in other NT texts - suggests quite clearly that Judaism and Christianity were already starting to go their separate ways by the end of the first century.

The Judean province remained a politically restive region, however, and after several periodic skirmishes the situation again boiled over into full-blown war in 132 AD with the famous Bar Kokhba revolt. Under the leadership of Simon bar Kokhba - a self-proclaimed Messiah - the Jewish population rebelled against the Roman Empire and for a short period were seemingly successful in establishing Israel as an independent state. The Roman response was typically ruthless, however, and the revolt was quashed in an orgy of violence by the year 135 AD. The majority of Jews in the region were likely to have been killed, sold into slavery, or - if they were lucky - sent into exile. Hadrian forbade them from entering Jerusalem (except for specially sanctioned ceremonies) and this marks a critical stage in the Jewish diaspora. The Jews would from this point have no homeland until the creation of the modern state of Israel in 1947.

Eschatology in Early Christianity: A Response to Liberal Criticisms

There are few scholars involved in Biblical scholarship today who would be moved to deny the eschatological basis of early Christian beliefs. It's simply to difficult to make sense of the NT texts or the breathless urgency with which early Christian evangelising was carried out within its first few decades. In my experience, the objections to Jesus ever having preached an eschatological message come primarily from those who tend towards the more "liberal" side of scholarship, probably best typified by the outlook of the Jesus Seminar. Such scholarship tends to view Jesus as a wandering sage, or a (pacifistic) political provocateur and argues that the eschatological material in the NT is a consequence of later generations retrojecting their own eschatological beliefs into the mouth of Jesus (I don't think any would dispute the claim that Jesus is at least presented as having eschatological ideas in the Gospels, for example). However, there are many problems with this view that I intend to explore here.

Firstly it seems beyond doubt that Jesus spoke frequently of something called "the Kingdom of God", as implied by the prominence of the phrase in Mark and Q. According to the anti-apocalypticists, we should interpret this term not as the expectation of some future eschatological event (God literally imposing his Kingdom on Earth) but rather as a kind of by-word for Jesus' power over evil spirits (cf. Mt. 12:28; Lk 11:20) and his pursuit of divine justice. According to this view, Jesus believed that the Kingdom of God had already arrived, and that it resided (metaphorically?) within those who followed his example (Lk 17:21). However, it is clear that the term is not used exclusively in this way in the gospels, and such an interpetation appears to be too reliant on gnostic (and therefore later and de-eschatologised) interpretations of "Kingdom of God" (e.g Gospel of Thomas sayings 3 and 113). Given the inconsistency with which this term is applied, it is undeniably difficult to say with certainty which of the divergent meanings can be attributed to Jesus and which can be attributed to the Evangelists, but I think we have to view "the Kingdom of God" as referring to some future state that Jesus believed was already imminent. The phrase "the Kingdom of God has drawn near" can be found in both Mark and Q (Mk 1:15; Lk 10:9,11; Mt 10:7) and although the use of the perfect tense ("has drawn near") tells us that this process has already begun, the use of "near" clearly implies that it is yet to fully arrive.

Another example of imminent eschatological expectations within the early Christian community is that of the Lord's Prayer, which - by its distinctive use of the word abba (as I discussed above) - few scholars doubt can be traced back to Jesus. Here the exortation for God's Kingdom to "come" (Mt 6:10; Lk 11:2) again implies some future expectation, which Matthew further elaborates as arriving "on Earth as it is in Heaven". The imposition of divine will on Earth, with God arriving literally as a "King", is the very essense of an eschatological belief, and clear parallels can be drawn with the Jewish eschatologies of Jesus' time. Again, the anti-apocalypticists may demure that we needn't read eschatological beliefs into such passages and that in exhorting God's Kingdom to "come" Jesus was merely praying for some kind of divine justice, but even then it's difficult not to envisage this form of justice as necessitating some great eschatological shift.

For instance, Jesus is regularly portrayed as envisioning a future in which "the last will be first, and the first last" (Mt 20:16), where "the meek... shall inherit the earth" (Mt 5:5) and other similar reversals of fortune. This feature of Jesus' teaching - where the order of the current age is replaced with a new, completely inverted one as a consequence of divine intervention - is the very definition of an eschatological belief, hence the terminology given to such beliefs in the parlance of Biblical scholarship - inversionary ethical eschatology. Other elements of Jesus' ethics are so extreme ("if a man takes your shirt, give him your cloak also"; "if you want to follow me, sell all your possessions and leave your family" etc.) that its sometimes suggested that they could only be considered workable if we presume that Jesus thought they would only need to be followed for the short period of time before the eschaton. In any case, it's simply impossible to make sense of certain elements of Jesus' ethics without presuming some eschatological corollary.

Elsewhere in the Gospels, Jesus is regularly depicted as talking about "the Son of Man", an expression that is difficult to define precisely (in part because it is used in many different ways, both in the OT and the Gospels) but its use in the Gospels appears to be shaped by Daniel 7:13, an apocolyptic text. The term is used some 80 times in the Gospels, though the Jesus Seminar voted literally every instance of its use as either black or grey (meaning these sayings probably can't be traced back to the historical Jesus). This glib dismissal of an extremely well-attested tradition is based on the assumption that "the Son of Man" motif was a Christological title retrojected into the accounts by the Evangelists, who admittedly did frequently refer to the LXX for passages that they could apply to Jesus as they composed their Gospels. So, by this account, we should simply view the "Son of Man" passages as a consequence of OT prophecy-mining undertaken by later generations of Christians eager to find the most apt ways available to describe Jesus' nature.

But, of course, such explanations fail upon closer examination:

• Firstly, the "Son of Man" expressions are only ever remembered as being spoken by Jesus and - therefore - were presumably remembered as characteristic of his teaching. The "Son of Man" does not appear anywhere else in the narratives of the Gospels.
  
  
• In contrast to other Christological titles ("Lord", "Christ", "Son of God" etc.) Jesus is never given the appelation of the "Son of Man" either in the narratives or by other characters in the Gospels. If it was intended as a Christological title, it's difficult to explain why it is almost never used that way, either in the NT or in other early Christian writings.
  
  
• Although Jesus is depicted as conflating himself with the "Son of Man" in the gospels (especially when prefiguring his future suffering and other soteriological themes) in the earlier traditions (namely Mark and Q) Jesus often seems to be clearly referencing this "Son of Man" as a third person, invoking him in an eschatological context (see Mk. 8:38; 13:26; 14:62; Lk. 12:8,10,40). This is the inverse of what we should expect to find if the "Son of Man" motif was a consequence of later Christological theorising. (The anti-apocalyticists partially attempt to explain this away by suggesting Q was composed in three layers, with a sapiential layer being penned first and the apocalyptic layer coming only later. Such a precise layering of a still hypothetical document stretches the evidence too far, and is too dependent on comparisons with the likely much later Gospel of Thomas.)
  
  
• Possibly the most important bit of evidence against the idea that the "Son of Man" motif was a retrojection into the tradition by later Christians is that these later Christians seem almost completely oblivious to it. The Gospel authors seem confused by its meaning (does it refer to Jesus or some third person?) and the term appears just three times in the NT outside of the Gospels-Acts complex (Heb 2:6; Rev; 1:13, 14:14), and even then only in an eschatological context recalling Dan 7:13. If the "Son of Man" is the result of later Christian thought, why doesn't it ever seem to appear in said later Christian thought?

Speaking of Christian thought, the prominence of eschatology from the very first Christian writings is also very difficult to explain if it cannot be traced back to Jesus. Paul writes expansively on explicitly eschatological themes like the parousia, a generalised resurrection of the dead, the coming of a "new age" (in contrast to the current "evil age") and the arrival of God and his angels on Earth in future judgment of the human race, and these themes are present from his earliest writings, barely 20 years after the death of Jesus. What is more, it must be stressed that such ideas were comprised of imminent eschatological expectations.

The fourth chapter of 1 Thessalonians makes it quite clear that Paul expected the intervention of God in the affairs of the world very soon, and that at this moment the faithful "will be caught up in the clouds together... to meet the Lord in the air" (4:17). Similar eschatological urgency can be noted in 1 Cor 7:29-31, and can be inferred from other scattered passages throughout his epistles. The fact that such predictions ultimately failed to manifest themselves can be posited as one of the major motivations for later authors forging epistles in Paul's name.The "contested" Pauline epistles (2 Thessalonians, Colossians, Ephesians) all contain aortist subtexts (that is, the belief that the eschatology had already been realised), and relevant passages are not difficult to adduce (e.g. 2 Thess 2:2; Col 1:13, 2:12-13, 3:1; Eph 1:4; 2:5-6). In Paul's corpus as in the gospels, then, it seems relatively clear that the most urgent eschatological exhortations come from the earlier material, with the more circumspect or anti-eschatological material being composed later.

So where could he have gotten such ideas from, if not from the tradition surrounding Jesus? The Pharisees (the Jewish sect of Paul prior to his conversion) didn't share such eschatological beliefs, at least in the context of  resurrection. Given that, it's difficult to see where Paul could have inherited his eschatology from if not from the early Christian community, and it's difficult to see where they could have got their eschatological beliefs from if not from Jesus.

As noted above, the eschatological themes are strongest and most urgent in the early gospel layers of Mark and Q - i.e. those dating closest to the life of Jesus. The urgency of the situation was apparently such that Jesus is depicted as saying (at the conclusion of the so-called "Little Apocalypse of Mark 13) that "this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place" (Mk 13:30; cf. Mk 9:1) and in Q the eschatological situation is depicted by Jesus as being so urgent that apparently a mourning son doesn't even have time to bury his father (Mt 8:21-22; Lk 9:59-60)! After decades of apparently unrealised eschatological expectations, why would the gospel authors have been moved to place such expectations on Jesus' lips with such embarrassing and unnecessary urgency if they cannot be traced back to him? Note also that the truly late books of the NT (i.e. gJohn, the Pastoral Epistles) contain almost no eschatological themes, further evidence against such themes being a later Christian development.

So if we can presume as well that John the Baptist had an eschatological theology (as the Gospels indicate - Mt 3:2,7; Lk 3:3,7) then it seems that Jesus is sandwiched on either side by strong eschatological beliefs. The most natural fit for this data is that eschatological teachings were a common feature of John's teachings, which Jesus inherited and passed onto his own followers, who wrote about them at length, before they were slowly softened or abandoned by later generations of Christians as the expectations remained unrealised. It's difficult to coherently explain this data if we assume that Jesus' teachings were not in a large part defined by his eschatological beliefs.