From Joseph Smith to Jesus: A Historical Reckoning
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From Nauvoo to Nazareth
The same tools that aided my deconstruction of Joseph Smith's restoration narrative significantly altered and amplified my understanding of Christianity.
I.
The Evening College Class
II. Joseph Smith as Laboratory
III. The Philosophical Groundwork: Hume, Spinoza, Voltaire
IV. The Quest for the Historical Jesus
V.
The Tools and Their Limits
VI. What Follows
I. The Evening College Class
I remember the setting clearly. The commute after a full day of work, the fluorescent hum of a college classroom, the random mix of students that is typical of community college.
I had returned from a two-year LDS mission in Oregon just months previously. When the course catalog at Mesa Community College listed a World Religions class that would spend significant time on Christianity and the New Testament, I enlisted enthusiastically. Actually, enthusiasm probably understates my excitement. In retrospect, I see my attitude at the time as a kind of cheerful intellectual condescension. I expected to learn, sure. But I also expected a teaching opportunity. In many ways I was still in missionary mode, and in that mindset, every conversation is an opening. After all, the vast majority of Christianity and the secular world only had half the picture on what Jesus had been up to since he was resurrected. They didn’t have the Book of Mormon. Religion, I believed, was my speciality.
The LDS mission experience is, amongst other things, simultaneously humbling and an intensive course in religious over-confidence. On the one hand, you spend two years on doorsteps and in family rooms, lecturing people who are older and more experienced than you, presenting a coherent, self-validating narrative about the Mormon history of Christianity. During his earthly ministry, Jesus started a church. He ordained apostles with priesthood authority. He revealed the salvation his atonement would bring. And he sacrificed himself to achieve it. Soon after his resurrection, he discretely delivered both the content and format of the dispensational program his disciples were to execute in the Mediterranean world. And then he went to do the same for his disciples in the Americas. But in the succeeding centuries, the original church apostatized, necessitating a restoration of the singular authority and doctrinal program of the organization you just so happen to represent. If people would just listen, we had all the world’s problems solved.
It’s not hard to imagine how non-Mormon Christians tend to react. Rejections and objections were common. For many missionaries, a combination of cognitive dissonance and persecution complex actually further entrenches you with confidence in your message. Yet on the other hand, if one is open to it, it also instills humility seeing your own deeply-held religious ideas and beliefs subjected to the public court of opinion. In real competition with every other meaning-making construct in the human marketplace of thinking. You are exposed to new arguments and critiques you otherwise wouldn’t encounter. By the time I sat down in that World Religions classroom, I arrogantly attended with the intention of teaching first and acting the student last. In reality, to quote Jesus’ famous aphorism, the “first will be last, and the last will be first”. Indeed, Nazarene.
The professor was in no way hostile to religion. He was, I think, as balanced a secular professor could be. His congenial manner in thoughtfully entertaining my frequent interjection of Jesus-visited-America! insights without castigating me was quite charitable. As we began our study of the New Testament texts and early Christianity, he showed us how scholars had developed a set of intellectual tools to apply to the texts – tools with names I was encountering for the first time. Form criticism. Redaction criticism. Source criticism. The criterion of multiple attestation, the criterion of embarrassment, the criterion of dissimilarity, etc. He was treating the Gospels the way any competent historian would treat an ancient text. The same way a geologist treats a rock face at an archeological dig site. As a layered artifact, each stratum deposited under specific conditions, each one telling its own story about the past that produced it as much as about its individual qualities and categories.
I registered a slight amount of discomfort as this class progressed. And yet, the more I studied and took seriously the historical-critical discipline in example after example of its application, the more I came to agree with its logic and reasoning. The discomfort gave way to fascination and curiosity. It was a humbling experience because many of the secular deductions reached by applying these tools struck me as demonstrably true. I finished the course impressed with the creativity and intelligence that biblical scholarship had achieved in its post-Enlightenment methods for study of its primary source documents. What would happen if I applied these tools to Mormonism?
II. Joseph Smith as Laboratory
What I did not understand at the time was why the historical-critical method felt so familiar even as it was dismantling some of the assumptions I inherited from the orthodox Christian tradition, albeit passed through to me in a somewhat modified form within Mormonism. As I reflected on my learnings in that class, I realized I had already applied similar reasoning in my scriptural study on my mission.
As I studied Paul’s letters and the book of Moroni in Oregon, I was surprised to identify a direct literary dependence between the two. How could a native American prophet writing in ~400 CE, located a hemisphere apart, have known and borrowed the exact vernacular of the Apostle Paul? I found even more troubling dependencies between the Book of Mormon and the Bible. Parts of the book of Alma clearly borrowed clusters of exact verbiage from Matthew and Hebrews. Alma’s conversion reflected knowledge of and dependency on Paul’s conversion account in Acts. This presented a far more difficult problem. These events described in Alma purport to take place between 100-75 BCE. That is more than a century before Paul would have his vision, and nearly two centuries before the authors of Matthew, Hebrews, and Acts would scribe their texts. How was this dependence possible – unless the author of the book of Mormon had the King James translation of the Bible available to them for reference?
Despite many earnest attempts at harmonizing the difficulty, and temporarily bolstered with apologetic interpretations from my faithful uncles, I still found the answers unsatisfying even at my most devout. I shelved the issue and continued preaching faithfully for the remainder of my mission. But in the wake of this World Religions class, I realized the seed had already been planted. My professor’s lessons had simply given it formal articulation. Gratefully, my respect for historical-critical scrutiny was still strong when I eventually experienced my Mormon faith crisis while attending BYU a few years later. It helped me to unwind all of the cognitive dissonance I had carried because of shelved issues like this one for so long. In part, it led to the creation of this blog. In my inaugural posts, I realized quickly that Mormonism is fertile ground for exactly this kind of inquiry.
The LDS movement is, in a way that much older religious traditions are not, a documentary-era religion. It was founded in the nineteenth century, in a literate society, by a man who left many, many records in his wake. Journals, letters, revelatory texts, legal documents, newspaper accounts, the testimonies of contemporaries who knew him and sometimes abandoned him. Early Mormonism leaves an extensive paper trail. The gap between the founding events and the surviving documentation is often measured in years, not centuries. If you want to understand what Joseph Smith actually said and did in contrast to what the institutional narrative later canonizes, with sufficient probing you can access the primary and secondary source documents. In most cases, we have the receipts.
This is precisely what makes Mormonism such a perfect laboratory for historical-critical inquiry. The same questions that scholars apply to the New Testament documents apply here. Who wrote this? For which audience? Under what pressures? What is the relationship between this account and that one? What explains the divergences? Who had something to gain from this version of events? The Darwinian Deity series I wrote in earlier posts on this blog was, amongst other things, an attempt to apply exactly those questions to the development of LDS theology about the nature of God. And to demonstrate that the documentary record and historical method produced illuminating results.
Naturally, in the wake of my Mormon exodus, my attention turned more broadly to Christianity. I took higher level college courses on biblical studies, absorbed PhD lectures on the history and philosophy of Western religion, and poured over the academic texts of subject matter experts. What I discovered in the years of study that followed was this. The same questions I asked of Mormonism, applied with greater discipline, had been asked of the New Testament tradition for nearly two centuries. I learned to admire the intellectual lineage of these early scholars. Because the distance was greater, the evidence thinner, and the tradition more deeply embedded in the foundations of Western culture. I stood on the shoulders of giants in the historical study of Mormonism, but those giants themselves depended upon and benefited from the biblical scholarship that preceded them.
Ironically as part of the 19th century American restoration movement, Mormonism epitomizes the conservative devotional pushback that this developing lineage of secular biblical studies received from the laity. It sought to refute and harmonize the increasingly intelligent critiques of the Bible and the Christian tradition being published by European scholars and philosophers at the time. How amusing that in the end, Mormonism led me to embrace the rising tide of Enlightenment secularism! Yet, personally, I still had questions of devotion in mind as I chose next to pursue a fuller understanding of the New Testament, Jesus of Nazareth, and early Christian origins in the crucible of my historical studies.
Expositing my findings is the project of this series. It has been roughly fifteen years in the making. Much off-and-on reading, and rereading, and wrestling with the scholarship since the last post on my Mormon deconstruction. The intellectual lineage I am primarily working within is mainstream: Albert Schweitzer, Bart Ehrman, John Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg, E.P. Sanders, N.T. Wright, Elaine Pagels, and others. But I also try to engage with some of the newer scholarship and various critics of the consensus or majority views. As you will find in what follows in this series, I align with some more than others. Suffice it to say, I’m negotiating with serious historical Jesus’s scholarship across the full spectrum of theological commitment and skepticism. What follows is my own synthesis, so I am responsible for its debts, its limits, and my ultimate conclusions are my own.
Speaking of which, the writing of this series is itself a microcosm of the very problem I’m trying to resolve. The challenge of recovering the historical Jesus is, at its core, the challenge of interpretation under conditions of significant uncertainty. Fragmentary evidence, contested methods, and scholarly dispute. There is the persistent tendency of interpreters to find in the past a reflection of their own concerns and commitments. I am a post-Mormon reader working through a specific intellectual formation and drawing on a curated selection of scholarly voices whose arguments I find persuasive. As we all do, I am making interpretive choices at every level. Which arguments should be foreground? Which evidence should be emphasized? All of that to say, I do not operate under the delusion that what follows is either comprehensive or concrete. But it is my honest attempt to construct the most defensible picture of him I can manage using the best tools at my disposal. This, of course, is a description of what all historical inquiry actually is. Probabilistic reconstruction.
III. The Philosophical Groundwork: Hume, Spinoza, Voltaire
Let me state my framework upfront so that the reader understands my interpretive lens.
I am a secular humanist. I describe myself as an empirical materialist or naturalist, though perhaps not in the absolutist sense. It’s not that I don’t believe in the spiritual per se. What I do believe is that the physical and the apparently meta-physical are best understood as operating in a collapsed, unified reality. The universe is a mysterious place and science is constantly making new, surprising discoveries. I hold open the possibility that there is more to the story of matter and energy and consciousness than our current frameworks yield. I try to resist confident reductionism, but in my current understanding I find the universe to be a closed system. So frankly, while my paradigm does not at all preclude the possibility of the existence of the divine, I am not personally convinced that supernatural interventions are possible – that specific violations of physical regularity by a personal divine agent happen. And on that point, I have a precise philosophical reason rather than an original a priori bias.
The argument that has shaped my thinking most directly is David Hume's, from Section X of his 1748 Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Hume's case against miracles isn’t an assertion that unusual things don't happen. It’s an epistemological argument about the proper weighing of evidence. A law of nature, by Hume's account, is established by the uniform and exceptionless testimony of human experience across different times and places. This is what he calls "firm and unalterable experience." He illustrates his reasoning in concrete terms: an ax head thrown into a body of water sinks. It sinks the first time and the hundredth time, whether in Galilee or Scotland, in antiquity or today. That accumulated uniformity is the strongest possible evidence we possess for anything. A miracle claim asks us to believe that in one specific instance, the regularity was suspended. But the evidence for that claim, however many witnesses, however sincere their testimony, will always be weighed against the accumulated evidence for the regularity itself. And the regularity will always win, because it is precisely what we mean by a law of nature. Hume argued the evidence against a miracle is "as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined."
I agree with Hume and here are the implications. If the evidential bar for Christian miracles is set low enough to admit them, that is if sincere testimony, multiplied witnesses, and the conviction of believing communities is sufficient, we must apply that same bar with equal consistency to every other tradition that has ever made comparable claims. We would have to accept the healing miracles of Hanina ben Dosa and Honi the Circle-Drawer, the Jewish sages of Jesus's own era whose miracle traditions are preserved in the Talmud, as readily as we accept those of Jesus. We would have to accept the healings, exorcisms, and post-death appearances attributed to Apollonius of Tyana. He was a pagan philosopher and near-exact contemporary of Jesus whose biography reads like an uncomfortable parallel to the Gospels in places. Uncomfortable enough that early Christian apologists felt compelled to explain the similarities away. We would have to extend the same credulity to the miracle traditions of every other religion whose witnesses were equally sincere and equally numerous. There is no principled epistemological basis for accepting Christian miracle testimony while dismissing comparable testimony from other traditions. Only the prior assumption that Christianity is true would permit such special pleading, which is precisely the conclusion the miracle is supposed to establish in the first place. Rather than singling out Christianity for skepticism, Hume’s standard applies to all miracle claims equally. This is what makes it a standard rather than a prejudice.
Baruch Spinoza wrote nearly a century before Hume, and he made the stronger metaphysical version of the same argument. For Spinoza, miracles aren’t an epistemological problem. They’re literally impossible because God and Nature are not two separate things. He coined his view, Deus sive Natura: God or Nature. He defined the natural order as itself divine rather than something that a divine being stands outside of and occasionally reaches into. It is what God is. To speak of God suspending the laws of nature is, in Spinoza's framework, to speak of a thing contradicting itself. What people call miracles are simply natural events whose causes they do not yet understand. Ignorance, as he put it, is the mother of miracles. I find Hume's epistemological version more defensible than Spinoza's metaphysical one because it requires fewer assumptions about the ultimate nature of things. But both point in the same direction. Hardly a refusal to take the tradition seriously, the rejection of supernatural metaphysics is the application of the same standard of evidence to religious claims that we apply to everything else.
Voltaire, perhaps sharpest of the three, added a dimension that is less philosophical and more sociological. And given my experiences and observations with Mormonism, I affirm it. It is also directly relevant to the institutional history of Christianity this series will examine. Miracle belief is not merely intellectually fraught, Voltaire argued. It is socially dangerous. It tends to prop up clerical authority, insulate institutions from scrutiny, and gives the credulous a reason to defer to the powerful. The more extraordinary the claim, the more extraordinary the evidence required. This principle was propounded by Voltaire in his own formulation a century before Carl Sagan made it famous. And yet, the frequent failure of religious institutions to provide sufficient evidence has never prevented them from demanding from their adherents the deference that a verified miracle would have warranted. All the same, they tend to muster all of the evidence they can with apologetic aims. This critique lands with particular force on the institutional history of Christianity, as I will argue toward the concluding chapters of this series.
One might inquire, why frame your study of Jesus and Christian origins with the voices of non-believers? But no. These three thinkers – Spinoza, Hume, Voltaire – were not atheists in the contemporary sense. None of them was simply hostile to religion as such. They were products of a Christian tradition they took seriously enough to interrogate from within. This is what gave their critiques such penetrating force. They were in a real sense the tradition's own most demanding internal critics, the people who loved the questions the tradition invoked too much to straightforwardly accept the answers the institution was providing. And their work over the following century fertilized the soil from which the historical-critical method eventually grew.
IV. The Quest for the Historical Jesus
The lineage runs more or less directly. The Enlightenment critique of supernatural metaphysics created the intellectual conditions under which the biblical text could be read as a human document. As the product of specific people in specific times and places with specific interests and specific limitations rather than as a transcendent transmission of divine revelation. As previously noted, by the nineteenth century German scholarship in particular had developed that critical reading into a sophisticated discipline. David Friedrich Strauss's Life of Jesus, published in 1835, applied mythological analysis to the Gospel narratives with an intelligible rigor that scandalized the devout. And it permanently altered what serious engagement with the texts looked like thereafter. Around the same time, Ferdinand Christian Baur examined the letters of Paul with the same tools a lawyer applies to a disputed evidentiary document. He asked about authorship, date, and purpose, reaching conclusions that the tradition had never confronted with such discipline before.
And then came Schweitzer. Albert Schweitzer's The Quest of the Historical Jesus, published in 1906, surveyed a full century of scholarly attempts to recover the historical Jesus and demonstrated that each one had produced, with notable consistency, a Jesus who looked suspiciously like a reflection of the scholar's own theological and cultural preoccupations. The liberal Jesus of the nineteenth century, Schweitzer showed, was a nineteenth-century liberal. He was more projection than product of the evidence. George Tyrrell, a Jesuit theologian and modernist critic, had arrived at the same conclusion independently and slightly earlier. He wrote against historian Adolf von Harnack's What Is Christianity? (1900), an influential reconstruction that reduced Jesus to essentially a teacher of timeless ethical principles. Tyrrell argued that Harnack's Jesus was little more than "the reflection of a Liberal Protestant face, seen at the bottom of a deep well."
What Schweitzer added was the systematic demonstration and his own bracing alternative. His conclusion was that Jesus was an apocalyptic Jewish prophet who expected an imminent end of the world, was wrong about that expectation, and whose significance therefore could not be reduced to the timeless moral teacher that liberal German Protestantism had wanted him to be. It was a conclusion that refused the consolation of Narcissus. Not without its flaws, Schweitzer’s work nevertheless proffered a Jesus who was genuinely strange and first-century rather than comfortable and contemporary. It also inaugurated modern historical Jesus scholarship.
Subscribing to this philosophical and scholastic lineage, I do not believe the supernatural apparatus the tradition erected around Jesus of Nazareth survives honest historical examination. I say so not as mere assertion. Rather, I think it can be demonstrated to have been post-hoc apparatus. This should not dissuade believing readers from engaging with the scholarly history, however. Miracles and the supernatural still have a valid domain outside of the historical-critical method (which as an exercise in assessing probabilities, cannot grant the probability of miracles – miracles being by definition the least probable event). Indeed, the domain of faith and miracles is that of theology. Its interlocutors enjoy the purview of reading God’s plan and activities into any and all episodes of human history. So much the better for the believing student to get their history right in the first place; their theology will be all the better for being grounded in the best available evidence.
All of that notwithstanding, I believe we can argue with measured confidence on purely historical and ethical grounds, that the figure recoverable beneath that supernatural apparatus is genuinely extraordinary. The apocalyptic Jewish prophet from Galilee, the student of John the Baptist who proclaimed the imminent arrival of God's Kingdom, who enacted that Kingdom in a ministry of radical table fellowship, the inclusion of the excluded, the political dissident whose message was radical enough that the Roman Empire deemed it necessary to crush him under the grinding wheel of imperial might. That figure is more fascinating and possibly more demanding than the domesticated institutional Christ of organized religion. I remain a student of that Jesus precisely because he is so strange from the developed perspective of the later tradition, and yet doubly inspiring set in his first-century context.
As mentioned, I am keenly aware this reconstruction is itself an interpretive act. Thomas Jefferson did it with scissors and paste, excising the miraculous from the Gospels and leaving the ethical teachings. John Dominic Crossan does it with the hypothetical Q source and the Gospel of Thomas. I do it as a synthesis of the historical-critical scholarship based on my best historical and moral judgments. There isn’t a view from nowhere. The tagline of this blog has always been William Law's formulation: the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Law was Joseph Smith's most principled, late internal critic. He was a man who loved the early church, served in its highest councils, but ultimately could not square his commitment to honesty with silence about what he had witnessed in Nauvoo. Last week was Holy Week, and so in this post-Easter context I offer my own flawed but earnest attempt at witnessing the truth about Jesus as best I can. That commitment is what drove my Mormon deconstruction project and it’s the same impulse that drives me here.
V. The Tools and Their Limits
Because the posts that follow will make frequent reference to the methods of historical-critical scholarship, a brief account of those methods and their limits is in order.
Historical inquiry is a set of practices for recovering probable pasts from fragmentary evidence. It is an attempt to distinguish with discipline, as rigorously as the evidence permits, what most likely happened from what someone later wished or believed had happened. To repeat myself, it works by examining: authorship, audience, timing, context, pressures, agendas, relationality, etc. It is a soft-science research practice that involves couching hard physical and documentary evidence within the study of social and anthropological sciences. It is a misunderstanding to presume historical-critical scholarship simply means the application of skepticism to the sources. To the contrary, it means taking the sources and the voices behind them seriously, contextualizing them, weighing them in the balance of many factors, and using our critical thinking skills throughout the process of reconstruction.
One of the most important disciplines this method requires is the deliberate resistance to hindsight bias, what historians sometimes call teleological thinking. Hindsight bias is the near-universal human tendency to look at the past from the vantage point of what actually happened and to assume, often unconsciously, that what happened is what had to happen. We know how the story of early Christianity ends. Constantine, the creeds, the institutional church, a global religion of two billion people. That after-the-fact knowledge exerts a gravitational pull on how we read everything that came before. It makes the movement’s trajectory look inevitable. Of course a small Jewish sect became the official religion of the Roman Empire. Because look, it did! The evidence read backward from the outcome seems to point inexorably toward the destination.
But the people living inside the first century did not know how the story would end. A fisherman in Galilee who dropped his nets to follow an itinerant prophet did not know he was joining the founding generation of what would become a new world religion. Paul, dictating letters to fragile communities scattered across the Aegean, did not know those letters would become scripture. The mystical Thomasine community, practicing its gnostic mystical Jesus-following faith in the first and second centuries, did not foresee that its version of the movement would be eclipsed and nearly erased. At every stage, the movement could have gone differently. Other outcomes were possible. The survival and eventual dominance of proto-orthodox Christianity was the product of specific historical contingencies. The destruction of Jerusalem, the elimination of the Jewish-Christian leadership, Paul’s particular theological synthesis finding receptive audiences in the Greco-Roman urban world, Constantine’s political calculations. But it was not inevitable.
This matters for how we read the evidence, because teleological thinking systematically distorts what we see. If we assume the outcome was inevitable, we read the early sources as prologue – as the first chapters of a story whose ending we already know. We emphasize what points toward the later tradition and downplay or overlook those that don’t. We treat the strand that survived as the main trunk and everything else as failed branches. But the historical method requires the opposite. Reading the evidence on its own terms, accounting for the escalatory and apologetic tendencies of the institutions that later manage it. Peeling back hindsight bias when conducting historical reconstruction is essential to it. Without that discipline, we fail at good history. We instead are writing origin myths for the present.
Applied to the New Testament, these questions yield a fascinating and sometimes surprising picture. Contrary to popular belief inside the tradition, the documents of the New Testament were not written by eyewitnesses to the events they describe. They were written by later communities with specific theological agendas, specific controversies to address, specific audiences to persuade. They draw on earlier sources, some of which can be partially sifted and reconstructed. They contradict each other in ways that are deeply informative about the development of the tradition. They were selected into a canon through a process of institutional decision-making that was neither neutral nor inevitable. They are genuinely extraordinary documents that reward careful reading precisely because they exhibit such patently human meaning-making in process.
To reiterate the obvious, the limits of the historical method are real. The documentary record for first-century Palestine is scant compared to Nauvoo. The questions scholars ask are genuinely difficult and contested. The field is still alive and the appearance of scholarly consensus can sometimes conceal significant ongoing debate. What the method can deliver is calibrated confidence: the ability to say with appropriate degrees of tentativeness what the evidence supports, what it does not support, and where the genuine uncertainties lie.
VI. What Follows
The next post in this series will start with the source documents themselves. The library that is the New Testament, its composition, its sources, and what the foundational documentary picture tells us about the trajectory of the tradition's development. What I aim to show is that the same escalating dynamic visible in LDS theology, what the Darwinian Deity series traced in Joseph Smith's developing conception of God, is visible in the New Testament documents as well. The earliest sources present a different Jesus than the latest ones. The direction of travel is consistent: toward greater divinity, greater cosmic significance, greater distance from the specific human being who walked in Galilee.
Instead of being scandalized, I would encourage my readers to recognize that trajectory is what all human communities do with the figures who matter the most to them. I am aware that some readers will find the project of this series threatening, and others will find it insufficiently skeptical. I have not necessarily written for either of those audiences specifically, though I hope it is useful to both. My intended audience is the studious reader who, like me, remains committed to the tradition’s own highest ideals: study, introspection, and the pursuit of truth using the best tools available to them, and honestly applied. Thus, I close with the words of J. Reuben Clark, a former member of the LDS First Presidency:
“If we have the truth, it cannot be harmed by investigation. If we have not the truth, it ought to be harmed.”
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Recommended Reading
David Hume. Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748).
Baruch Spinoza. Ethics (1677).
Albert Schweitzer. The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906). Adam & Charles Black.
David Friedrich Strauss. Life of Jesus (1835).
This is Part One of a seven-part series. Part Two, Sifting the Scriptural Sediment, will examine the New Testament documents, their sources and dating, and what the documentary evidence tells us about the trajectory of early Christology. Subsequent parts will address the historical Jesus reconstructed from the evidence, the crucifixion as state-sponsored terrorism, the resurrection tradition, the diversity of early Jesus movements and the dynamics of prophetic disappointment, and a final accounting of what the whole inquiry produces for me.
