This article was a long time in the making, because I had to really dig deep to get the source I needed. But it was well worth while, and I've got a skeptic here that nearly everyone will be glad I heaped the big smash on - because not only was this fellow a skeptic, he was also an outright bigot. And this time, it's not satire to any length when I say that.

Our subject's name was "Revilo P. Oliver" (yes, I know). I say "was" because I am told he is deceased, and perhaps that is good news considering what we are about to see. The article I am evaluating from his pen was taken from the Aryan "stormfront" Web page and contains some of the usual anti-Semitic diatribes we might be accustomed to from that quarter, some of which I may not be able to repeat because my Web server company tends to filter out that sort of thing! But we can keep on track with the main focus, which is the subject of the article: The existence of Jesus. And in this realm, the dead Mr. Oliver was a sort of a Christ-myther.

Oliver was no slouch in the publication and credentials department, apparently: My source for this project sent me data indicating that Oliver was a professor of Classics for 32 years, and wrote a number of books. Another source has told me that one of Oliver's articles was referenced as a source in the standard handbook on the transmission of ancient Latin texts, L. D. Reynolds' Texts and Transmissions. But you wouldn't know it from the article I was sent on the subject of the historical Jesus. This article by Oliver doesn't pay any attention to any of the secular references to Jesus and is decidedly no work of scholarship; sources include a fellow named Larson who theorized that the Essenes and Christians were one group (anticipating, perhaps, the insane likes of Thiering who propose this today) and himself used as sources the likes of Allegro and Dupont-Summer. But we proceed nevertheless, for I have no doubt that equally uncritical sorts might pick this sort of thing up and use it - and naturally we should be ready for them.

Oliver begins with the generalizing and blandly unsupported assertion that there were a large number of Jewish magicians who lived and roamed the countryside in the first century and in the one preceding (though only one is named - we'll get to that in a moment) and that "they often took the logical step of representing themselves as christs (messiahs)" - a decided untruth, as we have noted elsewhere; no such claim was made as recorded by any person other than Jesus until the time of Bar Kochba. But what of that one other?

Here is what Oliver has to say, and I warn those of you who read this that you may wish to strap yourselves down. You may find this either the most ridiculous or the most tragic accounting you've ever seen - I haven't decided which yet for myself - but one thing is certain: Not even the Secular Web or Farrell Till could possibly get this uncritical, and I'm actually happy to say that. Well, at least they haven't gotten this uncritical yet; with some of them, accepting the likes of the Gospel of Thomas, perhaps it is only a matter of time! Anyway...

One of the most interesting Jesuses...was Jesus ben Pandera, who was born in the reign of a Jewish King who had assumed a civilized name, Alexander Jannaeus. When he grew up, he learned magical tricks in Egypt, wowed the Jewish peasantry and even impressed Alexander's widow, Alexandra Helene, acquiring her favor and a considerable following, but he eventually was ruined by the holy men with whom he was in competition and, betrayed by one of his disciples, named Judas Iscariot, when he rode into Jerusalem on an ass, was hanged, after which there was hanky-panky about disposal of his body. His career obviously contributed quite a few elements to the tales about a later Jesus in the "New Testament."

The reader is perhaps already wondering where on the green earth this comes from. Well, the document as such does exist, and we'll get to that later; but what does Oliver make of it? He says:

It is not at all unlikely that there was another Jesus who, in Roman times, tried again and also came a cropper, and that, given the identity of two names, stories about them were conflated; that, in fact, would explain many of the passages in the "New Testament" that flatly contradict others.

Oliver doesn't bother to name one of these "flat" contradictions, or how they support his case, but it hardly matters. The attempt to use this document of previous reference is quite laughable. It is called the Toledoth Yeshu, or "Book of the Lineage of Jesus", and some may recall that it is sometimes used as a proof that Jesus actually existed - though it shouldn't be, as anyone from Jeff Lowder to G.A. Wells to R.T. France would agree. What happens here, though, is that Oliver - a bit of an insane scholastic himself, apparently - thinks that it is a reliable historical source. Did you catch that? It's a reliable source, he thinks. All right, so if it is, why haven't we heard about it before? Why haven't historians and NT scholars called upon it, other than the uncritical pagan-pusher G. R. S. Mead earlier this century? Here's Oliver's answer:

The record of Jesus ben Pandera has mightily embarrassed professionals in the Jesus-business ever since it was rediscovered in the Sixteenth Century. One expedient is to feign ignorance of it and hope the customers will not have heard of it...The more common expedient is to claim that the story of Jesus ben Pandera was devised by the wicked Jews during the Middle Ages to undermine faith in the Saviour of the "New Testament." That, of course, is intrinsically absurd: no one who intended to contradict a story about a Jesus who flourished when Palestine was a Roman province would transpose the story to an earlier period when Judaea was ruled by an historical Jewish King and Queen.

The skeptic may be of the worst sort, but sometimes arguments never change: It's all a conspiracy to hide the truth about Christianity! I don't know who wrote the TY, actually - no one knows - but whether they were wicked, or polemical, or whatever - perhaps they were ancestors of Nikos Kazantzakis, who himself had no real concern for historical accuracy - why shouldn't they have done such historical transposition? Perhaps they were too ignorant to know that the dates didn't match up. Perhaps they were having some fun and it's part of the joke: Oliver does not bother mentioning that these writers, whoever they were, also dragged a certain Rabbi Tanhuma back in time without benefit of a modified Delorean; he himself lived about 400 years after the usual time of Jesus! The story also has a few other funny recollections, like Jesus and Judas I. having a flying battle like Superman and Captain Marvel, and both using God's Divine Name to perform magic. In any event, it is clear that someone transposed the historical data somehow, whether it was the authors of this early version of the Weekly World News on the one hand, or else the Gospel authors, Paul, Josephus, Tacitus, the Church Fathers, etc. on the other. Maybe you need help deciding which to believe? If so, you are in the good company not only of the late Dr. Oliver, but also Voltaire, who as usual let his hatred of the Christian faith get in the way of common sense analysis and likewise believed the TY to be more original than the Gospels [Gold.JJT, 160]. Next time one of you skeptics out there quote old Volty as an authority on matters Biblical, you might wish to keep that in mind.

Let's get to some hard data. Is there anything we can say about the actual date of this document? Our earliest literary reference to it comes from the Archbishop of Lyons - c. 826 AD. Hard textual data at its earliest comes from six fragments of it found in the discard heap of a 7th-century synagogue. The hard data doesn't hold out a lot of hope, does it? No wonder Oliver doesn't say anything about it.

Schoenfield, he of Passover Plot fame, went as far as dating it to the fourth century; but the sixth century is more likely because of what the document draws upon as sources [ibid., 161]. And what does it use? In this work, Goldstein tells us, "we have a conglomeration of a parody on the Gospels, with the full play of the imagination which is characteristic of this period (the 6th century) in this type of literature in the Near East, plus misinterpretation of Talmud and Midrash passages, plus excerpts from non-Canonical and Patristic writings, plus vestigal remains of sectaries, plus (as some believe) items from the Yosippon, plus unwritten folk legend." [ibid., 163] In other words, either the TY borrowed from all (or most) of these sources, or the sources all borrowed from the TY. Take your pick.

Things don't get better for this document as time progresses, either: Goldstein remarks that "none of the prominent Jewish scholars" over history refer to it, and (as Oliver admits) it comes in multiple versions with all kinds of variations (changes he puts down to "Jewish stupidity" - not only did they create the document for his theory; they also ruined it!). Some of the variations won't pass my server's filter, but suffice to say that they are enough so that any use of this as a reliable historical source is even further put to rest.

Oliver does offer up one other reason why he feels that we ought to take this silly work seriously, to wit:

Moreover, the holy men who made that claim were, if at all educated in their profession, consciously lying. One cannot suppose that students of theology would not read so important a Father of the Church as Origen, from whom they would necessarily learn that the story about Jesus ben Pandera was known to Celsus when he wrote, c. A.D. 170.

Well, first of all, there is no evidence that "holy men" wrote this thing - again, we don't know who wrote it; maybe a 6th-century version of MAD magazine put it out. As for Celsus, this is a little off balance. Celsus makes reference merely to the idea that Jesus was the product of a soldier named Panthera; but he doesn't allude to anything like what is found in the TY, where Jesus' father is said to be a man of Judah named Joseph Pandera - much less does he seem to know about other elements of the story, like Jesus and Judas I.'s aerial battle, and there is certainly no indication that Celsus thinks that the Christians are worshipping a guy who was 100 years off their proclaimed date, or somehow mixing their guy with someone who was. Oliver was doing little more than scraping the bottom of the barrel here, and that's hardly surprising, because it takes that kind of tactic to overcome the mountainous indications against the veracity of the TY as a historical document. While he's at it scraping the bottom, the mountain will fall on top of him. Maybe that's what killed him.

Bottom line: Oliver is - or was - little more than a spinner of sick little fantasies, highly uncritical and selective (he goes on to give The Secret Gospel of Mark credence as well!) in his presentation, and really, just plain silly. You may never run into an Aryan Nationesque type of skeptic in your lifetime, and that's a fate I wouldn't wish even on Skeptic X, but if you do, you may want to bring along some pharmaceutical samples - aspirin for you, and psychiatric medication for them.

Update: As hard as it may be to believe, someone out there actually wanted to defend Oliver on account of this article. The material is no longer online, but Tekton Research Assistant Punkish earned his latest gold star by finding a cached copy of this defense, which was instigated by some comments from a reader in Finlad, Pietari (who we believe writes to us as well) who said:

(By the way, here is a review of an short piece written by one your heroes, Revilo P. Oliver! It is about the existence of Lord Jesus, and could be the only instance of Dr. Oliver being in any way evaluated by a non-racist. He sure may have had some knowledge on world politics, but on the theological front, he was an amateurish prejudiced dunce! Sorree! Read it and see if you can maintain your sense of humor!

Not surprisingly the respondent, "Kevin," had all the humor of a bull made into steak on the dinner table. He also seems to be the average dodgeball Skeptic, making him Worse Than Usual. Anyway, here is his response, and we will interject with comments in bold:

I would hope that serious people would give little credence to a site, like the "Tektonics" site mentioned by Pietari ( http://www.tektonics.org/oliver01.html ), which openly proclaims that its entire purpose is "apologetics," i.e., the tortuous misuse of words to justify a prior assumption of the perfect inerrancy of a cobbled-together hodgepodge of Jewish stories, and stories filched by the Jews from others, compiled more than a millennium ago. You don't even need my help to smell the enormous odor of a begged question here. A huge one. Kevin is a mad dog with ants under his collar, and seems used to the Tactical Elephant Hurl. Charge of bias, charge of begged questioning, implicit problem of cobbling and copycatting, and insinuation of age as a problem, all thrown together in one run-on sentence and not justified by one lick of actual argumentation. It's like they're running scared and throwing as much scattershot as possible.

The title of the referenced piece, "Nasty Nazis Who Know Next to Nothing," is informative in itself. The author, a person named James Patrick Holding, certainly proclaims his stance here, doesn't he? Um, yeah -- a title is usually a place to do that... And this proves, what? As much as Kevin's Elephant Hurl above, apparently... I must admit that I was astonished that an habitué of VNN would credit such a source. (Holding, by the way, happily admits that he might not be able to read all of the material on the Oliver or Stormfront sites "because my Web server company tends to filter out that sort of thing!") Bit of a missed mark. That was the reason, actually, why I could not reprint some of what is on there, not why I could not read it. I was perfectly able to read all of the material from a public library terminal. At any rate let Kevin's poor reading skills speak for themselves.

The entire thrust of Holding's piece, once the verbiage is stripped away, is that Dr. Oliver "believed" in an ancient Jewish book called the Sepher Toledoth Yeshu ("Book of the Lineage of Jesus"), which, Holding says, is inherently unbelievable. Therefore, says Holding, Oliver's enumeration of the parallels and contradictions between the "canonical" tales and Sepher Toledoth Yeshu has no merit. Er, no -- I say that Oliver "believed" -- only use of that word above -- that the TY was more reliable than the Gospels, which is true, and by itself does not say much. Thus Kevin misses his lunch when he says:

Holding's premise is preposterous. Oliver no more "believed" in the stories contained in Sepher Toledoth Yeshu than he believed in the equally improbable accounts in Schindler's List or The Diary of Anne Frank or, for that matter, the "canonical" books that Holding holds dear. Pfft ha -- well, let the inclusion of Frank's diary, etc. speak for itself. Again, we don't think Oliver believed in the TY as a whole, just that he believed it more than he believed the Gospels -- let's say 50% versus 30%. While admitting that such tales as the Toledoth &c. and the ancient "gospels" might have accreted around real figures in some cases, Bingo. Just as we said. Oliver definitely dismissed the supernatural gobbledygook which permeated virtually all of them. (Actually, no sane person could believe them all, since they make contradictory claims.) Does anyone seriously entertain the idea that R. P. Oliver thought that the Jesus of that story was actually able to perform miracles because he knew the "secret name of Yahweh," the four letters (!) of which he was easily able to remember because he wrote them down on a piece of parchment which he inserted into a cut in his thigh? Probably not. But he clearly believed more of the TY than he did of the Gospels, which was the point.

Oliver was actually trying to make two points: 1) The way in which the Toledoth story was altered and elaborated over the years is an instructive example of the means by which religious texts of that era evolved; and 2) Religious fervor is, in some persons, an antidote for honesty. Oliver did a great job of proving neither of these things, as we showed. I'll pass on the link Kevin gives to Oliver's original article, and I assume even my greatest Skeptical critic will not object to me not giving links to Nazi propaganda. We close with one more bad reading example:

Lastly, Pietari is wrong in claiming that Holding's piece is the "only instance of Dr. Oliver being in any way evaluated by a non-racist." Oliver has been the subject of quite a few articles in the press, from newspaper and magazine notices to the _ADL Bulletin_ to even Roger Ebert.Oops. Kevin left out the "could be" from that quote of Pietari, which may say a word or two with reference to his bit about antidotes to honesty. And that's all from Kevin -- not one specific engaged, not one argument answered, and one bad misreading. I think I may advise the three people I know named Kevin to change their names so as to avoid any possibility of being confused with this one. |

Source

1. Gold.JJT - Goldstein, Morris. Jesus in the Jewish Tradition. New York: Macmillan, 1950.