The crucified Messiah argument is one of a group of arguments which look at the Jesus
story, and in particular at the utility of the Jesus story as a tool for converting believers,
identifies particular aspects of it that don't seem to serve this purpose well, and then
questions how these aspects got in.
If the story was made up, why would its authors include things that made life difficult for
them?
The argument closely related to the well-known argument from embarrassment used by apologists
to say the story must be of divine origin as men would not have written it that way.
I am using a different name to avoid confusion.
The most obvious version of this argument focuses on the fact that the Jewish people
had a pretty good idea what they expected the Messiah to be, and Jesus was not that
person.
In particular the Messiah was not supposed to be crucified.
Paul was well aware of this problem:
1 Corinthians 1:18-25 18 For the message about the cross is foolishness
to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.
19 For it is written,
“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will
thwart.”
20 Where is the one who is wise?
Where is the scribe?
Where is the debater of this age?
Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?
21 For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided,
through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe.
22 For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, 23 but we proclaim Christ crucified,
a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, 24 but to those who are the called,
both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.
25 For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than
human strength.
The argument is primarily used rhetorically or in debate, rather than in written discourse
because in the more charged environment of public speaking, asking an audience.
"Why on earth would you make that up."
Is likely to gain some traction whereas in written discourse it begs the immediate objection
that we cannot know the minds of first century writers, so how can we possibly know why they
added this or that detail.
Anyway, the historicist explanation seems to be natural and without convoluted contrivance.
It is that Jesus was a man who attracted a following and his followers believed that
he was the Messiah.
After he died they maintained their belief in him, but had to deal with the widely known
fact that he had been crucified.
In other words the crucifixion was not an aspect of the story they chose but one that
was forced on them by known facts.
And as time passed much of Christian theology arose as an attempt to rationalise belief
in Jesus as the Messiah with the inescapable fact that he had been crucified.
On the face of it, that sounds reasonable but it glosses over, or rather completely
ignores, one of the most difficult problems with the historicist position.
And that is why is it that Jesus followers continued to believe he was the Messiah after
his death, and moreover elevated him from the status of an earthly Messiah to a God!
The most natural and obvious response to a situation where your chosen Messiah ended
up being crucified would be to recognise you got the wrong man, feel disappointed and then
move on with your life.
For historicists, this started with the growth of the belief that Jesus had been raised from
the dead, but added that occur?
This is usually credited to suitable hallucinations or revelations/visions.
Experiences of revelations and visions may well have been more common in the ancient
world than they are today . But the current secular view is not that they are actually
communications from the other side, but rather psychological manifestations of what is already
in the mind.
Therefore, the notion that widespread belief in the resurrection of Jesus began as hallucinations
or similar is circular.
Something must have planted such beliefs in the first place in order for the hallucinations
to occur.
What was that something?
The historicists do not have a good answer for this and it remains the biggest stumbling
block in their thesis.
Of course mythicists also have a comparable stumbling block and that is what prompted
believers in the spiritual Jesus to start thinking that he had been incarnated?
Another criticism of the crucified Messiah argument is that it uses a strawman version
of the mythicist position by assuming that some individual sat down and concocted the
story from whole cloth with the intention of converting both Jews and Gentiles to the
new religion.
That makes inclusion of counter-productive features in the story seem strange.
But this is only one version of the mythicist position and not the most convincing one.
The alternative is that an individual or individuals sat down and tried to synthesise a single-storey
that brought together a variety of existing beliefs which they could not control or change.
If those existing beliefs included a historical Jesus, a spiritual Jesus, and the crucifixion,
then the resulting story is what you'd expect, and not at all strange.
A further criticism is that the argument is prone to the fallacy of hindsight.
Current Christology is the version that his successfully evolved by descent though a series
of successful churches.
Clearly it is a version that is unattractive the Jews with a pre-existing idea of what
the Messiah should be.
However, the Jewish Christian church did not survive, and is therefore not in the line
of descent through which our current Christology reached us.
Gentiles seem to have had a greater familiarity with, and presumably the acceptance of, the
idea of suffering saviours.
Paul's church, aimed at Gentiles, is the one that survived.
Is it so surprising that the crucified saviour motif came with it?
Is comparable to the evolution versus creation argument about the eye.
Creationists argue that the intricate and purposeful anatomy and physiology of the eye
means that it must have been designed but we know this isn't true.
The eye evolved along with its purpose.
So the crucified Messiah argument is one that I would recommend specifically to historicists
who find themselves in the position of making their case from the lectern or pulpit.
Actually, though I think the objections are sufficiently cogent and numerous as to effectively
refute it so that I do not think it carries any traction either way.