[ref001]
The "Testimony" of Mara Bar-Serapion
[ref002]


[ref003]_The_Skeptical_Review_: 1995: Number Four: 
The "Testimony" of Mara Bar-Serapion

The absence of extrabiblical evidence of the historicity of Jesus of
Nazareth has long been an embarrassment to Christian apologists.  In their
defense of Christianity, early church fathers like Justin Martyr, Origen,
Tertullian, and Clement of Alexandria cited from both Jewish and pagan
sources evidences that they thought were supportive of Christianity, but
they were unable to produce any secular testimony of the actual existence
of Jesus.  The frustrating truth was (and is) that secular records
contemporary to the time that Jesus allegedly lived were completely silent
about this man who presumably was so famous that great multitudes followed
him during his personal ministry (
[ref004]
Matt. 4:24-25,
[ref005]
 8:1,
[ref006]
 18,
[ref007]
 13:2,
[ref008]
 15:30,
[ref009]
 19:2,
[ref010]
 21:9;
[ref011]
 Luke 5:15,
[ref012]
 Luke 14:25).

Inasmuch as word of Jesus's works spread at least as far as Syria
(according to the New Testament record) and attracted people from there to
be cured  of "divers diseases and torments" (
[ref013]
Matt. 4:24), one would think that historians of the time would have
heard about the man and recorded at least some of this part of his life.
But it didn't happen.  Contemporary secular records don't even mention the
man Jesus. It is as if historians would examine all records of the 4th
century B. C. and find no references to Alexander the Great.

In our modern age of enlightenment, the fact that no indisputable
testimony to the life of Jesus can be found outside of the New Testament
and apocryphal documents (all of which were penned by obviously biased
writers) continues to trouble Christian apologists, possibly more so than
at any time in church history. In their frustration, they have resorted to
some rather imaginative efforts to find Jesus of Nazareth in ancient
secular records.  One such effort has focused on a letter that may have
been written toward the end of the first century.

The writer, Mara Bar-Serapion, was in prison at the time, and he wrote the
letter to exhort his son to seek wisdom. The following quotation from the
letter is sometimes cited as evidence that Jesus of Nazareth was mentioned
in contemporary secular documents:


     What advantage did the Athenians gain from putting Socrates to death?
     Famine and plague came upon them as a judgment for their crime.  What
     advantage did the men of Samos gain from burning Pythagoras?  In a
     moment their land was covered with sand.  What advantage did the Jews
     gain from executing their wise king?  It was just after that that
     their kingdom was abolished.  God justly avenged these three wise
     men: the Athenians died of hunger; the Samians were overwhelmed by
     the sea; the Jews, ruined and driven from their land, live in
     complete dispersion.  But Socrates did not die for good; he lived on
     in the teaching of Plato.  Pythagoras did not die for good; he lived
     on in the statue of Hera.  Nor did the wise king die for good; he
     lived on in the teaching which he had given (quoted by F. F. Bruce,
     _The_New_Testament_Documents:_Are_They_Reliable?_ Eerdmans 
     Publishing Co., Fifth Revised Edition, p. 114).


Bruce, an often-quoted Christian apologist, noted that this letter was
"written some time later than A. D. 73, but how much later we cannot be
sure" (Ibid.). He, of course, wants to see this letter as proof of the
historicity of Jesus, but by  his own admission, the document was written
at least 40 years after the time that Jesus allegedly lived and possibly
even later.  Since Bar-Serapion made no claim in his letter that he had
personally witnessed the execution of the "wise king" or had ever even
seen him, his statement cannot in any sense be considered firsthand
testimony of the historicity of Jesus, as Bruce and other apologists would
like us to believe that it is.

We can't even be sure that Bar-Serapion was referring to Jesus. He didn't
identify the "wise king" by name, as he did in the case of both Socrates
and Pythagoras, so one merely speculates when he says that this is a
first-century secular reference to Jesus.  How does one make that
determination?  Messianic pretenders in Judea were a dime a dozen during
the era of foreign domination.  Josephus referred to some of them, and
even the New Testament mentioned two of them in Gamaliel's speech to the
Jewish council (
[ref014]
Acts 5:35-36). In Bandits, Prophets, and Messiahs: Popular Movements
at the Time of Jesus (Harper & Row, 1985), authors Richard Horsley and
John Hanson tell of several Messianic prophets of this period besides
Theudas and Judas of Galilee, whom Gamaliel mentioned in his speech. Some
of these Messiahs were even named Jesus, and most of them came to
ignominious  ends at the  hands ofeither  the  Romans or  their own
countrymen.  How, then, do Bruce and other apologists who cite Mara
Bar-Serapion's reference to a "wise king" who was executed by the Jews
know for a fact that this was an allusion to Jesus of Nazareth and not to
some other Messianic prophet of those times?

One could just as easily assume that Mara Bar-Serapion was referring to
the Essene "Teacher of Righteousness," who was often mentioned in the Dead
Sea scrolls found at Qumran. The person in these documents called the
teacher of righteousness was presented as a Messianic figure who suffered
vicariously for the people. Since Essene teachings were widely circulated
before and after the time Jesus allegedly lived, one could argue that this
teacher "lived on in the teaching which he had given."  The point is that
Mara Bar-Serapion simply did not identify the "wise king" whom the Jews
had "executed," and in the absence of that information, one can only guess
who this was supposed to be.  F. F. Bruce and his inerrantist cohorts
can't just arbitrarily make a vague statement like this into a reference
to Jesus. They need proof that Bar-Serapion definitely meant Jesus, and
they simply don't have it.

We should notice too the historical time frame of the characters that
Bar-Serapion specifically identified by name. Socrates lived in the 5th
century B. C. and Pythagoras in the 6th. One may legitimately wonder,
then, if Bar-Serapion's "wise king" was someone who had lived about the
same time as Socrates and Pythagoras rather than someone who had been
"executed" centuries after their time. Bar-Serapion did say that "just
after" the execution of their "wise king," the Jews had their kingdom
abolished and were "ruined and driven from their land" to live "in
complete dispersion,"  so he could very well have been referring to events
close to the time of Pythagoras and Socrates when the Jews' kingdom was
abolished by Nebuchadnezzar, after which the Jews  were taken into
Babylonian captivity and later dispersed in various countries, or he
could even have been referring to a king in the northern kingdom of
Israel, which was abolished by the Assyrian conquest of 722-721 B.C.,
after which the northern tribes were dispersed to Mesopotamia and Media,
where  they   eventually lost their national identity. At any rate, if
Bar-Serapion was using the word king literally, he had to be referring to
someone who lived before the Babylonian conquest of Judea, because there
simply were no "Jewish kings" after Zedekiah, whom Nebuchadnezzar
installed as a puppet until he finally sacked Jerusalem in 586 B. C. and
"abolished" the Jewish kingdom.  So if the Jews had literally executed a
"wise king," it had to have been someone who lived before that date.

There is just as much biblical evidence to support this view as there is
for the apologetic claim that Bar-Serapion was referring to Jesus.  The
Bible itself recorded the political assassinations of Jewish royalty
that occurred close enough to Nebuchadnezzar's capture of Jerusalem to
consider the conquest of either Israel or Judea as an event that had
happened "just after" the murder of one of these kings.  Josiah's father,
King Amon, for example, was assassinated less than 50 years before
Nebuchadnezzar's siege of Jerusalem (
[ref015]
2 Kings 21:23). Admittedly, the Bible didn't speak very flatteringly
of Amon or of most of the other assassinated Jewish kings either for that
matter, but in the absence of corroborating records, who can really know
how objective the writers of biblical history were? At times, they seemed
very political in their reporting.  Who can know either what records and
traditions Bar-Serapion may have known about that would have given him a
different perspective of Jewish history than the ethnocentric views of the
biblical writers? Furthermore, if Christian apologists are going to
quibble that some biblical details do not fit the theory that
Bar-Serapion's "wise king" was one of the kings of Israel or Judea
assassinated before Jerusalem's fall to Nebuchadnezzar, they should admit
that some biblical details don't fit their Jesus theory either. Where, for
example, does the New Testament say that the Jews executed Jesus?  It says
that he was executed by the Romans. The New Testament also teaches that
Judea was under foreign domination during the life of Jesus, so the Jews'
kingdom wasn't abolished after Jesus was executed.  It had been abolished
long before then.

For the sake of argument, let's just assume that Bar-Serapion's letter was
beyond all reasonable doubt referring to Jesus of Nazareth.  Still it
could not be considered reliable evidence that such a person had actually
lived, because the letter contains factual errors. According to
Bar-Serapion, the "men of Samos" had "burn[ed]" Pythagoras, an implication
that he had been killed by his countrymen. In reality, Pythagoras left the
island of Samos in 530 B. C. and emigrated to the Greek colony of Croton
in Southern Italy. He later died in Metapontum, which is now Metaponto,
Italy (_Encyclopedia_Americana_, 1994, Vol. 23, p.  45). The
men of Samos did not "burn" Pythagoras, so if Mara Bar-Serapion's letter
was incorrect in such an important detail as this, how can it be
considered reliable proof of the historicity of anything, much less the
existence of a person who wasn't even mentioned by name in the
document?

We might also ask what Mara Bar-Serapion meant in saying that Pythagoras
"lived on in the statue of Hera."  What statue of Hera? Hera was the
sister and wife of Zeus, so there were undoubtedly many statues of her in
the Greek culture of the 6th century B. C.  What exactly did
Bar-Serapion mean?  When was the island of Samos covered with sand "in a
moment," and when did the famine and plague come upon the Athenians after
their crime against Socrates?  History knows of no events as calamitous as
these that Bar-Serapion referred to.  To say the least, there is a lot of
vagueness and uncertainty in this document.

Christian apologists will have to keep looking, because they have
certainly found no proof of the historicity of Jesus of Nazareth in Mara
Bar-Serapion's letter.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Sharon Williams with whom I have debated
the historical Jesus and other biblical subjects through several letters
published in _The_Pekin_(Illinois)_Daily_Times_, was sent an
advanced copy of this article and invited to respond to it.  She declined
on the grounds that she did not want to be mistreated in
_TSR_.



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[ref002] http://freethought.tamu.edu/mag/sr/1995/4/4mara95.html
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[ref004] http://www.calvin.edu/cgi-bin/bible?version=KJV&passage=Matthew+4:24-25
[ref005] http://www.calvin.edu/cgi-bin/bible?version=KJV&passage=Matthew+8:1
[ref006] http://www.calvin.edu/cgi-bin/bible?version=KJV&passage=Matthew+18
[ref007] http://www.calvin.edu/cgi-bin/bible?version=KJV&passage=Matthew+13:2
[ref008] http://www.calvin.edu/cgi-bin/bible?version=KJV&passage=Matthew+15:30
[ref009] http://www.calvin.edu/cgi-bin/bible?version=KJV&passage=Matthew+19:2
[ref010] http://www.calvin.edu/cgi-bin/bible?version=KJV&passage=Matthew+21:9
[ref011] http://www.calvin.edu/cgi-bin/bible?version=KJV&passage=Luke+5:15
[ref012] http://www.calvin.edu/cgi-bin/bible?version=KJV&passage=Luke+14:25
[ref013] http://www.calvin.edu/cgi-bin/bible?version=KJV&passage=Matthew+4:24
[ref014] http://www.calvin.edu/cgi-bin/bible?version=KJV&passage=Acts+5:35-36
[ref015] http://www.calvin.edu/cgi-bin/bible?version=KJV&passage=2Kings+21:23
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