being stopped, bread and fish being multiplied, sons and daughters being raised from the dead. This is beyond any parallels. Third, Jesus' biggest distinctive is how he did miracles on his own authority. He is the one who says, 'If I, by the finger of God, cast out demons, then the kingdom of God is among you'-he's referring to himself He says, 'I have been anointed to set the captives free.' He does give God the Father credit for what he does, but you never find him asking God the Father to do it-he does it in the power of God the Father. And for that there is just no parallel. "This goes right along with the different way Jesus talked about himself-'all authority has been given to me,"honor me even as you honor the Father,"heaven and earth shall pass away but my word will not pass away.' You don't find rabbis talking like this anywhere." Havin been on the receiving end of that quick burst of arguments, I said with a chuckle, "So what's your point?" Boyd laughed. "Any parallels with wonder-working rabbis," he said, "are going to be very, very stretched."
I wasn't going to let Boyd's debating skills intimidate me. I decided to raise a more difficult issue: the seemingly stronger parallels between Jesus and a historical figure named Apollonius of Tyana. "You know the evidence as well as I do," I said to Boyd. "Here's someone from the first century who was said to have heated people and to have exorcised demons; who may have raised a young girl from the dead; and who appeared to some of his followers after he died. People point to that and say, 'Aha! If you're going to admit that the Apollonius story is legendary, why not say the same thing about the Jesus story?"' Boyd was nodding to indicate he was tracking with me. "I'll admit that initially this sounds impressive," he said. "When I first heard about Apollonius as a college student, I was really taken aback. But if you do the historical work calmly and objectively, you find that the alleged parallels just don't stand up." I needed specifics, not generalities. "Go ahead," I said. "Do your best to shoot it down." "OK. Well, first, his biographer, Philostratus, was writing a century and a half after Apollonius lived, whereas the gospels were written within a generation of Jesus. The closer the proximity to the event, the less chance there is for legendary development, for error, or for memories to get confused. Another thing is that we have four gospels, corroborated with Paul, that can be cross-checked to some degree with nonbiblical authors, like Josephus and others. With Apollonius we're dealing with one source. Plus the gospels pass the standard tests used to assess historical reliability, but we can't say that about the stories of Apollonius. On top of that, Philostratus was commissioned by an empress to write a biography in order to dedicate a temple to Apollonius. She was a follower of Apollonius, so Philostratus would have had a financial motive to embellish the story and give the empress what she wanted. On the other hand, the writers of the gospel had nothing to gain-and much to lose-by writing Jesus' story, and they didn't have ulterior motives such as financial gain. Also, the way Philostratus writes is very different than the gospels. The gospels have a very confident eyewitness perspective, as if they had a camera there. But Philostratus includes a lot of tentative statements, like 'It is reported that . ..' or 'Some say this young girl had died; others say she was just ill.' To his credit, he backs off and treats stories like stories. And here's a biggie: Philostratus was writing in the early third century in Cappadocia, where Christianity had already been present for quite a while. So any borrowing would have been done by him, not by Christians. You can imagine the followers of Apollonius seeing Christianity as competition and saying, 'Oh, yeah? Well, Apollonius did the same things Jesus did!' Sort of like, 'My dad can beat up your dad.' One final point. I'm willing to admit that Apollonius may have done some amazing things or at least tricked people into thinking he did. But that doesn't in any way compromise the evidence for Jesus. Even if you grant the evidence for Apollonius, you're still left with having to deal with the evidence for Christ."
OK, I thought to myself, let's give this one more try. A lot of college students are taught that many of the themes seen in the life of Jesus are merely echoes of ancient "mystery religions," in which there are stories about gods dying and rising, and rituals of baptism and communion. "What about those parallels?" I asked. "That was a very popular argument at the beginning of the century but it generally died off because it was so discredited. For one thing, given the timing involved, if you're going to argue for borrowing, it should be from the direction of Christianity to the mystery religions, not vice versa. Also, the mystery religions were do-your-own-thing religions that freely borrowed ideas from various places. However, the Jews carefully guarded their beliefs from outside influences. They saw themselves as a separate people and strongly resisted pagan ideas and rituals." To me, the most interesting potential parallels were the mythological tales of gods dying and rising. "Aren't those stories similar to Christian beliefs?" I asked. "While it's true that some mystery religions had stories of gods dying and rising, these stories always revolved around the natural life cycle of death and rebirth," Boyd said. "Crops die in the fall and come to life in the spring. People express the wonder of this ongoing phenomenon through mythological stories about gods dying and rising. These stories were always cast in a legendary form' . They depicted events that happened 'once upon a time.' "Contrast that with the depiction of Jesus Christ in the gospels. They talk about someone who actually lived several decades earlier, and they name names-crucified under Pontius Pilate, when Calaphas was the high priest, and the father of Alexander and Rufus carried his cross, for example. That's concrete historical stuff. It has nothing in common with stories about what supposedly happened once upon a time.' And Christianity has nothing to do with life cycles or the harvest. It has to do with a very Jewish belief-which is absent from the mystery religions-about the resurrection of the dead and about life eternal and reconciliation with God. As for the suggestion that the New Testament doctrines of baptism or communion come from mystery religions, that's just nonsense. For one thing, the evidence for these supposed parallels comes after the Zsecond century, so any borrowing would have come from Christianity, not the other way around. And when you look carefully, the similarities vanish. For instance, to get to a higher level in the Mithra cult, followers had to stand under a bull while it was slain, so they could be bathed in its blood and guts. Then they'd join the others in eating the bull. Now, to suggest that Jews would find anything attractive about this and want to model baptism and communion after this barbaric practice is extremely implausible, which is why most scholars don't go for it."
As disorderly and disorganized as his office was, Boyd's mind was sharp and systematized. His analysis of these much touted parallels left little room for doubt. So I decided to advance to another area that the media often write about: the "new discoveries" that are often the subject of books by Jesus Seminar participants. "There has been a lot written in the popular press about the Gospel of Thomas, Secret Mark, the Cross Gospel, and Q," I said. "Have there really been any new discoveries that change the way we should think about Jesus?" Boyd sighed in exasperation. "No, there are no new discoveries that tell us anything new about Jesus. The Gospel of Thomas was discovered long ago, but it's only now being used to create an alternative Jesus. Some theories about the Gospel of Thomas may be new, but the gospel itself is not. As for Q, it's not a discovery but a theory that has been around for one and a half centuries, which tries to account for the material that Luke and Matthew have in common. What's new is the highly questionable way that left-wing scholars are using their presuppositions to slice this hypothetical Q into various layers of legendary development to back up their preconceived theories." I knew that John Dominic Crossan, perhaps the most influential scholar in the Jesus Seminar, has made some strong claims about a gospel called Secret Mark. In fact, he asserts that Secret Mark may actually be an uncensored version of the gospel of Mark, containing confidential matters for spiritual insiders.' Some have used it to claim that Jesus was actually a magician or that a number of early Christians practiced homosexuality. This conspiratorial scenario has captured the media's imagination. "What proof is there for this?" I asked Boyd. His answer came quickly. "None," he said. Though he apparently didn't see the need to elaborate, I asked him to explain what he meant. "You see, we don't have Secret Mark," he said. "What we have is one scholar who found a quote from Clement of Alexandria, from late in the second century, that supposedly comes from this gospel. And now, mysteriously, even that is gone, disappeared. "We don't have it, we don't have a quote from it, and even if we did have a quote from it, we don't have any reason to think that it has given us any valid information about the historical Jesus or what early Christians thought about him. On top of that, we already know that Clement had a track record of being very gullible in accepting spurious writings. "So Secret Mark is a nonexistent work cited by a now nonexistent text by a late second-century writer who's known for being naive about these things. The vast majority of scholars don't give this any credibility. Unfortunately, those who do get a lot of press, because the media love the sensational." Crossan also gives credence to what he calls the Cross Gospel. "Does that fare any better?" I asked. "No, most scholars don't give it credibility, because it includes such outlandishly legendary material. For instance, Jesus comes out of his tomb and he's huge-he goes up beyond the sky-and the Cross comes out of the tomb and actually talks! Obviously, the much more sober gospels are more reliable than anything found in this account. It fits better with later apocryphal writings. In fact, it's dependent on biblical material, so it should be dated later." Unlike the overwhelming majority of biblical experts, the Jesus Seminar has accorded extremely high status to the Gospel of Thomas, elevating it to a place alongside the four traditional gospels. In chapter 3 Dr. Bruce Metzger strongly criticized that position as being unwarranted. I asked Boyd for his opinion. "Why shouldn't Thomas be given that kind of honor?" "Everyone concedes that this gospel has been significantly influenced by Gnosticism, which was a religious movement in the second, third, and fourth centuries that supposedly had secret insights, knowledge, or revelations that would allow people to know the key to the Universe. Salvation was by what you knew- gnosis is Greek for 'know,"' he said. "So most scholars date the Gospel of Thomas to the mid-second century, in which it fits well into the cultural milieu. Let me give you an example: Jesus is quoted as saying, 'Every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.' That contradicts the attitude that we know Jesus had toward women, but