[J-C Raspiengeas] Good evening everyone!
Thank you for coming tonight and for so many of you.
So this evening we're going to see a debate, a meeting between Brother Joël Boudaroua and Michel
Onfray that's bound to turn into an argument in the noble sense, and perhaps a controversy.
Since 2005, Michel Onfray, since your 'Traité d'athéologie' which earned you the wrath of the Catholic world,
in several of your books, you have repeatedly, many times, explained the extent to which you consider the real existence
of Jesus to be a fable, a myth, and you have said so many times.
And this time, as Christmas approaches, you're back with a book called 'The Jesus Theory: Biography of an Idea'. And so, this time
you really go into detail about your thesis.
So you're saying, it's not… He didn't exist historically, there's no proof of that, it's a fiction, a fable, a myth that's not based
on anything real or historically proven, but it's a necessary myth that men needed to compensate for their human imperfections, all too human.
So, to start with, you say, a conceptual figure.
In the preface, you say: "I put him in the same category as Father Christmas or
Emma Bovary, who existed, but in a fictional way, but who are still there."
So, to start with, I had two questions in one to ask you.
Could you remind the audience, in a few words, of your thesis on the non-existence of Jesus as an individual? On what do you base this idea?
And the second question is why this obsession? For more than ten years, you've been regularly explaining to us that Jesus didn't exist.
Why this obsession? Or, if you prefer, this need to keep working on it… Because in a way, this book is a bit like a condensed version of your previous books.
So two questions in one, your turn.
[Michel Onfray] Thank you very much.
Yes, it's something I've been saying for a very long time, but I haven't demonstrated it personally; in other words, it wasn't my subject.
I came up with this idea when I did my "Counter-history of philosophy" and started with the pre-Socratics.
There was a great moment, which is obviously a turning point in history, which is the arrival of Jesus. And so I thought, but how do I treat this in a counter-history of philosophy?
Do I talk about it, do I not talk about it, do I say, well there you go, two words, Jesus arrives and then something else happens and we cross over.
Or do I talk about it?
And at the time I had started to address the question.
It was around 2002.
So it was at the time when we were told to choose between Bin Laden and George Bush, and we were told,
you have to be either Judeo-Christian or Muslim… I said neither, because you can also be an atheist and not believe in God.
I'd gone over that quite quickly, that is to say I'd found that we couldn't spend hours on that subject.
And then the little I'd said at the time had earned me a lot of flak…
That's when I said to myself, I'm going to come back to this subject.
So it was detached from the counter-history of philosophy, it became the famous ‘Treatise on Atheology’.
So you're telling me that this earned me the wrath of the Christians, but also of the Muslims, and also of the Jews.
I got it from everybody.
This showed me that loving one's neighbour was difficult, and that forgiving offences was even more difficult,
and that maybe all these people were a bit more right than they could have imagined… I said
to myself, forgive me because I have sinned, and then I don't know what I'm doing…
Well, I've been brought up with all that, and I thought it didn't seem very ‘Catholic’, if I may say so.
So… On the second thing, it's not an obsession either, I mean, I've done 150 books, I've devoted a book
to this question, maybe two with the ‘Treatise on Atheology’. It's just a moment that I point out as such, but
very quickly, by saying the Jews say there's a messiah who'll come one day, some Jews say not to wait for
him any more, he's come, he's called Jesus, and then a certain number of things are announced about this messiah,
and then the proof is said that he's come, he said this, he did that and so on.
And there are people called mythists who are people like Prosper Alfaric and a few others, Paul Louis Couchoud,
who is not talked about much, who is not republished, who is never talked about, who say no, he didn't have
a historical existence, he had a conceptual existence in a way… And I wanted to do the work for myself.
Often, it's people who have studied to be priests, and who, working on the texts, realise that it doesn't work.
Few people read the four Gospels side by side, in a synoptic way, for the three that are synoptic
at least, and say, well there's… a version of the nativity in Luke, in Paul, and it's not the same…
We say, well, the resurrection, well, it's not the same, he doesn't appear to the same people…
Two here, three there, at such and such a place, but not…
And so there are historical contradictions in the text. And the first person to put forward this thesis was Bruno Bauer,
a German Hegelian philosopher, a right-wing philosopher as they used to say, who did historical criticism, a bit like David Strauss…
Then, in France, Renan says: "What an admirable man!"
And then, when we say oh my, Jesus is not a man!
And then there are also those who say no, Jesus is not a man, but he's
the son of God, but he's not even a man either, he's a concept.
Well, I'm the one who says he's a concept.
And at one point, I wanted to make my contribution to the edifice, because my old master Lucien Jerfagnon told me that
one day you would write a ‘Jesus’, and he also told me that one day you would write a ‘De Gaulle’… And then
it stayed in the back of my mind; I did the ‘De Gaulle’, and then I said to myself, I'm going
to do the ‘Jesus’. I can assure you that it wasn't my intention to annoy Catholics, or even to make a Christmas present of it,
but I said to myself, I'm not going to repeat the theses of [ ???], Couchoud, and so on.
Except that the people who put forward the idea that Jesus would have been a historical figure
are basing themselves on the same texts that science has shown us are not contemporary texts.
That is to say that when in Tacitus, Suetonius or Flavius Josephus there are references, first of all
they are references to Christianity, and the reference to Christianity is the proof that Christianity exists, but it is not
the proof that Christ took place as a man, as Jesus, I would say, a historical existence of Jesus.
And then, afterwards, you have to do a bit, which is what I did in my Popular University course,
a history of manuscripts. In other words, people think that the text of Flavius Josephus dates from Flavius Josephus.
Not at all.
It's written, rewritten, copied, recopied, translated, and then there are copyist monks who are sometimes even illiterate but
recopy things they don't understand, but simply because it was their job. They worked in scriptoriums. And then there
were others who knew how to read, how to write, how to think and so on.
And they added things by saying, this is missing, that is missing, and then they added three lines, ten lines, and so on.
And for example, concerning Flavius Josephus, people have demonstrated that stylistically the passages
concerning Christians do not date from the time when Flavius Josephus existed.
So it's a bit like saying today that we've found an extraordinary text by Descartes, an unpublished
text in which Descartes explains that Sartre's ‘L'Être et le Néant’ isn't a terrible book!
You think, oh my God, this text was obviously written in the twentieth century, and it's certainly not a text by Descartes.
In other words, each time there were arguments
these people dismantled them by saying historically, but no, but not at all, but this, but that, and so on.
And then when you take dictionaries, Jesus, the monumental encyclopaedias, they're always treated with contempt, saying
well, we're not going to get into the question of mythists, these people are a bit crazy,
today they write texts that are on the Internet, they're a bit conspiracy theorists etc…
But I'm saying, it's amazing, anyway, I addressed the issue, and answer very precisely these questions that are raised!
And so, on the question of Jesus' brother, on the question of his mother's virginity, on the question of Joseph's silence… Well, all these questions are never really addressed.
And what I wanted to do was, for once, take stock of this, saying that I've been saying this for a long time, I need to demonstrate.
And then, to say to myself, I'm going to do something very simple, I'm going to take the biography, from birth
to death, let's say from the annunciation to the resurrection, trying to show that there's a whole symbolism, that it's eminently elegant,
that every time you have something said it has to be decoded, and not taken at face value… And that perhaps, for
example, to be born of a virgin is not necessarily to be born of a woman who has not had sexual intercourse
with a man, but simply to have a miraculous birth… That we need to move into the realm of allegory, and not
biography, and say, for example, that if at a given moment there is the multiplication of the loaves, it's not because…
I don't know, a bakery explanation… I'd say it's an allegorical explanation. And I say, but if we're going allegorical,
symbolic, textual analysis,
if you look back at history at that point, you'll see that, yes, Jesus existed.
I'm not saying he didn't exist, but he didn't exist as a man who would come down to Earth, go through life, disappear, and have a biography.
So I'm saying this is the man that was announced by the Jews.
By the way, Jesus' last words on the cross are: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
Text found explicitly in a psalm
a thousand years before the existence of Jesus.
I say how is it that this Jesus on the cross had the text of the psalm in his head,
and that it was precisely this psalm that he was saying to us at the moment he was dying? Except that,
effectively, it's a perpetual collage written - mythologists call it in a blacksmith's forge - but with evangelists who are brilliant,
intelligent people, who are gifted in allegory, in symbolism, often Jews moreover, who practise the Talmud, well who know the Torah,
let's say, but who come from the Talmudic genius since the Talmud will intervene later, and it will intervene moreover
with regard to Christianity… Because all this is constituted, and I wanted to do a bit of the history of the constitution
of this Jesus who, at the very beginning, doesn't have much in the way of reality.
I love John's Gospel, which tells us that he's a Logos, that he's a Word.
And then we dress up the Logos with something else.
If you want to talk to a farmer, a carpenter, someone who is a fisherman, who catches fish I mean,
you're not going to start giving him a theory of Logos, of the Word, or of speech. You're going to tell
him the story of an ox and a donkey, of a father called Joseph who was a carpenter, of a mother
who was a virgin and who had this child… In other words, you tell stories, and when I say that
I don't mean it in a derogatory way, I mean that you address people in an extremely simple way so that
you can reach them. So that later, when the history of art takes up this story, it will be painted,
it will be told, there will be paintings, there will be sculptures, there will be stained glass windows… A little later, there
will be texts telling us about the lives of saints, explaining to us that all this did indeed happen.
So I wanted to do in this book… So, of course, there are so many books about Jesus, I think… But books
in the mythicist logic, there are very few, and very few today, because it's a trend
that has been abandoned… Because I think that no one cares much about it today.
People don't care if Jesus existed or not.
There are other considerations: Islam and so on.
In France, spirituality, the concern for spirituality, has gone elsewhere.
So it's an appointment I've had with myself for a long time.
It happens that, you're right, it happens at Christmas time!
[J-C Raspiengeas] So, Brother Joël, you're a Dominican. Is the idea that Michel Onfray supports so abundantly acceptable to you?
[Joël Boudaroua] Thank you for the invitation.
Perhaps I have a comment to make before I answer your questions, your question… I wanted to talk about the covers…
that Michel chooses for his books, always with great care, and I remember the cover of 'Traité d'athéologie', which featured
Delacroix's fresco at Saint Sulpice, that is, Jacob's struggle… And here, Fra Angelico's magnificent fresco at the San Marco convent.
And this fresco, which depicts the "Christ in contempt", is magnificently commented on by Michel in his introduction,
and I really enjoyed reading it… And I was very sensitive to the choice, obviously,
of this illustration, as a Dominican.
Obviously, Didi-Huberman says
that Angelico is not only a Dominican painter, but also a theologian. And so I don't quite agree with the conclusion
of Michel's comment. It's that…
Right, for Michel,
the painter presents here
he's presenting here, in the background, the ideality of Jesus…
I think just the opposite.
I think Fra Angelico is presenting here the contemporaneity of Jesus, that is to say his existence, I was going to say his permanent existence, in the mystery of His being…
And this contemporaneity is signified precisely by the presence of Saint Dominic at the feet of the scene where
Christ is seated. And in each cell of the friars' dormitory in San Marco, there is a fresco representing
a scene from the Gospel, with a Dominican who is associated with the scene, and who contemplates it as if
he were actually contemporary with it. I think it's the very mystery of Jesus that we're reaching here,
in this thought of the painter, in this figure
that he represents
this historical contemporaneity of Jesus to us.
That is, we are contemporaries of Jesus.
It's not so much looking for Jesus in a distant history, but in a present, in a permanent perpetual present.
But, obviously, that's the theological question, perhaps, the question of faith, the question of Christ, of faith…
The question of the Jesus of history, it remains… It remains the subject that Michel is tackling.
And the second thing I'd like to say is that the mythological question is not always dealt
with out of hand… I don't know, I'm not a reader of Joseph Doré, but many exegetes, New Testament specialists…
start their studies by asking the question: "Did Jesus really exist?"
The great specialists
of the Gospels, especially in the German Protestant liberal school, but finally, which is now assimilated by Catholicism,
by Catholic exegetes, like Daniel Marguerat, for example, in "Vie et destin de Jésus de Nazareth".
The first question he asks is this:
"Did Christ Jesus really exist?"
And of course he says yes.
And so I will answer yes to the question. Because yes, Jesus did exist historically, because there are criteria
of historicity that we can go back to ad infinitum, but above all, I would answer yes to the question.
No historian today, as far as I know, is putting this into practice.
And I'm not a specialist… I'm not a specialist in anything, but I don't think any historian
today questions the existence of a certain Jesus of Nazareth or a certain Jewish Jesus.
As John Meier shows in his masterly 4000-page work, five volumes published in French by Editions du Cerf between 2000
and 2015, where he takes up the issue anew and says, basically, Renan is right, we know practically nothing about Jesus.
In black and white, it would fit on a single page.
So we know almost nothing about him, but what we do know is that his historical existence is a certainty.
That's it, then we'll talk
to argue but…
[J-C Raspiengeas] So when Michel Onfray lines up the details, that is to say that in his book
there are a lot of details to support his thesis, if we take them one by one, we
won't take them all, but if we take them one by one, is there something troubling for you?
Is there anything in his demonstration that is admissible, or is it not…
[Joël Boudaroua] Ah yes, yes, absolutely.
[J-C Raspiengeas] Is it enough to say, as at the moment, the refutations of Michel Onfray's thesis, but there
are many historians who have established that it was true, but when Michel Onfray gives lots of precise details
on the supposed non-existence of Jesus, what can we say to him, what can you say to him?
[Joël Boudaroua] So I think that once again the question is necessary, we have every right to ask it, other philosophers and other historians have asked it,
it's legitimate.
And, in fact, it's not obvious. What are the testimonies based on,
what are the documents based on, to talk about Jesus, to develop this story, this narrative?
To take just one example…
The question, I take up again the question of the testimony of Flavius Josephus. Well, the question of the testimony of Flavius Josephus has
been discussed for a very long time. And we know very well that there are Christian interpolations in the text of Flavius Josephus.
So additions, as Michel said, by Christian copyists at one time, fine. But the fact remains that historical criticism,
modern criticism today, is obviously able to discern these Christian additions. So it removes them from the text.
And when we return the text of Flavius Josephus in its original state, I would say, we see that
it is coherent, that is to say that it still speaks of Christos as the one who did prodigies and so on.
And not only does he talk about Christ, once you remove the Christian additions, not only
does he talk, you see that he still talks about Christ, but he also talks
about this Jesus
as the brother of James, eh. Or he's talking about John the Baptist again, Flavius Josephus.
So that's three characters
from the New Testament that Flavius Josephus mentions.
So the testimony of Josephus in Judaic antiquity can't quite be considered null and void.
When we talk about the proximity of sources… For example, the fragment, the first fragment that we can date
from the Gospel of John… A fragment is not much, it's a clue, but historians, like policemen, work on clues.
When you take the fragment of the Gospel according to Saint John that dates
from 125, which is a manuscript in Manchester, it's P52, that's the code name of this manuscript…
We can see that this manuscript, which is dated
of 125 AD, is what?
It's thirty years old compared to when it was written.
of the original text of the first, of the first copy
of the Gospel called the Gospel of John. It's thirty years.
Thirty years is nothing at all.
So there's not much difference between the source and the first copies we have of the Gospels.
When you think that between the manuscripts that we have today
of Aristotle or the Iliad and the Odyssey, compared to their supposed original, it's fourteen
centuries. It's between thirteen and fourteen centuries, and there's no context for the existence
of these… and the authenticity of these documents.
So why are we contesting the historicity, at least what is historic, even if it's very small
in this basic documentation that
are the four Gospels, on the pretext that they are written by Christians, intended for Christians, as if that would discredit them from the outset?
Are we going to discredit the work of an American historian on the Second World War because he's American and because history is written by the winners?
No, we're not.
So you have to look at the documents.
The documents that we have, from the New Testament, as documents, but which are indeed composite documents, where there is indeed legend, fiction, Midrash
but also history.
And I think that the univocal position, which approaches the subject Jesus, the file Jesus,
only through the midrashic construction effectively from quotations of the Old Testament etc.
is univocal, and therefore doesn't take into account the complexity of the way
these texts were written… And which is, in my opinion, which testifies to their historicity.
Complexity is paradoxically a sign of historicity.
I'll finish with one thing, and that's that there are huge discrepancies between the evangelists, between
the Gospels, the contradictions, as you pointed out, but also the contradictions between the Gospels.
It is for me, paradoxically, a proof, not only for me, but a proof of authenticity.
Because if everyone had said exactly the same thing, then yes, we could have gone in the direction of fraud or deception.
But that's not the case. They make mistakes, they don't know, they fill in the blanks, they don't have any information, so
they make it up, or they take it from where they find it, and so there are huge amounts of information.
Huge differences, huge contradictions.
[J-C Raspiengeas] So what do you say to that, Michel Onfray?
You, you say precisely, the contradictions are the proof that all
this is conceptual, fabricated, forged, whereas Brother Joel says precisely, "The contradictions are proof that it all existed"… And what do you say to that?
[Michel Onfray] Well, that it's clever, but it only convinces the convinced. And that when
you believe in God, there's no problem, or when you're a Christian, there's no problem.
I think someone reading a history of the Soviet Union written by the president of the Supreme Soviet wouldn't give much credence to that.
So, at some point, you can't be judge and jury. I'm just referring, for example, to Flavius Josephus, we're not going
to get into technical debates for friends who are here and who don't know the details of these things…
I was going to say that these are rather Byzantine quarrels… But Jean-Luc Barré, from the ‘Bouquins’
publishing house, and Denis Molin, from the ‘Molin’ publishing house, have drawn up a text by Flavius Josephus
in which it is very precisely written, because a lot of ink has been spilled, that these
are late additions, later additions, and that these additions are only there to fill a gap.
How is it that there is a gap in someone who decided to tell the story
of Israel in the first century AD, and who says there was nothing there, nothing happened?
No Jesus, no Christianity, no crucifixion and so on.
I take the text. Let's take the text seriously.
Matthew says, at one point, that at the moment of Jesus' death there was night
in the middle of the day, a curtain was torn, rocks were broken, and so on.
I don't mind, there's no evidence of that, but I can agree.
Surprising, because Flavius Josephus could have said, yes, I heard about what really happened.
But Matthew tells us that the dead come out of their coffins and that they climb up to Jerusalem.
So what's that?
It's stuff that's missing and that you add… Why all of a sudden you say, well, the crucifixion is true, but maybe
people who get out of their coffins to go to Jerusalem, you think, well, that's funny, what do they do afterwards?
They go back into their coffins? How does a dead person die, how does a dead
person survive, and what state are you in when you get out of the coffin?
Is this the glorious body?
They don't tell us anything, they just tell us that dead people got out of their coffins and went to Jerusalem…
So, in the ‘Bouquins’ and ‘Molin’ edition, there are long notes that explain very precisely how the additions were made, why
and how… And I want to do the epistemology of writing, that is to say who writes, when, how and why.
I'm not saying "there are people who wanted to abuse", there are people who have been abused,
who have believed and who say, well, there are things missing, so we add them. I'm just saying that
at some point you say, ah, but that's allegory, that's symbolism, but that's reality, and so on.
When you talk about Meier, he did five volumes of a thousand pages each
but almost nowhere does it say that the author is a priest…
Well yes, that is to say that there is a certain moment when the a priori is that,
for this man, God exists, that Jesus is the son of Man, and that he believes it.
So, when you say that what he says about Jesus fits on a sheet of paper, he doesn't say that, he says
it fits on a few lines, it's not even on a page… It's on a few lines, and these are extremely simple things,
like a hypothetical date of birth, a hypothetical date of death under Pontius Pilate with Herod who existed, and so on.
Well yes, if you say that the character exists, he exists because he was placed in a historical configuration… The historical configuration
is not proof that the character existed. In other words, we create a setting, it's a real setting, Herod exists, Pontius Pilate exists,
we know the dates of these people, and we say to ourselves, well, that's where the story takes place.
Pontius Pilate exists, Jerusalem exists, and so on.
So that's the proof that it exists.
No, I find that there are extrapolations, there is no proof of the historical existence of Jesus…
To which I would add that there is even rather historical proof of the non-existence of Jesus, which is easily treated with a bit
of contempt by saying, yes, but no, this one, that one, but it doesn't hold up, etc etc.
That's why I say there's no fundamental problem.
I meet Michel Onfray, and I'm a believer. I'll tell Michel Onfray yes, but so what?
That's not the problem.
I have faith, you don't.
There's grace, you don't have grace.
The real question of this book is not so much the historicity of Jesus.
I'm convinced that there are billions of people on the planet who think like I do.
In other words, in a Christian country, you think, oh dear, another provocation from Onfray! But we're
out of our own little world… In China everyone thinks that, in India everyone thinks that…
In many African countries everyone thinks that.
So people say yes, so what?
That's not very original.
It's original in our configuration because we're in a Judeo-Christian configuration and we can't imagine it not happening.
So I'm not saying it didn't happen historically.
Well, yes, I'm saying it didn't happen historically, but it happened conceptually. Which is no mean feat… Since
I even end the book by saying that this Western civilisation of ours, starting with the image, starting
with the icon, precisely because there was a lack… There's a lack on the question of the Logos,
how to dress the Logos… To simple people you don't talk about the Logos and the Word, it's too complicated
to say "In the beginning was the Word," a brilliant phrase, everything is said, for me: "In the beginning
was the Word." It's just that, if you have to talk to simple people, you have to tell stories,
and the little Jesus, the Blessed Virgin, and so on. When my father talked to me about the Holy Story,
it was the good Lord, the Blessed Virgin, baby Jesus, the ox, the donkey and so on.
And you have to build this story.
I think you can do high-end theology, I would say, without having to rely on the historicity of Jesus, by saying but, so what?
And if he didn't exist, that's not a problem. There's faith, there's grace…
[J-C Raspiengeas] All the same! Because the whole theory of your book is to say: as long as things didn't exist, it doesn't stand on anything.
So, for example, you're questioning the resurrection, of course, the birth, as we said, you're questioning a lot of things.
So sometimes in details… You say, Jesus of Nazareth, very well, except that Nazareth didn't exist,
you say, according to archaeology that two centuries… it doesn't arrive until two centuries later.
So how come he's called Jesus of Nazareth?
So, on the basis of this historicity, contrary to what you just said, you say, the whole edifice rests
on nothing, except on a desire for wonder, for needing this fiction. But you say it's only a fiction.
[Michel Onfray] Yes, because, for example, when Constantine
who is the ‘Bernard Tapie’ of the time, but on the world territory, converts… Ah, really a bad guy, he converts to Christianity.
Then there's his mother, who's not very good either,
Hélène. And all of a sudden, both of them say to each other, but it's amazing, Saint Paul tells us that "all power comes from God."
And if, all of a sudden, I say that Christianity is my religion, if I am there in power, and I took
power by force, I will say that this power comes from God. And the good God, the just God, not the god
of the pagans, it's the god of the Christians… He says: "I saw a cross in the sky, and all of a sudden
the truth is there, and victory was given to me in this way, against Maxentius on the Milvian bridge…"
And all of a sudden, Helen goes to Jerusalem, and there… It's the fourth century! And that's when she discovers what?
What?
The crosses, the nails
the crown of thorns, etc.
Today, I'm saying there's still at some point… There are several Jesus foreskins on the planet.
I'm not just saying that, I'm just saying, there are several Jesus foreskins and so on.
Well, I've been to Nazareth, and in Nazareth they sell crowns of thorns, and they tell us
and these are crowns of thorns that existed, that were put on Christ's head, and so on,
and there it is.
You have a shroud from Turin that we are told obviously covered the body of Jesus.
And I say, but look at the texts, there is no shroud in the Gospels. There are stripes. I don't know
that a stripe can be nine metres long, it's not called a stripe in those cases.
There comes a point where you say, look for the shroud in the Gospels, you won't find it.
Either you don't talk about it, or you talk about stripes.
So I don't know the original text, I read the translations. Stripes is stripes.
And at some point, when people tell me, well, of course there's plenty of proof!
Look at the shroud! I say, but no, but read the texts, put them in relation
with the truth, you'll see that the shroud, if it exists, cannot have surrounded the body of Christ. What's
more, carbon 14 analyses have shown that it was made in the Middle Ages, and we even have
the name of the person who made the shroud in the Middle Ages.
We know who made the shroud, how it was made, how it was said, and so on.
But you always end up with people saying, no no no no, the real thing didn't happen! It's normal, you have
a pagan, atheist approach, you don't want it to happen, so you invent things, and we say these people are not credible.
My grandson recently said on television, it's only people like Onfray who say such stupid things.
I'm just saying, but mister grandson, for example, explain to me how stripes can be so long?
It's not that complicated. So, obviously, every time we take the text…
[J-C Raspiengeas] So you're calling into question some very important things that are at the heart of the Christian faith.
The resurrection, you say, there are several accounts of resurrection, nothing holds…
So what do you say to each other?
[Michel Onfray] Just a word on the question of miraculous births, resurrections and so on. My old teacher, Lucien Jerphagnon, taught me that.
But there are tons of them in antiquity! Plato was born of a virgin mother, for example, and there
are plenty of men who are thaumaturges, i.e. who resurrect others… In other words, when you absolutely want Jesus
to exist in a marvellous way, you draw on the codes of the marvellous, and that's not original. In other words,
if you read the life of Apollonius of Tyana, for example, by Philostratus, you'll see that it's exactly the story
of Jesus… In other words, it's not surprising at all, we're looking for the fiction of the moment.
So I don't mind people saying, this isn't fiction, it's reality, but then there's proof,
and the proof is that we end up saying, yes, but carbon 14 doesn't always tell the truth…
This fabric, which was dated to the Middle Ages, turns out to date from the first century… It's hard to agree
on common corpuses in order to discuss common corpuses, because sometimes the common corpus is denied. Like, yes, but that's not it, it has
to be discarded, yes but that's been added, no it hasn't been added, yes but that's part of, and so on.
I tell you when Flavius Josephus…
Did he write what others wrote after him?
He's talking about the Christians.
I don't see how we can infer from the existence of Christians the possibility of a historical existence of Jesus.
It proves that there are Christians,
It means that there are people who believe in Christ, but it doesn't mean that Christ existed historically.
[J-C Raspiengeas] What's your answer to that?
[Joël Boudaroua] Oh yes, Suetonius…
[Michel Onfray] Same thing, we can go into detail, but there aren't thirty-six texts: Tacitus, Suetonius, Flavius Josephus…
Oh yes, and then there are Christian authors. Ah yes…
[Joël Boudaroua] The question was…
[J-C Raspiengeas] the demonstration that there was…
[Joël Boudaroua] Yes, that's it. OK, so…
I'm absolutely…
sensitive to the questions being asked.
But… I'm not referring…
into outer darkness those who don't think the same as I do.
But, simply…
When you…
The question
of mythology
or miraculous births, which are everywhere, of course…
But you have to understand
that there is a common ground in humanity
to say things, to tell things,
and the writers of the New Testament, the Gospels, they're going to draw from that common ground
because they have no other material, because they have no other way to tell this story.
Telling the birth of Jesus when you weren't there
is telling it after the fact. And it's telling it as a miraculous birth, according to the exceptional destiny of this character.
And so we're going to draw on a common background, which belongs to everyone, and which is, yes, a background of a marvellous birth
and, of course, out of the ordinary.
So I don't have any problem finding in the Gospel, which I think
has a serious historical background, it doesn't shock me to find elements that come, once again, from this common archaic, mythological, cosmogonic background of representation, that's it.
And the evangelists, they're going to use this background to tell effectively
what they don't witness, what they haven't witnessed, but because they have no other way of doing it.
That's how you make a story, a narrative.
[J-C Raspiengeas] But Michel Onfray says, what credit should be given to this narrative, to the historicity of this narrative?
[Michel Onfray] But I would add, if you allow me, Brother Joel, and why, if the thing took place, is there no historical witness of the moment?
Why are there such long delays?
Why did you give the texts earlier, you know, the redactions of the Gospels…
When I say to people, but no evangelist knew Jesus, I'll add, and with good reason… But of course they did?
And I say no, but no of course not.
And when they say, "But what about the apostles?" I say, but there were no apostles at the crucifixion of Jesus.
In other words, every time we see who, and where, and what they did, etc. it's like we're in the same situation.
Every time, there's symbolism, there's allegory.
When I was writing, I was even surprised by what I discovered. Every time I worked, I said to myself, look, he's catching so many fish in Lake Tiberias, and so on.
And I said, so many fish, look out, that means something, there's a number, etc.
In fact, gematria… That is to say that the Jews worked on these questions,
the numbers are letters that mean things, that refer to references, it's hyper coded.
We've simply lost the coding today. When my father teaches me the Holy Story, we're there at Christmas, but there
was Gaspard, Melchior and Balthazar… As if by chance, there's a black man, a yellow man and a white man.
Just like that, eh? You could also say they didn't exist… What does that mean?
It means that the whole world welcomes the good news of Jesus' birth.
So don't believe… Some people might say, but he was my great-great-grandfather, Gaspard, and then Melchior we also knew well…
Because he was… No, we don't talk about it anywhere else, because we make three individuals with three skin colours,
who make up humanity… And this comet, some people say, but we're going to do a bit of astrophysics,
what was the sky like at the time? What's this shooting star telling us where we're going? But of course not, you shouldn't look
at it from the astrophysical point of view and say "we're going to ask people to reconstruct the sky for us…"
That's nineteenth-century positivism, and I think it's the wrong way to approach Jesus and the question of Jesus.
I say, every time something happens, you have to decode it from an allegorical point of view.
That is to say that the good birth, Gospel, the good birth, the good news, it is that
an individual announces to us that what the Jews were announcing has taken place. And it is announced
to the whole of humanity, in the form of Gaspard, Melchior and Balthazar. And this comet is there to explain
to us that every time, throughout the history of antiquity, we know that comets herald omens.
So it's not a question of looking for a comet in a sky from that era, etc.
It's just that the marvellous is built to announce to us that the Logos has come, that the Word has come.
And what is the advent of the Logos and the Word, if not the possibility for the wordally announced Messiah to have been incarnated?
So the question of incarnation is there. For me, the incarnation of Jesus is conceptual.
The proof is that Jesus' body is an ‘antibody’. He doesn't eat or drink anything other than the symbol.
He drinks water, he drinks wine, and again, he drinks wine, he eats bread, he eats fish, he eats lamb… Because it's
the lamb that signifies the scapegoat, the sacrifice of the scapegoat, because wine is the vine, which allows… and so on.
We know that every time it's a symbol.
He could eat Turkish delight, if he had really been a man, if he had eaten
what was eaten there… He would have eaten couscous, he would have eaten I don't know what.
Not at all.
He's ingesting allegory, he's ingesting symbol. Because Jesus is just a symbol.
And every time we say, but…
there's nothing that does manifest the corporeality of the body of Jesus, because this incarnation is conceptual.
The body of Jesus is an antibody, it's a conceptual body, and it's the painting that's going to give it flesh.
It's the whole history of art, afterwards, that makes me say that it's not nothing, Jesus, I believe in it, in that sense.
And I still believe in it so much that the question of iconography and incarnation is what makes possible our mobile phones, cinema,
photography, virtuality… I mean, all these things are only possible because one day a Logos and a Word had to be dressed…
I'm not going to say "so be it", but…
[Joël Boudaroua] We were going to say "amen"!
But yes, sowhat?
I mean, what was the intention of the writers?
It wasn't to go into the details of… I was going to say, the details of the story, because we don't have access to that.
That's not possible.
We have access…
We have access to the reality of what an individual is for no character of antiquity.
Otherwise,
for maybe, for Caesar, or for…
for Cleopatra or for Alexander… But it's the great people that make history.
Historians are not interested in Jesus, they don't talk about Jesus…
But with good reason, because he went unnoticed, as Pascal himself said. The birth of Jesus went unnoticed by historians who are only concerned with business
of the State.
And so the evangelists didn't have access to this real Jesus.
They can't give us the details of Jesus' childhood, his birth
and his adolescence. So they can only do it on the condition that they have information that
comes from eyewitnesses, that comes maybe from a set, maybe a corpus of very ancient texts
where they would have collected
specific memories or words of Jesus.
For example
this source of Jesus' words, which are called logia, and which are a collection of Jesus' words,
of sayings of Jesus, which we're sure are his… Because they are so singular and so striking that we remember them as soon as we hear them the first time.
So we have this collection of texts, and then, from this collection of logia, we're going to compose a first story.
This is probably Mark's. And then we'll have Matthew and Luke, who are dependent on Mark, but who also have
their own sources. And we mustn't forget that Paul is also a central figure, a key figure in this story, because
Paul's letters, at least those that are not pseudepigraphic, are authentic. They were written around the 1950s.
So that means about thirty, twenty or thirty years before the first Gospels were written.
And the account of the Last Supper, for example, comes from Saint Paul.
It's St. Paul who says, this is what I received the evening he, the night before he was betrayed, the Lord Jesus took bread, and so on.
But that's from Saint Paul first, before it's from Saint Mark or Saint Matthew.
And so that means that we've
gleaned, the authors gleaned wherever they could, information that seemed reliable, credible, that they could attest to.
They relate
really to Jesus himself
to the words and deeds of Jesus himself, which are not the construction
of a legend or a fiction around a historical fact, as there are elsewhere.
And so that's what the Gospel is built on.
So the intention is not to make
a detailed account of everything that happened, because the evangelists are not journalists, they're not reporters,
they don't take dictated notes when they meet Jesus in the evening, no, that doesn't exist.
So they're not journalists, it's not a report, but it's a construction.
And a construction is not fiction.
And then, finally, they do it with material that is scattered, that is very diversified.
very light, but they…
we can see the historical background.
I'll take just one example
to clarify. For example Saint Mark
in the Gospel, when he talks about Jesus, he talks about him as the son of Mary.
And Saint Luke, later, when he writes his own text, well he'll refer to Jesus as the son of Joseph… Because the son of Mary is not possible.
It doesn't work, it doesn't take well, it doesn't look well.
So you have to… Because there's a paternity defect, you can feel it, there's a problem
of paternity.
So basically Luke is correcting Mark. And exegetes know how to discern this very well. So here we are, more or less, in the presence
of an element, a clue that, well, there's something authentic in the idea that Jesus… It was considered from the start that he was,
well, he was Mary's son, but that he was, perhaps, fatherless, and the rumour of an illegitimate birth, of a birth
out of wedlock seems like an interesting thread to pull…
Much more than whether Mary remained a virgin before, during or after. And so, it's these elements, if
you like, these clues in the text, when we compare the texts, that allow us to say, well yes, in Mark
there is something that is really at the source, at the base, at the historical foundation of Jesus
that we… that we're looking for.
But theology later, and already in St. Luke, slightly corrects this first version by saying, yes, son of Joseph.
[J-C Raspiengeas] So, has this [ ???] shaken your thesis?
[Michel Onfray] Oh no! No, I think we invented a father, we invented a mother, and by definition when you have a mother it's
because she slept with a man. If she'd slept with a man, that's problematic, so you absolutely need a woman who's a virgin.
Then you think, but there are brothers and sisters…
And then we say, no, they're not brothers, they're cousins, and then we say brothers to avoid the whole thing.
We say, ah well, but if she's a mother why wouldn't she have had other children as well?
As for Joseph, he's the conceptual character par excellence. He doesn't say a word in the Gospels.
There's not a word, not a word.
There's not a word.
He's not with him…
In other words, at a given moment when we actually see him
when he's with the… at the temple, and then nothing, he doesn't say anything, he's just
there because we need one, but at the same time he hasn't had sex.
So we're saying that sexuality doesn't exist.
She's a mother and a virgin, even though Jesus has brothers… And then at the same time this man, we
don't know where he comes from, who he is, if he's dead, when he died, how he died, and so on.
At the foot of the cross he's not there, he's not with him at all.
There are no words from Joseph.
There are words of Joseph in the apocryphal writings, or in the apocryphal Gospels, in which we have a Jesus who is a bit problematic, you know.
He kills little boys because little boys make him angry, he kills teachers because teachers make remarks to him, and he creates
little birds made of earth, and then all of a sudden, pfuit, he makes them fly away, and so on.
And then you think, but these texts, why didn't we keep them?
[Joël Boudaroua] The answer is in what you say.
[Michel Onfray] No, it's in the fact that when you make a fable, there are things that can't be presented
as such, it's not possible, and you can't actually integrate that, because it doesn't fit into the Jesus you're making.
We're making one.
The logia you were talking about earlier… There are novel-writing schools in the United States today. And they explain how to write a novel.
Well, the Gospels today, there are the ones we still have, which we talk
about, the synoptics, the three plus John's, but there are also other Gospels.
And all of a sudden we say, ah yes, but the Gospel of Thomas isn't that, it's a proto-gospel…
So, when you have that in the Pleiades… You have intertestamental writings, you have apocryphal writings, sometimes even more
important than the New Testament. And we say to ourselves, why don't we take these considerations into account
to make the true Jesus?
It's amazing, though, why we took…
We took some because we wanted to make a character that would correspond to the writing workshop.
Because there were writing workshops, there were many evangelists, many more than there were…
And it was a kind of writing industry. And the logia are not so much the words of a Jesus who would
have existed, and we would have said oh dear, we're copying exactly what he said! You say yourself,
they weren't journalists, they weren't people who came home in the evening, who were there… Then
at the same time you say, yes, but there were still people who were journalists and who, when they came
home in the evening, said "Jesus said, Jesus etc etc."
So that attests to the truth of Jesus…
But no, on the contrary, I think it proves
the fiction of Jesus.
In other words, a bit like in writing schools, you're told: here are the language elements for writing
a Gospel. And in the elements of language for writing a Gospel, we say: he said this, he said
that, he said… That doesn't attest to historical truth, it attests to the truth of a forgery of writing
the Gospels, which were extremely numerous, on supports that were animal skins at the time. And at the time,
some of them had to be scratched off, what were called palimpsests, meaning that there were lots of texts
from antiquity, and they said, come on, let's scratch them off, and then we'll write the Gospels.
Then all these Gospels disappeared, not because they were destroyed, but because time kept some of them.
And then, afterwards, they wrote about it. And so, every time there were gaps,
the patristics came, the church fathers. And they said, well, there's something wrong here.
How can we explain it?
Come on, let's explain this, let's explain that.
Sexuality, the condemnation of sexuality, is not found in the Gospels.
It's Saint Augustine who sexualises the original sin by telling us that it is transmitted… By the fact of being born, the original sin is transmitted.
They say I'm not responsible, I didn't eat the apple, why should I suffer the effects of God's wrath because Eve once ate the apple?
So I think, the idea… I really wanted to do something on history, on the question of the historicity of Jesus, but certainly not
what the church fathers said about it, certainly not what scholasticism said about it, certainly not what the history of art said about it.
So you started with the Fra Angelico.
Indeed.
We had to cut it down for model reasons, but there's Saint Dominic on the right and the Virgin Mary on the left, and it's actually in a cell.
I just wanted to say, "Look at this fragmentation!" I used Fra Angelico… But this fragmentation has been going on for centuries,
and then we tried to put it all together, and we said these Gospels are canonical, and the others are discarded.
I don't see why… It's councils that decide these things.
Now, councils are made with people who are sometimes illiterate, people who are sometimes dead drunk! I've read things
about the historicity of councils where you think, oh my, there's the holy spirit and so on.
Not at all.
There are people there who are being bought.
We give them some money and then they vote for whatever we want.
And then when they don't agree, they get together at the exit and bake each other!
It's hard to imagine these people hitting each other when they leave the council.
And it's sometimes at the end of a council that something is decided… On Mary's virginity, on the question of Joseph,
on the question… and so on. So it's all been said: Mary was knocked up by a soldier called Pantera, a Roman soldier…
And his name was Pantera - don't be misled by the idea of a panther! - But I mean, it was found
and said, so it's true, it's not true… How can you imagine? And then, at some point, the councils decide. And it's on the basis
of… You have to think about the evolution of Jesus, well, you have to think about it in a dynamic way.
What I wanted to do was to say I'm sticking to the Gospels.
You talked about Saint Paul, I didn't want to include Saint Paul.
The epistles, I didn't consider that could be taken into account for historicity. I wanted to look
at the Gospels and say, look at how these Gospels, written most of the time by Jews, are thought
by Jews, that is to say in the hermeneutics, in the allegory… When you see a rabbi today, when
you discuss with a rabbi, you see the amount of intelligence, knowledge, etc. that he has.
So, the evangelist is the character who, every time he writes a sentence, refers to two or three things that
refer to two or three things that, etc. And today we've lost a lot of that. Today, we've lost a lot
of coding. And, over time, there are times today when there are things that even the most experienced
don't understand.
[J-C Raspiengeas] So I'd like to ask you again.
Brother Joël, is this likely to shake your faith and your convictions?
[Joël Boudaroua] No, not like that, but I mean,
the question is, basically, for me, it is less
the question of the historicity of Jesus… I think you have to answer yes, than to know which Jesus existed, that is to say is it the Jesus
of the apocrypha, is it the Jesus of the canonical Gospels, is it the Jesus of Renan, the Jesus of Mauriac, the Jesus of Benedict XVI or, well, the Jesus of the catechism?
That's it: which Jesus existed?
And this, we're not going to… It's the object of a perpetual quest, so it's not solved.
It's still not resolved.
I think we're showing it here tonight.
And what I think
is that this biblical culture of ancient Judaism is a culture of orality first, and that the written word comes much later.
We start by telling each other sagas, as we do as well.
for the Passover, for the Exodus… You start by telling it, and then you write it down, when you feel that the memory is failing or disappearing.
First of all, we live in an oral culture, that's why things get lost, irretrievably lost…
that we will never know
but are reliable.
Orality is reliable.
Remembering words like
"The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath."
You hear that once, you remember it all your life.
You hear, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."
So it worked
at first within the living memory, of the living, and then the elements
of this story were written down, because if it's not written down it flies away.
And so it's these writings, this background of writings, which has come down to us, and which I think is quite reliable
to make me sure
and certainly many others, of the historical existence of a person named Jesus, in the first century of what we call the Common Era.
On the question of Jesus' brothers and sisters, of course the councils, theology, theologians, will give their version of things.
Today I would say, the more we limit ourselves to the Gospel, indeed, as you say…
Uh, "adelphos" doesn't mean cousin, it means brother, and it's brothers and sisters by blood or by right,
meaning those who are half-brothers or adopted, or because in Greek for cousins there's another word.
So Jesus' brothers and sisters, there are five or six of them, are not de facto cousins.
We have to face the facts, and Pascal says it again… Already in the 17th century, Pascal says
that we have to stick to what the Gospel says, that Jesus had brothers and sisters.
Okay, so there are things we can base our knowledge of Jesus on. The historical
Jesus, if not the real Jesus, who remains unattainable like many characters in history.
[J-C Raspiengeas] So we've come, unfortunately, to the end of this debate, this argument, this controversy…
One last question for you, Michel Onfray.
Did it ever occur to you that you might have the same fate as Paul of Tarsus?
Thrown down on yourself, and with God calling you to account?
"Why do you persecute me?"
Have you ever asked yourself that question?
[Michel Onfray] I don't persecute him, God.
Sometimes I even think that he's persecuting me.
No, but I believe everything is possible.
I'm not one of those who says
that conversion - I think that's the point of your question - that conversion is impossible or unthinkable.
I think that's the real problem: the question of grace and the question of faith, and that's why I say
it doesn't matter in a way how historic Jesus is. You can say, but faith is faith, and then there you go, you've got it,
you haven't got it, and if you haven't got it, then I'm asking - Brother Joel is a friend, really,
he concelebrated my father's funeral mass. But I also have other friends who are rather traditionalist priests, and where we
have discussions with each other about this. But it's really the question of grace.
I say, but question your God! Why doesn't he give me grace?
So, questioning… It's Pascal's question, you quoted Pascal a lot, but I really like Pascal
and his reflections on grace, the question of predestination, the question of Jansenism, everything that happened in French
Jansenism… Well, not only in French Jansenism, but it's essential what happened there.
We've totally forgotten predestination, Augustine, Augustinism… If God wants what he wants, then he wants atheists to be atheists, and if he wants atheists to be
atheists, it's not enough to get down on your knees and pray, as Pascal said. But Pascal was also working on the question of Augustinism.
If there is this predestination… Saying "But I pray so that I can be saved!" But Augustine says,
it's not you who decides, it's God. If God wants to save you, he'll save you.
And if you're a libertine, he can save you.
And if you're a pious person who etc, he can damn you too.
You're not the master of damnation and salvation.
And so, in these cases, I would say, but my God, why have you persecuted me for so long by forbidding me the grace that would have allowed me to find my dead?
Because that's what religion is about: the idea of saying - so you were at my father's funeral - but to say that one day I'll
be able to find for eternity the people I loved who died, possibly the people I love who died before me, and so on.
But I would be the happiest of men.
I wouldn't care if Jesus existed historically or not.
[J-C Raspiengeas] [ ???]?
[Michel Onfray] That's what my friends often tell me: you don't wait hard enough. It's always my fault.
That is to say that - I even have a friend who told me the other day,
it was the date of Pascal's memorial night - and who told me "if tonight you pray until midnight, something may happen…" Well,
I didn't pray. But not that I want it to happen or that I don't want it to happen.
If it's going to happen
it will happen, but I think everything is possible or thinkable.
I've experienced… I once lost my partner.
and in front of her corpse you experience the birth of the sacred and the divine.
That is to say that we start by saying: "Answer me, open your eyes, speak!"
"Finally, say something, do something, don't stay like that!"
And in the face of the silence of death, we invent a word.
She sees me, she hears me, but, etc.
And from then on you create a kind of avatar that you think will last.
It's not possible for this corpse to be just a corpse. So part of this corpse is a soul,
and this soul goes somewhere, but it's not possible for it to be over… And there, in front of this body,
I was thinking, I'm witnessing the genealogy of belief and faith.
I think it implies a relationship with death, with nothingness, with time, with anguish… I mean, all these
things, and that sometimes the body reacts… What happens with Paul, on the road to Damascus…
I'm not talking about horses, as you know, it's the iconography that makes that possible, Caravaggio's paintings and so on.
But he has this kind of seizure. He becomes blind, mute, and then nothing that happens can be grasped by him. He is stopped,
forbidden, and then at a given moment something happens. And this something is, well, it's God, I don't know, what, well people talk…
There's also a sort of neopagan way of talking about tunnels, after-death experiences and so on.
I'm a bit sorry it's so short, but I think we could do the physics of metaphysics. And when we have explanations today that talk
to us about the plurality of worlds, the plurality of universes, quantum physics. And I think that quantum physics should allow a quantum metaphysics, in which,
if I believed in God, I would go and look for explanations of the existence of God… I would say, but no, the historicity or not
of Jesus is a particular phenomenon, which supposes that in order to address a certain number of people we had recourse to this.
But if you really want to do theology or ontology, if God exists, you'd better question quantum physics rather than
Irenaeus of Lyons, Gregory of Nazienzen, or a new text that we've found, a copy of an unpublished Gospel for example.
[Joël Boudaroua] But you're not that far from me, and I'm not that far from you.
[J-C Raspiengeas] Thank you Michel Onfray!
Thank you Brother Joël! Listening to you, one gets the impression that you are, despite what you write and what you say,
you seem to be a bit on the way…
Thank you very much.
Thank you to all of you.