Historian Paul L. Maier Interview Transcript
The following transcript is from an Apologetics 315 interview with Paul L. Maier. Original audio here. If you enjoy transcripts, please consider supporting, which makes this possible.
BA: Hello, this is Brian Auten of Apologetics 315. Today I interview Historian Paul Maier. Dr. Maier is the Russell H. Seibert professor of Ancient History at Western Michigan University, and much published author of both scholarly and popular works. His historical studies are in Ancient Near East, Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, Christianity and the Roman Empire, and the Reformation era. His scholarly works include Josephus, The Essential Works, that’s a new translation and commentary on writings of the 1st century Jewish historian, and Eusebius: The Church History. And that’s a similar book on the first Christian historian. He has also authored a number of books on Christmas and Easter including, In the Fullness of Time: A Historian looks at Christmas, Easter and the Early Church, The Very First Christmas, and The Very First Easter.
PLM: OK, I’m a professor of ancient history at Western Michigan University, which is in the southwestern corner of Michigan; a place called Kalamazoo—believe it or not there is such a place. And I’ve been teaching here for 49 and a half years. And I’ll probably hang it up this coming April.
PLM: Well, the first is Pontius Pilate, which is of course the story of the most important trial that was ever held in history and the judge who presided there. We have so many passion stories of course looking at the Roman tribunals of the Christian, or the view point as though we’re standing in Jesus’ sandals. And I thought that it was very important to try it the other way around and see what the Roman laws were governing such a trial as took place on Good Friday. And what about the punishment? There are all sorts of details that can be filled in from the other side. And that’s what I tried to do in the Pontius Pilate project. In the case of The Flames of Rome, again Luke breaks off. That’s the other book, The Flames of Rome. Luke breaks off with chapter 28 where Paul gets to Rome and he’s there for two years waiting for a trial before Nero, and it hasn’t happened yet so Luke doesn’t report it. So I really went into Luke’s story there. The first working title for that book was “Acts Twenty-nine.” Ha! But only biblical scholars like yourself would have figured that out. So those are the only two that I’ve written that are totally documented historical novels is the way I put it. Then I’ve also written popular novels too.
PLM: Okay. Well, first of all let’s consider the Roman sources. Tacitus. Cornelius Tacitus was a very important author of events in the 1st century in Rome. He gives a year by year account of what happened in Rome and it’s very very valuable to historians for getting timelines straight. For the year 64AD, Tacitus reports that the great fire of Rome broke out, and in the month of July, and it burned much of central Rome and it was a horrible catastrophe. Because they didn’t have TV reporters in those days, Nero got blamed for it, even though he’s probably innocent. He was giving a concert that night 35 miles away from Rome. But never mind, they blamed Nero and his throne is tottering. And so to save himself, he blames the Christians Tacitus writes. That’s the first time they show up chronologically on the Roman stage. So careful historian that he is, Tacitus tells us who the Christians are. They’re named for a Christ who is crucified by one of our governors Pontius Pilate. And he goes on to tell what happened to the Christians, how they were persecuted. So that’s one very famous reference.
PLM: Absolutely! Absolutely! And I’m willing to challenge anyone on earth in terms of whether there was a historical Jesus. There’s no question about that.
BA: One of the things you mentioned there was about when we’re watching programs and we hear phrases like, “historical consensus” or “most historians now agree” I can kind of feel red flags going up
PLM: Well, it was very amusing. I couldn’t believe somebody wanted to debate me on the historical Jesus because it was like shooting ducks in a pond or something! I mean it’s just so obvious that I didn’t even prepare for the debate, simply because something so obvious is almost… I feel like Alice in Wonderland you know… and the wonderment and the puzzlement of it all. So, I enjoyed the debate totally and evidently Mr. Barker didn’t enjoy the debate as much. He told me afterword’s that I really gave him a hard run for his money and said, well I wasn’t really trying to be funny but I said, “well thank you, Dan. I appreciate your comment because I’ve never debated anyone before.” And it’s true. I didn’t take debate in high school. It just shows you how easy it is to defend the historicity of Jesus. You don’t have to prepare for anything. You don’t have to know how to debate. I’ve debated since then, but I just had a lot of fun at that point.
BA: Any plans for a rematch in the future at all?
PLM: There is somebody who’s trying to get us rematched and I’m trying to clear my calendar to do that.
BA: Alright well, looking forward to that. Now back to Jesus. Another person is going to come along and they have watched this movie on the internet called Zeitgeist and they’ll say, “Well, yeah there was a Jesus but he was just a myth, he and his twelve disciples, all these birth narratives in the Gospels, these are all just copycat writings that are adapted from pagan mythologies.” You know, that’s a popular objection and you know, tying more knots in the story. What are your thoughts on that? And you watch that and what is your perspective as a historian?
PLM: What they would do in terms of my six famous places where Jesus is mentioned—and by the way, there are other allusions beyond those six. Believe me. Those are the six major ones. What they usually do is try to impugn the sources. They’ll say Tacitus didn’t really write this but somebody interpolated that in the Tacitian passage. Or Suetonius didn’t write that, or Pliny didn’t write that these are faked or something like that. Or, the latest I heard, the most amusing was that Tacitus probably read this in the Gospel records and then thought that Jesus was historical himself. Please, give me a break. Tacitus first of all doesn’t like the Christians at all. He considers them “so much sewage that flowed from the near east even into Rome, that common cesspool into which things hateful come from all over the world and find a vote.”(?) That’s to quote him directly. So, he regards the Christians as so much sewage, OK. Is he going to spend his time reading Christian literature? And if he were turned off by it wouldn’t he immediately say, “Hey, let me tell you about this great myth. There never was a guy named Jesus, though the Christians claim it.” He doesn’t do that simply because he knows there was a Jesus and he didn’t get it from the gospels.
BA: Well Josephus wrote a lot of history, but you know the common layperson won’t be able to read all of that and they won’t know really what to sift through. Do you know of any good works that have been written that would give all the essentials, if you will, that would be the “essential reading” of Josephus? Do you have anything you would want to recommend along that line?
PLM: Well it’s interesting that you should say that because one of my translations is indeed called Josephus: The Essential Works.
BA: No! (sarcasm)
PLM: O I love it! What a coincidence! Yeah, the Essential Writings is the same material but it’s all in black and white form where as the Essential Works is the same text but it’s beautifully illustrated in color along with commentaries at the end of each chapter.
PLM: Well that’s a good question and it’s a very easy one to answer. We have archeology that is simply a wonder, a latter day gift of God I think because now we have a chance to see what the smoking gun looks like from antiquity. Now we have hard evidence, which does an end run around all the wondering of the critics. For example, in the last century, I still mean the 1800’s by that, one of the higher critics as he was called, those who attack the bible was Bruno Bauer his name was in Germany. He said Jesus of Nazareth was not only not the Son of God, he never existed historically and anybody who ever intersected with Jesus also vaporized into nothingness. Well, what about Pontius Pilate the Roman governor? And he said, well any reference to Pilate outside the bible is an interpolation. Well, too bad old Bruno wasn’t around in 1962 when an Italian archeological detail was excavating in Caesarea on the Mediterranean where Paul was in prison for two years and they found a two by three foot stone which was a corner stone of a building Pilate erected. Things like this. So the people of Caesarea, Pontius Pilate was the prefect of Judaea has presented the Tiberium, that was a building in honor of the emperor Tiberium. So we have Pilate’s name mentioned in Tacitus, in Josephus, in the four Gospels, now we have his name in stone, we have a corner stone, and then what about the other side of the tribunal on Good Friday? Who was the chief prosecutor? Joseph Caiaphas right, the chief priest of the Sanhedrin. Well, his bones have been discovered. Nobody seems to know about this. Brian, what is it? I can be talking to a pastoral conference of three hundred pastors and I’ll ask who knows about the first authentic biblical bone to be discovered and three hands will go up. One percent. What does it take? It was a thrilling discovery. Ten ossuaries were discovered south of the temple area in Jerusalem and one of these was accidentally discovered, so that’s even better, and one of these was beautifully inscribed. This one had fluting around the edges and giant rosettes cut into it and then on the other side, the owner of those bones, his name was inscribed twice in Aramaic, Yehosef bar Qayafa, Yehosef bar Qafa. They did a carbon 14 test on the bones. They were 1950 BP approximately, that is before the present. The bones were that of a 65-70 year old, and nobody else is named that way. It’s a lead pipe cinched, there we have the bones of a biblical personality. And how can anyone doubt the historicity of the Good Friday trial when we have these people, either their bones or their names in stone archeologically discovered? That’s hard evidence people!
BA: Alright, great. Well, someone’s asking for lots, lots more saying well this isn’t enough, they’re basically setting the bar too high because we have sufficient evidence that shows that people at least thought these miraculous things were taking place
PLM: Well all I can do is only go so far with the evidence. But the evidence that I have supplied, for example that arrest notice, very, very interesting you know that you have even opponents of what Jesus was doing in whose interest it would be to shut up about it, not only do they not shut up about what he was doing but they call them sorcery, this event. And sorcery is only a miracle with a negative spin. And by the way this correlates perfectly with the biblical record. Believe it or not, sometimes you can even have sympathy for the scribes and Pharisees and Jesus’ opponents. How are you going to knock somebody who gives sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, walking ability to cripples, how are you going to knock that person? The only way you can do it is call in your spin-doctors and spread the word. The devil made him do it. Ha! So, what do you know? Here you have in the hostile sources exactly what the Gospel said they would do. So there are beautiful correlations again and again. Look, I can’t categorically prove everything in regard to Jesus. If I did then we wouldn’t need faith at all would we, as Christians or non-Christians? If we had total proof for all this stuff well then the world would believe like a marionette who’s strings are being pulled. And God didn’t want that kind of reaction evidently. Or else He would have given us complete proof. That takes away faith. You’ve got to have faith in there to wrap yourself around the event.
PLM: Well the nativity is simply an obvious target for these people because two of the four Gospels are silent in regard to the nativity and all we have is of course Mathew and Luke who obviously do not copy from one another, you can tell that, but that’s enough because even there we have Luke invoking a very famous Roman at the time, so that the non-Jewish, Gentile audience would be able to identify and give interest in the account. Everybody knew about the great Augustus you recall, the census that he took. The census is historical. In Rome where Augustus was buried, I should say his ashes were interred, we have the Augustin mausoleum in which two bronze columns were set up in front of it and these were the thirty-six greatest accomplishments of the fine Augustus, as it was called. Point number eight, I took a census of the empire three times. So the idea of Rome taking censuses is very well known. Every fourteen years they took it next door in Egypt and we have an actual census document from somebody who registers himself and his family just two generations after Jesus’ birth. That’s at the University of Michigan library and they bring it out every Christmas. And the neat thing about that document is that’s it’s not a copy of a copy of a copy like everything else we have. It’s the original papyrus document. So it’s a real thrill to see this thing brought out. All the political leaders are accurate, Augustus in Rome, Herod the Great locally, Herod Antipas later on, his son, these are all real people. The whole setting is not in a time long, long ago in a place called Middle Earth, Jesus comes along and we know it’s a fantasy novel by the English, but not in the case of the nativity account.
BA: So how does myth as a genre differ from the Gospel accounts?
PLM: Well, my thoughts would be, you’re right. It is a wonderful story and it’s more than a story and then go on from there. See, one thing we’re burdened with is that we always talk about the Christmas story, the Christmas story, story, story. And “story” immediately implies a bed-time story, a fairy tale or so forth and that one of the disagreeable parts of calling it the Christmas story. I usually refer to it as the nativity account, account, which is far more historical sounding than story. But you can begin with where they are and say yes it’s a beautiful story, let me tell you a little more detail about it and then go on from there. That’s the reason I wrote the Christmas section In The Fullness of Time book where in twelve chapters I interact between the secular and sacred evidence and point out how all of this is extremely logical and historically based against the background of everything that took place.
BA: Dr. Maier, now speaking to Christian apologists and those who would want to be better equipped to defend the faith, what sort of advice would you give them in their studies? If they’re reading along the lines of the historical Jesus and the early church, what kind of encouragement would you give them as far as its importance and it’s centrality and you know, encourage them to defend these things?
PLM: Brian, have a blessed Christmas and thank you so much for the interview.