Memo to Scholars: Jesus Is Not Original

There's a new 1st-century BCE tablet that's making the scholarly rounds with a lot of missing and indecipherable text but which seems to talk about a Jewish messiah getting killed by the Romans and rising again in three days. The view presented in the NYT is that this should be scary for Christians, since it shows that their Jesus story is just another one of the messiah stories making the rounds around the low point in Roman-Jewish relations. “Some Christians will find it shocking — a challenge to the uniqueness of their theology — while others will be comforted by the idea of it being a traditional part of Judaism.” But take it from an apostate: Christianity's validity doesn't rest on the idea of Jesus's story and its theology being brand-new. It rests on an interpretation of Jesus's life, teachings, and death in a history of Jewish prophecy and theology. So when you dig up texts before Jesus was born that talk about things that sound like Jesus's life, Christians for the most part don't say "Oh my god, Paul's a plagiarist," they say "hey, maybe there's another prophet foretelling Jesus's life." The Catholics spent centuries arguing that the Greek and Roman philosophers anticipated Jesus's theology. They can eat, digest, and excrete one more old tablet.