Jesus’s first non-Christian mention may be found in a Syrian philosopher’s letter, The Letter of Mara bar Sarapion, which was rediscovered in the 19th century but is vexingly hard to date. One eminent historian, Fergus Millar, concluded that this Letter was likely written as early as 73AD. This would make it roughly contemporary with the first gospels to be written.

Though Millar’s dating is contested, Mara’s Letter is certainly a pagan text of the first or second century AD. In it, both Socrates and Jesus are seen as belonging to an august history of philosopher-martyrs. Mara thinks that it is human error which led to their deaths, and to the devastation of the cities in which they died:

“What can we say, when wise men are forcibly dragged by the hands of tyrants, and their wisdom is taken captive by slander? … For what benefit did the Athenians derive from the slaying of Socrates? They received the retribution for it in the form of famine … Or the Judaeans [from the slaying] of their wise king? From that very time their sovereignty was taken away …. [Yet] Socrates did not die, because of Plato … nor did the wise king [die], because of the new laws that he gave.”

There is nothing necessarily untoward about Mara’s notion of divine nemesis. A Cynic philosopher, Dio of Prusa, similarly holds that Socrates’s death was the cause of the Athenians’ later misfortunes. And a Judaean historian, Josephus (on whom more in a moment), reports that many Judaeans viewed Herod Antipas’s humiliating defeat in 36AD, by a Nabatean king, as divine retribution for his murder of John the Baptist. For a first or second-century philosopher such as Mara, “killing the philosophers” was a recurring drama which led to the gods’ destruction of Mediterranean cities. And for early Christians (and many Judaeans), “killing the prophets” was a recurring drama which included John the Baptist and Jesus, and which brought down judgement on the cities of Galilee and Judaea.

We see that Mara’s Jesus has Syrian features by glancing at a second-century text by Lucian of Samosata. This dazzling Syrian satirist refers to “the man who was crucified in Palestine because he introduced new mysteries into the world”. Note that Jesus’s crime, here, is innovation. The gospels do not mention innovation as one of the crimes with which Jesus was charged, but Socrates was found guilty of introducing “new divinities”. Like Mara, then, Lucian seems to constellate the deaths of Socrates and Jesus. What is more, Lucian — like Mara — seems to see Jesus as a sort of lawgiver. As he writes about Syria’s Christians:

“Their first lawgiver persuaded them that they are all brothers of one another after they have transgressed once for all by denying the Greek gods and by worshipping that crucified sophist himself and living under his laws. Therefore, they despise all things indiscriminately and hold them to be common property.”

For Lucian, Jesus is a crucified sophist and the first lawgiver of the Christians. For Mara, he is a wise king who was put to death, but not before he had promulgated new laws. This slight Syrian archive suggests that pagan intellectuals in Roman Syria had come to know, by the late second century, that Jesus had been put to death — like Socrates — as a political criminal. Yet it is not entirely clear who put him to death. For Mara it is Judaeans, and for Lucian it is Romans. When their brief lines on Jesus are read in conjunction, we might suspect that both Judaeans and Romans had a hand in the death of the Christians’ new lawgiver.

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By Terry Eagleton

Early Roman mentions of Jesus are few, but we can relate them in interesting ways to our Syrian archive. It is the historian Tacitus who settles the question of who sentenced Jesus. “In the reign of Tiberius”, he reports, Jesus was “executed … by the procurator Pontius Pilate”. This graphs neatly onto what we read in numerous early Christian texts and formulas. It is significant, too, that Tacitus calls Pilate’s convict Christ, and not Jesus. This is a point of commonality in the early Roman texts which mention him.

In Pliny the Younger’s collection of letters, for instance, we find several charming ones addressed to his friend Tacitus. But his most-cited is a letter he sent to Rome’s “lord” (dominus), Trajan, from a province on the Black Sea which Pliny administered in the early second century. He informs Trajan that the Christians there “come together before dawn on a fixed day” — surely the first day of the week — “to chant songs … in honour of Christ, as if to a god”. For Pliny, as for Tacitus, Jesus bears a Latin title, Christus.

This is logical, since the Romans sentenced him as a messianic “king” — in Latin, a Christus. It is with Tacitus’s Christus (crucified by Pilate), and with Pliny’s Christus (revered as a god), both in mind that we turn to the third Roman text on Jesus, by Suetonius. I have mentioned that Pliny and Tacitus were friends; so, too, were Pliny and Suetonius. If Tacitus and Pliny call Jesus Christus, then Suetonius should, too. And he seems to — nearly. For, in his life of Claudius, Suetonius writes: “Since the Judaeans [in Rome] were always making disturbances because of the instigator Chrestus, [Claudius] expelled them from Rome.”

Is Suetonius’s Chrestus the Christus referred to by his friends, Tacitus and Pliny? There is a considerable literature on this question. On the one hand, Chrestus might be Jesus. For a Christ-related expulsion of Judaeans from Rome, circa 49AD, is noted in the New Testament. “Claudius”, we read, “ordered all the Judaeans to leave Rome” (Acts of the Apostles 18:2). What is more, early Christians tell us that some Roman bureaucrats softened the Greek-derived Christian into a more-Latin-sounding Chrestian (Latin Christianus, Chrestianus).

But on the other hand, Chrestus might not be Jesus. For nothing in Suetonius’s wording suggests that this “instigator” is 20 years’ dead. The meaning of Suetonius’ text, then, is unclear. What we do know is that during the first years of the second century, the names Christus–Chrestus denote a man crucified in Judaea by Pilate (Tacitus), a man reverenced in Asia as a god (Pliny), and a man known in Rome to be a source of unrest (Suetonius).

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Glancing back at our Syrian texts we can ask: What are Christians thought to have derived from Jesus? Mara talks of laws, Lucian of mysteries, and Suetonius of a “new superstition”. There is one eye-catching commonality, however. The laws are new, the mysteries are new, and the superstition is new. “The man who was crucified in Palestine”, as Lucian calls him, seems to be the figure of something new.

Perhaps the most valuable Judaean text on Jesus (outside the New Testament) is by Josephus, or Yosef ben Mattityahu — a Jerusalem native with convoluted ties to Galilee. It is known as Josephus’s Testimony (Testimonium Flavianum) and it is found in a huge book that he composed for Roman elites circa 90 AD. In some sense, then, Josephus’s book is neither Judaean nor pagan — but both. It is in a uniquely Judaeo-Roman chronicle that Jesus is said to have been accused by Judaean elites and crucified by a Roman prefect.

Now, the integrity of this Testimony has been doubted since the 16th century. It seems clear that a Christian hand (or hands) corrupted the received text. To my mind, however, this Testimony was credibly restored in the 19th century. Here is a modern reconstruction of what Josephus wrote in Greek:

“At about this time lived Jesus, a wise man. He did marvellous (or strange) things, a teacher of those who receive the truth (or novelties) with pleasure. He attracted many Judaeans and many of the Hellenes. Upon an indictment brought by the leading men among us, Pilate sentenced him to the cross. But those who had loved him from the very first did not cease to do so, and to this very day the brotherhood of the Christians, named after him, has not died out.”

Crucially, this Testimony is not only found in Josephus’ Greek manuscripts. There is an Arabic version, too, in the Universal History written by a 10th-century Syrian bishop, Agapius of Manbij. And intriguingly, Agapius links the death of Jesus to the history of philosophy. For he tells us that he had “found in many books of the philosophers that they refer to the day of crucifixion of Christ, and that they marvel at it”. One of the writers that Agapius cites is “Josephus the Hebrew”. This is Josephus’s Testimony in Arabic tradition:

“At this time there was a wise man who was called Jesus. His conduct was good, and he was known to be virtuous. And many people from among the Judaeans and the other nations became his disciples. Pilate condemned him to be crucified and to die. But those who had become his disciples did not abandon his discipleship. They reported that he had appeared to them three days after his crucifixion, and that he was alive. Accordingly, he was perhaps the Christ, concerning whom the prophets have recounted wonders.”

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We can see that Jesus is called a “wise man” (as in the Greek Testimony); his disciples are drawn “from among the Judaeans and the other nations” (as in the Greek); and that although he is “known to be virtuous”, Pilate condemns him (as in the Greek). In both the Greek and Arabic traditions of Josephus, Jesus belongs to a sombre history in which, as one 4th-century Christian puts it, “the whole world … persecutes good and just men as if they were evil and impious — torturing, condemning, and killing them”.

Where does this bring us? Recollections of Jesus are divided in Syrian, Roman, and Judaean texts of the first two centuries of our era. For Mara, he is a philosopher; for Lucian, a sophist. For Pliny, he is a sort of numen; for Tacitus, a dead convict. And for Josephus, he is a wise man.

Even the pagan deities are divided. “The gods have pronounced Christ to have been most holy,” according to one Syrian (and intensely anti-Christian) philosopher, Porphyry. There is backing for this in surviving oracles. The night-goddess Hecate calls Jesus “a supremely righteous man”. In contrast, Apollo derides him as a “deluded” figure, one who was compelled “to die cruelly by the worst of deaths”.

What are we to make of this impoverished Galilean rabbi whom a god called “deluded” and a goddess called “supremely righteous”, and who everyone knows suffered “the worst of deaths”? Twenty-one centuries later, much still hangs on how we answer this question.

This is not an argument that can be made today. “Critical thinking” has become a cluster of progressive dogmas, which are handed down as if they were self-evident truths. Students learn an intra-academic argot – intersectionality, hetero-normativity and the like — that has zero utility in the world in which they will go on to live.

They also learn that disagreement in ethics and politics is illegitimate. Anyone who departs from the prevailing progressive consensus is not just mistaken but malevolent. When enforced in universities, this is a prescription for censorship and conformism. What is being inculcated is not freedom of mind, but freedom from thought. Losing the ability to think while attending a university may be considered a misfortune. Incurring fifty or sixty thousand pounds of debt in order to do so looks like carelessness.

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Our illiberal empire of rights

By John Gray

The decline of the humanities is one of the defining facts of the age. Yet there has not been a great deal of serious discussion of its causes. In the Eighties and Nineties, an influential critique argued that universities had been co-opted by “tenured radicals”—the title of a provocative book published by the American art critic Roger Kimball in 1990.

As Kimball saw it, an academic nomenklatura controlled sectors of higher education and used its position to attack the values of the societies that funded it. Any version of a western canon was discredited, and its origins in classical philosophy and Jewish and Christian religion disparaged.

There is some truth in this critique. Though they remain ineffably redolent of the bourgeoisie at their most sanctimonious and self-deceiving, academic radicals define themselves by their opposition to the bourgeois civilisation that produced and now supports them. Kimball’s critique also identifies a key feature of tenured radicalism: it is self-reproducing. Through their powers of patronage, the nomenklatura decide the prospects of new entrants, and exclude anyone who deviates from the party line. No young scholar who fails to genuflect to it has any prospect of a future in academic life.

What this analysis fails to explain is the appeal of the ideology this class has adopted. Marx may be worth re-reading in a time when capitalism is entering another of its recurrent crises. But how could a turgid mishmash of Heidegger, Derrida and Lacan have gained such a stranglehold on institutions of higher learning?

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By Eric Kaufmann

The metamorphosis in liberalism that has occurred over the past generation has played a role. From being a philosophy of tolerance aiming at peaceful coexistence among divergent world-views, it has become a persecutory orthodoxy that tolerates no view of the world other than its own. If the contemporary academy is hostile to liberal values as they used to be understood, one reason is the rise of a new liberalism that dismisses these values as phoney and repressive. But this only pushes the question one step back. Why has illiberal liberalism become so popular?

Part of the answer may be found in a short, strange and inexhaustibly interesting volume that was published nearly a century and a half ago. The chief subject of Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), is the nature of Greek tragedy, which he interpreted as an art-form that overcame the lack of meaning in human life by reframing it as an aesthetic spectacle.

The most celebrated aspect of Nietzsche’s interpretation is his claim that Greek drama turns on an interaction between an Apollonian striving after reason and order, and a Dionysian yearning for chaos and frenzy. But the most important section of the book, to my mind, comes when he applies his account of Greek tragedy to the secular faith of modern times, which he calls “Socratism” — the belief that the world becomes properly intelligible only when the human mind has rid itself of myth.

“Socrates is the archetype of the theoretical optimist,” Nietzsche writes, “who in his faith in the explicability of things, attributes the power of a panacea to knowledge and science, and sees error as the embodiment of evil.” Later in the book, Nietzsche asks the reader to imagine “abstract man, without the guidance of myth — abstract education, abstract morality, abstract justice, the abstract state…then we have our present age, the product of that Socratism bent on the destruction of myth”.

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The end-result of Socratism for the West is “a resolute process of secularization, a break with the unconscious metaphysics of its previous existence”. In turn, the triumph of Socratism leads to a violent rebirth of mythic thinking, inspiring the frenzied totalitarian movements that Nietzsche saw coming and which, ironically, he was blamed for inspiring.

Writing when Europe’s high bourgeois civilisation seemed unshakably secure, Nietzsche foresaw the present crisis of the humanities. Deconstruction is Socratism in an extravagant form, an all-out effort to subvert the myths and metaphysics that underpinned western civilisation — not least Socrates’s own faith in reason. At crucial moments, as Nietzsche notes, Socrates turned to his daimonion — a “divine voice” that enabled him to be a true philosopher — for guidance. (In 1952, the great Irish classicist E.R. Dodds presented a similar view in The Greeks and the Irrational, where the founder of western philosophy is presented as an heir to Greek shamanism.)

Like Plato, Socrates was the mouthpiece of a mystical faith. It was this—not any process of ratiocination—that allowed him to assert that the true and the good were one and the same. The ideology of deconstruction aims to demystify this Socratic faith, along with everything else. As Nietzsche understood, once Socratism knocks away its metaphysical foundations it becomes a type of nihilism.

If Nietzsche’s diagnosis is even half-way sound, some awkward conclusions follow for the future of the humanities. Many lament the collapse of standards of truth and evidence in higher education. But what is their remedy? To restore rationality, no doubt. It seems not to have occurred to them that this may not be possible. For the most part, those who lament the condition of the humanities are evangelists for the Socratism that has led the humanities to where they are now. For these latter-day exponents of ‘Enlightenment liberal values’, rationality can be restored by an act of will. If enough people make a commitment to being reasonable, all will be well.

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Liberals of this kind remind one of J.M. Keynes’s comment on the “thin rationalism” of his friend Bertrand Russell. In an elegiac talk to a Bloomsbury Group audience, in 1938, published after his death as My Early Beliefs, Keynes observed: “Bertie sustained simultaneously a pair of opinions ludicrously incompatible. He held that human affairs are carried on in a most irrational fashion, but that the remedy was quite simple and easy, since all we had to do was carry them on rationally.”

Keynes thought Russell’s rationalism shallow because it skated over the passions that are the deciding forces in human events. Having been an official at the Versailles Peace Conference where the future of Europe after the First World War was supposed to be determined, he knew how emotions of resentment and revenge could overwhelm reasoned policy-making. But there is a deeper reason why rationality cannot be regained by reinstating the intellectual standards of the past.

The Enlightenment faith in reason to which many critics of the humanities would like to return was based on the belief that, once it had discarded myth, humankind would devote itself to the pursuit of knowledge through science. This was the “theoretical optimism” that Nietzsche discerned at the bottom of Europe’s bourgeois civilisation.

But “abstract man” proved to be an illusion, and during the 20th century, science became a vehicle for myths that made mass extermination seem rational. Turning to science as a panacea for evil today means turning a blind eye to the horrendous ends for which science has been deployed. If Nietzsche did nothing else, he predicted Steven Pinker.

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The discomforting truth is that the crisis of the humanities can’t be fixed, for it is part of a much larger malady. The ideology that has captured universities is only an inflated version of that which animates society at large. In both, the myths that sustained civilisation in the past are sacrificed to an idea of progress that is devoid of meaning.

The classical liberal economist F.A. Hayek wrote in The Constitution of Liberty (1960): “Progress is movement for movement’s sake, for it is in the process of learning, and in the effects of having learned something new, that man enjoys the gift of his intelligence.” But what is it that is learnt in the course of this purposeless process? Admirable for the clarity and honesty with which it is stated, Hayek’s idea of progress is as much an expression of nihilism as Derrida’s project of deconstruction.

Nietzsche found no way out from the condition he diagnosed, and it may well be that there is none. The decline of the humanities may be no more than an episode in the decline of the West. The idea that a solution can be found in the academy is silly. A cultural malady that goes all the way back to Socrates is not going to be remedied by anything that is done in floundering 21^st-century universities.

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By Nigel Biggar

It would be better to admit that the battle there has been lost, and advise young people to get to know the canon by themselves. It will not cost them tens of thousands of pounds to buy a copy of Montaigne’s essays, Emily Dickinson’s poems, Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim or Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, for example. If they want to move beyond western traditions, they can read Dostoevsky’s apocalyptic and hilariously funny Demons, the delightful Chuang-Tzu and dozens of other world classics.

The condition of the humanities has many of the qualities of black comedy. There is currently a campaign underway to have Camille Paglia sacked from the teaching position she has held for 30 years at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia because she has voiced what are considered to be incorrect opinions on a number of currently toxic issues.

As she once playfully boasted, Paglia is “one of the smartest people in the humanities in the world”. She is also one of the most original. Making her own use of Nietzsche’s dichotomy of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, she has dug into the most fundamental sources of the West’s cultural disorder. The power of her analysis is illustrated by the clamour against her, and she may not be surprised at the attempt to unseat her. Nietzsche believed the modern mind has become incapable of recognising tragedy. The same may be true of farce.

Why the humanities can't be saved

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The idea is that the conclusions follow inexorably from the premises. If you accept that all men are mortal, and that Socrates is a man, then you cannot claim that Socrates is not mortal without breaking the laws of logic. It doesn’t mean that the conclusion is true – the premises could be false – but the argument is logically sound.

This is argumentation at its most stripped down. It doesn’t need statistics or evidence or anything; it is a mechanical, algorithmic process. If P, then Q; not Q; therefore not P.

And yet, according to a new paper soon to be published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, whether or not you can correctly follow that algorithmic process depends, in part, on whether the outcome supports your political beliefs or not.

The paper, titled “(Ideo)Logical Reasoning”, asked several thousand people in three separate experiments to judge which of a series of syllogisms were sound. It’s been documented that we find it harder to judge them correctly when they have counterintuitive results – for instance, “All things made of plants are healthy. Cigarettes are made of plants. Therefore, cigarettes are healthy.” That’s a perfectly sound syllogism. The conclusion is obviously wrong, because the first premise is false – lots of things made from plants aren’t healthy, such as deadly nightshade, or tobacco – but the logic is correct: IF all things made from plants are healthy, THEN, etc. Still, many people will claim that it is unsound, because the conclusion is so jarring; they find it harder to see the logic.

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What the (Ideo)Logical Reasoning authors hypothesised was that people who are strongly conservative would find it harder to judge syllogisms with liberal-sounding conclusions correctly, and vice versa. (The authors are American, so “conservative” and “liberal” maps pretty well onto British understandings of “Right-wing” and “Left-wing” respectively.)

So they asked people to rate themselves from “very liberal” to “very conservative” and then asked them to judge some ideologically loaded syllogisms – “All drugs that are dangerous should be illegal. Marijuana is a drug that is dangerous. Therefore, marijuana should be illegal”, for instance, or “Judge Wilson believes that if a living thing is not a person, then one has the right to end its life. She also believes that a foetus is a person. Therefore, Judge Wilson concludes that no one has the right to end the life of a foetus.”

It turns out that conservative-minded people are quite a lot better at spotting false syllogisms when they have liberal conclusions, and vice versa. It wasn’t an enormous effect, but it was significant – in one of the experiments, conservatives spotted unsound arguments about 80% of the time when they had liberal conclusions, but only 60% when they had conservative ones, and the effect was almost exactly reversed for liberals. The effect was somewhat smaller in the other experiments, but it was seen in all three, which were carried on different groups of subjects.

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On one level, it isn’t a huge surprise – we know that we are more likely to believe things that support our prior beliefs. But it shocked me somewhat that it applies even at this most basic level, that even rudimentary logic gets derailed to an extent by partisanship.

I spoke to Brian Nosek, one of the authors of the study, and he said that surprised him too. “We think of the biases in politics being about our beliefs,” he said. “What this shows is that it has an effect even on the basic processes of reasoning. It shows how challenging these biases are to address; if I can’t see the dislogic in my arguments and you can’t see them in yours, how can we get to productive debate?”

It’s interesting to note as well that this is a very bipartisan arrangement. Both Left-wingers and Right-wingers find it harder, to roughly the same degree, to make accurate judgments in the face of an ideological headwind. This, incidentally, is also what another study – an upcoming meta-analysis to be published in Perspectives on Psychological Science – finds: a modest but consistent bias preventing us from reliably understanding arguments that undermine our beliefs, present almost equally in liberals and conservatives.

Nosek warns that it’s hard to be sure how accurate this is – “it’s the thing that’s most of interest but hardest to answer”, he says, and we need to be cautious – but certainly there’s no overwhelming evidence that either side is much worse than the others.

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These studies are quite powerful, statistically speaking, and have avoided some of the obvious pitfalls that can undermine scientific studies, so although you should never trust any single study implicitly, they’re a good bet. If they’re correct, what can we do? We’re all ideological to some degree or another; we all have tribes which we consciously or unconsciously identify with.

One thing is just to be extremely sceptical about yourself and your co-ideologists, and assume that a large number of the positions you take in the great ongoing culture war are wrong and you’ll never know which ones they are.

That’s especially true for the media. Both to the people writing it – they’re as blinkered (I’m as blinkered!) as anyone, and just as likely to fail to spot the flaws in convenient arguments – and to the people reading it. If you find yourself nodding along with some piece which purports to show how it is obvious that the solution to the Brexit impasse is exactly what you already thought it was, it’s worth remembering that there’s a good chance that the problems with their argument would be obvious to someone who disagreed. (Though trying to do this is really uncomfortable and unpleasant.)

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Nosek has another suggestion. One of the things that scientists do to avoid biasing their results is “preregistration”: essentially, publicly writing down your hypothesis in advance, so that you can’t, after you’ve got your data, chop it up in as many ways as it takes until you find something. Ironically enough, the “(Ideo)Logical” study itself was started before Nosek’s Centre for Open Science began preregistering studies; it gets around the data-fishing problem, though, by using the same tests on all three experiments and by replicating some of them.

He suggests we could do something similar. If you think some policy is good or bad – raising taxes, say – then say in advance what effect you think it will have, in explicit terms. I think a no-deal Brexit will be followed by at least two quarters of negative economic growth, for example. If, then, you don’t see what you were expecting, then it should give you some pause to think that your reasoning was influenced by your political beliefs.

This goes double for politicians and media pontificators who actually influence policy, of course. (Incidentally, this is very much what the “superforecasters” I wrote about recently think we should do, as well.)

Mostly, though, it’s just another reminder that pointing out the other side’s biases is a really un-self-aware thing to do; the important and useful thing to do is to be vigilant for your own. Remember the syllogism: All humans are biased; I am a human; therefore even I am biased.

PS: One of the syllogisms mentioned in this piece is logically unsound. Did you notice?