Following Wells, Martin postulates “four layers of Christian thinking,” the earliest of which “consists of Paul’s teaching of ‘Christ crucified’ in which Jesus is not placed in a historical context and the biographical details of his life are left unspecified.”^32 Wells and Martin do not deny that there are somedetails about Jesus in these early sources. But the issue concerns whether the New Testament writers knew more than a minimal amount of data about Jesus and whether they even knew that he lived during the time traditionally assigned to him. Martin states: “there is no good evidence that they believed that these events occurred at the beginning of the first century.”^33 Rather, these details emerged “only at the end of the first century.”
In order to further evaluate this scenario, we will look at the three chief avenues pursued by Martin himself: Paul’s admittedly early information about Jesus, the dating of the Gospels, and extrabiblical sources. It is my contention that Martin errs in an extraordinary number of his central claims, and in each of these areas.
27 These subjects will be addressed further in chapter 5 below.
28 Michael Martin, The Case Against Christianity(Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1991), chapter 2.
29 Ibid., pp. 59, 65, 85, 90–91, 95–96.
30 Ibid., p. 37. Martin concludes: “Wells’s argument against the historicity of Jesus is sound . . . .” (p. 67).
31 Ibid., p. 67.
32 Ibid., p. 59.
33 Ibid., p. 85; cf. pp. 65, 67.
1.The earliest epistles of Paul
Martin admits that from the genuine Pauline letters we do learn some claimed information about Jesus, especially concerning his death and resurrection. In spite of this, Paul does not seem to know many details about Jesus; we cannot even conclude that he knew that Jesus was a first century figure.^35
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