A patron has hired me to write a response to an article by an undergraduate “studying the classics at Indiana University Bloomington” called “Was Jesus a Historical Figure?” on her expansive website Tales of Times Forgotten. Her name is Spencer Alexander McDaniel. (A nice example of nominative determinism.)

She’s generally pretty good. Survey McDaniel’s site and you’ll find lots of reasonably well explicated things on many subjects in her field. Indeed you may enjoy a peruse and even like to follow her. My favorite, in my look-through so far, is her piece on the evidence for Alexander the Great, which adds even more examples of the great evidence we have to the ones I already enumerate in On the Historicity of Jesus, pp. 21-24 (and on this whole theme of “having evidence” ancient persons existed, see my article on Hannibal for a start).

But like everyone (including me) she doesn’t always get things right. She can be a mixed bag even in the same article.

For example, McDaniel’s piece debunking the Dark Ages has a lot of good material rightly debunking a lot of misconceptions about the Dark Ages. For instance, that wasn’t the era of witch hunting (the Inquisition, for example, was actually a much later phenomenon of a far more prosperous time) or of the kind of “armored knights” people usually imagine, and so on. And pretty much all educated persons knew the earth was a sphere. But it also was an age of decline and stagnation that did set us back a thousand years overall (see, for example, my chapter “The Dark Ages” in Christianity Is Not Great and previous articles here on the subject). McDaniel gets wrong many facts about the history of technology and science that mislead her into concluding otherwise. Indeed I’ll follow soon (maybe next month) with an article explaining where she (and others) lately go wrong on this.

But here I’ll analyze her lengthy case for a historical Jesus, as it was originally written. Because, note: After seeing this critique, McDaniel has since appended a notice confessing she doesn’t stand by everything in it, as it was written during her tenure in high school (which fact makes it, in my opinion, quite impressively composed even despite its errors). But the following critique remains instructive of why these original arguments were erroneous, and will be of use referring to if you encounter anyone who picks up from her or makes the same arguments on their own.

Here’s a quick hyperlinked table of contents for what’s to follow…

• Wrong and Right
• Getting Paul Wrong
• Getting Ancient Belief Systems Wrong
• Getting the Gospels Wrong
• Getting Logic Wrong
• Getting Josephus Wrong
• Getting Missing Data Wrong
• Getting Peter Wrong
• Getting Cultural Diffusion Wrong
• Conclusion

-:-

Wrong and Right

So, sometimes McDaniel has a lot of good points to make that she then ruins with a few bad facts and faulty inferences. As with the Dark Ages, so too with the historicity of Jesus. Despite McDaniel’s writing her article on that in 2018, she shows no awareness at all of the peer reviewed literature on the subject, particularly my book On the Historicity of Jesus, published in 2014. Her article on this subject was thus already out of date and obsolete the moment it was written.

Worse, McDaniel doesn’t seem to know that neither of the books she recommends on the subject—by Ehrman and Casey—are peer reviewed; and she strangely thinks Casey’s is the “more academic,” when in fact it’s the most crankish and polemical and devoid of sound argument; it’s Ehrman’s that’s actually the more academic, though still rife with documented errors. McDaniel’s third and final recommendation, meanwhile, The Jesus Legend, is an obsolete piece of fundamentalist apologetics, which is no more credible than hack mythicism—a defect McDaniel only comes close to admitting (see the review by Ken Olson; and for more, those of Neil Godfrey).

McDaniel seems to think it’s only “people on the internet” (and indeed, people with no credentials) who say Jesus didn’t exist. In fact, counting all scholars with relevant PhD’s who admit to historicity agnosticism, or at least the plausibility of it, there are now twelve. She also falsely claims “the major proponents of the Christ Myth theory all display a peculiar ignorance of critical Bible scholarship,” which is absolutely false of every single one of those twelve (proponents and sympathizers alike).

Meanwhile, my book arguing that Jesus’s historicity has odds of at best 1 in 3 is also the first to pass peer review in the century long history of arguing such a thesis (and indeed by a respected biblical studies press then run by faculty on the campus of the University of Sheffield). And its critics generally don’t honestly report or address what it argues or contains; a behavior that signals dogmatists circling wagons, not scholars sincerely confronting a thesis. That should warrant concern. And thus more care in arguing the contrary. Not less.

Nevertheless, much of what McDaniel says is correct, and an apt and needed corrective to a lot of dubious claims and bad reasoning littering the internet on this subject. Though he’d have done better to cite specific examples of who she is arguing against; instead she essentially invents an opponent, presumably based on random contacts with diverse arguers.

McDaniel is certainly right that there are a lot of bad internet hacks and poorly informed aficionados pushing bad logic and incorrect facts in aid of Jesus mythicism. Even some experts have really bad arguments, as McDaniel notes—such as those mythicists whose theories depend on the Pauline letters being littered with hundreds of interpolations…always conveniently supporting their theories. But also, “Quite frequently, especially in online publications, parallels” to other gods and religions that supposedly Christians copied, “are simply invented out of whole cloth with no regard whatsoever for the truth.” That’s true enough. (Emphasis on often, though. Which entails sometimes the parallels identified are genuine and apt; a logical and empirical fact McDaniel does not get.)

McDaniel is nevertheless also right to identify many Pauline letters as forgeries or of doubtful authenticity; to explain the Gospels’ authors and sources are unknown; and to explain that defending a historical Jesus does not mean defending the magical Jesus, rightly making clear she is “not trying to argue that Jesus was really born of a virgin, that he really performed miracles, that he really walked on water, or even that he really rose from the dead,” because “None of those things can be substantiated historically.”

McDaniel also rightly notes that the silence of Jesus’s contemporaries is not that great a proof of his non-existence if we accept he was far more of a nobody than the Gospels portray him as. A point I make myself in Chapter 8 of On the Historicity of Jesus, where my conclusion regarding that silence is that it has no effect on the existence or non-existence of Jesus—once we grant we are talking about a Jesus who actually wasn’t that famous. (Although McDaniel a touch overplays the unlikelihood of surviving records for Jesus; I give a more accurate account in OHJ.)

Similarly, McDaniel correctly concludes we can’t use the accounts of Tacitus and Pliny for the very reason that they aren’t independent sources: “since they both date to the second century, by which time…the mythical Christ had already been invented, they are hardly of much use for establishing Jesus’s historicity.”

So McDaniel gets some things right. But she also gets a lot wrong.

Getting Paul Wrong

Broadly speaking, where McDaniel goes wrong is in not actually addressing peer reviewed arguments against her assertions. She only addresses claims outside that context, or never interacts with the actual peer reviewed arguments she claims to be addressing; and thus straw man’s the case.

For example, McDaniel rightly starts with Paul, as the best (and IMO, the only) evidence historicists can attempt to call to their side. In OHJ, on my a fortiori side, I count the evidence in Paul as increasing the probability of historicity fourfold. In other words, I do indeed count Paul as evidence for historicity. Note this. Because it means anytime a critic claims I didn’t, you know they never read my book, and are therefore a dogmatist and not an honest scholar, no matter what credentials they can boast of. (See OHJ, Ch. 11, for a full discussion of the evidences in Paul, for and against historicity.)

I do count Paul as evidence against historicity on the other side of my margins of error. But that requires agreeing with me on some things. Things I think are pretty obvious and pretty undeniable; but to control for what may be biases on my side, I assume for the sake of argument those things are not as sure as I think they are, and accordingly count the evidence in Paul as much in favor of historicity as I can believe at all reasonable. And still I get a result for historicity of “probably not.” That’s how problematic and poor the evidence for Jesus really is.

Case in point: McDaniel says Paul “candidly admits that he never actually met Jesus in the flesh while he was still alive on earth.” Paul actually never says this. He never once says Jesus “was still alive on earth.” At any time. McDaniel is thus inserting an assumption about what Paul meant, that is not actually evidenced in Paul. This kind of slip is common among historians bent on maintaining a position not well supported by actual evidence: they conflate conjecture with evidence, and all of a sudden, such conjectures are offered to the public as “evidence” in their support. It is circular reasoning like this that led me to suspect that maybe this popular certainty Jesus existed was not actually founded on sound reasoning after all.

McDaniel performs this same illogical maneuver again when she says Paul met Jesus’s “closest disciple Peter.” Paul never says that. The word “disciple” is everywhere unknown to Paul. There are no “disciples” in Paul’s knowledge. Only apostles like himself. And Paul never says anything at all about Peter being “closest” to Jesus or in fact as ever having met Jesus at all—in any way other than Paul did, which was “in a revelation,” not in “flesh and blood.” Compare Galatians 1:11-12 with 1 Corinthians 15:1-9 and then 1 Corinthians 9:1 with Galatians 1:17-20: Paul does not mention Jesus ever “appearing” to Peter until after Jesus’s death; and apostles are only people who had a “revelation” of Jesus. Just as Paul says in Romans 16:25-26; and even Romans 10:14-16, where Paul reveals no Jews ever heard Jesus preach, except through apostles, “those sent,” apostellein, by which Paul everywhere else means those to whom a revelation was given.

McDaniel goes on to cite one of the only two items of evidence for historicity that can really be claimed: that Paul “does tell us that he knew Jesus’s ‘brother’ James.” To be exact, Paul does not say that, either. He says he met James “the Brother of the Lord,” Lord being a cultic title, not a personal name, for the figure also known as Jesus (literally Joshua, a common name, but also aptly meaning “God’s Savior”). Paul says all baptized Christians are Brothers of the Lord (OHJ, p. 108). Indeed from what we can tell in Paul, this sounds like an original name for their sect: the Brothers of the Lord (OHJ, pp. 582-92). Even at best, we cannot verify or adduce any evidence from Paul that he ever meant this literally; and there is even some evidence he didn’t. Either way, we can’t tell. This is not what an objective observer would call good evidence Jesus existed. In context it’s pretty terrible actually.

McDaniel similarly errs when she tries to argue that because “brother” means “from the same womb” that therefore it always meant direct and actual biological brother, but this is thoroughly refuted by Paul’s regular usage of “brother” fictively—as indeed was common in ancient salvation cults, but Paul even gives it an explicit theological and metaphysical basis: we are brothers because at baptism we are all adopted by God as his sons, and are therefore the brothers of Jesus, who is thereby the “firstborn” of “many brothers” (Romans 8:29; Galatians 4:6-7; etc.). That Paul routinely meant this word non-literally is as certain as anything can be in this matter, and therefore McDaniel’s argument here is really just an avocation of ignorance: a false fact-claim, producing a false inference.

In other words, if we read Paul by himself, we get no evidence of a historical Jesus. Just an astral being that apostles claimed to have met in revelations, to whom they were bound in brotherhood by a baptismal adoption as God’s sons. The Gospels would not be written for decades yet, a lifetime after the fact, by unknown persons, and whose narrative contents do not appear known to Paul in any significant way. So we cannot assume they inform Paul. That would be apologetics, not scholarship.

And that’s all McDaniel references. She doesn’t mention the only other evidence in Paul historicists can really cite (and which I also count a fortiori in favor), some vague allusions to Jesus’s parentage; which being so wholly allegorical and theological in nature, cannot really be established as meant literally either (see OHJ, pp. 575-82). Likewise Jesus having taken on a human body made of Jewish (indeed Davidic) flesh to recently die and be buried in: certainly Paul believed that; but never says where this occurred. We thus are left with total silence in Paul as to any of this historical drama playing out on earth.

To explain the otherwise astonishing scale of Paul’s silence regarding an earth-visit by Jesus, McDaniel resorts to the old and quite illogical canard that “Paul does not talk much about Jesus because his audiences are all baptized Christians who he assumes already know the full story of the gospel.” That’s refuted by the fact that Paul wrote 20,000 words repeatedly reminding his congregations of countless things they already knew. Indeed, that was his principle mode of arguing any point: to remind them of things he had already taught them. Over and over again. So why are none of those things anything to do with an earthly ministry of Jesus? That’s super weird. And cannot be so easily explained away as this. You really need to see the full force of this fact laid out in detail in the eleventh chapter of OHJ.

Meanwhile, and most remarkably, McDaniel thinks the only “mythicist” explanation for how “sayings of Jesus” could end up in Paul is that they are “interpolations” (I actually am not aware of any mythicist who argues this; some dubious radicals do argue for an absurd scale of interpolations in Paul, but not to this end). She clearly did not even read mainstream scholarship on this point, which all concurs many if not all of these sayings came to Paul by revelation. Because Paul himself explicitly says so. And never says any sayings came to him in any other way. You can’t bootstrap any historicity for Jesus by referencing post-atonement revelations from his heavenly spirit. Not unless you mean to argue the celestial spirit-Jesus really exists (as indeed all the first Christians certainly believed). But even that doesn’t get you to a Jesus on earth. That’s the problem.

Getting Ancient Belief Systems Wrong

McDaniel then says some completely garbled and misinformed things about the contents and dating of the Ascension of Isaiah that betray her not having actually researched it at all. But I’ll leave that to those who actually do want to do that research: see OHJ, pp. 36-48, and the scholarship there cited.

What’s worse is that McDaniel bizarrely asks of the “spiritual realm” atonement drama, “Where is the evidence for early Christian belief in this supposed ‘spiritual realm’? There is none; its proponents have just made it up.” Um. No they didn’t. The Ascension of Isaiah extensively refers to and describes that realm: mentioning “the firmament” above (the sublunar heaven) in which Satan and his angels rule and battle each other and where versions of every thing found on earth reside, and then describes seven more material levels of spiritual existence above that.

How McDaniel can think this wasn’t everywhere a Christian belief is unfathomable to me. What does she think Paul means when he describes people visiting “the third heaven” (2 Corinthians 12:1-4) or Pseudo-Paul announcing Satan is “Ruler of the Kingdom of the Air” (Ephesians 2:2) or Hebrews declaring Jesus had to shed his blood upon heavenly altars not earthly ones (Hebrews 9:22-25)? At any rate, the evidence Jews and Christians believed in such spiritual realms, and that they contained everything from castles and gardens and authorities to bodies and deaths and burials, is extensive (see OHJ, pp. 178-97).

Moreover, these beliefs were shared among other savior cults. For example, Plutarch tells us that in Osiris cult, practiced all over the empire and centered in the very province adjacent to Judea occupied by a massive Jewish community regularly traveling to and from, public myths narrated Osiris as an earthly historical Pharaoh in Egyptian history (which we know is false, due to a remarkably unbroken record of the rulers of Egypt dating back thousands of years), but the real teaching, Plutarch says—the one concealed from the public and shared only with ranking initiates—is that Osiris assumes a body of flesh in the sublunar heaven and is killed there by the Egyptian parallel to the Devil, after which Osiris resurrects and rises in triumph. If Osirians could teach this, Christians could just as well.

Getting the Gospels Wrong

Though she otherwise gets right much that’s wrong with the Gospels as sources, McDaniel nevertheless claims “the gospels contain details that can only be explained if Jesus was a historical figure.” This has long been claimed; but it simply does not hold up to any valid logical scrutiny, as many experts have repeatedly pointed out. I thoroughly cover this debacle in Chapter 5 of Proving History.

McDaniel likewise unfathomably claims that the Gospels being late, unsourced, local-community propaganda by unknown authors “does not in any way devalue the importance of the gospels as historical sources” (emphasis added). Um. Yes. It does. Quite a lot actually. In every other subject of history those are precisely the kind of sources historians deem almost the least reliable sources you can possibly have.

See my own brief discussion of this point in Sense and Goodness without God, pp. 246-47; Chapter 10 of On the Historicity of Jesus; but even more so Matthew Ferguson’s articles “Ancient Historical Writing Compared to the Gospels of the New Testament,” “When Do Contemporary or Early Sources Matter in Ancient History?,” “Eyewitness Recollections in Greco-Roman Biography versus the Anonymity of the Gospels,” “The Historical Reliability of Popular Biographies, Part 1: Framing the Comparison,” and “The Historical Reliability of Popular Biographies, Part 2: Redaction Criticism,” just for starters.

McDaniel here attempts to defend the Argument from Embarrassment, for example, but as numerous experts have concluded, it’s invalid in every case so far attempted in the Gospels. I thoroughly document this point in Proving History, pp. 124-69, backed by abundant peer reviewed literature concurring. That Jesus scholars continue using methods repeatedly debunked as bogus is indeed a serious problem indicting the reliability of the entire field itself.

Embarrassing things were often made up about heroes in antiquity. Attis castrated himself, among the most humiliating and embarrassing things to revere at the time; Romulus, as Quirinus one of the three principle gods of Rome, murdered his brother, the worst of all sins in Roman estimation; Hercules, even in his most glorifying myths, was condemned to clean shit out of stables; Aesop, in his own aggrandizing myth, was tried and executed for thievery and blasphemy. Heroes who were abused, crippled, condemned to lowly occupations, came from lowly origins, did damnable deeds, were convicted of crimes, were not rare in ancient mythology. In no way does this argue any of these people existed or any of those stories were true. I am rather astonished to see a Classicist not know this.

Indeed, being an anti-elite sect marketed to the poor and middle class, Christian myths had to exalt the humble and humiliate the grandiose. Jesus had to come from a lowly background and be crushed under the heel of the conniving and dishonest elite. That’s what makes him a populist hero. That in no way argues his story is true, any more than it does for Aesop, Jesus’s closest analog in extant literature (for Aesop see OHJ, pp. 222-27; for the whole trope of populist hero myths among Gentile and Jewish audiences: Not the Impossible Faith, pp. 55-63; with OHJ, pp. 209-12, 429-31).

Likewise, that later authors did not like Mark’s message and thus sought to change or alter it is not evidence that what Mark said was embarrassing to Mark, or anyone of his community; or before. To the contrary, internal analysis shows none of those things later authors disliked was embarrassing to Mark. So the Argument from Embarrassment does not apply, and thus cannot rescue historicity.

Cases in point:

• Nazareth

Matthew reveals a Nazareth origin was an expectation created by scripture (Matthew 2:23), which scriptures then included different books and said different things than they do now (OHJ, pp. 88-92). And accordingly, Mark never evinces any embarrassment or surprise at it. And indeed our earliest sources discussing it seem to understand his Nazareth origin as a secret allegory for something else. Exactly what public exoteric myths were designed to do (as Jesus is made to explain himself in Mark 4:9-13).

Indeed grammatically “Nazarene” (actually “Nazorian,” which does not mean someone from Nazareth) appears to derive from an early name the Christians adopted for themselves that did not mean hailing from Nazareth. And as no other source attests the contrary that’s independent of Mark, linking Jesus with a town of a similar name appears to have been an original innovation of Mark’s own mythmaking. It was never heard of before that.

Notice how later authors only try to harmonize it with scriptures having the messiah hailing from Bethlehem after Mark invented a Nazareth origin. That’s a dead giveaway. Had there previously been a problem of Jesus hailing from Nazareth instead of Bethlehem, attempts to solve it would have long predated Mark. But Mark has no knowledge of any such conflict or concern, demonstrating there was none. Which means Jesus’s Nazareth origin had not been invented yet. That only very late authors like John exploited this innovation to sell populist rhetoric about humble people being superior to the haughty upper classes only reinforces the mythic nature of the attribution.

(For all of these points and the evidence supporting them see, first, Proving History, pp. 142-45; then OHJ, pp. 400-02. And on John’s late invention of a social-class rhetoric around Nazareth: Not the Impossible Faith, pp. 63-74.)

• Carpenter

McDaniel incorrectly claims “the fact that the author of the Gospel of Matthew changes Mark’s” identification of Jesus as a carpenter to his father being the carpenter “indicates that early Christians were troubled by the fact that their savior had been a practitioner of such a lowly trade as carpentry.” There is zero evidence of any Christians being troubled by this. Least of all Matthew. In fact Matthew is the most Jewish of the Gospels; and Jewish audiences expected Rabbis to ply a trade. Every great Rabbi in history was a tradesman in some craft or other, from carpenters and stonemasons to sandal-makers and tent-makers (on this whole point, true even for populist pagan audiences as well, see, again, Not the Impossible Faith, pp. 55-63).

What McDaniel seems to be missing here is that the word used is actually the generic tekton, builder—not carpenter specifically. The word was often popularly used to refer to the Creator, the Builder. Mark is more likely saying allegorically that Jesus is the Creator (as Paul would agree: 1 Corinthians 8:6; cf. Colossians 1:15-16), and those questioning him are not getting the irony of calling him that without recognizing it. Matthew is more likely disagreeing with Mark over who can properly be called the Creator in this allegory, Jesus or his Father; so he changes the myth to capture his own desired symbolism. At the very least, we cannot rule this out (see OHJ, p. 441). As the fact that the Gospels are composed heavy in metaphor and allegory is well demonstrable, with such frequency in fact that we can never assume anything in them is being meant literally, no matter how much we might wish to (see Ch. 10 of OHJ for an extensive list of examples).

• Baptism by John

McDaniel repeats the oft-claimed and completely erroneous assessment that “baptism was for the remission of sins” ergo “if Jesus was baptized, that directly implies that he had sins that needed to be forgiven” and “if Jesus was baptized by John, that implies that John was his spiritual superior.” Neither is true. And this has been pointed out by many scholars before in the peer reviewed literature. I discuss this thoroughly in Proving History (pp. 145-48).

Mark actually uses the baptism by John to invent a very convenient legend that even the great and famous John the Baptist himself openly declared Jesus his superior and successor. Read Mark 1: that’s what John explicitly does, completely refuting the tired thesis that this story meant anything else. This is what Mark is doing. Not “preserving something embarrassing,” but inventing something extremely useful.

The whole baptism scene in Mark is actually an aetiological myth illustrating and explaining Christian baptism generally: baptism for Christians was submission to and adoption by God, as his son. Ergo Mark has Jesus submit to and be adopted by God, as his son. In the same baptism ceremony Christians practiced. Mark is very explicit about this, too. Again, read it. This is not a sinner coming to be cleansed; this is a supplicant coming to inaugurate his submission to and adoption by God. Notice how Mark says the others baptized confessed their sins first; but Jesus does not. Thus the notion that it would be “assumed” he had sins to confess is refuted by the very structure Mark gives the story.

Theologically, Jesus’s body of flesh would always have inherited the stain of original sin, meaning the potential for it to cause sin (not necessarily it having already done so), which it would need to be cleansed of before God could adopt him in that form. And this, too, is a perfect capturing of Paul’s entire doctrine of Baptism (see Romans 7-8) and of the flesh-spirit dichotomy (1 Corinthians 15:35-58). And as many scholars have observed, Mark is allegorizing the teachings of Paul (e.g. Tom Dykstra, Mark: Canonizer of Paul; Joel Marcus, “Mark the Interpreter of Paul,” New Testament Studies 46.4 (2000): 473-87; Thomas Nelligan, The Quest for Mark’s Sources: An Exploration of the Case for Mark’s Use of First Corinthians (2015); Oda Wischmeyer & David Sim, eds., Paul and Mark: Comparative Essays; and David Oliver Smith, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Paul: The Influence of the Epistles on the Synoptic Gospels).

• And So On

All the same can be said of the crucifixion: many mythical heroes suffered similar fates yet were glorified anyway; scripture already glorified such fates for the righteous chosen of god; it was necessary to Christian theology regardless of whether it was true (read Hebrews 9); and previous Jewish hero literature already glorified crucified heroes as atoning for Israel’s sins exactly like Jesus—in fact his myth is practically a copy of theirs. So we no longer need “it must be true” to explain it, any more than we need “it must be true” to explain the castration of Attis, the fratricide of Remus, the defilement of Inanna or Osiris, or any other “shocking” thing mythmakers invented of their heroes.

You can see my thorough analyses of this point, with numerous examples, in Proving History, pp. 139-41; Not the Impossible Faith, pp. 17-50; and On the Historicity of Jesus, pp. 610-16. That latter section particularly dismantles the notion that Jews did not nor would countenance a murdered hero or messiah: in fact Jewish lore was full of such notions, and had been since a dying Christ was invented by the forgers of Daniel over a hundred years earlier (Ibid., pp. 73-87).

In every case we can see that McDaniel’s absolutist rhetoric, that “the reason Mark tells this story can therefore only be because it really happened and everyone knew it,” is just really bad logic, easily refuted with any plausible contrary explanation of the same evidence for which there is at least as much evidence as for McDaniel’s thesis. And for any case she could mention in the Gospels, it turns out, there is always equally good evidence for contrary explanations. Ergo her explanation cannot be maintained even as the more probable, much less as the “only” one.

Getting Logic Wrong

McDaniel then elaborately tries to argue that because there are Aramaicisms and Jewish character to the teachings and stories in the Gospels that therefore Jesus existed. This is a non sequitur. And a really bad one at that. There is a reason David Hackett Fischer could fill hundreds of pages of fallacies from the peer reviewed literature in Historians’ Fallacies: historians often suck at logic, and badly. They need to see to that.

Aramaic was spoken across two continents for a thousand years; it in no way is unique to or indicative of even first century Judea, much less “of Jesus.” Likewise the Jewishness of anything in the Gospels. Jews did not cease to exist after Jesus. And Jesus was not the only Jew. Obviously Jewish Christians (and even studious Gentile Christians) continued well past even the writing of the Gospels (Matthew was written by one), and could continue inventing very Jewish things for Jesus to have said and done, and do it in language distinctive of Jewish authors and audiences. That tells us nothing as to the historicity of Jesus.

I’ve already exhaustively covered this fallacy elsewhere, noting a number of experts concurring on the point, so I won’t belabor it further here. But if you want to dip your toe in that, start with Proving History, pp. 185-86 (with pp. 175-77), and my discussion of the Fallacy of Aramaicism in respect to Maurice Casey. I also provide a brief summary in respect to Bart Ehrman’s deployment of this same fallacy (in Item 27 and Item 28).

Similarly, McDaniel illogically says it is “not a reasonable conclusion” to doubt the historicity of someone whose only record of existence is extensively mythical, because “there are similar legends about nearly every historical figure from antiquity.” That’s another non sequitur; more precisely, a false analogy. That many historical figures underwent some mythologization does not entail they are just as likely to be real as figures who underwent immense mythologization. “Somewhat” is not the same as “immensely.” To the contrary, the data clearly show the more mythologized the figure, the less likely they existed.

Moreover, McDaniel is here confusing prior with posterior probabilities, a common mistake historians make who don’t understand the logic of their own science. The more mythologized someone is, the less likely they are to have existed. That’s a demonstrable fact. And indeed it tops out at around no better than a 1 in 3 chance for anyone as mythologized as Jesus (which is almost as mythologized as any figure could be). Thus to be sure a person that mythologized was real, we need good evidence counter-balancing all that mythification. Otherwise we have to conclude they probably didn’t exist. That’s the role of evidence in determining the posterior probability: when we lack evidence someone existed, the prior probability remains the posterior probability. So if Jesus starts as unlikely to exist, he ends as unlikely to exist. Unless we have good enough evidence to reverse that conclusion.

As I wrote when explaining this to James McGrath:

If you put Jesus and everyone else as mythologized as he is into a hat, and drew one out at random, the odds you’d draw a historical person are no better than 1 in 3—and possibly as bad as 1 in 15 (OHJ, Ch. 6). Because this cannot be circularly prejudged—so we cannot say in advance whether the person drawn out of that hat is Jesus or not. The odds must be the same. For Jesus as for anyone else in the hat. That can only be changed with evidence—that is, evidence specifically that Jesus is more likely historical than the others in that hat. Notably, exactly what McGrath wants to say.

For instance, if for some reason Julius Caesar were in that hat (he isn’t, but let’s pretend he is), the prior odds he’d be historical would be 1 in 3—the odds upon merely drawing his name from the hat—but the evidence would still be overwhelming that he nevertheless existed, totally crushing that 3 to 1 against into millions to one in favor. So we need evidence. And that’s what we lack for Jesus.

McDaniel herself presents a good example: Pythagoras. Heavily mythologized. So why do we believe he was real? “[W]e know he was a real person because he is mentioned shortly after his death by several of his near-contemporaries, including Xenophanes of Kolophon, Alkmaion of Kroton, and Herakleitos of Ephesos.” Precisely what we don’t have for Jesus. If these authors merely mentioned, as Paul does, that they met Pythagoras in visions from heaven, plus some fictive brothers from a society of his worshipers, and never placed him on earth, we would in fact doubt the historicity of Pythagoras. So also we should Jesus.

Getting Josephus Wrong

McDaniel claims of the infamous Testimonium Flavianum that (my emphasis):

Most historians agree that the core of the passage is authentic because it contains phrases that are characteristic of Josephus, but which a later Christian forger would be extremely unlikely to use, especially in describing Jesus or Christians. For instance, Josephus calls Christians a “tribe,” a word which no Christian writer is ever attested as using in this context. Josephus calls Jesus “a wise man,” a phrase that a Christian writer would be extremely unlikely to use while describing his divine Savior.

This is all false. There is nothing in the TF that is unique to Josephus or unused in Christian authors. Indeed, when we compare it to the usages of Eusebius, there is nothing peculiar in it not found in Eusebius! But plenty that is peculiar for Josephus. Which is why many scholars suspect Eusebius of forging it (though I have noted before this same evidence could also implicate instead Eusebius’s predecessor and teacher, and Origen’s successor, Pamphilus). See my article “Josephus on Jesus? Why You Can’t Cite Opinions Before 2014” and my thorough analysis (citing scholars concurring) in On the Historicity of Jesus, pp. 332-42.

As Ken Olson has repeatedly demonstrated (in “A Eusebian Reading of the Testimonium Flavianum” in 2013, op. cit., etc.), “some of the language used in this section of the Testimonium is paralleled in Eusebius’ work, but not in Josephus,” giving several examples, including “tribe of Christians,” which he notes “occurs twice elsewhere” in Eusebius; while such a use never appears in Josephus, which is especially weird because Josephus is fond of referencing and describing sects like this, yet the TF never uses the procedures or language he does for describing other sects. Which is clear evidence even in itself he didn’t write it. Likewise, Josephus never calls anyone “a wise man.” But “Eusebius calls Jesus…a wise man (sophos anēr) in the Prophetic Eclogues” (Olson, “The Testimonium Flavianum, Eusebius, and Consensus” 2013). Hm. Curious that, eh?

It is clear here that McDaniel is either relying on internet amateurs or Christian apologists who didn’t check their facts, rather than the latest peer reviewed and expert literature from bona fide scholars who have actually studied this question in Josephus; or else she is not checking their latest work. She also relies on faulty logic, irrationally imagining, for example, that a forger aiming to pass this off as Josephan would not think to open it by copying a typical Josephan opening. Come now. Forgers may not be geniuses, but they are at least smart enough to do something like that. Such evidence is thus not indicative of authenticity any more than forgery and thus cannot stand as an argument against the latter.

McDaniel also apparently isn’t aware that the argument from the Arabic fragment has been refuted—it was proved recently to derive from Eusebius and thus does not preserve a pre-Eusebean variant of the text as was once claimed (see my most thorough discussion in “The End of the Arabic Testimonium”). It’s therefore no longer evidence for the TF’s authenticity.

All of this illustrates the importance of keeping up with the literature; and here we may be seeing the difference in competence between an undergraduate and a graduate student showing through. But it also looks like McDaniel may be relying on internet amateurs and apologists rather than the actual peer reviewed scholarship she should be—violating even her own professed standards.

For example, McDaniel argues at one point that the TF’s awkward and illogical position is not indicative of interpolation (though really it is) because “Josephus frequently breaks up other narratives with tangential anecdotes, a tendency which can be explained by the fact that ancient historians did not use footnotes.” This “footnotes” argument is a giveaway: it’s a claim I only see coming from amateurs and apologists. For instance, this sports writer, Colin Green. An amateur internet apologist.

As I wrote there:

I don’t know what peer reviewed scholar has made this “footnote” claim (Green cites no one). But they’d have to be remarkably incompetent to do so. A footnote is a commentary or digression on something just stated in the main text. The TF is neither. It’s wholly un-anchored to anything in the narrative. It has no apparent function there at all. It comments on nothing just said. It expands on nothing just said. It contributes nothing to that chapter’s narrative point or purpose.

That’s what we mean by the passage breaking the narrative flow. Josephus always explains his digressions (unless their function is obvious; but the TF can’t claim that); he links them to the story he is telling, or says why he is digressing from that story. To just insert an irrelevant vignette contrary to the entire thesis he is assembling stories to tell? Not what Josephus ever does. It’s in fact outright bizarre—for any ancient author (other than authors of Miscellanea, which Josephus never was).

McDaniel also falsely claims “there is no indication that early Christians would have had reason to quote” the TF before Eusebius. To the contrary. Origen stated many reasons to have done so (OHJ, pp. 335-36). It’s therefore weird he has no knowledge of it. And many other Christian authors had reason to quote it precisely because it was a priceless testimony in their favor from a renowned and Jewish source. Not because they needed testimonies to historicity, but because they would have prized respectable Jewish testimonies to their Lord’s goodness, genius, powers, achievements, and influence. So it is really strange no one ever heard of it or saw any use for it to boast of beforehand. Especially Origen.

McDaniel then moves on to the other passage where Josephus mentions a James being executed, the brother of a certain Jesus, attaching the label “the one called Christ.” This she claims “all historians…universally agree is authentic,” which is false, as I and several other historians have indeed called it out as having been altered. My peer reviewed article proving it has been reproduced for easy access in Hitler Homer Bible Christ. McDaniel seems not to even know this article exists. For when she does reference its thesis she attributes it to me as “a blogger,” never cites the article, and does not appear to know what’s in it—because she attempts some amateurish arguments against its thesis that are already refuted in it.

For example, McDaniel incorrectly claims this brief mention “strongly indicates in favor of the authenticity of the Testimonium Flavianum” because “the terse manner in which Josephus happens to just casually mention Jesus implies that he has already been described to the reader in much greater depth,” but the opposite is the case. If Josephus wrote this and the TF, he would here reference the TF explicitly: as indeed he does even for more obvious back references, for instance in this very passage where he says “as we have told you already” when he references a previous discussion of Ananus, and “as we have already observed” when he references a previous discussion of the Sadducees. That there is no such reference here to the TF (an even more obscure matter and thus even more in need of mention) is thus actually evidence against it having existed (see Richard Carrier, “Origen, Eusebius, and the Accidental Interpolation in Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 20.200,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 20.4 [2012]: 489-514, reproduced in HHBC; cf. pp. 495-96, which gives numerous reasons why even more than a cross-reference would be required here, given the strange incongruities of this narrative with that one).

Likewise, McDaniel claims “it would have been recklessly ambiguous for Josephus to just mention someone named ‘Jesus’ without any further explanation,” rather “If Josephus were really referring to ‘Jesus, son of Damneus’, the passage would have originally said ‘Jesus, son of Damneus’.” Evidently unaware that my paper actually argues it did. Moreover, it also argues against the presumption it had to. McDaniel does not seem aware of either argument and gives no rebuttal to either. This is careless and irresponsible scholarship. I would advise anyone who wants to perform above the level of amateur to actually read and address the peer reviewed literature they are challenging before attempting to gainsay it.

Worse, the “Josephus would never do that” argument is refuted by numerous examples of Josephus in fact doing that. I strongly suspect McDaniel foolishly trusted that crank amateur liar Tim O’Neill, without checking my responses exposing O’Neill’s lies and errors, including regarding this very point. For someone who rails against the reliability of internet amateurs, to then rely herself on internet amateurs is just an embarrassing hypocrisy. That’s not going to get you into grad school. Do better. Please.

Getting Missing Data Wrong

McDaniel claims “there is absolutely no evidence that anyone even questioned the historical existence of Jesus until the eighteenth century.” That’s false; there is in fact evidence of it from as early as the second century (see OHJ, pp. 350-51). But it’s also a non sequitur (Ibid., “Missing Evidence: Contra Myth,” pp. 349-56). Because it’s a logically invalid argument from silence (on which: Proving History, pp. 117-19).

McDaniel herself just got done explaining why we can expect almost all evidence to be lost. Even for the ordinary reasons she gives (with which I concur: OHJ, pp. 293-08, 356-58). And she didn’t even get to the fact that even what little evidence was preserved, was preserved by late orthodoxists, not other or earlier sects of Christianity (or any non-Christians at all for that matter). Which has hugely skewed the record (OHJ, pp. 275-77).

We only get to read what late historicist Christians wanted us to read. Much of which even mainstream scholarship has established was forged or doctored (OHJ, pp. 214-22). We don’t get to read hardly any of the literature of all their rival sects, and almost none from any of the sects of the first century (OHJ, pp. 146-52, 306-08, 315-23, 580-81; even the Ascension of Isaiah was excised and meddled with: OHJ, pp. 36-48). Including the original, foundational sect that started it all—the Hebraic, Torah observant Christianity of Peter (OHJ, p. 146). Indeed, 1 Peter, James, and Jude, the only letters with any real chance of being written by its founders, evince no knowledge of Jesus ever having been on earth! (OHJ, pp. 528-31)

Likewise the only evidence coming from actual Jewish sources (like the Talmud, or lost writings of the Torah-observant Christian sects employed as sources for Epiphanius) places Jesus in a completely different historical place and period (a hundred years earlier, under Hasmonean and not Roman rule: OHJ, pp. 281-89). Yet apart from those late, second-hand references that reveal such sects existed, all the writings of those sects were destroyed. We get to hear nothing else of them, and nothing at all from them. Why? What might having those records change how we think of the origins and evolution of Christianity? And if those Christians could wholly fabricate a historical Jesus of their own (as even McDaniel must agree they did, as they completely changed when and how he lived and died), why couldn’t other Christians have done the same? You can’t claim it’s so implausible after having seen it done.

So when we add all that up, why does McDaniel think there would be evidence of people gainsaying historicity? Where would that come from?

It can’t come from the first forty years of the sect’s spread, as no one, so far as we have any evidence, was claiming Jesus lived on earth then; so no one would have had any reason to challenge the claim—because no such claim existed to be challenged. We know many sections of Paul’s letters have been deleted (e.g. OHJ, pp. 261 n. 14; 280 n. 50; 511 n. 4; 582); and we know many of his letters were removed from the record (e.g. OHJ, p. 280 n. 50). What did they say, do you think, that warranted not preserving them or even excising them? Likewise all the other correspondence of all other apostles and church communities for the whole first hundred years of the church expanding across three continents and two empires. What happened to it? Why don’t we have it? What did it say?

You cannot argue from the silence of documents you don’t have. “None of those lost letters mention the Jesus drama only took place in the heavens” is not a statement you can make. Because you don’t have those letters. Nor any description of what was, and was not, in them. We don’t even get to read any critics of Christianity or any rival sects of Christianity, at all, until well over a hundred years had passed (and even then, only through the distorting lens of their enemies; we rarely get to read anything they wrote themselves)—by which time no one would have had access anymore to the truth of whether Jesus existed or not. Thus no one could gainsay it anymore, at least not based on any evidence. It was all gone by then.

Hence the first actual critic of Christianity we ever get to hear about is Celsus, writing 130 years after Christianity began. Why don’t we get to hear from any critics before that? A hundred years of criticism erased from the record. Why? What were those critics saying? And also why don’t we get to hear from any rival sects before that? A hundred years of alternative Christianities erased from the record. Why? What were those sects saying? Even the heresiologists at the turn of the third century only addressed Christian sects of Christianity’s second hundred years, not the first. So we don’t even get to hear from those original Christianities even from their critics. All their documents and teachings are inaccessible to us. So we can’t be making claims now about what they did or didn’t say about historicity.

Indeed why don’t we even get to see what Celsus himself wrote? We only know of some of it as quoted by Origen, his Christian opponent half a century later. The original, destroyed. And yet, from what we can tell even from that, other than the Gospels Celsus had no information whatever about the first century of Christianity; he had no access to any documents to check any of the claims in the Gospels by (such as to confirm the Jesus in them ever even lived). Celsus simply assumed the Gospels were embellishing on some real guy. Because he had no other sources to judge by. Why did he have no other sources to judge by?

In the end, you cannot logically claim that Celsus didn’t challenge the historicity of Jesus because Jesus was really historical. Celsus had zero information, no data at all, to ascertain that. So his basing that on the Gospels was as unreliable then as it is now—indeed even more so, as our modern forensic tools of source analysis did not even exist. And if Celsus had no data on that, then neither would anyone else have. By that time, the invention of an earthly Jesus could not be challenged. No documents, no living soul, remained to check such a claim. (See my article “How Did Christianity Switch to a Historical Jesus?”)

“So,” you might say, “Okay, yeah, by then there was no evidence left but the Gospels, and no way to tell whether they were wholly made up or not; but what about in the century before Celsus was born? What happens when we check what critics and challengers were saying then, precisely when data, like documents and witnesses, might still have existed?” Good question. Why don’t you check them? Oh right. Because every single thing they said has been destroyed. It doesn’t even survive in the quotations of their opponents, in the way Celsus’s destroyed critique survives in fragments through Origen.

We literally don’t get to hear one single thing from any of those critics.

Doesn’t that disturb you? Doesn’t it make you question rather than lean on the illogical argument that “they didn’t challenge the historicity of Jesus”? Because you don’t know that. So why are you claiming it? Indeed why are you so sure of it? Based on what? Total, absolute ignorance? How is that logical?

Indeed, it’s worse than that. We face not only the total absence of evidence regarding whether or not anyone did challenge Jesus’s historicity when people still could, but we know for a fact that it was all eliminated from the record (either directly or by neglect) by the historicists themselves, the very and only ones who got to preserve to us any information from the past about such questions as this. In no way would “I know what they said” in such circumstances pass muster in any other field of inquiry. To the contrary, we would be deeply suspicious of what those historicists chose to withhold from us. We would not be confident it supported them. Surely it didn’t. That’s why they destroyed it.

(And no, this required no conspiracy, at any time in history. Just independent actors who shared common attitudes about what was worth preserving and what worth eliminating or neglecting, operating over centuries: OHJ, pp. 276, 291, 303, 305, 609.)

Getting Peter Wrong

I won’t bother much with McDaniel’s face-palmingly illogical argument for historicity that “new religions are almost always led by a charismatic leader,” as if Peter and Paul were not charismatic leaders founding the actual Christianity we know.

That’s as dumb an argument for historicity as attempting to claim the angels Moroni and Gabriel must exist, because who else could have founded Mormonism and Islam? Well, obviously, we don’t think Moroni and Gabriel existed, and certainly not that they, though claimed as the founders of Mormonism and Islam respectively, actually were so. No. We know the people who claimed to have met them in revelations were the real founders—Joseph Smith and Mohammed (or whoever it was who claimed the revelations from Gabriel now assembled as the Koran, his name hardly matters). Obviously on mythicism Peter (i.e. Cephas, “The Rock”) is the Joseph Smith or Mohammed of Christianity. And we can no more claim his celestial source real than can they.

McDaniel claims Peter can’t have founded Christianity because he was “a poor leader” and not “much of an innovator” but there is absolutely zero evidence of that. The portrayals of him in the Gospels and Acts are polemical inventions, not reliable accounts of the man. We can’t establish them to be based on any real information at all. Whereas when we look at evidence that can in any way be trusted, we get rather the opposite observation: Paul himself had to admit Peter outclassed him as a leader (Gal. 2:9; 1:18; 1 Cor. 1:12 and 3:21-22; 1 Cor. 9:5); and if Paul could be such a potent leader and innovator as he was, a fortiori Peter was even more so. There is no basis on which to conclude otherwise.

Getting Cultural Diffusion Wrong

McDaniel repeats the Christian apologetic canard that no Jews would ever have picked up cultural diffusion from their pagan conquerers because “devout Jews … utterly abhorred anything pagan.” This is so provably false I cannot believe anyone still takes this argument seriously.

Almost everything we think distinctive of Judaism, its apocalypticism, dualism, flaming hell, elaborate angelology and demonology, belief in mass resurrection, identification of Satan as the enemy of God, was all lifted from their pagan conquerors—and at precisely the time when they were collecting and composing ardent polemical literature about how much they abhorred and intended to reject all things pagan (i.e. what we now call The Old Testament).

Before the Jews adopted all that machinery from Persian Zoroastrianism (see Not the Impossible Faith, pp. 85-99), Judaism had none of those features. It had no resurrection belief (the dead stayed dead, unless woken by witches). No apocalypticism (it was, to the contrary, eternalist). Satan was one of God’s right-hand agents, and there were no great divine enemies of God. The world was not defined as locked in a battle between cosmic good and evil (God was the author of all). There was no Hell. Only a few lucky saints got to live in Heaven. Its angelology and demonology was hardly elaborate (much less awash with Persian names like Asmodeus).

So it is clearly false to say Jews would never have adopted pagan ideas when they abhorred pagan ideas. The history of Judaism itself refutes this.

McDaniel is trapped in a naive folk-anthropology that thinks cultural diffusion of religious ideas works like, “Hey, let’s go borrow these foreign ideas into our religion!” When in fact it works more like, “Hey, we see powerful religions have these features; our religion being true must also be powerful; ergo our religion must always have had those features too and we just need God to confirm that to us through visions and hidden messages in his scriptures.” Thus, they are never imagined to be “pagan ideas.” They are always “Jewish ideas.” That the pagans must have stolen. That that isn’t factually true is irrelevant; religious innovators are not anthropologists, they’re propagandists (on how religion often innovates by claiming innovations are actually natively ancient: Not the Impossible Faith, pp. 129-34).

The parallels Christianity really does share with surrounding religious trends are more subtle and generic (though still much more numerous and telling) than McDaniel seems aware. I document the real ones extensively in On the Historicity of Jesus (pp. 96-108, 164-75). What you don’t find there, probably didn’t check out. The process of syncretism was common at the time and entailed taking foreign frameworks and ideas and merging them with Jewish particulars and adjustments, thus transforming pagan ideas into new Jewish ones, which are then sold as old Jewish ideas.

In all these savior cults under the Empire (Egyptian, Persian, Syrian, Thracian, Mycenaean, and so on) the similarities shared across multiple comparable movements are the borrowed framework; the differences are the local culture’s adaptation. Thus everything different between Christianity and other savior cults across the Empire was the Jewish part; everything shared, is the adopted apparatus. That’s how the cultural diffusion of religion actually works. And it is as unmistakably evident in the formation of Christianity as it is in the formation of every other well-documented savior cult of the age.

This is not the naive, internet-hack argument of “Jesus is just a copycat of Horus” or whatever nonsense. McDaniel is right to reject that, in all its countless and often ridiculous guises. But she herself is wrong to think this also applies to all the real evidence of outside causal influence in the forming of the original Christian sect of Judaism. To see that, you have to read my peer reviewed survey in OHJ.

Accordingly, I won’t go into what’s right or wrong about McDaniel’s survey of purported parallels. Because he’s not even talking about the right thing. At no point does she ever address the real parallels, which are structural and ideological, not superficial and incidental. And even with respect to taking down shoddy “internet mythicism” her survey is useless, because she never quotes or addresses any actual causal claim from any actual mythicist.

McDaniel also doesn’t do a very good job outlining pertinent facts (so I can’t even recommend her survey for that). Indeed she often again conflates her own conjectures with evidence, such as when she thinks Christians were ignorant of Mithraism when they admitted its similarities; the evidence is quite the contrary. But as McDaniel makes no useful point out of that anyway, there really is no point in responding to her errors and omissions here at all. For instance, she does not go into any of the literature regarding Mithraic baptism, soteriology, fictive kinship, and communal meals. She doesn’t even discuss the passion (patheôn) of Mithras—she is right it was not a death; but it was still some form of great suffering by which Mithras acquired power over death that he could share with those in his communion. And these are the relevant parallels, because these were shared across all the savior cults, including Christianity.

Likewise for every other savior cult McDaniel barely even touches on (if she even does at all), and never with enough accuracy.

So there just isn’t anything of use to read here from McDaniel.

Conclusion

In the end McDaniel relies on the apologetic fallacy that this weak and ambiguous evidence in Paul and the Gospels is “overwhelming evidence” for the historicity of Jesus.

Even insofar as one can honestly claim it is even evidence at all for such a thing, it is nowhere near “overwhelming.” If you want to see what “overwhelming” evidence looks like, look at the countless examples I’ve catalogued: see my article on Spartacus and all the other linked examples in its opening paragraph, particularly the article on Hannibal that expands on this very general point. Jesus does not come anywhere near this standard.

So the fact that someone needs to say this—that scant, weak, and insecure evidence is “overwhelming” evidence—that they need to resort to such hyperbole contrary to any plain look at the facts, is damning. It implies a desperate emotional need rather than a sober examination of the case. One should ask why. Why is it so important that such lies and errors and hyperbole are needed to avoid confronting even the possibility Jesus didn’t exist? And why is that emotional desperation so rapidly clouding the judgment even of people who’ve demonstrated they really ought to know better?

Your guess is as good as mine.