After ten years of observing the field after publishing my academic study on the subject, I find there are generally only two reasons to remain confident in the historicity of Jesus: a desperate faith-based need to; and a disinterest in actually checking. The former is, of course, why believers can’t engage in honest debates over the historicity of Jesus: merely entertaining the proposition requires them first to admit their religion is false (whereas, conversely, nonbelievers are entirely content with any of the “historical Jesuses” mainstream scholars now construct). We all knew this going in (see On the Historicity of Jesus, pp. xii, 14, 18–19, 601–02, 617). What is surprising is how many people join the second camp, showing no genuine interest in actually checking if Jesus’s historicity is something we should be confident in.
There is also, of course, the unfortunate public who believe there are mountains of evidence for a historical Jesus because they keep being told that. But that tends to have the opposite effect, when they check and find they were lied to about that. The evidence is actually scant, vague, weak, and problematic. And if you don’t admit that to them from the start, you’ll lose them. Because people don’t like being conned. The exaggerative hyperbole of historicists is their own worst enemy. But today my interest is in a certain segment of historicist scholars—not the hostiles who run the con, but the friendlies who still believe we should be confident Jesus existed, and why they still believe that.
The Problem
Bart Ehrman, for example, is a hostile: he had repeatedly refused to even read either of the two peer reviewed studies finding doubt the more credible posture (my On the Historicity of Jesus, and Raphael Lataster’s Questioning the Historicity of Jesus; I’m told he denies this now, and claims to have read my book, but he has never published anything in respect to it). One can only speculate on his reasons (stubbornness, ego, peer pressure, intellectual inertia, fearing a loss of financial success or social status, family issues, who knows). There may be different reasons for every individual who puts themself in this camp, even a congeries of reasons in each case. The only thing they all manifestly share in common is the singular result: they have convinced themselves they don’t need to check anything. And because they don’t check, they remain mired in an academic dogma they’d otherwise begin to doubt.
We see this most plainly in every hostile case: so far, every critic of our studies has demonstrated, repeatedly, that they don’t even know what’s in them (you can check every single example in my List of Responses to Defenders of the Historicity of Jesus). Some of them also lie a lot. And that tells you a lot. A defensible position does not require lies to defend. But even then they mostly lie about having read the studies they claim to be answering (and thus, didn’t actually), or about other things that help them defend their not doing that. As a paradigmatic example:
[Chrissy] Hansen claims “Lord Raglan’s work has since been widely dismissed by folklorists and mythologists” but cites for this claim only two scholars, Zumwalt and Dundes, neither of whom attest to this claim, but in fact attest the opposite. Zumwalt actually supports Raglan’s mythotype and critiques only his assumption of a ritual foundation behind it. Dundes literally published a defense of applying the Rank-Raglan mythotype to Jesus; and in the work (and very page, 231) Hansen cites, Dundes endorses the mythotype explicitly as reasonable. Hansen is lying. Either she is lying about what Zumwalt and Dundes said. Or she is lying about having checked what Zumwalt and Dundes said.
Either way, we are looking at the behavior of a Christian apologist, not a scholar. And it’s worse than that, of course. Any search of scholarship for the use of the Rank-Raglan mythotype finds numerous studies employing it, and almost no one scorning it. Exactly the opposite of Hansen’s claim. As just three examples picked at random: the mythotype is taken as rote in The Heart Is a Mirror: The Sephardic Folktale published by Wayne State University Press in 2007; “The Legend of the Jewish Holy Virgin of Ludmir” published in the Journal of Folklore Research in 2009; and “Josephus’ Portrait of Moses” by famed Josephus expert Louis Feldman, published in The Jewish Quarterly Review in 1992. [Plus five more examples I could have named.] So Hansen didn’t even check (or lied about what she found).
“Chrissy Hansen on the Pre-Existent Jesus”
Later I discovered evidence that Hansen found the same list of scholars I did (she ran the same or similar Google Scholar search), and thus in fact lied about her results supporting the opposite conclusion (no scholar on that list “dismisses” the mythotype). But even more appallingly, Hansen simply blatantly lies about what the scholarship she herself cites says. It says the opposite. And the field generally attests the opposite. This appears to be in aid of only one thing: while checking got the result she didn’t want (so she chose to suppress that result), she instead promulgated a lie to try and encourage everyone else not to check The common theme: not checking. The world just has to be a certain way (for whatever reason); and checking the facts for real would undo that. Therefore, you mustn’t check. Nor must anyone else. (For more examples of this kind of thing, whether dishonest or merely bumbling, see Some Controversial Ideas That Now Have Wide Scholarly Support and An Ongoing List of Updates to the Arguments and Evidence in On the Historicity of Jesus.)
Peruse my list of critics and you will find example after example of people acting this way (whether simply not checking, or even lying about it). It is the only kind of response to our findings that ever gets a write-up (whether in a script, article, or chapter: see What I Said at the Brea Conference). After that, apart from scholars conceding that doubt is a credible position to take (whether they themselves take it or not: see List of Historians Who Take Mythicism Seriously), there is only one other kind of response: dismissals without a write-up, where someone just gives an off-hand reason why they are confident Jesus existed even despite multiple studies questioning that. They don’t bother writing up any actual defense of their position (much less critique of the peer reviewed studies questioning it).
In this last category, the most common formula is what I call a friendly dismissal, rather than a hostile one. These are usually couched in some diplomatic way like, “I can see how one might find it doubtful, but I think it’s just more plausible to conclude Jesus existed, because…” and they give some reason(s). Which of course have already been refuted or challenged in the studies they are thereby making an excuse not to read. But since the purpose of their statement is to get them out of having to check—rather than instead first checking if their reasons hold up before affirming them—this exhibits the same psychological end-game: to not check; and to justify not checking. Whether they are trying to justify this to themselves or others, it doesn’t matter. The result is the same. They don’t check.
The Scandal
Things fall apart when you check.
This was my own surprising result. I used to be a stalwart historicist, dismissing mythicists as the cranks and amateurs they were, and appealing to consensus and all the usual knee-jerk “reasons” scholars give. I made sport of the notion (see, for example, the collection of my earlier thinking at the time in Kersey Graves and The World’s Sixteen Crucified Saviors; that collection post-dates my slide toward agnosticism but its content, which it only assembled into one place, pre-dates it). It actually took considerable persuading to get me to consider reading Earl Doherty’s The Jesus Puzzle. I only did because several people whose judgment I trusted had independently asked me to, and all affirmed that he didn’t succumb to any of the usual baloney you get from mythicists, which I was by then sick and tired of—no conspiracy theories, no dumb astrotheology, no gross errors of fact or logic. When I read his work, I was very surprised by how well it held up. I had my criticisms; but I also realized the field had no adequate reply to his stronger points (see my 2002 outcome report, “Did Jesus Exist? Earl Doherty and the Argument to Ahistoricity”).
I then became concerned. It was starting to look like historicity was a questionable dogma and not actually all that defensible. I wasn’t convinced yet, but I fell onto the fence of agnosticism, awaiting some effective response from experts. None came. Eventually, patrons funded my own postdoc research study to try and sort this out once and for all. I devoted six years to researching every published or even conceivable defense of historicity. And lo, I found that for every argument, no matter how sound it looked, once you start pulling at the threads holding it together, it falls apart. The result was two peer-reviewed books (On the Historicity of Jesus, published by an academic press then housed at the University of Sheffield and run by faculty thereof; and Proving History, which I mandated by contract that Prometheus Books get peer reviewed by a professor of mathematics and a professor of Biblical Studies; Prometheus is now an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield), and several peer-reviewed journal articles (reproduced now in Hitler Homer Bible Christ). I mention the fact of peer-review because, when I don’t, the assumption or assertion becomes that none of this is real, peer-reviewed, academic work. It is. So is Lataster’s.
When I started my study I was startled to discover that no other dedicated study of historicity had been published in almost a hundred years (the last, in defense, was written in 1912; with a second edition in 1928; and that’s it). And still, since mine finding for doubt, only one other such study has passed peer review, Lataster’s—corroborating my result. And so far, that’s it. It is thus very strange that no one wants to actually read these books, not even those attempting academic critiques of them. The fact that when we check, we get this result, while the only opposition we face are people stalwartly disinterested in checking, has convinced me that we are right. Opposition now is just dogmatic, not legitimate.
This trend does not just hold for the whole shebang. It holds for every single argument for the historicity of Jesus (see Historicity Big and Small: How Historians Try to Rescue Jesus and A Few More Attempts to Rescue Jesus, as well as Desperately Searching the Epistles for Anything That Attests a Historical Jesus). And today I want to illustrate this for this last echelon of resistors: the friendly givers of off-the-cuff-reasons why they stick to the dogma and don’t look into any of the serious doubts.
Foreshadowing
While I was conducting my postdoc study (between 2008 and 2014) I realized something blasphemous for a “mythicist” to admit: Gnosticism Didn’t Exist. This is sometimes a good test to apply: historians will often wax on about how mythicists misuse “Gnosticism” to get their results; when they are surprised to learn my study never even mentions Gnosticism, you know they haven’t read it (even Lataster only spends a couple paragraphs on it). I chose to never employ the concept anywhere in my study because I came to believe the concept is a modern invention—what we today mean by “Gnosticism” simply did not exist in antiquity. It’s an anachronism. One more idea that falls apart when you pull at its strings. I was delighted to learn later that scores of experts in the field were coming to the same conclusion at the very same time: the Westar Institute’s seminar committee on the subject came out with the same conclusion the same year, which its Fellows unanimously approved (I am now also a Westar Fellow).
I was also starting to suspect the same is true of Docetism, and am now even more certain of that (Did ‘Docetism’ Really Even Exist?). This is important. Because a lot of hand-wavy reasons given to go on maintaining the historicity dogma hinge, for example, on claiming of every attestation of mythicism in antiquity, “Oh, that’s just Docetism,” when in the modern sense of that word they intend, that is actually full-on impossible (see How Did Christianity Switch to a Historical Jesus?, in particular its analysis of Ignatius, which I develop further in Jesus from Outer Space; likewise, my related discussions of 2 Peter). But they don’t know this. Because they don’t check. They have seen a dozen publications and peers assert this, so it must be true. Damned if the evidence bears it out. Who cares? They said it must. How could they be wrong? Well, regardless how, I’m here to tell you, they are. They are wrong about a lot of things. Because too many things in this field get repeated over and over without being checked. This has happened so routinely in the Q-source debate as to be all but a joke now (see Why Do We Still Believe in Q? and The Backwards and Unempirical Logic of Q Apologetics).
Nevertheless, in all three cases—Gnosticism, Docetism, and Q—an assumption I firmly held as a historian, because everyone else did, turned out to be dubious as soon as I examined it, even things (like Gnosticism) that are supposed to be supportive of mythicism.
Things fall apart when you check.
I started getting so used to this that it no longer surprises me anymore. Whenever you hear some trope being repeated by a scholar as a “reason” to believe in historicity, I’d bet you real money, they didn’t check; and when we check, it will fall apart somehow. Because it always does. This was the revelation that finally made me realize this is a dogma, and not a validly formed consensus (see On Evaluating Arguments from Consensus). Which means Jesus’s historicity is even more dubious than I thought. Not impossible—I still give it a respectable probability—but it’s not something we should pretend we can be so certain of. It’s something we should doubt.
Examples
Here is a sample of the most common arguments we hear from friendlies (though you’ll hear them from hostiles, too):
The Argument from Illiterate Fishermen: “The disciples can’t have constructed [invented, derived, built] this religion out of Scripture, [because] they were illiterate fishermen.” Were they? Why would you gullibly believe that? Even the Gospels don’t ever really say it (Acts alone has one sentence claiming this, and Acts is full of shit; see my discussion in Science Education in the Early Roman Empire, pp. 137–38). Did you know back then educated Rabbis were required to ply a manual trade—like fisherman? (see Not the Impossible Faith, Ch. 2) Oh. You didn’t? Now re-examine your thinking. “They were fishermen, therefore illiterate” just went down the toilet as a line of reasoning. So why should your conclusion survive the death of its premise?
It’s not even credible they were fishermen. Paul never mentions it; nor 1 Clement or Hebrews or any defensibly early text. And it looks more to me like the author of Mark invented it to construct a clever pun (OHJ, p. 440; or a play on Homer’s Odyssey: OHJ, p. 399). But regardless, were it true the “Disciples” were illiterate, Paul would have made hay of that fact all over his Epistles (OHJ, pp. 263–64). Because that would mean he alone, and not they, could read the Scriptures, which he attests was absolutely essential to demonstrating the faith and ascertaining its tenets (e.g. Romans 16:25–26 and 1 Corinthians 15:1–8 and Galatians 3:1; plus examples after examples after examples after examples after examples after examples). And yet, instead, Paul always defers to them as his equals or near superiors; this argument never comes up (just look at Galatians 1–2, 2 Corinthians 11:5–7, 1 Corinthians 1:11-13, 1 Corinthians 3:19-23, 1 Corinthians 4:1-9, 1 Corinthians 12:27-29). That means Paul—and his congregations—knew the first Apostles were just as educated as he was. Their illiteracy was a myth invented later, much like the illiteracy of Mohammed, to make their roles and efforts seem more miraculous. It has zero plausibility as history.
This is one of those things that just “keeps being repeated” by historians in this field, “the Disciples were illiterate,” but none of them ever stop to ask if it’s even plausible, much less credibly evidenced. They don’t check.
The Argument from Knowing Him in the Flesh: We see the same thing happen when James Tabor was once asked to explain why he believed Jesus existed, and he said he was convinced by the fact that Paul said in 2 Corinthians 5:16 that people knew Jesus in the flesh. Um. Oh dear. Tabor didn’t check. He must have heard this somewhere; maybe from some Christian peer, or maybe even a secular peer just repeating what some Christian down the line said, none of them checking this verse in context to see if this was even true. All of these “But didn’t you think about this verse?” arguments you can usually refute quite readily using the Scripture index in OHJ (and anything I missed there, is now here). You’ll find this verse listed in OHJ on page 669, where you’ll see it is discussed on page 571, where you will read this:
[W]hen Paul says, ‘although we have known Christ according to the flesh, now we no longer know him that way’ (2 Cor. 5.16), he is not excusing the fact that he did not know Jesus personally as the other apostles did, because he is referring not to himself but to all Christians, including the Corinthians he is writing to (as the context indicates: 2 Cor. 5.1-15). This is therefore a reference to our living no longer ‘according to the flesh’ but according to the spirit (Romans 8). So it is not Christ’s fleshly existence Paul is referring to here (because even on historicity the Corinthians can’t possibly have known Christ that way), but our fleshly existence, and our choice to live ‘in’ the flesh or out of it—and the fact that Christians begin in it, and ascend out of it. Thus, we all know Christ when we are in the flesh, but then we evolve beyond that. As Paul says in the very next line (2 Cor. 5.17).
Tabor was snowed by Christian apologetics. And many Bible translations make this clear. But he didn’t know that, because he didn’t check. Which means Tabor is resting his confidence in the historicity of Jesus on a manifestly false claim about what’s in the Bible. But will he change his conclusion when he realizes his premise was false? I doubt it. He is not interested. In his case, you might guess why.
The Argument from Oral Tradition: But the same thing happened with Mark Goodacre. In our conversation on Unbelievable he maintained as one of his reasons to be convinced is that in 1 Corinthians 15:1-8 Paul says he learned the gospel “from those who were in Christ before him.” But that’s not there. Why did Goodacre think that line was there? On the show, when I pointed that out, he tried to find it in the Epistles somewhere. It isn’t in them. To the contrary, Paul insists (indeed, outright swears) the opposite was the case (Galatians 1:11–18, using the same vocabulary, thus indicating he is referring to the same thing in both places: see OHJ, p. 536; as Paul indicates there, human tradition wasn’t even a respected source at the time, and is never referenced in Paul: cf. e.g. Romans 16:25-26).
And yet Goodacre was so sure of this. Because it’s what he was told. He never checked to see if what he was told was even true. I know the feeling. I was told this, too. I was thus surprised to find it wasn’t true. The only difference is, I allowed the loss of the premise to change my conclusion. Checking mattered to me. Goodacre remains stubbornly committed to the conclusion, such that it survives the loss of every premise (and indeed there are more examples than this of the same thing happening in that show). Yet this insistence on “we have evidence of an oral tradition from people who knew Jesus” remains Goodacre’s cornerstone reason for remaining a historicist. Yet there is no such evidence—the existence of such a tradition is only a hypothesis in want of evidence. It is thus always a circular argument: the hypothesis that there was a relevant “oral tradition” gets handwaved into a “fact” that is then used to support the hypothesis (see Robyn Faith Walsh on this point, although as we’ll see in a moment, even she buys into this myth at some level). But only when you concertedly check will you discover this, and finally react to the realization of it.
The Argument from John the Baptist: This conflation of hypothesis with fact, enduring because of a failure to check, is also exhibited by Francesca Stavrakopoulou when she was asked why she still thought Jesus existed (although her confidence in that conclusion, she has admitted, is not that strong): she gave the stock reason that the Gospels’ inclusion of Jesus being baptized by John seems too embarrassing to have been made up, and so they appear to have been forced to admit it only by its being well known. This is a common argument. Yet it’s a perfect example of a claim that is believed because it keeps getting repeated, but no one actually checks if it’s even true—or else, when they do check, they find that it is not, as John Gager did in “The Gospels and Jesus: Some Doubts about Method,” Journal of Religion 54.3 (July 1974), pp. 262–63.
Almost everything about this claim is false, even its logic (Proving History, pp. 145–48). The Gospel authors had no trouble leaving things out they didn’t like; so the idea that they were “forced” to include it is simply false. And the whole idea of it appears invented by Mark, who, far from being embarrassed by it, found it incredibly (indeed quite suspiciously) convenient: the famous Baptist, in the role of the scripturally required Elijah, openly endorsing Christ as his superior and successor! That’s the kind of story you make up. Not the kind you want to avoid. Only in later decades were theological problems with this story raised, evincing concerns explicitly rejected by Mark (Ibid.).
Stavrakopoulou at least pointed to a different detail as more telling for her than the baptism itself: the story (originating in Matthew, not Mark) that Disciples of John came questioning Jesus, suggesting some sort of historical tension between them. But when you read the whole story (Matthew 11:1-15) that isn’t what it indicates, but quite the contrary: it is a story attempting to claim endorsement by John’s men, by inventing them asking about it and being satisfied; Jesus is then given a speech praising John and establishing him as a prophet endorsing Jesus! Think about this. You know everyone loves the late Carl Sagan. So you tell a tale wherein Sagan sends his friends to ask you if you are the best caretaker of his legacy, and you say yes, and his friends don’t contest it, while you then boast how awesome Sagan is and therefore how authoritative it is that he endorsed you! This isn’t evincing tension. It sounds more like something you quite conveniently faked. The idea that it evinces “tension” is a hypothesis, not a fact; and it’s a hypothesis that actually strains against the evidence, rather than being established by it. But once a dubious hypothesis becomes “fact,” and gets repeated over and over, and no one checks, you end up with mythical reasons to believe in the historicity of Jesus—just like this.
Indeed, Matthew added a bunch of stuff about John to the material he inherited from Mark, but like this, all of it embellishes the same mission Mark began: to steal John’s glory for Jesus, by having him always as the prophet who announced Jesus and thus proved or endorsed him as his successor and superior. This is too motivated to be trusted. Just like Mark’s very different story, in which Jesus is asked why his people didn’t fast like John’s people did (Mark 2:18–19), which is a typical etiological myth, a pithy story explaining why Jesus’s sect behaves differently than John’s, a fact needing explanation regardless of whether Jesus was ever really asked this. We see similar mythical comparisons in Mark 6:12–29, Mark 8:27–29, and Mark 11:29-33, in every case depicting the Jesus sect as the equal or better to John’s, as Jesus is made to be the expected Messiah rather than John. These stories are far too motivated to be credited as historical. Maybe they were. But their being so convenient can only leave us unsure, not the other way around.
This is what happens when you pull at the threads. This is what happens when you check.
The Argument from Nazareth: A more esoteric yet popular example comes from Christopher Hitchens—though he did not originate it; it originated in Christian apologetics before him: that Nazareth was too obscure a town to invent for Jesus, and there is no explanation of the need to invent it at all, when they could have just stuck with Bethlehem, rather than being forced to contrive convoluted reasons to have him come from both places. Of course, only Matthew felt such need (Luke is just redacting Matthew). Matthew often does—that’s why he invents two donkeys for Jesus to ride simultaneously, because (Matthew erroneously thought) Scripture mentioned two (Proving History, p. 144). Mark has no knowledge of Bethlehem, and appears to have invented the connection to Nazareth (you won’t find that in any earlier Christian writings; not Paul, James, Jude, 1 Peter, 1 Clement, or Hebrews).
Matthew, meanwhile, tells us why he thought both towns had to be there, and it’s the same reason he thought two donkeys did: Scripture said so (Matthew 2:23 and 2:5–6). And lo, when you check, you discover a lot else besides: that Christians used scripture and variant readings of scripture we no longer have (OHJ, Chapter 4, Element 9); that even our versions state the messiah will arise not from Bethlehem (a town of Judea) but from Galilee (Isaiah 9:1-7); and that “Nazorian,” the actual title assigned to Jesus, does not in fact refer to a denizen of Nazareth but meant something else, and did so earlier than the assignment of the only-similar-sounding Galilean town to Jesus (Proving History, p. 142–45; OHJ, index, “Nazareth”). When you put this all together, it seems clearer that in fact Nazareth (then indeed a real town) was contrived to be the town of Jesus, simply to fit and explain these meanings and scriptures, and not because he actually came from there. At the very best, we no longer can be certain of the latter explanation. Once again, when you check, that argument collapses. We actually can’t be sure anymore. (And isn’t it weird this is what keeps happening?)
The Argument from Crucifixion: An even more typical example is one often voiced by Bart Ehrman, that Paul repeatedly refers to the “crucifixion” of Jesus, and “crucifixion” was an inherently Roman practice, and therefore could never have described any other killers of Jesus than the Romans, which entails Paul believed Jesus was recently an earthly, historical man, a victim of imperial politics. The reasoning is sound. The problem is that the premise isn’t. No word existed in ancient Greek that was distinctive of Roman execution; all the words Paul actually used were routinely used of Jewish executions and the executions of other national cultures and eras. There simply is no clear indication it was a Roman execution anywhere in Paul. To the contrary, Galatians 3 seems more plainly to say that Jesus was subject to a Deuteronomic, and thus Jewish, execution; and if you want to defend instead as authentic the interpolation in 1 Thessalonians 2, you are committed to accepting that Paul outright said so—he thus had never heard of any other executioners of Jesus but the Jews (so, lucky for the historicist, Paul never said that, because There Is No Logically Sound Case Against Interpolation in 1 Thessalonians 2).
Importantly, I did not make this up. I checked. And I found very thorough scholarship establishing the point in Gunnar Samuelsson’s Crucifixion in Antiquity: An Inquiry into the Background of the New Testament Terminology of Crucifixion (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011). And in my postdoc research phase I was inspired to check (and thus discovered Samuelsson’s study) by having previously discovered other scholars making the same point before I was asking the historicity question (but rather questioning resurrection apologetics) in my chapter on the burial legend in The Empty Tomb: D.J. Halperin, “Crucifixion, the Nahum Pesher and the Rabbinic Penalty of Crucifixion,” Journal of Jewish Studies 32 (1981), pp. 32-46; and J.A. Fitzmyer, “Crucifixion in Ancient Palestine, Qumran Literature, and the New Testament,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 40 (1978), pp. 493-513. In short, anyone hung on a pole dead or to die, by anyone, anywhere, could then be referred to as crucified, by any of the terms Paul used. These terms were in no way distinctively Roman. And all of this I discussed and summarized, with primary source examples (OHJ, pp. 61–62). Which makes this an excellent way to catch someone lying when they claim to have read my book but don’t know any of this. That’s how you tell the difference between someone who checked…and someone who didn’t.
And when we check a detail like this, everything falls apart. For example, Paula Fredriksen also said the one thing she was sure was historical about Jesus was that “he was crucified,” because Paul is a contemporary source repeatedly affirming it without argument or pushback (or so dogma presumes). But once you lose Ehrman’s premise, and discover the word “crucified” carries no specific historical or ethnic meaning, how can we be sure Paul was talking about a death on Earth at the hands of men? He seems sooner to imagine it was at the hands of celestial demonic beings (as Gaventa, Litwa, and others admit; cf. OHJ, p. 189 n. 86, and pp. 563–66). At best, that’s as likely as not. So even though we can establish Paul and his contemporaries believed Jesus was recently killed by or then hung on a pole by “rulers of this aeon,” we cannot establish that that really happened—any more than we could prove Satan’s war in heaven “really happened,” even though these same people firmly believed that, too. These are historical events from their point of view, but not from ours. So can we be so sure Jesus was “really” crucified? We would need something more than that they believed it. Particularly as they claim to have learned of it only mystically (1 Corinthians 15:3; Romans 16:25–26; Galatians 3:1; etc.). Just like Satan’s war. That sooner suggests it’s imaginary.
Of course, when we check, the Gospel tales of Jesus’s execution don’t hold up very plausibly, either. Neither the trial procedures nor the calendar date are historically credible, but seem literarily designed to make symbolical points rather than record anything actually having happened. As depicted, there is no intelligible reason why either the Jews or the Romans would have executed Jesus. Yes, we can contrive our own modern hypotheses, about some hidden underlying realpolitik or whitewashed insurrection, or some convoluted reason never explicitly articulated—but we are making those up. The stories themselves do not advocate them. And we should not confuse hypotheses with facts. There is no more history in the Gospels than there is an earthly Jesus in Paul. A great many scholars are coming to admit the first point. How long until they realize that walks us right up to the second?
Ironically, the Talmudic tale of the execution of Jesus—by stoning, for sorcery—is more historically plausible than the Gospels. But, a bit of a problem there: they consistently date this event a hundred years earlier, when Romans weren’t even there to look on, much less carry it out (OHJ, Ch. 8.1). Methodologically this puts the historicist in a pickle: what do you do when the only plausible story is clearly fiction? You are forced thereby to admit that plausibility does not prove historicity. Which means the Gospels can prove it even less—being all the less plausible. Which, by the by, gets us to another common argument produced by not checking things: the ubiquitous “but even the Jews in the Talmud attest the historicity of Jesus.” Oh, dear. Did you not check? Do you not know the Talmud dates this event to the 70s BC, and has Jesus executed by stoning, at the sole direction of a Jewish court, and in Lydda, not Jerusalem? How do you account for that? It’s a conundrum. Because you can’t use an obviously bogus account to attest the event as actual—and yet you must still explain how the century Jesus lived in was so conclusively altered. The Talmud has Jesus interact with famous personages of that century, and his fate reflects the actual political and legal realities distinctive of that century. If all that could be made up there, why are we to assume switching all these details to a different century was any less made up in the Gospels? Things fall apart when you check.
Sure, if the Gospels said Jesus was executed by being trampled under Emperor Tiberius’s personal war elephant, the credibility of the story would suffer in a way the actual story does not. But that is already expected. Mythographers, like any authors of fiction, will tend to choose storylines that culturally make sense, because that is where they are getting their communication framework from in the first place—when they aren’t forced to go off-book by other concerns, such as how the Gospels completely violate all historical reality when it comes to the legal and calendric details. As is proved by the Eastern chronology: whoever composed the Gospel known to the Babylonian authors of the Talmud (and we know it was Christians, the Torah-observant Nazorian sect in particular, as this fact is referenced by the heresiologist Epiphanius), they decided it was more culturally relevant to have Jesus stoned by the Sanhedrin under the Hasmonean regime rather than the Romans. But to make that make sense, they had to relocate it a hundred years earlier, thus preserving historical plausibility—or…perhaps it was the other way around? Whether that was the true story and the Western chronology the rewrite, or the canonical account the original and the Eastern chronology the rewrite, or both were equally contrived, once the “when” was chosen, the authors had to change the method and political context of the execution—either way, making the story fit their chosen context was clearly a motive shared by all. Otherwise we cannot explain why those Nazorian Christians would change the method, date, and context of Jesus’s execution. But once we accept this, we have to admit, the Western chronology becomes just as suspect, does it not? The only thing we can be sure of is that Christians, East and West, were far more fond of producing historical fiction than historical research.
There are many more examples I could give of this “making an argument without checking first” as the most common basis for maintaining trust in the historicity of Jesus, from the old canard that “Paul didn’t have to remind people of things he already told them” (while those who check discover the contrary: Paul does that all the time) to the even older canard “but Paul quotes Jesus” (while those who check discover: Paul only ever mentions getting such information from revelations), and beyond (look what happens, for example, when you try to argue from semen, women, or brethren: every single time, check, and the argument falls apart). But I will close with one of the most common, just to tie a bow on all this and drive the point to conclusion.
The Argument from Apostles Before Him: Probably every historicist has tried this in some form or other, but a recent example is when Robyn Faith Walsh gives her reason to think Jesus existed:
…Because what Paul provides is a story of Christ, because he never knew Jesus. He rarely tells us anything about the historical Jesus. He doesn’t really care. He gets no authority from that. [But] you know, he tells us that Peter and James are still around. Those guys get authority from having known the historical Jesus, but they didn’t write anything down. Paul did. And you know he’s authorized because he has the most recent intel, he’s talked to the risen Christ and so that’s what he emphasizes.
She also argues that Paul mentions a “Last Supper,” which isn’t true. He only appears to reference a vision (he says “the Lord” told him about it directly, the word “last” is never there, and only Jesus is present in the scene he relates), similar to the vision of a meal Acts reports for Peter. That’s another example of something that, when you check, it falls apart (see my discussion in Mark’s Use of Paul’s Epistles and What’s Up with 1 Corinthians 11:23?, and the corroboration of my conclusion in the findings of Beverly Roberts Gaventa and Francis Watson).
But let’s focus on this common fallacy of assuming prior Apostles means Disciples. Is there any evidence in Paul that “those guys get authority from having known the historical Jesus”? No. To the contrary, that conundrum is conspicuously absent from the letters of Paul: that they knew Jesus and he didn’t is never an argument he ever has to face or rebut. As far as Paul appears to know, the first time Peter and gang ever saw Jesus was after Jesus died, and they only knew he died from scripture (this is, after all, literally what 1 Corinthians 15:3-5 says; but see my survey of all the evidence in OHJ, Chapter 11.2, 11.4, and 11.8). There is a reason Paul has never heard of anyone being a “disciple” of Jesus, and why he keeps assuming “apostle” simply meant someone receiving a vision of Jesus (1 Corinthians 9, where there is no notion of any other way to see Jesus; Romans 10:12-16, where the Greek makes clear he is talking about apostles; and so on). Paul also never argues that he has any greater authority because he spoke to Jesus “most recently.” That’s a hypothesis, not a fact. And it’s not a good hypothesis, either. When you check, that notion simply doesn’t hold up; rather, quite the opposite: in Galatians 1 Paul makes clear the only respectable way to have really seen Jesus was by vision (OHJ, pp. 524–27, 536, 553–54). Yes, the idea that Paul was in some sort of contest with the Disciples over their having been hand-picked before Jesus died is a notion repeated over and over again in the field. But when you check, it falls apart. It’s not in Paul. So, this is a common reason given to believe in historicity. But it’s a really bad reason.
Walsh also says she finds it hard to believe that they all (Peter and Paul and the lot) made up a historical Jesus. Which is another argument I have heard before; and it reflects, point blank, the phenomenon of not checking. If she would check, she would find out that I and Lataster—the authors of the only legitimate studies finding historicity doubtful—agree with her on this. I even included it as a theory I ruled out as having too small a probability to credit (OHJ, pp. 53–55). The only alternative to historicity that I found has any chance of being more likely is that Mark (or someone of his generation) “made up” what we mean by a historical Jesus, not Paul or any of the first Apostles. In their generation, no one had come up with any such idea yet; that’s why it is so bizarrely absent from all pre-War Christian literature (all of Paul; 1 Clement; Hebrews; even James, Jude, and 1 Peter if you categorize them that early). In their day, they were talking about a celestial event (an incarnation, death, and resurrection) that they only knew happened by revelation (and “secret messages” in scripture). Yes, they thought that was a historical event, just as they thought Satan’s war in heaven was a historical event. But we know better.
And they might not have been making any of that up. They might have sincerely believed it all (the anthropology of religion affords countless parallels: OHJ, Ch. 4, Element 15). They might also have made it up (that’s a lot easier to do; it also has countless precedents in the anthropology of religion, as I survey in Ch. 10 of Not the Impossible Faith, though Mormonism and Islam come to mind as oft-cited examples). It might also have been a little of both. But the bottom line is, going around claiming a celestial being visited them in a dream or waking vision, conveying secret information, is something we know to be quite plausible, because it happened a lot back then, and since. And in respect to the resurrection of Jesus, Walsh would concede that is what did happen. All we are saying is that this same circumstance just as easily accounts for both Jesuses: pre-mortem and post-mortem (see my Analogy in Resurrection Apologetics). Walsh is evidently unaware of this, our actual theory. And consequently, because she remains stuck on an implausible theory, she remains convinced of historicity. Imagine what will happen when she discovers this assumption of hers is false? When she finds out peer-reviewed mythicism argues something other than what she has been assuming? Will she update her conclusion, now that its premise is eliminated, or will she try to come up with something else to defend the dogma by?
Conclusion
This is the most common reason the consensus on Jesus is useless: it is based on false assumptions about what the alternative even is, much less the evidence for it; and, as we’ve seen, it is based on a series of ancillary dogmas that turn out to be false when checked. It is thus based entirely on not checking (or not admitting to the results once checked). Which is all indicative of a malformed consensus, which cannot be used as an argument—it is, rather, its own refutation (see, again, On Evaluating Arguments from Consensus). Only scholars who have checked all these things have relevant opinions. Everyone else literally does not know what they are talking about. Sometimes intentionally. Sometimes owing to bad practices inculcated in their training. Sometimes due to laziness or disinterest. But regardless of the why, the what remains: the ignorant are not relevant authorities.
Citing such scholars on this matter is therefore a textbook example of the fallacy of Argument from Authority. If they haven’t checked, they can’t know. And if they can’t know, their being mere “experts” in the field is of no relevance. Appealing to them would be like appealing to a forensics expert who hasn’t reviewed the evidence specific to the case you are seeking their opinion on. Yeah, they are an expert. But even experts are not psychics. If they didn’t even look at the arguments and evidence in that specific matter, if they don’t even know what they are, they can’t honestly know their merits, can they? Their opinion on it is therefore worthless. Only after they inform themselves will their opinion matter—and that means only when they check, and that means check it all: what the only credible alternative to historicity actually is, what evidence it actually appeals to, and the merits of every knee-jerk ancillary dogma resorted to in any effort to deny it. Because I can tell you, every “But surely x” argument for historicity falls apart when checked. And that should tell us something.
And that’s the bottom line. Notice just from this article alone how many bad arguments for historicity occupy the field. This is why the field remains stuck on the dogma of historicity: they don’t even know these are bad arguments. Because they aren’t checking.
To quote Bart Ehrman “There’s very good reason to think…” [insert random claim here]
The reasons are never disclosed, though. But he says they are good, so there’s that, right? Case closed.
I’m baffled he holds such status, seeing how much plainly false/misrepresentative claims comes from him – from claiming Q is evidence for historicity (unless hypothesized evidence is a thing) to stuff like his recurring statement “Paul met Jesus brother, for crying out loud” – yes, Bart, we are crying. From shame of a scholar misrepresenting the data like that.
That’s also a common phenom, although that is mostly an Ehrmanism. Most scholars, even hostiles, do at least try to defend their claims, or are genuinely surprised to discover they can’t. Ehrman has mostly given that up. He uses anger, exasperation, and browbeating instead. He is uninterested in answering real criticisms of what he has said, or even acknowledging they exist.
As to Ehrman’s fame, it is operationally comparable to that of Dawkins, and why many philosophers complain (a bit overmuch, but still) that Dawkins isn’t even a qualified philosopher and everything he wrote about atheism was over-simplistic.
Ehrman, analogously, has zero history degrees (Bachelors in English; Masters in Divinity; PhD in New Testament Studies from Princeton Theology Seminary, which is component of the Presbyterian Church—as a degree, NTS is more comparable to a literature degree than a history degree, but can be described as interdisciplinary).
Yes, it was very ironic when he, with no actual degrees in history, attacked me, with a PhD in history (in the very period at issue), for not having the “correct” degree to discuss a question in history.
Their fame is not a function of their skill or quality, but simply opportunity: they each wrote the right book at the right time (and decent books for their market), fame ensued, and economic lock-in sealed them into place as The Go To for their respective subjects (Jesus and Atheism).
Once Cult of Personality sets in, well, that’s just how it will be from then on. They are now Avatars. No one else emotionally “matters” to people disinterested in knowing what’s really the case, but only interested in being validated in their cherished assumptions and prejudices. Avatars work well for that. Ehrman has the added metric in this debate that he is not a Christian, so he serves well as an effigy of The TruthTM (“even an unbeliever thinks Jesus existed” is a non sequitur but emotionally salient).
I think they know, deep down, Ehrman, Davis, etc, that you got meat on your bones, so to speak. To me, that’s the only reason they freak out on you challenging historicity while people like Valliant can put out this insane conspiracy theory about Roman emperors creating Christianity without getting any backlash. He’s clearly a crank while you’re not.
As for cult of personality, well, as a member of your cult I better refrain from commenting on that… 😆
But as Samuel Clemens said, “History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.” I feel the response to your work rhymes with the Moses myth debacle, and similarly, it’ll take time for the next generation scholars to catch up on this. But we’re getting there, for sure.
Lol. There’s no need to fear falling into a Cult of Personality trap if you always insist on making every argument, and every decision, about the evidence and arguments, and not the person who made them. “Message, not Messenger,” and you will always be on the sound side of logic.
About Dawkins’ writing on atheism, should atheism to be complicated? Any explanation for me that he oversimplified it?
Reality is complicated. So any description of reality will be complicated. But more relevantly, apologetics is by design even more complicated. It can’t be dispatched by straw manning it; it can only be dispatched by steel manning it. Which requires a lot more work and care, as tedious as that may be, to be successful. Otherwise all you do is own-goal yourself by selling a straw man of atheism.
By doing that (the complaint goes), Dawkins inadvertently created a whole cottage industry of apologetics with the psychologically convenient argument that they can show he straw manned theism and even Christianity “and therefore New Atheism is a sham.” A mess we all then have to clean up. Hence, own goal. This is very frustrating to real philosophers, and they do lay a lot of blame on him. They might say it is like the crank mythicists making my job harder: t’would be better were they not around mucking shit up and making our job harder.
To be clear, as I noted before, I think this is exaggerated. I don’t share quite the same extremity of complaint. I’m just reporting that it exists and what caused it. As a pragmatist and ordinary language philosopher I don’t feel the Dawkinses of the world are such a problem; the analogy to crank mythicists is not as strong as philosophers might insist. Complaining about colloquialization is a common pastime of elites and I don’t sympathize with it.
But the small problem is real: there is a danger in straw manning the opposition and then elevating that as “the best case” everyone should read, owing to a Cult of Personality confusion between prestige and quality. Dawkins should be treated as only a 101 introduction to a whole database of higher quality arguments, not as “the best argument we have.” Dawkins’ case essentially is a straw man of atheism. That can have its uses for intro popularization, but not when it gets treated as anything more than that.
Per the “The TruthTM” :), Stanisław Lem’s 1964 story, published in English for the first time, tells the tale of a scientist in an insane asylum theorizing that the sun is alive. @ https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-truth-by-stanislaw-lem/
And BTW, the way to tell the difference between that Cult of Personality trap and a real interest in the facts is to look at how much someone leans on who the person is (their name, fame, social status, prestige, and the like) that they are citing to make a point—rather than what their evidence and arguments actually are.
I like your way to handle ordinary language from ordinary person like me. And I think it is not necessary for me to use philospoher language. But it is still not clear for me which Dawkins’ argumens considered as strawmanning theism.
You can Google around and find countless examples. Like This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. Etc.
I am not saying I agree with those critiques, but that these are coming from (or describe statements from) real philosophers, including atheists. They aren’t just bullshit apologetics (which I would say most of his criticism online is).
If Dawkins (and presumably the other three Horsemen) was “101” then what would you recommend for the 201 class? Thanks!
It depends on which thing you want to dive into. There is no such thing as a “one stop shop” for literally the entirety of modern nontheist philosophy, much less the entire science and philosophy of religion.
So, for example, let’s say what you want is “the best single book giving the widest range of well-formed arguments against theism,” then I would say Malcolm Murray’s The Atheist’s Primer.
Or, let’s say what you want is “the most sophisticated single attack on theism to date,” then I would say Graham Oppy’s The Best Argument against God.
Or, let’s say what you want is “the best and fullest build-out of Oppy’s approach,” then I would say Raphael Lataster’s The Case Against Theism: Why the Evidence Disproves God’s Existence.
Or, let’s say what you want is the best one-stop full-shop rebuttal to resurrection apologetics today, then I would say Jonathan MS Pearce’s The Resurrection: A Critical Examination of the Easter Story.
Or, let’s say what you want is the best build-out of a positive naturalist worldview that out-performs theism, then I would say my own Sense and Goodness without God (simply because no one else has even written a comparable book to recommend).
Or, let’s say what you want is the best summary of the science of religion, then I’d say Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell.
Or, let’s say what you want is the best articulation of the religion-causes-violence argument, then I’d say Hector Avalos’s Fighting Words: The Origins of Religious Violence.
And so on.
Pick a lane, and I can point you to the best guide down it.
P.S. But as to the “other” horsemen, they didn’t do the same thing Dawkins did. Dennett doesn’t even compare, because he’s an actual philosopher. Everything he actually wrote is top notch and in some cases even required reading in their subject.
Hitchens was a journalist. And that’s how he wrote: journalistic editorializing. As such, it doesn’t pretend to more. And in result, his book was never held up as some sort of philosophy manual for atheists, but simply a reportage on why atheists popularly have the attitudes he reports. He also died too young, so he couldn’t ruin his legacy (in the same way Dennett doesn’t try to inject his opinion into everything, he just sticks to his expert study fields, with the same result).
A good way to understand the difference between journalism and philosophy, and why Hitchens thus does not annoy philosophers but Dawkins does, is to compare their treatments of Aquinas. The rest of his treatment of the debate is similar. He focuses on on-the-ground realities of human psychology and experience; for example, notice his focus on microencephaly in his chapter on design.
Harris was similarly more focused on socio-politics. But not very good at it (Avalos is better; as are other scholars with specifically relevant training, like Marlene Winell and Valerie Tarico).
When Harris does philosophy, he’s really bad at it. I use his book Free Will in my Science and Philosophy of Free Will course because it’s wrong about almost everything, yet in a way very typical and thus that someone should be familiar with, and critically examining his errors is the best way to learn correctly the actual science and philosophy of free will, as well as just how to do philosophy better generally. Obviously on that topic, Dennett is far better, being an actual expert who knows what he’s talking about.
Hi dr. Carrier,
What do you think about the following historicist argument:
1) the “kingdom of God” associated with the Gospel Jesus was an earthly holy Jewish empire,
2) the spiritualization of this is anachronistic in Paul, or the mere addition by Paul.
3) therefore Jesus existed.
Basically, the assumption is that a Jesus working always in heaven doesn’t fit the early Christian focus on the earth as the place where the messianic kingdom will be inaugurated, while it fits the (anachronistic) hope of a celestial Jerusalem or a paradise in heaven.
To assess that I’d have to see a valid format of the argument. The syllogism you present is formally invalid: the conclusion does not follow from the premises.
One also has to support the premises with evidence. When did anyone before Paul preach any other kind of kingdom in this cult? And what evidence traces that supposedly earlier teaching to Jesus and not, say, Peter? And where in the Gospels is anything differently preached about the location of the Kingdom than in Paul, or even its nature? Etc.
But since the premises need to be rewritten to get the conclusion, I can’t really evaluate that, either. As currently written, these premises are non sequiturs.
The best I can do is walk up the actual facts regarding this kingdom business:
All Christian literature (from Paul’s generation to the Gospels and beyond) preach only one kind of Kingdom of God: the Presence of God on Earth in the form of the Church, spiritually inhabited (possessed) by the Spirit of the Lord Jesus. There is no example of any Christian text that preaches a material warrior-won kingdom other than as foretold for the future (when Jesus will descend from heaven with legions of angels to crush all temporal rule). They all preach a Kingdom that is on Earth. And they all preach that it is a spiritual (not military) kingdom (the Gospels are even poetically emphatic about this, e.g. the Barabbas and Swine narratives conclusively rebuke military-material conceptions of the kingdom, as does the Emmaus narrative’s transvaluation of the Romulus narrative, and so on).
Paul tells the Galatians (and they appear to have had the means to check so as to confirm) that he preached nothing different than the Apostles before him—Peter, James, and John, in particular—save only one difference, that Paul had a new “recruitment” theology for Gentiles (endorsed to him directly by the then-celestial Jesus). That was the only point of contention between them. And the other letters bear this out: there are no discernible disputes with the previous Apostles other than that (vague allusions notwithstanding, as those can’t be linked to any specific issue; and disputes with or within his congregations but not the other Apostles aside).
For example, Paul never has to face (and thus rebut or overcome) the argument “But Jesus said we should pick up swords and attack Rome!” or any other concept than his pacifist notion of the Kingdom.
Paul’s entire theology of the Kingdom is in respect to its location and function consistent with all early Christian literature:
By animating the Church through the Holy Spirit (1 Cor 12), the Lord Jesus, assigned the powers and authorities of God the Father (1 Cor 15), now directed from outer space (Gal 1; 1 Cor 15; Rom 16:25-26 and 10:12-14) that “believers” assemble and live according to a new covenant until Jesus returns with his stellar forces to ravage Earth and beam his devout up into space to live with him there (1 Thess. 4).
Until then (and after), we are all part of God’s Kingdom by virtue of being Adopted by God through Baptism (Gal 3-4, Rom 7-8) and thus being Sons of God and thus Heirs to God’s Kingdom (sons being by definition heirs to their father’s estate), making us all brothers to “the” heir, the Firstborn Son of God, Jesus. And by this means, God will spare his duly adopted children from the Apocalypse, and even resurrect them if dead, to live forever when his Kingdom becomes Complete (and the distinction, the barrier, between Heaven and Earth eliminated, per 1 Cor 15).
I don’t see anywhere in here where this has to have come from a historical Jesus. A revelatory Jesus can just as easily have been imagined or claimed to communicate all this to the first Apostle Peter, and then the rest, on the exact model of Gabriel to Mohammed or Moroni to Joseph Smith. Indeed, in the Christian case, we have internal and contextual evidence that the origin of these ideas was in “inspired” readings of secret messages in Scripture, a.k.a. pesher, which was only validated by “seeing Jesus” afterward to confirm it. All that requires is that Peter be a Rabbinical interpreter of Scripture, and thus the first to “discover” all this hidden there.
All this requires is that Peter not be illiterate. Hence my pointing out how implausible it is that he was. That knocked-out card topples the whole house.
9th paragraph should be “Jesus comes” not “Jesus returns”
Or returns, if the first time he came was in visions.
See my discussion of the “second appearance” language in Hebrews in OHJ Ch. 11.5.
It is true that “they all preach a Kingdom that is on Earth”, but what about the emphasis on the space physically circumscribed by this ‘kingdom’? For example, so Bermejo-Rubio:
In fact, basileìa toû theoû is often interpreted not as “kingdom of God” but exclusively as “kingly rule” or “dominion of God”, thereby excluding more spatially oriented readings of the term kingdom. Put otherwise, the phrase kingdom of God is deemed to refer not to the place where God rules but to the mere fact that God rules, or to the power through which God manifests his sovereignty: its territorial meaning has thus been removed. (They Suffered under Pontius Pilate: Jewish Anti-Roman Resistance and the Crosses at Golgotha, Fortress Academic. , 2023, p. 164)
Is the mythicist paradigm complicit with Christian historicists in this eclipse of the spatial dimension of the kingdom?
Put otherwise: would Peter have agreed with Paul about the presence of the “kingdom of God” in a church animated by the holy spirit but placed in the Diaspora (and not in Judea)?
is it conceivable that an hallucinated archangel had promised to Peter an earthly kingdom limited exclusively to Judea alone? Taking the example of the archangel Gabriel: did he command to Muhammad to unify only the Arabic peninsula?
Thank you in advance for any answer
I am still not sure what you are asking.
If you want to understand the Christian conception of the Kingdom of God all across the NT, read 1 Corinthians 15:20-28: the Kingdom of God is the extent of God’s power across the entire cosmos, interrupted by warring powers (Satan et al.) wrestling for control over the lower sphere (inclusive of Earth), resulting in the evil of Death (through a complicated esoteric theological process Paul tries to articulate elsewhere, like Romans 7-8).
Jesus represents the breaking out of the Kingdom of God into this warred-over sphere, enabling his “spiritual” warriors to now cast out demons and be rescued from Satan’s “kingdom” via resurrection and so on.
Nothing about this spatial disorder relates to determining the probability of historicity of mythicism. It is compatible with both. This is why it is in the Background section of OHJ (Elements 34 to 38), not the Evidence section.
It sounds like you are trying to ask something about political kingdoms (“Judea”), but there is literally nothing (zero things) in any NT book about that. The NT is consistently only about a universal (cosmic) kingdom, implicating the eventual destruction of the entire Earth and its replacement with an entirely new world.
I would caution against over-relying on Bermejo-Rubio. He is very stuck on a militant Jesus hypothesis, and thus over-interprets evidence to fit his need for Jesus to have been a military political messiah and not the spiritual messiah we find in the NT. He violates numerous methodological principles to do this, albeit in ways commonly violated by all historicists. In result, he conjures non-existent facts like this notion of Jesus or Peter or anyone ever teaching a “political” kingdom, which is attested literally nowhere in the NT.
This is indeed the core of our debate in Gesù Resistente, Gesù Inesistente. I’m too busy with other things to complete the English edition of that soon, but some of the relevant content ended up in Jesus from Outer Space (Chapter 3; that’s why Bermejo-Rubio appears as my foil there).
I first saw in print the challenge that Jesus was just like Hercules back in the 1990s and my first reaction was how could so many believe he was real, there must be evidence. So began my quest because I had seen many christians state that there was more evidence for Jesus than any other historical figure… ok, I thought, only need to find one bit of hard evidence, got to be easy, right?
I started with a simple premise, a story is just as story until evidence demonstrates it is more.
30 years later I have found more reason to doubt the historicity and yet to find one single bit of hard evidence… thanks to Scholars such as yourself, I am not longer a nut case tilting at windmills.
As to Ehrman, nearly everything he currently states demonstrates that just about everything written about Jesus is mythological. He has helped me to see the complete lack of historical evidence while maintaining it is obvious that Jesus was historical… a bit bizzarre.
Well I don’t know if Ehrman has gone viral on any media other than YouTube but you have – at over a million views on one of your presentations, last I saw. I’m pretty sure he hasn’t gotten that kind of viewership at least on YouTube, and it reaches a wider audience and is more relevant than public radio which is his usual beat. So there’s that. I agree with the other commentator here, it’s just going to have to probably wait for the next generation of scholars to come up, or reach a tipping point; a critical mass and when it does the whole edifice of Jesus Studies/NT shamership is going to fall like the house of cards that it is, and when it does I will watch with pleasure!!!
Well I guess “viral” has a specific number and time limit. I should’ve checked!! Shit. But still that’s a lot.
Time & time again I find Christians to be outright desperate liars!
All too often. But most of them are dupes, the victims of liars and not the liars themselves. And some are in between: lying to themselves.
The Rank-Raglan freakout is so weird because it is such weak tea, by your admission. All it does is show that Jesus was rapidly mythologized. Whatever reason his followers had to be so fanatical as to raise their teacher so quickly or to use that particular package (e.g. maybe they thought that if they marketed to certain Jew-friendly Greeks that the sheer obviousness of the adoption of the model would either be ignored or forgiven) would still apply to historicism. They’d just need to find an argument that that’s reasonable from the evidence.
Like, yeah, Jesus followed a locally popular mythotype in mythical stories. What else would we expect? If it was common in the culture, a sufficiently clever rabbi could have borrowed from those ideas in his own mythology, however far at hand his inspiration was. And his followers who included educated people would have embellished further. And on and on. Then the “best of” all of that is further embellished by religious marketers.
Really, their objection needs to be to the idea that Jesus being so rapidly mythologized is a problem for historicism. Because the RR is not the only way you’re getting there. One just needs to read Paul and Mark side by side and see the vast difference in how the same subject is being discussed. How did that happen? If there’s no good answer for that on historicism, then historicism fails.
But screw that, apparently we need to toss out the baby because he may have bathwater on him.
Incidentally, how likely would you say it is that Peter may have not been the literal first generation of tradent in the Jesus game and there may have been a broader, if still obscure, tradition? That could push the first Christianity back even further and lower the RR effect even more.
As to that question:
Paul and his congregations evidently knew it started very recently with Peter. Paul says so, and in a way that reflects prior and evidently established and well known tradition (1 Cor 15; Gal 1). It is very unlikely, therefore, that that is incorrect.
What could still be the case is something like this:
A number of competing fringe sects, some of whose offshoots are represented by the literature at Qumran, were trying desperately to find a messianic prediction in Daniel and Isaiah and other scriptures that pertained to their own generation (as we see in fact going on in the documents at Qumran; and theologically, morally, etc., the similarities between the Qumran sect(s) and Christianity are strong, even organizationally, e.g. Qumran speaks of a community council of twelve running the show).
They kept at this for a couple hundred years, evidently “rewriting” their interpretation after every failed generation, as apocalyptic cults always do (think: Jehovah’s Witnesses; Pentecostals; Seventh Day; etc.).
During this run-up, one of these sects (not necessarily physically at Qumran) started building a picture that contained much of the outline of Christianity (e.g. OHJ Elements 10 through 18), as something that was “going to happen soon” (already there are hints that much of this was already completed even at Qumran, as several scholars have documented in different ways).
Then, Peter, in this scenario already a leader of one of these sects and its council of twelve, tired of waiting for it to “actually” happen (after generations of fails and disappointments), simply declares the Lord finally came to him in a dream and declared to him that it is no longer in the future, but has all happened as predicted, and now they must go forth to preach the end has come before the final clock runs out (whether Peter made that up or his subconscious really did deliver, it hardly matters psychologically). His charismatic influence inspires his henchmen to then “have” confirming visions. And so, Christianity is born.
That’s a plausible scenario. We don’t have enough evidence to prove that’s what happened, but IMO, it’s the most likely sequence of events given all we know, or at least something like it. And it can’t be ruled out on any evidence we know.
That’s roughly what I thought, but I was curious if it could slow the rate of mythologization. So the historicist version of that would be that this counter-cultural Jew who’s been immersed in all of these weird Qumran cults (say, from his teens to about his 30s so he seems to come out of nowhere when he starts his mythologization 😉 ) would start a ministry of some kind, either high on his own supply and being a messianic pretender or just having assembled this pesher, and then when he does die (either from the Romans or just in general) Peter takes up the mantle and turns up the revelational elements. Which wouldn’t push back Jesus much but could mean that the ideas of the cult were firmly around for awhile before Peter came back.
Your argument about Mark and Nazareth is even stronger! Mark only mentions Nazareth once (Mark 1, 9) but Matthew, in replicating with additions Mark’s intro, fails to include this sole mention (Matthew 3, 13). This is even though he is very keen to argue that being a Nazarene meant coming from Nazareth (Matthew 2, 23), rather than being a member of a militant sect. This is to the extent of providing a spurious argument (Matthew 4, 12-17) for Jesus to have moved to from Nazareth to Capernaum (where – in the Markan narrative – Jesus actually did live!).
Why did Matthew miss out such a desirable detail? I suggest it is because it wasn’t there in his manuscript of Mark, when he was reading it around CE 100. But it was added later to Mark.
qv ‘Nazarene or Nazareth’ in The Invention of Jesus, pp 146 -163.
Frank Zindler has made that argument, but IMO there isn’t sufficient evidence to establish it. Without evidence, its probability is between 1 in 200 and 1 in 1000 (based on known rates of interpolation).
And what evidence we have is ambiguous (mentioning a town’s name only once is not unusual enough to be indicative; the evidence of manuscript meddling around the vocabulary of ‘Nazarene’, across both Mark and Matthew, is suspicious but not directly indicative; and so on).
So, at best, it’s a plausibility, but not a premise you can build any argument on.
Dr. Carrier,
I recently finished reading Robert Price´s book “The Amazing Colossal Apostle”. And while I am not entirely convinced by his “neo-Dutch Radical” prespective on Paul´s Epistles, he does make some good points that make me doubt the mainstream scholarship on the authenticiy of the seven epistles. I am not convinced that “Romans” and the “stitch work” that is the “two Epistles” to the Corinthians are fraudulent, but reading Price´s book made me doubt on the authenticty of 1st Thessalonians, Galatians and Phillipians (I am aware you also consider it likely that the Epistle to Philemon to be a forgery based on a letter by Pliny The Younger, but that you don´t speak much of it because it is not relevant in regards to the historicity of Jesus).
One point that stuck out to me is one about “Galatians”, where in the 1st Chapter the author refers to “Judaism” in the past tense – “For you have heard of my previous way of life in Judaism” -, which looks to be unlikely for someone who is writing around 2 or 3 decades after the beggining of the religion. As Price points out, this would not be strange if the writer was differentiating the Jewish religion from paganism, but in this case, he is differentiating it from Christianity in what is supposedly a pre-Second Temple destruction epistle. Isn´t it anachronistic? Price points out this as one of his “clues” that Galatians in not an authentic epistle by Paul, while he also cites the hypothesis of scholar J. C. O´Neill, who in his “The Recovery of Paul’s Letter to the Galatians” (1972), suggests that such passage is part of a post-Pauline interpolation due to this exact same observation.
Another one is – and I won´t “torture you” with more examples – how in the beggining of “Phillipians”, the author mentions “deacons and bishops”, something which pressuposes a church hierarchy that would be too developed in the lifetime of Paul – a issue that already leads mainstream scholarship to overwhelmingly reject the “Pastoral Epistles”, thus implying that “Phillipians” would belong in the same “strata” as this ones.
What is your opinion on this observations? (Sry if somewhere I might sound incoherent, English is not my 1st language).
Price is highly prone to possibiliter fallacies and conflating speculations with facts. So I don’t find any of his arguments convincing. They also don’t follow proper discourse analysis, e.g. Galatians makes no sense as a corrector of Acts whereas Acts makes complete sense as a corrector of Galatians, establishing the order of influence and thus odds of authenticity. The evidence of letter-stitching is extensive and makes no sense for a forgery (you don’t botch an edit of a forged letter; you just forge the letter; only attempting to keep the original intact across the stitch do signs of the resulting awkwardness then arise). Also stylometrics is pretty solid on this (only Philemon has weak markers but that can be because it’s so short; and in any event, it’s an almost nothing letter, so it has little value even as an authentic writing).
Price’s reading of Paul’s use of “Judaism” is also simply wrong. See “Ioudaismos and ioudaizō in Paul and the Galatian Controversy: An Examination of Supposed Positions” by Carlos Gil Arbiol (NTS 44.2, 2021). There is nothing at all peculiar in context about this. This is an example of his not using discourse analysis (compare Philippians 3 on the same point). Paul is specifically writing to Galatians who have questioned his claim that they don’t have to Judaize, and defending his position against his Torah-observant critics. That’s literally the entire point of the whole flow of argument from Galatians 1 through 4. So framing that distinction is essential to his argument.
There are other prpblems. No one writes that long an argument for this and doesn’t mention the slam dunk, that the temple cult no longer exists and thus neither can Jewish law help anymore. Forging a letter set before that time is counter-productive; and even if one did that, they can too easily have included arguments that could be leveraged on the temple reality without having to anachronistically mention it; but the author of Galatians clearly has no idea the situation of an ongoing cult without the temple would ever even exist. Moreover, “Judaizing” was no longer a major problem Christians were dealing with in the second century, so why would this letter be written then? And so on. There are just too many tall stacks of assumptions Price is leaning on here, none of which well evidenced, some even counter-evidenced.
It just doesn’t hold up.
Likewise, the “deacons and bishops were a century later” thing is another “falls apart when you check” dogma that keeps getting repeated but was obviously never plausible to begin with. You literally cannot run an international organization for decades and never have officers. That was the dumbest idea Jesus scholars ever had, indicating a complete obliviousness to the sociology of organizations.
Obviously deacons would have existed from practically day one (the word just means “assistant,” “administrator,” a.k.a. “secretary,” it isn’t some special unique Christian thing, but was a term and office standard across all religions and societies). As soon as there were multiple congregations across three continents, there’d be appointed secretaries (hence, Romans 16:1).
Likewise “bishop,” which isn’t actually a word anywhere in the Bible (that’s a modern English appellation). The Greek word is simply the generic episkopos, “overseer,” “guardian,” “supervisor,” another word common across ancient societies and religions. Deacon is a subservient office, necessitating a supervisory one. There cannot then have been “servants,” without supervisors to manage them. So we have no reason to believe that office was late.
And we have evidence they both existed in Paul’s day: 1 Clement attests this. And it is certainly no later than the 60s AD. Once again, the idea that that letter was later is a modern dogma that gets repeated over and over but is based on no good evidence and goes against the evidence—another dogma that falls apart when you pull at its threads. Just like this nonsense about “an international organization never thought to invent officials for a hundred years.”
Regarding the bishop/deacon distinction, do you think it’s possible that what modern scholars have reconstructed is the classic reticence of an organization trying to pretend to be organizationally flat (a band of brothers) trying to rhetorically downplay their positions which may have been less formal and more ad hoc than they would have been when the Church became more authoritarian? I’ve known plenty of cults that got surprisingly large before they had to start getting organized (though obviously it’s much easier in the modern era because you can kind of fake it with communications tech).
I don’t see any evidence of that.
What has happened is something else: scholars conflated “we lack 99.99% of everything they wrote in the first century” with “they never talk about x, therefore there was no x.” This is an extremely common error mode in Biblical studies.
It’s also not even true (notice how the field screwed up its whole understanding of this subject by misdating 1 Clement, and handwaves over the passages in Romans and Philippians).
But even insofar as something true about this could be said (that these offices, and other matters of organizational structure, aren’t often mentioned), it’s a result of selection bias in what records have been preserved. Subjects don’t come up when they aren’t relevant. And lo, we don’t have any church organization manuals from the first century (unless we do, and guess what’s in it).
I should add that another error is to hear one scholar talk not about the existence of the office but the specific concerns raised about it (as in studies of the Pastoral Epistles), and then conflate what they said with “the office didn’t exist in the first century,” when in fact what they said was “these particular concerns about the office” or “this particular understanding of the office” didn’t exist in the first century. The actual argument made is sound (the Pastorals show concerns more reflective of the political and historical circumstances of the second century than the first).
Switching gears, but I’m convinced Revelation was written during the time of Nero since 666 and 616 (whichever was in the OG) make no sense to refer to the anti-Christ during another emperor’s reign. The usual date of 100AD cannot explain why the author(s) picked THAT reference (to Nero) rather than any other emperor. Also, the semitic style of the text and it’s poor Grk make me think it was composed by a Hellenistic Jew. I’m also going to break ranks again and say that the first author of the Gospel of John may have been the same as the author of revelation given the urban nature of the Grk and its semitic style. I don’t think any of the Johannine epistles were written by whoever was the (first) author of G. John or Revelation.
(1) We have no copy of John^1 from which to analyze their distinctive style.
(2) Common dialects do not indicate common authors.
(3) The usual view is that the Johannines were written after the final redaction of GJohn (because they share a common style and one of them references John^3 material in GJohn). Because three authors are represented in GJohn, and we can’t reliably disentangle them, we cannot really determine if, say, the last of them wrote the Epistles or someone else emulating them did. I don’t think anyone should hold up hope that this will ever be a solvable problem with what we have.
(4) There is a lot of evidence that Revelation was written with Domitian in mind as the last-ruler-but-one, the final one being Nero resurrected. That is why Nero is the Beast. That the final emperor and hence Beast will be a resurrected previous emperor is explicitly stated in Rev. 17:8-11.
Consequently, the dating of Revelation to the 90s AD is reasonably well established (Domitian gets succeeded by Nerva in 96 and he named Trajan his successor almost immediately, then his death put Trajan in office in 98; so Revelation cannot likely have been written after 96).
Thanks, so of the books in the NT with disputed authorship, which would you say has the most likelihood of being the work of the author traditionally associated with it? 2nd Thess with Paul maybe or Jude?
I’m not sure what you mean. My answer is of course 1 Peter. But if you meant, besides that, then my assessment is simply:
2 Thess. and Pastorals and Deutero-Canonicals absolutely were not written by Paul. Their stylistic differences from the authentics are too great (and 2 Thess. clearly was originally written to denounce and “replace” 1 Thess. to suit and quell a later generation and thus is the most deliberate of forgeries).
Hebrews (and 1 Clement) are anonymous, but IMO “authentic,” in the sense that they aren’t pretending to have been written in the 60s AD, they really were, Hebrews by someone close to Paul’s circle (and possibly someone using 1 Peter as a style-guide but who isn’t themselves Peter or even of his faction; there are affinities between 1 Clement and Hebrews as well, but not as indicate the same author).
The Johannines are not credibly authentic even as anonymous texts (none actually identifies themselves as John; that’s an appended title not in the text); they seem self-evidently constructed to “pass” as apostolic without ever actually saying they are, and like 2 Peter, are pretending the Gospels are literal historical accounts (and they are written after the final redaction of John, which makes these probably the last texts written in the NT, probably mid-second-century).
That leaves James and Jude. Neither says which James or Jude they are written by, except that Jude claims to be the brother of James, but still does not identify himself or his brother as an Apostle (and they cannot be the brothers of Jesus; were that the case, they’d say that instead). So “traditionally” is the key here: “traditionally” these are supposed to be by the brothers of Jesus, but that is impossible. However, they could well be authentic, in the sense that they are written by who they say they are (since they neither of them say they are the brothers of Jesus), and maybe even the Apostles by their name (though that is not required for authenticity, as they neither of them say they are).
So, I guess my answer would be, if we mean “other than 1 Peter,” then I would say James and Jude, except for the word “traditional,” which nixes them as authentic in that specific sense.
Thank you for the answer. I wonder if you are aware of Brad McAdon´s article “Josephus and Mark” from 2017. I do not have access to it, but according to what I have red on “Rational Wiki” page about “Jesus myth theory” (with quotes and bibliography mentioned), he argues that :
1 – there are a significant similarities between the 2 accounts;
2- the lack of any independent source about John The Baptist outside of the Gospel tradition (starting with Mark) and of Josephus´ “Antiquities” leads to a more probable conclusion that one account is dependent on the other, with McAdon concluding that more likely Mark copied the account from Josephus (similarly how Mark was probably influenced by Josephus´s account of Jesus Ben Ananias in order to create his “Passion narrative” of Jesus of Nazareth).
Such conclusion would implicate a much later date for Mark´s Gospel.
If you have access to the article, what do you make of it?
I am not aware of any such article being published in a peer reviewed journal. Can you provide the complete citation?
Not knowing what his argument is, I cannot comment on it specifically.
But the only comparable argument I have seen is on Mark’s use of the War (Jesus ben Ananias) which is solid, so I think we can certainly date Mark no earlier than the late 70s. But I have not seen any comparable-quality evidence for a use of the Antiquities in Mark; only in Luke.
Note the Baptist material is compromised. Once we strike the sentence likely added to it as a Christian interpolation, what remains deviates too much from Mark to indicate direct sourcing. The most probable explanation is that Mark and Josephus are each independently using a common source.
That could be oral lore, but I am generally skeptical of such claims. More likely it was a published account of some kind, similar to Nicolaus’s court Memoirs of Herod the Great, which we know Josephus used. That could not be in this case, of course, as Nicolaus was long dead by the time of the 30s AD. But there were surely recorders of the courts of later Herods. Josephus (and Mark) would have had access to hundreds of books we no longer even know existed. That’s where Josephus is getting his material. And if Josephus could access books from that era in the 90s, so surely could Mark twenty years before.
I think in general there is this fallacy that the ancients only had the books we have, when the opposite is the case: we have only a thousandth or less of the works then available. And we have names or descriptions of hardly a single percentage of what was lost. So arguments like “no other source exists” are bad arguments. We cannot say what was not in books we don’t have—and we don’t have almost all the books of antiquity.
This is important. See my discussion of its effect on Christian apologetics surrounding the book of Acts in How We Know Acts Is a Fake History.
I make some rough calculations regarding the number of lost books from the early first century in OHJ (pp 300–01). It’s large.
McAdon, Brad (2017). “Josephus and Mark”. [I]Alpha: Studies in Early Christianity[/I]. [B]1[/B]: 92–93. “The author of our canonical Mark may have been influenced by several texts . . . Josephus’s [I]Antiquities[/I] Book 18, and the Septuagint. If so, there will be significant implications concerning the historicity of Mark’s John the Baptist narratives, the dating of canonical Mark, and Mark’s compositional practices.”
[QUOTE]
The narrative similarities between Antiq 18 and Mark (especially) 6 seem striking:
[LIST=1]
[]Flashbacks: Both accounts are widely recognized as literary ‘flashbacks’.
[]“Herod” instead of “Herod Antipas”: “Antipas” does not occur in any of the passages under consideration in Josephus’s Antiq, but only “Herod”; “Antipas” does not occur in Mark’s account, only “Herod”.
[]“John a good man”: Josephus expresses that John “was a good and righteous man” (18.117); “Herod in awe of John, knowing him to be a good and holy man” (Mk 6:20).
[]Reference to John’s arrest: Because of Herod’s suspicions, John was brought in chains to Machaerus (18.119); “Herod himself had sent men who arrested John, bound him, and put him in prison” (6:17).
[]A reason for John’s arrest: Herod’s fear of John’s persuasive effect may lead to a form of sedition (18.118); “On account of Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife, because Herod had married her” (6:17).
[]Herodias’s previous marriage: Herodias was previously married (18.110); Herodias was previously married (6:17-18).
[]Herodias’s previous husband identified: Correctly as Herod’s step-brother (Herod II, 18.106); incorrectly as Philip (Mark 6:17).
[]Herodias has a daughter: Herod II and Herodias have a daughter named Salome (18.136); Herodias’s daughter is not named in Mark.
[]A “Philip” in both narratives: Philip as Herodias’s daughter’s (Salome’s) husband (18.136); Philip as Herodias’s first husband (Mk 6:17).
[]Criticism of Herod and Herodias’s marriage: Herod and Herodias’s marriage criticized for traditional / religious reasons (18.136); Herod and Herodias’s marriage criticized for traditional/religious reasons (Mk 6:17).
[]Leviticus 18:16 and 21: Implicit reference to Leviticus (18.136); implicit reference to Leviticus 6:17-18).
[]Reasons for John’s death: Because of Herod’s suspicion that John’s ability to persuade the people may lead them to revolt (18.118); not because of John’s persuasiveness and fear of sedition, but because of his denouncing of Herod for taking his brother’s wife (Mk 6:17).
[*]Herod executes John: Antiq 18.116-19 and Mk 6:16,27).
[/LIST]
From a narrative perspective, it seems that the material in Antiq 18 could provide auMark [author of Mark] with much of the narrative material that would be needed to frame the ‘death of John’ narrative in Mark 6—very similar to, as just one example, how the narrative material in LXX Jonah 1:4-16 served as his framing material for the Jesus “calming the sea” narrative in Mk 4?
[HR][/HR]
–[URL=’https://vridar.org/2020/12/10/another-pointer-towards-a-late-date-for-the-gospel-of-mark/#comment-124733′]Comment by Brad McAdon—13 December 2020[/URL]—per Godfrey, Neil. “Another Pointer Towards a Late Date for the Gospel of Mark?”. [I]Vridar[/I]. 10 December 2020.
[/QUOTE]
This is a more substantive attempt to argue the point.
But alas, half of these links are too generic (they would have to be in Josephus’s source and thus would be as well in Mark’s; these are not things Josephus is constructing, but reporting) and others aren’t even links (“Herod in awe of John” is a non-parallel, as Josephus does not say this; likewise “incorrectly as Philip,” which indicates non-awareness of Josephus; hence, “may lead to a form of sedition,” “Herodias’s daughter is not named in Mark”; they disagree on who “Phillip” was married to; etc.).
The parallels lack distinctive vocabulary and order and other features Josephus would have brought to the construction and thus added to or changed from his sources. So there is no evidence here for specifically the use of Josephus rather than the same sources Josephus had.
Dr. Davis is appearing with a couple Christian apologists to ‘fact check’ this article… (I am embarrassed for him at this point. He is better than that.)
(https://www.youtube.com/live/bWjdbrm4EHA?si=ZtNb8xCtzwm9P-kq)
My question to all:
Can you please cite one modern monograph on the subject of historicity demonstrating Jesus probably existed‽
Dr. Carrier typically references Shirley Jackson-Case’s The Historicity of Jesus… (which came out one-hundred-years before Professor Ehrman wrote his awful book on the subject.)
Thank you all!
— Q
(a student of Dr. Carrier’s course, ‘New Testament Studies for Everyone’)
Let me know what comes of that.
In the meantime, I’ll check that video out when it airs. I already have blogs planned this month, so if I bother with a response at all, it will be next month most likely, but as that video drops near the end of this month, the timing might work out.
Since I do not know why I cannot reply to your recent response, I am responding through here, regarding your request about Brad McAdon´s article I mentioned. (your reponse from NOVEMBER 6, 2023, 6:59 PM)
It´s the following:
McAdon, Brad. “Josephus and Mark.” Alpha (1): Studies in Early Christianity, edited by Alvin P Cohen et al., Warring States Project, 2017, pp. 92–93.
One thing that stands out to me is that in response to Celsus´ challenge to provide attestations to Jesus outside of Christian Scriptures, Origen only provides the passage from Josephus about John The Baptist and the supposed “James passage”, which was actually from Hegessipus and not Josephus (as you demonstrated in “OHJ”).
If for Origen an attestation of John The Baptist was good enough as a response to Celsus´ challenge, wouldn´t he use other attestations of John if they existed? I think an argument from silence can be made that there probably weren´t any others – outside of Josephus and Christian Scriptures -, since Origen certainly would have access to much more material than we have today (but then again, I´m an amateur with an interest on the topic, and I might be wrong on this).
On the tech matter:
There is a limit on nesting of threads. So your procedure is precisely how to operate. Also, you can add a hyperlink to any comment you are referring to (the URL is under the comment’s timestamp, for example in this case it is https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/25689#comment-36803). Comments also accept some basic HTML coding, so you have use href tags if you are familiar. But if not, just drop the URL into the comment text. I might code it for you or leave it be.
On your point:
That is precisely an argument I use in my peer reviewed studies (the one on Origen and James, and Historicity).. It is not credible that Origen would “not mention” those things, even if they were negative, as he would have to buffer even negative material with apologetics, and mine even a negative passage for confirmations of his own points.
On the McAdon argument:
Thank you for the citation. I don’t have ready access to its content, but if its argument consists solely of what is quoted at Vridar, it operates on the fallacy I already mentioned. For a corrective see my discussion of what we know about authors’ use of books and sources in composing in my discussion of Acts (linked in my last comment). If McAdon’s atrgument contains the mimesis argument, then it fails to conform to sound methods of mimesis criticism.
In short, that “no such source” is attested mistakes the fact that authors use sources, not “a source,” as proved by Josephus himself (it also is fallacious to expect sources to survive; almost all do not, even in mention, a point I made in my Acts article); and that Mark had access to those sources is proved by the fact that, obviously, Josephus did. If he could access them decades later, so could Mark have decades earlier. So no argument can proceed towards dependence the other way. One needs much sharper evidence than that (as we have in the ben Ananias case).
My response video is now available:
Scholars Methodologically Fail || Carrier vs James McGrath & Kipp Davis
Corrections: I am told that recently Bart Ehrman does claim to have read my book. But he has never published anything in respect to it, so it is impossible to verify the truth of his statement. I have amended my article to reflect this.
But for example, he recently re-published his material on the Brothers of Jesus from his 2012 book, which predated mine (and thus was written before he even could have read it), without apparently seeing any need to revise that material now that he (supposedly) has read my book and knows he isn’t addressing its arguments (which are not the arguments he addressed in 2012).
So you have to decide for yourself if that’s the behavior of someone who actually read my book and thus knows his old material needs to be revised or expanded.
Update: Watching the Davis-McGrath live I made one edit to this article today to add clarity (since they seemed not to understand a particular sentence and struggled to even after reading the paragraph it introduces). The edits appear in brackets.
But we’re over an hour in now and they haven’t brought up any examples of any of their complaints, haven’t correctly described things I’ve said or argued, and aren’t even interacting with the content of this article.
In fact at several points they clearly show they haven’t read it; e.g. Davis had to be told my literacy argument was about reading the scripture, until which he struggled to understand the opening sentence of that paragraph; McGrath tries to defend the Argument from John the Baptist, but does not respond to any of the refutations of his points are already in this article he is supposed to be responding to; etc.
So this seems to be a waste of time.
The same happens in the remaining part all the way to close. They don’t actually interact with the arguments in this article.
They do make a ton of false statements, but they are all refuted already by what I have already written on the subjects concerned, so no further response is needed.
But if anyone has specific questions about claims or arguments they made in that video, let me know here below in comments! (And please provide a timestamp location so I can go right back to what you are asking about and be sure to get right what they said.)
I have a couple:
1. @27:00 paraphrase -> “There is wide academic support for the notion that Moses was a historical person” and therefore Moses can not be used as an example of a person once thought historical, but now considered myth.
What’s Kipp referring to @41:47 about “bad photographs”
@46:12 Kipp’s according to the scriptures argument. I myself made the argument in the chat that Christians later use “Kata Markon” which doesn’t fit Kipp’s usage. Listening to it again though it seems that he wants to say Mythicists are interpreting the phrase incorrectly, but the examples he goes on to give seem to me to correspond with scriptures as a source of information. So I don’t really know what to make of it.
@57:28 “Illiterate Fisherman” means that they can not write, not that they can not read. It seems to me possible that one could read but not write, but how likely is that?
[28:00] Davis >>>…the denial of the historicity of Moses [as featured in the scriptures] is not the outright rejection of an historical figure [of some sort 😉 .. that the scripture’s author(s) mined for the scripture’s featured Moses figure]…
Davis is a “Biblicist” for Moses and Jesus historicity.
Cf. Loftus, “Preface: The Jesus We Find in the Gospels Never Existed!”. in Loftus, John W.; Price, Robert M., eds. (2021). Varieties of Jesus Mythicism: Did He Even Exist?. Hypatia Press. ISBN 1839191589.
To be charitable, DB, I think what he means is the same thing I do, that the historicity of Moses is doubtful but no one claims to be “certain” he didn’t exist. Davis acts like a Christian apologist quite a lot, probably because that was how he was trained before apostatizing, so he is playing on distortion and false light rhetoric here, pretending I claimed anything differently than this (e.g. I give as much as a 1 in 3 chance there was a Jesus; I suspect that’s higher than almost all mainstream scholars would give to Moses; it’s certainly no less). Once you illuminate and remove his false light rhetoric, Davis isn’t actually saying anything relevant.
Yes. Good examples, Jason.
1) Your paraphrase is inaccurate. See related comments. He wasn’t trying to say Moses’ historicity is mainstream; he was trying to say that some mainstream scholars hold out hope for (some few even offer hypothetical) “minimal” Moseses. But if you actually went and checked, you’d find out that they just mean there is some possibility of this, not that it is established by any extant evidence. Which is literally my position on Jesus.
I can sympathize with your being misled, however. Davis acts like an apologist a lot, and like apologists, he often uses ambiguous, false-light rhetoric to frame things a certain way, which are deliberately misleading, or distortions of the actual things he is referring to. You need to be on your guard for that.
2) I agree that was a confusing section of the live, but to parse it out, the “bad photographs” remark was regarding the Dead Sea scrolls, not the use of kata to cite scripture. I’ll treat those separately.
First, his remark about the DSS was another standard false-light tactic, whereby he claims that somewhere I rely on an “old reading” of a scroll such that, if we adopted the “new” reading, my conclusion would be undone. But he never gives any examples. Even in his videos where he claims to, at no point does he ever describe any argument I actually made, but invents arguments I didn’t make, and argues against them—and barely uses any of this “new reading” rhetoric there (see Kipp Davis’s Selective Confirmation and Ignoring of Everything I Actually Said in Chapter 4 of On the Historicity of Jesus, And Then Kipp Davis Fails to Heed My Advice and Digs a Hole for Himself, and And So Kipp Davis Conclusively Demonstrates His Incompetence as a Scholar).
Rather, Davis invented that tactic after I cited a list of three dozen experts refuting him, and he cherry-picked a single one of them (Puech) and claimed that guy made errors and implied that Davis’s own mentor, George Brooke, was thereby misled; but like with me, Davis never cites a single pertinent example of this (and I doubt he can; Brooke can read the DSS himself, and there are no instances I am aware of where Brooke uses a reading by Puech that has been corrected, and Brooke himself clearly agrees, as he has republished his work on this without caveat or correction). And it’s moot anyway. “One dude fucked up” does not erase near forty other dudes (and dudettes).
Notice this is how Christian apologists act: they ignore the vast ton of citations you give them, find the weakest one, attack that, and then act like that’s the only study you cited. It’s all the worse that the attack even on Puech is evasive: Davis never gives a pertinent example. Maybe Puech got some readings wrong. But are any of them relevant to what we are talking about? I doubt Davis even knows. Per the logic of bullshit, Davis doesn’t actually care whether the things he says are true or false. He just wants you to believe they are true.
Second, everything Davis said about the Greek use of kata as source-citation was false. Which is to be expected, as once again, he never gave any examples of anything he said, which is a good red flag for not trusting what he says.
(a) Here is the Liddell & Scott, cf. IV “fitness or conformity,” says “in quotations, according to,” i.e. this is how you cite a source. You are correct to note the Gospels’ titles as examples: kata markon means, “according to Mark” as a source citation, not an author; this is one of the reasons scholars conclude the Gospels were originally anonymous, because this isn’t how authors identified themselves (they use the genitive or other approaches). When saying a prophecy was fulfilled, words meaning “fulfilled” are used (e.g. James 2:23).
(b) Davis lied when he said Paul used this all the time in some other sense. Paul never uses kata [scripture] himself. The phrase only appears one time in Paul: in his quotation of the creed in 1 Cor 15. It is generally agreed he did not write that creed. So those are someone else’s words, not his. Elsewhere, Paul never uses this formula. Ever. Much less in “some other way.”
(c) When we check to see what Paul understood that formula to mean, in his own words, it completely refutes Davis (and he would know this if he checked the evidence I cited for the point I made that he was incompetently trying to rebut here): “Now to him who is able to establish you in accordance with my gospel [not scripture], the message I proclaim about Jesus Christ, in keeping with the revelation of the mystery hidden for long ages past, but now revealed and made known through the prophetic writings by the command of the eternal God, so that all the Gentiles might come to the obedience that comes from[a] faith” (Romans 16:25-26). Paul clearly understands the scriptures to be the source of the gospel and kerygma of Jesus. This is plainly stated in his own words. As elsewhere (among the many other examples I cited).
(3) So, I might do a live with Godless Engineer on this (watch my Twitter or Facebook feeds for that). But this thing about reading vs. writing was the biggest boner of the night for Davis, a true own-goal, total foot-in-mouth.
Okay. Here goes.
Davis said I should listen to the literature and scholars on ancient literacy.
My dissertation adviser at Columbia University was William V. Harris, the world’s leading expert on ancient literacy and author of what is still a leading textbook on it. Davis mentioned Catherine Hezser (the same; likewise), who only expanded Harris’s findings to Judea (finding no different results). At Columbia I also took graduate level courses under Raffaella Cribiore, one of the world’s leading experts in ancient education, also having written one of the most definitive studies of that.
Do you know what I learned from them and their studies (which are detailed and excellent, BTW)?
(a) It has been established scientifically as well as historically that it is impossible to do what Davis suggested, and there is no evidence of it ever being done in the whole of human history. To compose the kind of complex pesharim as Christianity was launched by absolutely requires extensive education. There is no way around it. You cannot just go to lectures, memorize everything, assemble a complete repository of scripture in your head, and manipulate it with pesher analysis. This requires highly complex symbolic processing, which requires letters, phonemes, syllables; reading.
It also would require impossible coincidences, like that somehow someone could end up listening to the entire Torah, by attending sermons on weekends this way; very little of the Torah actually gets read to the public, and one sermon a week will not cut it, even in a lifetime.
(b) This is true even without literacy specifically. For example, the Mishnah was memorized in the time of Jesus (not written). But this was only possible because of extensive years of education (drilling) of children in Rabbinical schools. Years and years of training. Needless to say, if you are already buying that expensive education for your kid (or they are getting it on scholarship, which did exist), you aren’t going to neglect teaching them to read the Torah as well. There were not “different” Rabbinical schools, ones that didn’t teach you to read the Torah but only to memorize the Mishnah and ones that did both. There was only one kind of school you could go to, which taught both. And you had to have attended one to use scripture the way the Christians were.
(c) It is indeed the case that if Paul could read the scriptures and the others couldn’t, this would establish his authority over them. Because common people are not going to trust guys who can’t read when they are selling a religion entirely reliant on reading the scriptures. The fact that this argument or conflict or obviously powerful rhetorical point never comes up in Paul can only mean it didn’t exist. Which refutes any notion that the Apostles could not read the scriptures.
Kipp Davis at this point gave a weirdly self-contradictory argument, whereby somehow Paul “referenced written scripture constantly” even though this “wasn’t the flex he thought it was.” You have to pick a lane. Either Paul thought citing written scripture was centrally important (explaining why he constantly relies on it) or he didn’t. If he did, then it was the flex he thought it was. If he didn’t, then he wouldn’t have done it—but he did. What’s missing is the resulting flex: that he could do this and no other Apostle could. This follows necessarily. Either Paul would use it, or the argument over its relevance would appear in his letters (the “illiterate” Apostles defending themselves, and Paul having to respond).
There is no way to get around this with self-contradictory verbal legerdemain.
The real kicker is that this point is established by the results of all the studies of ancient literacy Kipp references, and I know this, because I studied under these people and have read their studies in detail.
P.S. It was rather funny watching them spend a weird amount of time on a different article, the one listing scholars who deem mythicism plausible instead, and they acted like that list is an Argument from Authority (i.e. that I mean it should convince people mythicism is true). Um. No. That list only exists to refute one claim: that “No one with relevant qualifications takes mythicism seriously.” That’s it’s only actual purpose. As is stated there.
But if anyone is curious why Davis, McGrath, and Ehrman aren’t on that list: it is because the have all said (publicly), in one way or another, that mythicism isn’t plausible. Indeed, they repeatedly said that (in different words) several times in this very video!
This is a notable point, because Davis seemed not to understand why I list Heacock: it’s because the triangulation of the three statements I quote from him confirm he does not share Kipp’s position that mythicism should be dismissed, not only as “incompetent” (his usual line, repeated in this video) but as essentially impossible on the given evidence (as also implied repeatedly in this video).
To the contrary, Heacock really does think historicity is questionable, even if he himself does not doubt it (remember, that is not a list of doubters; though it includes them; they are at the top in bold type). Each one of his statements might have been too vague to conclude that, but all of them together confirm it. Davis has never publicly taken such a position, and even denied it to me on another live. McGrath has denied it repeatedly, in this video and elsewhere. Likewise Ehrman. That’s why they don’t qualify to be on the list.
Meanwhile, as that list intro states, the list only includes persons alive as of the publication of my book in 2014. So I never even checked Allegro’s credentials, because he was long dead, and thus he wouldn’t go on the list even if he had a relevant PhD.
Just saw a video on the possibility that Luke was actually the first gospel… Marcion tells us as much(even though his version is a chopped up smaller one)… but it would solve two issues… why Q does not need to exist, and where the gospels got their start… Marcion claimed that Paul dictated it to Luke(minus the gold plates and seer stones).
what eliminates this possibility?
Marcion never actually said it was the first Gospel. He also never said that thing about Luke learning from Paul (that was a later anonymous legend never connected to Marcion). We are only told he chose to use a version of it.
Nor would Marcion likely be able to know such a thing (it requires modern literary methods to discern that now; he would not have had access to those, or any other relevant data; this is why Papias gets literally everything wrong about the history of these texts, and he was Marcion’s contemporary). The speculation that Marcion lied about “using” a Gospel because in fact he wrote that Gospel, and passed it off as someone else’s, would get you to a conclusion that Luke was first, but that’s speculation in, speculation out. GIGO, in more appropriate terminology.
There are some serious scholars arguing for Lukan priority (among them the Marcion specialist Markus Vinzent, I think?). But their arguments have not tested out well so far (Goodacre has pretty much destroyed every attempt yet published, and I don’t hold out much hope anyone is going to do better). From my own perspective, it appears extremely improbable, simply owing to basic literary redaction analysis (Matthew literally makes no sense as a redaction of Luke, but Luke makes complete sense as a redaction of Matthew and Mark). Add to that Goodacre’s more technical analyses (e.g. authorial fatigue, etc.), and the theory seems doomed to me.
For an example of discission, pro and con. You can compare methods (e.g. one is correctly probabilistic, the other depends on possibiliter fallacies) to get the idea of which argument line is actually credible in the end.
I was reading the mid-90s NIB commentary on Matthew and it said that tax booths disappeared from the Holy Land in 39CE and used that as evidence for the reliability of (at least some of) the gospels. Is that true (not that that alone is enough to convince me)?
Later in the same commentary it said that rock hewn tombs with the stone rolled over the doorway are most prominent in the traditionally located site of Golgotha. Since the 90s has anyone made any progress in uncovering rock-cave tombs in the region and if so, is the site identified as Golgotha still the one with the most such tombs?
Hmm. What edition of the NIBC are you using or where in it do you find these remarks? The 1995 edition (commentary by M. Eugene Boring) does not mention these things in the commentary itself (Matt 9:9 is written skeptically, not apologetically, and never brings up the tax “booth” thing; ditto, vis the tombstone, in 27:60 and 28:2). The introduction is similarly doubtful of apologetical lines of argument (e.g. see Boring’s discussion of who wrote Matthew on p. 107). If you are looking at an older edition or one of the appended essays not written by Boring, do specify, and quote their argument and any sources they cite.
But, working from just what you’ve said, this sounds like apologetical methodology rather than scholarly.
(1) Rock hewn tombs existed there from all eras, but Round stones actually post-date the Jewish war—with exceptions only for royal tombs, which may be the symbolic intent of “inventing” one for Jesus, a symbolism that would be understood at the time. It is historically virtually impossible that Jesus was really buried in one of those. He would have been buried in a tomb with a square stone, or a tomb complex with no stone at all (on the actual cultural context of his burial, particularly as he was a convict, see my chapter on it in The Empty Tomb). Tourists today are shown tombs with round stones, but those are either royal tombs or modern fabrications (using post-war doorstones to cover tombs that previously had square stones).
(2) It’s hard to fathom how someone would know something like that customs booths stopped being used precisely in “39 C.E.” I’d have to see their argument or their source. And I don’t know the nitty gritty on the tax situation (hence I’d need to see their source to assess its value). But I assume this is another apologetical inference, based on assumptions more than facts.
39 happens to be the year Herod Antipas was removed as tetrarch of Galilee, but it was then assigned to Herod Agrippa. But it was never governed by Romans until after the Jewish War. So there must be some confusion over what “tax booths” (customs stations) would be doing there. They wouldn’t have been Roman, neither before 39 nor after. They’d have to have been part of the Jewish administration of Antipas, taken over subsequently by Agrippa.
Their relationship to Rome was indirect: the Herods retained client control over Galilee by treaty (as tetrarchs) as long as they paid a fixed annual tribute to Rome. But how they raised that tribute was up to them. Customs taxes would be an obvious way to do it. So the “tax booths” Matthew would be referring to would have to mean those. I have not exhaustively checked, but I suspect there was no decade that lacked them there. So, again, I’d need to see the evidence being cited to the contrary.
Thanks! The toll booth comment is in the commentary on Mark by Perkins in the same 1995 volume (page 513).
Ah. Okay. You had said Matthew. So I did not think to look in the Mark section!
Can you cite the page as well for the tomb doorstone claim?
Meanwhile…
Perkins cites Theissen. Whose argument you can read here.
The argument is unsound. It derives the conclusion from the assumption that tax collectors (“customs agents”) could only mean border agents, and the border near Capernaum was dissolved in 39. There are a number of problems with the major premise, but I didn’t look into whether that border argument is true or even makes sense. The fatal problem is with the minor premise: that telônion only refers to “border customs.” That’s false. It refers to literally any tax collection whatever (a “telos” is a “due,” on anything; a “telônion” is a “little dues place,” i.e. a small place you pay your dues).
For example, see my translation of an Egyptian tax receipt (this was my final project in the year-long graduate-level course I took on papyrology at Columbia University under renowned papyrologist Roger Bagnall). This is exactly the kind of thing these booths produced: you’d reckon and pay your taxes at the booth, and the scribe there would then write up a receipt for you. So that papyrus is a receipt that literally comes from one of those tax booths (albeit deep in Egypt).
You can see there that the taxes (the “dues,” or telê, although that word does not appear there) that Chaeremon and family are paying at that booth include all sorts of things: various property taxes (on their acreage, e.g. the “naubion” tax funding civic irrigation infrastructure, plus various property taxes based on acreage and what is grown there which function as essentially income taxes), rent (on government sheep), and dues on produce transport (another income tax, whereby a percentage of any produce he transports off his land, i.e. sells rather than uses himself, is tendered to the government, so that tax is paid in goods rather than money).
As well as administration fees! They are charged for writing the receipt and processing the taxes. The family also had to provide its own “paper” (papyrus) scraps to write these receipts on, or else they’d have been charged for that too, which is why receipts spanning several years appear on this same sheet.
All these taxes and fees have different names. So to refer to them all collectively, one would say “telos singular / telê plural” (simply, “dues”). Thus a tel– –ônion is a place where all these would be collected.
The word therefore has nothing specific to do with border taxes (though obviously border customs would likewise be so called).
And such dues would be collected by any ruler, as I mentioned. They are not specifically Roman (my Egyptian tax receipt documents Roman taxes; but similar taxation schemes, also called telê, would exist under any client state as well).
Is there a way to determine exactly which year between say 20ce and 40ce the bible timing could be correct for Jesus supposed death? I cannot find a definitive way to tell which year had thursday night become Nissan 14, so that friday night became the double sabath of passover and the weekly sabath as the bible indicates… because of the julian gregorian drift… if it could be established that no year in that time period matched we could be sure the story was complete fiction. Also Daniel 9 would be invalidated or supported one way or the other… I suspect they slotted Jesus into a year that matched Daniel rather than having real years.
Obviously, yes. They did not know (or else, did not find convenient) the actual date or year of his death.
The specific calendrics of the Gospels are theological, not historical (see my discussion elsewhere). Most mainstream scholars would likely agree; it’s apologists who don’t want to admit this. But the impact is: you can’t actually use the Gospels to “date” the death of Jesus. The most they usefully give us is: it was when Pontius Pilate governed Judea. That sets the date at anywhere between 26 and 37 (based on external evidence).
And that’s just the canonical (or “Western”) chronology.
The Eastern chronology puts the death of Jesus a hundred years earlier, but still no more precisely.
Unfortunately the evidence in Paul does not help us decide between the Western and Eastern chronology. But fortunately, the evidence in Paul does fix it as most likely one or the other (other dates don’t fit as well). See How Do We Know the Apostle Paul Wrote His Epistles in the 50s A.D.?
But if you want to see a historically informed but apologetical effort to treat the Gospels literally and thereby derive a date (a wholly gullible, naive, and implausible procedure; but popular nonetheless) see The Handbook of Biblical Chronology by Jack Finegan.
Needless to say, he gets mixed results, a variety of possible years for Christ’s death; and that’s even after “harmonizing” the actually contradictory accounts in John vs. the Synoptics. But he at least does not conceal such problems. So he can be a useful working point if you want to interact with the apologetics and not the legitimate historical literature.
I’ve been asked if I meant this sentence literally (or if I meant to replace “is” with “may”):
“…believers can’t engage in honest debates over the historicity of Jesus” because “merely entertaining the proposition requires them first to admit their religion is false.”
I do mean that as written. The non-existence of Jesus and the truth of Christianity are logically contradictory (except for very fringe Christianities not widely found among the populace).
Therefore for most Christians it is not even logically possible that Jesus did not exist—unless Christianity is false. This is the reason why there is such emotional pressure to avoid even entertaining the possibility: doing so entails questioning their faith; and, moreover, they cannot adopt the one proposition without abandoning the other. Which is the psychological threat that hampers their ability to honestly engage this question, even with themselves.
Earl Doherty thinks otherwise but that makes me wonder why he says (in the same book, though I can’t remember which one, or if it was on his website) that his writings have helped people leave Christianity. How could he coherently say that the earliest Christians didn’t believe in a real Jesus and say that 1.It is possible today to be a Christian without believing in a historical Jesus and 2. That his books have led people away from Christianity entirely?
If Peter and Paul didn’t think there was a historical Jesus, then of course one can still be a Christian and accept their view BUT what would a physical mythicist church look like? What would the worship services look like? Would it have a eucharist, hymns? Or what if some people tried to resurrect (pun intended) Marcion’s views into a church, would people come and give it traction and competition with mainline denominations and megachurches? Would it just be a few former occultists?
Is it impossible, even in theory, for sects like those to be resurrected and gain lots (millions) of followers today?
See my reply to Jiohdi.
“It is possible today to be a Christian without believing in a historical Jesus” requires adopting a completely different belief system than is normally referred to by the word “Christianity” today. That is possible, but it would be essentially abandoning the modern faith Christians desperately need to believe in, for a completely different faith that would make them a laughing stock (and a threat) to their peers and institutions.
So I think what may be tripping Doherty up here is an equivocation fallacy. When I say “Christian faith” I mean the modern construct. That is logically incompatible with historicity. Other constructs, meanwhile, will never be popular; they will always be fringe, and adopting them is as much an existential threat to the modern faith as atheism.
The only thing worse than being an atheist is being “a crazy heretic.” Indeed, there is more acceptance for atheism; which is why that’s where people go when they lose the modern faith: instead of “completely revising” Christianity to actually answer all their objections to it, it becomes obvious at that point that if you have to do that, the religion is clearly false. So to atheism they go.
If, christian origins are as you believe, then finding out Jesus was an astral being would only be returning to the truth faith proclaimed by Paul, no?
In objective terms, yes. That would be a historicist position in faith-terms because it would be affirming the cosmic death of Jesus really historically happened. So that is an available “out.” We just don’t account that historicist because if we conclude that that is what they believed, we lose all basis for trusting that it was ever even plausibly true. Which is why most modern Christians by far can’t go there. They need the faith they have, not the implausible faith of yore.
Hence apart from fringe sects, no Christian today would accept the original religion in any form. Because they’d have to be Jewish, for one thing—fully Torah observant; but even under the Pauline deviation, which is a heresy relative to the original religion, for most Christian believers now, adopting a “merely mystical” Jesus, or as some fringe Christian thinkers have attempted, a “merely symbolical” Jesus, is tantamount now to simply not believing it. Out goes Trinitarian (hence most) modern Christianity, but as well even non-trinitarian sects like JW and Mormonism. Only the UU would survive, and as everyone pretty much acknowledges now, they are already atheists, functionally or literally (hence why they are so fringe: their numbers insignificant).
Indeed, the original faith requires believing in a cosmological model of the universe that has been decisively refuted by science (believing antiscientific things is possible, we know, but such a new notion will never be popular), but also because it requires somehow handwaving away the fact that the original religion taught those were the last days (Jesus was “the firstfruits”), but it’s two thousand years on now, a fact the original faith is logically incompatible with, which is one of many reasons no one believes in the original faith. It is the same reason they’d have to abandon their modern faith sooner than adopt the ancient one.
It’s thus a conundrum: to adopt the old faith requires adopting a belief so decisively refuted by events as to be impossible for all but the most abjectly delusional to believe now; while to maintain the modern creed that Christians have staked their faith on requires holding logically contradictory propositions at once: that that modern faith is true and yet Jesus did not exist.
The non-existence of Jesus is therefore an existential threat to modern Christian faith.
(That does not, however, make this any good as an argument against Christianity, because the evidence is too insecure: it is thus only a threat conceptually, not rhetorically. To be evaded at all costs; but easy to evade.)
But it would not require them first to admit that their religion is false.
It would only required them to entertain the possibility that their religion could be false.
And I’m sure that most Christians are uncomfortable and some unwilling to do that, thinking that doing so would be allowing the devil to get a foothold in corrupting their minds and compromising their faith at the very least, and perhaps engaging in a form of heresy at the very worst.
But I think as you have stated it is incorrect. It should read something like this instead:
Believers can’t engage in honest debates over the historicity of Jesus, because merely entertaining the proposition is something that they are simply not comfortable with and unwilling to do.
Which is exactly my point. It’s an existential threat to their belief. The proposition “Jesus did not exist” is functionally equivalent to “Your deeply and desperately held religious belief is false.”
They are not separate propositions.
That’s why it is impossible for a deeply believing Christian to engage honestly with the proposition. Because to them, the proposition is an attack on their entire faith system, which therefore must then be defended.
By contrast, atheists face no such threat from “Jesus existed.” That’s why they can entertain it objectively. The proposition does not attack their entire worldview, and therefore they are not activated by it to defend their entire worldview. They can just evaluate the evidence, freed from all existential dread.
For a cross-analogy, consider what the Christian faces when offered the proposition that Confucius did not exist. No existential dread. No defenses activated. Unless…they fear that proposition implicates support for doubting the historicity of Jesus; then it’s “all hands on deck; we must destroy this proposition, all facts and logic be damned, or else it’s slippery slope time!”
This is what I’m talking about.
Carrier’s position—as is the position of other scholars (see note)—is to doubt the historicity of Jesus with the caveat that no one claims to be “certain” he didn’t exist.
[note] Carrier (25 August 2022). “List of Historians Who Take Mythicism Seriously”. Richard Carrier Blogs. Retrieved 31 October 2023.
Nota bene: Scholarly doubt about the historicity of Jesus should not be construed as an argument against Christianity.
Correct.
Because the uncertainty of that conclusion (“Jesus did not exist) is millions if not trillions of times larger than the uncertainty of the more relevant conclusion (“Jesus did not rise from the dead; at all, much less at the behest of the eternal God Yawheh, even less for the magical purpose of communicating the final sating of that God’s bloodlust against taboo violators”).
For exactly the same reason, that Jesus existed isn’t an argument, at all, for the truth of Christianity, either. That’s why it poses no threat (at all, much less existential) to atheism or any non-Christian worldview.
Dr. Carrier I’m curious if you’ve seen this yet.
Contra Carrier: Christologies in the 1st Century BCE.
It’s been pointed out. That’s the crank Mike Lawrence. I’ve interacted with the stuff claimed in that video before.
I rarely bother with videos at all, unless I’m paid to. There are hundreds of videos online about me, almost all terrible, vacuous, or crank, and I don’t generally bother with it. The time-to-relevant-data ratio is usually so large that videos are usually a waste of my time to even listen to. And in this case, a quick scan of the transcript shows me there are no new arguments in it; they are already refuted by the material they claim to be rebutting.
Which is typical of cranks who suck at arguing. The effect is, you only need go and read what they claim to be responding to to discover they have no argument.
See How Do We Know the Apostle Paul Wrote His Epistles in the 50s A.D.? and in particular my comments in response to Lawrence (here and here). And on his misinterpretation of Barnabas, see the discussion here, particularly its closing observation:
This is correct.
English:
Greek:
My own literal translation:
This is a reference to the Romans commissioning the construction of Aelia Capitolina (and its temple to Jupiter) over the ruins of Jerusalem, announced by Hadrian around 130, launching the Bar Kochba revolt in a failed bid to stop this.
It cannot refer to the building of the Second Temple, because the First Temple was destroyed by the Babylonians, and the Second was rebuilt by the Jews, at the direction of the Persians (indeed at the expense and direction of Cyrus the Great, after conquering the Babylonians).
There is no way to rig this to say something else. The word autoi specifically means “the same” people, and the word here for the “servants” of those people means “staff,” not some mystical other thing. This can only refer to Hadrian publicly directing his agents to rebuild the second temple. It cannot refer to Cyrus funding the Jews’ own rebuilding of the first temple.
Lawrence, being an amateur crank, does not understand that the next verse, 16:5, is a new lemma. This has been a series of predictions made (supposedly) by Jesus (16:1), and 16:5 is not about “another” temple other than the ones just described (in 16:3–4), it is about the cause, “Again, it was revealed how the city and the temple and the people of Israel should be betrayed.” How. Not that. (Greek: Πάλιν ὡς ἔμελλεν, “Again, how it would be that”)
You write ” … James Tabor was once asked to explain why he believed Jesus existed, and he said …” It would be good to have a reference to where and when James Tabor was asked this so we could check exactly what he said.
He says it a lot. I got it from a video where he was directly asked why he believed in historicity (I lost track of which one, but one of the MythVision eps). But he makes the same mistake elsewhere, so it’s a part of his repertoire.
You are using “hostile” as a noun?
Hostiles and friendlies. Standard English. “A person or thing that is antagonistic or unfriendly” and vice versa.
Dr. Carrier,
You’ve explained before that all four authors of the Gospels were anonymous. That the names attributed to them did not come about until sometime much later. And that was done so in an attempt by Christians to give the Bible some type of validity/authority.
Having said that I have some specific questions concerning all of that.
Q: What do you make of the fact that the Gospels writers were anonymous? How common was that a thing back then?
Apologists claim to know some specific things about each the of the authors that are not attributed by theologians to have written the Gospels (see below).
Do you suppose that initially the names were just fictional author names, and then sometime later legends made up about who these authors to try and authenticate them as being real people?
Or do you think these named people actually did exist, and then at some point apologists decided to attribute them as being the authors of the four gospels?
“According to tradition, the author, Mark is not an apostle himself. Not one of the original disciples, but rather the follower of one of them. Traditionally, he’s supposed to be the disciple of Peter …. We don’t know exactly where this Mark was or where he actually wrote.”
“Matthew was a dishonest tax collector driven by greed, until Jesus Christ chose him as a disciple. We first meet Matthew in Capernaum, in his tax booth on the main highway. He was collecting duties on imported goods brought by farmers, merchants, and caravans.”
“Luke was a physician and possibly a Gentile. He was not one of the original 12 Apostles but may have been one of the 70 disciples appointed by Jesus (Luke 10). He also may have accompanied St. Paul on his missionary journeys.”
“John is also known for being one of the three closest disciples of Jesus, preparing the place for the Last Supper, witnessing Jesus raising Jairus’s daughter from the dead, being present for the Transfiguration, and being present in the Garden of Gethsemane the night before the crucifixion.”
For a slightly more accurate articulation see Three Things to Know about New Testament Manuscripts.
It was routine…for myth and fiction.
Notice almost all of the “historical books” of the Bible are anonymous (from Genesis to Kings and Chronicles, etc.). Almost all Jewish apocrypha as well (Tobit, Joseph and Asenath, the Biblical Antiquities, Enoch, Jubilees, Maccabees, etc.). And in pagan literature, the Lives of Aesop are a close parallel: they exist in multiple redactions over time (just like the Synoptic Gospels); all anonymous.
The Gospels are myths. As such, the author did not even want to be known or inserted into the narrative. They wanted this to be a timeless, inspired narrative (or seem like one), just like the Scriptures (canonical and apocryphal), which rested on no human authority. The problem is that, as noble as that sounds, it doesn’t survive well in a competing market, eventually necessitating the identification of authors with a pedigree, in order to defend the narratives as reliable history and not just a collection of ideological pamphlets (this is the Noll thesis, which I describe in OHJ; check the author index).
An increasing dependence on biblical literalism is a similar symptom of the same market competition (see Establishing the Biblical Literalism of Early Christians).
Essentially, yes. Originally there was just “the Gospel,” rewritten in many forms, each posing as “the correct” one. Then someone assigned them names—probably the editor of the Anti-Marcionite edition mid-to-late second century, when all four Gospels were bound together as a quartet. That editor borrowed names from the Gospels (and the Epistles bound with them) to create a veneer of authority. Then legends started being spun out for those authors (those legends indeed appear soon after, and independently).
There is a remote chance that the anti-Marcionite prologues were part of that original edition and thus not an afterthought but a contrivance of the same editor. But we have no way of proving that (no one attests it being the case, nor do any manuscripts).
Your question is a kind of masked-man fallacy. It depends on what you mean by “these people” or “actually did exist.” Take Luke as an example. Paul attests such a person. Then a forged letter of Paul claims he was a doctor. Then whoever bound that forged letter with the fourfold Gospel decided to tack that name onto the top of one of the Gospels, the one that seemed the more sophisticated, like one might expect from a doctor (addressing it as “according to” Luke, i.e. as a source, not the author). Then someone spun out a legend that, hey, yeah! That guy Luke Paul knew really was a doctor (almost certainly he wasn’t), and he wrote this Gospel (he certainly did not)!
The same or similar storyline follows the other Gospels. As likewise most of the apocryphal Gospels (of which there were several dozen).
I hesitate to enter this debate which is nothing short of overwhelming for a blogger like me (blindfaithblindfolly.wordpress.com). Author of a self-published book (“From Illusions to Illumination. The Itinerary of a Franciscan Priest from Catholicism to Atheism”) and of a unique blog which already contains over 1300 posts (two new ones every week), my knowledge of the historicity-of-Jesus question has been limited to Freke and Gandy’s book. But even if Jesus never existed, I believe it worth my while – and the few years I have left at age 86 – to ridicule religious credulity and to invite Believers on the Brink to discover the illumination of atheism. Not only is the Book of Acts “full of shit” but both Testaments, the Torah and the Koran. I would be interested in your appreciation of my blog and that of Professor Richard Carrier.
OP: “Is there any evidence in Paul that “those guys [sc. Peter and gang] get authority from having known the historical Jesus”? No. To the contrary, that conundrum is conspicuously absent from the letters of Paul: that they [sc. Peter and gang] knew Jesus and he [sc. Paul ] didn’t is never an argument he ever has to face or rebut.”
Historicity arguments assert that in the context of higher authority viz. Apostles, Disciples. The cultural norm was to grant that Apostles had higher authority than Disciples. Thus Apostles like Paul could ignore and safely avoid having to face or rebut any argument made reliant on any historicity knowledge a Disciple proclaimed.
“Paul’s avoidance of the original church members makes complete sense. In their absence, he can keep focusing on the visions that tell him that he’s right about this, that he doesn’t need to listen to anyone else, that he’s heard this from the mouth of Jesus himself. He can push down pesky inconvenient thoughts about the implications of the fact that people who supposedly also personally heard from Jesus are saying something completely different. As far as Paul is concerned, Jesus has personally delivered God’s message to him directly. Therefore, anyone who thinks differently is just plain wrong. QED.” [Dr Sarah, “‘Deciphering The Gospels Proves Jesus Never Existed’ review: Chapter 9, Part 1”. Geeky Humanist. 13 June 2023]
There is no evidence of that in Paul.
That sounds like a modern Christian invention.
Paul never avoids them. He engages them, criticizes them, interacts with them, and arguments concerning him and them, quite a lot. And he refers to why his words carry authority a lot, and was challenged on that a lot. And he strove to align most of what he taught to what they did (even if he lied about how he came across that knowledge).
Just see Gal. 1–2 for a start. But there’s the whole “superapostles” complaint; the “we’re with Cephas” argument; and so on. His letters are full of this.
I came here for updates on the state-of-play regarding historicity, and found your analysis (that people often do not check their facts) to be a very insightful summary. Alas, only a few people will be embarrassed by this: most will ignore your critique or invoke some special pleading to avoid cognitive dissonance – such is human nature.
I have one comment/question about “the argument from Nazareth”, namely that Mark only refers once (in the prologue) to Jesus coming from Nazareth (as you know) and that in the corresponding (pretty faithful) passage in Matthew, this reference to Nazareth is omitted, despite Matthew’s interest elsewhere in the Nazareth origin. This suggests to me that the version of Mark that Matthew used did not have this reference to Nazareth, and so the Nazareth origin was not invented by Mark – Mark instead portrayed Jesus as a Nazarene, and the connection to Nazareth was added later. What do you think is the likely explanation?
(PS. In reading your recent posts, I noticed that you tend to use “disinterested” rather than “uninterested” to mean “not interested”, whereas I am used to “disinterested” meaning “impartial” (although it can mean both). Is this a deliberate choice you are making? I know these words have a complicated history, particularly the associated noun “disinterest”, as “uninterest” and “noninterest” barely exist.)
This is a question worth asking.
First, Matt. 2:23 and 4:12–13 might be based on Mark 1:9. Matthew had to rewrite it because of the way he constructed his Nativity (and entire John the Baptist story arc), but these verses show awareness of Jesus being based at Nazareth when he was baptized. That could be because his source (Mark) said so. Or it could be because Matthew invented this detail, and it crept into manuscripts of Mark by abbreviated harmonization. We can’t tell.
Second, Mark is the Gospel that actually uses the correct moniker for a Nazarene (rather than Nazorian, which is consistently used by Matthew even in the same passages, and that formulation does not mean someone from Nazareth). However, there is textual and manuscript evidence that Mark originally used Nazorian. The matter is complicated (see OHJ, p. 401 n. 34). So again, we can’t be sure.
So, the short answer is: Mark 1:9 might be interpolated, but there is no evidence specifically for that, and the evidence we do have is problematic, which leaves the option at its prior probability, the base rate of interpolation in the NT, which is around 1 in 200 to 1 in 1000 verses per century. Which forces us to conclude it probably wasn’t interpolated. But we should not be overconfident either way.
(Re: disinterested, it means both, decided by context. It’s possible there is a variance in trend across American and UK English, I haven’t checked. But my writing has been influenced by both and I often mix dialects without knowing it.)
I was reading the Matthew-Mark vol. of the original Interpreter’s Bible Commentary and it said that John the Baptist was probably executed at Tiberias, contra Josephus, because the fortress that Josephus mentions would have been too out of the way. Is there any evidence that it would have been at Tiberias?
I don’t see that in my copy of that volume. Page 321 and 598 do not mention a Tiberias hypothesis.
What edition are you looking at? (Mine is 1995)
Just going by your description of the argument, the argument doesn’t make sense. John was sent to prison, and that prison was Machaerus. That he was executed there is simply an incidental consequence of where he was doing time when the order came in. Its being “out of the way” has no role to play in this sequence of events. If anything, it makes more sense to imprison a popular demagogue in an out of the way place, rather than Tiberias where crowds could swarm or harass his jail or effect regular communications with him.
Okay, yeah, it was the OG (1950s) edition, not the 90s one. I think your answer is convincing. In the same volume, it says Jesus knew Judas would betray him by the look on his face, but that is nowhere suggested in the text and the commentator seems to be psychoanalyzing Jesus (much like a pastor/priest would do in church).
Dr. Carrier specifically concerning the possibility that Jesus was not an historical figure, what is your response to those who would point out that even Paul directly quotes Jesus a few times?
1 Corinthians 7
1 Corinthians 11
1 Timothy 6
First, 1 Timothy is a second-century forgery. Not written by Paul or even anyone of his century.
Second, Paul says he spoke to Jesus in revelations (2 Cor 12; Gal 1-2; Rom 16:25-26). He never mentions getting data from Jesus any other way.
So when he says he heard things from Jesus, he appears to be referring to that. He never mentions there being any oral report of things Jesus said before he died. It appears all to be things Jesus said after he died, which of course is a Jesus we know didn’t exist; they simply imagined hearing that Jesus tell them those things (indeed, the vocabulary they use is compatible with even dreaming it, since then conversations with gods in dreams were believed by the believing to be real conversations with the gods).
At best, there is no way to tell. Since Paul says he got sayings from Jesus by revelation, and doesn’t say he got any any other way, we cannot conclude he got any of these sayings any other way—even if (unbeknownst to us) he did. The evidence here is thus null.
Dr. Carrier I was listening to a podcast with Bart Ehrman. He was talking about and defending the idea that the author of Mark didn’t portray Jesus as God. Something I think you agree with. But he did say of Mark’s idea of Jesus, that he thought Jesus was “devine”.
I can see how someone might take that as double-talk, at least based on my understanding of proper use of the word devine. I understand it to mean “of or relating to a god”. I know people will sometimes describe someone as being “devine”, but they are obviously and knowingly being superfluous in those instances.
What do you make of Ehrman describing Mark’s potrayal of Jesus that way? To be clear I’m not asking of your opinion as to whether Jesus should be described that way (as being God or even God like).
I’m asking whether you think his use of that term to describe how Mark saw Jesus (in his stories) as being devine is accurate, and if so what is your understanding of the word if to mean something other than God or like God?
I consider this just semantics. What the word “divine” means can vary by context and plenty of existing valences fit Mark’s Jesus. So I don’t see anything shady in Ehrman’s language. What he means by the difference (being merely a divine being vs. being literally God) he has adequately explained in his book on the subject. On which you can read my review: Bart Ehrman on How Jesus Became God. I think in fact that might clear some things up for you.
But as to Mark specifically:
First, I don’t know if Ehrman adopts the view that Mark thinks Jesus was a pre-existent being. That’s not the same thing as being a divine being. Plenty of divine beings begin as divine mortals, not pre-existent incarnated entities. Ehrman can simply mean “empowered by god, demigod, superhuman,” which literally matches what Mark depicts.
Second, even if Ehrman adopts my view that Mark does indeed know Jesus is a pre-existent being, remember two things: (1) Mark is reifying Paul’s theology (Mark’s Use of Paul’s Epistles), which definitely placed Jesus as a pre-existent sub-god incarnate; and (2) Mark is writing to obscure that actual theology behind allegory (as Mark just-as-covertly warns us in Mark 4:9–13), a device not uncommon in religion generally (see Elements 13 and 14 in Ch. 4 of OHJ).
So you should not read Mark literally. By omitting explicit references to Jesus’s primordial origins he is not conveying his belief that he had none. He is concealing it.
This is why demons already know who Jesus really is, but he doesn’t want them to tell anyone (reifying into narrative 1 Cor. 2:7). It’s not coherent (why wouldn’t those demons then have warned Satan off and thus stopped the crucifixion?), but mythology rarely is. There are plenty of implausible and contradictory storylines in Mark (like cursing a fig tree for not bearing figs out of season, or letting a horde of demons destroy an entire town’s livelihood by drowning thousands of pigs—and no one getting upset about this). Because it’s not history. It’s mythology.
Hence Mark preserves Pauline ideas only in symbol: Jesus is God’s adopted son (reified by a mythical baptism scene), and his flesh is inhabited by a Spirit before that happens (mythically signifying the incarnation of a pre-existent Spirit); which also leaves Jesus when his body dies (the crucifixion scene has him “expire,” lit. exiting the pneuma, exepneusen). None of this can be confidently read that way by itself (that’s the point of concealing the truth behind parable, per Mark 4); but in conjunction with the knowledge that Mark is using stories to convey Paul’s ideas, it becomes apparent enough.
But again, Mark does not mean any of this literally. Mark does not think Jesus was just a schmo until a bird from outer space flew into his body and took over. The scene is not meant as history. It is meant as symbol, a tale signifying deeper truths figuratively, not literally.
Like the fig tree scene. Mark does not actually think Jesus was a lunatic who once cursed a fig tree for not bearing figs when it wasn’t even supposed to be bearing figs. The fig tree represents the Jewish temple cult, the season remark represents God’s decision that the season for that has ended, the cursing of the tree symbolizes God’s destruction and razing of Jerusalem (through the agency of the Romans). And so on. (All as discussed in OHJ, author index, “Hamerton-Kelly.”)
Dr. Carrier I’m curious if you’ve registered for an will be attending Bart Ehrman’s free new course titled
“Did Peter Hate Paul?”
It will be broadcasting live this weekend and if you can’t make it they will be sending you a link to see the replay (if you registered for the course). I think it would be cool if you attended and even submitted a question or disagreement during the course (if you had any). It would be interesting also to see if he would be willing to engage you on a topic that is outside the heated mythicism area (which he refuses to engage you on).
You can register for the course by click on the link below.
http://www.tinyurl.com/BartHate
I’m assuming that it is an auto-registration type process so I expect you would be accepted like anyone else.
But you could always try to sign up using an anonymous account just to be safe. LOL
I wouldn’t have time. But feel free to report on it here.