And for those not aware, that’s in reference to Avalos’s superb and revealing study, The End of Biblical Studies.

Professional ethics forbids me unilaterally doing that. But I have asked the reviewers to waive that expectation and make this an open review (where their entire or PII-redacted reviews are made publicly available). And the publisher told me they refused.

So the reviewers are blocking you from being able to read their reviews. They can change that attitude at any time. They just have to tell my publisher to give me or them the go-ahead to publish them.

But I did “peer review” the peer reviewers: two peers reviewed what’s in those reports in the MythVision show linked above (and for convenience I’ll link that again here). So you can check that out.

I didn’t. Biblical studies presses won’t let you dictate that. And the biblical studies guild pretty much has a lock on controlling that by insisting no one else is “qualified” to peer review books in their field but them (so, basically, Christians and their allies run this show).

But any experts can peer review it when it publishes: you can ask or hire any mathematician or ancient historian or classicist to read the book once it ships and write up their critique of it. That is essentially open review, and it’s a model physics is already moving toward.

That’s 90% true. But it’s 10% false. For example, Papias claimed (so far as we know: we only have quotes) to still know oral lore about Jesus not in the Gospels. It’s all ridiculous though (Judas exploded; Jesus predicted grape clusters in heaven the size of houses; absurd things like that). Scholars will make the same claim about noncanonical Gospels (like the Gospel of Thomas; even though Goodacre proved it’s just another redaction of the Synoptics).

So you can still prove “Nobody of them knows anything about an oral tradition about Jesus,” it just takes more work to prove that than simply saying there is never any reference to oral lore. Rather, it’s on the rare occasions we get that, what we get is absurd, and never anything mundanely plausible and thus credibly actual. But that takes more work to “prove,” especially to the satisfaction of a Christian believer who actually believes in the absurd.

The reality of how Justin, for example, argues Jesus was real does support your point, but it takes more work to show that. For example, he says Jesus was born in a cave. The gullible will say that proves an oral lore. The informed will say that he is just referencing the Protevangelion of James as among the “memoirs” of the apostles (as he calls them), an absurdist work of fiction, not a collection of oral lore. Likewise, Justin doesn’t “do research” to prove the content of the Gospels historical; he believes they are historical because of a ridiculous line of reasoning: that his fellow Christians can “perform miracles” and therefore Christianity is true, and if Christianity is true so must the Gospels be true, therefore the Gospels are not made-up myths but really true. But this takes a lot of work to prove.

However, this doesn’t get us evidence against historicity; it only removes evidence for historicity. Because in antiquity (in the absence of newspapers, for example, or even widespread literacy or even education or critical thinking at all) it was extremely easy for the historical core of any person or event to be completely forgotten in mere generations, especially when the only people who care about the information are hell bent on replacing it with what they want rather than what really happened. So the complete loss of information about Jesus does not prove he didn’t exist, rather it only proves he wasn’t famous enough to make an unerasable mark on generational memory.

See How Did Christianity Switch to a Historical Jesus? for what I mean. And the example I use there I repeat in Obsolete Paradigm: look what happened to the resurrection narratives. If we did not have the Epistles, the only shred of truth left about that would be in the contradictory and obviously absurdified tales of Paul’s conversion experience in Acts. All oral lore of what the revelations were like that Paul refers to (an actual eyewitness to his own experience and what his peers said about theirs) was either erased (it’s entirely gone from the Gospels and living memory outside them) or so buried under fiction as to be effectively indiscernible (the Acts stories have a hint of some oral lore behind them but without the Epistles we’d have no chance of figuring out what it was). And that’s a historical reality (Paul really did have or claim to have “revelatory experiences” of Jesus, and so did others he personally knew). So if the oral lore for that disappeared, we can hardly expect any about Jesus while alive to have survived.

I give another example about first century Christianity in Alexandria: Paul proves Christianity was spreading across the Empire that whole century (and thus must have been in Alexandria even in his own generation though he didn’t have any contacts there himself), so we know that was a fact; yet all lore about it was lost by the next century (forcing Eusebius to fake it). So we do not expect oral lore to survive of real historical things that are (a) not famous enough and (b) met with pressures to erase it by the only people who would be able to have preserved it in the first place (as first century Christians were declared heretics by the only sect that survived to decide all document survival).

Hence in my original study, the silence of external sources (even in quotation or paraphrase by Christians) does not affect the probability Jesus existed. It only constrains theories of Jesus, e.g. you cannot argue Jesus was famed “across all Syria” as Matthew avers, but must accept that he was a relative nobody and his followers a straggling scant few for at least a century, as only that can explain why so much was forgotten and replaced with so much obvious nonsense.

This creates a Catch-22 for Christian believers who need Jesus to have been amazing and famous and Christianity as successful as sex in the sixties, but in consequence of which their belief is soundly refuted by arguments like yours—or they must painfully give up that cherished belief to rescue Jesus as historically plausible again. The cognitive dissonance is real. But atheists don’t face it. It’s easy to believe Jesus a nobody and believers straggling. And the silence of the record does not argue against that version of events.

I assume you mean to ask why the word “Disciple” would increase the probability of historicity had Paul used it. The answer is that Disciple (mathêtês) means “pupil, apprentice” and that would be unusual for Paul to say if he did not know they sat at the feet of a tutor. It’s not impossible, but it would be weird, and weird is another word for improbable. So if the word appeared there, it would add weight to historicity (maybe not decisive weight, but something). And if it was paired with unmistakable context (if Paul said “disciples of Jesus in the flesh” or “disciples of Jesus when he was on Earth” or “disciples of Jesus the Galilean” or something) it would start to get decisive.

Instead Paul only says apostle (apostolos) which just means “one sent, messenger” which can refer to (and indeed Paul appears to explicitly say it refers to, several times) someone sent by revelation. It could be someone sent by a real person (so the word is not evidence against historicity); but it does not imply that (so the word is just not evidence for historicity).

As for the Goodacre debate (that is still in the Unbelievable radio show’s archives online, so you can listen to it; and I have my full postgame on it in The Goodacre Debate; and note all this happened before my peer reviewed study came out) we were not debating whether Paul could have learned revelations second hand, but that Paul has no knowledge of anyone learning any other way but by revelation. Goodacre was not arguing that “merely” Paul learning things by lore proved historicity, but that it formed part of a series of evidence that would then make that more likely. Removing that part of the argument was thus essential not because it was the whole of his argument but because it was essential to it—and it was a false belief about the text (Paul never does say that; and that Goodacre could not believe he never said it shows how strange it is that Paul actually says the opposite—that apostles only learn by revelation, they cannot learn by lore—and thus how much of a threat it is to historicity to admit that this is the case).

In the later discussion you reference, I was only using this one cherry-picked piece of our debate to illustrate the methodological principle that scholars are assuming things that aren’t true, and thus basing their belief in historicity of false assumptions they refuse or fail to question and discover are false. Hence, Goodacre’s entire theory of historicity depended on the apostles being disciples who relayed what Jesus said in life, which depends on Paul having information about that from them, and thus hangs on Paul having said that. But this house of cards falls when you realize not only that Paul never did say that, but repeatedly said exactly the opposite. Which in turn does not disprove historicity either, but does tip the scale against it, in precisely the way Paul saying he learned about Jesus from the apostles would not prove historicity either, but would tip the scale a little for it.

As far as what people believed before Paul, we only have Paul’s reports about that. No other documents prior to him survive (unless 1 Peter is an example, which would not bode well for historicists as it lacks any reference to ever meeting Jesus in real life—its author only heard of his crucifixion from scripture and revelation, which would be impossible for the actual Peter to say unless historicity is indeed false; it’s just that most scholars deem it a late forgery that is simply assuming the Gospels already in circulation, although that would better describe 2 Peter which we know was forged by a different author than 1 Peter).

So we have to reconstruct early beliefs from these secondhand sources (Paul, Hebrews, and 1 Clement are the only pre-war documents we have, everything after that is mythologies and forgeries). But as for how it started and then evolved see my article How Did Christianity Switch to a Historical Jesus?.

Is there anything in it worth responding to? I find usually these are vacuous or disingenuous and just ignore everything I actually said. I see no reason to waste a minute on a three hour video, especially from him. But if you somehow survived that ordeal and found anything in there that (a) corrects anything I actually said and (b) is relevant to anything significant (and not just opinions or trivia) let me know the timestamp so I can zero in on it, or even just quote the transcript of that brief bit here and ask me about it and I can give you a reply here.

Alas, no, I don’t know how foreign supply works with Pitchstone.

I assume they are printed in the US and shipped to a UK warehouse of one of the few global distributors (maybe Ingram, for example), and then ship to or for retailers like Amazon and IRL bookstores. Americans are receiving the first printing now and it’s almost run out (so a second printing is about to roll out), but that run-out should already have included foreign warehouse shipments.

But there is no NAFTA agreement as we have (or had, until Trump) with Canada, so wholesale shipping and clearing customs I am sure makes a delay. The rest has to do with the efficiencies with Ingram and retailers like Amazon in the UK (whoever you preordered through), which I also don’t have familiarity with. So I can’t be sure. My own armchair guess is December delivery for a November printing is plausible. But if nothing shows up by January I’d assume something went wrong and chase it down.

Yes, you can search my blog (box top right margin) for Errata Obsolete and find:

Errata for Obsolete Paradigm of a Historical Jesus

And that one isn’t on it! So, good catch. Thanks. I just added it. It’s p. 118 not 210, so ironically there’s a typo in your typo report! 🙂