Are you serious? Was the “criminal” he speaks of nonbinary? He never challenges the charge that he is a man as described. He defends it.

The phrase “when you attribute to our religion the worship of a criminal and his cross, you wander far from the neighbourhood of the truth, in thinking either that a criminal deserved, or that an earthly being was able, to be believed God” entails no disagreement with the charge that he was a man, and was a criminal (he merely did not “deserve” it). He simply says Jesus was not a mortal man, but a divine (and thus immortal) one. He never says “we do not worship a man” or “our god was never crucified as a criminal” or “you do not understand that this happened in celestial not earthly realms” or any such thing.

This is even clearer in the Latin:

Nam quod religioni nostrae hominem noxium et crucem eius adscribitis, longe de vicinia veritatis erratis, qui putatis deum credi aut meruisse noxium aut potuisse terrenum. Ne ille miserabilis, cuius in homine mortali spes omnis innititur.

Literally:

For when you wrote about our religion’s guilty man and his cross, you stray far from the vicinity of the truth, by thinking it possible for a terrestrial to be believed a god or deserving guilt. Nay, miserable is he who rests all hope on a mortal man.

The distinction is thus whether the man was mortal and guilty, not whether he was a man. Felix thus says exactly the opposite of what your proposal would have entailed him to say instead.

Moreover, in Latin, terrenum (“terrestrial”) is an adjective and thus must take a noun. The only noun it can be modifying is hominem, “man.” So the grammar entails Felix did say “man.” That “man” is also the apposite of deum (God) and the only available subject of the verbs credi and meruisse (“believed” and “deserves”). Likewise the adjective noxium, “guilty,” in the denial can only take the noun hominem as well, and that is even directly paralleled between the statement and the denial. So grammatically his being a man is not the aspect being denied but is being affirmed.

So there is no way to get the text to mean anything else.

Moreover, if your really bad argument could be replaced with a slightly better one, that Felix does not deny he was a man (even Doherty’s theory requires the first and all Christians to have believed Jesus was a man) but where he died (as if somehow that would answer the charge of “whether” he died; it would not), that is also conspicuously absent here.

Felix does not challenge “where” this happened, and where it happened is not part of the charge he is answering. So Felix is not meeting any question of where. He is assuming everyone agrees on where, including his accusers, and himself. So there is no dispute about the where here. The adjective “terrestrial” is not positioned grammatically as disputing where the cross or god ever were, but as a synonym of mortal, as the following line explains. It is not a reference to where he died. It’s a reference to what sort of man he was when he died: earthly or divine.

If Felix were keen to rebut the charge that Jesus was executed as a criminal on Earth, he would answer that he was not executed on Earth and by no human court but a demonic one which is illegitimate. But that is not what he argues. He argues that “he was not guilty” and “he was not mortal,” which assume he died at the hands of a human court on Earth, and that this can’t be mocked because he wasn’t guilty, and he rose again and lives on in outer space whence he came.

So there is no way to get Felix to be a mythicist or even unaware of historicist accounts of Jesus.

I have read Felix’s Octavius very carefully, and I do not find any explicit reference to a “crucified He,” that is, to a specific historical individual who was crucified and whose innocence or divinity Octavius would be defending. The passage contains no statements such as “He was innocent” or “you are mistaken in thinking that He deserved it or that He was not divine.”

While one may interpret the accusations put into Caecilius’ mouth within a broader context of early Christian polemic, such an interpretation goes beyond what the text itself explicitly states. For this reason, I do not see how Doherty can be said to be “misreading the text,” especially when the supposed correction relies on claims that are not actually present in the text.

It’s the entire argument of §29. When Felix meets the accusation he worships a crucified man, he does not deny it (he does not say he was not crucified), but defends the man. As Lejay puts it, “To the accusation of adoring a criminal he contents himself with replying that the Crucified One was neither a man nor guilty,” referring to 29.2:

For in that you attribute to our religion the worship of a criminal and his cross, you wander far from the neighbourhood of the truth, in thinking either that a criminal deserved, or that an earthly being was able, to be believed God. Miserable indeed is that man whose whole hope is dependent on mortal man, for all his help is put an end to with the extinction of the man.

The answer to “you worship a crucified man” is that “you err in thinking he deserved it, or that he wasn’t divine” and thus would have survived being killed, which entails the author believed he was an earthly man, and was crucified, but did not deserve to be (and thus is not a “criminal” in the accused sense), and survived it because he was divine (and thus was not mortal; the accuser is assuming he was mortal, just as they are falsely assuming he was guilty).

He then goes on to complain that pagans worship men on crosses, so what’s wrong with him doing so? (“Your victorious trophies not only imitate the appearance of a simple cross, but also that of a man affixed to it!”) He never argues that his man wasn’t on one. He only says he is not an idolator (therefore they do not worship “crosses,” rather than the man himself). Conspicuously missing is any denial of the man he worships being crucified.

You say “he (Felix) is actually defending his worship of a crucified man (by saying he was innocent ….

Where does Felix say this, please?

It’s unlikely Mark would have intended to revive the “any day now” rhetoric that he is trying to fix because it failed. And Mark lacks any such urgency (that we find more plausibly represented in Matthew for example, as the Sermon on the Mount is entirely based on what happens to us now being moot as the end is so near). He seems to have a long game in mind. Maybe Matthew wanted to push the short game, but even he doesn’t explicitly correct Mark on that. He just argues with more urgency, but is just as vague about timelines.

And indeed, it’s hard to get the Jewish War to be published in time for Mark to have used it before 74.

But more importantly, Mark conspicuously avoids ever discussing Daniel’s clock. That he avoids it tells us he found it a problem and didn’t want to call attention to it.

And even more importantly, Daniel’s clock starts with the messiah’s death. The destruction of Jerusalem is supposed to happen 3.5 years after he died, so if Jesus died in 30, the temple was supposed to fall in 33. The messiah then returns 3.5 years after that, which would be 37 or so. Obviously that got totally bollocksed. So Mark can’t rescue it. He thus just dumps it.

What we see in later Christian apologetics is to “float” the 3.5 years (Revelation has it floating in the future, after or in the 90s AD; Irenaeus has it be the period in which Jesus continued appearing after his death before the closing of the apostolate, and thus disconnects it from the fate of the temple altogether, and puts it firmly in the past). We don’t know what Mark did with it because he never says.

Regarding the dating of Mark, I have always found Randel Helms’s argument that it dates to the range of 70-74 AD impressive. (see quote of Helms at Gospel of Mark ). The argument is that Mark clearly identified the fall of Jerusalem as being the abomination of desolation prophesied in Daniel. As Daniel had said that the son of man would come 3 1/2 years after the abomination of desolation, Mark seems to be saying that the Son of Man will come within 3 1/2 years after the fall of Jerusalem, by 74 AD. Later writers were left to explain why it did not come as expected.

Whereas Daniel had a son of man coming with clouds, by the time of Mark, this had changed to a Son of Man coming in the clouds. (I discuss this at Prophecy Strikes Out). But it all comes from Daniel.

You argue based on a reference to Josephus that Mark wrote later, in which case Mark must have taken Daniel’s 3 1/2 years to be symbolic. That could be, but I wonder if he didn’t think it would be a literal return within the next 3 years after writing.

Now I see it is not working. Sigh. I’ll have to try something else.

I think that’s more confusing to most people, because you are making a lot of mathematical assumptions here that most people have forgotten (or were never taught) to make, much less apply. I learned that lesson over the years. That’s why my chapter goes through it more slowly, at a lower level of analysis, and skips no steps.

But you are right. That’s all we are doing.

We are interested in the odds of Jesus being historical (P(H)) vs. nonhistorical (P(~H). We know that specific evidence exists (E). So, what we are really looking for is the probability that both the evidence and Jesus exist, versus the likelihood that the evidence exists and Jesus did not exist. Mathematically,

Odds of Jesus existing = P(H+E) / P(~H+E)

When analyzing the probability of two events, one can take the probability of the first independent of the second and then multiply that by the likelihood that the second would be true if the first is true. Mathematically, P(H+E) = P(Hb) * P(E|Hb), where Hb represents the conclusion that Jesus is historical based solely on our prior knowledge of the ancient world before considering the specific evidence. Substituting this and a similar expression for ~H back into the original equation, we get:

 Odds of Jesus existing = P(Hb) * P(E|Hb) / [ P(~Hb) * P(E|~Hb) ]

We can rearrange to make it simpler to analyze:

 Odds of Jesus existing = [ P(Hb) / (P(~Hb) ] * [ P(E|Hb) / P(E|~Hb) ]

We now have two factors based on two ratios. One represents the odds based on our prior knowledge (prior odds), and the second represents the odds based on the evidence that arises from the actual events (consequent odds). Although the actual probabilities may be impossible to estimate, these two ratios can be estimated.

And you then take us through calculations for these two ratios.

Cool. I approved this one. So your next comment should go through without stalling in mod.