Right. Bruce is engaging in fallacious and hardly credible Christian apologetics that does nothing but abuse the Greek grammar and context of the passage.

It should be noted that in fact taqsh were called “early fruit,” not “fruit.” If Mark knew the difference (and Bruce’s argument requires that he would have), then he would have used the correct term. But in fact Mark explains the absence as simply it not being the season for it. He does not explain the absence by saying there should have been early fruit buds in the pre-season to eat, or that Jesus could tell that it wasn’t going to fruit, or any other statement that would suggest what Bruce wants. Rather, Jesus expected there to be something to eat (that’s why he goes looking for the tree; had there been taqsh, he would have eaten them, not cursed the tree for giving him nothing to eat), even though Mark says there shouldn’t have been anything there to eat (“he found nothing but leaves because it was not the season of figs”). Hence Matthew rightly drops the absurdity by not mentioning it wasn’t the season for fruiting (so Matthew knew what Mark meant far better than Bruce did). It was evidently embarrassing to Matthew–and he knew Judea better than Mark did. Note also how Luke “fixes” the whole story to make more sense by converting it into a parable instead (and changes the meaning somewhat): Luke 13:6-9. It’s not that Mark was an idiot. It’s that he didn’t expect the story to be read literally, the way Matthew and Luke appear to do (or pretend to do), much less Bruce.

The other miracle is the cursing of the barren fig tree (Mk. xi. ‘2 ff.), a stumblingblock to many. They feel that it is unlike Jesus, and so someone must have misunderstood what actually happened, or turned a spoken parable into an acted miracle, or something like that. Some, on the other hand, welcome the story because it shows that Jesus was human enough to get unreasonably annoyed on occasion. It appears,however, that a closer acquaintance with fig trees would have prevented such misunderstandings. ‘Thetime of figs was not yet,’ says Mark, for it was just before Passover, about six weeks before the fully formed fig appears. The fact that Mark adds these words shows that he knew what he was talking about.When the fig leaves appear about the end of March they are accompanied by a crop of small knobs, called taqsh by the Arabs, a sort of forerunner of the real figs. These taqsh are eaten by peasants and others when hungry. They drop off before the real fig is formed. But if the leaves appear unaccompanied by taqsh, there will be no figs that year. So it was evident to our Lord, when He turned aside to see if there were any of these taqsh on the fig tree to assuage His hunger for the time being, that the absence of the taqsh meant that there would be no figs when the time for figs came. For all its fair show of foliage, it was a fruitless and hopeless tree.’

That’s an MA and Fellow of the British Academy talking there, folks.

This is going in my file of “most ridiculous apologetics by supposedly reputable scholars,” right alongside James Charlesworth’s “Lazarus Can’t be the Beloved Disciple Because We All Know Resurrected Men Can’t Run Very Fast” apologetic.

Ah. I get you. I just haven’t examined that parallel myself, so I couldn’t comment on it. It’s not in the literature so far as I found (although I haven’t scoured Krenkel or the others to see if they said anything on it).

There’s no mention of Lazarus in the article. I just meant the generic thesis that Luke used Josephus. And of course I understand that doesn’t mean everything in Luke comes from Josephus. But I was surprised that the article didn’t mention what I think is a pretty obvious connection between the Parable and the Discourse. So I wondered if that was another example of Luke getting stuff from Josephus or something else. Do we have other sources that suggest the details in the parable and in Josephus (such as “bosom of Abraham” and “great chasm”) derive from a common source?

This kind of “free” manuscript tradition over the centuries needs to be stressed more, I think.

I concur. I didn’t even go into all the interpolations in Luke-Acts in Codex Bezae, most of which the Aland text ignores even though they claim to use it–and pretty much all experts in the community are well aware of this, because the variants in Bezae are written and talked about constantly, warranting even entire conferences. That manuscript shows, cover to cover, how freely they felt leave to alter the text of scripture (I give a few examples in On the Historicity of Jesus). And I may have mentioned how scribes inserted the spearing in John into the crucifixion narrative of Matthew as another example. And it’s well known the Gospel of John we have is not the original: it has been heavily altered, with passages missing, added, and out of order. That’s such mainstream knowledge within the field that the leading texts on John openly discuss it and center their entire commentary around it, one even declares it in the title. Yet this information doesn’t get broadcast to the public.

This kind of “free” manuscript tradition over the centuries needs to be stressed more, I think. These guys were not treating the texts as “holy scripture,” but as stories that they could change at will (since no one — they thought — would ever know the difference). I have no reason to believe the situation was any different in the first century.

The John/Lazarus stuff was good, too. And here I was thinking James Charlesworth was one of the “better” Jesus scholars. They really are all nothing more than apologists at their core, aren’t they?

Where is a mention of Lazarus there? Perhaps you can quote the line or paragraph from that article you have in mind.

(Or do you just mean the generic thesis that Luke used Josephus? That doesn’t entail every passage in Luke derives from Josephus.)

Correct. Note that “the Jews, Scribes and pharisees” never saw the risen Jesus, i.e. he did not visit them, just as Lazarus did not visit the brothers of the rich man. The parable is saying the reasons are the same: “if they will not believe the prophets, neither would they have believed Jesus if he appeared to them,” thus trying to answer the obvious argument that if Jesus really rose from the dead, he would have appeared to persuade everyone–otherwise, in what sense could his resurrection be a sign of anything, if no one of any significance got to witness it?

This has already been done. Tons of times. See here and here and here. You are clearly new to the game.

What will prove my book worthy of support is not whether I answer some random hack web rant, but the fact that my mythicist book passed formal peer review and will be published by a major respected biblical studies press (Sheffield-Phoenix, a publishing house at the University of Sheffield). Proving History likewise underwent, and passed, a formal academic peer review. Unlike the blog links you mention. So please consult real scholarship before asking questions about this.

Reference the above links for the details, but in summary:

(8) Paul’s authentic letters (and their authentic content) never clearly reference an earthly Jesus, but only ever clearly reference a cosmic Jesus known only through revelations and scripture. The rest are forgeries. Ditto the other epistles: some are known forgeries (and all of this, BTW, is the mainstream view), the rest make no clear reference to an earthly Jesus. The passages where Paul mentions brothers of the Lord is just as unclear as everything else, because Paul says all baptized Christians are brothers of the Lord, and he never says anyone referred to that way was a biological brother of Jesus, rather than just a baptized Christian. This is all old news, BTW, so if you didn’t know this, you are clearly not up on this debate.

(7) Both Nazareth and Bethlehem were predicted sources of the messiah in scripture (as Mathew, the first to combine them, explicitly says), so it is not surprising someone invented stories to try and satisfy both prophecies, especially a Gospel known to duplicate prophetic fulfillments (as Matthew is). Moreover, Jesus was not originally called a Nazarethan, the name for someone from Nazareth, but a Nazôraian, a word wholly unconnected with the name Nazareth and which even some early Christians admitted meant something else. See Proving History, index, “Nazareth.” This is also old news.

(6) Everything the “listserv” says about the connection of the baptism with Jesus is false. See Proving History, index, “baptism.”

(5) All mentions of Jesus in Josephus were added over a century after Josephus wrote, by Christians. Josephus thus never mentioned him. This is very old news. See my past blogs on it here and here.

(4) The passage in Tacitus is probably also an insertion (see my peer reviewed academic article on that fact, reproduced as the last chapter in HHBC), but even if authentic, almost certainly derives from Christians citing the Gospels (through an interrogation of Christians performed by Tacitus’s best friend Pliny just a few years before Tacitus wrote). It therefore cannot be cited as corroborating them. If the Gospels are false, so is the reference in Tacitus. More on that in the aforementioned article, and the links above.

(3) The James ossuary inscription has been tampered with (confirmed by court of law), has likely been partly forged (confirmed by several experts), and does not identify its occupant as our Jesus, yet Jesus was a common name. Contrary to what the listserv entry says, the courts did not rule the inscription authentic (or confirm any experts were lying), they ruled there was insufficient evidence to prove Oded Golan forged it. It remains deeply suspect, and is too generic to be known of Christian origin. It is therefore evidence of nothing.

(2) Christianity became a world religion centuries later, therefore Jesus existed? Please. Hopefully you would not fall for this argument. By that reasoning, the angels Gabriel (mythic founder of Islam) and Moroni (mythic founder of Mormonism) existed, as did the Jewish Patriarchs (even though most mainstream scholars agree they are mythical). In point of fact, Christianity remained an extremely small, fringe, nearly failed sect for over a century before it gained any popularity, long after anyone could check any claims about Jesus. See Not the Impossible Faith, esp. chapter 18.

(1) The crucifixion is no more likely to be true because it was embarrassing than the castration of the god Attis is to be true because it was even more embarrassing. The whole logic of this argument is fundamentally fallacious, and refuted by too many counter-examples. See Proving History, index, “Criterion of Crucifixion.”

The other link just stacks up more falsehoods: Thallus never mentioned Jesus (I proved this in a peer reviewed academic article, also reproduced in HHBC); Pliny never says Jesus was an earthly man (and even if he did, he was told all he knows by a Christian who would simply be repeating the Gospels by then; likewise all other references, which come decades or centuries after him, e.g. Lucian); the Talmud was written centuries too late, and places Jesus a hundred years before Pilate and well before Roman rule in Judea (a fact even harder for a thesis of historicity to explain); and the apocryphal Gospels are so obviously fictions, anyone citing them for history is being silly.

There just isn’t any overwhelming evidence Jesus existed. The evidence there is cannot in fact even be called good.

But if want to argue the point, wait for my forthcoming book On the Historicity of Jesus.