Read chapter four of OHJ, esp. the elements on mystery religion and why they all did this. All of them did the same thing. So odds are the reasoning was the same. Mark himself repeats that known reasoning in his chapter four.

Exoteric myths were created to disguise the truth (the esoteric myth) from the uninitiated, which only the initiated had earned a right to know. Thus, as Plutarch says for Osiris cult, exoteric myths placed Osiris in earth history as a subsequently deified man, but those were an allegorical disguise for the esoteric truth that he never was on earth but instead actually dies and resurrects only cosmically.

Subsequent redactors (esp. Luke and John) then used this as a system of double truth, which I quote Origen explaining: lower ranking Christians were told the Gosoels were literally true because they were too uninitiated and uneducated to be saved otherwise, while higher ranking Christians were told the actual truth, which is that the Gospels are allegories for deeper truths and not literally true stories.

Thus Luke, for example, strives to make his version look like a history. Yet he composes only in the mode of allegorical fiction (see chapters 9 and 10 of OHJ).

This version (there were others, placing Jesus in a completely different historical period: see OHJ, chapter 8) appears to have been necessitated by the destruction of the Jewish temple cult in 70 AD yet without the world ending soon after, two events that needed explaining, and in conjunction with providing a manual for missionaries to model (and draw models from) in their evangelism.

I did write a blog on that. And when you read it, you will understand why I probably will never write another—and why I take the position I do instead (we cannot know when they were written but within a wide plausible range of possible dates; I personally think probably it’s on the late end of the plausible range; but when arguing a fortiori, I assume the early end of the plausible range, so no one can object on those grounds).

Your point about mentions is not effective, because we have no writers at all who survive to check for earlier mentions. Thus the absence of them is expected even if the Gospels were written early. Because all evidence to check that by has been erased.

Also, the Talmud explicitly calls this Jeaus the “Nazarene” and explicitly identifies his mother’s name as Mary.

You are right. It is Class A Bullshit.

First, they are talking about this bullshit.

Second, this new bullshit is nothing more than “soil in the James ossuary is the same as in the whole region in which the others were found, a region in which thousands of other tombs and ossuaries have been.” Which is almost entirely useless a finding. It does not establish the James ossuary came from that one single same tomb.

Besides, that ossuary has been tampered with: the inclusion of the name of Jesus is almost certainly a forgery.

As stated (“at least”) 33% is the upper bound of the error interval. The lower bound I found to be under 1 in 12,000 (and even that is optimistic). So the confidence interval (at the highest confidence level reasonably possible) is between about 1/12000 and 1/3 (or more roughly 0-33%).

Yes, the Catholic reasons for insisting the brothers of Jesus are half-brothers have no basis in any evidence and are purely of ideological necessity.

Catholics cannot admit the truth either that brothers of the lord is what baptized Christians were called. Because they need those brothers still to be half-blood brothers. Otherwise the Gospels are lying. And they can’t have that.

If the evidence for Jesus were even a millionth as good as the evidence for an old earth and for the evolution of life, then he would have a point.

That the evidence for Jesus is in fact objectively sparse and terrible, yet few experts will admit this, has the opposite implication: it indicts those experts as divorced from logic and reality.

If only that were the case for YEC. Then they’d be right in all they say against the scientific establishment. But that it isn’t the case for YEC is precisely why the analogy to Jesus studies does not hold.

This is one of the most incoherent troll comments I’ve ever read on my blog. I’ve blocked two veritable lunatics before. So that’s saying something.

No. I don’t know any agents. Sorry. But good luck!

That’s a fair point. It can’t be carried too far, but it works surely when they have the gall to claim I’m the one who isn’t qualified. I’ve made this point in my discussion of Ehrman (see and follow links in point 2; also 21, and 22).