One of the core tenets of the Jesus myth theory (aka "mythicism") is that the first Christians got the Gospel from private revelations or reading Scripture rather than from the historical Jesus.

In one sense, this is a no-brainer. If Jesus never existed, then of course the Gospel didn’t really come from him. However, there is in fact more to this than simply a logical corollary of the theory itself.

Many mythicists believe that the New Testament actually contains traces of the real origin of the Gospel, and they think they can prove it. Specifically, they point to passages in the epistles that seem to affirm this.

In this article, I want to look at two of these passages, the two that I think present the best evidence for the theory of mythicism, and see if the argument holds up.

The Gospel from Revelation?

In the opening chapter of Paul’s Letter to the Galatians, he explicitly tells us that the Gospel he preached was given to him by direct revelation from Jesus Christ:

“For I would have you know, brethren, that the gospel which was preached by me is not man’s gospel. For I did not receive it from man, nor was I taught it, but it came through a revelation of Jesus Christ.” (Galatians 1:11-12)

On the surface, this looks like very strong evidence for the mythicist position, and the case becomes even stronger when we compare this passage with another one from Paul’s letters:

“Now I would remind you, brethren, in what terms I preached to you the gospel, which you received, in which you stand…For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures.” (1 Corinthians 15:1, 3-4)

Popular mythicist Richard Carrier points out several verbal parallels between these two texts. They’re both about the “gospel” that Paul “received” and then “preached,” implying that they’re referring to the same set of information.¹ In other words, when we look at these two texts together, it seems that Paul is claiming to have received the Gospel about Jesus’ death and resurrection via direct revelation from Jesus Christ, not from human witnesses to those events.

What Was Paul’s Gospel?

At first glance, this may seem like an airtight case, but let’s take a closer look at Paul’s claim in Galatians. Is he really talking about the basic message about Jesus’ death and resurrection, or is “the gospel which was preached by me” something else? If we look closely at the surrounding context, it seems like it’s actually the latter.

To begin, the whole letter is about whether or not Christians need to be circumcised and follow the Jewish Law. Paul argues that we do not, and his opponents claim that we do. With this in mind, take a look at something Paul says a few verses earlier:

“I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and turning to a different gospel…If any one is preaching to you a gospel contrary to that which you received, let him be accursed.” (Galatians 1:6, 9)

What is this “different gospel” that Paul is writing about? Is it a denial of the death and resurrection of Jesus? No, in the context of the entire letter, it’s obviously a Gospel that requires its adherents to follow the Jewish Law. Paul is here contrasting this with the Gospel that he preached, which didn’t require such obedience.

Once we realize this, we can understand what he means when he says that he received the Gospel directly from Jesus. He’s not talking about the basic message of the death and resurrection of Jesus; rather, he’s talking about the point of contention between him and his opponents. He’s saying that Jesus revealed to him that Christians no longer need to follow the Jewish Law.

As a result, Carrier’s connection between the passages in Galatians and 1 Corinthians doesn’t hold up. Yes, they both use similar language, but they’re about two different things. One is about the basic message of Jesus’ death and resurrection, and the other is about the freedom from the Law that Christians enjoy. When Paul said in 1 Corinthians that he received the Gospel about Jesus’ death and resurrection, there is nothing to indicate that he received it directly from Jesus himself.

The Gospel from Scripture?

The second text I want to look at comes from Paul’s most famous letter, to the Romans:

“Now to him who is able to strengthen you according to my gospel and the preaching of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery which was kept secret for long ages but is now disclosed and through the prophetic writings is made known to all nations, according to the command of the eternal God, to bring about the obedience of faith— to the only wise God be glory for evermore through Jesus Christ! Amen.” (Romans 16:25-27)

Like the passage from Galatians, this one also tells us that the Gospel Paul preached came from somewhere other than historical witnesses, and again, mythicists sometimes argue that this supports their case.² The one difference is that in this text, the Gospel comes from the Old Testament (what Paul calls “the prophetic writings”) rather than direct revelation.

However, like that previous passage, this one too is about the freedom of Christians from the Jewish Law, so in the context of the entire letter, that is most likely what Paul means by the phrase “my gospel.”

However, there is one other element in this passage that we need to look at as well. Paul says that “the preaching of Jesus Christ” is now “through the prophetic writings…made known to all nations,” which some take to mean that he learned about Jesus’ own preaching only from Scripture.³ Again, on the surface, that looks like strong evidence for the mythicist position, but it’s actually pretty innocuous. The Greek phrase translated as “the preaching of Jesus Christ” is ambiguous. It can mean the preaching that Jesus himself did, or it can mean the preaching of others about Jesus. On purely grammatical grounds, it could go either way, but in context, the latter is more likely. All throughout Romans, Paul describes the Gospel he preached about Jesus, but he doesn’t say anything about Jesus’ own preaching, so this phrase is almost certainly referring to the preaching of others about Jesus.

What Now?

At the end of the day, there is simply no evidence that any early Christians learned about Jesus’ death and resurrection solely from direct revelation or Scripture rather than from historical witnesses to those events.

Granted, this doesn’t prove that they did learn those things from historical witnesses or that Jesus even existed, but it does clear away some arguments for mythicism. As a result, the debate will have to move to other evidence. Simply put, Paul’s statements about the origin of his Gospel provide no evidence against the existence of Jesus.

We've devoted many articles on this site to "Mythicism", the belief that Jesus of Nazareth is simply a myth and not a real, historical figure. Today we feature the interesting introduction to Bart Ehrman’s best-selling book, Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth which deals with the question.

Ehrman is a preeminent New Testament scholar, but he's not a Christian. In fact, he's one of the world's best-known skeptics of religion, regularly debating against Christian scholars and apologists. Ehrman specializes in the gospels and early Christianity and became increasingly surprised by the stream of questions he got, both after his lectures and via email, about the existence of Jesus. He admits he was largely unaware of the skeptics, mostly online, who insist Jesus is a completely fictitious person.

Here’s how Ehrman opens the book:
 

 
Every week I receive two or three e-mails asking me whether Jesus existed as a human being. When I started getting these e-mails, some years ago now, I thought the question was rather peculiar and I did not take it seriously. Of course Jesus existed. Everyone knows he existed. Don’t they?

But the questions kept coming, and soon I began to wonder: Why are so many people asking? My wonder only increased when I learned that I myself was being quoted in some circles—misquoted rather—as saying that Jesus never existed. I decided to look into the matter. I discovered, to my surprise, an entire body of literature devoted to the question of whether or not there ever was a real man, Jesus.

I was surprised because I am trained as a scholar of the New Testament and early Christianity, and for thirty years I have written extensively on the historical Jesus, the Gospels, the early Christian movement, and the history of the church’s first three hundred years. Like all New Testament scholars, I have read thousands of books and articles in English and other European languages on Jesus, the New Testament, and early Christianity. But I was almost completely unaware—as are most of my colleagues in the field—of this body of skeptical literature.

I should say at the outset that none of this literature is written by scholars trained in New Testament or early Christian studies teaching at the major, or even the minor, accredited theological seminaries, divinity schools, universities, or colleges of North America or Europe (or anywhere else in the world). Of the thousands of scholars of early Christianity who do teach at such schools, none of them, to my knowledge, has any doubts that Jesus existed. But a whole body of literature out there, some of it highly intelligent and well informed, makes this case.

These sundry books and articles (not to mention websites) are of varying quality. Some of them rival The Da Vinci Code in their passion for conspiracy and the shallowness of their historical knowledge, not just of the New Testament and early Christianity, but of ancient religions generally and, even more broadly, the ancient world. But a couple of bona fide scholars—not professors teaching religious studies in universities but scholars nonetheless, and at least one of them with a Ph.D. in the field of New Testament—have taken this position and written about it. Their books may not be known to most of the general public interested in questions related to Jesus, the Gospels, or the early Christian church, but they do occupy a noteworthy niche as a (very) small but (often) loud minority voice. Once you tune in to this voice, you quickly learn just how persistent and vociferous it can be.

Those who do not think Jesus existed are frequently militant in their views and remarkably adept at countering evidence that to the rest of the civilized world seems compelling and even unanswerable. But these writers have answers, and the smart ones among them need to be taken seriously, if for no other reason than to show why they cannot be right about their major contention. The reality is that whatever else you may think about Jesus, he certainly did exist.

Serious historians of the early Christian movement—all of them—have spent many years preparing to be experts in their field. Just to read the ancient sources requires expertise in a range of ancient languages: Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and often Aramaic, Syriac, and Coptic, not to mention the modern languages of scholarship (for example, German and French). And that is just for starters. Expertise requires years of patiently examining ancient texts and a thorough grounding in the history and culture of Greek and Roman antiquity, the religions of the ancient Mediterranean world, both pagan and Jewish, knowledge of the history of the Christian church and the development of its social life and theology, and, well, lots of other things. It is striking that virtually everyone who has spent all the years needed to attain these qualifications is convinced that Jesus of Nazareth was a real historical figure. This is not a piece of evidence, but if nothing else, it should give one pause. In the field of biology, evolution may be “just” a theory (as some politicians painfully point out), but it is the theory subscribed to, for good reason, by every real scientist in every established university in the Western world.

Still, as is clear from the avalanche of sometimes outraged postings on all the relevant Internet sites, there is simply no way to convince conspiracy theorists that the evidence for their position is too thin to be convincing and that the evidence for a traditional view is thoroughly persuasive. Anyone who chooses to believe something contrary to evidence that an overwhelming majority of people find overwhelmingly convincing—whether it involves the fact of the Holocaust, the landing on the moon, the assassination of presidents, or even a presidential place of birth—will not be convinced. Simply will not be convinced.

And so, with Did Jesus Exist?, I do not expect to convince anyone in that boat. What I do hope is to convince genuine seekers who really want to know how we know that Jesus did exist, as virtually every scholar of antiquity, of biblical studies, of classics, and of Christian origins in this country and, in fact, in the Western world agrees. Many of these scholars have no vested interest in the matter. As it turns out, I myself do not either. I am not a Christian, and I have no interest in promoting a Christian cause or a Christian agenda. I am an agnostic with atheist leanings, and my life and views of the world would be approximately the same whether or not Jesus existed. My beliefs would vary little. The answer to the question of Jesus’s historical existence will not make me more or less happy, content, hopeful, likable, rich, famous, or immortal.

But as a historian I think evidence matters. And the past matters. And for anyone to whom both evidence and the past matter, a dispassionate consideration of the case makes it quite plain: Jesus did exist. He may not have been the Jesus that your mother believes in or the Jesus of the stained-glass window or the Jesus of your least favorite televangelist or the Jesus proclaimed by the Vatican, the Southern Baptist Convention, the local megachurch, or the California Gnostic. But he did exist, and we can say a few things, with relative certainty, about him.
 
 
(Image credit: NT Blog)

An article titled "5 Reasons to Suspect that Jesus Never Existed" was posted last week at Salon.com and was featured in the Yahoo news feed. The article itself does not contain anything groundbreaking to anyone who follows this debate, but it presents the most common objections.

Below are five reasons author Valerie Tarico gives, and how to answer them.

1. No first century secular evidence whatsoever exists to support the actuality of Yeshua ben Yosef.

 
Tarico uses only an extensive quote from skeptical Biblical scholar Bart Ehrman in which he explains that there are no first century non-Jewish, non-Christian sources that mention Jesus. If this is proof that a historical Jesus never existed, then someone needs to tell this to Professor Ehrman.

In his book, Did Jesus Exist?, Ehrman argues that a historical Jesus did exist. He explains:

"[N]o Greek or Roman author from the first century mentions Jesus. It would be convenient if they did, but alas, they do not. At the same time, the fact is again a bit irrelevant since these same sources do not mention many millions of people who actually did live. Jesus stands here with the vast majority of living, breathing human beings of earlier ages." (pg. 43)

The fact that there are no non-Christian or Jewish accounts of Jesus seems somewhat irrelevant to me. As a former mythicist, I never found this argument to hold as much weight as some do. It implies that the first century documents contained in the New Testament are unreliable simply because they were written by Christians. But as Ehrman also points out, this would be a bit like “dismissing early American accounts of the Revolutionary War simply because they were written by Americans” (pg.74)

2. The earliest New Testament writers seem ignorant of the details of Jesus’ life, which become more crystalized in later texts.

 
To make this point, Tarico picks on the fact that St. Paul never mentions certain details about Jesus’ life including his Virgin Birth, the wise men, or a star in the East. She goes on to explain:

"He virtually refuses to disclose any other biographical detail, and the few cryptic hints he offers aren’t just vague, but contradict the gospels. The leaders of the early Christian movement in Jerusalem like Peter and James are supposedly Jesus’ own followers and family; but Paul dismisses them as nobodies and repeatedly opposes them for not being true Christians!"

The “few cryptic hints he offers” are major points about the life of Jesus. He really existed (Gal. 4:4), was the “Son of God” (Rom. 1:4), was crucified under Pontius Pilate (1 Tim. 6:13), and that he rose from the dead (Rom 1:4).

It’s true that Paul does not give us more specific details about the life of Jesus, but that doesn’t mean he was unaware of them. Claiming that he "virtually refuses" to disclose further details is speculative. He had no reason to rehash the Gospel narrative in any of his letters.

Paul was writing to specific churches as praise for right conduct and adherence to sound doctrine, or as correction to those who had strayed from the Faith. Since his audience was already Christian, he may have assumed they were aware of the details about Jesus and saw no reason to elaborate.

This is true in modern Church documents. When a pope or other clergy member writes a letter to another church, it’s not likely they would feel the need to explain the life of Jesus in every detail to an audience already familiar with the story. They might reference specific details to make a point as Paul did, but letters of praise or correction from one Christian to another are not going to contain a complete retelling of the Gospel narrative. And it would be absurd to expect them to.

3. Even the New Testament stories don’t claim to be first-hand accounts.

 
With this objection, Tarico claims that none of the Gospels were written by eyewitnesses, and that the attribution of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were not designated until one hundred years or more after Christianity began.

If it was actually the case that author attributions were not chosen until many years after the time of Christ, then it is a curious thing that they did not choose more prominent disciples like Peter or James.

The authors of the Gnostic gospels chose the names of prominent disciples to lend credibility to their writings, but we know these couldn’t have been written by the people they are attributed to because they don’t appear until two or three hundred years later. The overwhelming majority of Biblical scholars, on the other hand, place the authorship of at least three of the Gospels within a generation of Jesus, and all four of them definitely within the first century (Did Jesus Exist?, pg. 75).

My colleague Jimmy Akin argues that Matthew and John were both eyewitnesses of the ministry of Christ, and that a strong case can be made that Mark and Luke both received their information from eyewitnesses. You can read more on that here.

4. The gospels, our only accounts of a historical Jesus, contradict each other.

 
Oceans of ink have been spilled on the subject of contradictions in the Bible from both sides of the Christian/non-Christian debate. But the question remains: Do these contradictions indicate that there may not have been a historical Jesus upon which the core of the Gospels are based? I would argue that these contradictions—valid or not—have no bearing on the existence of a historical Jesus.

Tarico points to discrepancies in the Resurrection accounts as an example. Even if we are to concede that these accounts contain details that are impossible to reconcile, it still does nothing to prove that there was no Jesus. At best, it would only prove that one or all of the authors of the Gospels got their facts wrong about the Resurrection, in particular.

The core facts of the Gospels (that Jesus existed, preached and won disciples, and was crucified by Roman authorities) is attested to in the writings of Paul, the early Church Fathers, the Jewish historian Josephus, and several other non-Christian authors. Even the enemies of Christianity never denied the existence of its founder.

5. Modern scholars who claim to have uncovered the real historical Jesus depict wildly different persons.

 
This is probably the weakest of Tarico’s points. If we asked ten people to tell us about the life of a person they knew, and all of their descriptions deviated from one another in very important details, this would not in any way mean the person in question did not exist. Tarico continues her point:

"Jesus appears to be an effect, not a cause, of Christianity. Paul and the rest of the first generation of Christians searched the Septuagint translation of Hebrew scriptures to create a Mystery Faith for the Jews, complete with pagan rituals like a Lord’s Supper, Gnostic terms in his letters, and a personal savior god to rival those in their neighbors’ longstanding Egyptian, Persian, Hellenistic and Roman traditions."

There is a lot to unpack here. Many skeptics have claimed that there are parallels with the pagan religions of the time in the details about the life of Jesus and Christian rituals. In my own research, I have not found these parallels to be compelling (you can read my articles on these kinds of claims here).

What I do find compelling is that the Christian movement managed to spread so quickly. The Jewish historian Josephus confirms that the movement began in Judea, while Tacitus, Seutonius, and Pliny the Younger tell us that it spread all the way to Rome and Bithnya. According to the writings of the early Christians, these new communities were started by apostles who had been sent by the movement’s founder, Jesus. (You can read more on this here.)

Conclusion

 
Certainly there are more sophisticated arguments against the existence of Jesus than what is presented by Tarico. Most of her points are based on arguments made by mythicist author David Fitzgerald in his book Nailed: Ten Christian Myths That Show Jesus Never Existed at All.

One of the points that I have heard Fitzgerald make in both his writing and in recorded interviews is that most scholars believe Jesus existed because most of them have been Christian (or formerly Christian). One could argue that all mythicists are atheists, but neither point really addresses the issue.

The Christ myth theory has circulated for nearly 200 years, going in and out of style. I have been criticized by some for paying any attention to it at all, but from my perspective there is a growing number of people who believe Jesus never existed, and thus it is something worth taking seriously.
 
 
(Image credit: Jaroslav74 via Shutterstock))

NOTE: This it the second of a two part series. Before reading this be sure to check out Part 1.
 

 
Many Christians accept that a historical Jesus existed because they never thought to question the idea in the first place, or because they are convinced that the gospels can be read as (more or less) historical accounts and so don't need to be seriously doubted on this point.  But why do the overwhelming majority of non-Christian scholars also accept that Jesus existed?

The Total Lack of Evidence for a "Mythic Christianity"

 
Essentially, it's because it's the most parsimonious explanation of the evidence we have.  Early Christianity and the critics of early Christianity agree on virtually nothing about Jesus, except for one thing - that he existed as a historical person in the early first century.  If there really was an original form of Christianity that didn't believe this, as all versions of the "Jesus Myth" idea require, then it makes no sense that there is no trace of it.  Such an idea would be a boon to the various Gnostic branches of Christianity, which emphasized his spiritual/mystical aspects and saw him as an emissary from a purely spiritual world who aimed to help us escape the physical dimension.  A totally non-historical, purely mystical Jesus would have suited their purposes perfectly.  Yet they never taught such a Jesus existed - they always depict him as a historical, first century teacher, but argued that he was "pure spirit" and only had the "illusion of flesh".  Why?  Because they couldn't deny that he had existed as a historical person and there was no prior "mythic Jesus" tradition for them to draw on.

Similarly, the memory of an earlier, original Christianity which didn't believe in a historical Jesus would have been a killer argument for the many Jewish and pagan critics of Christianity.  Jesus Mythicists claim this mythic Jesus Christianity survived well into the second or even third century.  We have orthodox Christian responses to critiques by Jews and pagans from that period, by Justin Martyr, Origen, and Minucius Felix.  They try to confront and answer the arguments their critics make about Jesus - that he was a fool, a magician, a bastard son of a Roman soldier, a fraud etc - but none of these apologetic works so much as hint that anyone ever claimed he never existed.  If a whole branch of Christianity existed that claimed just this, why did it pass totally unnoticed by these critics? Clearly no such earlier "mythic Jesus" proto-Christianity existed - it is a creation of the modern Jesus Mythicist activists to prop up their theory.

Indicators of Historicity in the Gospels

 
The main reason non-Christian scholars accept that there was a Jewish preacher as the point of origin of the Jesus story is that the stories themselves contain elements that only make sense if they were originally about such a preacher, but which the gospel writers themselves found somewhat awkward.  As noted above, far from conforming closely to expectations about the coming Messiah, the Jesus story actually shows many signs of being shoehorned into such expectations and not exactly fitting very well.

For example, in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus is depicted as going to the Jordan and being baptized by John the Baptist (Mark 1: 9-11), after which he hears a voice from heaven and goes off into the wilderness to fast.  For the writer of Mark, this is the point where Jesus becomes the Messiah of Yahweh and so there is no problem with him having his sins washed away by John, since prior to his point he was man like any other.  The writer of the Gospel of Matthew, however, has a very different Christology.  In his version, Jesus has been the ordained Messiah since his miraculous conception, so it is awkward for him to have the chosen one of God going to be baptized by John, who is a lesser prophet.  So Matthew tells more or less the same story as he finds in Mark, which he uses as his source, but adds a small exchange of dialogue not found in the earlier version:

"But John tried to deter him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” Jesus replied, "Let it be so now; it is proper for us to do this to fulfill all righteousness." Then John consented." (Matt 3:14-15)

When we turn to the latest of the gospels, the Gospel of John, we find a very different story again.  The writer of this gospel depicts Jesus as being a mystical, pre-existent Messiah who had a heavenly existence since the beginning of time.  So for him the idea of Jesus being baptized by John is even more awkward.  He solves the problem by removing the baptism altogether.  In this latest version, John is baptizing other people and telling them that the Messiah was to come and then sees Jesus and declares him to be the Messiah (John 1:29-33).  There is no baptism of Jesus at all in the Gospel of John version.

So in these three examples we have three different versions of the same story written at three times in the early decades of Christianity.  All of them are dealing with the baptism of Jesus by John in different ways and trying to make it fit with their conceptions of Jesus and at least two of them are having some trouble doing so and are having to change the story to make it fit their ideas about Jesus.  All this indicates that the baptism of Jesus by John was a historical event and known to be such and so could not be left out of the story.  This left the later gospel writers with the problem of trying to make it fit their evolving ideas about who and what Jesus was.

There are several other elements in the gospels like this.  The Gospels of Luke and Matthew go to great lengths to tell stories which "explain" how Jesus came to be born in Bethlehem despite being from Nazareth, since Micah 5:2 was taken to be a prophecy that the Messiah was to be from Bethlehem.  Both gospels, however, tell completely different, totally contradictory and mutually exclusive stories (one is even set ten years after the other) which all but the most conservative Christian scholars acknowledge to be non-historical.  The question then arises: why did they go to this effort?  If Jesus existed and was from Nazareth, this makes sense.  Clearly some Jews objected to the claim Jesus was the Messiah on the grounds that he was from the insignificant village of Nazareth in Galilee and not from Bethlehem in Judea - John 7:41-42 even depicts some Jews making precisely this objection.  So it makes sense that Christian traditions would arise that "explain" how a man known to be a Galilean from Nazareth came to be born in Bethlehem and raised in Nazareth - thus the contradictory stories in the Gospels of Luke and Matthew that have this as their end.

If, however, there was no historical Jesus then it is very hard to explain why an insignificant town like Nazareth is in the story at all.  If Jesus was a purely mythic figure and the stories of his life evolved out of expectations about the Messiah then he would be from Bethlehem, as was expected as a Messiah.  So why is Nazareth, a tiny place of no religious significance, in the story?  And why all the effort to get Jesus born in Bethlehem but keep Nazareth in the narrative?  The only reasonable explanation is that Nazareth is the historical element in these accounts - it is in the story because that is where Jesus was from.  A historical Jesus explains the evidence far better than any "mythic" alternative.

But probably the best example of an element in the story which was so awkward for the early Christians that it simply has to be historical is the crucifixion. The idea of a Messiah who dies was totally unheard of and utterly alien to any Jewish tradition prior to the beginning of Christianity, but the idea of a Messiah who was crucified was not only bizarre, it was absurd.  According to Jewish tradition, anyone who was "hanged on a tree" was to be considered accursed by Yahweh and this was one of the reasons crucifixion was considered particularly abhorrent to Jews.  The concept of a crucified Messiah, therefore, was totally bizarre and absurd.

It was equally weird to non-Jews.  Crucifixion was considered the most shameful of deaths, so much so that one of the privileges of Roman citizenship is that citizens could never be crucified.  The idea of a crucified god, therefore, was unthinkable. This was so much the case that the early Christians avoided any depictions of Jesus on the cross - the first depictions of the Crucifixion appear in the Fourth Century, after Christian emperors banned crucifixion and it began to lose its stigma.  It's significant that the earliest depiction of the crucifixion of Jesus that we have is a graffito from Rome showing a man worshipping a crucified figure with the head of a donkey with the mocking caption "Alexamenos worships his god".  The idea of a crucified god was, quite literally, ridiculous.  Paul acknowledges how absurd the idea of a crucified Messiah was in 1 Corinthians 1:23, where he says it "is a stumbling block to the Jews and an absurdity to the gentiles".

The accounts of Jesus' crucifixion in the gospels also show how awkward the nature of their Messiah's death was for the earliest Christians.  They are all full of references to texts in the Old Testament as ways of demonstrating that, far from being an absurdity, this was what was supposed to happen to the Messiah.  But none of the texts used were considered prophecies of the Messiah before Christianity came along and some of them are highly forced.  The "suffering servant" passages in Isaiah 53 are pressed into service as "prophecies" of the crucifixion, since they depict a figure being falsely accused, rejected and given up to be "pierced .... as a guilt offering".  But the gospels don't reference other parts of the same passage which don't fit their story at all, such as where it is said this figure will "prolong his days and look upon his offspring".

Clearly the gospel writers were going to some effort to find some kind of scriptural basis for this rather awkward death for their group's leader, one that let them maintain their belief that he was the Messiah.  Again, this makes most sense if there was a historical Jesus and he was crucified, leaving his followers with this awkward problem.  If there was no historical Jesus at all, it becomes very difficult to explain where this bizarre, unprecedented and awkwardly inconvenient element in the story comes from.  It's hard to see why anyone would invent the idea of a crucified Messiah and create these problems.  And given that there was no precedent for a crucified Messiah, it's almost impossible to see this idea evolving out of earlier Jewish traditions.  The most logical explanation is that it's in the story, despite its vast awkwardness, because it happened.

Non-Christian References to Jesus as a Historical Figure

 
Many Christian apologists vastly overstate the number of ancient, non-Christian writers who attest to the existence of Jesus.  This is partly because they are not simply showing that a mere Jewish preacher existed, but are arguing for the existence of the "Jesus Christ" of Christian doctrine: a supposedly supernatural figure who allegedly performed amazing public miracles in front of audiences of thousands of witnesses.  It could certainly be argued that such a wondrous figure would have been noticed outside of Galilee and Judea and so should have been widely noted as well.  So Christian apologists often cite a long list of writers who mention Jesus, usually including Josephus, Pliny the Younger, Tacitus, Suetonius, Lucian, Thallus and several others.  But of these only Tacitus and Josephus actually mention Jesus as a historical person - the others are all simply references to early Christianity, some of which mention the "Christ" that was the focus of its worship.

If we are simply noting the existence of Jesus as a human Jewish preacher, we are not required to produce more mentions of him than we would expect of comparable figures.  And what we find is that we have about as much evidence for his existence (outside any Christian writings) as we have for other Jewish preachers, prophets, and Messianic claimants of the time.  The two non-Christian writers who mention him as a historical person are Josephus and Tacitus.

Josephus

 
The Jewish priestly aristocrat Joseph ben Matityahu, who took the Roman name Flavius Josephus, is our main source of information about Jewish affairs in this period and is usually the only writer of the time who makes any mention of Jewish preachers, prophets, and Messianic claimants of the first century.  Not surprisingly, he mentions Jesus twice: firstly in some detail in Antiquities of the Jews XVIII.3.4 and again more briefly when mentioning the execution of Jesus' brother James in Antiquities XX.9.1.  The first reference is problematic, however, as it contains elements which Josephus cannot have written and which seem to have been added later by a Christian interpolator.  Here is the text, with the likely interpolations in bold:

"Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man; for he was a doer of paradoxical deeds, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles. He was [the] Christ And when Pilate at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him; for he appeared to them alive again the third day; as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him. And the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day."

There has been a long debate about what parts of this reference to Jesus are authentic to Josephus or even if the whole passage is a wholesale interpolation.  Proponents of the Jesus Myth hypothesis, naturally, opt for the idea that it is not authentic in any way, but there are strong indications that, apart from the obvious additions shown in bold above, Josephus did mention Jesus at this point in his text.

To begin with, several elements in the passage are distinctively Josephan in their style and phrasing.  "Now (there was) about this time ..." is used by Josephus as a way of introducing a new topic hundreds of times in his work.  There are no early Christian parallels that refer to Jesus merely as "a wise man", but this is a term used by Josephus several times, e.g., about Solomon and Daniel.  Christian writers placed a lot of emphasis on Jesus' miracles, but here the passage uses a fairly neutral term παραδόξων ἔργων - "paradoxa erga" or "paradoxical deeds".  Josephus does use this phrase elsewhere about the miracles of Elisha, but the term can also mean "deeds that are difficult to interpret" and even has overtones of cautious skepticism.  Finally, the use of the word φῦλον ("phylon" - "race, tribe") is not used by Christians about themselves in any works of the time, but is used by Josephus elsewhere about nations or other distinct groups.  Additionally, with the sole exception of Χριστιανῶν ("Christianon" - "Christians") every single word in the passage can be found elsewhere in Josephus' writings.

The weight of the evidence of the vocabulary and style of the passage is heavily towards its partial authenticity.  Not only does it contain distinctive phrases of Josephus that he used in similar contexts elsewhere, but these are also phrases not found in early Christian texts.  And it is significantly free of terms and phrases from the gospels, which we'd expect to find if it was created wholesale by a Christian writer.  So either a very clever Christian interpolator somehow managed to immerse himself in Josephus' phrasing and language, without modern concordances and dictionaries, and create a passage containing distinctively Josephean phraseology, or what we have here is a genuinely Josephean passage that has simply been added to rather clumsily.

As a result of this and other evidence (e.g., the Arabic and Syriac paraphrases of this passage which seem to come from a version before the clumsy additions by the interpolator) the consensus amongst scholars of all backgrounds is that the passage is partially genuine, with additions made in a few obvious places.  Louis H. Feldman's Josephus and Modern Scholarship (1984) surveys scholarship on the question from 1937 to 1980 and finds of 52 scholars on the subject, 39 considered the passage to be partially authentic.

Peter Kirby has since done a survey of the literature and found that this trend has increased in recent years.  He concludes "In my own reading of thirteen books since 1980 that touch upon the passage, ten out of thirteen argue the (Antiquities of the Jews XVIII.3.4 passage) to be partly genuine, while the other three maintain it to be entirely spurious. Coincidentally, the same three books also argue that Jesus did not exist."

The other mention of Jesus in Josephus, Antiquities XX.9.1, is much more straightforward, and much more of a problem for Jesus Mythicists.  In it Josephus recounts a major political event that happened when he was a young man.  This would have been a significant and memorable event for him, since he was only 25 at the time and it caused upheaval in his own social and political class, the priestly families of Jerusalem that included his own.

In 62 AD the Roman procurator of Judea, Porcius Festus, died while in office and his replacement, Lucceius Albinus, was still on his way to Judea from Rome.  This left the High Priest, Hanan ben Hanan (usually called Ananus), with a freer reign than usual. Ananus executed some Jews without Roman permission and, when this was brought to the attention of the Romans, Ananus was deposed.  This deposition would have been memorable for the young Josephus, who had just returned from an embassy to Rome on the behalf of the Jerusalem priests.  But what makes this passage relevant is what Josephus mentions, in passing, as the cause of the political upheaval:

"Festus was now dead, and Albinus was but upon the road; so (the High Priest) assembled the Sanhedrin of judges, and brought before them the brother of Jesus, who was called Messiah, whose name was James, and some others; and when he had formed an accusation against them as breakers of the law, he delivered them to be stoned."

This mention is peripheral to the story Josephus is telling, but since we know from Christian sources that Jesus' brother James led the Jesus sect in Jerusalem in this period, and we have a separate, non-dependent, Christian account of James' execution by the Jerusalem priesthood, it is fairly clear which "Jesus who was called Messiah" Josephus is referring to here.

Almost without exception, modern scholars consider this passage genuine and an undisputed reference to Jesus as a historical figure by someone who was a contemporary of his brother and who knew of the execution of that brother first hand.  This rather unequivocal reference to a historical Jesus leaves Jesus Mythicists with a thorny problem, which they generally try to solve one of two ways. They either claim:

(i) "The words "who was called Messiah" are a later Christian interpolation"

Since it is wholly unlikely that a Christian interpolator invented the whole story of the deposition of the High Priest just to slip in this passing reference to Jesus, Mythicists try to argue that the key words which identify which Jesus is being spoken of are interpolated.  Unfortunately this argument does not work.  This is because the passage is discussed no less than three times in mid-third century works by the Christian apologist Origen and he directly quotes the relevant section with the words "Jesus who was called the Messiah" all three times: in Contra Celsum I.4, in Contra Celsum II:13 and in Commentarium in evangelium Matthaei X.17.  Each time he uses precisely the phrase we find in Josephus: αδελφος Ιησου του λεγομενου Χριστου ("the brother of that Jesus who was called Messiah").  This is significant because Origen was writing a whole generation before Christianity was in any kind of position to be tampering with texts of Josephus.  If this phrase was in the passage in Origen's time, then it was clearly original to Josephus.

(ii) "The Jesus being referred to here was not the Jesus of Christianity, but the 'Jesus, son of Dameus' mentioned later in the same passage."

After detailing the deposition of the High Priest Ananus, Josephus mentions that he was succeeded as High Priest by a certain "Jesus, son of Damneus".  So Mythicists try to argue that this was the Jesus that Josephus was talking about earlier, since Jesus was a very common name.  It certainly was, but we know how Josephus was careful to differentiate between different people with the same common first name.  So it makes more sense that he calls one "Jesus who was called Messiah" and the other "Jesus son of Damneus" to do precisely this.  Nowhere else does he call the same person two different things in the same passage, as the Mythicist argument requires.  And he certainly would not do so without making it clear that the Jesus who was made High Priest was the same he had mentioned earlier, which he does not do.

The idea that the Jesus referred to as the brother of James was the later mentioned "Jesus son of Damneus" is further undercut by the narrative in the rest of Book XX.  In it the former high priest Ananus continues to play politics and curries favour with the Roman procurator Albinus and the new high priest by giving them rich presents.  This makes no sense if Jesus the brother of the executed James was also "Jesus the son of Damneus", since the new high priest in question is the same Jesus ben Damneus - the idea that he would become friends with his brother's killer just because he was given some nice gifts is ridiculous.

Mythicists are also still stuck with the phrase "who was called Messiah", which Origen's mentions show can't be dismissed as an interpolation.  They usually attempt to argue that, as a High Priest, Jesus the son of Damenus would have been "called Messiah" because "Messiah" means 'anointed" and priests were anointed with oil at their elevation.  Since there are no actual examples of any priests being referred to this way, this is another ad hoc argument designed merely to get the Mythicist argument off the hook.

So the consensus of scholars, Christian and non-Christian, is that the Antiquities XVIII.3.4 passage is authentic despite some obvious later additions and the Antiquities XX.9.1 passage is wholly authentic.  These references alone give us about as much evidence for the existence of a historical "Jesus, who was called Messiah" as we have for comparable Jewish preachers and prophets and is actually sufficient to confirm his existence with reference to any gospel or Christian source.

Tacitus

 
The mention of Jesus in the Annals of the aristocratic Roman historian and senator Publius Cornelius Tacitus is significant partly because of his status as one of the most careful and skeptical historians of the ancient world and partly because it comes from someone who is obviously a hostile witness.  Tacitus absolutely despised Christianity, as he make clear when he mentions how the emperor Nero tried to scapegoat them after the Great Fire of Rome in 64 AD.  He also gives an account to his readers as the origin of the Christian sect and their founder in Judea:

"Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judæa, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their center and become popular." (Tacitus, Annals, XV.44)

Again, this clear reference to Jesus, complete with the details of his execution by Pilate, is a major problem for the Mythicists.  They sometimes try to deal with it using their old standby argument: a claim that it is a later interpolation.  But this passage is distinctively Tacitean in its language and style and it is hard to see how a later Christian scribe could have managed to affect perfect second century Latin grammar and an authentic Tacitean style and fool about 400 years worth of Tacitus scholars, who all regard this passage and clearly genuine.

A more common way of dismissing this passage is to claim that all Tacitus is doing is repeating what Christians had told him about their founder and so it is not independent testimony for Jesus at all.  This is slightly more feasible, but still fails on several fronts.

Firstly, Tacitus made a point of not using hearsay, of referring to sources or people whose testimony he trusted and of noting mere rumour, gossip or second-hand reports as such when he could.  He was explicit in his rejection of history based on hearsay earlier in his work:

"My object in mentioning and refuting this story is, by a conspicuous example, to put down hearsay, and to request that all those into whose hands my work shall come not to catch eagerly at wild and improbable rumours in preference to genuine history." (Tacitus, Annals, IV.11)

Secondly, if Tacitus were to break his own rule and accept hearsay about the founder of Christianity, then it's highly unlikely that he would do so from Christians themselves (if this aristocrat even had any contact with any), who he regarded with utter contempt.  He calls Christianity "a most mischievous superstition...evil...hideous and shameful...(with a) hatred against mankind" - not exactly the words of a man who regarded its followers as reliable sources about their sect's founder.

Furthermore, what he says about Jesus does not show any sign of having its origin in what a Christian would say: it has no hint or mention of Jesus' teaching, or his miracles, or anything about the claim that he rose from the dead.  On the other hand, it does contain elements that would have been of note to a Roman or other non-Christian: that this founder was executed, where this happened, when it occurred ("during the reign of Tiberius") and which Roman governor carried out the penalty.

We know from earlier in the same passage that Tacitus consulted several (unnamed) earlier sources when writing his account of the aftermath of the Great Fire (see Annals XV.38), so it may have been one of these that gave him his information about Jesus.  But there was someone else in Rome at the time Tacitus wrote who mixed in the same circles, who was also a historian and who would have been the obvious person for Tacitus to ask about obscure Jewish preachers and their sects.  None other than Josephus was living and writing in Rome at this time and, like Tacitus, associated with the Imperial court thanks to his patronage first by the emperor Vespasian and then by his son and successor Titus.  There is a strong correspondence between the details about Jesus in Annals XV.44 and Antiquities XVIII.3.4, so it is at least plausible that Tacitus simply asked his fellow aristocratic scholar about the origins of this Jewish sect.

Conclusion

 
The original question we concerned ourselves with was whether historians regard the existence of Jesus to be "historical fact".  The answer is that they do as much as any scholar can do so for the existence of an obscure peasant preacher in the ancient world.  There is as much, if not slightly more, evidence for the existence of Yeshua ben Yusef as there is for other comparable Jewish preachers, prophets, and Messianic claimants, even without looking at the gospel material.  Additionally, that material contains elements which only make sense if their stories are about a historical figure.

The arguments of the Jesus Mythicists, on the other hand, require contortions and suppositions that simply do not stand up to Occam's Razor  and continually rest on positions that are not accepted by the majority of even non-Christian and Jewish scholars.  The proponents of the Jesus Myth hypothesis are almost exclusively amateurs with an ideological axe to grind and their position is and will almost certainly remain on the outer fringe of theories about the origins of Christianity.
 
 
Originally posted at Armarium Magnum. Used with permission.
(Image credit: DDMCDN)

Scholars who specialize in the origins of Christianity agree on very little, but they do generally agree that it is most likely that a historical preacher, on whom the Christian figure "Jesus Christ" is based, did exist.  The numbers of professional scholars, out of the many thousands in this and related fields, who don't accept this consensus, can be counted on the fingers of one hand.  Many may be more cautious about using the term "historical fact" about this idea, since as with many things in ancient history it is not quite as certain as that.  But it is generally regarded as the best and most parsimonious explanation of the evidence and therefore the most likely conclusion that can be drawn.

The opposite idea—that there was no historical Jesus at all and that "Jesus Christ" developed out of some purely mythic ideas about a non-historical, non-existent figure—has had a checkered history over the last 200 years, but has usually been a marginal idea at best.  Its heyday was in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, when it seemed to fit with some early anthropological ideas about religions evolving along parallel patterns and being based on shared archetypes, as characterized by Sir James Frazer's influential comparative religion study The Golden Bough (1890). But it fell out of favor as the twentieth century progressed and was barely held by any scholars at all by the 1960s.

More recently the "Jesus Myth" hypothesis has experienced something of a revival, largely via the internet, blogging, and "print on demand" self-publishing services.  But its proponents are almost never scholars, many of them have a very poor grasp of the evidence, and almost all have clear ideological objectives.  Broadly speaking, they fall into two main categories: (1) New Agers claiming Christianity is actually paganism rebadged and (2) anti-Christian atheist activists seeking to use their "exposure" of historical Jesus scholarship to undermine Christianity.  Both claim that the consensus on the existence of a historical Jesus is purely due to some kind of iron-grip that Christianity still has on the subject, which has suppressed and/or ignored the idea that there was no historical Jesus at all.

In fact, there are some very good reasons there is a broad scholarly consensus on the matter and that it is held by scholars across a wide range of beliefs and backgrounds, including those who are atheists and agnostics (e.g. Bart Ehrman, Maurice Casey, Paula Fredriksen) and Jews (e.g. Geza Vermes, Hyam Maccoby).

Unconvincing Arguments for a Mythic Origin for Jesus

 
Many of the arguments for a Mythic Jesus that some laypeople think sound highly convincing are exactly the same ones that scholars consider laughably weak, even though they sound plausible to those without a sound background in the study of the First Century.  For example:

1. "There are no contemporary accounts or mentions of Jesus.  There should be, so clearly no Jesus existed."

This seems a good argument to many, since modern people tend to leave behind them a lot of evidence they existed (birth certificates, financial documents, school records, etc.) and prominent modern people have their lives documented by the media almost daily.  So it sounds suspicious to people that there are no contemporary records at all detailing or even mentioning Jesus.

But our sources for anyone in the ancient world are scarce and rarely are they contemporaneous—they are usually written decades or even centuries after the fact.  Worse still, the more obscure and humble in origin the person is, the less likely that there will be any documentation about them or even a fleeting reference to them at all.

For example, few people in the ancient world were as prominent, influential, significant and famous as the Carthaginian general Hannibal.  He came close to crushing the Roman Republic, was one of the greatest generals of all time and was famed throughout the ancient world for centuries after his death down to today.  Yet how many contemporary mentions of Hannibal do we have?  Zero.  We have none.  So if someone as famous and significant as Hannibal has no surviving contemporary references to him in our sources, does it really make sense to base an argument about the existence or non-existence of a Galilean peasant preacher on the lack of contemporary references to him?  Clearly it does not.

So while this seems like a good argument, a better knowledge of the ancient world and the nature of our evidence and sources shows that it's actually extremely weak.

2.  "The ancient writer X should have mentioned this Jesus, yet he doesn't do so.  This silence shows that no Jesus existed."

An "argument from silence" is a tricky thing to use effectively.  To do so, it's not enough to show that a writer, account or source is silent on a given point—you also have to show that it shouldn't be before this silence can be given any significance.  So if someone claims their grandfather met Winston Churchill, yet a thorough search of the grandfather's letters and diaries of the time show no mention of this meeting, an argument from silence could be presented to say that the meeting never happened.  This is because we could expect such a meeting to be mentioned in those documents.

Some "Jesus Mythicists" have tried to argue that certain ancient writers should have mentioned Jesus and did not, and so tried to make an argument from silence on this basis.  In 1909 the American "freethinker" John Remsberg came up with a list of 42 ancient writers that he claimed "should" have mentioned Jesus and concluded their silence showed that Jesus ever existed.  But the list has been widely criticised for being contrived and fanciful.  Why exactly, for example, Lucanus—a writer whose works consist of a single poem and a history of the civil war between Caesar and Pompey (in the century before Jesus' time) "should" have mentioned Jesus is hard to see.  And the same can be said for most of the other writers on Remsberg's list.

Some others, however, are more reasonable at first glance.  Philo Judaeus was a Jew in Alexandria who wrote philosophy and theology and who was a contemporary of Jesus, and who also mentions events in Judea and makes reference to other figures we know from the gospel accounts, such as Pontius Pilate.  So it makes far more sense that he should mention Jesus than some poets in far off Rome.  But it is hard to see why even Philo would be interested in mentioning someone like Jesus, given that he also makes no mentions of any of the other Jewish preachers, prophets, faith healers, and Messianic claimants of the time, of which there were many.  If Philo had mentioned Anthronges and Theudas, or Hillel and Honi or John the Baptist, but didn't mention Jesus, then a solid argument from silence could be made.  But given that Philo seems to have had no interest at all in any of the various people like Jesus, the fact that he doesn't mention Jesus either carries little or no weight.

In fact, there is only one writer of the time who had any interest in such figures, who also had little interest for Roman and Greek writers.  He was the Jewish historian Josephus, who is our sole source for virtually all of the Jewish preachers, prophets, faith healers, and Messianic claimants of this time.  If there is any writer who should mention Jesus, it's Josephus.  The problem for the "Jesus Mythicists" is ... he does.  Twice, in fact.  He does do so in Antiquities XVIII.3.4 and again in Antiquities XX.9.1.  Mythicists take comfort in the fact that the first of these references has been added to by later Christian scribes, so they dismiss it as a wholesale interpolation.  But the majority of modern scholars disagree, arguing there is solid evidence to believe that Josephus did make a mention of Jesus here and that it was added to by Christians to help bolster their arguments against Jewish opponents.  That debate aside, the Antiquities XX.9.1 mention of Jesus is universally considered genuine and that alone sinks the Mythicist case (see below for details.)

3.  "The earliest Christian traditions make no mention of a historical Jesus and clearly worshipped a purely heavenly, mythic-style being.  There are no references to an earthly Jesus in any of the earliest New Testament texts, the letters of Paul."

Since many people who read Mythicist arguments have never actually read the letters of Paul, this one sounds convincing as well.  Except it simply isn't true.  While Paul was writing letters about matters of doctrine and disputes and so wasn't giving a basic lesson in who Jesus was in any of this letters, he does make references to Jesus' earthly life in many places.  He says Jesus was born as a human, of a human mother, and born a Jew (Galatians 4:4).  He repeats that he had a "human nature" and that he was a human descendant of King David (Romans 1:3).  He refers to teachings Jesus made during his earthly ministry on divorce (1 Cor. 7:10), on preachers (1 Cor. 9:14) and on the coming apocalypse (1 Thess. 4:15).  He mentions how he was executed by earthly rulers (1 Cor. 2:8) and that he died and was buried (1 Cor 15:3-4).  And he says he had an earthly, physical brother called James who Paul himself had met (Galatians 1:19).

So Mythicist theorists then have to tie themselves in knots to explain how, in fact, a clear reference to Jesus being "born of a woman" actually means he wasn't born of a woman and how when Paul says Jesus was "according to the flesh, a descendant of King David" this doesn't mean he was a human and the human descendant of a human king.  These contrived arguments are so weak they tend to only convince the already convinced.  It's this kind of contrivance that consigns this thesis to the fringe.

The Problems with a "Mythic" Origin to the Jesus Story

 
The weaknesses of the Mythicist hypothesis multiply when its proponents turn to coming up with their own explanation as to how the Jesus stories did arise if there was no historical Jesus.  Of course, many of them don't really bother much with presenting an alternative explanation and leave their ideas about exactly how this happened conveniently vague.  But some realize that we have late first century stories that all claim there was an early first century person who lived within living memory and then make a series of claims about him.  If there was no such person, the Mythicist does need to explain how the stories about his existence arose and took the form they do. And they need to do so in a way that accounts for the evidence better than the parsimonious idea that this was believed because there was such a person.  This is where Mythicism really falls down.  The Mythicist theories fall into four main categories:

1. "Jesus was an amalgam of earlier pagan myths, brought together into a mythic figure of a god-man and savior of a kind found in many cults of the time."

This is the explanation offered by the New Age writer who calls herself "Acharya S" in a series of self-published books beginning with The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold(1999).  Working from late nineteenth and early twentieth century theosophist claims, which exaggerate parallels between the Jesus stories and pagan myths, she makes the typical New Age logical leap from "similarity" to "parallel" and finally to "connection" and "causation".  Leaving aside the fact that many of these "parallels" are highly strained, with any miraculous conception or birth story becoming a "virgin birth" or anything to do with a death or a tree becoming a "crucifixion" (even if virginity or a cross is not involved in either), it is very hard to make the final leap from "parallel" to "causation".

This is particularly hard because of the masses of evidence that the first followers of the Jesus sect were devout Jews—a group for whom the idea of adopting anything "pagan" would have been utterly horrific.  These were people who cut their hair short because long hair was associated with pagan, Hellenistic culture or who shunned gymnasia and theaters because of their association with pagan culture.  All the evidence actually shows that the earliest Jesus sect went through a tumultuous period in its first years trying to accommodate non-Jews into their devoutly Jewish group.  To claim that these people would merrily adopt myths of Horus and Attis and Dionysius and then amalgamate them into a story about a pagan/Jewish hybrid Messiah (who didn't exist) and then turn around and forget he didn't exist and claim he did and that he did so just a few decades earlier is clearly a nonsense hypothesis.

2.  "Jesus was a celestial being who existed in a realm just below the lunar sphere and was not considered an earthly being at all until later."

This is the theory presented by another self-published Mythicist author, Earl Doherty, first in The Jesus Puzzle (2005) and then in Jesus: Neither God nor Man (2009).  Doherty's theory has several main flaws.  Firstly, he claims that this mythic/celestial Jesus was based on a Middle Platonic view of the cosmos that held that there was a "fleshly sub-lunar realm" in the heavens where gods and celestial beings lived and acted out mythic events.  This is the realm, Doherty claims, in which it was believed that Mithras slew the cosmic bull, where Attis lived and died and where Jesus was crucified and rose again.  The problem here is Doherty does very little to back up this claim and, while non-specialist readers may not realise this from the way he presents this idea, it is not something accepted by historians of ancient thought but actually a hypothesis developed entirely by Doherty himself.  He makes it seem like this idea is common knowledge amongst specialists in Middle Platonic philosophy, while never quite spelling out that it's something he's made up. The atheist Biblical scholar Jeffrey Gibson has concluded:
 

"... the plausibility of D[oherty]'s hypothesis depends on not having good knowledge of ancient philosophy, specifically Middle Platonism. Indeed, it becomes less and less plausible the more one knows of ancient philosophy and, especially, Middle Platonism."

 
Secondly, Doherty's thesis requires the earliest Christian writings about Jesus, the letters of Paul, to be about this "celestial/mythic Jesus" and not a historical, earthly one.  Except, as has been pointed out above, Paul's letters do contain a great many references to an earthly Jesus that don't fit with Doherty's hypothesis at all.  Doherty has devoted a vast number of words in both his books explaining ways that these references can be read so that his thesis does not collapse, but these are contrived and in places quite fanciful.

Finally, Doherty's explanations as to how this "celestial/mythic Jesus" sect gave rise to a "historical/earthly Jesus" sect and then promptly disappeared without trace strain credulity.  Despite being the original form of Christianity and despite surviving, according to Doherty, well into the second century, this celestial Jesus sect vanished without leaving any evidence of its existence behind and was undreamt of until Doherty came along and deduced that it had once existed.  This is very difficult to believe.  Early Christianity was a diverse, divided, and quarrelsome faith, with a wide variety of sub-sects, offshoots, and "heresies", all arguing with each other and battling for supremacy.  What eventually emerged from this riot of Christianities was a form of "orthodoxy" that had all the elements of Christianity today: the Trinity, Jesus as the divine incarnate, a physical resurrection etc.  But we know of many of the other rivals to this orthodoxy largely thanks to orthodox writings attacking them and refuting their claims and doctrines.  Doherty expects us to believe that despite all this apologetic literature condemning and refuting a wide range of "heresies" there is not one that bothers to even mention this original Christianity that taught Jesus was never on earth at all.

Doherty's thesis is much more popular amongst atheists than the New Age imaginings of "Acharya S" but has had no impact on the academic sphere partly because self-published hobbyist efforts don't get much attention, but mainly because of the flaws noted above.  Doherty and his followers maintain, of course, that it's because of a kind of academic conspiracy, much as Young Earth Creationists do.

3.  "Jesus began as an allegorical, symbolic figure of the Messiah who got 'historicized' into an actual person despite the fact he never really existed"

This idea has been presented in most detail by another amateur theorist in yet another self-published book: R.G. Price's Jesus: A Very Jewish Myth (2007).  Unlike "Acharya S" and, to a lesser extent Doherty, Price at least takes account of the fact that the Jesus stories and the first members of the Jesus sect are completely and fundamentally Jewish, so fantasies about Egyptian myths or Greek Middle Platonic philosophy are not going to work as points of origin for them.  According to this version of Jesus Mythicism, Jesus was an idealisation of what the Messiah was to be like who got turned into a historical figure largely by mistake and misunderstanding.

Several of the same objections to Doherty's thesis can be made about this one—if this was the case, why are there no remnants of debates with or condemnations of those who believed the earlier version and maintained there was no historical Jesus at all?  And why don't any of Christianity's enemies use the fact that the original Jesus sect didn't believe in a historical Jesus as an argument against the new version of the sect?  Did everyone just forget?

More tellingly, if the Jesus stories arose out of ideas about and expectations of the Messiah, it is very odd that Jesus doesn't fit those expectations better.  Despite Christian claims to the contrary, the first Christians had to work very hard to convince fellow Jews that Jesus was the Messiah precisely because he didn't conform to these expectations. Most importantly, there was absolutely no tradition or Messianic expectation that told of the Messiah being executed and then rising from the dead—this first appears with Christianity and has no Jewish precedent at all.  Far from evolving from established Messianic prophecies and known elements in the scripture, the first Christians had to scramble to find anything at all which looked vaguely like a "prophecy" of this unexpected and highly un-Messianic event.

That the center and climax of the story of Jesus would be based on his shameful execution and death makes no sense if it evolved out of Jewish expectations about the Messiah, since they contained nothing about any such idea.  This climax to the story only makes sense if it actually happened, and then his followers had to find totally new and largely strained and contrived "scriptures" which they then claimed "predicted" this outcome, against all previous expectation.  Price's thesis fails because Jesus' story doesn't conform to Jewish myths enough.

4. "Jesus was not a Jewish preacher at all but was someone else or an amalgam of people combined into one figure in the Christian tradition"

This is the least popular of the Jesus Myth hypotheses, but versions of it are argued by Italian amateur theorist Francesco Carotta (Jesus was Caesar: On the Julian Origin of Christianity: An Investigative Report, 2005)), computer programmer Joseph Atwill (Caesar's Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus, 2005) and accountant Daniel Unterbrink (Judas the Galilean: The Flesh and Blood Jesus, 2004).  Carotta claims Jesus was actually Julius Caesar and imposed on Jewish tradition as part of the cult of the Divius Julius.  Atwill claims Jesus was invented by the Emperor Titus and imposed on Judaism in the same way.  Neither do a very good job of substantiating these claims or of explaining why the Romans then turned around, as early as 64 AD (fifteen years before Titus became emperor) and began persecuting the cult they supposedly created.  No scholar takes these theories or that of Unterbrink seriously.

No scholar also argues that Jesus was an amalgam of various Jewish preachers or other figures of the time.  That is because there is nothing in the evidence to indicate this.  These ideas have never been argued in any detailed form by anyone at all, scholar or Jesus myth amateur theorist, but it is something some who don't want to subscribe to the idea that "Jesus Christ" was based on a real person resorts to so that they can put some skeptical distance between the Christian claims and anything or anyone historical.  It seems to be a purely rhetorically-based idea, with no substance and no argument behind it.
 
 
NOTE: Stay tuned for Part 2 on Friday, where we'll examine the actual evidence for the existence of historical Jesus.
 
 
Originally posted at Armarium Magnum. Used with permission.

Recently, Atwill sent out a press release that was picked up by outlets such as The Daily Mail.

According to the press release, Atwill is planning to explain his theory that Jesus Christ never lived.

Atwill is a mythicist—a person who claims that Jesus is a myth, not a historical figure.

According to Atwill’s version of mythicism, Jesus is a fictional character that was invented by the Roman emperor(s) and the circle around them.

How well does his claim stand up to scrutiny?

Setting the Context

The position of mythicism is extremely uncommon among historians and Bible scholars. Virtually all—including those who are not Christian—acknowledge that the historical evidence indicates that Jesus was a real, historical figure.

In a previous post, we’ve looked at some of that evidence.

Just looking at early non-Christian sources, we have clear evidence that the Christian movement began in the first half of the first century A.D. in the Roman province of Judaea, and, by the end of the first century, had spread widely in the Roman world.

These are facts admitted by both early Christian and non-Christian sources alike.

The movement's sudden appearance and rapid spread indicate that it was highly organized and motivated to spread its message—facts that in turn point to the existence of a founder who gave the movement its organization and mission.

The earliest sources we have that address who that founder was (that is to say, the New Testament documents), indicate that it was Jesus of Nazareth.

This was the movement’s own account of its founding, and this must be regarded as the most reasonable explanation unless there is compelling evidence otherwise.

Does Atwill have such evidence?

Revealing Statements

In his book Caesar’s Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus (Flavian Signature Edition), Atwill frames his case with some revealing remarks.

He states:
 

"This imperial family, the Flavians, created Christianity, and, even more incredibly, they incorporated a skillful satire of the Jews in the Gospels and Wars of the Jews to inform posterity of this fact.
 
The Flavian dynasty lasted from 69 to 96 C.E., the period when most scholars believe the Gospels were written. It consisted of three Caesars: Vespasian and his two sons, Titus and Domitian.
 
Flavius Josephus, the adopted member of the family who wrote Wars of the Jews, was their official historian.
 
The satire they created is difficult to see. If it were otherwise, it would not have remained unnoticed for two millennia. . . .
 
[W]hy then has the satirical relationship between Jesus and Titus not been noticed before? This question is especially apt in light of the fact that the works that reveal their satire—the New Testament and the histories of Josephus—are perhaps the most scrutinized books in literature.
 
Moreover, the satirical level of the Gospels has not been discovered because it was designed to be difficult to see.
 
The Flavian Caesars wanted more than just to transform messianic Judaism. They wanted Christianity to flourish and become widely held, even world-wide, before the Gospels’ satirical level was discovered."

 
So let’s be clear on what Atwill is claiming: The Flavian Caesars invented Christianity, but they did so in a way that incorporated a satire both in the Gospels and in the writings of the Jewish historian Josephus.

They incorporated this satire to reveal the falsehood, so that future generations could admire their cleverness.

Yet this satire was “designed to be difficult to see” because “they wanted Christianity to flourish and become widely held, even world wide.”

Thus they disguised this satire so cleverly that it would not be recognized for 2,000 years, even though—as Atwill states—the New Testament and the histories of Josephus “are perhaps the most scrutinized books in literature.”

Really?

More than “Too Clever by Half”

This claim is more than “too clever by half.” It’s too clever by several orders of magnitude.

Nobody is going to invent a fake religion and then plant in it a satire that reveals what they are doing, trusting that they have disguised the satire sufficiently that it will let the religion become widespread, or even world-wide, and then expect it to be discovered in future generations.

Even if they tried that, the satire would never remain undiscovered for 2,000 years—in “perhaps the most scrutinized books in literature”—until an obscure computer scientist figures it all out two millennia later.

Simply looking at this set of remarks reveals that the vastly greater likelihood is that the supposed satire is in the computer scientist’s imagination—and that the scholars who scrutinized the texts for 2,000 years and didn’t see the satire were reading them right.

An Example

Just to give you a taste of the kind of thing that Atwill sees as evidence of satire, let’s consider one of the key “parallels” that he cites as evidence for the satire.

In a famous passage in Wars of the Jews (6:3:4), Josephus reports that at one point during the siege of Jerusalem the lack of food was so great that an upper-class woman roasted and ate half of her infant son.

The aroma attracted attention, and some of the rebels in the city came to her and demanded her food.

She then offered them what was left, and they went away, horrified, as she sarcastically berated them for causing the calamity that had come upon the city.

Oh, and this woman’s name was Mary (daughter of Eleazar of Bethezub).

And all of this is depicted as occurring more than three decades after the life of Christ.

Despite that, and despite the fact that Mary was the single most common female name in Palestinian Judaism at the time (so that there are six or seven Marys in the New Testament alone), Atwill takes this account as evidence of Roman satire:

• For Mary of Eleazar, read the Virgin Mary
• For the unnamed, roasted son, read Jesus
• For the eating, read the Eucharist

The connections are exceedingly tenuous, to say the least. In his book, Atwill cites several more, equally tenuous connections, but they do not change the fact that the alternative explanation is far more likely: That Josephus is not parodying the Eucharist but reporting an incident that actually took place during the siege of Jerusalem after the rebel leader John of Gischala burned the city’s grain supply and doomed it to famine (5:1:4).

Unfortunately, this kind of parallelomania is common in Atwill’s writing. He regularly cherry-picks Josephus for wildly improbable allusions to the New Testament, at times using his own, idiosyncratic translations of terms.

Frankly put, this is not scholarship.

What Motive?

Taking a step back from the level of detail, let’s consider some of the larger problems with Atwill’s claim.

For a start, why would the Romans do this? What motive would they plausibly have had?

According to Atwill, the Gospels were most likely written between A.D. 71 and 79, during the reign of the Emperor Vespasian.

Vespasian and his son Titus had just fought the First Jewish War (A.D. 66-73) to put down revolutionaries in Judaea, and they wanted to forestall similar incidents in the future.

They thus wanted to create a pacifistic version of Judaism that would accept Roman rule.

There are several problems with this.

The Roman Way

First, creating elaborate literary hoaxes to develop pacifistic strains of foreign religions wasn’t the Roman way of doing things.

The Roman way of doing things involved armies and assassinations, not literary hoaxes. They were, after all, Romans, not Cardassians.

Then there is the factor of time: It would take decades or centuries to create a movement that could pacify Judaism, and the Roman emperors simply did not think that long-term.

They were far more focused on surviving their own reigns, and they wanted problems dealt with expeditiously.

For them, the sword was far more powerful—and quicker—than the pen.

Jews Willing to Accept Roman Rule

Second, creating a literary hoax so that Jews would be willing to accept Roman rule would have been completely unnecessary.

There already were Jews willing to accept Roman rule. Loads of them.

And since the revolutionaries had largely been killed off, those willing to accept the Roman rule were now clearly in the majority.

There were even movements within the Jewish community—such as the Sadducees—who were known for being Roman collaborators.

If you wanted to pacify the Jewish community, fostering such existing movements—not spawning a literary hoax to create a new one—would have been far more logical.

Who Has Heard Our Message?

Third, just who was going to be pacified through the new Christian movement?

The revolutionaries, such as the Zealots and the Sicarii, would be the last people interested in a pacifistic version of Judaism.

Anyone preaching cooperation with the Romans would find their message falling on deaf ears when it came to the Zealots and Sicarii.

The only people likely to respond to the message would be the very people who don’t need convincing.

No Position to Rebel

Fourth, Judaea was in no position to rebel after the war finished.

It had been ravaged, its economic and military power destroyed, and its population disorganized, scattered, or killed.

It would take decades of rebuilding before Judaea could think about rebelling again, and when the next rebellion came (the Kitos War of A.D. 115-117) it started outside Judaea, in lands that had not been crushed in the first war.

What Vespasian Actually Did

Fifth, we know what the Vespasian actually did to deal with the Jewish community.

Rather than creating a fake religion, he taxed them.

Vespasian imposed a punitive tax on the Jewish people and, just to add an additional element of humiliation now that their temple was destroyed, he had the money directed to the Temple of Jupiter Best and Greatest in Rome.

His approach was thus to humiliate the Jews through temporal means, not to convert them to a new, pacifistic religion.

Problems with Writing

Another set of problems with Atwill’s claim (beside the issue of motive) are of a practical nature.

For a start, how did he and the circle around him come up with the documents of the New Testament?

They weren’t Jews. They weren’t immersed in the Jewish Scriptures the way the authors of the New Testament clearly were.

It would not have been possible for pagan Romans to write the New Testament. They would have had to have Jewish help.

Indeed, the New Testament documents had to have been produced by individuals intimately familiar with Jewish thought, culture, and language.

So did they employ Jewish writers to do this for them? Why would the Jewish authors have collaborated on a project this blasphemous?

Many Jews would have been willing to die rather than do so.

Planting Secret Messages

Even if they found some who could be forced into doing so, these Jews would have been far more likely to slip in “This is all fake” messages into the texts rather than the elaborate satire Atwill claims is there.

And are we really to believe that the authors' Roman masters were so interested in planting the satire that they were willing to closely superintend the writing and say, “Hey, we need more satire here. Dig through your memory of Jewish lore to come up with something offensive and biting.”

The Role of Josephus

Further, if Josephus himself were one of the authors involved in this conspiracy, and if his writings are meant to form a companion to the New Testament, why didn’t he say more about Jesus in his writings?

He barely mentions Jesus twice.

If Josephus was seeking to plant information to foster Vespasian’s Christ conspiracy, why didn’t he do so in a clear and direct way in Jewish War and Antiquities of the Jews (not to mention his Life and Against Apion).

How Will They Hear Without Someone Preaching?

Then there is the practical problem of how the documents of the New Testament were to be distributed.

They couldn’t just leave them in libraries, waiting for the illiterate masses to check them out and start a new religion among the lower class and the slaves.

Religions didn’t get started by literary means.

To effectively spread a faith in the first century would have involved doing exactly what the Gospels present Jesus doing: Starting an organized preaching mission, with evangelists to carry the word to others.

So where, in the A.D. 70s, did Vespasian get a team of Jewish preachers to go out, at risk of damnation, to proclaim a false Christ?

Even if they were charlatans who didn’t believe in actual damnation, why would they be willing to risk persecution and martyrdom at the hands of the local authorities?

These would have been risks for them, because the kinds of riots and divisions we see in the book of Acts would have been precisely what they would face as they preached Jesus among the Jews in different cities.

They would be lucky not to get lynched!

And, if pacifying Judaism was what this was supposed to be all about, why wouldn’t the Romans call the whole enterprise off as soon as they started seeing the kind of uprisings it was provoking in the Jewish communities?

Busted!

There is also the problem of getting their message accepted.

While many people in Judaea had been killed, many survived and were scattered throughout the Roman world.

Many who had lived in Judaea in the A.D. 30s were still around, and when Christian missionaries showed up with a message about Jesus of Nazareth preaching to thousands, they would have been in a position to say, “Hey! There was no such guy! I was there!”

Some might say, “I was in Jerusalem at Passover of A.D. 33, and the events you describe simply did not happen!” or “I’m from Galilee; it’s a tiny place; and there was no such Jesus going about preaching and working miracles.”

Who Has Believed Our Word?

Even without such a witness in a local Jewish community, consider what this enterprise would have involved: Creating—in the A.D. 70s—the illusion of a movement stretching back to the A.D. 30s.

That movement was based in local congregations known as churches, and the New Testament documents report churches being located in major metropolitan areas between A.D. 30 and A.D. 70.

These areas include Jerusalem, Syrian Antioch, Ephesus, Corinth, Rome, Thessalonica, Philippi, and others.

Now: If Christianity was first introduced into these cities some time after A.D. 70, why didn’t the first converts pick up on the fact that there had been no churches in these cities previously?

For example, Ephesus is a major Christian center in Acts. Why didn’t the first actual Christians in Ephesus not notice that there had been no church there previously, though Acts says that there was?

Trying to create the illusion of a previously existing movement would have been fraught with peril and far harder than simply starting one, without claiming an extensive past history for it.

A more logical way to proceed, if you wanted to claim Jesus had lived decades earlier, would be to have a single disciple who knew Jesus but was under orders not to preach him until now.

Making up an elaborate, decades-long backstory for the Church, filled with claims that could easily be falsified, would not be way to go.

Playing with Dynamite

All told, the scheme that Atwill attributes to Vespasian and his circle would seem to have a remarkably remarkably high chance of failure.

One of the missionaries breaking under the pressure of a lynch mob and trying to exculpate himself by pointing to the Emperor would be all it could take to give the plan away.

And if it did fail, the consequences would have been dramatic.

Trying to subvert the Jewish religion is the very kind of thing that would cause a massive Jewish uprising.

If the idea got out that the Romans were trying to get Jews to worship a false Messiah, it would have sparked an empire-wide rebellion that would have been far worse than the Jewish War of the A.D. 60s.

Trying to pull off such a hoax would be playing with dynamite, and the Roman emperors would have been crazy to attempt such a hare-brained scheme.

What Now?

If you like the information I've presented here, you should join my Secret Information Club.

If you're not familiar with it, the Secret Information Club is a free service that I operate by email.

I send out information on a variety of fascinating topics connected with the Catholic faith.

In fact, the very first thing you’ll get if you sign up is information about what Pope Benedict said about the book of Revelation.

He had a lot of interesting things to say!

If you’d like to find out what they are, just sign up at www.SecretInfoClub.com or use this handy sign-up form:

Just email me at jimmy@secretinfoclub.com if you have any difficulty.

In the meantime, what do you think?

EDITOR'S NOTE: Today ends our four-part series on the historical evidence for Jesus. Popular atheist writer Richard Carrier began Monday with an article titled "Questioning the Historicity of Jesus". On Tuesday, Catholic writer Jimmy Akin responded with his piece, "Jesus Did Exist". Next, Richard offered a post titled “Defending Mythicism: A New Approach to Christian Origins". Finally today, Trent Horn provides a rejoinder.

 
I’d like to thank Dr. Carrier for responding to my article “Four Reasons I Believe Jesus Really Existed”. I’ve followed his work for quite a while and recommend that defenders of the view that Jesus never existed take heed of his advice (especially his rejection of mythicist arguments made in the vein of videos like Zeitgeist).

I’m sure he will agree that the debate over Jesus’ existence is an intricate affair that can’t be settled in a short blog post, but I’d like to comment on some points he raised in response to my original post which gave four reasons for why I believe in the historical Jesus.

4. It is the mainstream position in academia.

 
Like Aquinas, I agree that appeal to authority is the weakest of logical arguments (or, “so says Boethius”). However, mythicists who are not as well-read as Dr. Carrier may think that contemporary scholarship is legitimately divided on this issue, a misconception I wanted to make sure was cleared up before advancing my main arguments.

It is true that merely holding a fringe view does not mean that Dr. Carrier is automatically mistaken. It only means that he must put forward substantial evidence in order to defend a claim that nearly every other scholar in the relevant field, including fellow skeptics, have not found convincing. Or, as he is fond of saying in other contexts, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

Dr. Carrier also points out that scholars do not have a unified consensus of who the historical Jesus was (i.e. cynic sage, prophet, revolutionary, etc.) and he says this counts against the mainstream position. But I don’t see why this disagreement should cause us to doubt there was at least a Jesus who scholars now study. There are many figures in history whose motives or deeds are hotly debated by scholars, but that debate is rarely used as evidence that those people never existed.

3.  Jesus’ existence is confirmed by extra-biblical sources.

 
Dr. Carrier dismisses the references made by Josephus and Tacitus as being unreliable. Unfortunately, Dr. Carrier provided no reason in his response to think the references in Josephus are unreliable. He merely referenced his own article on the subject that is published in the December 2012 issue of the Journal of Early Christian Studies in his response to Jimmy Akin. As a result, I will stand behind the scholarly consensus that Josephus is at least partially authentic and wait to see how fellow Josephus scholars interact with Dr. Carrier’s paper on the subject.

In regards to these accounts being independent of the Christian tradition I will simply say that Tacitus’ disdain for Christians and his reputation as a careful historian, as well as Josephus’ intimate knowledge of Galilee after Jesus’ death, both bode well for their ability to vouch for the events they describe.

2. The Early Church Fathers don’t describe the mythicist heresy.

Dr. Carrier said that we simply don’t have enough information about what heresies existed in the early Church to know what happened to the mythicists. But this still does not explain the problem I raised. It seems incredibly unlikely that early gnostic heresies about Jesus being God disguised in human form could plague the Church for centuries but the mythicist “Gospel” preached by Peter and the other real founders of Christianity could simply disappear into thin air in the span of one generation, a length of time where those who knew the apostles could object that the events described in the Gospels never happened.

Dr. Carrier claims that even in the face of this silence there are “hints” pointing to the ancient mythicist believers. He cites 2 Peter 1:19 where the author says Christians did not follow “cleverly devised myths,” but this passage makes no reference to any particular myth or particular groups of people promoting a Jesus myth, so it could just be a general statement about the historical value of the Christian faith. Dr. Carrier also mentions The Ascension of Isaiah which features prominently in the writings of fellow mythicist Earl Doherty. However, the liberal Christian blogger James McGrath provides an excellent summary of why this apocryphal book does not support the mythicist thesis.

1. St. Paul knew the disciples of Jesus.

 
According to Dr. Carrier, Paul only knew apostles, or the deluded followers of a celestial Jesus who were “sent” to preach the Gospel after learning about it through a series of visions. Paul allegedly never describes interactions with people who were the disciples of an earthly Jesus. Of course, even if Paul did describe Jesus “discipling” the apostles, how could someone prove these “interactions” were not mere spiritual visions? If Paul’s descriptions of Christ’s death and resurrection could take place in the “lower heavens,” then why couldn’t these events take place there as well?

Dr. Carrier also replies to my argument that Paul is giving a biological reference about the apostle James when Paul mentions James as “the brother of the Lord” in Galatians 1:19. Carrier claims that Paul could be referring to James as a “spiritual brother” of the Lord and writes:
 

"All baptized Christians were the adopted “sons of God” (Romans 6:3-10) and thus were only “brothers” because they were brothers of their common Lord (Romans 8.15-29, 9.26; Galatians 3.26-29, 4.4-7). We cannot tell from his letters themselves whether Paul means brother of the Lord by adoption, or brother of the Lord biologically."

 
I’m curious that Dr. Carrier cites Galatians 4:4 as evidence that Paul viewed all believers as Christ’s spiritual brothers when the context clearly states that believers become adopted sons of God (or “brothers”) precisely because, as Galatians 4:4 says, God sent his son “born of a woman, born under the law” to redeem mankind. This seems to be strong evidence that Paul saw Jesus as a “God-man” who became a man like we all did, by being born. Paul did not view Jesus as some kind of non-human cosmic savior figure.

Dr. Carrier is correct that other people did refer to themselves as having a kind of brotherly relationship with Jesus. In Ephesians 6:21 Tychicus describes himself as “the dear brother and faithful servant in the Lord” and in 1 Corinthians 6:5-6 Paul refers to any believer as a “brother” in Christ. But it is very different to be a brother in someone, as in the spiritual sense that we’re all brothers “in the Lord,” and being the brother of the Lord. In Galatians 1:19 Paul says, “I saw none of the other apostles except James the Lord's brother” or in Greek, “ouk eidon ei me Iakobon ton adelphon tou kyriou.” The use of the genitive case for tou kyriou signifies that the corresponding English preposition is “of” the Lord, as opposed to “in” the Lord.

Another point in favor of this being a biological title is that Paul does not say Peter is a “brother of the Lord,” only James. This doesn’t make sense under the spiritual view since both men would have a claim to that title (Peter even more so as chief of the apostles). The biological view would make sense and be an easy way to identify James and not confuse him with James the son of Zebedee (another apostle) or James the son of Alphaeus.

Finally, Dr. Carrier says that we can’t conclusively prove Paul is referring to biological brothers of Jesus. That may be true, but I doubt that any of the arguments put forward in defense of the mythicist thesis could meet the standard of “conclusive proof.” The better standard to use is what is most probable, and I think a biological reading of the passage meets that standard.

Conclusion

 
While I disagree with Dr. Carrier’s conclusion I look forward to reading his upcoming book on the subject and hope that future posts at Strange Notions will be able to explore other facets related to the Jesus myth debate.
 
 
(Image credit: Hot Teapot)

EDITOR'S NOTE: Today continues our four-part series on the historical evidence for Jesus. Popular atheist writer Richard Carrier began Monday with an article titled "Questioning the Historicity of Jesus". Yesterday, Catholic writer Jimmy Akin responded with his piece, "Jesus Did Exist". Today, Richard offers his take on “Four Reasons I Think Jesus Really Existed" by Trent Horn. Finally tomorrow, Trent will provide a rejoinder.

 
Strange Notions has featured two articles defending the historicity of Jesus, and I was asked to write a short piece on how we advocates of the alternative view respond to the kind of arguments in them. I addressed one of them in a previous installment. Here I’ll address the other.

In “Four Reasons I Think Jesus Really Existed”, Trent Horn offers four reasons to conclude Jesus existed. The fourth is that this is currently the mainstream position. But so once was the view that Moses was historical, as I explained in my previous article. The mainstream position now is that he was not. And that change began with a small number of scholars challenging the mainstream position of the time. So we must be wary of arguments from authority. Particularly when the authorities in question have no working methodology and can reach no consensus on which historical Jesus the evidence supports (as I’ve shown in chapters 1 and 5 of Proving History). As I noted in my previous article, even some of those authorities affirming historicity (like professor Philip Davies) agree mythicism is at least worth examining.

Horn’s remaining reasons are the same ones mythicists have long found suspect, for reasons even Jimmy Akin was aware, as I noted in my article (see Akin’s “Did Jesus Exist? An Alternate Approach”.)

Horn’s third reason is that there is evidence corroborating the Gospels. But there actually isn’t. He relies on the references in Josephus—which I explained in Part I are both too suspect to count as evidence. But even if they were counted, they cannot be shown to be independent of the Gospels, and thus are not known to independently corroborate them. Likewise the passage in Tacitus, which comes twenty years later (nearly a hundred years after the movement began).

Horn’s second reason is that “the early church fathers don’t describe the mythicist heresy,” but we have no writings from “church fathers” until the late second century, a century and a half after the movement began and almost a century after the Gospels were even written. What was being said in those missing 50-100 years? We pretty much don’t know. We don’t know what heresies, for example, Papias mentioned—because only a few scattered quotations of him were preserved. The church threw his books away so we don’t get to read them. And yet even he wrote most likely near the mid-second century, so even if we had his works it might not be much help. Who was writing in the late first century about the various “alternative sects” of Christianity then, when the Gospels were first spreading a historical version of Jesus? We don’t even have a single name. Much less any book on the subject. Not even a quotation. We simply don’t know what was being said then. And we can’t argue from the silence of authors and documents we don’t have.

There is some evidence of mythicist sects that slipped through medieval church censors and selectors. The New Testament itself mentions a rival sect teaching that the Gospels were fabricated myths (2 Peter 1:16-2:2, commonly agreed to be a forged letter most likely originating in the second century). And manuscript evidence suggests that the second century apocryphal text The Ascension of Isaiah originally depicted Jesus being killed by Satan and his demons in the lower heavens (and not on earth), exactly as the mythicist thesis proposes. Even some of the “other sects” discussed by later authors like Irenaeus appear to have imagined Jesus was born in the heavens, not on earth, and regarded stories about him to be allegories, not biographies.

But we don’t expect more than hints to survive. Because the sect that gained power in the fourth century and decided what documents to preserve or quote and which to discard or leave in silence had no reason to preserve anything that challenged their version of Christian origins. We thus see that east of the Roman Empire, a sect of Christians beyond their reach still believed Jesus was killed around 80-70 B.C. (under the reign of king Jannaeus) and not under Roman rule a century later. This sect was in fact the original Torah observant sect, still called the Nazorians (as I explained in Part I, one of the original names for the Christian movement). But we only know about this because Epiphanius chanced once to mention it, and this was the only sect the authors of the Babylonian Talmud knew. We otherwise have not a single surviving document from or about them.

So arguments from silence cannot prevail against mythicism. We have no reason to expect any such evidence to survive, and yet still even have some hints in the evidence that did survive.

Finally, Horn's first reason is that “St. Paul knew the disciples of Jesus.” This is a common myth of modern times. It is a myth because Paul never once calls anyone a disciple. The word is nowhere to be found in his writings. Paul only knows of apostles like himself, and so far as he ever mentions, apostles became apostles by receiving visions of Jesus (1 Corinthians 9:1, 15:5-8; Galatians 1), not by having met him in person. Paul never once mentions anyone having done so. Which is actually strange. It’s one of the strangest things there is about the epistles of Paul, and one of the main reasons serious scholars are considering mythicism as a viable alternative of Christian origins.

Horn concludes with what mythicists do generally concede is “the most powerful argument against the Christ-Myth theory,” that Paul mentions having met “brothers of the Lord” (although not “brothers of Jesus” or “brothers of Jesus in the flesh”). But all Christians were “brothers of the Lord.” Jesus was “the firstborn among many brethren” (Romans 8:29). All baptized Christians were the adopted “sons of God” (Romans 6:3-10) and thus were only “brothers” because they were brothers of their common Lord (Romans 8.15-29, 9.26; Galatians 3.26-29, 4.4-7). We cannot tell from his letters themselves whether Paul means brother of the Lord by adoption, or brother of the Lord biologically. So we cannot conclusively prove that he is referring to actual brothers of a historical Jesus, rather than spiritual brothers of a celestial Jesus.

Obviously a great deal more can be said on all these points. As I noted in Part I, I treat all the objections and suggestions and debates surrounding all the evidence in my forthcoming book. I was asked here to be brief. But this at least can give you an idea of where this new approach to Christian origins is coming from. There can be good and bad arguments on either said of the debate. And nothing I have said here ends any argument. But when all the bad arguments are cleared, I find that all the good arguments left over weigh more strongly against historicity. Not, perhaps, enough to be certain Jesus didn’t exist. But certainly enough to be uncertain if he did.
 
 
(Image credit: Thoughtful Christianity)

EDITOR'S NOTE: Today we continue our four-part series concerning the historical evidence for Jesus. Popular atheist writer Richard Carrier, probably the world's best known Mythicist, began yesterday with his article "Questioning the Historicity of Jesus". Today, Catholic writer Jimmy Akin responds. Tomorrow, Richard will offer his take on “Four Reasons I Think Jesus Really Existed" by Trent Horn. Finally, on Thursday, Trent will wrap up the series with a rejoinder.

 
I would like to provide responses to the arguments and evidence that Richard Carrier offers to rebut my argument that Jesus existed. This task is complicated because, in his response to my original piece, Carrier says a surprisingly small amount that engages my argument and a large amount that does not.

Approximately half of his piece is devoted to other matters:

• running through the names of people who agree with him in varying degrees
• recommending books
• expressing hope for the fortunes of his thesis in future decades
• plugging his forthcoming book
• acknowledging the mistakes of fact and argument made by others who hold that Jesus never existed
• discussing the goal of his own research.

Stating Your Position is Not an Argument

 
In the part of his post that does respond to the original piece, Carrier does not interact very directly with its argument. Instead, he makes a series of alternative assertions that state his own view.

His view does disagree with mine, but stating your own view is not the same thing as providing evidence in favor of it. Much less is it the same thing as providing evidence against the view you are responding to.

Carrier’s goal in the post does not seem to be so much responding to the original argument as “giv[ing] you an idea of where this new approach to Christian origins is coming from”—that is, sketching an outline of his own view.

What are Carrier’s Arguments?

 
Arguments for his view are apparently to be found in other people’s books, behind a paywall, or “in my forthcoming book,” where “I treat all the best objections and suggestions and debates surrounding all the evidence.”

I’m glad to hear that his forthcoming book will be so comprehensive, but the absence of arguments here makes it difficult to respond.

I could take any of the specific claims he makes in his post and critique it, but without knowing what evidence he plans to cite for it, he can simply say, “You’re attacking a straw man. Just wait until my book comes out.”

He does make occasional gestures in the direction of an argument—e.g., claiming that “There actually were Christian sects that said Jesus lived a hundred years earlier” or stating that Jesus probably was not from Nazareth—but he doesn’t put these together into a coherent argument.

I could try to form one out of the pieces he gives us and then critique it, but he could always say, “You’re attacking a straw man. That’s not what I would have said.”

So let’s set these aside and to the best we can with what Carrier has given us.

The Central Argument

 
The central argument I posed was based on evidence showing that Christianity was a movement that emerged in Judaea in the first century and then spread widely across the Roman world within a few decades, indicating that it had a substantial degree of organization and a founder who really existed. Carrier concedes these points.

The argument then held that it is most natural to look at the movement’s own account of its founding for information about who the founder was. Carrier’s attitude toward this is unclear.

My article then pointed out that the earliest records we have say that Christianity was founded by Jesus of Nazareth. Carrier takes exception here and states:
 

"[B]ut that’s not true. The earliest accounts (in the letters of Paul) know nothing of Nazareth and never mention Jesus recruiting or training anyone. When Paul mentions Jesus communicating with and sending apostles, it is always in the context of revelations."

 
Carrier appears to misunderstand the reference to “the earliest accounts” to mean “the early Christian documents we have.”

The subject at hand was who the “founding leader” of Christianity may have been. The relevant accounts, therefore, are those that dealt with this question.

The earliest specific accounts that we have of that question must include the gospels and Acts, which clearly point to a historical Jesus as the founder of the movement. These documents are nowhere near so late as Carrier seems to think, but even setting that aside, what can we learn from Paul?

Paul on the Founding of Christianity

 
As Carrier acknowledges, Paul speaks of “Jesus communicating with and sending apostles,” pointing to Jesus as the founder of Christianity. But does he indicate, as Carrier says, that this was “always in the context of revelations”?

Not in the slightest.

It’s true that Paul acknowledged that his own contact with Jesus was through revelation (Gal. 1:12), but Paul acknowledges that his relationship was different than that of the other apostles, that he related to Jesus as “one untimely born” (1 Cor. 15:8)—that is, out of the normal sequence that governed how the others related to Jesus.

So how does Paul indicate that Jesus related to the others?

Brothers of an Unreal Man?

 
Paul indicates that some of them were his brothers. Later in Galatians 1 (which Carrier cites as an authentic text), Paul writes that once when he went to Jerusalem, “I saw none of the other apostles—only James, the Lord’s brother” (Gal. 1:19).

Paul acknowledges that James, together with Peter (Cephas) and John, was one of the “pillars” of the Jerusalem church (Gal. 2:9).

And this is not Paul’s only reference to the “brothers” of Jesus. He also asked: “Do we not have the right to be accompanied by a wife, as the other apostles and the brethren of the Lord and Cephas [Peter]?” (1 Cor. 9:5). So Jesus had “brothers” who were distinct from the apostles and other major Christian leaders such as Cephas/Peter.

An examination of early Christian sources reveals that James was the foremost of these “brothers” of Jesus. We can discuss precisely what their relationship was to Jesus (whether they were cousins, step-brothers through Joseph, etc.), but the early sources indicate that they were familial relations of Jesus, despite strained mythicist attempts to avoid this.

Paul also tells us that Jesus was “descended from David according to the flesh” (Rom. 1:3) and “born of woman, born under the Law [of Moses]” (Gal. 4:4). This clearly indicates Jesus’ birth as a Jew who belonged to the lineage of David (and who, as well, had both flesh and a woman as his mother).

All this indicates that Jesus was a real, historical individual.

Other Indications

 
In 1 Thessalonians, commonly regarded as one of the earliest New Testament documents, Paul writes that the Jews “killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and drove us out” (1 Thess. 2:14-15).

He also states “that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed” instituted the Eucharist and told his followers to perform it (1 Cor. 11:23-25) and afterward was “buried” (1 Cor. 15:4).

And, in 1 Timothy he writes that Jesus “made the good confession...in his testimony before Pontius Pilate” (1 Tim. 6:13).

Some would challenge the last document as post-Pauline, though not the former two, and the former two provide further indications that Jesus was a historical individual who gave instructions to his followers on a specific night, on which he was then betrayed; who was killed through the agency of earthly individuals, who also killed the prophets and drove Paul and others out of Judea (cf. 1 Thess. 2:14); and who was then “buried.”

This is all consistent with the idea that Jesus was a historical individual who lived, died, and was buried on earth, and there is no indication of this taking place in “the lower heavens.”

The Islam Analogy

 
Carrier acknowledges that the same logic used to support the existence of a historical Jesus also points to the existence of a historical Muhammad as the founder of Islam. He writes:
 

"Akin’s analogy to Islam is on point, and I would add Mormonism as equally apt: their founders, Mohammed and Joseph Smith, respectively, were “sent by” and “communicated the teachings of” non-existent celestial beings, the angels Gabriel and Moroni, respectively. In the most credible mythicist thesis, Jesus corresponds to Gabriel and Moroni."

 
I’m glad to see that Carrier recognizes the validity of the argument to this extent, but his own addition to it is problematic.

It’s true that Christianity, Islam, and Mormonism each had a founder who organized a movement that spread rapidly, but in each case the movement’s early writings point to that founder being a historical individual: Jesus, Muhammad, and Joseph Smith.

Their writings do not point to that founder being, on Carrier’s thesis, a spiritual being (i.e., a purely spiritual Jesus, Gabriel, and Moroni).

Carrier can’t have it both ways. He can’t say that the founding of Christianity, Islam, or Mormonism point to the existence of their claimed historical founders in two cases but not the third.

Not unless he has compelling evidence to the contrary.

Carrier’s Future Book?

 
Might he provide this evidence in his forthcoming book? We’ll have to wait and see, but the way that he handles evidence in this post does not provide much confidence. For example, at one point he claims that:
 

"Paul says no Jews could ever have heard the gospel except from the apostles (Romans 10:12-18)."

 
This is simply false. Paul says nothing of the sort. What he does do is stress the importance of preachers to spread the Christian message. But he merely indicates that people need “a preacher” (Greek, kerussontos) to tell them about Jesus, not “an apostle” (Greek, apostolos). (Romans 10:14; see here for Romans 10:12-18, the range of verses Carrier cites.)

Perhaps Carrier has some further, also-not-provided-here argument for why Paul actually meant what Carrier thinks he meant, but the fact is: It’s not what he said. It’s not even close.

What Carrier has provided does not give the appearance of a solid case against the existence of Jesus. It gives the appearance of a castle built of shaky inferences that strain to get us away from the plain meaning of the texts.

Including the Pauline texts.
 
(Image credit: GCSC)