‘Deciphering the Gospels’, by R. G. Price, argues the case for Jesus mythicism, which is the view that Jesus never existed on earth in any real form but was an entirely mythical figure in the same way as Hercules or Dionysus. (The author is not the same person as Robert Price, also a Jesus mythicist author.) I’m an atheist who holds the opposing (and mainstream) view that Jesus was originally a human being of the 1st century about whom a later mythology grew up. I’m therefore reviewing Price’s book to discuss his arguments and my reasons for disagreeing.
The first post in this book review is here. Links to the posts on all subsequent chapters can be found at the end of that post.
Chapter 10: Non-Christian Accounts Of Jesus
First off, a small detail that is driving me nuts; I have corrected the capitalisation in the above chapter heading, but Price wrote it as ‘Non-christian Accounts Of Jesus’. ‘Christ’ is a proper noun and thus that, and words deriving from it, should be capitalised. Every time I open up the menu with the chapter list, that ‘Non-christian’ niggles at me and eats into my deeply pedantic soul. R.G., if you take nothing else on board from this entire critique, fer cry yi yi PLEASE at least get the grammar in the chapter headings correct in further editions.
[Edited to add: On this one, Price is blameless. It was the editor’s fault. Consider that plea to be redirected to the editor, or at least the proofreader.]
Thank you. I feel better now.
In this chapter, Price goes along with a very common misconception among people who know little or nothing about ancient history; the idea that we could expect Jesus to have been mentioned in numerous surviving written works of the time, and therefore there’s something mysterious about the paucity of such mentions (a mystery which, you guessed it, can only be solved by assuming Jesus didn’t exist).
The overwhelming lack of commentary about Jesus in the historical sources
of his supposed time has troubled Christian scholars from the very beginning.
That might very well be true; after all, this lack of mention certainly should be a problem for Christian scholars. According to their beliefs, Jesus was God Incarnate, working dazzling miracles, arriving on earth to be the sole saviour of all humanity, rising from the dead and appearing to hundreds in his magically risen form, impacting upon the world like a thunderclap. The fact that none of this gets mentioned in any of the non-Christian sources of the time does indeed raise some major questions as to the validity of those claims. (Which, by the way, is a good anti-apologetic argument that mythicists tend to overlook and weaken in their insistence on focusing on claims that Jesus didn’t exist at all. The lack of surviving mentions in non-Christian sources actually is good evidence against the Christian claims about Jesus.)
However, the debate here is not over that Jesus. It’s over whether the Jesus in whom the movement originally believed was a real person who walked the earth a couple of millennia ago and had a following prior to being executed. And, as people who actually know their ancient history will tell you, such a Jesus wouldn’t be someone likely to get mentioned in contemporary works. He would have been one of many apocalyptic preachers and faith-healers of the time, and the many surviving works we have from authors of the time typically don’t bother mentioning people in those categories.
(One other important factor to bear in mind, of course, is that most things written at the time haven’t survived. The material typically used for paper at the time – papyrus – crumbles to dust after a few centuries, so the physical documents written at that time are long since dust on the winds. The writings we still have are the ones that someone at the time took the trouble to copy and then recopy over the centuries. The overlap between ‘writer important enough to have works copied and preserved in such a way’ and ‘writer who wanted to spend time recording the doings of some minor-league troublemaking Jewish preacher’ is, in practice, negligible.)
There are at least a couple of mentions of Jesus in the late 1st/early 2nd century, which we’ll get to in later posts. Before getting to those, however, Price first focuses on writers whose lifetime overlapped with Jesus’s estimated lifetime. (That specific requirement is one that tends to come up a lot among mythicists. It seems to be a combination of vague assumptions: a) that information that doesn’t come from a personal eyewitness is somehow useless, and b) that any author who lived in Jesus’s time would surely have not only heard about him but also introduced it into their written work, however irrelevant.)
Anyway, Price gives us a list of
[…] some of the primary persons who lived during the supposed lifetime of Jesus, whose works we do have and who we could reasonably expect would have mentioned Jesus had he existed… All of these people lived during roughly the same time that Jesus supposedly lived and are prime candidates for being potential witnesses to, and documenters of, the existence of Jesus.
Let’s start out by looking at that ‘prime candidates for being potential witnesses’ claim.
First off, realistically, none of the authors whose works have survived to the modern day are ‘prime candidates’ for having seen Jesus. From the scanty information we have, it seems Jesus spent most of his life in the backwater region of Galilee followed by less than a week in Jerusalem (already a large city with tens of thousands of people) during an unspecified year. We simply cannot pinpoint any supposed movements of either Jesus or of authors of the time with remotely the accuracy needed to pick out ‘prime candidates’ for having seen this one particular person at any particular time.
And, secondly, even allowing for that, Price seems to be stretching the definition of ‘prime candidates’ astonishingly. His list includes:
- Pliny the Elder, who was in fact born in North Italy in 23 CE and grew up there. Yes, his lifespan technically overlapped with that of Jesus, but at the time Jesus would have been executed Pliny was a child growing up hundreds of miles away. How is he a ‘prime candidate’ for having witnessed a rabbi in Galilee or Jerusalem?
- Velleius Paterculus, a former soldier who published a political and military history. We know nothing about his whereabouts in the later years of his life, and this includes the years that Jesus might have been preaching.
- Valerius Maximus: we know almost nothing of his life, and so can’t say where in the Roman Empire he was living at any given time.
- Seneca the Younger: born in Spain, lived in Rome. I can find nothing to say that he ever visited Galilee or Jerusalem.
Price does marginally better with the example of Justus of Tiberias, in that he did at least come from Galilee. The problem here is that – as even Price points out – he was probably born only after Jesus supposedly died, making him another very unlikely candidate for having seen Jesus. (By the way, Justus also doesn’t fit the ‘works we do have’ criterion; he’s known to have written at least two books, but neither of them have survived, so that’s another inaccuracy from Price.) And, while Philo of Alexandria probably did visit Jerusalem once in his life, the odds that that happened to be during the tiny window of time that Jesus was there are very low indeed. Price’s description of these people as ‘prime candidates’ for supposedly having witnessed Jesus is an unfortunate illustration of his stretching of facts and lack of critical thought on the matter.
Then, there’s the matter of what these writers wrote. Bear in mind again, here, that Price is saying that we would expect these authors to have written about Jesus:
- Justus of Tiberias, the author Price lists as second only to Philo of Alexandria as a candidate for someone who ‘should’ have mentioned Jesus in his work, wrote a history of the Jewish War (which took place decades after Jesus’s death) and an apparently brief history of Jewish kings. Price glosses over this last by simply describing it as ‘a well-preserved history of the region’, but the mention we have of it, in Photius’s Bibliotheca, does specify that it was a history of kings. In other words, hardly the kind of work that bothers to mention itinerant rabbis.
- Pliny the Elder’s most famous work, the one for which he is mainly known, was a book on natural history. According to the Britannica article about him, he is also known to have written works on ‘grammar, a biography of Pomponius Secundus, a history of Rome, a study of the Roman campaigns in Germany, and a book on hurling the lance’. That’s a laudably broad bibliography, but it’s hard to see how ‘rural rabbis’ or ‘Messianic wannabes’ would make it into any of those works as a subtopic.
- Seneca the Younger wrote about Stoic philosophy, which has nothing to do with alleged teachings of Jesus.
- And Velleius Paterculus wrote a Roman history that, according to Price’s own description, ‘covers history up to 14 CE’. I leave as an exercise for the reader why this might not have mentioned a rabbi whose best-known activities seem to have occurred in the early years of the 30s CE.
Valerius Maximus’s work seems potentially more promising at first sight, since the title translates as ‘Memorable Deeds and Sayings’, which at least might have covered deeds and/or sayings attributed to a rabbi. However, let’s look at what Valerius himself has to say in his opening lines, with emphasis mine:
I have resolved to collect together the deeds and sayings of most note, and most worthy to be remembered, of the most eminent persons both among the Romans and other nations, taken out of the most approved authors, where they lie scattered so widely, that makes them hard to be known; to save the trouble of a tedious search, for those who are willing to follow their examples. Yet I have not been over-desirous to comprehend everything. For who in a small volume is able to set down the deeds of many ages?
So, Valerius is looking for deeds and sayings of the people he’d consider ‘the most eminent persons’; in other words, not a Jewish preacher from a rural backwater. He’s looking for them in ‘the most approved authors’. Even if there had been any chance of him counting the anonymous authors of a strange religious cult in that category (which, let’s face it, there wasn’t), Valerius published his book in 30 CE, many years before the gospels would even be written; and, even on the small off-chance that Valerius might have lived in a part of the empire in which he’d have happened to hear about a Galilean preacher via word of mouth, that wouldn’t have interested someone who was specifically looking for sayings and deeds already thought worthy of recording by ‘approved authors’. And Valerius himself points out that he’s got no chance of covering every possible interesting deed or saying in this book and he’s not even going to try to do so. The result, not surprisingly, is a book that doesn’t seem to mention any rabbis, as far as I could see from skimming through the religion section.
That leaves Philo of Alexandria, who is Price’s top pick for Person Who Should Have Mentioned Jesus; ‘If Philo had known about Jesus, he surely would have written something about him’ Price insists with his usual seamless transition from might-have-happened to must-have-happened. And here he is, at least, dealing with a might-have-happened; he’s not as totally off base as he was when he was insisting that mentions of Jesus surely ‘should’ have been included in a very brief book about kings or in a work of natural history or in a history that covered a time period ending almost two decades before Jesus did anything even vaguely notable. Philo was a Jew writing about religious ideas and the occasional event of interest, he was an adult at the time Jesus was actively preaching, he did go to Jerusalem at one point, and so it’s not totally out of the question that he might have a) heard of Jesus and b) thought he was worth mentioning in one of his works. It’s just a massive exaggeration to declare this to be a definite.
Price’s certainty is, you might be unsurprised to hear, based on some fairly spurious reasoning. He declares that the gospel authors might well have used Philo’s writings, as though that somehow means that the reverse would have been true. He makes much of the fact that Philo writes about Pontius Pilate, as though this would have somehow meant Philo could have known (or cared) what the most famous scene of Pilate’s life would retrospectively, generations later, turn out to be. He claims that Philo personally lent money to Herod Agrippa I, the king of the Jewish population of Judea a decade after the time Jesus was supposedly executed; apart from the bizarrely tenuous nature of the attempted implication that this somehow makes it a certainty that Philo would have a) heard of and b) written about Jesus, this claim doesn’t even seem to be correct, since it was actually Philo’s brother who lent the money. Price seems to have misread his source article on that point.
All of this is piled on top of a description of Philo that’s downright skewed to start off with; Price describes him as a ‘historian’ who ‘reported on events throughout the Mediterranean world’ and that he ‘traveled throughout the Roman Empire’. In fact, nearly all of Philo’s works are commentaries on either the Torah or philosophy, his few historical accounts are about matters that were directly relevant to his life, and we only know of one trip that he made to Rome and one probable trip, of unknown date, to Jerusalem. So Price is considerably exaggerating some aspects of Philo’s known life story to make him sound more likely to have encountered/written about Jesus.
Stripping all of that away… was Philo someone who wrote about a comprehensive list of contemporary rabbis? This was difficult for me to answer as I’ve read almost none of his works and don’t realistically have the time to read through them, but I thought of a handy way to check. I downloaded the Kindle version of Philo’s complete works, which is quite cheap to do, and did a wordsearch on it for three names of rabbis who were particularly well known in the rabbinical world in that period of Judaism: Hillel, Shammai, and Gamaliel.
While Hillel’s name at first seemed to pop up several times, I rapidly ascertained that these mentions were in the modern-day commentary included with the book, not in anything Philo himself had written. As for Shammai and Gamaliel, I couldn’t find any mention of either name (even trying the alternative spelling of ‘Gamliel’, which I gather was sometimes used). So, if those search results were correct, Philo didn’t mention any of the three rabbis who were most famous in that time period. It seems extremely unlikely that an author of that time who actually was interested in citing rabbis contemporary to him wouldn’t mention any of those three. Therefore, even without having read Philo’s extensive body of work, I feel comfortable in deducing that Philo was not, in fact, someone who cited rabbis of his time.
If I’m wrong and Price is in fact aware of numerous such rabbis cited by Philo whom he simply neglected to mention in his list of Reasons Why Philo Would Definitely Have Written About Jesus, then I’m happy for him to give me the citations. But, from what I can currently see, it looks as though Philo simply wasn’t particularly interested in naming/citing particular rabbis, even those who were considerably more well-known in their time than Jesus was. So, unfortunately for Price’s argument, even his top candidate for Person Who Surely Would Have Mentioned Jesus seems, in practice, to be yet another person who wasn’t actually likely to have mentioned Jesus.
In future posts: a couple of other people who I agree probably also did not say anything helpful about Jesus… and a couple who did.
I note the most likely place for Philo to have written about Jesus would have been in his On the Embassy to Gaius [aka Caligula] ~38CE where he is trying to get the emperor to not put an idol in the Jerusalem temple among other things. It is here he writes about Pilate in very unflattering terms. It is possible that Philo if he knew about Jesus might have included him among those unnamed people in “his [Pilate’s] continual murders of people untried and uncondemned”. However there would be very good reasons not to name Jesus if so since the gospel accounts all seem to agree that Jesus was executed for supposedly claiming to be King of the Jews something Caligula would agree was a capital crime. It would not help Philo’s argument to name a supposed usurper even if he was executed without proper procedures and even if Philo knew about him.
I think, as you said, it boils down to:
1) If there truly was a holy man who truly did turn water into wine, fed the masses out of a tiny amount of food, rose from the dead and did all the other miracles such a god would do…then someone, somewhere would have recorded it and it would have been recopied down the ages
2) if Yeshua bin Yusef ran around the middle east with a handful of followers, as just one of a whole bunch of apocalyptic rabbis, then there was nothing special about that one and he was just a man with some common whackadoodle ideas–some good, many not-so-good.
In the USA, there’s a legend about a man named Paul Bunyan who lived a couple-hundred years ago, a giant of a man with a giant of a big blue ox, who wandered around the country cutting down trees. Did such a man exist? Well, “Paul” and “Bunyan” are certainly valid names that might have existed together. And such a person with that name might have been taller-than-most (but surely not 15 feet tall or whatever height is ascribed to him in any particular retelling). A tall man named Paul Bunyan might even have worked as a lumberjack: it’s a real job that real people had and still have. And had an ox that was bigger-than-common to carry stuff.
That’s pretty much the way I feel about the Jesus myth: it could well have been based on a real person and the story got bigger and more spectacular every time it was told. Or it could just be a story using a name (Yeshua) that was common in the area and miracles that everyone in the basin of the Middle East were running around telling each other.
I have a question about Palm Sunday. If there was a Jesus that really existed wouldn’t it be likely that the Palm Sunday story about his triumphal entrance into Jerusalem actually happened in some way?
And according to that story, that Jesus guy was being proclaimed as the King of the Jews.
Now, history tells us that Rome had an army there because of perceived threats to their rule. So how is it, that a guy who is proclaimed as their king, who rides into town in a parade with hundreds if not thousands praising him, doesn’t get into the Roman records? And if he did get into those records, why did Josephus and Tacitus base their histories exclusively on word of mouth even though we know that both of them had access to official Roman records?
And while proving a negative is often impossible, this lack of mention actually helps to do exactly that.
@markmckee
Maybe they did; however, we do not have the Roman records for that time and place because those records did not survive (we actually have very few Roman records from any part of the empire, mostly either very important notices engraved in stone or some that survived in the dry sands of Egypt). Note even according to the gospel stories this threat from the time it became known (Jesus riding into Jerusalem or causing an incident in the Temple) until the time it was quashed (a few days later with his execution) was very short and included very little violence. Add in that the gospel stories almost certainly multiplied the number of people and what you get is a minor incident rapidly dealt with by the Roman governor (a governor that Philo notes often dealt death to people without following proper procedures). There were plenty of much more serious incidents that get, in the surviving writings (nonofficial, mostly Josephus) one or two lines though not in any surviving Roman records.
Much as I enjoy playing the contrarian on this topic, I can’t find anything to disagree with here.
I had thought I could score a small point by challenging an anachronism, but doing a little digging contradicts my possible gotcha: it seems the title “rabbi” may well have been in limited use during the purported lifetime of Yeshua al-Nazari (or whatever they might have called him).
Certainly Pliny, Sr, would have recorded, had he heard of it, a localized eclipse in Jerusalem followed by an eruption of zombies.
I’m with Katydid, people are going to have to define Jesus in a lot more detail
This often feels like the setup to a goalpost moving exercise. “Jesus existed therefore join my church”
It’s almost certain that if the “triumphal entrance into Jerusalem” happened at all, it’s been enormously exaggerated in the gospels. Jesus was a hayseed from a provincial backwater, it’s unlikely anyone in Jerusalem had heard of him other than those he brought with him and maybe a few of their families or friends who’d moved to the big city, so it’s extremely unlikely hundreds, let alone thousands, were praising him. Moreover, the Romans simply didn’t keep records of every disturbance in distant provinces, as far as we can tell.
I’m not absolutely sure of that. People of the time were generally accepting that what we’d call supernatural occurrences did happen, so they might accept that Jesus performed magic of some kind, without considering his alleged claims to special status.
About 10 – 15 years ago, there was a chain of emails that went around about the actor Chuck Norris, ascribing to him all kinds of superpowers that the man himself didn’t actually have but matched the fictional characters he played in movies. Sometimes they were interchangeable with The Most Interesting Man Alive.
I’m willing to believe there was once a Yeshua bin Yusef al Nazari (or however the name might have been) who was the head of an apocalyptic cult. (If it turns out that was just fictional, I’m okay with that, too). I am willing to believe long after he was dead (if he ever lived), people passed around tales that got bigger and bigger each time they were retold. It just seems to be human nature.
It doesn’t need to be “long after he was dead”. Particularly in predominantly oral cultures (and it’s unlikely any of Jesus’s original followers were literate), processes of mythification can happen very quickly. Paul, in 1 Corinthians 15, probably written in the mid-50s CE, so only some 25 years after Jesus’s death, claims the risen Jesus appeared to 500 people at once. I assume you agree with me that that didn’t happen.
Indeed. Historians should take the same attitude to early Christian texts as they do to all other texts from the time: take them seriously but critically as sources, discarding all the “supernatural” elements (which occur in practically all historical, biographical or similar ancient texts of any length), without chucking out the whole thing because of these elements. Most historians apart from fundamentalists and mythicists (and even including convinced but non-fundy Christians when writing as historians) do just that.
Why? We have as good evidence for his existence as for most people of the time for whom we don’t have their heads on coins, their names on monuments or gravestones, or texts they wrote – and even when we have texts, they are not the original manuscripts (except in rare cases such as the Vindolanda letters and the Oxyrhynchus scraps of parchment), and their attribution is sometimes dubious.
We even have a skeleton biography which most relevant experts would agree on: Jewish preacher and faith-healer, hailed from the village of Nazareth in Galilee, baptised by John the Baptist, gathered some sort of following in Galilee, came to believe he was the prophesied Messiah, travelled to Jerusalem, made some kind of disturbance in the Temple, got on the wrong side of the Roman authorities and was crucified around 30 CE.
Of course none of that implies anyone accepting it should worship him or join a church. Many of the scholars accepting it are atheists, agnostics, or practising Jews.
Sinouhe wrote: Wed Mar 19, 2025
Two hypotheses, then:
1/ Jesus is a poor, little-known first-century Jew who died pierced and was deified immediately after his death simply because he was humble like the servant and was pierced like the servant.
The problem with this theory is that anyone humble and pierced to death could have been the servant in that case, and it does not explain the mania a few years after his death to turn him into a divine, incarnate being and even to make him the co-creator of the universe. And it’s even crazier if we consider that James was Jesus’ biological brother.
2/ Alternatively, the early Christians were not speaking of a historical figure but of a dead/resurrected Messiah discovered in the scriptures. That would explain why their only sources were these very scriptures and mystical revelations, and it would also explain why he was deified to the point of being considered a pre-existent being who founded the universe.
This would also explain why Mark decided to portray him as a superhuman being and to write a completely fictional biography of the character whose teachings are based on Paul’s epistles and whose narrative accounts are built from the Old Testament.
@ https://earlywritings.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=187163#p187163
Hi Sarah,
Just proving some rebuttal here. I think the argument I put forward has been mischaracterized. I was very clear in every comment I made about “expectations” that someone would have written about Jesus to say, “if he existed as described in the Gospels”.
Yes, obviously if we start postulating hypothetical unknown “Jesuses” then anything can be claimed. Maybe Jesus was an unknown homeless vagrant who was killed while locked up in a prison and there was no public crucifixion at all. Sure. That no one wrote about this “real Jesus” is totally understandable. But that Jesus is not the Jesus of Christianity.
The point is, in this chapter every time I talked about expectations that someone would have written about Jesus I explicitly said, “if he existed as described in the Gospels”. I notice that you left that out of the quote from this chapter. You provide the quote: “If Philo had known about Jesus, he surely would have written something about him”, but leave out that just prior to this I said, “If Jesus existed as described in the Gospels”.
Secondly, the point of that chapter was not to claim that “since no one wrote about him outside the Gospels he didn’t exist”. Of course that is absurd. The point of the chapter is to address the belief or claim that existence of the Christian Jesus is substantiated by historical records.This is made clear in the closing of the chapter:
“With all of this, we can see that there are certainly no solid independent attestations to the existence of Jesus Christ in the non-Christian literature. Modern scholarship recognizes that the Testimonium Flavianum is the only reasonably possible independent witness to Jesus Christ in the non-Christian literature, and there is nothing else aside from that one passage that could even claim to confirm his existence.
The reality, however, is that even the Testimonium Flavianum cannot be maintained as an affirmation of the existence of Jesus Christ. The Testimonium Flavianum is by far best explained as the full insertion of a later note, and this was the dominant view among Protestant scholars before the rise of the challenge to the existence of Jesus. The Testimonium Flavianum has only been strongly defended as at least partly authentic within the past one hundred years, which corresponds to when the challenge to the existence of Jesus emerged and became substantial. In short, the Testimonium Flavianum is strongly defended now because Christian scholars know that it is the last potential thread tying Jesus into history. But given that Josephus wasn’t even born until after Jesus supposedly died, Josephus cannot be a witness to the life of Jesus anyway. At best, Josephus’s passage would be passing on hearsay.
This leaves us with the fact that there are no known independent accounts of Jesus by anyone outside of Christian writings. There is not a single writing or artifact outside of Christian claims that attests to this person’s existence, and all Christian claims to Jesus’s existence are dependent on the Gospels, which are shown to be fictional.”
As for Hillel, Shammai, and Gamalie, there is no indication that these are people that Philo should have cared anything about when he was writing. Hillel supposedly lived in the first century BCE, but this figure did not become a “well known person” until the writing of the Talmud many centuries later. Descriptions of Hillel in the Talmud are all highly dubious. In the Talmud Hillel serves a mythic role as part of the unbroken chain of transmission of the Law from Moses to the writers of the Talmud. Every single story about him utterly fantastic. I’m not going to get into a discussion about whether Hillel was a real person or not, but the fact is that the “biography of Hillel” that comes to us from the Talmud is almost certainly entirely spurious. So, the idea that Philo should have “known something” about this person who was “made famous” hundreds of years later through fabricated stories about him is quite dubious.
The same can be said for Gamaliel. Gamaliel became well known because Josephus wrote about him as a martyr of the First Jewish-Roman War. There is nothing to indicate that he was someone would stand out and have been mentioned prior to his execution in the First Jewish-Roman War, decades after Philo had died.
Regarding the loan issue, here is the source I used: https://iep.utm.edu/philo/
Yes, it is possible I misread this:
“Very little is known about the life of Philo. He lived in Alexandria, which at that time counted, according to some estimates, about one million people and included largest Jewish community outside of Palestine. He came from a wealthy and the prominent family and appears to be a leader in his community. Once he visited Jerusalem and the temple, as he himself stated in Prov. 2.64. Philo’s brother, Alexander, was a wealthy, prominent Roman government official, a custom agent responsible for collecting dues on all goods imported into Egypt from the East. He donated money to plate the gates of the temple in Jerusalem with gold and silver. He also made a loan to Herod Agrippa I, grandson of Herod the Great.”
The link you provided is behind an access wall, so I don’t really know what it says. But from the above, I would think that a straightforward reading of this would indicate that Philo is the one who loaned money, not his brother. If, in fact, it was the brother who loaned the money then I would say that the above statement is poorly worded and did not make that clear. But I can see how the author would have meant the “hes” following the mention of Alexander to refer to Alexander and the “hes” from before to refer to Philo.
As for the point about the chapter title. Its funny, because that is actually how I wrote it in the manuscript. I hadn’t noticed it, but apparently they changed that in the editing and publication process. My copy of the final draft has it properly capitalized.
Neil Godfrey said 2025-02-18:
This post is a sequel to Not Finding the First Jesus, Look for the Last. What follows assumes one has read that post.
It is the orthodox view that Jesus came in order to fulfil the Jewish Scriptures, but he did so in a manner that defied the expectation that the messiah would conquer the enemies of the Judeans. I have suggested that this view of Jesus arose in a wider context of ideas whereby a Jesus or Saviour figure came to overthrow the works of the Old Testament creator and lawgiver god.
My view is built on Nina Livesey’s argument for Paul’s letters being produced by one of the several “Christian schools” that existed in Rome in the second century. As I pointed out in my previous post, I have found it difficult to understand how the kinds of teachings we associate with “gnosticism” — arguing that Jesus did not have a flesh and blood body, that the Jewish god was evil, that creation itself was evil — arose from what we know of our gospels and letters of Paul. But as per my previous post, I think that the relationship between those “gnostic” ideas and the ideas of orthodox Christianity makes sense if we set orthodoxy as the latecomer.
–Godfrey, Neil (18 February 2025). “Which One Came First? “Gnostic” ideas or “Orthodox” Christianity?”. Vridar.
@ https://vridar.org/2025/02/18/which-one-came-first-gnostic-ideas-or-orthodox-christianity/
ChristBeforeJesus said:
[52:33] “I see where you’re coming from. But that argument still holds on to the assumption that this Paul is a Jewish person.”
Authors of Christ Before Jesus.png
–“Meeting the Authors of Christ Before Jesus”. YouTube. @godlessengineer. 31 August 2024.
@ https://youtu.be/QDJEKwMPSOM?t=3157
db@13,
The first hypothesis is stated in such a ridiculous fashion that it’s hard to believe Sinouhe put it forward in good faith. The actual historical hypothesis, as held by most relevant experts, is much as I described it @12. Jesus was indeed “little known”, but he had a local following, he and they probably believed he was the Messiah and came to Jerusalem expecting great events to follow. When it went disastrously wrong, some of them (and it may have been very few) convinced themselves – probably as a result of grief-induced hallucinations, which are by no means rare particularly in the case of a sudden or violent death – that he had been brought back to life. He was not, by the way, deified until at least decades after his death: the early belief seems to have been that he’d been adopted as the “son of God”.
This completely fails to explain why the story set Jesus’s activities in Galilee, when the Messiah was supposed to be born in Bethlehem (hence the implausible and contradictory birth narrative retcons in gMatthew and gLuke). Nor the fact that there is no precedent in the Jewish scriptures for a Messiah being killed (let alone in such a humiliating way) and resurrected – he’s supposed to become an earthly ruler. Nor his baptism. Nor the fact (and the denials are simply not credible) that Paul describes meeting his brother.
Then you’re not talking about the Jesus of historical scholarship (see my #12 for a minimal summary), but that of Christian fundamentalism, who no-one apart from Christian fundamentalists believe existed – and they have a hard time trying unsuccessfully to reconcile the obvious contradictions between the gospels. So you’re wasting your time.
First, note that none of the Gnostics, as far as we know, denied that Jesus came to earth, although they did deny he had an ordinary flesh-and-blood body. If mythicism is correct, why didn’t they just say he never came anywhere near this corrupt creation, and spoke to people only through dreams and visions? But in fact the move toward Gnosticism is readily explicable in the light of the disagreement between those members of the Jesus movement who continued to follow Jewish Law, and those who did not. This disagreement is already evident in the letters of Paul, which actually refer to his arguments with Peter and Jesus’s brother James on the issue. Paul, seeking to appeal to Gentiles, decided they did not need to follow Jewish Law to follow Jesus. Some of the canonical gospels, particularly gJohn (generally considered the latest by relevant experts) are distinctly anti-Jewish; Gnosticism is simply a logical outcome of second-century movement further in this direction. The Jewish faction of the Jesus movement died out. What Godfrey calls “orthodoxy” is a compromise position.
I think what you mean is: People have invented a concept of Jesus that is undetectable to history in order to salvage the possibility that he really existed.
rationalrevolution@20,
No, that is not what I mean, as you are of course perfectly well aware. Jesus is not “undetectable to history”, since the great majority of relevant experts – those who have studied the issue, including many atheists, agnostics, and practising Jews – conclude that it is highly likely he existed. His existence is better attested than the overwhelming majority of people of the time who are not recorded on coins, gravestones, monuments, or in texts they appear to have written or dictated themselves.
Re: Stylometry results post by dabber » Thu Mar 20, 2025 10:51 am
The Gospels, Hebrews and James, and Revelation have similarities in writing style (frequency of words used and distance between words) with the hebrew books. This to me would suggest the authors of these books were of Jewish origin. Whereas the authors of Paul’s books incl 1 and 2 Peter and 1 John were of Greek origin.
@ https://earlywritings.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=187179#p187179
@KG #17 March 20, 2025 at 10:49 am says:
His existence isn’t attested at all. That’s the whole point. There is nothing at all that attests to this person’s existence. One can argue that we shouldn’t expect there to be anything that attests to his existence, but that’s not the same thing as claiming that his existence is attested to.
You can go into court and explain why you don’t have an alibi that proves you weren’t at a crime scene, but that’s not the same thing as having an alibi. Saying “I don’t have an alibi because I live alone and I was at home asleep” may be true, but that is not the same as “I was at a party and there are time-stamped pictures of me at the party”.
Allen does not claim ahistoricity, but does point out all the gaslighting of historicity.
“The Jesus Lie: The Greatest Deception Ever Crafted | Dr. N.P.L. Allen”. YouTube. @History-Valley. [02:41:44] Oct 28, 2024
@ https://youtu.be/b_kE4V5kQwI?t=7
Allen does claim that no historicity is evidenced with the authentic writings of Josephus,
Allen, Nicholas Peter Legh (2020). Christian Forgery in Jewish Antiquities: Josephus Interrupted. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publisher. ISBN 978-1527555273.
“Christian Forgery in Jewish Antiquities: Josephus Interrupted | Dr. Nicholas Peter Legh Allen”. YouTube. @History-Valley. [02:48:58] Streamed Jul 24, 2024
@ https://youtu.be/opLmMLmkCzM?t=25
@KG
Because people like my mum will hear that Jesus existed and treat that like justification for their religion. While the Jesus you’re talking about it seems reasonable, although i don’t think it’s certain. But a lot of the time people don’t clarify what they mean, so you don’t know what’s actually being discussed. As i said, it’s often a goal post moving exercise
Also i suppose there’s the aspect that I don’t really care about a historical Jesus, seems plausible but not proven. And i also don’t really care about the religious concept of Jesus, i have other issues with people coming from that perspective
This is a kind of the Motte and Bailey( https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Motte_and_bailey ). The Motte is this very particular person getting killed and somehow instantly turned into you know the greatest thing since sliced bread in the Jewish World. Versus, Oh, there was just some guy who got crucified.
It’s like yes, that a guy got crucified, is obviously totally believable. We know lots of people did. Then why do we say this particular person, that led to this particular set of events. That’s where I think there’s the confusion.
Just saying one thing is plausible does not actually make the overall hypothesis probable. You have to compare the two hypotheses and how do we explain the other piece of evidence namely the original high christology of Jesus. How do we explain that with just some dude who basically got some fishermen to follow him around.
“Mark was a Pauline [gospel]. We thus know he believed in the preexistence and divinity of Jesus.” –Comment by Richard Carrier on January 5, 2020 at 2:09 pm per “Tim O’Neill & the Biblical History Skeptics on Mythicism”. Richard Carrier Blogs. 22 December 2019.
davidlau17 wrote Jun 15, 2019:
[A] number of Jesuses are described as leaders on the battlefield. The most notable of which is Jesus son of Sapphias, who is described as being: one of the high priests, the leader of the Galilean city Tiberias, and the leader of a number of mariners/fisherman and poor people.
In addition, a Jesus son of Shaphat is described as leading a group of bandits near Tiberias; and sometimes a ‘Jesus’ is referred to without any identifiers in Wars and Vita.
So, to summarize, from the years 62 to 66 CE, we have:
1. Jesus brother of James (alleged Christ, relevant in 62 CE)
2. Jesus son of Ananias (“woe to Jerusalem” omen, 62-66 CE)
3. Jesus son of Damneus (high priest, 63-64 CE)
4. Jesus son of Gamala (high priest, 64-65 CE)
5. Jesus son of Sapphias (a high priest, c. 66 CE)
6. Jesus son of Shaphat (leader of bandits, c. 66 CE)
A number of other Jesuses are also mentioned, but most considerably pre-date the aforementioned figures. A ‘Jesus brother of John’ was killed by John around 180 BCE; a ‘Jesus brother of Onias IV’ became high priest in 175 BCE; a ‘Jesus son of Fabus’ was removed by Herod as high priest in 23 BCE; and a ‘Jesus son of Sie’ briefly replaced Eleazar ben Boethus as high priest in 3 BCE.
@ https://earlywritings.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=187183#p187183
maryhelena, 2025 Mar 21 said:
@KG #17 March 20, 2025 at 10:49 am says: “…it’s hard to believe Sinouhe put it forward in good faith. The actual historical hypothesis, as held by most relevant experts, is much as I described it @12.”
Sinouhe, 2025 Mar 21 said:
@ https://earlywritings.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=187253#p187253
@KG #12: oversimplification and a tendency to present debated points as settled facts, a misleading presentation of scholarly consensus.
Concerning Philo — I don’t think he would have cited any rabbis, because he and those working on the Rabbinic tradition that eventually became codified as the Mishna were on opposite sides of a split within Judaism; something like Hellenistic on one side and Hellenophobic on the other.
Not too long before the first century CE was the occupation of Judaea by the Seleucid Greeks. Many Jews were actually interested in Greek culture and Greek philosophy. But the Seleucids pushed Hellenism way too strongly into areas that more orthodox (and Hellenophobic) Jews considered sacred, and those eventually successfully revolted and set up the Hasmonean kingdom.
Philo, living in Alexandria, was heir to the Ptolmaic Hellenic tradition; he was a Hellenized Jew. He would have considered himself to be very different from the Seleucids. But to the rabbis, Greek was Greek, and Philo’s ideas merging Judaism with Greek philosophy would have been considered suspect at best. And Philo would have been aware of the antipathy, and would have turned away from the rabbinic tradition in turn
That’s simply untrue. You can argue that the attestations (in Pauls’ letters, in the gospels, in the Didache, in Josephus, etc.) are not conclusive, but to claim they don’t exist is absurd.
db,
@23 quoting Carrier:
The more usual translation of the Hebrew word is “Galilee of the nations” – meaning the tribes of Israel. And religious Jews interpret the chapter to refer to Hezekiah, king of Judah. It is of course possible that a 1st century Galilean Jew believing himself to be someone special might interpret it as confirming that he is the promised Messiah. But in any case, this mention of copying of Jesus’s connection with Galilee from Paul’s letters to Mark to the other gospels is rather at odds with the idea that Marcion’s Evangelicon contained the first written account of Jesus. Which is it? Or are you just going with whichever hypothesis is most convenient at any particular point in an argument?
@27,
But that’s simply not what happened according to a non-religious historicist account. Jesus’s followers (and Jesus himself) probably already considered him to be the Messiah (a human figure) before his death, destined to free the Jews from the Roman yoke with divine assistance. How they (or rather, those who became convinced he had been resurrected) thought about him immediately after his death we don’t know, because there are no records that cast light on that – but we do know that religious sects whose expectations are falsified frequently find bizarre ways of reinterpreting events so they can go on believing. Paul was writing more than 20 years later – plenty of time for Jesus’s status to be inflated, and he may have been the first to suggest Jesus was a preexistent divine being.
@28,
I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make here, but, it’s quite clear Josephus was referring to the Jesus who died at the hands of the Roman authorities in Jerusalem around 30CE.
@29
More on the account that Paul gives of meeting his brother. You can’t meet the brother of a literary figure. (And the attempts to explain this away are simply ludicrous.)
@30 quoting Sinouhe
Srsly? Consider the more recent figures who’ve been able to start entirely new sects that consider them divine figures or similarly exalted.
KG’s apologetic flawed analysis fundie-mentally misunderstands the core argument being made.
* Absence of Positive Attestation:**
* The central point is the *complete lack* of any positive evidence or attestation for the person’s existence.
* It explicitly acknowledges that there *could* be reasons for this lack of evidence, but that doesn’t change the fact that the evidence is absent.
* The alibi analogy is used to illustrate the difference between explaining the lack of evidence and providing actual evidence. Simply explaining why evidence is missing does not count as providing evidence.
* **Item 2’s Misinterpretation: Confusing Inconclusive Attestation with Non-Existence:**
* Item 2 incorrectly interprets item 1 as claiming that “attestations don’t exist.”
* It then counters by stating that “attestations” do exist, though they may be “inconclusive.”
* This completely misses the point. Item 1 is not arguing about the quality or conclusiveness of potential evidence; it’s about the *total absence* of it.
* Item 2 is changing the argument from “no attestation exists” to “The attestation that exists, is not conclusive”. These are two very different arguments.
* **The Flaw:**
* The flaw lies in the apolegetic shift from addressing the absence of evidence to debating the strength of potential evidence.
* Even if there were weak or inconclusive “attestations,” that wouldn’t negate the original claim that there’s nothing *positively* attesting to the person’s existence.
* Essentially, Item 2 creates a strawman argument. It attacks an argument that item 1 never made.
In essence, item 1 is saying there is a zero, and item 2 is arguing about the value of numbers greater than zero.
There is a significant difference between:
1. Simply thinking a man is divine. As evidenced with John the Baptist and Jesus.
2. Believing that a man created the universe—and then founding a cult in his honor (to date being apologetically explained as absent with JtB, cf. Aaron Adair @ https://youtu.be/L6ga5hBQcGY?t=1274 ).
@KG #34 says, “Paul gives of meeting his brother. You can’t meet the brother of a literary figure. (And the attempts to explain this away are simply ludicrous.)”
Risible apologetic nonsense
vs.
Carrier, Richard C. (2023). On the historicity of Jesus: why we might have reason for doubt. Vol. “One” (Revised ed.). Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press. ISBN 9781914490248.
Forthcoming second Vol.: Carrier, Richard C. (2025). On the historicity of Jesus: why we might have reason for doubt. Vol. “Two”. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press.
Chapter 7 : “The Mistaken Invention of Docetism”
Chapter 8 : “Why Romans 1:3 Cannot Demonstrate a Historical Jesus”
Chapter 9 : “Why Galatians 4:4 Cannot Demonstrate a Historical Jesus”
Chapter 10 : “All Baptized Christians Were the Brothers of the Lord”
@KG #34 says,”[I]t’s quite clear Josephus was referring to the Jesus who died at the hands of the Roman authorities in Jerusalem around 30CE.”
Risible apologetic nonsense
vs.
There is no independent evidence of Jesus’s existence outside the New Testament. All external evidence for his existence, even if it were fully authentic (though much of it isn’t), cannot be shown to be independent of the Gospels, or Christian informants relying on the Gospels. None of it can be shown to independently corroborate the Gospels as to the historicity of Jesus. Not one single item of evidence. Regardless of why no independent evidence survives (it does not matter the reason), no such evidence survives.
(p. 418)
–Richard Carrier [ap. Lataster, Raphael (2015). “Afterword by Richard Carrier”. Jesus Did Not Exist: A Debate Among Atheists.]
* The central point is the *complete lack* of any positive evidence or attestation for the person’s existence.
I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make here, db…but it seems there was indeed some positive attestation that some person existed who preached a bit and got a following. That may not be “proof” of anything, but it’s good enough evidence to support a basic claim that is quite plausible and likely: some guy founded a cult, the cult caused a stir, and occupation authorities responded by crucifying him. Each of those things was known to have happened in Roman-occupied Judea.
I don’t have to be a Christian to accept that someone kinda sorta like Jesus really existed (and had his story built up to the Biblical Jesus we all know). Nor do I have to consider (let alone believe) any of the historical accounts and controversies in order to decide whether this or that form of Christianity is a valid set of beliefs.
I don’t know what to say to this. You have to understand what evidence is. No, there is not a single shred of evidence for any of that, at all. Firstly, there isn’t a single bit of anything that even claims to show that this person existed outside of Christian scriptures. I assume you understand that.
But to the second point, you understand that the ONLY thing that purports show that there was a “person” named Jesus who did this stuff is the Gospel stories. Do you understand the difference between fiction and fact? Between mythology and reality? You know that anyone can write anything about anything right?
Do you have any idea how many stories were written in the ancient world about things that never happened at all? Even in the first and second centuries? Literally hundreds! Do you have any understanding of level of literary fraud that took place? It was totally rampant!
In fact, it was so rampt, what the church fathers were claiming was that hundreds of other Christian writings were all fraudulent! They even accused other Christians of inventing prophets that never existed! You underhand that people like Galen wrote books explaining that the entire Roman book market was overrun with fraudulent writings so much so that his reputation was being ruined by the hundreds of people writing fake books in his name about things he never did or said! The reality is that ancient Rome was absolutely awash in “fake news”. It was indeed a real and true crisis. It wasn’t just Jesus; there were tons of fake stories about tons of fake people.
Now, the fact is that we can determine whether the events in the Gospels are based on reality or not, which is what my book is about, because every single scene in the original story was based on the Jewish scriptures, meaning derived from the scriptures. This is why orthodox Christians believed that Jesus had “fulfilled prophecies”, Christians identify over 300 cases of Jesus “fulfilling prophecy”. That’s because the whole story, from beginning to end, is created by copying and pasting passages from the “Old Testament”. When we read in the Crucifixion story, for example, that the soldiers “cast lots” for his clothing, we can determine that this is not a historical fact, because that comes from Psalm 22:
“Mark 15: 24 And they *crucified Him, and divided up His garments among themselves, casting lots for them to decide what each man should take.”
“Psalm 22: 18 They divide my garments among them, And for my clothing they cast lots.”
This detail from the Crucifixion does not come from an eyewitness account, it comes from someone inventing a scene based on a scripture. But in fact, when you look at the Gospel of Mark, the WHOLE thing is written like this – line after line after line. This IS the story. This is why Christians thought,” OMG this guy fulfilled hundreds of prophecies!”
But here is the kicker, every single person, ever, including “heretics”, who ever said that they believed that someone called Jesus existed, all described that person based solely on the Gospels and nothing else. There is no other source of information. There is one single Gospel story which was created by copying from the Jewish scriptures, which was then copied into dozens of other versions of the story, all of which include all of the same key details. The church fathers believed that four specific versions of the story were literally true and that dozens of other versions were all frauds. The church fathers believed, wrongly, that the four versions of the story they trusted were all independently written by different people. They weren’t. They are all just variant copies of one story.
And the first story, as I show in the book, is a fictional allegory based on the events of the First Jewish-Roman War. What the writer of the first story did was they took passages from the Jewish scriptures that were about the events that led up to the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians and they invented a new story that showed a set of parallel circumstances leading up to the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans. So the “Gospel story” is a copy of the story of Elijah and Elisha, the prophets whose actions led to the destruction of Jerusalem in the 6th century BCE. Thus, the writer of the Jesus story was clearly inventing his story in reaction to the events of the First Jewish-Roman War, in which Jerusalem was sacked and the temple was destroyed, just like the scriptures described in the book of Kings when talking about the invasion of the Babylonians.
And guess what, in the book of Kings, the destruction of Jerusalem was blamed on the Jewish leaders for persecuting the Jewish prophets, Elijah, Elisha and Isaiah! So what we have is a story that was invented after the First Jewish-Roman War that depicts the Jews repeating a cycle of history. And there is no way that the story can be based on “accounts of the real Jesus” because all of the scenes are based on scriptures about the destruction of the temple!
This is literally a case of people mistaking fiction for reality.
“You have to understand what evidence is.”
Walsh puts on the training wheels for the apologetic evidence devotees at time 38:59…
Host >>> “What about the slightly more modest claim that the gospels are still rooted in eye and ear witness testimony…”
Dr. Robyn Faith Walsh @38:59 >>> “I think that’s a fair portrait of what may be going on. The caveat…”
–“Did Eyewitnesses Write the Gospels? | Discussion with Dr. Robyn Faith Walsh”. YouTube. @nahoalife954. 16 September 2023.
@ https://youtu.be/ll7OYDjk2F4?t=2339
@Erp, #1: I agree with what you say, and also, of course, there’s the fact that Philo didn’t name any of the people concerned, even though he makes it clear there were several. If he didn’t think it necessary to name any of the people Pilate executed, why would Jesus be the exception?
@Katydid, #2 and dangerousbeans, #6:
The Jesus we’re debating over is the Jesus who supposedly started Christianity.
Put it this way: At some point, the religion that would come to be known as Christianity got started. Based on the earliest records that the religion itself kept, this happened with a roving preacher referred to as Iesus (the Latinised form of the Hebrew name Yeshua) who collected a bunch of followers who thought him to be the long-awaited Jewish Messiah. The most common belief among non-Christians is that that is indeed how the religion started.
Mythicists, on the other hand, typically believe that the religion started with a group of people believing that Iesus/Yeshua the Messiah was a divine figure living and dying in the heavens, and that this then got retconned into a belief that this (imagined) divine being had come down to earth to live a human life.
So, if we had some way of looking back in time and rewinding to the very starting point of Christianity, past the various iterations and back to the earliest group of what we might call proto-Christians in order to look at what they meant when they talked about their leader Yeshua, would we see that this referred to an actual leader Yeshua who was going around preaching and gathering them? If so, that’s the historical Jesus.
If, on the other hand, what we’d actually see would be that this group believed that Yeshua was a divine being in heaven who was going to be executed there for people’s sins, then there wouldn’t be a historical Jesus and the mythicists would be right.
If we saw that latter scenario yet did manage to find some actual person called Yeshua who had nothing to do with the particular first-century group that would eventually spawn the Christianity we know today, then that Yeshua would not be the historical Jesus. It’s not ‘can we find some guy called Yeshua/Iesus at that time of history?’ (yes, of course we can; lots of them), but ‘was this the guy who founded the original proto-Christian movement, or did that guy only exist in the imagination of his followers’?
Or, to put it another way: Jesus mythicists are the people who hold to the latter scenario, and Jesus historicists are the people who disagree and tell them they were wrong. Price believes the original group believed in a Jesus who’d never been on earth, and has written a book arguing his case. I’m picking apart the flaws in his case because that’s something I like doing. (Don’t knock it; everyone needs a hobby.)
Hope that’s somewhat clearer. The next post is now up and I’ve changed the initial blurb a bit in hopes of making it clearer what I mean when I argue for a historical Jesus; see what you think. I’m open to suggestions for wording changes.
@mark mckee, #3:
Not really following your argument. In the first place, we don’t know where Josephus or Tacitus got their information from. In the second place, it’s unlikely that any Roman records made about Jesus at the time would still exist decades later, and not that likely that Josephus or Tacitus would go and hunt such records out even if they did exist. So on the one hand it’s odd to be stating categorically that they didn’t use those records, but on the other hand we can logically conclude that they probably didn’t, simply because there were good reasons why they either wouldn’t have been able to or wouldn’t have bothered, which means that the question about why they wouldn’t is already answered by the very argument that tells us that they probably didn’t, if that makes sense.
@Pierce R. Butler, #5:
Yes, I think ‘rabbi’ as a term was already around at that time. But in any case, it’s a word that we use now for a Jewish preacher, so I was using it in that sense.
@KG, #8:
Well, the traditional Christian teaching is that Jesus was part of the all-powerful divine being who’d created the entire universe and that he’d come to earth on a crucial rescue mission to save humanity’s souls from hellfire, a salvation that could only take place if they believed in him. Logically, if all that were true, he should have made a lot more of an impact (what with being an incredibly powerful being who was well-motivated to want the whole world including future generations to take notice), and the fact that he made such a small ripple at the time should bother Christians who believe the points in my first sentence. (It doesn’t.)
Meanwhile, of course, that acceptance of the existence of magic does add an extra explanation to why authors of the time did not consider anything they heard about this Yeshua chap to be so important they had to find a way to incorporate it into their books.
@db, #13:
In addition to the points KG already made in #17 (thanks, KG!):
a) We don’t know the gospel-writers’ sources, and so cannot conclude that ‘their only sources were these very scriptures and mystical revelations’. (In fact, there’s some interesting analysis (Maurice Casey) showing that several items in the gospels are best explained by having been translated from an original Aramaic source.)
b) No, this would in fact not explain why Mark decided to write a fictional biography portraying Jesus as a human with a home town, a previous profession, and multiple siblings.
c) It also wouldn’t explain how such a fictional account could somehow convince everyone that it was the truth and inspire multiple other people to write expanded versions.
@rationalrevolution, #14: Hiya! Good to see you back here again.
‘I think the argument I put forward has been mischaracterized. I was very clear in every comment I made about “expectations” that someone would have written about Jesus to say, “if he existed as described in the Gospels”.’
OK, let’s look at how Jesus is described in the Gospels. This is complicated both by the fact that different gospels have different descriptions of him, and by the fact that we can both agree we can discard the descriptions of him actually working miracles. However, what we do consistently see is that Jesus is described as a wandering preacher in the backwater area of Galilee whose followers believed that he could perform miracles and was the Messiah.
What is there about this that makes you think that someone of his time would surely have mentioned him in the kind of writing that would be copied and preserved for centuries to come? Which authors with surviving works of the time have written about itinerant preachers or faith-healers? Why do you insist that Philo would have heard of a preacher in a rural backwater four hundred miles away from him, let alone that he ‘surely would have’ mentioned him in his works had he known? Which other preachers does Philo mention in his works?
‘Secondly, the point of that chapter was not to claim that “since no one wrote about him outside the Gospels he didn’t exist”. Of course that is absurd.’
Good to know that you think that, but unfortunately that’s not at all the message that comes through from your repeated insistence that various people ‘should’ have written about Jesus and that it’s a ‘striking absence’ that someone from 400 miles away who didn’t write about other rabbis also didn’t mention Jesus.
‘Modern scholarship recognizes that the Testimonium Flavianum is the only reasonably possible independent witness to Jesus Christ in the non-Christian literature, and there is nothing else aside from that one passage that could even claim to confirm his existence.’
I have no idea why you think that modern scholarship somehow refuses to recognise the Tacitean passage or the ‘brother of Jesus called Christ’ line. From what I’ve heard on the matter, modern scholarship as a whole – barring the occasional fringe argument – is just fine with accepting both of those as valid.
‘As for Hillel, Shammai, and Gamalie, there is no indication that these are people that Philo should have cared anything about when he was writing.’
Agreed. So why do you think that Jesus should be any different in this respect?
‘So, the idea that Philo should have “known something” about this person who was “made famous” hundreds of years later through fabricated stories about him is quite dubious.’
Honestly, I think you’re making my point for me.
‘The link you provided is behind an access wall, so I don’t really know what it says.’
Sorry about that. I’ve no idea how I managed to use one that was behind an access wall; could have sworn I had one that was accessible, but, if so, I can’t find it again. Anyway, here’s another: https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Philo_Judaeus. I agree the information at the link you used is confusingly phrased and ambiguous, but from other articles it’s clearer that the statements about loaning money/gilding the Temple gates refer to the brother.
‘My copy of the final draft has [the chapter heading] properly capitalized.’
My pedantic self is genuinely glad to hear this; thank you! I will update the post.
@db, #23:
(Carrier as quoted by db)
‘O’Neill also asks why Jesus is in Galilee. He evidently doesn’t know scripture required him to be.’
But, according to Carrier, at this point the proto-Christian group believed Jesus was a heavenly Messiah rather than an earthly one. If Mark thought the Messiah had to be in Galilee, what would he have been doing in a group that believed in a heavenly Messiah in the first place?
‘Or that such a location was remarkably convenient for Mark’s messaging… Galilee allows Mark to have Jesus interact as often with Gentiles as with Jews and still be solidly in the Holy Land and in agreement with scripture. It also gives him a body of water in the middle of it all to emulate the miracles of Moses in.’
I might be wrong about this, but isn’t Mark the author who’s known for making geographical bloopers in how he describes the route taken by Jesus’s ministry, who is therefore generally thought not to know much about Galilee? I’m having a hard time reconciling that with the same author picking Galilee based on his knowledge of the area.
@db, #27:
‘how do we explain the other piece of evidence namely the original high christology of Jesus. How do we explain that with just some dude who basically got some fishermen to follow him around.’
We don’t know whether the high Christology was there before Paul, and, as previously discussed, Paul didn’t know Jesus and went off on a complete tangent with his version of the faith, in which he’s just interpreting Jesus’s life and death in ways that work for him. So, Paul wasn’t responding to ‘some dude who got some fishermen to follow him around’, but to his own imagining of what the death-and-resurrection story meant to him.
@db, #29:
(db quoting maryhelena)
‘Josephus could write about a Jesus crucified under Pilate a dozen times. All that would indicate is that he was aware, around 93/94 ce, of the gospel story.’
…which in itself would be a problem for mythicism, which claims that the gospel stories were originally fictions made up for a small group who believed in a heavenly Messiah. Why would Josephus be aware of such a story as early as 93 – 94 CE?
@db, #31: What part of ‘most relevant experts would agree’ on the points listed by KG do you consider to be a misleading presentation of scholarly consensus?
Sorry, skipped one to which I meant to reply:
@db, #30: (db quoting Sinouhe)
‘Would a vision of a man whom the apostles had known—and whose supposed brother was also an apostle—really be enough to conclude that this ordinary Jew had created the universe and was the Son of God? That seems a bit weak, given his family context and the fact that the apostles were supposed to have known him in person.’
We have no surviving records from the apostles themselves. They probably did refer to him as the Son of God, because in their culture that was another title for human kings chosen by God and would have been applied to someone whom they believed to be the Messiah. There’s zilch to indicate that they believed him to be part of God. The Christology came in a bit later, probably with Paul, who didn’t know Jesus.
Now, let’s turn that question around. Would a read of gMark be enough to convince people who believed in a heavenly Messiah that Mark was actually the truth, the existing group had it all wrong, and really Jesus had been a man executed on earth a few decades earlier? I’m not seeing it.
@Owlmirror, #32: Thanks, useful points.
@KG: #33:
Small correction; comment 24 was by rationalrevolution, not by dangerousbeans.
@db, #35:
‘The central point is the *complete lack* of a positive evidence or attestation for the person’s existence. […] Item 2 incorrectly interprets item 1 as claiming that “attestations don’t exist.” ‘
Incorrectly?? If you see ‘complete lack of attestation’ as being somehow different from ‘attestations don’t exist’, you’re going to have to explain what you see the difference as being. In the comment to which KG was replying, rationalrevolution was very clear about his belief that there are no attestations for Jesus’s existence. How is it incorrect to say that this is a claim that such attestations don’t exist?
‘This completely misses the point. Item 1 is not arguing about the quality or conclusiveness of potential evidence; it’s about the *total absence* of it.
* Item 2 is changing the argument from “no attestation exists” to “The attestation that exists, is not conclusive”. These are two very different arguments.
They’re not ‘very different arguments’; they’re a claim and a counter-claim. Rationalrevolution claimed that there are no attestations to Jesus’s existence, and KG was pointing out that that isn’t true.
‘* Even if there were weak or inconclusive “attestations,” that wouldn’t negate the original claim that there’s nothing *positively* attesting to the person’s existence.
* Essentially, Item 2 creates a strawman argument. It attacks an argument that item 1 never made.’
Rationalrevolution claimed there were no attestations to Jesus’s existence. KG disagreed and gave examples. That’s a perfectly valid counter. You seem to have some weird logic based on the idea that inconclusive attestations aren’t positive attestations, whatever that’s even meant to mean.
Firstly, there isn’t a single bit of anything that even claims to show that this person existed outside of Christian scriptures.
Actually, yes, there seem to be plenty of claims that such a person existed. And we can accept such claims, at least provisionally, because a) they are both possible and plausible, b) they’re not even extraordinary claims, and c) even without specific evidence, the claim that such a person existed, and had his story built up and embellished to the Bible story we all know, is FAR MORE PLAUSIBLE than the claim that no person like that existed and a bunch of people conspired to make up a story out of nothing. The latter simply doesn’t happen, because no self-respecting cabal of cultist manipulators would do something that has so little chance of success.
Do you have any idea how many stories were written in the ancient world about things that never happened at all?
Were they made up out of nothing? Or were they embellishments of stories or legends that grew with each retelling in each generation?
Also, we can, at the very least, easily separate stories that are both possible and plausible from stories that are neither. Then we can further weed out stories that are quite plausible but also plausibly contradicted (or at least cast into reasonable doubt) by other evidence.
…his reputation was being ruined by the hundreds of people writing fake books in his name about things he never did or said!
Yes — those fakers were capitalizing on the fame of someone who already existed and had become known. Which is what either a cult-building conspiracy or a fervent evangelist is most likely to do — capitalize and latch onto someone who had already shown some ability to get results (i.e., build a following).
The way I look at this is, that we really can’t prove a negative. Once we’ve discounted all the supernatural/miracle claims about Jesus, we’re left with a guy who preached some stuff that at least some people liked, and then got crucified for it by political officials who were afraid (rightly or not) of civil unrest. And historians and experts do seem to agree that a) Roman-occupied Judea was a place/time of ideological ferment with foreign (mostly Greek and Roman) ideas mixing with indigenous Jewish ones; b) because of this ferment there were people preaching various new religious ideas at that time; and c) the Romans did use crucifixion to punish people who threatened to upset their social order. If we can accept those basic facts, then the idea that one of those itinerant preachers could have been elevated to the Biblical Jesus becomes far more plausible than the idea that the Biblical Jesus was 100% made-up and not based on any real person.
@db, #36:
(db quoting Aaron Adair)
‘That’s all true for John the Baptist, but nowhere in the Baptist literature do they ever say John was an Angel, let alone God incarnate, as later Christians would. How do we explain this stark difference.’
Well, firstly there’s the fact that we don’t have any surviving JtB literature in the same sense as we have gospels; we know him only as a side character in the gospels and as a short piece in Josephus’s work, and, for different reasons, neither the gospel authors nor Josephus is going to portray him as divine. So it’s quite possible that some of JtB’s followers at the time did think of him as an angel or divinely sent in some way; we just don’t have their records, so we can’t say whether they did or didn’t.
And secondly, we have Paul. We have this very weird happenstance in which someone who had nothing to do with the original group suddenly comes up with a whole new theology around their leader, which he believes he’s received in visions. And he then goes off and dedicates his life to actively spreading these new beliefs and starting up new groups. So the belief in Jesus as Messiah ends up surviving in a much more durable form (it’s no longer just about Jesus coming back to kick out the Romans, but also about eternal salvation) and evolving over time to become Jesus as co-creator of the universe. JtB didn’t have a Paul-equivalent, and so any residual belief in his messiahship after his death ended up dying out as well (or being subsumed into the Jesus movement).
@db, #37: You’re citing a book that claims that Galatians 4.4 must be allegorical just because there’s an allegory about someone completely different eighteen verses later, that clearly all Christians could be referred to as ‘brothers of the Lord’ even though we never see this in any other context, and that Romans 1:3 can be explained by a supposed Jewish belief in a cosmic sperm bank. I really don’t think you’re on tremendously strong ground describing someone else’s theory as ‘risible apologetic nonsense’.
Meanwhile, if you want to defend Carrier’s arguments on those topics, you’re welcome to go back to the posts in which I discussed the same arguments as made by Price. (I wrote about the ‘born of a woman’ line in the Chapter 9, part 3 review and the ‘brothers’ reference in Chapter 9, part 4. Price didn’t address the ‘seed of David’ line, but I’ve discussed it in a comment in one of the past threads, which I can find if needed.)
@db, #38:
(db quoting Carrier)
‘There is no independent evidence of Jesus’s existence outside the New Testament. All external evidence for his existence, even if it were fully authentic (though much of it isn’t), cannot be shown to be independent of the Gospels, or Christian informants relying on the Gospels.’
If Carrier has an explanation for how he thinks the Antiquities 20 story of James’ death came from the gospels when not only is it not in the gospels but Carrier himself has pointed out that it isn’t in any Christian writing, I’m certainly happy to hear it. I’m also happy to hear how he thinks Tacitus would have obtained information either directly or indirectly from the Christian gospels when he clearly despised Christianity.
@rationalrevolution, #40:
‘Firstly, there isn’t a single bit of anything that even claims to show that this person existed outside of Christian scriptures. I assume you understand that.’
RG, the problem is not that we don’t understand what you’re claiming. It’s that you’re simply wrong about this. Yes, we do have the line in Tacitus about Jesus. Yes, we do have Josephus’s mention that one of the people executed by Ananus was ‘the brother of Jesus called Christ’. I understand that you do not believe either of these mentions to be valid evidence and, as previously stated, I will be addressing your reasons for this in future posts. However, claiming that these two mentions by known historians are not ‘a single bit of anything that even claims to show that this person existed’ is simply not correct.
‘Do you have any idea how many stories were written in the ancient world about things that never happened at all? Even in the first and second centuries? Literally hundreds!’
Then please tell me whether you know of any others that somehow convinced people that a basic part of their own religion was incorrect. You’re claiming that this one fictional story, written for people in a group who already believed Jesus had never been on earth, somehow convinced the group that what their leaders were teaching about a heavenly Jesus wasn’t true and that Jesus had in fact led an earthly and apparently human life. Convinced them so much that multiple people wrote extended versions of this Jesus’s life, including one who was clearly at least trying to make this a historical account and to talk to people whom he thought might know something about this earthly Jesus yet apparently didn’t realise at any point that this earthly Jesus didn’t exist.
So, out of all these hundreds of fictional stories you mention, which I’m sure convinced at least some people at the time, which of them convinced people on the kind of scale that would have been required to turn a group believing in a Jesus who’d only existed in heaven – who, supposedly, saw this as a key part of their beliefs, according to you – into a group who not only believed that this same person had lived on earth, but had no records at all of their previous belief in a Jesus who’d only existed in heaven? Which of them managed to obliterate a group’s previous core belief within decades only?
‘There is one single Gospel story which was created by copying from the Jewish scriptures, which was then copied into dozens of other versions of the story, all of which include all of the same key details.’
…and all of which include a lot of other details, including, in the case of Matthew and Luke, similar material that’s interspersed with Mark’s story in different ways, exactly as you’d expect if they were both working from other collections of writings as well as Mark’s, but not in a way that you’d expect if they were inventing things about a person in a fictional story that they’d read.
‘This detail from the Crucifixion does not come from an eyewitness account, it comes from someone inventing a scene based on a scripture. But in fact, when you look at the Gospel of Mark, the WHOLE thing is written like this – line after line after line. This IS the story.’
As per my previous posts on this, here is what I actually found when I went through your arguments about gMark’s origins:
• A number of scenes that clearly were derived from scripture, plus some that probably were derived from Paul.
• A number of scenes that had only a tenuous connection to the scriptural passages that you were claiming inspired them, meaning we need to weigh your claims of derivation up against the possibility that the similarity could be a coincidence
• A couple of things (the naming of Pilate as handing down sentence, the line in the Parable of the Vineyard about the killing of the son) that didn’t make sense under your theory and for which you didn’t or couldn’t account when asked.
I know you want this to add up to proof that the whole of gMark was fictitious. But it doesn’t, because it’s also exactly what we’d expect to see if gMark was a highly embellished true story. And we know that it was normal in that place and time to embellish stories about actual people, which I know you’re aware of because you stated it yourself back in Chapter 4. And we know that Mark was willing to do this for effect, because we see him doing this with John the Baptist. So even the foundational argument of your case doesn’t hold up.
‘But here is the kicker, every single person, ever, including “heretics”, who ever said that they believed that someone called Jesus existed, all described that person based solely on the Gospels and nothing else. There is no other source of information.’
Paul believed in a human Jesus, and clearly did not get this information from the gospels as they hadn’t yet been written at that time. Of course, Paul is unreliable anyway since he got his information largely from his own imagination, but it isn’t correct to say that he described Jesus from the gospels. And he certainly believed this Jesus had had brothers, at least one of whom he’d met.
Tacitus very clearly hadn’t read the gospels, since he despised Christianity and was about as likely to read the gospels as most of us are to read Jehovah’s Witnesses literature.
Josephus clearly didn’t get the story about James’s execution from the gospels.
‘And guess what, in the book of Kings, the destruction of Jerusalem was blamed on the Jewish leaders for persecuting the Jewish prophets, Elijah, Elisha and Isaiah!’
And in gMark, the fates befalling the Jews are blamed on them for persecuting prophets including Jesus. (Mk 12:6 – 9) In the gospel that you claim he wrote entirely as an allegory to blame the Jews, the primary thing for which he blames the Jews is, supposedly, killing the person you claim Mark thought was only a heavenly being. Isn’t that rather contradictory under mythicism?
rationalrevolution@24,
Apologies for attributing your comment wrongly (and thanks Dr. Sarah for the correction @55).
Your claim @40 that:
is simply false. The reference in Josephus Antiquities 20 is the clearest counter-example. The reference in Tacitus is another.
I agree there are no eyewitness accounts of the crucifixion. And of course the gospel writers used the Jewish scriptures in the process of mythification that folowed Jesus’s death (such mythification routinely occurred to figures in the ancient world, using whatever sources were culturally appropriate). But where is the crucifixion itself (or the alleged resurrection) in the Jewish scriptures? If they were inventing the whole story, why would the gospel writiers have chosen to use the degrading event of crucifixion, rather than having Jesus snatched up to heaven like Elijah?
Anyone who “described him”, maybe, although there is the Didache, usually dated 70-100 CE and attributed to Jewish followers of Jesus, which refers to him as a human teacher, definitely not as divine in any sense. And with regard to asserting his existence, certainly not. The earliest source for that is the letters of Paul, who describes meeting Jesus’s brother. As I said before, you can’t meet the brother of a literary character, and the attempts to explain away Paul’s reference to Jesus’s brother are ridiculous.
By the way, where are the people who denied his existence altogether, or as an earthly being? We have quite a few references to anti-Christians who denied Jesus’s status, and the Marcionites denied that he was born of a woman and took on a flesh-and-blood body (so it’s not the case that anti-Christian or “heretic” views simply vanished), but why did no-one apparently deny his earthly existence altogether? Ancient people must surely have been aware that there was a lot of “fake news” around, why did they not identify the stories of Jesus as such? And how, and when, did Christians come to belief that Jesus had been a real earthly individual, if he never had?
db@35,
Simply asserting that there is no attestation or evidence of Jesus’s existence does not make it true. In fact, it’s manifestly false. I don’t know what you’re refering to by your “item 1” and “item 2”.
db@37, 38,
To use your own terminology, that’s risible mythicist nonsense. See above with regard to evidence from outside the NT. Nothing Carrier says can be taken seriously – his record of absurd and often dishonest claims in multiple contexts is quite clear, so quoting or citing him is not going to convince anyone who is not already a mythicist, as I’ve said before.
db@41,
No-one here is claiming eyewitnesses wrote the gospels, nor does any reputable modern scholar.
Nothing Carrier says can be taken seriously – his record of absurd and often dishonest claims in multiple contexts is quite clear, so quoting or citing him is not going to convince anyone who is not already a mythicist, as I’ve said before.
I really don’t understand why some people have such a need to “prove” that Jesus (or someone like him who was the basis for all the legends about him) never existed. It’s not like proving Jesus was a real person suddenly proves Christianity is true (and which version would it prove anyway?).
I can accept that Moses, Mohammed and Joseph Smith were real people, without in any way being won over toward Judaism, Islam or Mormonism. So why should I have a problem with Jesus being a real person?
Raging Bee@63,
dangerousbeans@26 says:
Although dangerousbeans goes on to say they don’t really care about either the existence of the historical Jesus, or the religious concept of Jesus, I think there are some people who have seen family or friends deeply and damagingly immersed in Christianty, who think that if only it could be proved there never was a Jesus, those people would snap out of it. They wouldn’t, of course. Even if we dug up a well dated 2nd century BCE document giving the story of Jesus as an explicit piece of fiction – say, as a Greek tragedy but set in Judaea and using Jewish characters, and obviously the prototype of the gospels – it wouldn’t convince such people.
In other cases, I think it’s a kind of “athier than thou” one-up-man-ship: “Don’t believe in god? Huh, well I don’t even believe in Jesus!, or just a wish to show they are cleverer than all the hoi-polloi and the academic Bible scholars and historians. Or simply something they got into more or less by accident, getting the idea that it’s the atheist or sophisticated thing to think, or that anyone who admits the likely existence of a historical Jesus is a closet Christian, or reading a book which is superficially convincing, and then doubling down when challenged. Some of these cases, though not all, closely resemble other forms of contrarianism and denialism
KG: Yeah, I never thought that would work with committed believers either. I always figured it was better to use Bible quotes to at least make them suspect that some of their worst beliefs or actions may not really be what their God wants.