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 Christianity started with a human Jesus. In other words, the Jesus referred to as the founder of Christianity was originally a 1st-century human being, about whom a later mythology grew up, whose followers became the original group that would mutate over time into Christianity. 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

Price goes on to address the five passages from the end of the first/early second century that are generally cited by Christians as being early evidence for Jesus. In chronological order of when they were written, these are:

• In the manuscripts that we have of Book 18 of Flavius Josephus’s ‘Antiquities of the Jews’, there is a short passage about Jesus (paragraph 3 at that link) known as the ‘Testimonium Flavium’.
• In Book 20 of the same work, in an account of a Jewish high priest overstepping his authority by ordering a group of people executed without first getting official permission to do so (first paragraph at that link), we are told that one of these people was ‘the brother of Jesus called Christ, James by name’.
• Tacitus has a short passage in his ‘Annals’ (in Chapter 44 at that link) commenting on Christians being blamed by Nero for the Great Fire, which includes a line (44.28) about their founder ‘Chrestus’ being executed under Pontius Pilate.
• One of Pliny the Younger’s letters, written to the Emperor Trajan in 112 CE, is a request for advice on how to deal with people of this odd new religion of Christianity.
• Suetonius, in ‘The Lives of the Caesars’, mentions ‘the Jews making constant disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus’ in what would have been the year 49 CE (the book itself was written in 115 CE).

Price, of course, dismisses all these references for various reasons. Just to make a change, I agree with him about some of them. In this post, I’m therefore going to go through the three references that I agree are little or no help in determining whether Jesus existed, and explain why I agree with Price that these three should be dismissed as evidence in this particular debate.

The Testimonium Flavium

The Testimonium Flavium, a short passage in Josephus’s ‘Antiquities’ describing Jesus, would have been excellent evidence except for one major problem: Several of the lines in it were quite clearly added to the manuscript by an over-enthusiastic Christian scribe at some later date, and this, unfortunately, raises the question of whether any of the passage originated with Josephus or whether it was all the work of the unknown forger.

There has been considerable scholarly debate on this question over the centuries, with no definite consensus to this day. Based on comparisons of the more plausible parts of the passage with Josephus’s style and analysis of slightly different manuscript traditions, the majority of scholars have concluded that at least some of the passage originated with Josephus. (And, no, these aren’t just Christian scholars grasping at straws, but also include Jewish and non-religious scholars.) However, the view that the whole passage is a Christian interpolation is by no means a fringe view; it’s held by a sizeable minority of scholars, including some eminent ones in the field. Blogger Tim O’Neill has a readable summary of the arguments, but the tl;dr is that we simply don’t know either way.

You will be unsurprised to hear that mythicists are firm supporters of the argument that the whole passage is an interpolation (and that this is what Price argues). In fact, mythicists will often extend this to claiming that Josephus’s other mention of Jesus must also be an interpolation, and quite possibly to any passages in any document that seem to support historicity. The more clearly Christian-interpolated lines in the TF are Jesus scholarship’s Piltdown Man; an obvious fake that has long since been recognised as such but is used by a fringe group with an agenda to cast discredit on the whole field.

I’m not arguing quite the same position as Price on this one. He, of course, is arguing that the whole passage is a fake, whereas my position is that it’s more likely to be partly real but that we can’t know either way. However, for purposes of the mythicism argument it comes to the same thing; there is too much doubt about the authenticity of this passage to use it as evidence for Jesus’s existence.

I do, however, think there are two important takeaways from the debate over the TF, before we move on:

Firstly, ‘can’t know either way’ cuts both ways. While there’s too much doubt over even the partial authenticity of this passage to use it as evidence for the Jesus-historicist side, there’s also too much doubt over the claim of complete forgery for us to be able to say that Josephus didn’t mention Jesus here. And that, of course, causes further problems for the already poor argument that historians mysteriously never mentioned Jesus. Josephus, unlike the other historians held up for candidates of same, actually is a good contender for someone who might well have mentioned a historical Jesus, in that he does write about various other rabbis and Jews with anti-Roman followings. And, lo and behold, we have a situation where he might indeed have mentioned a historical Jesus; we just don’t know whether he did or not. So, while this Schroedinger’s Mention isn’t enough for active evidence for the historicist side, it does put an extra nail in the coffin of the ‘historians didn’t mention Jesus!’ mythicist argument.

And, secondly, the forged lines in the passage give us a test case as to how the world of biblical and NT scholarship actually does react to an obvious forgery about Jesus (as we know at least some of the lines in the TF to be, whatever your position on partial authenticity). I raise this because I’ve noticed that mythicists sometimes seem to fall into the habit of not only dismissing pro-historicist evidence as possible interpolation, but also dismissing scholarly consensus of the authenticity of such passages with a ‘well, they would, wouldn’t they?’ attitude in which it’s assumed that the only reason relevant scholarship don’t think these passages are interpolations is because scholarship in this area is too Christian-dominated to consider the possibility. This therefore becomes a good excuse for dismissing any passages that are awkward for mythicists to explain away. (Yes, yes, #notallmythicists, but it’s certainly an attitude I’ve seen.)

That being so, I think it’s instructive to note the actual reaction of Jesus-related scholarship to a genuinely obvious interpolation: Everyone in the field accepts that the more obviously Christian lines in the passage are interpolated, and, although the ‘total interpolation’ position is the minority view, it’s still a respected view that has its place in scholarship rather than being dismissed. And, hence, the belief of some mythicists that it’s only bias that prevents experts as recognising any other mythicist-inconveniencing passages as interpolations doesn’t really stand up.

One final point: In anticipation of commenters about to unleash C&P’d arguments about how the total-interpolation position clearly must be the correct one (cough db cough), I’ll say here and now that I’m not particularly interested in arguing the merits of either partial authenticity vs. total interpolation or ‘we can’t know either way’ vs. ‘obviously totally interpolated’. What I do believe is that random people C&P-ing internet arguments they like the look of aren’t the most authoritative sources for a controversy on which actual scholars of the topic can’t reach a consensus. So, for those genning up to give their opinions on this particular subject; well, go right ahead if that’s what you enjoy, just be aware I’ll probably ignore you.

Pliny the Younger

I agree with Price on this one; this letter is clearly about Christians rather than about Jesus. While Pliny’s comment that the Christians ‘sing a hymn to Christ as to a god’ (emphasis mine) does seem to imply that the Christians in question also described their Christ as something other than a god (i.e., an earthly person), that is a really slender thread on which to hang any argument. So, while I find this letter fascinating as a non-Christian’s view of Christianity back when it was a rather odd new cult rather than the most famous religion in the Western and possibly the entire world, I don’t think it has anything of substance to offer this particular debate.

Suetonius

Finally, this passage is another one that can be quickly disposed of in this argument. The passage in question only tells us that someone called Chrestus was thought to have instigated Jewish riots. While it’s natural that Christians would assume this to be a misspelling of ‘Christus’, the fact is that ‘Chrestus’ was also a first name in the Roman Empire, and that there is nothing in the passage to indicate that this ‘Chrestus’ was Jesus rather than someone with the name Chrestus. Rather the contrary, considering that whoever this Chrestus was he was apparently in a position to be able to be accused of instigating riots almost twenty years after Jesus would have died, which doesn’t prove he wasn’t Jesus (after all, people are still supposedly being instigated to do stuff by Jesus two millennia later) but does mean Suetonius is rather unlikely to have been talking about Jesus. So, again, I agree with Price here; this gives us no helpful evidence regarding Jesus’s historicity, and can be discarded from the debate.

Which leaves…

… the Tacitus reference and the Josephus ‘brother of Jesus called Christ’ mention, which Price covers in that order and which I will therefore also cover in that order. So, the next post on this chapter (which might or might not be the actual next post depending on whether I decide to do a ‘Walking Disaster’ post in between) will be on the reference in Tacitus, and the one after that (ditto) will be on the Josephus Antiquities 20 reference. See you then.