‘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
So far, we’ve discussed why we wouldn’t expect Jesus to show up in any accounts by his contemporaries regardless of whether or not he existed, and why some of the apparent mentions of Jesus in slightly later works are also not much help in establishing whether he existed. That leaves two passages that need addressing; the mention in Tacitus’s ‘Annals’ (44:28 at that link, as part of a short passage about Christians themselves being persecuted), and Josephus’s mention of ‘the brother of Jesus called Christ’ in Antiquities 20. Both of these, although brief, do provide good evidence for Jesus’s existence, and both are, of course, dismissed by Price.
Price discusses the Tacitus passage first of the two, so I will also go for that order and will discuss Tacitus’s mention in this post and the Josephus line in a separate post.
Background
First, a disclaimer: I haven’t read Tacitus or studied the classics for myself, unless you count my Latin O-level. (Don’t. It really isn’t worth counting in this context. Or in almost any context, for that matter.) My information on this comes primarily from this post on the History for Atheists blog, which is written by Tim O’Neill, a skeptical blogger with a history degree and a relevant Master’s degree, according to his ‘About’ page. I’ve checked the references in the post for myself and also read what other online information I could find about Tacitus’s writing. If anyone with better background knowledge of Tacitus than me (which, by the way, I would bet actual money does not include Price) wants to put forward an argument for disputing any of the points made here, I’m willing to take it on board.
Anyway, here’s what I have learned:
Tacitus was a Roman politician who wrote several very well-known and well-respected historical works, and who apparently had a useful commitment to letting his readers know when the information he was passing on was something he’d effectively heard only through rumour and couldn’t validate; he would qualify these claims with a phrase such as ‘it is said’ or ‘in popular report’. Tim O’Neill, as well as giving several references himself to examples of this, also cites Mendell’s book ‘Tacitus: The Man And His Work’ here:
Mendell goes on to note 30 separate instances in the Annals where Tacitus is careful to substantiate a statement or distance himself from a claim or report about which he was less than certain (Mendell, p. 205).
O’Neill, Jesus Mythicism 1: The Tacitus Reference To Jesus (link as above)
However, Tacitus – as was normal for historians of his time – usually didn’t give us references for where he got other pieces of information. There are some exceptions; for example, in 15.74 he mentions having found a particular point ‘in the records of the Senate’, and in 3.3 he mentions checking ‘the historians and the government journals’ regarding the question of whether Germanicus’s mother attended his funeral (which apparently he could find no record of her doing even though he found records of Germanicus’s other relatives being there, so it’s an interesting example of giving evidence for a negative). In 11.27, acknowledging that the story he has just told seems unbelievable, he takes pains to assure us that he has not embroidered the story and that ‘all that I record shall be the oral or written evidence of my seniors’. We also have a surviving letter from Pliny the Younger that states up front that it was written in reply to Tacitus’s request of him for information on the death of his uncle Pliny the Elder, so this is an external example of Tacitus checking with a reliable source. We don’t, however, get references for the vast majority of points he makes (which, once again, was normal for historians of the time).
What all this seems to add up to – and, again, I’m quite happy for anyone with better knowledge of Tacitus’s works to chime in if they feel they can support a different viewpoint – is a picture of a writer who aimed for scrupulosity both in checking his facts with sources that he considered to be reliable and in alerting his readers when he was instead reporting points he couldn’t verify, but who for the most part didn’t tell us what his sources were whenever he did consider them reliable. From that, it seems fair to conclude that, where Tacitus gives us information that he doesn’t qualify with any version of ‘it is said’ or ‘in popular report’, it is likely that he got it from a source that he himself considered trustworthy.
With all this in mind, here is the passage in question:
But neither human help, nor imperial munificence, nor all the modes of placating Heaven, could stifle scandal or dispel the belief that the fire had taken place by order. Therefore, to scotch the rumour, Nero substituted as culprits, and punished with the utmost refinements of cruelty, a class of men, loathed for their vices, whom the crowd styled Christians. Christus, the founder of the name, had undergone the death penalty in the reign of Tiberius, by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilatus, and the pernicious superstition was checked for a moment, only to break out once more, not merely in Judaea, the home of the disease, but in the capital itself, where all things horrible or shameful in the world collect and find a vogue.
So, what do we learn here? As of some point around 115 – 120 CE (it’s not clear exactly when the Annals were written or published, but that’s the estimate I found), Tacitus believed that someone known as Christus had been sentenced by Pontius Pilate during Tiberius’s reign and executed, having first founded a very unpopular group in Judea, known as Christians, whose beliefs then spread to Rome. And, since he doesn’t add any qualifiers about this being ‘said’ or ‘reported’, he probably got this information from a source that he thought to be reliable.
(As to what that source might have been, Tim O’Neill hypothesises that Tacitus spoke to a Hellenised Jew, quite possibly Josephus. From what I can see, this is plausible, though of course unprovable. Either way, we still have the important point that Tacitus apparently felt his source for this information, whoever or whatever it was, to be reliable.)
Price’s view
Price first gets into a brief digression querying why Nero would have been persecuting Christians in the first place or whether this group of Christians was ‘even the same group of Christians as those who were believers in Jesus Christ’ (as opposed to… some other group also following someone called Christ who was crucified by Pilate?). Having done that, he tells us that the passage is ‘not an independent witness to the existence of Jesus’.
Indeed, Tacitus is clearly relaying information that originally came from Christians themselves…. New Testament scholar John P. Meier acknowledges that here Tacitus is only passing on information gleaned from Christians
Now, going back to O’Neill’s post for a minute, O’Neill makes a really good point about this common mythicist dismissal of the Tacitean passage; it is clear from the passage that Tacitus despised Christians. O’Neill brings this up to point out that they would, therefore, hardly have fitted Tacitus’s idea of a source reliable enough that he didn’t feel the need to qualify it, but the point made me realise something else: Tacitus wouldn’t have been having conversations with Christians about their beliefs in the first place. It would be the equivalent of you or me deliberately striking up a conversation with a Jehovah’s Witness or a Mormon about their teachings. So we can quite reasonably dismiss any idea that Tacitus got his information directly from Christians.
However, Price is more likely to have meant that Tacitus’s information came indirectly from Christians (as in, snippets of information about Christian belief could by then have percolated through society to the point where they were also widely known amongst non-Christians).
The information that he is passing on would have been common knowledge by 109 CE
And it’s very interesting that Price thinks this, because it causes yet more problems for his theory.
One obvious problem here is that this, again, wouldn’t fit with Tacitus’s penchant for clarifying when the information he passed on was just what was ‘said’ or ‘reported’; since he doesn’t add that clarification here, it seems unlikely that this is something he absorbed in a general ‘everyone knows that’ sense. It doesn’t quite rule it out – after all, even skeptics can slip up on skepticism sometimes – but it does make it unlikely. But there’s another big problem, and that’s the timeline Price has just given himself.
Price’s theory, to recap, is that the original Christians (proto-Christians?) believed that the Messiah had already lived, been executed, and been resurrected in heaven only, where he could be uncorrupted by the material world. At some point after the Jewish-Roman War, Mark wrote a fictional story, intended only as an allegorical message, about this Jesus living an earthly life as a preacher and being crucified on earth rather than in heaven. This fictional story – somehow – convinced so many people that multiple other people wrote expanded versions of the story without noticing that the person they were writing about had never existed. Eventually things reached a point where the entire group believed so completely in this earthly Jesus who’d never lived that the original belief in a heavenly Jesus was completely obliterated.
Now, Price has never explained just how a single allegorical story could not only so drastically mislead so many people but reach the point of ultimately overriding the group’s existing beliefs about Jesus so thoroughly that the original beliefs vanished without trace. He’s never explained why the supposed belief in a completely heavenly Jesus of the original church leaders could be so thoroughly suppressed that it didn’t survive in our literature even as a heresy to be refuted. He’s never explained why so many people in a group who were supposedly being taught by their leaders that their Jesus existed only in heaven would read one story and believe that this was the truth and that their own leaders were wrong. He’s never explained how the subsequent gospel authors – including Luke, the one who Price agrees was trying to at least do some kind of historical research into his writing – never noticed that they were writing about a man who never lived on earth. So that’s already a gaping hole in his theory.
But he also, now, has his problem compounded by the timeline by which all this would have had to happen. He’s set up a hypothesis in which the story of this fictitious person’s fictitious earthly execution under Pilate is, less than fifty years later, so widely believed by even non-Christians that the skeptical Tacitus passed the information on absolutely unquestioned. That would mean this sea change would have to have happened over less than a human lifetime. There would have still been people alive in the Christian church who remembered being taught a completely different version of Jesus’s story as children. How, exactly, does Price think the new belief would have taken over the group so completely that the previous one vanished like that and, instead, even widespread numbers of non-Christians had heard about this execution under Pilate that in fact never happened?
Of course, there’s a much simpler theory for how Tacitus could have come to believe that Jesus was executed under Pilate: Jesus actually was a person whose execution was ordered by Pilate, this information was passed on when people had disapproving conversatoins about those troublemaking Christians, the Christians themselves couldn’t refute this as it had in fact actually happened, and thus it was that at some time by or before the early second century this information was widely known enough that someone Tacitus trusted as a reliable source could have been aware of it and passed it on to Tacitus at some point. So, yet again, we have a situation where Jesus-historicity explains the evidence much better than Jesus-mythicism. If Price still wants to argue that the claim about Jesus being executed under Pilate could have become public ‘knowledge’ by the early second century despite never (under his theory) having happened, then it’s on him to come up with a plausible explanation.