‘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.
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.
Hardly the only plausible scenario. We can infer from Paul, among others, that a varied folklore existed around a Jerusalem “savior” and his martyrdom, condensed into multiple “gospels” (later accepted at Nicaea, or not). “Mark”, and possibly “Q”, set the standard template for such writings, but all of them seemingly date from over a generation after the alleged events described, putting them clearly into the urban-legend category (to which I doubt the admirably conscientious Tacitus, >70 years later, had immunity).
The core question here remains the source(s) & content of the oral traditions: the written versions, while interesting to track, constitute a basket of red herrings.
Pierce R. Butler said:
“ multiple “gospels” (later accepted at Nicaea, or not”
Pardon? You think the Council of Nicaea had something to do with selecting gospels?
It strikes me that the simplest theory for how Tacitus could have come to believe that Jesus was executed under Pilate is that Christians at the time believed it, and Tacitus found the basic idea fine. So it tells us that Christians at the time believed that Jesus existed, but it doesn’t tell us that he did exist
As you point out the timing does make Price’s theory very dubious
And given timing of all this in relation to the writings about Christianity I think it does support a historical Jesus, but I’m not sure it’s as strong support as you imply there
We can also infer from Paul that he met Jesus’s brother, because he says so (Galatians 1:18-9 and 1Corinthians 9:5). Of course there are ways this inference could be wrong: these letters could be (contrary to expert consensus) forgeries in whole or in part, or James might have somehow been given the special status of “brother” to someone who had never existed and was not believed to have existed on earth (the claim that “brother of the Lord” applied to many members of the movement relies on doing horrible violence to the plain meaning of the text that this James was in a special fraternal-type relationship to Jesus). But the evidence that Paul met Jesus’s brother, and hence that Jesus existed, could only rationally be discarded if there were other strong grounds for believing that he didn’t. And there aren’t.
Yes. I’ve not read extensively in mythicist works, but this is such a key point that you wouldn’t expect to need to in order to come across a mythicist explanation of when and how Jesus’s existence came to be generally believed in, apparently by both Christians and anti-Christians. And for no obvious trace of belief in a purely heavenly Jesus to have survived – when evidence of other “heresies” such as the gnostic belief that he did come to earth but didn’t have an ordinary flesh-and-blood body, and gossip such as that his father was a Roman soldier, did survive.
Tim O @ #2: You think the Council of Nicaea had something to do with selecting gospels?
I sit corrected – too much Voltaire!
KG @ # 4: We can also infer from Paul that he met Jesus’s brother…
In this case, I allude primarily to Galatians 1:7,
Jimmy or no Jimmy, this indicates a pre-existing range of Jesusery.
… the claim about Jesus being executed under Pilate could have become public ‘knowledge’ by the early second century …
Ask people on the American street who killed Kennedy, King, or that other Kennedy – within less time after the event than in the JC case – and tell us how reliable we should consider stories about deaths. Rinse & repeat with Elvis, Malcolm X, or Rich Seth; or, closer to the time in question, Alexander or Pompey. Poor ol’ Pontius had a bloody rep, and made a plausible villain all around.
Ftr: I do not claim any of this establishes JC mythicism, just that it highlights various weaknesses of JC historicity.
@Pierce R. Butler #5, See Irenaeus the 37th Doctor of the Church at time t=2898 seconds selecting his preferred gospels from among those on the open market of true christian thought/dogma (ortho-hetro-homo-dox).
@ https://youtu.be/dFPPGgYzhH0?t=2898
Pierce R. Butler@5,
Yes, it’s a widespread view among historicists that Paul disagreed with the Jerusalemites, about whether Gentiles had to follow Jewish law in order to be accepted as part of the Jesus movement. I don’t know what point you’re making here.
Come off it. In all the cases you mention*, the conspiracists are alleging that some hidden hand murdered the person concerned. In the case of Jesus, we’re talking about a public execution occurring when Pilate was the top Roman official in the area, and so the execution ipso facto took place under him. The (canonical) gospels try to exonerate him morally as far as possible, blaming “the Jews” for forcing him to go through with it or hand Jesus over, but they all agree that it took place under him.
*Except Pompey. AFAIK, there’s no mystery or conspiracy narrative about who killed him.
I always thought Carrier made a few good points, but that the historicist side was stronger. Unfortunately, Carrier is his own worst enemy when it comes to defending his arguments. Anyway, this series of posts reminded me that I had hoped many years ago that the newer scholar, Raphael Lataster, might take it up, and possibly be less… difficult. Since I’m not particularly invested in the debate, I haven’t checked in much for several years. I decided to see what what Lataster has been up to. Apparently, he gave up Jesus studies, got MAGA-pilled, became a COVID conspiracy theorist, and loves RFK now. So I suppose we’re back to Carrier and Price!
DrVanNostrand@8,
I’m not surprised by Lataster’s trajectory as you report it. The phenomenon of crank magnetism is well-known, but Lataster appears to exemplify a somewhat unusual variant – attraction to crank individuals (Carrier, RFKJr) as much as to crank ideas!
• Carrier (10 July 2023). “An Ongoing List of Updates to the Arguments and Evidence in On the Historicity of Jesus”. Richard Carrier Blogs. Retrieved 8 April 2025. “[Per]…questioning the authenticity of the material in Tacitus (. . . I do not take that position in my study).”
KG @ # 7: I don’t know what point you’re making here.
See my # 1: … a varied folklore existed around a Jerusalem “savior” and his martyrdom…
IOW, I contradicted our esteemed host’s apparent supposition that the written record drove the oral accounts, rather than vice-versa.
As for Pompey, sfaik we can only say for sure somebody knifed him immediately on arrival in Egypt. Most histories point the finger at Ptolemy, but nobody seems to have set up an Official Commission so we could know For Sure.
DrVanNostrand @ # 8: … Lataster … gave up Jesus studies, got MAGA-pilled…
Whereas Robert M. Price seems to have come to Jesus studies pre-pilled. In some ways the strongest case against J mythicism consists of the ad hominem that its primary advocates
leanleap towards nuttiness. (Does anybody know much about the politics/lifestyle of G.A. Wells, and whether they changed when he switched to historicism?)I didn’t mean to imply that made mythicism wrong. I had just barely heard of him about the time I quit paying attention, so I didn’t know anything about him, but wondered if maybe he would take up the fight better than Carrier. So I thought it was funny that not only did he quit the field altogether, but that he’s even more arrogant and obnoxious than Carrier.
https://okaythennews.substack.com/
Pierce R. Butler@11,
But Galatians 1:7, to which you refer @5, doesn’t say anything about “folklore” – it just shows there was some (there unspecified) disagreement between Paul and some (there unspecified) others. Which is a common view which I’m sure Dr. Sarah would agree with, as I do. So I still don’t see your point.
According to wikipedia on Pompey:
The doubt is about who, if anyone, told Lucius Septimus to do it. But again, it’s not an officially sanctioned public execution, like that reported of Jesus in the gospels. How would that come to be the only oral account going around if it wasn’t actually true? And if it wasn’t the only account, why would the gospel writers have chosen that account, when they all try to exculpate Pilate – despite not being able to deny his official responsibility – and put as much blame as possible on “the Jews”? Why would they choose an account of crucifixion (which was a specifically Roman punishment, and specifically intended to be maximally humiliating as well as agonising) at all?
KG @ # 13: But Galatians 1:7… doesn’t say anything about “folklore” – it just shows there was some (there unspecified) disagreement between Paul and some (there unspecified) others.
That verse indicates quite clearly that multiple versions of the Jesus story went into circulation by or before Paul’s evangelizing, and thus contradicts Dr Sarah’s summary of RG Price’s scenario:
Oops – apologies to all for omitting the “/” needed to end-blockquote the single line cited from Dr Sarah’s original post!
Pierce R. Butler@14,
No, it doesn’t. Here’s the whole of the verse in various translations:
KJV: Which is not another; but there be some that trouble you, and would pervert the gospel of Christ.
NIV: which is really no gospel at all. Evidently some people are throwing you into confusion and are trying to pervert the gospel of Christ.
NKJV: which is not another; but there are some who trouble you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ.
World English Bible: and there isn’t another “good news.” Only there are some who trouble you, and want to pervert the Good News of Christ.
It says nothing at all about the “Jesus story”. – the narrative of his life and death – only about his supposed message – which, as appears elsewhere, Paul thought he had received directly from Jesus, so anyone who disagreed with him must be “perverting the gospel”.
The earliest surviving source for Alexander’s life dates from nearly 3 centuries after his death, so a comparison is ridiculous. Besides, there are obvious motivations both for putting in a personal swordfight with Darius and (as you note yourself) inventing a visit to Jerusalem. There’s no such motivation for inventing a crucifixion (see below).
But this doesn’t fit with the gospels’ attempts to put the blame on “the Jews” (whose rebellion was crushed) rather than the Romans (the crushers). If the aim was to “link the Empire with brutal oppression and cruelty”, why minimise the guilt of the Roman authority (Pilate)? And “Follow our glorious leader and saviour – he got crucified” doesn’t seem like a message a new cult would adopt unless they had no choice because that’s what had actually happened to Jesus.
It was in the context of 1st century Judaea.
KG @ # 16: …It says nothing at all about the “Jesus story”. – … – only about his supposed message …
A pretty fine distinction, particularly since many interpreted “the good news” as the overcoming of death. In a wider context, the different emphases of each purported gospel in themselves reveal the range of viewpoints riding on Jesusism.
The earliest surviving source for Alexander’s life dates from nearly 3 centuries after his death, so a comparison is ridiculous.
From what I’ve read, it seems Alex had spin doctors embellishing his own legend even as he built it, so some comparisons surely apply. Or we might consider closer to our day: “Marxism” and “Trotskyism” evolved so rapidly, even with undisputed original texts widely available, that their namesakes repudiated them contemporaneously.
… the gospels’ attempts to put the blame on “the Jews” … rather than the Romans …
Both factors operated simultaneously: the cult rejecting its roots as it spread, the empire allowing some critique of its agents while demanding respect of other components. The baroque intertwining of politics and religion in the Middle East goes back at least as far as the Hebrews’ concoction of their own origin myths, with any attempt to simplify or streamline such narratives undergoing rapid rejection (e.g., Mani).
As for the crucifixion part of the story, allow me to (however reluctantly) cite the Robert M. Price thesis that “Jesus” is a compound character accreted from a mashup of actual and mythic persons according to the inclinations of varied narrators (somewhat like his purported father, perhaps). A martyr here, a miracle-monger there, a pithy preacher up on a hill, an embodiment of a philosophy pulled from a wine jug – we might more accurately dub this the multiple-historical-Jesuses hypothesis, rather than merely mythicism.
Pierce R. Butler@17
It’s a fundamental distinction. There is no evidence at all, AFAIK, that Paul disagreed with other Jesusists* about the narrative of Jesus’s life and death (he doesn’t actually show much interest in it, a point which mythicists often emphasise) – or about the core claim that Jesus was resurrected (although maybe about what this meant); there is clear evidence he disagreed about Jesus’s message, specifically about whether Gentiles had to follow Jewish Law to become Jesusists. And absolutely no-one outside the most purblind of fundamentalists disagrees that the gospels reveal a range of viewpoints among Jesusists.
As I’ve already noted, the gospels specifically do their utmost not to criticise Pilate – but can’t escape the fact of his legal responsibility for any sentence carried out while he was in charge of Jerusalem! In the wake of the Jewish uprising of AD70, the gospel writers were very anxious to show that the cult was not anti-Roman or subversive, and pissed off that the vast majority of Jews had rejected Jesus as Messiah.
The mythicist fallback position, for which there’s not a particle of evidence. Tim O’Neill takes it apart here.
*Since it’s disputed whether the term “Christian” is appropriate this early – it’s unlikely they used it themselves – and since it’s nice and short, i’ll happily adopt this term!
KG @ # 17: It’s a fundamental distinction.
Depending on the point at issue. Mine is: a welter of “rescuer” (approximate literal meaning of “Yeshua” bubbled around in the eastern end of the Roman Empire circa the 30s CE, producing scattered groups of mostly-Jewish followers sort-of organized by Paul but with significant variance in their stories. (Their primary commonality seems to have involved predictions of the world ending soon at the hands of a divine avenger of their many grievances – not the sort of people anyone should take as reliable witnesses or recounters of anything.) The second (post-Paul) generation of this cult made some attempts to sort out and make consistent their shared lore, and arguably did a better job than did the priests (et alia) who tried to reconcile the mythologies of Judah and Israel after many refugees from the latter moved to the former, but still prioritized factionalism over factuality (as evidenced by the plethora of gospels, the pseudo-Pauline epistles, etc).
… the gospels specifically do their utmost not to criticise Pilate…
At least “utmost” enough to avoid having centurions knocking at the door – that washing-of-hands bit, f’rinstance, strikes me as a tidy bit of “he who hath ears, let him hear” winking and nudging.
… pissed off that the vast majority of Jews had rejected Jesus as Messiah.
Much as, over here, many Greens and Libertarians spew particular venom at the Dems and Repubs they have respectively left behind. Note the frequent slapdowns of Pharisees, apparently the strongest post-rebellion (thus, post-Temple) faction of what remained of Jewish leadership (at least among the diaspora). Such preoccupations do not seem likely to have resulted in historical reliability.
The mythicist fallback position, for which there’s not a particle of evidence. Tim O’Neill takes it apart here.
A quick reading shows O’Neill kicking at numerous particles of evidence even as he chases an array of wild geese. He mostly flings mud at Aron Ra (whom I will heartlessly leave to defend himself), while demanding consistency from the sources AR cites explicitly to point out the inconsistencies of various J-historicist arguments. He also tries to debunk Richard Carrier’s 2014 list of parallels (or should we say “particles”?) between JC and Josephus’s story of Yeshua ben Ananias’s martyrdom without noticing that Carrier apparently cribbed same from Robert M. Price’s The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man (2003). I remain much less impressed with O’Neill than is O’Neill.
Please recall, as I’ve commented here before, that I try to present Jesus-historicity-hard-agnosticism here rather than straight-up mythicism. Even alpha-historicist Bart Ehrman concedes that we can hardly discern anything – words, events, associations – of the “actual” Jesus once we peel off all the tendentious tales told in later decades.
Correction to 1st line of my #19:
Pierce R. Butler@19,
I don’t think you present anything here that makes the “multiple Jesuses” position any more credible. I’ll leave people to read O’Neill’s piece, and the targets of his criticism, and make up their own minds. I think he shows quite clearly that Aron Ra simply doesn’t know the basic facts of the issue, and that Carrier’s “parallels” are as absurd as practically everything Carrier says on any subjct (sure, O’Neill has a high opinion of himself, but it’s nothing to Carrier’s fervent belief in his own unparalleled polymathic genius). BTW, the “literal meaning” of “Yeshua” is entirely irrelevant, although I think you’re trying to suggest otherwise without actually saying so – it was a very common Jewish name.
KG @ # @ 21: I don’t think you present anything here that makes the “multiple Jesuses” position any more credible.
Nor have you shown anything that undermines it.
I suspect we all agree that a great deal of the Jesus story includes, ah, embellishments, so the “composite character” argument turns into merely a matter of degree for all but strict fundamentalists (who then must confront a confusion of contradictions).
If we move to discredit arguments on ad hominem grounds, we won’t have much left on any side (so maybe my agnosticism wins?). Carrier & RM Price & Ehrman, et alia, at least can claim reasonable fluency in the languages necessary for this debate, which leaves practically all the rest of us out in the cold.
And I have to disagree about the “literal meaning” of “Yeshua” – if it meant something neutral like “rock” or “flower”, that would make it irrelevant, but a name meaning “savior” would add a lot of punch to a (mostly illiterate and uncritical) population hungry for metaphorical succor. Even the current US president has surely gained just that little crucial edge by having a name synonymous with “overcome” or “prevail” in our supposedly more semantically sophisticated times.
The fact that there’s simply no evidence for it would be sufficient under Occam’s razor, which IIRC was originally propounded in the form: “do not multiply entities unnecessarily”. If anyone could identify two or more distinct individuals who could have contributed to the composite character it would be worth taking seriously, but no-one has done so credibly. And one of these individuals would have to be the one whose brother Paul recounts meeting, and who had become the object of veneration by that brother, and by Peter, who knew him – so whatever narrative elements from elsewhere might have adhered to him, it would make little sense to deny that he was the historical Jesus. If you’re going to deny the significance of that evidence, it makes more sense to go for straight mythicism, but first, you have to provide good reasons to dismiss it. As it is, O’Neill is right to say multi-Jesusism it is “not so much a coherent argument and more of an emotional defence mechanism.”
Well at least you’ve now come out and made the argument explicit, but it’s a remarkably weak one, when everyone would have known multiple Yeshuas.
BTW, Kipp Davis, who’s an (atheist) expert on the Dead Sea Scrolls, thinks Carrier doesn’t understand Hebrew or Aramaic to any adequate level.
KG @ # 23: … there’s simply no evidence for it …
Oh? Find a simpler explanation for, e.g., the divergent genealogies for Jesus in Matthew & Luke. Re-read the Price/Carrier list of parallels between JC & J son o’ Ananias. Try to refute Burton Mack’s attribution of words placed in Jesus’s mouth to contemporary popular philosophies.
The necessity of multiplying entities already exists, and the assertion that having multiple narrators accounts for all the anomalies, with none of them having brought in other stories while compiling second-hand tales (at the very best), in itself makes heavy demands on our credulity.
… everyone would have known multiple Yeshuas.
Everyone “in the context of 1st century Judaea”, I s’poze. Many then considered names magical, and magical thinking can cherry-pick downright miraculously.
Hadn’t heard about Kipp Davis or his opinions on Carrier (and prefer to eschew YouTube). Can’t recall RC hanging a mythicist argument on anything but the Greek of the NT, but I concur that claim, if true, weakens his cred significantly. My point remains: us amateurs can’t settle any of these arguments.
Pierce R. Butler@24
Oh come on. No-one outside fundamentalists takes either seriously – they are both made up, probably deriving from a common source as they do overlap quite a bit. It’s extremely unlikely ordinary Jews of that time kept long genealogies any more than most people do today. There were doctrinal reasons for insisting Jesus was a descendant of David, and if you claim that, skeptics are going to demand a genealogy.
Srsly? Reread O’Neill’s deconstruction of the list of supposed parallels.
Again, srsly? Consider how many fake quotations have been put in the mouths of Einstein and Churchill. Are they evidence for multiple Einsteins or Churchills?
Well that is the context in which the Jesusists began spreading their claims about him, and the only one that makes any sense in the context of your #23.
Yeah, but any scholar who doesn’t know Aramaic or Hebrew is severely handcapped in understanding the Greek of the NT, because so much of it refers back to stuff originally written in those languages. Davis gives actual examples of Carrier’s misinterpretations, when I have time I’ll go back and find them.
Indeed, and in such cases it makes sense to provisionally accept the view of the great majority of relevant experts, in this case including atheists, agnostics and observant Jews as well as Christians who one might reasonably discount – which is that there was a specific individual it makes sense to identify as the historical Jesus, and about whom there are at least some things it can reasonably be said we know: came from Nazareth in Galilee, baptised by John the Baptist, went around preaching, tellling parables and faith-healing, came to Jerusalem with some followers for Passover, made some sort of disturbance, got on the wrong side of the Roman authorities, got crucified.
KG @ # 25 – we’ve started repeating ourselves here, a clue that wrapping-up time has arrived.
… they are both made up…
Not, I have to say, a strong argument for historicism in general. If we were to play Thomas Jefferson and cut out the “made up” sections from the Jesus story, we’d have very little left.
Reread O’Neill’s deconstruction …
Suddenly O’Neill demands exactitude – the two Jesuses came to town for different festivals, one gotten beaten up while the other got whipped, etc.This disproves oral &/or literary borrowings?
Fake quotations don’t mean much, but what little weight they have does not lean towards historicism.
… the context in which the Jesusists began spreading their claims …
1st century CE, of course. Jews, yes, to some degree – but how much? Paul set himself to recruiting Gentiles to the cult, and created a lot of the surviving literature from the first generation thereof; he probably didn’t run across a lot of Yeshuas (Yeshuaim?) in that demographic. How much a name meaning “rescuer” meant in that time & place, we can’t say with much certainty, but I place it at non-zero in the context of a salvation cult.
… any scholar who doesn’t know Aramaic or Hebrew is severely handcapped in understanding the Greek of the NT…
Agreed entirely. How much that applies to R. Carrier remains unproven, but if the non-historicist argument depended entirely on him, we’d have to debate about something else. Does it apply to RM Price or GA Wells? I truly dunno.
… it makes sense to provisionally accept the view of the great majority of relevant experts…
It also makes sense to discount a significant share of arguments from institutional pressure/inertia, though I couldn’t begin to put a number on it. Perhaps as a USAnian who has lived through successful, fact-based revisionism of the histories of Cristobal Colon, John Smith & Pocahontas, the “winning” of the West, the “Lost Cause”, Watson & Crick’s “breakthrough”, the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, etc, etc, I have too strong a taste for debunking official narratives, but I consider distrust of “established” legends convenient to major authorities/short on actual evidence often worthwhile.
Pierce R. Butler@26
This suggests you have no idea how historians – particularly historians of the ancient world – treat source texts. What they don’t do is say: “Oh, this bit’s obviously made up – chuck the thing away”, or even: “Most of this is probably made up – chuck the thing away”. They try to work out. by attending to the language, the historical context, other sources, what is actually phyically possible, etc., what is probably true, what may be true, what is unlikely to be true, what just can’t be true. That’s what those studying the sources concerning Jesus have done, and the great majority of them, including as I’ve said atheists, agnostics and observant Jews – none of whom have any ideological reason to believe there was a historical Jesus – have concluded that it’s very probable that there was a single person who can be so identified, and a relatively small but important set of biographical items concerning him that are also very probably true.
Your “etc.” is doing a fantastic amount of work there – I hope you’re paying it extra!
Why on earth would Gentiles place any importance in the “literal meaning” of a Jewish name? You’re really reaching here! In the context where the “literal meaning” of the name was known, there would have been lots of Yeshuas, in the context where where weren’t lots of Yeshuas, no-one would be likely to care what the name’s “literal meaning” was.
As to Wells and Price – Wells has actually changed his position and accepts there was a historical Jesus. R. M. Price I think does have the relevant knowledge. Don’t know about R.G. Price. (One imagines future historians debating whether “Robert Price” had a real earthly existence, or was a mythical or composite figure!)
Says every climate change denialist and anti-vaxxer. Academics with any ambition want to advance original/minority positions as long as there’s something going for them.
KG @ # 27: … historians of the ancient world … don’t … say: “Oh, this bit’s obviously made up – chuck the thing away”…
Nor do they misread others’ arguments so clumsily.
… none of whom have any ideological reason to believe there was a historical Jesus …
Ideological reasons, not so much. Institutional, however …
… “etc.” is doing a fantastic amount of work there – I hope you’re paying it extra!
Nice quip; poor evasion of my examples of how O’Neill’s analysis would apply much better to courtroom evidence than to literary construction.
Why on earth would Gentiles place any importance in the “literal meaning” of a Jewish name?
If the evangelists spreading the story used a literal translation, their spiels would include the word “savior” (& its synonyms) a lot.
… Wells has actually changed his position and accepts there was a historical Jesus.
Which I acknowledged @ # 11 above. Alas, I haven’t read that one of his books yet. While on the topic of Wells, I’d like to remind you that his mythicism apparently has roots in pre-christian legends of an embodiment of Truth (Goodness, Innocence, more) suffering martyrdom in the unworthy human world, made more gripping by description as a specific, nitty-gritty case. Mythicism has since focused more on detective work about those details, leaving to Wells* the themes he saw as motivating the overall lessons and appeal of said myth (and it is quite a deep fable – Philip K. Dick did wonders with it in Valis, f’rinstance).
… future historians debating whether “Robert Price” had a real earthly existence, or was a mythical or composite figure!)
Would you feel the slightest surprise at running across a rant somewhere in which someone less erudite than those of us here did conflate the mythicist Prices?
Says every climate change denialist and anti-vaxxer.
And fact-checker debunking an urban legend, and folklorist, and poll-taker facing an issue not specifically covered by a survey, and anyone else considering an observed but not-explicitly-measured phenomenon. While you’re at it, don’t forget to fault me for commenting in English, a language used by innumerable hucksters and hustlers.
Academics with any ambition want to advance original/minority positions …
The ambitious ones want to advance positions that will bring them recognition without embarrassment; association with R. Carrier and denunciation by established leaders in their field(s) won’t help much with career-building (in the absence of Tel Dan Stele-level major new evidence, and this issue in particular demands painstaking, unglamorous detail, with damn little in the way of zingers). Agnosticism in general fails to provide the emotionally satisfactory drama and conclusiveness that a clear positive or negative answer delivers, and the “originality” of Jesus-mythicism has had the juice sucked out of it long ago.
*And his less-scholarly followers such as Freke & Gandy.