As promised Friday, here I shall reply to Ehrman’s longest reply to me to date (in Fuller Reply to Richard Carrier, mostly responding to my critique of his book). I won’t rehash the points I already addressed in my previous response (see Round One). Here I’ll just cut to the chase:

Was Pilate a Procurator?

Ehrman finally does what he should have done originally (take note of this trend: it confirms the entire point of my original critique), and asks an expert. But what he didn’t do was read the scholarship I pointed him to (my article, which references the most definitive literature on the point: in fact it is rather important to this whole debate and my subsequent remarks here that we read my paper’s section on what a procurator was in the time of Jesus).

The view that Claudius changed the title of Judaean governors from prefect to procurator has long since been refuted (most conclusively by the work of Fergus Millar; contrary to what Ehrman’s quotation might seem to suggest, the PIR his colleague translates the Latin of on this point is a modern source, not an ancient one, and thus represents an outdated scholarly assumption and not what anyone in antiquity actually said). For example, Herod the Great was appointed procurator of Syria, before Claudius was even born, and even Cicero attests the practice of prefects being simultaneously appointed procurators. The surviving evidence extensively confirms no province or district was ever governed by a procurator who was not also a prefect, at least to the end of the second century (as Millar and others document).

In the paper I linked to above I extensively document all of this, including the sources and scholarship establishing that (a) many prefects were simultaneously also procurators, well before Claudius, and that this was especially the case for major provincial prefects (as we know most conclusively for the prefect of Egypt, neighboring Judea, and I also list evidence the same was true of Pilate), and that (b) this has been known to modern specialists in Roman imperial administration for at least forty years.

In fact, procurator is not a government office, but a private one (it means business agent), and prefects were often simultaneously appointed imperial procurators so they could handle the private affairs of the emperor using the legal apparatus of state power (precisely through holding the prefecture). I discuss this at length, and reference the scholarship on it, in the article that I summarize on my blog (and link to above), to which I directed readers in my critical review of Ehrman. I would ask that Ehrman have his informant read that piece (the specific link I provide above; he only need read the relevant section of the academic article, which that link will take him to directly), and then relay what they say in reply. Notice what happens.

[Regardless, I think it’s fair to say this fact is too obscure a point to expect Ehrman to have gotten it right. So I’ve withdrawn it as a criticism.]

Did Ehrman Overlook Tacitus Scholarship?

When discussing his failure to mention that the mythicists had some scholarly support for their questioning of the passage on Christ in Tacitus, Ehrman misrepresents my argument in various ways. For example, he says:

Carrier says this is “crap,” “sloppy work,” and “irresponsible,” and indicates that if I had simply checked into the matter, I would see that I’m completely wrong.

First, I did not say he was completely wrong. In fact I said very much the opposite. Here is what I actually wrote (emphasis now added):

That the overall consensus of scholarship, myself included, sides with Ehrman on the conclusion is true (I am sure the passage is authentic and has not been relevantly altered), but that does not change the fact that readers are being seriously misled by Ehrman’s characterization of the matter. For him to claim that mythicists “just made this up” because it was convenient for them is false. But more alarming to me is the fact that this demonstrates that he didn’t even check. And again, if he didn’t check this, what else didn’t he check? This kind of sloppy work, the failure to check his facts, to do any basic research we should expect of a scholar, and consequently to misrepresent his opponents and their position, and misinform the public about the debate, is the same kind of crap we get from the bad mythicists.

Notice. I did not say he was completely wrong, but that he was mostly right, and was only misleading readers by giving the impression that mythicists were on their own here. I also did not mean that this particular incident makes the book crap. To the contrary, if it were only a few cases like this I would barely make an issue of it. Rather, as you can see from the quote above I was saying this kind of thing, repeated throughout the book, is the same crap Ehrman himself calls out mythicists for. In other words, I am saying it is the number of cases like this that made his work sloppy. Not just this instance. Because just one instance wouldn’t (nor even two).

I ended every section of my review with similar remarks, explaining why I was presenting each example as one instance of a pervading trend. In fact earlier on I said:

[O]ne or two mistakes like this would be excusable. We all make them. And we can’t all know everything. But my point is that this is an example of a pervasive number of similar errors throughout the book…

Ehrman now makes it seem like I was saying just this one Tacitus oversight makes his work “sloppy” and the same “crap” he convicts the bad mythicists of (and yet he, too, made his point about them by just selecting a few examples, just as I did). That was not my point at all. My point was the same as his: we find so many things like this, that we must dismiss their work as unreliable. Ehrman mischaracterizes my argument in order to avoid it, turning it instead into just a few nitpicks, which if that were an acceptable defense, he would have to accept it from the mythicists he dismisses, too.

On the charge of irresponsibility, this is what I actually said (emphases now added):

This is important, because part of Ehrman’s argument is that mythicists are defying all established scholarship in suggesting this is an interpolation, so the fact that there is a lot of established scholarship supporting them undermines Ehrman’s argument and makes him look irresponsible.

In other words, his argument depends on there being no scholarly basis for the mythicists’ doubt of the passage. This is why his new defense doesn’t address my point. Ehrman says now, “my point is that I was not trying to make a statement about the history of Tacitus scholarship; I was stating what scholars today think.” This I would credit as a fair statement (assuming, again, that he checked), but it’s not what he says in the book (nor does he now mention whether Benario’s subsequent surveys document anyone rebutting the scholarship he summarized on this passage before; just because the topic didn’t come up in later years doesn’t mean it has been universally rejected, or even rebutted, a fallacious kind of inference that typifies Ehrman’s continual shortcomings in logic). In fact, if all Ehrman meant were that no current Tacitus expert doubts the passage, then his book’s argument doesn’t hold up. He would have to change that argument to make this new premise work.

It must also be noted that Ehrman still doesn’t admit that he tars the competence of mythicists when he tells his readers (and regardless of what he meant, what his readers will take him to mean is the issue: because it is that that I have to constantly correct and therefore makes the book bad) that no competent expert would ever agree with them and that they are the only ones coming up with these ideas. But if serious qualified experts had the same notions, that seriously alters the entire impression of the matter. It’s not a crazy idea coming out of left field anymore. It’s just wrong. And the difference is huge. This should be particularly clear to someone who acts like such criticisms are personal attacks and unfair. Ehrman made his opponents look crazier and less competent than they are. That is much more of an unfair personal attack than what Ehrman is putting up with from me (since unlike him, I am accurately representing what he said). That he doesn’t even see this plank in his own eye while complaining about the splinter in ours is ironic coming from an expert on Jesus.

But more importantly, this change in the point (from “no scholar says” to “no scholar today says”) also significantly changes how Ehrman must argue: now he can’t say the mythicists are making this up and have no scholarly support, but he must argue instead that though there are published scholarly arguments for their conclusion, they have been rejected, which requires him to show that they have been (that no one has since published on it, pro or con, does not mean the issue is dead or that no living scholar is at least agnostic on the issue), or else that they have been because of x, y, and z (whatever the arguments are that lead scholars not to be convinced by the previous work challenging the passage; which would require Ehrman to actually find out what those are–in other words, it would require him to do his job).

It is for these reasons that this book sucks. Ehrman has to make excuses for repeatedly saying misleading things, and for not having checked to confirm the things he claims. I am not convinced Ehrman even knows why most scholars are convinced the Tacitus passage is authentic. But I wouldn’t care about that. All he had to say was that few scholars accept the notion that the passage is inauthentic in any way. That would be a fair enough point. Instead he gave the impression that no expert would ever think that, that only mythicists came up with it. And again, do not mistake this for a one-off goof. This is typical of how Ehrman treats the mythicists; I only gave representative examples of each kind of error. And that was my review’s central point.

Of course, a thorough investigation would require more, such as actually examining the reasons for and against accepting the passage and arriving at a conclusion therefrom. Ehrman might have legitimately avoided that labor by saying what I would say (and do say), that I welcome anyone making that case in a new peer reviewed article, but until then I have to side with the broadest contemporary consensus of experts where I myself see no good reason to reject it. This would at least be honest. Instead he made it look like mythicists have no support from published scholarship and are the only ones thinking these things. And it’s that that is the problem.

Are There Dying and Rising Gods?

Ehrman argues:

It is true that Osiris “comes back” to earth to work with his son Horus … Literally, he came “from Hades.” But this is not a resurrection of his body. His body is still dead. He himself is down in Hades, and can come back up to make an appearance on earth on occasion. This is not like Jesus coming back from the dead, in his body; it is like Samuel in the story of the Witch of Endor, where King Saul brings his shade back to the world of the living temporarily (1 Samuel 28). How do we know Osiris is not raised physically? His body is still a corpse, in a tomb.

Of course the same is most likely true of Jesus (as I and several scholars have argued: see my Empty Tomb FAQ; even conservative scholar N.T. Wright has suggested the possibility), and obviously this is in fact how Jesus was originally believed to have appeared (in visions, not a walking reanimated corpse), so there is no clear difference from the Osiris case even as Ehrman describes it.

But even granting the difference, this is precisely the kind of distinction that isn’t relevant to the point: Osiris is a dead god who still “lives again” and visits and converses with the living. Like all the gods that do this, they do it in their divine resurrection bodies, which have replaced their flesh and blood corpses. This is explicitly stated in the sources for many gods, such as Hercules (see Empty Tomb, p. 137); and many Jews believed the same thing about their own resurrection (and Paul appears to say exactly that in 1 Cor. 15:35-49, declaring that the body that dies is not the body that rises; Josephus describes a similar body-exchange theory as apparently a common view of resurrection among Jews, and we have many examples of both Jews and Christians advocating it: see Empty Tomb, pp. 109-13, 136-37). This is not like the “witch of endor,” precisely because these are gods, and gods have divine bodies. That’s what makes them gods (and not just impotent spirits). The Jewish view of resurrection was essentially the same view, only extended to humans, who would all become like gods. (A view that actually came from the Zoroastrians, and thus is not uniquely Jewish: see Not the Impossible Faith, chapter 3.)

Insofar as even the first Christians, or certainly later ones, believed Jesus rose from the dead in the same body that died, that would be an element of syncretism with the Jewish belief in corpse reanimation (held by many but not all Jews), or even an adaptation of other pagan views of gods that experience the same kind of resurrection (most clearly, Zalmoxis and Inanna, and perhaps Inanna’s consort Tammuz, i.e. Adonis, since as her consort in the same myth, his celebrated resurrection is not likely to have substantially differed from hers, we just don’t have the portion of the text that describes it, only external references to it being part of the same cult’s myth). Even if the later Christian idea did not come from these pagan same-body resurrection myths, a pagan body-exchange resurrection (returning to earth after their deaths in an immortal glorious resurrection body, as Romulus does, for example) combined with a literalist Jewish resurrection still gets you the version of dying-and-rising god that we meet with, for example, in the Gospel of John. But that’s still just a variant of the same mytheme: a god who dies and is then celebrated as having risen again, in a more glorious body than they once had. That’s why Osiris is said to have returned to life and been recreated, the exact terms for resurrection, as even Ehrman admits Plutarch freely uses to describe what happened to him.

[Update: It should also be noted that Ehrman isn’t telling the truth about Osiris or Plutarch. The physical resurrection of Osiris’s corpse is explicitly described in Egyptian pre-Christian pyramid inscriptions (I quote them, and cite other pre-Christian texts on other such gods as well, in OHJ, pp. 168-73). And Plutarch says the belief that Osiris went to Hades was false. And he goes on to explain the truth was his death and resurrection occurs in outer space, and never involves a visit to Hades, and definitely involved coming back to life in a new superior body, in which he ascends to a higher realm to rule from above, just like would be said of Jesus. And Plutarch says this death and resurrection concept was told for many other gods of his day.]

On all of this take note: Ehrman says his views are the standard in the field, but in defense of the claim he still only names one advocate (Smith). In the link above, in support of my view, I name eight. And in my chapter on resurrection bodies in The Empty Tomb I cite more, including abundant primary evidence. So you decide who to follow on this point.

Did Ehrman Fail to Mention that Some Sources Attest a Christian Belief That Jesus Died a Century Before Pilate?

Yes, he did. Ehrman doesn’t deny this. He simply claims that when he said “the view of all of our sources that deal with the matter at all” (on p. 251) he didn’t mean all of our sources that deal with the matter at all. (See a trend here?) Even if we believe Ehrman “knew” that all those sources existed and date Jesus as they do, and he just chose not to mention them (even though they are directly pertinent to the hypothesis Wells was arguing), because he was “only” referring to the sources he had previously enumerated (even though the Talmudic passages were one of those sources–see pp. 66-68–so his excuse doesn’t even hold up on his own internal logic), even granting all that (which I find hard to do), he still mislead his readers into thinking no such sources exist, and that Wells was just pulling this idea right out of nowhere. Which kind of thing happens repeatedly throughout his book. And that still makes his book an unreliable failure.

Ehrman also (again) deploys an argument in his reply that should have been in the book: that he discounts those sources on this point because they are late; which is in itself a fallacy, since late sources can preserve early tradition, and therefore you have to make an argument for why this is not occurring in this case. Indeed, that this was the belief of what appears to be (a) a pre-Pauline sect of Christianity (the Nazoreans still being Torah observant and having a name similar to what Christians were sometimes called in Paul’s time, if we are to trust Acts 24:5) and (b) the only sect of Christianity apparently known to the Babylonian Jews, argues against this being some recent novelty. Even the late existence of such a tradition is hard to explain on Ehrman’s theory of Jesus’ historicity (how could such a tradition have arisen?), and thus requires explanation, it can’t just be ignored. Ehrman would prefer to ignore it. Possibly he would even prefer you not to know of it.

Did Ehrman Tell Everyone the Romans Kept No Records That Would Have Been Relevant to Studying Jesus?

Yes. Once again, he even attempts to stand by this one, although contradicting himself…at one point saying he meant only that we shouldn’t expect such records to survive (precisely what I said he should have said in the book, but didn’t), and at another point saying that he does indeed deny “any indication that there ever were Roman records of anything” in Palestine. But his arguments here are an embarrassment of fallacies.

Ehrman now says that (at least in Egypt) such records existed and were kept (something he definitely does not tell his readers in his book), but “most of these are not in fact records of Roman officials, but made by indigenous Egyptian writers / scribes.” This is twice fallacious (even setting aside his strange assumption that “indigenous Egyptians” could not be Roman officials or in their employ): first, “most” is not “all” (so his point is moot…formally, we call this a non sequitur); second, what he doesn’t tell you is that even the private records are frequently the personal copies of government records (e.g. the tax receipts I once translated would be a private citizen’s copy of the very same receipt that would enter the government archives). Thus, the fact that we have only the copies, albeit made under official circumstances, often at the same time as the originals, is again moot to the point as to whether the government kept such records. Indeed, that private citizens sought and kept copies of state records precisely proves my point that Christians could have done this, too…had they wanted to, which requires explaining why they didn’t.

Ehrman then says he only meant that Romans kept no such records in Palestine. He doesn’t actually provide any evidence to back this claim, of course, and it’s obviously absurd, the kind of implausible armchair assertion I expect from Christian apologists. Obviously Romans kept the same records in every province that they kept in any.

There might not have been a record of Jesus’ birth at the time of his birth (that would depend on where he was really born and whether, instead, any state or local Jewish administration kept such records, e.g. Josephus implies having records of his own ancestry), but if he or his family ever paid Roman taxes, there would be records of that, and if his family was ever the subject of any Roman census at any time while Jesus was alive, there would be a record of that, and along with it a record of his birth, age, and family relations (Tertullian claimed such records existed, although he is unlikely to have really checked). And certainly, there would have been a record of Jesus’ trial, of Pilate’s ruling, of the execution, and any recorded witness affidavits. There would also be ancillary records, e.g., other trial records or official correspondence (akin to the letter of Claudius Lysias) discussing Christians and their tussles with the Jews or attempts to get them prosecuted in Roman courts, which would certainly have to mention the historical Jesus and information about him.

All we can say is what I myself said, that (as Ehrman correctly phrases it now, but not in his book) we have no reason to expect such records to survive. Although that requires admitting that no early Christians ever had any interest in preserving or using them.

In short, everything I said originally remains the case. Ehrman has no actual rebuttal.

Did Ehrman Libel Doherty?

Yes. Ehrman tries to completely reinterpret what he said on this point, but in this case the direct quotation of Ehrman I provided in my review conclusively rules out his entire attempt to claim to have said something else, so no further reply is needed from me. Just compare my quotation of Ehrman, with what Ehrman now wants you to think that meant, and no reasonable person will conclude with Ehrman on this one: Ehrman wrote “he fails to point out that not a single one of these scholars agrees with his overarching thesis” and now claims that that sentence meant “I am not denying that Doherty sometimes acknowledges that scholars disagree with him.” You do the math on that.

Ehrman’s comment about Doherty’s use of Morna Hooker in particular has already been rebutted by Godfrey  and Doherty, and I would add that reading what Doherty actually wrote in context, it’s obvious he in no way implied Hooker said Jesus became flesh in outer space; he quotes her on a different point altogether (that Jesus became what we are so that we may share in what he now is; a statement, by the way, I doubt Ehrman has any disagreement with). But even despite that, picking isolated quotations like this is moot anyway, because Ehrman stated a blanket generalization that Doherty never says something that in fact he frequently says–even explicitly about the whole issue of whether any scholar he cites agrees with his overall thesis (his introduction is quite clear about this, and covers all cases). Ehrman simply lies about this–or, again, is such a godawful writer he accidentally said the exact opposite of what he meant to say, and thus completely misrepresents Doherty and misinforms the reader.

Did Ehrman Screw Up His Citation of Pliny?

Here Ehrman agrees with everything I said and insists it was just a typo and he knew everything I said already (that he was referring to two completely separate letters, and he should in each case have said “a” letter in “book” 10 that contains all of Pliny’s Trajan correspondence and not have called both letters “letter” 10, and that neither letter connects the two contexts, only modern scholars do). But he still failed to say any of this to his readers (thus even his excuse does not rescue the book from the charge of misinforming the public and therefore being unreliable).

More importantly, I do not believe he’s telling the truth here. Because the wording in the book does not look even remotely like he knew that two different letters were being discussed, or that their connection was a scholarly inference and not something directly revealed in the context of “the letter” he twice references. I’ll just quote the relevant section in full [skipping only incidental material] and leave this one for you to decide (emphasis added):

…Pliny is best known for a series of letters that he wrote later in life to the Roman emperor, Trajan, seeking advice for governing his province. In particular, letter number 10 from the year 112 CE is important, as it is the one place in which Pliny appears to mention the existence of Jesus. The letter is not about Jesus himself; it is dealing with a political problem. In Pliny’s province a law had been passed making it illegal for people to gather together in social groups… The law applied to every social group, including fire brigades….and so villages were burning.

In his letter 10 to the emperor Pliny discusses the fire problem, and in that context he mentions another group that was illegally gathering together. As it turns out, it was the local community of Christians.

So you tell me. Is Ehrman now lying about what he actually thought when writing the above?

Conclusion

In the end Ehrman ducks behind the “it was just a pop book, you shouldn’t expect it to be all accurate and the like” defense. This requires no reply. The reader can judge for themselves whether that excuse only makes the whole matter worse. (Can you imagine him accepting that excuse from any of the mythicists he attacks?) He also tries to play the victim card and claim I violated my own principle of interpretive charity. But in fact I did not. I gave him the benefit of a doubt everywhere an innocent explanation was conceivable, exactly as my principle requires (for example, I assumed that when he wrote “Justin of Tiberius” for Justus of Tiberias on p. 50 that that was a mere typo). But my principle also states (exactly as he himself quotes it) that when no such interpretation is plausible, we ought to point that out, so the author can correct their error. Which is exactly what I did.

Thus, his attempt to twist a rule of interpretive charity into a monstrous absurdity doesn’t cut it, and only exposes how poor a grasp he has of logical reasoning. Authors don’t get to say the exact opposite of what they meant and then claim it is our responsibility to telepathically know that that is what happened. Authors don’t get to say things that clearly indicate they badly mishandled their sources, and then claim we are always to assume they never do that. Authors don’t get to say things that clearly indicate they didn’t check their facts, and then claim we are always to assume they nevertheless did. Indeed, as his own quote of me says, if you cannot reconcile a contradiction or error in my work, you should call me on it so I can correct myself. Well, I called him on it.

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