M. David Litwa’s new book How the Gospels Became History: Jesus and Mediterranean Myths (Yale 2019) argues the authors of the Gospels “deliberately shaped myths about Jesus into historical discourse to maximize their believability for ancient audiences.” In other words, they made their myths look like histories, because that’s what the pagans around them were doing. I agree. Indeed, opposite what we’d expect if Jesus really existed, this tendency grew over time. Mark writes his biography like a fable; then Matthew tries to make Mark’s story look as historical as the Pentateuch; Luke then tried to make it look like the more rational pagan histories; and John finally essentially damns all who don’t believe what he’s telling them is literally true.

This is of course a dangerous thesis to defend, as it admits the stories of Jesus the Gospels encapsulate began as myths and were only later dressed up as histories. So to avoid ridicule and exile from his peers, it’s vitally important that Litwa affirm to them that he isn’t arguing Jesus began as a myth; just the stories about him, see. So he throws into his book a rather irrelevant digression attacking mythicism—in which he reveals he doesn’t understand what mythicists argue, nor knows any of the evidence for it they’ve published under peer review. In other words, once again a historicist denounces mythicism, after having read nothing about it, and getting little of it right. This is not how to argue for historicity.

Here I won’t review the rest of Litwa’s book. I’m sympathetic to its project, but whether his defense of it holds up will take me a more careful and thorough read to really say. Here I will only address his digression on the unrelated thesis of whether Jesus himself existed (pp. 22-45), which is not directly relevant to his book’s thesis (that could stand as correct whether Jesus existed or not).

Bad Start

Litwa starts by summarizing the deranged, un-peer-reviewed pop market book by Maurice Casey, which very much did not engage with any peer reviewed Jesus mythicism at all, and consisted mostly of ignorant, bizarre rants and name calling. A serious scholar would notice this, and thus stay well clear of even mentioning it. Nothing more need be said on the point here (see the above link). Litwa at least dismisses Casey as only targeting amateurs, not serious scholars, which Litwa says he will now address; but then goes on about Bauer, a scholar whose work and perspective is so obsolete I can no more fathom why he’d be singled out for any mention today than, say, Couchoud or Drews. This is not modern peer reviewed theory. So why address it?

After burning several pages to no use on those subjects, Litwa turns his attention to Brodie, the rare example of a believing Christian (indeed, a Catholic) who, still today, concludes there was no historical Jesus, that he was a mythic symbol from the start. For which he has been silenced and exiled by the Catholic Church. But though Brodie published a personal memoir that described why he came to these conclusions, he never really published a peer reviewed study of those conclusions. He was shut up before he could. So he’s not the best advocate to turn to as an exemplar. It’s only the worse that, since his case appeared only in the context of a memoir not a thesis, it’s actually not a very well vetted or well-thought-out thesis. His doubt about Paul’s historicity is implausible, for example, and his doubts about Jesus incomplete in their formulation. I think his case needed to be honed under the critical eye of a more direct peer review to reach a more refined and defensible state. So I won’t have much to disagree with Litwa here.

Indeed, I especially agree with Litwa when he says:

Brodie is right about many things. He is right, for instance, to question whether the evangelists offer anything like reliable historiography. Their knowledge of Palestinian geography might be like Vergil’s knowledge of Trojan geography (that is, based on reports, not experience). Their social memory generated about Jesus does not necessarily mean that there was a man behind the memory. Their use of oral tradition is often presumed and unverifiable (since all oral knowledge has perished). Furthermore, Brodie is right that the description of Jesus in early Jewish and Roman authors does not provide any more information than what is in the gospels. (It is likely that these writers depended on the gospels.)

Amen. But then Litwa commits the standard cognitive error of only assessing the weak examples Brodie gives for the derivation of the stories of Jesus from the Septuagint, and then assuming that assessment holds equally for all of Brodie’s strong examples as well. This is a common fallacy among historicists, and is a very unsound way to do history. Consequently, Litwa simply doesn’t even address Brodie here. He merely straw mans him and moves on. (Just as many do to Dennis MacDonald’s work; and, ironically, I’m sure many will do to Litwa’s work.)

That’s half of all the pages Litwa devotes to the subject, and still he has not actually offered any critique of mythicism as a thesis. He merely repeats truisms, such as that it “might” be that there is some historical Jesus material amidst all the myth, which we all agree with. But that doesn’t get us to “there probably is” some such material. The confusion of “maybe” with “probably” is perhaps the historicist’s most common fallacy. Even worse when they incorrectly attribute that fallacy to mythicism, which does not in fact depend on it: we are content to say much of the Gospel material’s historicity is unknown. Which means: we don’t know it’s ahistorical; we also don’t know it’s historical. Unlike historicists, we simply admit we can’t do anything with evidence like that. You cannot argue to the known from the unknown.

The remaining ten pages Litwa then directs at me.

Worse End

Of the ten pages devoted to me, Litwa literally burns the first two (a fifth of his critique) to developing the bizarre thesis that I believe I experienced a literal demonic attack by Yahweh and this has driven me on a crusade to destroy the historicity of Jesus. It’s hard to even describe this without laughing; or worrying about Litwa’s sanity. But from a strictly analytical perspective, what has any of this to do with the evidence for or against the historicity of Jesus? Beats me.

Litwa seems to want to contrive some sort of weird genetic fallacy, which, as best as I can reconstruct it, is supposed to go something like this: “Carrier thinks he battled a demon [no, I don’t; neither then nor now]; he thinks that demon was Yawheh [no, I don’t; neither then nor now]; therefore he thinks Christianity [!?] is demonic [um, only a Christian would think that Yahweh was a Christian]; therefore he is blindly attacking Christianity by disingenuously challenging the historicity of Jesus,” when, in actual fact, I have adamantly and repeatedly told people you cannot do this. The non-existence of Jesus is simply not a usable argument against Christianity itself. The irony is that Litwa had just gotten done pointing out that just such a genetic fallacy is invalid (p. 24). Yet, he burns two whole pages making such an invalid argument here (pp. 33-35). Face, meet palm.

The really strange thing is that to construct this bizarre, totally bonkers argument, Litwa clearly researched and read so as to quote mine my books not on the historicity of Jesus. Yet when it comes to critiquing my books on the historicity of Jesus, he fails to even correctly describe their contents, and acts like I didn’t argue several things there that in fact I did. He thus basically just skimmed, and that incompetently, the one book he is actually supposed to be critiquing. There is almost no better proof of the bankruptcy of the current consensus than that historicists act like this when defending it.

Litwa concludes this portion of his case with “Carrier’s thinking is rationalistic, black and white, and seemingly untouched by developments in postmodern philosophy over the past thirty years.” He gives no examples of any of these things being the case. Anyone who knows my work in philosophy and history will be scrunching their eyebrows by now. Litwa’s description of it could hardly be more inaccurate. And as he presents zero evidence for it, his case is also wholly unempirical. Welcome to how inept Christian historians have become.

Finally Something Relevant?

Litwa reveals his incompetent failure to actually read my book On the Historicity of Jesus (despite claiming to have) right out of the gate with the statement that “Carrier does not completely deny Jesus’s existence” (which is true) because “In fact, he concedes that there is a one in three ‘prior probability’ that Jesus existed.” Um. No. It’s a one in three posterior probability. The mere prior probability is not the probability of a thing at all. It’s the probability before taking into account all the evidence. When I conclude there is indeed a one in three chance Jesus existed after all, that’s after considering all the evidence. Which is the posterior, not the prior. This is so carefully explained in the book (especially in chapters 1, 6, and 12) that there is no honest excuse for Litwa to make this mistake. It reveals he made no honest effort to even pay attention to my argument.

Continuing to prove this, Litwa then says “Carrier frequently appeals to what is called ‘the hero pattern’.” That phrase exists nowhere in my book (so why did Litwa put it in quotes?). Perhaps he meant my frequent reference to hero-types, but we can tell he doesn’t mean that because he thinks I only reference one, the Rank-Raglan mythotype. In fact, I describe numerous hero-types Jesus belongs to. Litwa seems completely unaware of this (or else deliberately conceals it from his readers). Okay. So he’s completely off the rails already. But what, at least, does he say about the Rank-Raglan type and my use of it?

Litwa resorts to the standard fallacy that ‘differences refute all similarities’—as if he has never read any postmodern philosophy of the last thirty years—or indeed studied any critical literary theory at all. Worse, I specifically rebut that fallacy in OHJ. What is his response to my rebuttal? He gives none. He evidently didn’t even read it, and thus doesn’t know I refuted him already. He also doesn’t address the one actual argument I base my use of the Rank-Raglan set on: that if it were not an indicative set (if, as Litwa avers, it was simply a phantom of random features only in the mind of modern scholars), the set should contain a considerable number of historical persons. Yet despite having over a dozen members, it contains not even one. That cannot be by random chance—except at such a low probability as to render the premise untenable; adopting it to defend historicity would thus render historicity even more improbable. Because in any valid argument, all probabilities in the premises commute to the conclusion.

It is so rare for any member of the Rank-Raglan set to be a historical person, that this is highly indicative that any member in that set we choose at random will not be historical. So that Jesus belongs to the set is a problem; one you can’t just handwave away. That problem would remain even if we didn’t have so large and clear a set to work from, as I’ve already explained before. It just allows us to make the point clearer: Jesus is one of the most rapidly and heavily mythologized people in history. And that rarely happened to real people. Not never happened; but so rarely that we need evidence Jesus is one of the exceptions; we cannot rest on a presumption that he was.

I’ve already addressed Litwa’s mistake as it already occurred in the hands of James McGrath, so I needn’t replicate that material here. I similarly dismantled the version attempted by David Marshall, who repeats yet more fallacies shared by Litwa—such as trying to deny Jesus was raised by one or more foster parents (in fact he was: Joseph), and many like errors, not paying attention to how many Rank-Raglan heroes also had similar variations as Jesus, necessitating the more careful definitions of the criteria I employed, which Litwa completely ignores.

Differences always exist among instantiations of tropes and mythotypes, and anyone who doesn’t know that is simply not competent to be discussing this. Jesus also belongs to many other myth-heavy sets; Rank-Raglan is only useful because it has the most members, and thus is the most reliable set to work from. And the math doesn’t lie; so handwaving won’t escape the statistical fact that you cannot explain why no historical persons fit the Rank-Raglan scale, other than by admitting that fitting it is indicative of a person more likely being mythical than historical. And if you want to argue the reverse, that fitting it makes a character more likely historical than mythical, you have to demonstrate that with data. Not unempirical armchair assertions. Litwa prefers unempirical armchair assertions. Which renders him incapable of arriving at any sound judgment regarding historical facts.

To illustrate how brazenly Litwa didn’t read the book he claims to be responding to, his only example of an actual mismatch in criteria in my construction of the Rank-Raglan set is this:

Claimed similarities are sometimes forced (the fudge factor). Carrier avers, for instance, that though Jesus failed to marry a princess, he took the church as his bride. Yet here we are on the level of Christian allegory, at second remove from the gospel stories.

Here is what I actually say about this in OHJ (emphasis added):

The only two elements Jesus does not score are the last I’ve listed: we cannot establish (21) that his parents were originally imagined as related or (22) that he ever married (much less the daughter of his predecessor). However, the peculiar absence of that last element practically advertises the fact that he does merit that element allegorically: from the earliest time Jesus was imagined to have taken the ‘church’ as his bride, which was indeed understood to be the ‘daughter’ of his predecessor (the nation of Israel). So in all honesty we could assign him that element as well. But as it is not ‘literal’ I will leave his score at twenty. Nevertheless, even then he is nearly the highest scoring person in history, next only to Oedipus; and if we granted that last element, he would be tied even with him for highest score.

So Litwa appears to be lying to his readers: he falsely implies I scored this element for Jesus, when I explicitly said I did not count this, and for exactly the reasons Litwa himself gives; and he does not tell his readers I outright said it was only allegorically true, exactly as Litwa himself says. So Litwa doesn’t address my actual scoring of Jesus; and he misleads his readers into thinking he did not just completely agree with me and thus actually has no argument here.

I think if any scholar did that to him he would be outraged. So why, then, is this what he did? Rather than address any of my actual arguments, he fabricated an argument I didn’t make, and made several assertions about it that are in fact what I also said, and then, though in fact he literally agrees with everything I said, he leads his readers to believe he caught me in an error—the error, evidently, of completely agreeing with Litwa. We are in bizarro land here. Why is this how Litwa chooses to argue? What is going on here?

The bottom line is, if Litwa wants to argue the prior probability that someone as mythologized as Jesus was actually historical is above 1 in 3, he needs to show us a set of people, whose total number comes to more than a handful, who are as mythologized as Jesus, and more than 1 in 3 of whom were genuinely historical. That is the only way Litwa can challenge my prior probability. That is the only legitimate, logically valid, empirically sound way to do it. So why do historicists never do it? Why won’t they do the actual, required, empirical work here? I would suggest it’s because they can’t: because there is no such set. So their presumption that there is is simply fantasy, not empirical history. But hey, it’s easy to prove me wrong, if indeed I am. Just present the evidence. Do the damned work. (And, please, do it correctly: see Jesus and the Problem of the Fraudulent Reference Class and What about the Rank-Raglan Mythotype?)

Historicists Love the Possibiliter Fallacy

In Proving History (index) I describe the fallacy of possibiliter ergo probabiliter, “possibly, therefore probably.” As I mentioned above, it’s one of the most common fallacies historicists rely on. We see this again when Litwa admits I’m right about the meaning of 1 Corinthians 2:8 (a concession that will horrify most historicists), then immediately leans on a possibiliter fallacy to rescue historicity from that concession:

Paul says that the “rulers of this age” crucified “the Lord of glory” (1 Cor. 2:8), and these rulers are probably daimonic agents. One should not exclude the view, however, that we have a double entendre: “rulers” refers to both human and daimonic persons.

We don’t exclude that view, Dr. Litwa. We can allow it an equal probability: there is a 50/50 chance Paul is or is not including human agents in this remark. On the a fortiori side of my argument, for the entire collection of material in the Epistles that could refer to Jesus’s “deeds in life” I assign a 75% probability if he existed and a 100% probability if he did not, but this would not much change if we extracted this single passage and assigned it a straight 50/50 odds (meaning, it’s just as likely to be what Paul would write, whether Jesus really existed or not). Nevertheless, a 75/100 odds would represent why this, when placed in conjunction with the whole of Paul’s letters, is evidence against and not for historicity: this is a really weird way to refer to the Roman authorities executing Jesus, the same Roman authorities whom Paul argues never did anything but God’s will (in Romans 13). That Paul never clearly references Romans ever doing the deed is weird. And weird means, by definition, infrequent. And infrequent means, by definition, improbable. Anyone who does not admit this is not being logical.

Moreover, Paul cannot simply mean the Romans here, as the Romans did not possess the esoteric cosmic knowledge Paul attributes to the killers of Jesus: had they known its magical effects on the universe (defeating the power of death for all humankind), they would not have killed Jesus. That can’t describe the Romans. They neither knew nor believed such blood magic nonsense. And they hardly would have stopped a holy sacrifice the performance of which would save them from death—if they really knew it would, the very knowledge Paul says the killers of Jesus did indeed possess. That’s simply not the Romans. It can only mean the demons, as Litwa admits. They are the only ones who want to thwart God’s plan to defeat death. The Romans had no such interest; nor would have had, even if they knew and believed all this magical stuff about the cosmos.

So to get “Romans” out of 1 Corinthians 2:8 requires adding an elaborate supposition not in evidence: that Paul also thought these demons somehow fooled the Romans into doing their bidding unwittingly. That’s not in the text. Nor anywhere in the 20,000 words Paul wrote. Yes, he could have imagined that. But without evidence he did, you cannot assert that he did. You cannot invent a fact out of a speculation. It’s speculation in, speculation out. If to get Romans out of this passage you have to speculate an elaborate thesis nowhere in evidence, in order to defend the historicity of Jesus, then the historicity of Jesus is itself only a speculation. For everything in the premises commutes to the conclusion. If a conclusion relies on a speculated premise, the conclusion can only be a speculation, too.

It would be different if we didn’t need this passage to defend historicity. If we could leave it at “it’s 50/50” which speculation holds, and therefore “it’s 50/50” which conclusion follows, and these exhaust all possible conclusions, then all’s fine. But that leaves us at “it’s 50/50 whether Jesus existed on this evidence alone,” and that doesn’t get us to “Jesus probably existed.” It only gets us to “we don’t know if he did.” It would similarly be different if we had evidence Paul would or did think this way. In other words, if it wasn’t merely a speculation; or if we could prove Paul would always have thought this regardless of the historicity of Jesus; or any such line of reasoning. But all that requires evidence. Not speculation. You have to do the work. Like pretty much all historicists, Litwa doesn’t believe in doing the work.

The bottom line is: Litwa has no evidence that Paul thought Romans or Jews or even humans were in any way the killers of Jesus. Yet he won’t admit this. Instead, he invents speculations, and pretends he just presented facts. This is why I doubt Jesus existed. Because if he did, this is not how historians would be defending it.

Not Reading Is Irresponsible

Litwa repeatedly shows he did not read the very book he claims to be rebutting. That is unprofessional and irresponsible as a scholar. Another example of this appears when Litwa complains that “how the daimons actually affixed a spiritual being to a spiritual cross and how this spiritual being could die is not explained.” False. It is explained repeatedly and in detail in OHJ (as I’ve pointed out before). Why does he not know that? Why does he not know what that explanation is? Why does he have no response to that explanation? Why did he lie to his readers by claiming an explanation that is extensively covered in OHJ is not in OHJ at all? Why does the historicity of Jesus have to be defended with lies?

Similarly, Litwa says such silly things as “Trees do not grow in the sky,” somehow not knowing, in fact, they did: the entire Garden of Eden was located in the Third Heaven, according to the very scheme endorsed by Paul in his report of a visit there in 2 Corinthians 12. As Hebrews explains, everything on earth has a counterpart in the heavens. And as the Ascension of Isaiah explicitly states, there is also a counterpart to everthing on earth in the firmament. Everything would include trees, thrones, castles, soil—everything. I again have an entire section on this in OHJ, with abundant evidence and citations. Why does Litwa not know this? There is only one possible explanation: he wasn’t being truthful when implying he read my book.

“Likewise,” Litwa says, “crosses do not hover in the heavens,” evidently unaware of all the ancient reports of entire armies and thrones and gardens ‘hovering in the heavens’, “they are sunk in the soil,” evidently unaware of all the soil ancient Jews believed could be found in many levels of the heavens, particularly in the firmament, the zone of all corruption. “Men of flesh dwell on earth,” Litwa insists. Except when they don’t: many a human sorcerer and sage could fly (or even, like Isaiah or Elijah, be carried by angels or other creatures), and Philo reports the firmament was full of beings of mortal flesh residing at all levels.

Anyone who actually read OHJ, rather than lied about doing so, would know that the evidence establishes that even if Jesus died cosmically, he did so wearing a mortal body of flesh (Philippians 2). Not “a spiritual” body. That he had only before and after his incarnation. Not during. That’s the whole point: he had to wear one, so that he could be sacrificed, so he could atone eternally for all sins (Hebrews 9). Which means he was also killed physically, not “spiritually.” He was killed upon a stake, one of the copies of things in the heavens and the firmament that are found on the earth—as Hebrews explains, as the Ascension of Isaiah explains, and as abundant Jewish literature attests was widely believed. All as extensively explained, with cited and quoted evidence, in OHJ (Chapter 5, Element 38; especially in the context of Elements 34-37). Why does Litwa not know any of this?

Irresponsibly not reading the book he is critiquing leads Litwa to make statements that almost look like outright lies, such as when he says “Carrier at one point speculates that an earlier version of the text” of the Ascension of Isaiah “was available to Paul,” and then claims my “speculation is baseless—an attempt to down-date a text to serve an argument.” At no point do I use this speculation as a premise in any argument. To the contrary, I explicitly reject doing so, declaring unequivocally that “the earliest version in fact was probably composed around the very same time as the earliest canonical Gospels were being written,” and thus not ‘before Paul’ (pp. 36-37). There is no way Litwa can know what I said about this, and not know what I said about this—unless he only skimmed, and did not read, any argument I made about this. It also looks a lot like lying to claim my speculation “is baseless.” I give several arguments for it; that’s called a basis (pp. 47-48). Litwa offers no rebuttal, nor even mentions there is an argument to rebut. Yet I still point out, in the footnote there, that Paul and the Ascension might instead each be quoting a lost Apocalypse and not each other. Hence I acknowledge that the mere possibility Paul knew a version of the Ascension is too speculative to use as evidence. And so I don’t. Litwa falsely (whether dishonestly or incompetently) claims the opposite.

Similarly, Litwa claims that I “did not address any of Norelli’s arguments” for the “pocket gospel” depicting the Jews killing Jesus being an interpolation in the Ascension of Isaiah. That’s not actually true (see M. David Litwa, the Ascension of Isaiah, and the Problem of Incompetent Scholarship). As far as I can tell, the case I do make for it does counter Norelli’s. But since Litwa won’t tell us what my case was, or what Norelli’s was, or what in Norelli’s case my case doesn’t already answer, what use is there in Litwa even mentioning any of this? This is again irresponsible, lazy, and completely useless to everyone. Indeed Litwa is so inexplicably careless here that he claims “on earth…the angels crucify Christ” in this “pocket gospel,” when no such thing happens—which is precisely what contradicts the earlier text. Unlike what the angel tells Isaiah earlier on, the interpolated text unequivocally says “the children of Israel” were roused “against” Jesus, “not knowing who He was, and they delivered Him to the king and crucified Him.” How does Litwa not know what the very text he is talking about says? Or why it’s peculiar—after supposedly having read my list of all the things that are, in fact, peculiar about it?

It’s just all the more galling that Litwa doesn’t even notice (or admit?) that the impact I allow the Ascension of Isaiah to have on the probability of the historicity of Jesus is so minuscule as to essentially assign it no effect upon it (as I explain in my critique of Kamil Gregor’s similarly missing this obvious point; I have since explained it again, in response to Litwa subsequently saying many other completely false things about the Ascension of Isaiah). This is another strange but common thing historicists do: they ignore all the data I assign significant weight to (and thus actually derive my conclusion from), and instead obsessively focus on minor trivia (like what I say about the Ascension of Isaiah) that I allow to have almost no effect at all upon my actual conclusion. Why?

Confusion Reigns

Litwa then inexplicably says “Carrier repeatedly makes an appeal to James George Frazer’s category of ‘dying and rising gods’.” I never once mention Frazer, and never use his list of such gods or his criteria for them. Litwa also inexplicably says “Carrier leaves unexplained” how the Inanna myth could influence Christianity thousands of years later; in fact in OHJ I discuss that very issue several times, including its evident influence on second-temple Judaism, the continuance of the cult in Tyre right into the Roman era, Roman-era evidence of its associated resurrection myth of Tammuz, the evident influence of the Inanna myth on other resurrection cults demonstrably thriving in the Roman period, and much else besides (index, “Inanna” and “dying-and-rising gods (concept of)”).

Litwa then even more confusingly claims “the category” of dying and rising gods “is now defunct insofar as it designates a god strictly identified with the seasonal growth cycle,” evidently unaware of the extensive discussion in OHJ, with cited texts and scholarship, showing that those agricultural myths had by then been converted into personal salvation myths, in the form of the mystery religions that Christianity emulated in too many ways to be coincidental. How did Litwa miss literally my entire discussion of dying and rising gods, yet somehow know I discussed dying and rising gods?

It’s all the weirder when Litwa admits:

The chief point of similarity between Christ and these deities is not that they rise again but that they suffer. Their suffering is not just any suffering but the calamitous, shameful, even grotesque suffering that excites both wonder and pity.

This is literally identical to a point I make repeatedly in OHJ (pp. 115, 168, 186, 212). Why does Litwa not know that? Litwa also does not seem to have any coherent idea of how I even made use of the fact that a dying-and-rising personal-savior mytheme was all the rage precisely in the era and empire in which Christianity began. Where in any of my calculations does it even affect my assessed probability of the historicity of Jesus? What objection does Litwa actually have to my actual use of this data?

Even more confusingly, Litwa even agrees with me, quoting Jaime Alvar (whom I literally cite in OHJ, though his name came to be misspelled at some point in the editing process), declaring that:

Triumph over human destiny is made possible through divine suffering. Alvar observes, “That is why the [Greek] mysteries [rites performed in secret] needed divinities who had had some experience of something like the human condition, had themselves lived historically, so that they could function as models.”

As Alvar could explain to Litwa, not a single one of those suffering saviors actually existed historically. Alvar is literally giving Liwa the reason why they came to be historicized—and it’s the very same reason Jesus would be. And Litwa quotes this approvingly—evidently clueless to the fact that he’s making my case here, not rebutting it. Litwa weirdly does this again when he says “Carrier fails to note that ancient Romans never seemed to have questioned the existence of Romulus” and “Jews in antiquity apparently never denied that Daniel lived.” Yet Litwa admits Romulus and Daniel likely didn’t live. Somehow he doesn’t realize this actually verifies my point.

Litwa similarly inexplicably claims “few Mediterranean gods actually die; even fewer die and rise,” as if I did not in fact only list those gods for whom I could cite actual direct evidence of their deaths and resurrections in extant myths. I’ve since organized that evidence into a blog. And I do not include Attis among them in OHJ, despite Litwa implying I did; and contrary to Litwa accusing me of falsely claiming it, I cited evidence that Osiris did ascend to and rule from heaven (not the underworld) in elite mythology. Similarly, Litwa straw man’s my case by contrasting Jesus with Homer—completely ignoring the more apt parallels in John Frum, Ned Ludd, and Roswell that I actually used. No, Jesus is not that much like Homer. That’s an irrelevant observation. Do you know what is a relevant observation? How similar Jesus is to Ludd and Frum. So why does Litwa never address this, nor even mention it?

Likewise, Litwa tries to make much of the name of Jesus as evidence for historicity—yet never mentions or addresses what I said about that very same point (such as in Chapter 6 of OHJ); like, for example, that it is, in fact, suspicious to have God’s savior named “God’s savior.” In just the same fashion, Litwa argues “Paul…considered Jesus to be a real human being” because he said “Jesus was ‘born of woman’ and was ‘of the seed of David'” and so “He had a real human mother with a real human ancestor,” as if Litwa didn’t know I actually address these passages, extensively! He attempts no rebuttal to anything whatever I said about them. He simply pretends I never mentioned them. (Litwa also confuses here “real human” with “human on earth,” as if I didn’t extensively explain in OHJ why those are not synonymous.)

Litwa is supposed to be a competent and responsible scholar. He’s supposed to actually look at my evidence and sources, and address what I actually said, to know what I actually said, and the evidence I presented for it. He’s also supposed to acknowledge how many instantiations of a trope we need to indicate its popularity, and whether I met that standard—and indeed whether he ever has. So why didn’t he? Why did he make several completely ignorant, easily disprovable assertions? Why didn’t he, instead, check first?

It’s as if historians completely abandon all responsibility, all competence, everything their studies and degrees are supposed to have taught them to do, as soon as they have to defend the historicity of Jesus. Why?

Conclusion

Litwa wants Jesus to be special, because “His death” was uniquely “a conscious sacrifice, an act of substitution,” which has no relevance to what the dying-and-rising trope tells us or what use I make of it—every instantiation of which varies in details from every other; tropes exist in shared commonalities, not in the distinctions that make each instantiation of a trope unique. Christianity is a syncretism of pagan and Jewish salvation ideology; what does not come from one, comes from the other. And indeed this detail isn’t at all novel: Litwa is somehow completely ignorant of the fact that I document in OHJ the Roman mythology of devotio and Jewish martyrdom legends that already perfectly captured what the Jesus myth replicates in the idea of self-sacrifice (pp. 76, 209-14, 430-31).

There is nothing new in Christianity, a point Litwa in the end even concedes. And yet his desperate need to make Jesus special still cripples his abilities as a scholar. And I do not merely assert this; you have just seen a whole battery of evidence demonstrating it.

Litwa did not read my book and never responds to any of its actual arguments, even my arguments for the trivia he obsesses over—far less still my arguments for determining the actual probability of historicity, not a single one of which Litwa shows any knowledge of, or makes any response to. He just strings together an incoherent list of bizarre, confused ad hominems, genetic and possibiliter fallacies, littered with countless false statements about what is and is not in On the Historicity of Jesus. He never checks evidence, or even knows that it exists, even though I carefully document and cite it abundantly. And not even once does he present any evidence whatsoever that Jesus existed.

This is what passes for a defense of historicity.

Should anyone wonder why the more honest among us are starting to doubt it?

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