For the gist of this two-part series see the intro of Part I. That part covered the first of two videos spanning the 2018 debate between YouTubers Godless Engineer and Michael Jones. Here I dive into the second of those (you can watch them online: Part 1 and Part 2). In Part I I responded to 55 statements by Michael Jones that my patron hired me to comment on. Here I finish out the whole 99 with 44 more (presenting each as only a rough quote from the original audio, as best as could be heard).

This time the focus shifts more from Tacitus to Josephus. Spoiler: their debate never gets to any relevant evidence—like the Gospels or Epistles—except in the end when no time remained to debate them; and only to “mention” them as possibly containing evidence. Never is any actual evidence from them argued for. So the whole two hours was a waste of time. Not only did Jones burn all that time only defending indefensible extra-biblical evidence, he never once even addressed the reasons given for it being unusable. He was totally nonresponsive.

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Regarding the Testimonium of Josephus, Origen doesn’t mention it because again it can have no apologetic merit regarding his response to Celsus or trying to support his theology. It just basically mentions that Jesus existed and establishes facts Christians would have already said and what seems to be the skeptics at the time would have already accepted. (2.1-2)

This is false. I already covered why in Item 54 in Part I. But in short, Origen explicitly says he is looking for passages attesting Jesus and things about Jesus, or anything in the Gospels at all, to rebut the charge by Celsus that it’s all made-up and only advocated by Christians. The Testimonium affords abundant utility to Origen’s argument, in several specific, and several general respects. And even if our Testimonium has replaced a now-lost hostile passage (and there is zero evidence for this, so such a claim is special pleading anyway), Origen would be even more compelled to mention and address it, specifically to forestall his critics from using it against his case and thus supporting Celsus. It is therefore simply very improbable Origen would never mention Josephus mentioning Jesus. Therefore it is very improbable Josephus did.

Proving that point even more conclusively is the fact that Origen even tried to cite Josephus attesting to Jesus’s brother, indeed regarding an event never even recorded in the Bible, which should be even less relevant to Origen’s case against Celsus than Jones avers, so if Origen went out of his way to cite Josephus on that, he could not possibly have failed to cite Josephus on a far more direct and relevant passage than that. It just so happens that when Origen thinks he is citing Josephus on the James matter, he is in fact referencing Hegesippus, demonstrating he mistook which author said this (a kind of mistake I show Origen made more than once: see my peer-reviewed article on this in Hitler Homer Bible Christ).

So here we have Jones not even checking his sources, then confidently making a false claim, snowing his audience (if not also himself). This is the problem with amateurs. It’s also a common problem even with Christian apologists who are experts—but they have less of an excuse.

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Also, Pseudo-Hegesippus, who says all of the nice things that Josephus says, like he was like a wise man, he did these wonderful works, but doesn’t quote that he was the Christ. He is not working off of Eusebius he is working off of a Latin text. Eusebius is just focusing on the Greek, so he doesn’t actually make mention of Eusebius, or whatnot. (2.0-2)

Jones seems to be confused here. Again. “Pseudo-Hegesippus” is a Christianized Latin translation of the Jewish War of Josephus. It contains numerous liberalities and inaccuracies and inventions, and was composed by a Christian. The Testimonium Flavianum (or TF) that Jones is talking about here does not appear in the Jewish War. So its appearance in Pseudo-Hegesippus cannot be because he was just “translating” Josephus. Moreover, Pseudo-Hegesippus does not contain a word-for-word translation of the TF but a dispersed paraphrase of it, with several deletions and additions, and its parts out of order. The Christian Latinist producing this text took the passage from somewhere and cut it up and reworded it and reordered it amidst his own commentary and then inserted all that mess into his liberal translation of the War of Josephus.

We have examples of later Christian authors “softening” the line about Christ in the TF, so as to make the text appear more plausible from a Jewish author (see The End of the Arabic Testimonium). In other words, they were embarrassed by how bad the forgery was, and endeavored to “fix” it. That is not evidence any of the TF goes back to Josephus (contrary to Jones gullibly believing otherwise). But in fact, Jones isn’t actually reading Pseudo-Hegesippus, or the analysis, apparently, of any critical experts (rather than of gullible or shifty Christian apologists). As the actual expert Ken Olson has explained, Pseudo-Hegesippus does include the line about Christ, he just renders it in his own words and puts it in out of order, as he does much else in the TF.

For example, Pseudo-Hegesippus moves the material about Pilate farther up and rewords it all, and then several lines later he has Josephus say instead of “[Jesus] was the Christ and Pilate, because of an accusation made by the leading men among us, condemned him to the cross,” the quite different sentence “even the leading men of the synagogue who delivered [Jesus] up to death acknowledged him to be God.” Now, no way is that statement in Josephus. Yet Pseudo-Hegesippus is claiming it is. He has thus, in his loose manner of translating, simply transformed the awkward “he was the Christ” into “they admitted he was God.” Neither comes from the hand of Josephus. So none of the TF in Pseudo-Hegesippus can have either. Why doesn’t Jones know this?

By contrast, all the evidence against any of the TF coming from Josephus is far more numerous and substantial. Jones thus appears to be cherry picking a lousy piece of evidence, “reinterpreting” it circularly in the exact way he needs, ignoring all the evidence in his own source against him, and then pretending the resulting Frankenstein’s Monster he just invented can outweigh considerably greater and more solid evidence depending on no such convenient ignorances and reinterpretations at all. This is typical of Christian apologists. It’s even more typical of amateurs. But even amateurs could do better if they tried. Just compare Jones’s folly here with the far more skilled analysis of Roger Viklund, who though not relevantly degreed so far as I know, does have peer-reviewed publications in the field, and here explains everything above, with citations of experts, amply well.

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Jerome also cites the passage without it saying he was the Christ. He says “he was believed to be the Christ”, so there’s that as well. This passage when we take out the obvious Christian interpolations, this passage, the overwhelming majority of scholars accept that it is original. It uses phrases that are distinct to Josephus. (2.0-2)

Jones is not being truthful here. The “obvious Christian interpolations” are not limited to the difference between “he was” and “he was believed to be” the Christ, which is demonstrably a Christian “fix,” not a Josephan one. So it simply isn’t true that Jerome (or any subsequent repeater of the passage) has reproduced a plausible text of Josephus. And it is not at all true that “the overwhelming majority of scholars accept that” Jerome’s version is a translation of “the original.” In fact almost no scholars do, especially once you exclude Christian apologists.

The overwhelming majority of experts conclude either that the TF is wholly a forgery or existed in some very different form than any we have (including Jerome’s). Only a fringe minority still attempt to argue the TF was in Josephus as Jerome quotes it, and all of them stalwartly ignore all the evidence against them—which you can confirm yourself, so you know you can’t rely on their opinion (see Josephus on Jesus? Why You Can’t Cite Opinions Before 2014). Even those scholars who try to maintain some different TF was in the Antiquities than we have even in Jerome are special pleading—they have literally no evidence at all, and must rely on several implausible ad hoc suppositions. Whereas the scholars who admit it’s all fake, don’t. Only one side of this debate is using sound method.

There are also no phrases in the TF that are “distinct to Josephus” (rather than vocabulary and phraseology common to Josephus and many other authors). To the contrary, there are more words and phrases in the TF that are weird for Josephus, exactly the opposite of what Jones is snowing NonSequitur’s audience with. In fact, the TF shares more verbal similarities with the authorial style of Eusebius than Josephus, leading many experts to conclude Eusebius forged it. IMO, an even more likely culprit is Eusebius’s tutor (and previous possessor of the manuscripts in question), Pamphilus, who succeeded Origen in command of the same library Eusebius composed at. But either way, there is more evidence it wasn’t written by Josephus, than that it was.

And that’s not just in respect to vocabulary (and it is) but also, even more importantly, discourse style. Because forgers can easily ape some obvious stylisms of Josephus (so that can never be evidence against forgery), but won’t likely succeed in doing so perfectly (so they will still make many mistakes, exactly as the TF does), and they’ll rarely even think to replicate an author’s discourse-style at all (the way an author typically tells stories or relates facts), as the TF totally fails to do (and even more so in its imaginary “redacted” version some scholars want to claim authentic, thus soundly refuting any possibility that it was).

For all the above see, again, On the Historicity of Jesus (hereafter OHJ), Chapter 8.9, and Josephus on Jesus? Why You Can’t Cite Opinions Before 2014, and the works cited and linked therein.

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[The possibly authentic version of the TF] uses “a wise man,” and Christians probably wouldn’t have used this phrase because the word he uses for “wise” was not distinct in their vocabulary, it denotes some sort of worldly wisdom and they were against that, because they distinguish between a godly wisdom and a worldly wisdom. (2.0-2)

This is false. Eusebius himself calls Jesus by that exact epithet (“our Lord and Savior was a wise man,” Prophetic Eclogues 105.12), and often uses that phrase of others as well. Josephus never uses it except when speaking of ancient Biblical figures, Solomon and Daniel. You do the math. (Note the similar phrase “a wise man and prophet” appears in Josephus but only in a quotation of another author.)

To the contrary, a forger probably thought this sounded like something a Jew or Greek would say. It actually isn’t. Josephus would have explained what he meant—wise how, and who thought so? For Daniel and Solomon, it was a widely famous feature of their character, which Josephus always illustrates with stories. He’d have done the same here. That he didn’t is how we know he didn’t write this.

Again, amateurs don’t check these things. Then they tell audiences falsehoods as if they were confident, known facts that they checked. This is why you shouldn’t have amateurs doing these debates. Even on the other side; no matter how in good faith they operate—after all, how could Godless Engineer know this obscure claim Jones just made is false? Whereas now that an expert has exposed him, you certainly can’t trust anything Jones says. By now, here and throughout Part I, we’ve seen time and again Jones confidently asserts falsehoods as if they were facts he checked—to the point of even being a modus operandi.

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And [the TF] uses the phrase “those that loved him.” As Robert Van Voorst and Edwin Yamauchi have noted, this is typical Josephen style. As John Myers says, “It’s not exactly a useful apologetic tool when addressing pagans, or useful polemic tool for Christology controversies among Christians.” There is no reason for any early Christian to cite this passage because no one doubted that Jesus existed at this time, we have no direct evidence of that. So, I hardly see why that would even matter. (2.0-2)

Both claims are false.

First, As Ken Olson has pointed out, there is no fathomable reason why Van Voorst (or Yamauchi who might simply be relying on Van Voorst) would say this was in Josephan style. Indeed, “Van Voorst’s claim that the sentence is characteristically Josephan is unusual in scholarship on the issue and is not discussed further or footnoted.” To the contrary, “Most commentators have found the fact that it is not clearly stated what [Jesus’s] adherents ceased to do, but leaves the reader to infer it from context, is unusual in Josephus.” Indeed.

“Those that loved him” is actually not a phrase but a single word, agapêsantes (the word “him” is not in the Greek), which is egregiously common and thus not distinctive of Josephus at all. The actual phrase, which makes an idiom—the sort of thing that would be indicative of an author’s style—is “those that loved him from the first” (hoi to prôton agapêsantes). Never appears in Josephus. So how is it “Josephan style”? Connecting agapêsantes, in any form, with any form of ouk epausanto, “did not stop,” also never occurs in Josephus. The mere use of ouk epausanto appears in Josephus. But guess who also uses it a lot? Eusebius. Again it’s actually common across countless authors.

Note how it is precisely Jones’s amateurism that disqualifies him from being able to discern his cited authorities made an error and misinformed him as to a phrase being distinctively Josephan. He just gullibly cites them, doing no due diligence to fact-check that what they said is correct. Meanwhile, Godless Engineer certainly can’t run various multi-stem searches of the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae to test the claim by; as he’d confess, not even at all, but even had he known how, he couldn’t do it in a live debate. Nor even could I. This is why amateurs should not be live-debating things like this.

Meanwhile the second part of what Jones said just repeats something he already said, which I’ve already noted is false. Christians would not cite it to prove Jesus existed, but to prove Jews acknowledged many things about him, that their stories about him were not myths, and so on; the very same reason Origen cites Josephus attesting John the Baptist, and tries to cite Josephus attesting James the brother of Jesus. Which in fact by Jones’s reasoning Origen had even less reason to cite Josephus on. Ergo, he certainly would have discussed the TF—had it been then in Josephus.

Once again I’d like to call attention to the methodological point here. Jones is asserting a generalization (about how Christians would behave) not only on a basis of no particular examples of it (the exact opposite of how generalizations should be formed), but in direct contradiction to evidence he himself mentions in this debate (the behavior of Origen with regard to Josephan attestations of John the Baptist and James). In other words, the only test ever run of his theory, falsified it. And yet here we are. Please, everyone, learn how to test generalizations—and actually do so—before cockily asserting them.

I should also reiterate another methodological point I made last time: Jones frequently fails to grasp the logical distinction between an argument against attestation and an argument against authenticity. If we didn’t have Origen—whose silence does produce strong evidence against the authenticity of the TF even alone, but damn near conclusively when conjoined with all the other evidence against its authenticity that Jones keeps ignoring—we would still have no attestation of the TF before Eusebius. That would, in that case, merely be an argument that we cannot assert authenticity on such a basis (not that we can assert inauthenticity on such a basis).

Yes, we observe that it just so happens no one else but Origen had particular reason to mention the TF; but they still don’t mention it. If no one mentions it, we can’t claim to know it was there—other than by an argument from prior probability, e.g. the rarity of interpolation, but that gets nixed when other evidence comes to bear against a passage, as has happened for the TF, abundantly (see my further explication of this in Point 95, and, for example, my mathematical demonstration of it for the widely-conceded anti-Semitic interpolation in 1 Thessalonians 2 in OHJ, pp. 566-69, esp. n. 73). Again, this is not ad hoc. We’re not just making this up. There’s lots of evidence against the TF. Jones simply ignores it all.

And finally, Jones doesn’t get the cumulative point, either. We might be able to explain each individual silence, but the probability of a continuing silence over dozens of texts, becomes increasingly improbable—the point then is not that we found extant texts had no occasion to mention it, but that no occasion to mention it ever arose. How likely is that? And remember, the reasons for doing so are not singularly to establish historicity, so Jones is arguing fallaciously when pretending that’s the only occasion someone would bring it up. I already explained the mathematical problem for Jones here in respect to a different instance last time. Here this point is weaker, IMO—if we didn’t have the slam dunk example of Origen, I’d say only a weak argument from silence remains, but one still strong enough to warrant at least a modicum of suspicion, and that still adds to a cumulative case if other evidence converges on the same conclusion.

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[The TF] fits what Tacitus tells us; they both seem to be independent sources regarding the actual person of Jesus. And again [to dismiss them] is huge special pleading for these passages. This is the same way we establish other historical persons. Especially in Judea from that time. Same thing with someone like Hannibal for example. All of our sources post date his existence and they’re running from the Romans side, for example. (2.0-2)

Everything Jones just said about Hannibal is false. Thus so is his claim that “this is the same way” we establish others’ historicity (follow that link for a thorough demonstration of that point).

The rest of Jones’s statement is illogical. The extant Tacitus passage only mentions Pilate executing Christ, and only in the one line that abundant evidence suggests he didn’t write. That this minimal datum “agrees” with what every expert admits to be a heavily Christian-redacted passage in Josephus is therefore 100% expected on the theory that both were wholly fabricated. So such an agreement cannot be evidence either passage is authentic. It’s simply exactly what Christians would add to either text. So there isn’t any logical sense to Jones’s argument here. It’s as if Jones is illogically using the premise “forgeries with the same goals will say the same things” and from that fact concluding “therefore they aren’t forgeries.” Huh?

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We could just say that the Romans made up Hannibal to give themselves credit in the Mediterranean Sea and show why they are the mightiest power. Look who they defeated. This amazing general and they were able to destroy him. Maybe they just made him up for their uses or whatnot. No historian uses that kind of criteria. It’s only when we get to Christ Mythicists, who want to talk about the historical Jesus, that we start applying this special set of circumstances regarding historical investigations. (2.2-8)

Nope. We can’t say the Romans made up Hannibal. The evidence forbids any such claim. It’s that good. Yet no comparable evidence exists for Jesus. That’s the problem. So Jones is relying on completely false claims as an excuse to ignore the actual argument of the other side. This is the worst kind of straw man fallacy: he is fabricating an argument no mythicist makes, so as to knock that down, then claiming to have thereby refuted mythicism. Welcome to Christian apologetics. And the folly of amateurs.

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When we do historical investigations it’s not just about explanatory power and scope. It’s about explanatory power, scope, it has to be the least ad hoc, has to be plausible and has to provide illumination. I’m not going to argue that you don’t have explanatory scope, or power. I’m going to argue that your theory is implausible, it is not the least ad hoc and it doesn’t provide a lot of illumination. (2.8)

Jones never justifies any of these assertions.

Of course all theories must rely on ad hoc suppositions, especially in ancient history, owing to the great paucity and difficulties of the evidence. So Jones correctly means (I hope) that better theories will need fewer of them. But Jones simply is wrong to claim historicity is the one that does. It actually requires more of them. Remember, “suppositions” that are proven with evidence are not ad hoc, they are in fact facts. Mythicists rely on no suppositions that are not proven (and thus facts) or not also required by historicicts, either literally or in some comparable but transformed version (see my discussion of Kamil Gregor on this point). Jones tends to ignore all the evidence mythicists give for their premises, and thus falsely declares those premises ad hoc. Nice try. Doesn’t work.

In actual fact Mythicism is less ad hoc than historicism. We don’t need to “make up” excuses to deny evidence or force the interpretations we need: we get our results from a straightforward reading of the facts. When we say an item of evidence doesn’t exist, it doesn’t exist; when we say an item of evidence does not increase the likelihood Jesus existed, that evidence does not increase the likelihood Jesus existed; when we say an item of evidence is, in its literary and historical context, ambiguous, it is, in its literary and historical context, ambiguous; when we say the sum of evidence is for (or against) a conclusion, the sum of evidence is in fact for (or against) that conclusion. It is historicists who need to invent countless facts not in evidence, in order to “explain away” or “reinterpret” the facts as they are. We see this with Jones relying on the completely made up notion of a “different” version of the TF being in Josephus that is attested literally nowhere. You can test the rest by simply comparing all the excuses Jones fabricates to dodge obvious facts and logic, with the actual arguments for mythicism in the peer-reviewed literature, such as in On the Historicity of Jesus. This is indeed the entire thesis of Lataster’s peer-reviewed critique of historicity in Questioning the Historicity of Jesus.

There is also nothing implausible about the mythicist thesis—to the contrary, when we look at the actual context in which Christianity arose, everything mythicists are saying is well precedented or based on common, well-established facts of the time (for starters, see Chs. 4 and 5 of OHJ and the abridged summary in Ch. 12.3). Of course, many mundane theories of historicity are also plausible; which is why I found the odds to be as much as 1 in 3 that a historical Jesus nevertheless existed (see OHJ, Ch. 12). So this debate cannot be decided on plausibility.

Finally, Mythicism actually illuminates a great deal more than historicity. Mythicism provides a much more intelligible explanation of why Christians East of the Roman Empire “placed” Jesus in history a hundred years earlier than Christians within the Roman Empire. Mythicism provides a much more intelligible explanation of all the very strange things Paul does and doesn’t say, or ever has to respond to in the Epistles. Mythicism provides a much more intelligible explanation of why Jesus never appears in any mundane recollection by anyone, but always and only ever in theological and mythological material, and later rationalizations thereof. And so on.

I should also add a minor methodological point here. Jones seems to have messed up a common argument form, called Argument to the Best Explanation (see Proving History, pp. 100-103). He has counted the same criterion twice: what he calls “providing illumination” is actually a restatement of the criterion of scope (a good theory will explain more evidence than a bad one). He correctly lists the other three criteria: explanatory power (a good theory will make the evidence more likely than a bad one), plausibility (a good theory should look more reasonable or typical in context than a bad one), and ad hocness (a good theory will require fewer ad hoc suppositions). The fifth is supposed to be not “providing illumination,” but explanatory fitness: a good theory will contradict fewer established facts or conclusions than a bad theory will. And lo, it is Jones who has relied on contradicting a lot of facts (such as with his false claims about the stylistics of the TF, the evidence for Hannibal, and so on).

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2 Peter is a huge sort of imposing interpretation on that very vague statement about cleverly devised myth. Is he talking about pagan myth? Is he talking about myths regarding Jesus’s majesty? They don’t ever actually specifically say historical person. And the overwhelming number of scholars do not do that. (2.8-10)

We’ve already been over this. Contrary to whatever dogmas Christian theologians or apologists have insisted upon, to anyone who actually reads 2 Peter it is very clear who he is targeting: not pagans, but fellow Christians, who deny anyone physically saw Jesus. Thus the letter invents a fake testimony to having physically seen Jesus. That the forger chose the Transfiguration scene to do this with is incidental, as you can clearly see the argument he is combating is far broader than that, and is against Christians, and thus obviously not people who denied that God bestowed glory and sonship on Jesus. They were instead denying how that fact was known. In other words, Christians claiming stories of hanging out with Jesus like that are cleverly devised myths, that such facts were only really known through mystical visions and inspired readings of scripture. Exactly as Paul repeatedly said. The entire Epistle of 2 Peter was written to rebut and condemn exactly that view and no other.

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Regarding Josephus, you basically talked about how it is possible. It’s not about possibility, it is about probability. And about Josephus’s break in flow of the work, that is what he does, he breaks his flow, all the time. (2.8-10)

This is false. There is no comparable “break in flow” anywhere in any work of Josephus. Jones is conflating the TF with digressions, every single one of which Josephus introduces as such and explains. The TF just abruptly appears in a list of reasons the Jews went to war, despite having nothing whatsoever to do with why the Jews went to war, and without introduction or explanation, precisely where it does not belong and makes no sense. That is literally not how Josephus ever writes.

There is a great deal more about the TF itself that is not at all how Josephus writes (see, again, Josephus on Jesus?). But its botched contextualization is also. The TF immediately follows a sad calamity befalling the Jews, and is immediately followed by introducing “another sad calamity” befalling “the Jews” as a whole that occurred “around the same time” as what was just described. But the TF describes no calamities befalling the Jews (not even in any modern ad hoc made-up version of it either). The following passage thus clearly originally followed the preceding passage. The TF’s appearance in between fits neither the preceding context, nor the ensuing context. And no explanation is given for why it does that. Thus, Josephus cannot have written it. And this is one of a dozen separate items of evidence converging on the same conclusion. No evidence converges on Jones’s.

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This very passage in Josephus we’re not even sure if it has a very good chronological order. He puts it in there because it would have had a significant event during the reign of Pilate. For example, John Barclay notes that in Antiquities book 2, the whole is not well structured and gives the appearance of a patchwork. Seth Shwartz says of book 20 that it’s a historical patchwork, and then of course in the book, A Companion to Josephus, they say books 18 to 20 seem to be more of a patchwork. The reason is Josephus breaks his flow all the time. That’s simply what he does, that’s how he wrote. (2.8-10)

Jones is here either lying, or not very bright, or didn’t read the works he claims to. I’ll let you choose. I’m quite certain these references to patchwork structure have nothing whatsoever to do with the botched contextualization of the TF, and any intelligent person who actually read the relevant scholarship would know that.

In A Companion to Josephus, Seth Schwartz only means by “patchwork” that Josephus took his stories from disparate sources and patched them together into his narrative—not that he did so in illogical or inexplicable order (p. 40). Indeed Schwartz’s chapter is entirely and solely about Josephus’s sources, not his narrative structure. And yet he had just gotten done explaining how careful Josephus was in specifying the chronological order of events in his narrative in the Antiquities (even when placing them out of order, he takes care to specify their overall relation in time), by specific contrast with the Jewish War for example, which often gathered events topically (pp. 37-39), directly contrary to Jones “confidently” telling the NonSequitur audience that the Antiquities does not have “a very good chronological order.”

So to me this looks a lot like the all-too-common, and totally dishonest Christian apologetic tactic of quote-mining. Maybe Jones has been gullibly duped by another apologist who did the dirty deed, but that would be yet another reason why no amateur should be live-debating this—experts will actually check these things themselves (like I just did), not trust bullet points assembled by shady apologists.

I suspect the same will happen if we ever find what John Barclay actually said. Schwartz, mind you, never discusses any instance of Josephus “breaking his flow.” So where does Jones get the idea that this is a thing Josephus does? Barclay is the only other authority he names, though Jones only cites him as claiming Book 2 of the Antiquities was a “patchwork” (which is already of dubious relevance, as that book covers Biblical, hence largely mythical, history, and thus is in no way analogous to the real, proper history being done in book 20). But did Barclay even say this? And did he actually mean what Schwartz did and not what Jones claims? Beats me. I could find no work in which Barclay even discusses Book 2 of the Antiquities. He is known rather for his work on Against Apion. Not citing your sources—a common problem with amateurs. How could Godless Engineer rebut a snow job like this, much less in the middle of a live debate? Even I couldn’t find Jones’s source to fact-check it, and I spent half an hour trying.

An expert wouldn’t pull a dishonest quote-mining stunt like Jones here did. An expert would research what was typical about Josephan digressions. For example, I just did a rudimentary search for relevant literature and immediately found Peter Perry’s The Rhetoric of Digressions, which has a whole section on digressions in Josephus, which cites further scholarship on their stylistic features and functions (pp. 152ff.). Here we learn “scholars agree” that Josephus will include off-topic digressions in his narratives, but that they are always “essential to his rhetorical goals.” He even cites Barclay declaring a Josephan digression “is both admitted and justified, indicating Josephus’s control of his discourse.” In other words, exactly what the TF does not do. Perry goes on to give many examples; all of which look nothing akin to the TF, to such an extent as to actually prove the TF un-Josephan even in its placement and contextualization.

This is what happens when you approach a question as an objective expert would—rather than as a shady, amateurish apologist.

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If you look at this exact passage on Pilate it starts out with Pilate arriving, Pilate introduces these Imperial images into the temple, he caves in to the Jews, takes the stuff back to Caesarea, then he takes money from the temple, then the Testimonium Flavianum appears, then Josephus jumps to an event about some follower from Isis in Rome and not directly involving Pilate, then he jumps to an account about [an expulsion from Rome of] Jewish scoundrels not directly involving Pilate, then he goes back to Pilate with the Samaritans and then Pilate gets kicked out by the Emperor. Josephus is a patchwork. If you just read Josephus straight through you can clearly see that. (2.8-10)

This is a non sequitur. Everything Jones listed is in a meaningful order and sticks to the same theme that is Josephus’s entire stated purpose for this section. So there is no “patchwork” in the sense Jones means. This is a deliberate and intentional sequence, every item in which serves the purpose stated for the whole: to list the events that led the Jews to war.

In that context, this sub-section Jones just surveyed covers, chronologically, the items answering that description that occurred around the tenure of Pilate. That’s why the events in Rome are also put there: they occurred in the year 19 (as we know from Tacitus in Annals 2.85), immediately before Pilate took over the administration of Judea. Hence Josephus has changed the apparent sequence for rhetorical effect. Hence he says the two events in Rome took place “about the same time” as Pilate’s abuses upon taking power. And again the TF can’t be meant by this, because it describes no calamity “befalling the Jews” (at all, much less “around that time,”), much less one that would explain their trajectory toward war. Whereas everything else Jones lists, does.

Indeed, we can see here exactly what Josephan digressions look like:

• First, his digression about the scandal in Isis cult is written in Josephan discourse style, exactly unlike the TF. Take a look at it: had Josephus written the TF, it would be as intelligible and detailed and clear in its causal narrative (but it’s not, not even at all: see OHJ, Ch. 8.9 and my discussion of discourse style in Josephus on Jesus). To imagine Josephus would devote that length and detail of explanation to such a frivolous matter in religious affairs in Rome, while so cursorily digressing on the Jesus incident in Judea—which actually involves Pilate and Jewish religion—as to make no intelligible sense to anyone not already a Christian versed in the Gospels, is essentially impossible. Only a very gullible fellow would think that’s likely.
• Second, Josephus introduces this digression, explaining that it is a digression, exactly unlike the TF. Josephus starts it with “I will now first take notice of the wicked attempt about the temple of Isis, and will then give an account of the Jewish affairs,” then after doing that, he concludes, “I now return to the relation of what happened about this time to the Jews at Rome, as I formerly told you I would.” Sound like the TF at all? Nope.
• Third, the digression actually relates rhetorically to Josephus’s overall theme: he had just told stories of Pilate defiling the Jewish temple, sordid tales involving money and sacrilege, then tells a story of Romans defiling their own temple, a sordid tale involving money and sacrilege; in which Tiberius does the just thing and destroys the temple and punishes the wrondoers who defiled it, just as Josephus is about to show Tiberius will do to Pilate for the same reason; likewise, the larger narrative (of which this whole swift list of disasters around Pilate’s tenure is only part) is about why the Jews went to war resulting in the destruction of their temple, and though Josephus does not want to explicitly say it’s for the same reason, he is here rhetorically creating such a parallel that would sate his Roman audience. It is thus directly on theme, and in multiple ways—all in precisely the way the TF is not.
• Fourth, the Isis catastrophe in Rome is paired with a Jewish catastrophe in Rome with many similar features, before returning to the Pilate narrative. Thus a chiasmus is created: we get two stories about Pilate’s abuses of the temple in Judea; then two stories about Tiberius exercizing religious justice in Rome; then two stories about Pilate back in Judea—his final atrocity, and his removal for it by agents of Tiberius. The TF does not fit into this rhetorical structure or its messaging anywhere. Thus, we know it wasn’t there.
• Finally, in this chiasmus of three pairs of stories, Josephus starts with Pilate and the temple sacrilege, which features the importance of Jewish religious law and the Jews’ devotion to it, then moves to the money scandal in which Pilate shows his viciousness resorting to military violence, also featuring Jewish devotion to religious law; then we get the two-part digression in Rome, with one pagan scandal and one Jewish scandal, both prominently featuring the importance of religious law and devotion to it, and both featuring responding actions by Tiberius that are causally explained; then we get the Samaritan massacre which again has many similar features to all the previous stories in this sequence (e.g. the importance of religious law and Jewish devotion to it), and Pilate’s punishment for it (Tiberius is only denied the chance to effect justice upon him, Josephus tells us, by dying before Pilate reached Rome for trial).
• Indeed, that third unit of two stories links to the first unit of two stories through the role of Pilate’s savage violence, and links to the second unit of two stories through the role of religious deceivers leading the people astray and furthering the causal sequence leading to war, and the role of Tiberian justice. Even the Isis story connects to the war theme, as it also foreshadows the Roman destruction of the Jewish temple in result of its own keepers’ religious failings.

If you want to understand what a Josephan text looks like, how he contextualizes digressions and rhetorically orders his narratives, you need to actually read Josephus. Jones apparently never did, and has no idea how bizarre and unlike Josephus the TF is, and how completely inexplicable it is even as a digression, as it fits none of the features typical of Josephan digressions, both in general, and even more so here. Honestly, no informed, rational, honest person can conclude from all this that Josephus wrote it.

But we also can’t expect Godless Engineer to know all this either. Nor, even if he did, does a live debate afford time to explain it all. Jones is thus allowed to snow the audience with false claims about what was typical for Josephus in placing and contextualizing digressions. By now you can clearly see, a lay audience simply can’t trust anything Jones says is true. But there is no way for a lay audience to know that.

68

Regarding your thing about [the Gospels representing] distinct communities of Christians…I mean, if you just read the four Gospels they’re all basically promoting the same theology. I don’t know of any scholars that say there were this many communities in them. Even if there was, that is not going to threaten the passages and tasks of Josephus. Which are more than enough to establish at least a historical person of Josephus.  (2.1-15)

Here Jones again conflates several different arguments made by Godless Engineer.

First, contrary to Jones’s confident assertion that no scholars say there were so many diverse sects, I am pretty sure every scholar alive today agrees there were. In fact what Godless Engineer said about this is an established, mainstream conclusion across the entire field: substantial sectarian divisions are already attested in Paul; the canonical Gospels reflect themselves different sectarian views (Mark is a Paulinist, Matthew is a Judaizer, Luke is a unificationist, and John represents quite divergent views from all three); and extra-canonical literature reveals countless other sects were composing Gospels or literature of their own in the same overall period (from the 50s to the 150s), and even more schisms continued thereafter. So Jones is again just making shit up, and getting away with it because no expert was on hand to expose him. And so the audience gets snowed. This is why no one should be sponsoring live debates between amateurs on this subject.

Second, G.E. made no argument connecting the sectarianism of the Gospels or of Christianity with the TF in Josephus. G.E. merely argued that mythmaking in service to doctrine is an established feature of the sources, and that is not conducive to finding historical facts within them. So Jones’s last argument here is a non sequitur. And its implied, separate argument, that the TF is alone enough to establish the historicity of Jesus, is so absurd it barely merits a reply. Jones cannot establish its independence of the Gospels or Christian informants relying on the Gospels. It thus has zero value for determining historicity even if it were entirely authentic, which it plainly is not.

Even Bart Ehrman agrees with this. Hell, even the considerably more gullible Robert Van Voorst (whose work is already unusable here as it predates 2014) admits that, ultimately, “we cannot tell” where Josephus got his information and it is only “perhaps” independent (Jesus Outside the New Testament, p. 103). You can’t get to “is independent” from “is perhaps independent.” That’s the fallacy of possibiliter ergo probabiliter, “possibly therefore probably” (Proving History, pp. 26-29). This is literally exactly the opposite of being “more than enough to establish” Jesus existed. By no logical means can the TF even slightly increase the probability that Jesus existed anywhere outside of Christian mythology.

69

Again I’m not going to defend the validity of the Gospels today, or the New Testament itself. My case can be made from the hostile sources in and of themselves. Just on the mere existence of a historical person behind the Christian movement. For example Rudolf Bultmann, a famous New Testament scholar, believed the Gospels were myths. He agreed with you on that, and he said it’s absolutely insane to suggest there was [no?] historical person behind this, so you can accept some of the stuff you said and still believe in an historical person. For the sake of this argument, I am only arguing for a historical Jesus, not for the reliability of the Gospels. I would challenge you to apply those same criteria to Alexander the Great or whatnot. Trying to argue that scholars are reading through Christian lenses is just to call them biased and that’s a distraction from the actual evidence they bring up. (2.10-15)

First, Bultmann was dead for almost fifty years before the first peer-reviewed case against historicity appeared. So his opinion cannot be credited as informed. Citing the obsolete, undefended assertions of long-dead scholars is a popular pastime of Christian apologists. Real experts know better than to do that. Only the latest scholarship is applicable here.

Second, we have applied the same criteria to “Alexander the Great and whatnot” (see Okay, So What about the Historicity of Spartacus?). And that exercise has clearly demonstrated how doubtable Jesus is and why. The evidence for Alexander is vast, early, and of high quality. The evidence for Jesus is not. Jones kept making this completely uninformed, factually false statement in the debate (again and again and again), which only illustrates how much of an ignorant amateur he is, and how utterly incompetent he is at debating this subject. So why is he on someone else’s YouTube show debating it? YouTubers, please, stop.

The irony here is that the only possible evidence for the historicity of Jesus is in the Gospels and the Epistles, as those are the only demonstrably primary sources we have. And Jones has just declared the Gospels useless (at least for the sake of argument). I agree; but I do at least think one needs to see that debated before understanding why (hence see Chapter 10 in On the Historicity of Jesus along with Chapter 5 of Proving History), because the unusability of the Gospels is not as obvious as it is for all the extra-biblical evidence.

So Jones has a thoroughly broken epistemology here. He has delusionally convinced himself that sources he can’t even establish are independent of what he admits to be a mythical Gospel tradition are somehow magically more reliable than that very mythology! And that’s before we even get to the considerable, cumulative evidence for those passages not even being authentic, all of which Jones continually ignores, and in comparison to which there is literally no evidence for their being authentic—just the gainsaying assertions of those (experts and amateurs alike) who want them to be authentic, but can present no actual evidence they are.

70

Regarding Josephus breaking [his narrative] flow, [the Testimonium Flavianum] is not a very happy passage; he says [Jesus] died. It doesn’t necessarily sound like it’s a very good thing. If you take out the Christian interpolation it is just saying there was a guy who was put to death, but people still believed in him anyway and he drew over a lot of Gentiles. (2.15-20)

This is a weird statement. It’s hard for me to believe Jones actually believes what he just said. It sounds like the kind of bullshit you throw out just to get rid of a point while hoping no one notices. Jones said this in response to Godless Engineer having just said the TF is a fawning, happy “commercial” for Christianity. So, Jones wants us to believe what G.E. said is false because…the TF mentions the guy died? He seriously wants us to believe the TF “is just saying” a guy died and some Jews and Gentiles still followed him?

FFS. Sigh. Okay, children. Let’s line-item the damned thing… (I can’t believe Jones is making me do this; he’d better be ashamed of it):

• “Jesus is a wise man.” Happy or sad? Sound like a calamity befalling the Jews, or Christian propaganda?
• “If it be lawful to call him a man!” Happy or sad? Sound like a calamity befalling the Jews, or Christian propaganda?
• “For he was a doer of wonderful works!” Happy or sad? Sound like a calamity befalling the Jews, or Christian propaganda?
• “For he was a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure.” Happy or sad? Sound like a calamity befalling the Jews, or Christian propaganda?
• “He drew over to him both many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles.” Happy or sad? Sound like a calamity befalling the Jews, or Christian propaganda?
• [“He was the Christ” Jones at least admits we should cut]
• “But Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men among us, condemned him to the cross.” Sad, yes. But…does this sound like a calamity befalling the Jews, or Christian propaganda? Does the author of this line think Jesus deserved it? Or are they shaming “Pilate and the principle men among us” for doing it? Remember, this line immediately follows the fawning five lines above and is completely contrary to any expectation that should follow from them.
• “But those that loved him at the first did not forsake him!” Happy or sad? Sound like a calamity befalling the Jews, or Christian propaganda?
• “Because he appeared to them alive again the third day!” Happy or sad? Sound like a calamity befalling the Jews, or Christian propaganda?
• “Just as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him!” Happy or sad? Sound like a calamity befalling the Jews, or Christian propaganda?
• “And the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct to this day!” Happy or sad? Sound like a calamity befalling the Jews, or Christian propaganda?

Okay. If anyone who just followed us line-by-line through the whole TF still thinks what Jones just said isn’t total bullshit, I honestly can’t help you.

71

You can believe in a historical person with myths, for example there were a lot of myths about Caesar Augustus, that doesn’t mean that he didn’t exist. Rudolph Bultmann believed the Gospels were a myth and yet he still believed he was a historical person. Just because there were myths about someone, that does not necessarily mean that a historical person is not behind that. (2.15-20)

Non sequitur. No one is arguing that a mythology surrounding a person means they didn’t exist.

The argument is: Jesus only exists in mythological and theological texts, and sources we can’t establish were independent of them; therefore we need evidence to be sure he wasn’t wholly mythical; for other persons (like Caesar Augustus), we have that evidence; for Jesus, we don’t; therefore, odds are, Jesus didn’t exist. “But, some historical people had myths too” does not respond to this argument at all.

72

In fact most scholars believe that the Gospels are Greco-Roman biographies about Jesus, they don’t necessarily believe they were myths anymore, taking off of Rudolph Bultmann’s old view. (2.15-20)

This is false. And it’s the kind of falsity that is especially particular to Christian apologists, who don’t know what they are talking about (because they didn’t check) or who are lying—and hoping you don’t fact-check them.

We see this phenomenon with William Lane Craig and his repeated false claim that cosmologists believe the BGV Theorem entails time is past finite and thus everything “had a beginning.” It says no such thing. And every single author of that theorem has explained to him that it says no such thing (see my discussion of this example in My Fourth Reply to Craig acolyte Wallace Marshall). But because Craig doesn’t grasp (or deliberately doesn’t want you to grasp) the actual meaning of technical phrases like “geodesically incomplete” in the expert literature, he conflates “classical spacetime ends” with “spacetime ends” and thus falsely reports that the BGV theorem describes a past finite cosmos. It’s a clever way to snow the public, by abusing their ignorance of technical terminology—and the fact that experts often have a hard time explaining things in plain English so as to actually be understood by non-experts.

Jones is doing exactly the same thing here with the word “biography.” Now, I don’t know if Jones is the liar (as I am quite certain now that William Lane Craig is), or the dupe of some other liar—some Christian apologist who told him this (or told someone else this who told him this, and so on; the chain of deceit can be long), whose assertion he didn’t fact-check, because he’s an amateur who doesn’t know what he’s doing. Or if Jones just went all Dunning-Kruger again and read something in the expert literature he didn’t understand, and now confidently declares what he mistakenly thinks it said. Because he’s an amateur who doesn’t know what he’s doing.

“Biography” in the technical literature of history is inclusive of entirely mythical biographies. So it is a completely false inference to say “scholars agree the Gospels are biographies, therefore they agree they aren’t myths.” This is a false dichotomy nowhere found in the expert literature. To the contrary, apart from conservative Christian apologists (whose belief to the contrary is wholly absurd and obviously driven by religious need), all experts today agree the Gospels are myths (see Adventures at the Society of Biblical Literature Conference, Part 2). Even those who think they can extract some historical facts from them. But whether they really can is a separate question (which I rather conclusively answer in the negative, along with every other expert who has ever written a study of their methods, as cited and quoted and explicated in Chapter 5 of Proving History).

73

As Bart Ehrman noted in his debate with Bob Brice, we have multiple independent sources for the existence of Jesus. These are the same criteria we would use to accept somebody like Hannibal for example, whom we don’t have any archaeological evidence for. Or somebody like, you know, the high priest Caiaphas or Hillel, you know, Honi the Circle Drawer, and we’re not going to doubt the existence of these people because of the very same criteria. Criteria I’m using to show at least a historical person named Jesus existed. I just don’t understand why it has to be so special with Jesus when this is exactly how we establish the historicity of so many other people from the ancient world. (2.15-20)

Jones is again simply ignoring everything Godless Engineer said. At no point did he ever say we are using different criteria for Jesus; he has consistently argued these very same criteria don’t get the same results for Jesus (and this is the third time Jones has repeated this defunct argument: see my dispatchment of it last time). In other words, our argument is not that Jesus “is special” so we can dismiss multiple independent testimonies; our argument is that there aren’t multiple independent testimonies. And Jones simply never engages with that argument, certainly not on any sound grasp of the facts.

Jones is also again being disingenuous—or else not actually reading his own sources. In the Ehrman-Price debate, Ehrman never cited Josephus or Tacitus or any extra-biblical attestation as evidence for Jesus. Probably because he doesn’t believe they are—as he explicitly said in his book Did Jesus Exist? What Ehrman ridiculously claimed in the Price debate was that the Gospels, combined with non-existent made-up sources derived from them (!), counted as “multiple independent testimonies,” an argument so illogical he honestly should be ashamed of it. But since Jones chose not to argue “from the Gospels,” his citing Ehrman here is another non sequitur.

And once again: yes, we do have archaeological evidence for Hannibal, as well as multiple independent eye-fucking-witness testimony! Again, look at why we believe Hannibal existed, and apply the same rules (not different criteria, but exactly the same criteria) to Jesus and you don’t get the same result. I am annoyed I have to keep repeating this. But evidently I do.

74

[What] Paul [wrote] does not affect other independent sources like Tacitus and Josephus. Which are independent sources for a historical person. Even Bart Ehrman acknowledges that the New Testament authors thought that Jesus was a divine pre-existing being. I don’t think that would affect how they think he was an actual person regarding that. Paul says, “For I would have you know, brother, that the gospel that was preached by me is not a man’s gospel, for I did not receive it from any man, not was it taught to me, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.” He’s talking about “the Gospel,” the actual theological message, not necessarily about the actual person of Jesus Christ. That’s not necessarily to deny an actual person existed. So that would be assuming way too much about one small little passage there. (2.20-21)

That Tacitus and Josephus are “independent” sources Jones never establishes in this debate, by any evidence whatever. But I’ve already well explained that over and over again, here and before. Therefore it does matter what Paul says—and doesn’t say. I’m glad Jones admits the first Christians taught Jesus was a pre-existent celestial being. He’s close here to getting why Jesus is not the same as Gamaliel or Hannibal. But he still can’t quite grasp the point. He here just dismisses the fact that Paul only ever says anything was learned from Jesus “by revelation” as of no significance. But if all our contemporary sources for Gamaliel or Hannibal said they were only known as celestial beings communicated with by revelation, we would admit this was evidence against their actual historicity. Same rules, same results; so we are justified in saying this of Jesus.

Jones also acts like this is the “only” passage in Paul establishing the point. It’s not. The entirety of Paul’s writings establishes the point, including numerous specific verses. It’s a strong argument because it rests not on one passage but abundant cumulative evidence of many passages and the entire content and span of the authentic letters, the more than 20,000 words Paul wrote about Jesus and his gospel that we’re allowed to see (see Chapter 11 of On the Historicity of Jesus). So we aren’t arguing “Paul says this one thing in Galatians, therefore we should conclude Paul never heard of Jesus also being encountered in person before he died.” We are arguing, “we have this passage in the context of several other directly pertinent passages and the abundant absence of any contrary data across the entirety of his corpus, therefore we should substantially increase our doubt that Paul ever heard of Jesus being encountered in person before he died.” As it turns out, Jones will never respond to this, our actual argument.

75

Tacitus does place Jesus in history. He places him with other historical people like Pontius Pilate, for example, under the reign of Tiberius. He is placing him in history. You are special pleading because you would not apply this type of reasoning to Caesar Augustus or Hannibal… (2.21-22)

With that last line Jones then goes on repeating the same refuted bullshit he has by this point said at least five different times. I’ve already shown that it is Jones, not Godless Engineer, who is engaged in special pleading here. We are applying the same criteria to Jesus as anyone else like Hannibal. Jones is the one claiming special exceptions for the evidence when Jesus is involved.

And with the first line, Jones reveals that he still, after more than an hour now debating this, doesn’t even understand what Godless Engineer has been arguing the whole time. The Gospels also place Jesus with other historical people like Pontius Pilate under the reign of Tiberius. The same Gospels Jones just conceded could be entirely mythical. So it in no way argues for the historicity of Jesus that when that mythology reached the ears of Tacitus, he repeated it. I cannot fathom how Jones can be so impervious to that point by now.

I suppose as a Christian apologist Jones would also “insist” Daniel must be authentic history and not (as all mainstream scholars now conclude) a myth composed in the second century B.C., merely because it “places Daniel with other historical people like Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar.” That’s simply a non sequitur. Historical method does not work that way. Historians all know ancient fiction and myth often enough incorporated real historical persons and had them interact with fictional ones. So that tells us nothing. And since Jones can present no evidence Tacitus checked these claims, he cannot assert they were verified not to be just as mythical as the Gospels that appear to have originated them—because again, the Gospels are the first time we ever hear of Jesus being in any way connected with any historical figure, Pilate or otherwise.

Jones is thus acting like someone trying to argue the book of Daniel is authentic—against all the evidence that it is not—merely because Josephus, “who was a very good historian,” simply believes that mythical treatise and relates its content as history in his Antiquities (in his own rationalizing way, just as Tacitus does the Christian myth conveyed to him). Likewise Plutarch with the myths of Romulus, or Manetho with the myths of Moses, and so on. No competent historian would ever reason that way. Search all the mainstream peer-reviewed literature; you will never find such a bone-headed argument.

76

You did say that the New Testament talks about him being a mythical figure therefore he is a myth. Again, Bart Ehrman thinks that Jesus actually existed as a person, just that there were myths that revolved around the actual historical person. I don’t see how that would actually show him not to exist. (2.22-23)

Godless Engineer never once argued “the New Testament talks about Jesus as a myth, therefore he is a myth.” Nor does “some people known to be historical are found in myths, too” respond to anything he did argue.

77

You’re taking one sentence in 2 Peter and assuming you know what myths they are talking about. … To take one passage in 2 Peter, one sentence in 2 Peter and say “this is clearly talking about mythicists” is just unfounded. (2.23-24)

As already noted, the argument is not “just one sentence in 2 Peter,” but the entire content of 2 Peter. Which clearly establishes who was being targeted and what they were teaching. We also have many other passages in the Bible alluding to the same thing (ibid.). And many passages outside the Bible alluding to the same thing.

78

For the same objections Celsus brought up, he accused them of believing myths about Jesus or uses the term ‘juggling tricks’, but he still believes in an actual historical person. Again “myths” is just a very general term it most likely refers people confusing them of thinking Jesus resurrected or was transfigured or actually was the Son of God or whatnot. That does not doubt the existence of a historical person. Trypho didn’t; Celsus didn’t. Just because you see “myths” in Second Peter that does not mean they’re [attacking Christians denying] an actual historical Jesus. I mean, Celsus accused the Christians of believing in myths and he still believed in a historical person. (2.24-25)

Broken record. We already covered all this. Not only once. Not only twice. But three times now.

79

An argument from silence is used when there is one source that says something and you say “well, other sources don’t say it, therefore this one source is wrong.” If someone were to say that “they thought Jesus was a Martian,” we would say “No, there is no evidence of that.” They could not say, “No, that’s an argument from silence.” No. We have zero sources of such a thing. Then that’s not necessarily a fallacy to call that out. An argument from silence would only be a fallacy if they only say one source. Like, for example, we have Suetonius who talks about the Jews being expelled from Rome. It would be an argument from silence to say “Josephus didn’t mention it, therefore Suetonius made it up.” (2.25-26)

This is a barely intelligible garble. Not a single thing said in it is true. That is not how arguments from silence work (again, see Proving History, pp. 117-19). That is not what any mythicist is arguing (maybe this time read Jesus from Outer Space once it comes out later this year, if you need it told you short and sweet). And Suetonius is not our only source for the Jews’ being expelled under Claudius (Dio Cassius discusses it, and in a way that entails he was not using Suetonius).

Suetonius is our only (surviving) source for that expulsion being caused by the rioteer Chrestus (perhaps the argument Jones intended, and he just got flustered and misspoke), though we know the section where Tacitus would have discussed him is lost (nullifying an argument from silence: because you can’t argue from the silence of documents you don’t have), and we have evidence Josephus would have avoided the subject. But unlike celestial superbeings who, in our earliest sources, communicated only in revelations, and generations later only first appeared in sacred myths, and were never independently documented in any other way, we have no reason to doubt the historicity of Chrestus. He’s a mundane person in a mundane, researched history, for whom we know of no mythological source Suetonius could be depending on, and for whom we have no early followers claiming only to have met him in visions from outer space.

Get it yet?

80

Just because he didn’t mention it doesn’t mean he didn’t believe it. Why didn’t Josephus mention the Jews were expelled from Rome under the reign of Cladius? Why did Ulysses S. Grant write a diary of the Civil War and never mention the Emancipation Proclamation? Why didn’t Marco Polo mention the Great Wall of China? You could do this with any historical person—why didn’t they mention this or that? What does Arrian tell us some things about Alexander the Great and Plutarch tells us some other things? Why didn’t they agree on some of these things? (2.26-27)

Broken record again. Jones simply isn’t responding to anything Godless Engineer argued, and instead is just repeating the same false statements and confusions. We have evidence Josephus would skip the story of the Claudian expulsion, and no evidence Suetonius could have had a mythical source for it. Ulysses S. Grant’s writings do mention the Emancipation Proclamation. Whereas his Memoir—not his Diary, which doesn’t survive; Jones seems not to grasp the difference—never discusses specific legislation of any kind; it’s rather about his military campaigns and personal encounters and correspondence. Marco Polo didn’t mention the Great Wall because it wasn’t there. And Arrian says different things about Alexander the Great than Plutarch does because we have evidence that they used different sources and methods (consult literally any book on Alexander the Great). Jones just can’t ever get even basic facts right; nor produce a logical argument even from false ones.

This is why, once again, amateurs should not be live-debating this stuff.

81

You could even do this with contradicting sources. Take Suetonius and Plutarch’s readings of the assassination of Julius Caesar. They actually contradict. Did Caesar yell out before he was stabbed or after? Did he grab the arm of the man who stabbed him in the neck or reach for his knife? Did Brutus stand over him and say something, or not? Did Brutus stab him in the groin or not? Just because they didn’t mention something doesn’t make it a valid argument. There are so many historical sources that do this. I challenge you to sit down and read someone like Suetonius, or Tacitus, straight through and then compare notes on them. You’re going to see differences. You’re gonna see silences from one and not the other, you’re going to see contradictions. (2.27)

Another non sequitur. Not a single bit of this has any relevance to anything they are debating. No one is arguing “accounts conflict, therefore Jesus didn’t exist.” Nor is anyone arguing “some sources omit details, therefore Jesus didn’t exist.”

82

Like where Nero was during the fire of Rome. Suetonius tells us he was on a tower fiddling. Dio Cassius tells us he was in his palace and Tacitus tells us he was miles away. He even thinks that Nero wasn’t responsible for the fire. So they’re just telling us different perspectives of what’s going on. That doesn’t mean a fire in Rome didn’t happen. That doesn’t mean that a historical person didn’t exist either. (2.27-28)

Another non sequitur. Not a single bit of this has any relevance to anything they are debating. No one is arguing “explanations of events conflict, therefore Jesus didn’t exist.” Nor did Godless Engineer argue “sources differ in their accounts, therefore Jesus didn’t exist.”

83

When you take the mythicists’ argument and apply it any other area of history, any other person in history, they just fall apart. Regarding other historical persons, which you say isn’t special pleading, then I challenge you, then go apply this to Hannibal. Our best source is Livy and he’s our earliest. Cato is supposedly mentioned, but then we lost that source. So maybe Livy was just making up quotes from Cato in order to support his argument better. Apply this to someone like Honi the Circle Drawer, whom no historian doubts existed. Why would we doubt his existence just because Josephus [inaudible] him? (2.28-30)

Everything said here is false. As I’ve mentioned time and again now. See What About Hannibal, Then?

It is Jones who is special pleading, by claiming Jesus is in the same evidential state as Hannibal. That’s absurdly false. Livy is not our earliest source. And Livy is not our only witness to Cato’s writings on the subject (so is Cicero, for example). Jesus is not even in the same evidential state as Honi. I couldn’t tell what Jones said, but it sounds like he claimed Josephus did not mention Honi. In fact he does. He’s our leading source in fact. Honi is also discussed in the Mishnah and multiple Talmuds. Which are actual multiple independent sources. And none of these sources portrays Honi as a celestial superbeing communicating in visions from outer space. And none has any known mythological source as their source. We can (and scholars do) doubt much that’s said about him, but unlike Jesus, we have no particular reason to doubt he existed.

Thus, again, Jones is getting the argument wrong. He thinks Jesus is in the same epistemic state as these people, but he’s not. And that he is not is our actual argument. Thus Jones is ignoring our actual argument, fabricating an argument we didn’t make (that different evidential “rules” should apply to Jesus), and knocking that down. The most disingenuous of straw men. And a total non sequitur.

84

The most probable person Tacitus is talking about is the only person we know was crucified under Pontius Pilate during the reign of Tiberius, who was called the Christ. Who among the Romans was called ‘The Chrestus’. Which was virtually interchangeable with ‘Christos’ at the time as we’ve seen from the manuscripts and funeral inscriptions. It is the most probable explanation. (2.31-33)

Here once again Jones simply ignores what Godless Engineer actually argued. G.E. gave evidence-based reasons to doubt that that line about Christ was in Tacitus originally. All of which Jones here just keeps ignoring and makes no response to. He just reasserts his contrary conclusion, as if it hadn’t been rebutted already. In technical debate scoring, that’s called a drop. He would be marked as losing that argument, for failure to respond. Indeed, the evidence against its authenticity is considerably more extensive than even Godless Engineer enumerated.

Jones’s second point is also entirely false. No elite Roman ever called Jesus “The Chrestus.” And that was not interchangeable with Christus in elite literature. And none of his cited examples argue so, but the contrary: such conflation only occurred in Vulgar Latin and Greek, the language of non-elites. But I already covered all that last time: see Point 6 and Point 31. If Tacitus meant to explain the vulgar word, he would either have explained that disconnect between Christ and Chrestian so as to excuse his appeal to one to explain the other, or he would have explained the vulgar word Chrestiani by appeal to the vulgar word Chrestus, not Christus. That he does neither is evidence he didn’t mention “Christus” at all. Which warrants at least suspicion. And when combined with the abundant other lines of evidence we have, this conclusion becomes only more secure, not less.

85

You see in the New Testament the referring to Jesus as Christ and associating it with his name. If Christians are saying “the Christ has come, we follow the Christ,” that is the only thing Romans need to know. They called themselves Christians in their own works so why would they associate him with some other name? That is an argument from silence, to assume that Tacitus needed to mention his actual personal name. For the same reason we don’t need to mention Genghis Khan because we know who we’re talking about. Or to say that Caesar crossed the Rubicon to know we’re talking about Julius Caesar. We understand that from history, from other sources. (2.33-34)

Broken record. He is here simply repeating the same non sequitur as last time.

86

So for example Josephus and the Talmud mention more about him. It [?] would [collaborate? corroborate?] with Tacitus in and of itself [?]. So that’s one thing to remember regarding that. And you can even use the Christian sources and even the second century Christian sources that would [collaborate? corroborate?] with Tacitus regarding an actual historical person behind that. So we need to remember that when moving forward. The same still applies with other historical people. (2.34)

This is largely unintelligible. Jones is slurring words and forming incoherent sentences by this point. As best I can make out, what he means to say here is that:

• “Josephus and the Talmud give us independent information about Jesus.” Which is false. The Testimonium Flavianum aligns so well with the information in Luke 24 (including its order: see my discussion of Goldberg’s findings; and Luke is already a late derivative work reworking the first Gospel, Mark) that it is almost certainly not independent of it (which is yet more evidence of Christian forgery; Josephus is unlikely to have used Luke as a source). And the Talmud says Jesus was stoned, not crucified, and by Jews, not Romans, and near Lydda, not Jerusalem, and in the 70s B.C., not the 30s A.D.—so it does not give us “more” information about Jesus: it either completely refutes the Gospels, or is yet more evidence of Jesus being mythically placed in history (see OHJ, Chapter 8.1).
• “Josephus and the Talmud corroborate Tacitus on Jesus.” Which is both false and a non sequitur. The Talmud (as just noted) actually does not corroborate but in fact falsifies the historical data in Tacitus (unless you throw out the Talmud as evidence altogether). And for Josephus the debate is whether Josephus and Tacitus corroborate each other for the obvious reason that Christians faked both, or Gospel-using Christian sources informed both—or because they somehow each had reliable sources independent of the Gospel tradition, sources for which we have no evidence, and abundant evidence against. Jones’s point is simply non-responsive to the argument. That’s a drop. He just officially lost this point.
• “Christians in the second century also corroborate the historicity of Jesus.” Which is false. As any honest and competent historian will tell you, dependent sources are by definition not corroborating sources (see OHJ, Chapter 7.1). And all Christian sources outside the Bible are dependent on the Gospels. Not independent sources.
• “This is all just like any other historical person.” No. It is not at all like any other person experts agree existed. That’s the whole point. A point Jones has spent over an hour now completely ignoring.

87

Tacitus has no need to give [his account] any more detail either, because he’s [only] explaining why this group [is] called the Christians [who are] associated with Nero burning them. Why would [Tacitus] need to give more information regarding that when his entire purpose is just to explain the origins of this group? Some Christ under Pontius Pilate was crucified and then we have other [collaborating?] sources which go along with that as well. So we need to remember that it’s not just Tacitus that fits in our entire mosaic of different pieces. (2.34-38)

Jones’s speech is a bit garbled and hard to follow again. But clearly another non sequitur. Godless Engineer did not make any of the arguments Jones here thinks he is responding to. Instead he is just repeating his position, and not giving pertinent arguments for it against G.E.’s rebuttals. That’s a drop.

88

Again, Paul says he got the Gospel from Jesus, not his belief in a historical person Jesus; that’s about theological messages. We have other independent Christian sources other than Paul. We can go into the passion narrative, which even the skeptical atheist Maurice Casey dates to the 40s. (2.38-39)

Sorry, but Maurice Casey was an idiot. Even an amateur can identify the fatal fallacies in his reasoning on this point. Which is why almost no expert agrees with him, making this another cherry picking fallacy—and another case of special pleading: Jones depends on non-existent, totally imaginary, made-up sources for his defense of the historicity of Jesus. That this is what historicists have to resort to is why Lataster finds the field wholly bankrupt methodologically in his own peer-reviewed study of it. Godless Engineer is not wrong to point this out. Jones never makes any reply. As for his non sequitur about what Paul said (which literally ignores G.E.’s actual entire argument)—which again counts as a drop, losing him the debate—see what I already said above.

89

Okay, the Nag Hammadi find is an extremely late collection of works. For example, the Gospel of Thomas at Nag Hammadi follows very closely with a work called the Diatesseron which was written by Tatian around the year 160, in Syria. It has about five hundred Syriac catch phrases in it, and most likely fits very late Syriac Christianity. As far as I have seen, very very very few scholars, like very fringe level, date the Nag Hammadi [texts?] to the first century. It overwhelmingly dates to the late second century and third century. (2.39)

All true. But also a non sequitur. I’m not sure Jones here understood Godless Engineer’s argument. But I can excuse that, as I found it hard to follow as well. The overall point G.E. was making was that Christians so routinely fabricated Jesus myths, that we have no a priori basis to trust “the four” that got into one faction’s Bible (a faction which just by chance became politically victorious centuries later) were any less mythical. The argument, correctly formulated, is sound (see OHJ, Chapter 5, Element 44, and Chapters 6, 7.7, and 10.1). It does not require claiming the Nag Hammadi texts date to the first century, and G.E. never said they did. Jones seems to have confused this with G.E.’s previous argument from sectarianism.

90

Regarding Matthew’s birth narrative, yes, I agree that it is modeled in terms of Old Testament passages. That would not show Jesus didn’t exist because as many experts would note, that is what they did back in that time, they modeled a lot of narratives in terms of already existing patterns. [People] would retell [a person’s] story in terms of a Biblical story, in order to give it more credit for explaining a theological message. That doesn’t mean Jesus didn’t exist. (2.40-41)

All correct. But another non sequitur. Godless Engineer never argued “Jesus’s story exhibits a lot of mythic modeling, therefore Jesus didn’t exist.” He argued “Jesus’s story exhibits a lot of mythic modeling, as do both historical and mythical people, therefore we need evidence before we can claim to know whether this was done to a real or a mythical person in the case of Jesus.” I’ve already pointed out Jones’s failure to comprehend how arguments work (see Point 60 and Point 68 above). He appears to be making a similar mistake here.

It is not valid to argue “But, historical people also had this done to them, therefore we know this person was historical.” The premise is correct. The conclusion is not. If we know (and we do) that both mythical and historical people were conveyed in myths, we cannot claim to know they are historical merely by reference to the myths. Therefore we need more evidence than that. And that’s where things fall apart for the historicist. Jones cannot tell the difference between dependent and independent sources, does not know how to establish any source as independent, does not know how to discern a valid from an invalid argument from silence, and doesn’t even know how to establish a generalization or any statement of frequency (such as “most people this was done to existed,” which is a premise Jones’s argument requires; spoiler: the evidence does not support it, as I demonstrate in OHJ: Chapter 5, Elements 44-48, and Chapter 6).

In short, being an amateur, even after over an hour of trying, Jones still can’t get right any basic principle of historical reasoning, and fails to comprehend any historical argument his opponent is making.

91

For example, Tacitan scholar Rhiannon Ash says Tacitus did this as well. She says he embedded such points in that very language and to which end he used linguistic echoes of structured similarities. We see the same with Augustus. Virgil tries to paint him in a lot of Roman mythology, for example. That doesn’t mean that Augustus didn’t exist. Check out the Social-Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels. They say “to be able to quote the tradition from memory, to apply it in creative and appropriate ways, not only brings honor to the speaker, but lends authority to his words as well.” (2.41-44)

This statement is an illogical mess. Let’s break it down…

• Ash did not say Tacitus made up entire mythic stories about people emulating prior myths (as Matthew does for the Nativity of Jesus). Indeed, it would be ironic if she did, as that would refute Jones’s earlier attempt to insist Tacitus would never do this. No. Ash is simply talking about word choice and literary devices like allusion and metaphor. Matthew is not telling a true story with literary and linguistic similarities and allusions to past myths. Matthew’s nativity is entirely made up, as pretty much every mainstream scholar alive today agrees. So which mistake is Jones making here? Did he not read Ash and doesn’t know what she actually said and thus falsely reports to NonSequitur’s audience what experts actually said? Or is he going “Christian fundamentalist” on us here and insisting Matthew’s Nativity is a true story? Either way discredits him. He just lost this argument.
• Virgil wrote poetry. If Jones can’t tell the difference between poetic fiction and historical prose, he’s done here. Time to go home. It’s only worse that the historicity of Augustus does not rest on the poetry of Virgil, whereas the historicity of Jesus does rest on the historicity of the Gospels (not specifically the Nativity fables, but still), so it’s a completely false analogy to begin with.
• And the SSCSG…man, I don’t even get why he thinks that quote is pertinent to his point. I can only guess he didn’t read it. He must be gullibly repeating the quote-mining scam of some other shifty apologist. The quote comes from pages 383-384 of the SSCSG, and is about Mark explicitly citing scripture to prove his knowledge of it, not weaving myths based on them. Completely irrelevant example. This is especially pathetic of Jones, because the SSCSG explicitly says it will never address the historicity of any passage in the Gospels (pp. 14-15). So for Jones to abuse their book in defense of a position its author doesn’t even hold is insulting.

92

Luke 1:68-79 is an example. It’s stitched together from phrases of Psalms 41, 111, 132, 105, 106 and Micah 7. The ability to create a mosaic implies extensive detailed knowledge of the tradition and brought great honor to the speaker. The speaker was able to pull it off. So again, even if these [authors?] were just writing myths, this does not mean there is not a historical person behind there. Scholars have evaluated this extensively and we see this in all sorts of other works. All you have to do is read other ancient sources like Virgil, or Tacitus for example. (2.41-44)

This continues the same errors and non sequiturs from above. No one has argued that because there are myths about Jesus in the Gospels that therefore Jesus didn’t exist. So Jones is again not even responding to any argument made. That’s a drop. By now, he’s simply lost the debate.

Jones also doesn’t get anything correct here. Luke 1:68-79 is simply a series of quotations of the Psalms, not a myth or story about Jesus, so that isn’t in any possible sense a relevant example of anything. Luke 1:67 does make the claim (and thus does weave the myth) that this pastiche was originally composed and sung by the father of John the Baptist and not Luke, but since pretty much no mainstream historian on Earth believes that’s true, it’s actually an example supporting Godless Engineer, not Jones. And there is no analog whatsoever between Virgil and Tacitus, nor any analog between either of them and any point Jones is illogically trying to make here.

93

[Jones is asked “What do you think is the best or strongest evidence in support of your position?”] Hostile witnesses, which clearly would have been happy. Celsus would have been happy if Jesus never existed. He would have used that if that was the case. He never even considered that as a possibility. Tacitus is considered one of the best historians from the ancient world and Josephus is also considered a very competent historian and they know Jesus existed when they didn’t even need to. There is overwhelming evidence showing, just in the secular sources, clearly shows there was at least a historical person. (2.44-46)

Notice how hopelessly illogical Jones’s position is—and how he has learned nothing from this debate. After ignoring every argument against him, he just repeats his refuted opinions as if they were “evidence,” rather than fallacious conclusions from evidence (much of which doesn’t even exist; Jones made dozens of false statements of fact that he employed as premises). An inability to tell the difference between evidence and inferences (and true facts from false) is common among both amateurs and Christian apologists.

When asked for his best case, this is what we get: Jones illogically thinks Celsus would be able to know Jesus didn’t exist—a false premise, producing his false conclusion here, on which Jones rests his belief in the historicity of Jesus. Not even Tacitus could know that. Nor Josephus. All of them are simply trusting what the Gospels relate, or what Christians told them they believed, who were using the Gospels as their source. Jones never produced any evidence otherwise, so he cannot assert a premise otherwise. That is simply a fallacy. And that’s even if we believe all these authors even report Christian belief in their time. There is very good evidence Josephus and Tacitus did not—all of which evidence Jones simply ignored.

Ignoring evidence, leaning on false premises, and relying on blatantly illogical reasoning does typify historicity apologetics—sadly, even from experts. But even they would not so badly hose every single point here as Jones did. And yet there was no way for the audience to know that. So it’s high time we stopped asking amateurs to live debate this stuff.

94

Bart Ehrman, for example, in his debate with Robert Price even uses Paul. He says that Paul in Galatians 4, he says Jesus was born in human fashion and he had a ministry of the Jews. In 1 Corinthians 5 he says Jesus was physically buried. Jesus was a direct descendent of King David in Romans 1:3. He refers to Jesus in a lot of human terms, so we just see that a lot of things Paul says are just off the cuff so we just have a lot of overwhelming evidence there was at least a historical person there. (2.44-46)

This is actually dirty pool. It is very bad form in a debate to never make an argument until at the end of the debate when your opponent has no time to respond. Jones never presented any “Argument from Paul” in almost two hours of debate. Then he throws it in here as among his “best” evidence. If it was his best evidence, why did he never use it anywhere in the previous two hours? This barely dignifies a response. He surely must know (?) expert mythicists have presented abundant evidence against relying on the passages he now refers to as evidence of historicity (some of which don’t even exist—nowhere in Paul’s letters, much less in Galatians 4, does he ever say Jesus “had a ministry”). But since this never got debated, the audience isn’t allowed to know that. They got snowed. For a corrective, see Chapter 11 of my peer-reviewed defense of mythicism in On the Historicity of Jesus.

95

There are numerous independent sources that even Bart Ehrman noted in his debate with Bob Price that all confirm there was at least an historical person. The Christians could have done [only] so much if they wanted to invent a person. For example Steve Mason in Josephus and the New Testament says Christian copies were quite conservative in transmitting text. They transmitted all the works of Philo and never decided to be devious and start adding little sayings of Jesus here and there. That could have been done quite easily. We don’t actually have a lot of evidence of Christians doing this, so this is just an unfounded assertion. (2.50-end)

I already noted above that Ehrman did not say what Jones is here misleading his audience to think; he said something much more ridiculous and indefensible. And Christians did not preserve all the works of Philo (they most peculiarly destroyed his treatise on Pontius Pilate, and several other works besides). And Jones’s citation of Mason is slightly misleading (Josephus and the New Testament, pp. 232ff.). Mason does describe that argument, but does not agree that it prevails. And this was twenty years ago. Remember, You Can’t Cite Opinions Before 2014. So Mason is obsolete here anyway. But methodologically, Jones is committing a mathematical mistake here: there are thousands of agreed interpolations across ancient literature (not just Christian ones); no one rejects any of them because “interpolations are rare.” That’s a non sequitur.

It is correct that Christian interpolation was rare (as interpolation was generally), though it was more common than this statement indicates; we have many examples of Christians interpolating passages, across a whole range of literature, including their own Bible. I’m also not so sure it didn’t occur in Philo; just because critical editions do not include obvious Christian meddling (and I haven’t even checked to confirm they don’t) still does not mean it isn’t present in the manuscripts. As Bart Ehrman explains in The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, most variants don’t appear in critical editions of any work because they are found in manuscripts that we can already rule out as tampered with. Indeed, Christians forged or falsely attributed entire works by Philo; so they wouldn’t necessarily scruple to tamper with authentic ones—and indeed some scholars have claimed Christian interpolations in the works of Philo (example, example), though I haven’t vetted any myself. But that’s moot, since the issue is how commonly interpolation occurred, not whether it occurred in one specific author’s corpus or not.

In my peer-reviewed article on the Tacitus passage in Vigiliae Christianae (available now in Hitler Homer Bible Christ), I find the rate of Christian interpolation per author is between 1 in 10 and 1 in 200 (HHBC, pp. 370-71). Let’s assume a fortiori that it was 1 in 200. That means we can expect to find at least one Christian interpolation for every 200 authors. Thus, we would not expect to find one in Philo, or Josephus, just on the mere assumption that it occurred there. The “one” author out of “two hundred” authors could just as easily be someone other than Philo or Josephus. So not finding it in Philo affords no evidence it didn’t happen in Josephus, other than in contributing to the overall possible frequency of interpolation altogether. Thus “it didn’t happen in Philo, therefore it didn’t happen in Josephus” is a non sequitur.

All this tells us is that we need evidence to believe an interpolation has occurred. You can’t just declare a passage interpolated. The odds could be as much as 1 in 200 against that assumption; and you can’t base any arguments on such dismal odds. But no one is doing this. Least of all Godless Engineer. He is listing evidence—and not even all of it. So the question becomes: is that evidence more unlikely unless an interpolation occurred, than that it occurred given the base rate alone? In other words, if we add up all the evidence there is for the TF being an interpolation (and there is a lot), how likely is it that all that evidence would exist just “by chance or accident” and not because the TF is an interpolation? It is easy to show the answer is “far less likely than 1 in 200.” Which overcomes the prior probability against, converting low odds back to high odds.

This is literally how evidence works. And that is why scholars agree an interpolation has occurred when enough evidence has been adduced for it, and have done so thousands of times now. They don’t claim “that’s rare, therefore no evidence can ever make it likely” like Jones is illogically attempting here. So Jones should be talking about the evidence. Not making excuses to not consider any. “But, it’s rare” is an excuse not to look at the evidence for interpolation, not a legitimate argument against interpolation. Yet when, instead, you rationally weigh the evidence, IMO it more than overcomes even a steep prior against interpolation, not only for three passages in Josephus (the TF and the James passage, which I cover in OHJ, Chapter 8.9; and one line in Josephus’s passage about John the Baptist), but for the one in Tacitus as well (HHBC, pp. 392-94).

Jones never responded to any of this evidence in the whole debate, certainly not with any factually accurate or relevant information. He simply dropped it. And lost.

96

We have dozens and dozens. We have I think 42 sources that Habermas and Licona calculated to within 150 years that Jesus existed. That’s a lot of different sources confirming the historical Jesus. (2.50-end)

FFS. Seriously? Jones definitely lost the debate here. He literally just asserted no difference between dependent and independent sources, violating one of the most basic principles of historical reasoning, and cited a list well known to contain false entries (the danger of trusting shady apologists like Gary Habermas: pro tip, don’t). Talk about shooting yourself in the face. Michael Jones here just transformed into a third rate Christian apologist.

97

That would be amazing for something like that if we had that for someone like emperor Tiberius, or if we had something like that for Honi the Circle Drawer, or John the Baptist, or the high priest Caiaphas, or Gamaliel. The criteria we use to establish other historical people is just thrown out the window when it comes to the Jesus mythicist movement. They don’t want to apply the same criteria to someone like Hannibal. They don’t want to apply the same criteria to other historical figures. They have this weird sort of special [movement?]. (2.50-end)

All false. I’ve already explained several times that we are not applying different criteria. To the contrary, it is Jones who is ignorant of the fact that we have more and better evidence for all of the people he names, than we have for Jesus. Our argument is not “we must apply different criteria.” Our argument is “there is way more evidence for those people than you are claiming, and way more than there is for Jesus.” See So What About Hannibal, Then? for a general explication. Jones never once responded to this argument. Ever. In the whole debate. Never responding to your opponent’s principal argument is a fatal drop. So he lost. Decisively. And no one in the audience noticed. Because they were snowed by an amateur.

98

One of their chief arguments is that the Gospels could have been myths. Well I have arguments against that. I have videos for that. Even if they were myths that would not show that the historical person did not at least exist. You can have myths about a historical person, so that argument is just sort of missing the entire point right there. (2.50-end)

Sorry, Michael Jones, but you explicitly said you would not defend the historicity of the Gospels in this debate. So you are engaging in dirty pool here. Again. You don’t get to concede an argument in a debate, then at the end of the debate bring out and affirm that argument precisely when your opponent no longer has sufficient time to reply. Least of all when you just “mention” that argument, and never actually make it—at no point did Jones ever give any reason why we should believe anything in the Gospels about Jesus is true.

Michael Jones is actually the one “missing the point right here.” No one argued “the Gospels contain myth, therefore Jesus didn’t exist.” They argued “the Gospels contain myth, therefore we can’t use them to prove Jesus existed.” Not the same argument. And Jones never responded to that actual argument, at any point in this debate. That’s a fatal drop. He was a completely nonresponsive opponent. Thus he lost. Conclusively.

99

So at the end of the day there are numerous sources regarding this. Historians don’t even bring this up. I believe it was Michael F. Bird who says the majority of scholars believe Jesus existed and those who deny his existence are just bad historians. I’m sorry if that’s what they are saying when it comes to what you actually say about stories on this matter. So at the end of the day we just have too many sources to deny an actual historical person behind the Christian movement existed. (2.50-end)

This is a non sequitur. Jones is merely repeating his position, not any arguments for it. He never showed that any expert doubting historicity or admitting it’s debatable (of which there are a dozen now) is a “bad historian,” by any evidence or example, ever in this debate. Assertions are not arguments. And because he made no arguments that ever addressed the principal arguments made against his position here, he conclusively lost this debate by any technical measure. He completely failed to represent his side competently. And that’s why amateurs should not be representing historicity in public debates.

Conclusion

Live amateur debates on technical subjects like this are unhelpful and really shouldn’t be promoted. One side or the other, or even both, will simply spew falsehoods and fallacies with total confidence, snowing host and audience and possibly even opponent alike. It simply becomes a menagerie of Dunning-Kruger Syndrome. Michael Jones demonstrated this in spades.

Written debates suffer less from this problem, especially if they are allowed to go through more than one stage of rebuttal, because amateurs then have the ability to take adequate time to make an effort to fact-check claims and consult with experts before framing responses. If they drop that ball, there then remains no excuse for them. But at least they then have a chance to produce an informative outcome for an audience. See my full explication of why written debates are more fair and productive in Tips for Debate.

Otherwise, you need at least one opponent in a live debate to be a real expert—ideally, someone who actually has peer-reviewed publications in the topic being debated, but at least someone who has a Ph.D. in a relevant field (no one else qualifies as a real expert). And even then it’s kind of unfair to one side or the other if only one side has that expert representation. But if regardless of all the above advice you still just need to host an amateur debate for some reason, then you need to organize that debate entirely differently.

For example, there must be a commitment from both sides to stop acting like experts, and to instead humbly admit they are not, and that they don’t know very much about the matters at hand, and are only here to explain why, as an amateur themselves, certain experts have convinced them and others have not. And they must likewise agree, unless both sides in the debate concede a fact together, that they will only report as fact what real experts say whom they can cite (giving both name and source so the claim can be checked). And only on the understanding that there will be a follow up show in which their every fact-claim—hence their every cited source—will have been checked, and they will be shamed for every one they reported falsely; and if contrary expert opinions are found, they must either agree to admit they relied on an invalid cherry picking fallacy or else be ready to debate why they preferred one opinion to another.

Of course this requires learning how an amateur can evaluate the relative merits of expert opinions. I wrote an article on that: On Evaluating Arguments from Consensus. I think hosts of amateur debates should ensure the principles there laid out get followed well enough for their audience’s benefit. Hosts and debaters can also benefit from following my guide on How to Successfully Argue Jesus Existed (or Anything Else in the World). Then, maybe, you can have a worthwhile amateur debate. But usually, it will have been a waste of everyone’s time. Worse, it will only have helped disseminate falsehoods and misinformation. Please stop doing that.