My new book is available in kindle and print (audio is still in production but should arrive before 2022): Jesus from Outer Space: What the Earliest Christians Really Believed about Christ. Copies have already gone out to reviewers, and one is already scheduled to publish: Robert M. Price reviews JFOS in an upcoming issue of his Journal of Higher Criticism (probably in issue 15.3 or 15.4).

Outer Space pares down the argument of my extensive peer reviewed monograph On the Historicity of Jesus from nearly 700 pages to about 200. No footnotes, no digressions, minimal citations (it includes a page-by-page concordance to OHJ where you will find all of those things). And no math (or rather, no obvious math—it’s actually all there, but now hidden behind colloquial English). It also sticks to only the essential arguments and facts, so anyone reading it can’t resort so easily to the fallacy of “arguing against a minor point not even relevant to the conclusion” and claiming to have refuted its thesis (an otherwise common practice among critics).

JFOS also re-frames and expands some of those key arguments for a mythical Jesus in ways that more clearly explain them, and more clearly show why they are hard to rebut, and that more decisively refute what have become “the usual rebuttals,” which tend to be misinformed and illogical. Here there will be fewer places for critics to hide. But this book isn’t actually written for scholars, though it may be useful to them when used in conjunction with OHJ as sort of an appendix. JFOS is a colloquial treatment for everyday readers—and it demonstrates with real examples why scholars in Jesus studies can’t really be trusted on this issue anymore. But it also keeps things simple and brief, so even a scholar can’t hide behind excuses like “the book is too long” or “there is too much in it” or “it got confusing.” Moreover, because JFOS expands and focuses its arguments, and contains built-in responses to critics of OHJ, all serious critics will now need to consult JFOS first before making erroneous or uninformed rebuttals to OHJ. But this new book’s greatest feature is its appeal to any reader.

This is the ideal gateway drug for you to buy for anyone else you want to read up on this thesis, or whom you think isn’t adequately up to speed on it, or to whet their appetite. Its brevity will help ensure they’ll read it. And its simple and uncluttered approach will help ensure they’ll understand the argument and why it’s stronger than critics claim. But this book will also help you grasp the main arguments, and arm you to better explain and defend them online and elsewhere. It can also help you get even more out of OHJ as an encyclopedic reference. As here you get “just the basics,” and a stronger defense of each; and for any point you want to dig into more deeply, its concordance will direct you to where to look in Historicity for the corresponding material and scholarly citations.

New material includes a clear explanation, right out of the gate, of why this book’s “shocking” title is actually not anachronistic or contentious, but in fact entirely, contextually accurate—even if Jesus existed. That’s right. Even historicists must concede the first Christians believed Jesus was what they would then call an extraterrestrial. He did not come from “heaven” as an alternative dimension, in the way modern Christians believe. He literally came from outer space. As “heaven” then meant exactly that. As a preexistent being, Jesus lived among the stars, just beyond the orbit of Saturn. Until he descended—either to enter Mary’s womb (as historicists maintain the first Christians believed), or to enter a sublunar body-suit in the realm of Satan and his Legion (as the most defensible alternative maintains)—and then to be killed and rise from the dead, and return, literally, to the farthest reaches of outer space, to communicate with earthlings below in their dreams and visions.

This is actually a mainstream consensus view. The only thing I’ve changed is that I’ve put it in plain English, rather than hiding it behind esoteric vocabulary and prolix phrasing. The rest of the book takes the same approach. It’s intended to shock you into realizing you have been importing anachronistic modern assumptions into the ancient evidence, so you can start to see things instead the way ancient audiences would have. As only then can you really understand how to interpret and draw inferences from the evidence.

The table of contents is brief. After a Preface explaining the above and more, and before a Bibliography, a Concordance to On the Historicity of Jesus and Proving History, and an Index, there are nine short chapters:

1. Which Jesus Are We Talking about Exactly?
2. There Is a Good Chance Jesus Never Existed
3. A Plausible Jesus Is Not Necessarily a Probable Jesus
4. All the Historians on a Single Postcard
5. But Isn’t Jesus as Attested as Any Other Famous Dude?
6. More Like All the Other Dying-and-Rising Savior Gods of Yore
7. How Did Christianity Switch to a Historical Jesus?
8. The Cosmic Seed of David?
9. The Peculiar Cult of the Brothers of the Lord

With that description under our belt, let’s look at its first proper review…

Robert M. Price on JFOS

Of course, Price loved the book enough to offer a promotional blurb, which you might see in future ad copy:

It helps if you are omniscient, and Richard Carrier appears to be! The arguments and data supplied on behalf of Jesus Mythicism in his new book are astonishing—even if you thought you knew the debate pretty well! And if, like me, you are too stupid to understand Bayesian Probability, you will be relieved to see that the author has skipped it this time!

—Robert M. Price, author of Jesus Christ Superstition and The Christ Myth Theory and Its Problems

Others have concurred:

Carrier’s best, most engaging, and readable work yet. Don’t let the hilarious title fool you; this book is all business. Putting all the historical evidence for Jesus in the crucible, he burns away every apologetic argument and cuts through centuries of special pleading and pious fraud to demonstrate that the ‘Real Jesus’ is an unreal one.

—David Fitzgerald, author of Nailed and Jesus: Mything in Action

And:

Jesus From Outer Space distills and simplifies, yet at the same time strengthens, core arguments in Carrier’s earlier work, On the Historicity of Jesus. Some, like me, will find the colloquial style jarring and some will find details to quibble over, but there is no gainsaying that the logic on every page is tight and the supporting evidence abounds. Carrier also addresses with forceful cogency some criticisms of his earlier arguments. Especially of note is the unrelenting demonstration of the circular reasoning and factual ignorance of several prominent critics of the Christ Myth hypothesis.

Neil Godfrey, author & editor at Vridar

In Price’s upcoming review for JHC (which he shared with me; issues of JHC are now available as they come on Amazon, so keep your eye out for this one; it’s entirely possible he might rewrite the review before publication, so remember from here on out I am only working from the draft he sent me), he does what most good academic reviewers do, which is couple the praise he deems due with his most important criticisms. In Jesus from Outer Space, Price says, “Carrier gives the reader both the comprehensive ‘big picture’ and a detailed account of the relevant data in both early Christian and contemporary pagan sources” and “His arguments are impressive and impressively presented.” And despite the few quibbles he does have with it (which I’ll get to next) he still concludes “The book is very powerful!”

Should I Make Mythicism More Fringe?

Price offers other supportive remarks, but of more importance I think are his critiques. His first criticism is that my presentation “suffers” from my “retention of elements of traditional ‘mainstream’ scholarship.” In other words, he ironically criticizes me for being too mainstream—and not “fringe” enough. That’s actually high praise. It is to the credit of my work that it is the least fringe defense of the nonexistence of Jesus you can find. Price of course dislikes a lot of mainstream premises, and would like to see me tear more of them down. But this may be a principal difference between us: as a disciplined historian, I should not litter my thesis with unnecessary propositions already deemed unlikely by the academy that needs to be persuaded. If my conclusion follows from even their own assumptions (about basic facts like the mainstream dating of the Gospels and the authenticity of “the seven” trusted Epistles of Paul), they can have even less justification for rejecting my conclusion.

This is a basic requirement of effective argumentation, particularly given what we know of the neuroscience of inherent human irrationality. If you defend the same conclusion with a hard-to-rebut argument and an easy-to-rebut argument, the human tendency is, neurologically, to attack the easy one and then conclude—even literally convincing themselves—that they have therefore refuted the conclusion. Even though they never touched the strong argument for it. The conclusion we must draw from this scientific information about human behavior is: never include weak arguments for a conclusion. If you don’t need them, simply bin them. You will literally be hurting your case, making it less likely to gain adherents, otherwise.

Price is aware of the principle, concluding he thinks I am “trying to shorten [my] line of defense by granting as much common ground to [my] opponents as [I] can,” which is true (I explicitly say so in OHJ: see index, “a fortiori (method of)”). Because that’s how to argue effectively. Never defend a premise you don’t need. And if you can show you’re right even after granting all your opposition’s own premises, you will have far better chance of getting them to see the light. But there is actually another reason I do this, which is simply that it is sound historical methodology, probably taught to every graduate school history major on the planet: a consensus is usually correct, until you have enough evidence to show it’s not. And it’s an unnecessary load of work to do that, when you don’t need to.

Even so, you’ll notice I do challenge a majority consensus a lot in OHJ, but only when the evidence I can present against it is overwhelming. Which takes a lot of work; and when the results aren’t conclusive, they should be abandoned as too weak a suspicion to demonstrate. And this explains every position I side with the consensus on that Price doesn’t like. My avoidance of weak or unnecessary arguments doesn’t stop critics from misreading what I wrote and deploying ill-informed rebuttals in a prime example of exercising that neurological defect I just noted we all suffer from if we don’t check ourselves—attacking a weak, irrelevant point and concluding you’ve rebutted the strong, relevant ones—but there is little I can do to compel a scholar to act competently, or to actually read my work before criticizing it (the most I can do is simply not include such things so as to forestall their folly, which is one of the principal rhetorical advantages of JFOS).

Otherwise, for example, with respect to dating the New Testament documents, I put it this way in OHJ (and the same point goes for anything Price would deem too accommodating in my assumptions):

There is a great deal wrong with how a ‘consensus’ has been reached on the dates and authorship of all these Christian materials, and the conclusions usually cited as established tend to be far more questionable than most scholars let on. Nevertheless, as I found the task of trying to sort this out impossible, I will mostly rely on the majority consensus for no other reason than that I haven’t anything better to work with. I projected it would take a minimum of seven years of full-time research to adequately examine and analyze all the evidence and arguments regarding the dating and authorship of these materials, and that with no actual prospect of any clear resolution for any of it, since it is not simply a given that we actually know the answers to any debated question. I think there is a lot of work here that needs to be properly redone in NT studies, and I’m not alone in thinking that.

On the Historicity of Jesus, p. 260

So I acknowledge Price’s point. It just isn’t my business in OHJ (or JFOS) to do that work. I don’t need to. And it would probably be unproductive anyway. I think most of these questions are unanswerable.

The one example Price spends the most time on is of course one of his own passion projects: his insistence that the letters of Paul are “heavily” interpolated (rather than, as I grant, only occasionally so) and that many deemed authentic, like Galatians, are really second century forgeries. The reason I don’t concede these points, however, is that there is simply no good evidence for them. Price’s case for such notions I found to be so multiply flawed I had to abandon it as unprovable, or indeed even contradicted by a balance of evidence. Galatians is so clearly a pastiche of Pauline correspondence, no credible case can be made that anyone in the second century would have produced it, even less so fabricated it in the first. And until far better evidence arises, I see zero basis for adopting its forgery as a premise. The improbability of that conclusion commutes to any conclusion based on it, so using it as a premise can only reduce the probability of any conclusion you want to reach with it.

Indeed, that is so even if this premise’s probability were as favorable to Price as “50%,” as that literally means you are halving the probability of any conclusion you use that premise to reach. Why would I want to halve the probability of my conclusion? Even if we assigned Price’s case a 90% likelihood (and we can’t), that still lowers my conclusion’s probability by 10%. In other words, it does not increase anything; it always makes your case worse, no matter what your case is. So why propose it? We need facts to be well-nigh certain to use them as direct evidence in a case (see my discussion of this point in respect to Kamil Gregor; background facts can be less certain, but those will be ancillary, not central points in any case, and would be included only with the full recognition of their uncertainty).

In my research I found the frequency of interpolation in New Testament manuscripts to be sufficiently low per century that we have no evidence-based reason to believe more than 1 in 200 verses have been inserted or substantially altered; and the rate might be as low as 1 in 1000 for the first century of textual transmission. Without any evidence the base rate is higher (and “evidence” means objective facts everyone can verify, not subjective suspicions or “feelings”), I cannot responsibly act like it is. The consequence of this is that to simply “say” the phrase “Brother of the Lord” was “interpolated” after the name James in Galatians 1:19 is to assert something all evidence indicates cannot be any more likely than 1 in 200. You are thus reducing the probability of whatever conclusion you then reach by two hundred times. Perhaps it is Price’s self-confessed inability to comprehend how probability works that prevents him from grasping this and thus realizing it’s a problem for his position.

(BTW, I explain all of this, and how I derive these base rates, and how you need good evidence to overcome them, in OHJ: p. 569, n. 73, in respect to why we can conclude 1 Thessalonians 2:15-16 is interpolated, and p. 591, n. 103, on why that same reasoning does not work for Galatians 1:19. The data these base rates derive from I cover in my peer reviewed journal article on Tacitus reproduced in Hitler Homer Bible Christ, pp. 382-83.)

It’s worth pointing out that “1 in 200” is vastly better odds than any supernatural explanation can claim (those come with prior odds of millions to one against even at our most charitable: see Naturalism Is Not an Axiom of the Sciences but a Conclusion of Them and The Argument from Specified Complexity against Supernaturalism), so interpolation is always more likely than “Jesus was a resurrected miracle-working demigod,” for example. But I am not ever testing mythicism against that hypothesis. I only consider non-supernatural theories of historicity as at all worth considering and thus comparing against mythicism.

I mention this because of another cognitive error we all, but Christian apologists especially, are prone to: flattening all probabilities into the same probability. Everything that’s called “improbable,” for example, will be treated as equally improbable, and so “improbable” erroneously becomes synonymous with “not true.” And so, for instance, “that’s improbable” becomes an argument against accepting “interpolation rather than resurrection,” because they lose track of the fact that something can be both improbable and more probable than something else, e.g. “interpolation is more probable than resurrection” can be true even when “interpolation” is very improbable. People have a hard time grasping basic principles of probability like this, which is why it is so important to get better at it so as to educate them, or thus expose the mistakes in their reasoning otherwise resulting from their intuitive mathematical errors like this.

Run from math, lose the argument. Learn it. Live it.

Should We Assume Romans 1:3-4 Is Bogus?

Price’s second criticism, which he builds on the first, is to ask, “how,” without embracing his position of a veritable swarm of interpolations in Paul, “can one harmonize the Mythicist notion of Jesus as a heavenly archangel descending to earth” (he must mean, sublunar realm) with the “adoptionist Christology of Romans 1:3-4,” which says “Jesus, though ‘declared Son of God in power…by his resurrection from the dead’, was already qualified as Messiah by virtue of his Davidic lineage.” Ironically, I think Price might be committing the very sin here that he is accusing me of: assuming modern mainstream conceptions of adoptionism and its relation to this passage are correct (they are not), in order to derive his conclusion that this passage must have been interpolated (By whom? An adoptionist contradicting themselves?).

The passage in question reads (translating literally):

…concerning His Son, [the one] having come-to-be from the semen of David according to the flesh [and] having been singled-out as God’s Son in power according to the Spirit of Holiness from [his] resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord.

Romans 1:3-4

Paul is consistently an adoptionist. He repeatedly implies God adopted Jesus as his son, throughout his letters, setting this up as a model for how we can be adopted by God and thus become God’s sons, too (and so Jesus is “the firstborn of many brethren”). And we know from Philo that Paul (and thus his fellow Christians) regarded Jesus as the already-established “archangel of many names” in Jewish angelology, who Philo tells us was always called the Son of God, in fact even “Firstborn Son of God,” the exact same phrase Paul repeatedly uses of Jesus (see OHJ, Ch. 5, Element 40).

So it’s important to notice that Paul does not say in Romans 1 that Jesus was “adopted” as God’s son at his resurrection; he says “singled out as God’s Son in power” from his resurrection onward. Jesus is thus being reconfirmed in a station he had abandoned to effect his atoning sacrifice, being restored to power, the very power he had given up in the incarnation to be “a slave” to the natural world order (just as Paul says in Philippians 2:5-11). Paul makes clear Jesus was always God’s son, even from the dawn of creation (Romans 8:3-4, Galatians 4:4; cf. Ps.-Paul, Colossians 1:15; and Hebrews 5:5-10). So his being “singled out as” the Son from his resurrection onward (when he resumed his supernatural state, after having voluntarily submitted to a mortal one) was only a reconfirmation of a status he already once had.

Price further conflates “messiah” with “Son of God.” The archangel Philo describes, who is clearly the archangel the earliest Christians believed Jesus was (and they believed this of him even if he existed), was always the Son of God. That was a position of supernatural status, not a biological reality. A messiah could also be called God’s son (as any king or priest could), but the messiah was a specific mortal-world agent, someone chosen (anointed) for a specific mortal-world task. All high priests and kings were so-described as messiahs (and “sons of god”). But “the” messiah often meant the final chosen one, who would inaugurate the awaited end of the world. Sometimes it meant the final messiahs—as in the Talmud, there are two eschatological messiahs, the penultimate messiah “Son of Joseph” who would die and then be resurrected by the ultimate messiah “Son of David,” signaling the last days (see OHJ, Ch. 4, Element 5).

In Paul’s credal statement in Romans he is clearly using it in the final messianic sense: Jesus became not just any messiah but the Messiah Son of David in the flesh, meaning biologically (whether miraculously, procreatively, or allegorically; Paul does not say). This was a temporary, voluntary status he assumed, to initiate the end of days. It is a status he only held, and only could hold, in a body of flesh—indeed, Davidic flesh, as prophecy required. Because this is an explicit reference to the prophecy of Nathan (more tellingly in the Septuagint translation Paul is riffing on), that God would take “semen from” David’s belly and “produce” from it a Son who would sit an eternal throne; the figure thus described clearly being Jesus in Christian conception.

There is no sense in which Paul would imagine someone’s becoming the Messiah Son of David by birth (by entering a body of flesh) as identical to being declared the Son of God in Power (a supernatural position of cosmic rule). That could only happen to a spiritual being (hence, “according to the spirit,” not according to the flesh). Paul is saying that the archangel who was the Son of God, already the appointed viceroy of the universe assigned many of God’s powers, indeed even tasked with effecting God’s creation for him (per Philo; and Paul, e.g. 1 Corinthians 8:6), gave up all of that (Phil. 2:6-7) so he could assume a body of flesh so that he could become the final Davidic messiah (Phil 2:8-10), for which sacrifice God then rewards him by reappointment to his former supernatural status as God’s immortal son and viceroy, once again assigned God’s powers over creation.

Price complains this is “harmonization,” but it’s already in harmony. I don’t have to add anything to get this result—all of what I just said is well-established in evidence, not something I am making up to force a harmony. Philo and Paul do equate Jesus with the same archangel who was always the Firstborn Son of God in power. Paul is referencing Nathan’s prophecy. Paul did write and endorse the cosmological account in Philippians of how Jesus gave up that supernatural status to assume a body of flesh and die. Paul doesn’t say Jesus was “adopted” or only “first” so appointed to his cosmic viceroy status after that. And so on. What I am doing is not harmonization. It’s reading what Paul wrote; and doing so, as we ought, in the context of the actual evidence of what Paul and other Jews then believed.

Only if you ignore all these facts and misread Paul the way modern historicist scholars mistakenly do can you get the problem Price has created. There is no problem. That’s a fabrication of modern historicist scholars. We need to read the texts of Paul as they are written, not with modern historicist assumptions; to the contrary, we should be adopting only those assumptions we can establish already were facts when Paul wrote (such as regarding Jewish angelology and messianism). Not circularly assuming later interpretations of Paul were extant when Paul wrote, so as to conclude Paul was endorsing those interpretations.

I think Price needs to get out of the framework historicists have fabricated here, and look at the text anew. Just as he knows we should be doing. But we need to do it consistently, across the board. It is precisely by doing that that I get the results I do. It’s the one fundamental lesson historicists need to learn. And I think Price would agree with me. He just forgot to do it here.

Ejaculated, Cosmic, or Allegorical Seed?

A similar mistake might be what prevents Price from understanding how solid my arguments are that Paul meant “came-to-be from the seed of David” in a literal (and thus cosmic) sense or the same allegorical sense he means elsewhere—such as when he says even Gentiles, upon conversion, come-to-be “the seed” of Abraham, which Paul explicitly tells us he means allegorically. Although he is referring to metaphysical realities, he is not referring to copulation or procreation, he is referring to which world-order—mortal or celestial—we can claim heritage to. If he could speak this way of our being “of the seed of Abraham,” then he could speak this way of Jesus being “of the seed of David.” We have literally no evidence against that being the case. So we cannot claim to know it isn’t.

I think the evidence for Paul in fact meaning what he says literally is even stronger—God took semen directly from David and formed a body for Jesus from it, the only way Nathan’s prophecy could be rescued from having been falsified (no eternal throne was sat by the seed of David’s belly). But that’s actually beside the point. My argument is not that we know what Paul meant here. My argument is that we don’t know what Paul meant here. I make this very clear in JFOS. There is no evidence to increase the probability of any reading of Romans 1:3-4.

People who want Paul to have meant “descended from David” in the normal biological way have no evidence to offer that that’s the case. It’s simply a presupposition. And one that grates against the evidence: that’s not what the Greek says, in fact Paul speaks very weirdly here if that’s what he meant (as I explain in JFOS and OHJ); and it does not accord at all with what he says in Philippians 2, where Jesus does not descend from David, but from outer space, directly into a body manufactured for him—no mention of it ever being in anyone’s womb or produced by copulation. That means Paul is just as likely to have meant this verse in the directly literal sense (the least ad hoc way to read anything, as it requires no presuppositions at all), which is the cosmic sense (God directly made a body for Jesus out of semen taken directly from David exactly as Nathan said), or in the allegorical sense (just as Paul elsewhere speaks of being “of the seed” of Biblical figures). The issue is not that I or anyone can prove either of those possibilities more likely than the historicist’s; the issue is that no one can prove they are less likely than the historicist’s. Consequently, we can’t use this passage to argue for any hypothesis, historicist or mythicist.

Perhaps Price’s inability to grasp how probability works blocks him from understanding this point? Because he seems trapped in a black-and-white fallacy where either Romans 1:3-4 “must” be referring to biological descent or it “must” be referring to a cosmic or allegorical framework. He is thus violating the Law of Excluded Middle by excluding a middle possibility: that we don’t know. Thus he confuses the ontological fact that, yes, it must be one or the other, with the epistemic fact that we lack the data we need in order to know which it is. My argument is the latter. I am not saying Paul did believe Jesus was given a body directly manufactured from David’s semen or that this prophetic requirement was in some way satisfied allegorically. I am saying we cannot know he did or didn’t. I am saying there is no evidence that makes the historicist interpretation any more likely than either of those alternatives, particularly given the weird way Paul phrases this in Greek, and what he, and the Bible, elsewhere say.

So when Price says that the cosmic and allegorical alternative “strikes me as a fantastically cumbersome ad hoc hypothesis,” it’s not—nothing I say in defense of it is ad hoc, but all entirely, demonstrably true. It entails no more assumptions than the historicist reading does: they need to presume something strange about Paul’s choice of vocabulary, and about how Paul thinks this actually satisfies Nathan’s failed prophecy as written; they need to ignore the fact that Paul actually does talk about being of a Biblical seed allegorically (they have to just “import” their own assumptions that he “wouldn’t” do that here even though he did it there), and that Paul never says Jesus had a father other than God or “descended” from David (they have to just “import” their own assumptions that that is what he meant); they have to pretend Paul doesn’t talk about God manufacturing bodies (our future ones, and both Adam’s and Eve’s) and use the exact same vocabulary in Romans 1. And so on.

By contrast, Price argues we don’t need to point any of this out because “scholars commonly understand Romans 1:3-4 as either Paul quoting a Roman creed-fragment to ingratiate himself with his readers, or as a post-Pauline insertion,” as if interpolation isn’t a vastly less probable option (as I just noted, and hence why few scholars embrace it here, and those who do, do so solely on circular presuppositions, not objectively verifiable evidence), and as if Paul’s having to ingratiate himself to a crowd believing Jesus biologically descended from David doesn’t outright refute mythicism altogether. It’s thus Price’s approach I find wanting. That’s why I don’t adopt it.

I feel like Price makes a similar blunder when he argues “whereas Zoroastrian scripture plainly states” that the eschatological messiah’s body would be formed from semen directly banked from the ancient Zoroaster (a direct model and thus proof-of-concept for my cosmic seed hypothesis), “Paul never does.” Well, obviously. If he had said that in any letter he wrote, we would not have that letter (and we know we are missing several). Or else that line would have been dutifully removed from it (even easier to do than adding a line). Somehow Price forgot his own conclusions about how textual survival has been completely decided by staunch historicists, who didn’t allow any texts to survive that would argue Jesus was never on earth, least of all from the hand of Paul. This is why no argument of the form “But Paul didn’t explicitly say that” holds any logical validity (OHJ, Chapter 7.7).

Does Peer Review Not Matter?

Price complains that I rely a lot on the value of peer review in choosing what arguments to cite as reliable. Yes. You read that correctly. He complains that I rely on peer reviewed research rather than other stuff never vetted by experts. “I care nothing for peer review,” Price says “or rather, I consider our readers to be our peers and reviewers.” Which, take note, is an admission that his Journal of Higher Criticism is not peer reviewed. This is a deep and abiding methodological difference between us. What some rando says is simply not ever as reliable as something that has undergone objective expert critique, and been revised in light of it before being published. We need peer review to sift out tons and tons of bad and misleading and miseducating and error-filled material. Peer review is what ensures us that some independent experts agree a paper or book is worth our time to read, because it contains no obvious errors that more amateur readers won’t be able to identify precisely because they are amateurs.

Relying on peer reviewed research, which I know has thus been vetted and challenged and tested, rather than stuff written by amateurs and randos that has never undergone any real critique (least of all by well-qualified experts) before it was published, is essential to any scholar who expects to be taken seriously by other experts. It is also an extension of the same rhetorical process I already explained to be necessary earlier: any argument a fortiori, which is expected to convince anyone in the academy, needs to rely on processes they trust. If I can establish mythicism on a body of solely peer reviewed research, my case is thereby made far stronger than if I were to rely on random, unvetted opinion pieces by amateurs and experts dodging established checks on their own possible mistakes.

Thus, making my case on peer reviewed research is necessary. It is what makes my work more worth taking seriously, and more persuasive to other experts. Indeed it is a fundamental requirement of history as a profession, if you want to change the consensus in that profession.

I am not of course saying that “peer reviewed” signals “true.” That isn’t even its purpose. Peer reviewers can err and suck and misjudge owing to their own biases. But even acting with perfect objectivity, they never have to agree with a thesis they approve; they are only tasked with verifying it commits no obvious errors and meets the standards of the field. Nor am I saying “not peer reviewed” signals “false.” If I wish to rely on an argument or claim that hasn’t been peer reviewed when publishing under peer review myself, I can. I just have to actually reconstruct the argument and evidence so it can be peer reviewed. This is not the same as saying “I’m not going to present any of the argument and evidence establishing their claim, I’m just going to ask you to gullibly believe it holds up.” Likewise, if I wish to publish outside peer review, I can. I just have to make sure that when I do, my case is based on logic and evidence anyone who cares to can independently verify (and, ideally, that I am professionally trained to do that—qualifications matter). But that is still not meeting the same standard as peer review, and I would never pretend it was. “My readers are peer reviewers” simply isn’t the same thing as “my peer reviewers are established, published professionals in the field with full qualifications to assess this,” much less “whose review process was also overseen and verified by neutral third party editors.”

The fact that an aversion to peer review is also a well-established symptom of crankery only makes my every point here more important to heed (see my discussion in Killing Crankery with Bayesian Reasoning).

Which Brothers of the Lord?

Price doesn’t like my conclusion that Paul means by Brothers of the Lord just rank-and-file Christians. He doesn’t really give a reason, other than “I much prefer G.A. Wells’s contention that ‘brother of the Lord’ instead denoted a group of itinerant missionaries who also appear in Matthew 25:40, 1 Corinthians 9:5, and 3 John verse 3.” This is an example of issues I frequently have with Price: he has a tendency to prefer much more ad hoc explanations of things for which there is no evidence, than the simplest hypotheses based entirely on evidence. There is zero evidence for any special group of Christians so-called. None. Zip. So why invent a thing for which you have no evidence? And why claim it is therefore a better explanation than what we do have evidence for? I can’t fathom.

What we have here is Price (via Wells) circularly citing 1 Cor. 9 to explain 1 Cor. 9 (and circular arguments are ineffectual), and two other verses, neither of which mention any special group of any special name. The parable he cites from Matthew is speaking of Christians generally. No mention even of itinerance or missionaries. So is the passage he cites from 3 John, which just talks about Christians visiting with news, not missionaries, nor any special group. There is no evidence whatever that those two passages mean some sub-group of Christians; and what group is meant by the Corinthians passage is precisely what we are asking.

There is simply no evidence for any such sub-group of Christians. So the probability that there was is nowhere near 100%. It’s at best 50% and I think even that’s being too generous (what evidence do we have that the odds are even that high that such a special group exists that Wells just made up?). But still, once again, if we must adopt a premise only 50% likely to be true, we are halving the probability of any conclusion we reach from it. That’s shooting yourself in the foot. It makes no sense methodologically.

Contrast that with what I argue: we have undeniable, extensive, and clear evidence that Paul regarded all baptized Christians as Brothers of the Lord (OHJ, Chapter 4, Element 12). That’s not conjecture. It’s an established fact in our background knowledge. What are the odds that when all Christians are Brothers of the Lord (an established fact) that there would be a special sub-group among them also called Brothers of the Lord? Given what we know about how humans name things? Nigh zero. No one names a sub-group exactly the same thing as the main group. That might never have happened in the entire history of the human race; but certainly so rarely as to be too improbable to credit here.

This is in fact my argument against the historicist interpretation as well. We know for a fact Paul thought all baptized Christians were Brothers of the Lord. And we have zero evidence he ever meant or even knew about biological brothers of Jesus. But even if he meant that, that’s another sub-group—biological brothers of Jesus; actual kin, not the adopted sons of God comprising nearly the whole church. So they would need to be given a different designation or name than just “Brothers of the Lord.” Paul would need to specify to make clear he does not mean a mere Brother of the Lord, but a particular special kind of one—a “Brother of the Lord in the Flesh” or a “Natural Brother of the Lord” or a “Brother from the Lord’s family” or any of a million things Paul could say to indicate that.

So if Paul doesn’t specify a special sub-group of Brothers, then that indicates Paul did not know he had to specify; which means he didn’t know of any other kind of Brother of the Lord than what he tells us of: Christians. And even if that weren’t the case, we’re still left not knowing which kind of brother Paul means. So we can’t just “assume” he means the biological. It wasn’t until the Gospels that that notion would be invented; and even they never heard of any biological kin ever becoming Christians—Luke is the first to imagine this (in Acts 1), but then they vanish from his own public history of the church, clearly never having existed in the first place (OHJ, Ch. 9.3 & 11.10).

I really see no way around this. Yet Price comes along and takes that direct, 100%-evidence-based, rock-solid logic and throws it over for a wild conjecture for which there is no evidence at all and even some evidence against. I really don’t understand his methodology here. It’s bizarre. I cannot fathom its logic.

Please Use the Concordance

This is really minor, but Price throws in as an aside that he wished I “had given credit to Theodore J. Weeden for demonstrating the gospels’ use of Josephus’ account of Jesus ben Ananias to construct the Jesus passion narrative,” evidently not aware that I did: as I explain in the preface, JFOS has minimal citations (no footnotes, minimal bibliography, etc.), so that its concordance to OHJ must serve as substitute for a footnoting apparatus; the first time I mention Jesus ben Ananias in JFOS is page 18 (as you can learn from the index, under “Jesus ben Ananias” on page 224); if you look up that page in the concordance, on page 214 under the entry for pages “18-19” you will see listed pages “427-429” of OHJ, which includes the section where I discuss the ben Ananias issue in detail, where you will find (on page 429) footnote 86, which reads as follows:

• Theodore Weeden, ‘Two Jesuses, Jesus of Jerusalem and Jesus of Nazareth: Provocative Parallels and Imaginative Imitation’, Forum N.S. 6.2 (Fall 2003), pp. 137- 341; Craig Evans, ‘Jesus in Non-Christian Sources’, in Studying the Historical Jesus (ed. Chilton and Evans), pp. 443-78 (475-77).

Note the Evans piece was published a decade before Weeden’s. Price has mistook who first discovered this. Of course Evans, a conservative Evangelical Christian, attempts an alternative explanation of the parallels, but even he cannot deny they are real. Evans’ argument is of course apologetic nonsense, ably refuted by Weeden, and numerous other notable scholars (at least twelve by current count: see Neil Godfrey’s initial list here, expanded on here and here).

“Nor,” Price complains, do I “even mention S.G.F. Brandon” in my “discussion of the Zealot hypothesis, instead relying on the copycat hack Reza Aslan’s stupid rip-off Zealot,” so “No wonder the theory sounds weak” to me. I don’t know how Price missed this, but my discussion is not based on Aslan but Fernando Bermejo-Rubio, a much more skilled and formidable scholar than Aslan or indeed even Brandon. And I did not mention Brandon in JFOS because he is dead, and has been for almost my entire lifetime, and thus is not someone “still” defending the thesis today. Granted, the JFOS concordance in this case would have led Price to where I merely mention the zealot hypothesis in Proving History rather than my extensive footnote on page 176 in OHJ, but in both books I do indeed cite Brandon (Bermejo-Rubio came to my attention later).

Conclusion

I’m grateful that Price praises and approves of Jesus from Outer Space and found most of it edifying and useful and highly recommends it. And our disagreements are few, and you have what you need now to decide for yourselves which of us you should be siding with in each case. But you should certainly read the book for yourself, and see what you get out of it, and how you can benefit from using its arguments going forward, to understand the mythical Jesus hypothesis better, and to better defend it against those who balk.