In my debate with Craig Evans, one of the strange arguments he attempted was the Argument from Verisimilitude, whereby he says we should believe any story that’s dressed up in a realistic background. In my original Analysis of the Carrier-Evans Debate, I described the way he put it as:

The Gospels, Evans says, correctly enough describe the geography and customs of first century Judea that archaeologists can rely on them and have dug up what the Gospels predict will be there. His presentation of this I found to be disturbingly disingenuous. It isn’t true, to begin with, that any archaeological site has ever been found on evidence in the Gospels. Unlike, for example, Troy, which was found on evidence in the Iliad. Yet Evans would not then claim the Iliad has verisimilitude, therefore Hector and Achilles existed. So why does he think this argument makes any sense in any other context?

I revisited this strange tactic in my subsequent Post-Debate Analysis, there pointing out that this is exactly the opposite of how real historians decide what sources to trust. I list twelve features historians look for in a source all of which are lacking in the Gospels, such that “There is no field of history—absolutely none—where such sources as these would be trusted as history at all.” Evans wants to bypass this procedural, methodological fact accepted across the entire discipline of history, by appealing to the Gospels “just sounding believable” to him and their authors being good at situational trivia. That’s not historical method at all. That’s formalized gullibility.

Formalized Gullibility

Believing a ridiculous story (and every Gospel is throughout ridiculous, by every standard historians apply in any other field), simply because its author was smart enough to color it with realistic details, is the very definition of gullible. It declares you will believe any obvious liar as long as they are good at it. And by framing this gullibility as a formal methodological principle, you are essentially declaring allegiance to gullibility as a methodology.

This finally struck me when I recently listened to an interview of Craig Evans on the American Freethought Podcast (which I only happened to do because I was their next week’s guest). In that Evans lays out his principle of gullibility—or, as he would put it, his methodological principle of verisimilitude—and defends it as being established in long-respected handbooks of historical methodology, most particularly, the much-outdated but still-revered Understanding History: A Primer of Historical Method by Louis Gottschalk (originally published in 1950). Except…no such principle exists in that work. To the contrary, Gottschalk there describes principles by which historians would reject the Gospels as wholly untrustworthy sources. So either Evans did not read Gottschalk, and is instead fibbing about what Gottschalk argued to gain fraudulent prestige for his enshrining of gullibility as a methodological principle, or Evans is a marvelously incompetent, or outright delusional, reader of Gottschalk. Neither commends him.

I demonstrate how thoroughly ridiculous even the supposedly most mundane Gospel narrative is, that attributed to Mark, in Jesus from Outer Space. I expand on that for the other Gospels in On the Historicity of Jesus. But I already gave just a sample of these points in my write-up on the Evans debate:

• Even the most informed author, Matthew, isn’t a paragon of accuracy. For example, it’s well known that the Pharisees did not forbid healing on the Sabbath, yet they are depicted as arguing this with Jesus repeatedly, when the arguments put in the mouth of Jesus are actually the same Rabbinical arguments used by the actual Pharisees themselves (e.g., see Geza Vermes’ discussion in The Authentic Gospel of Jesus, pp. 46-47).
• Similarly, none of the Gospels presents a trial sequence that is at all plausible within the known laws and customs of the time (Proving History, p. 154).
• The clearing of the temple scene is not at all plausible given the known facts of the temple layout and its police force (OHJ, pp. 431-32).
• The Barabbas narrative invents non-existent Roman customs to create an ahistorical Jewish symbolism (OHJ, pp. 402-08).
• Matthew ridiculously has Jesus ride into town on an adult and a baby donkey simultaneously (OHJ, pp. 459-60).
• The disciples abandon their jobs and property and families, and pick up and follow and completely devote themselves to Jesus after he, a complete stranger and a pauper, just walks up to them and utters a few sentences.
• And so on (cf. OHJ, pp. 435-36).

Verisimilitude is not actually so prominent a feature of the Gospels. So not only is Evans relying on a completely gullible principle, he has delusionally convinced himself that that principle actually applies to the Gospels! And he does that, I can only deduce from the way he argues, by literally ignoring every counter-example the Gospels offer (every single instance, of the hundreds we could count, of the Gospels’ lack of verisimilitude), and cherry picking the few instances where they give a background detail that matches common knowledge of the time, like the names of cities, and of prominent figures, details any liar or producer of fiction and myth can produce.

History without Gullibility

In my own peer reviewed book on historical methodology, Proving History, I addressed a similarly gullible principle, the so-called Criterion of Vividness of Narration (pp. 182-83), noting “vivid detail,” such as when a story is written “as if the author were ‘there’ and viscerally responding to what she experienced,” is “also an established trend in fictionalization and embellishment.” In fact, “Good storytellers often come up with these details, especially when they are lacking, and thus such elements are as likely as any to accumulate in the retelling over time.” Ancient schools even specifically taught students to do this.

And we know that’s also true of the kinds of “background” facts that so illogically impress Evans. As Jan Brunvand found in his famous analysis of urban legends in The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and their Meanings, false stories actually accumulated realistic, accurate background facts over time, and as they moved around in space (such as from one country or city to another). Names of real streets and buildings, real people, real cities, details that make a story sound realistic and thus believable, are typical features of these tales.

In OHJ I cite the example discussed by William Hansen in his Phlegon of Tralles’ Book of Marvels (pp. 68-85), where he shows an ancient ghost story told by Phlegon was later recast in early modern Ireland, complete with all the same details aimed at authenticity, only altered to sound authentic to its new setting (ancient names and places and customs all being changed to modern Irish ones), thus illustrating how legends actually get composed. As the renowned biblical commentator C.K. Barrett pointed out in his 1991 Theological Studies review of The Trial of St. Paul attempting a similar argument, “It is enough to remark that the reviewer has read a large number of detective stories which were completely correct in their description of legal and police procedures—and pure fiction.”

So we know, as historians, that Evans’ principle is invalid. It cannot be used to attach historicity to anything in a story. The reason we can corroborate details like that Pontius Pilate governed Judea when Caiaphas was high priest or that Tyre is near the region of Galilee is that these are precisely the public, then-widely-known, generic details any writer could include to color their story, as all contrivers of legends did and still do. We trust those details are historical because we have independent corroboration for them. Yet the one thing we want independent corroboration of—literally any detail particular to Jesus and his travels—is peculiarly never what we find any corroboration of. That warrants suspicion of those details, not their gullible acceptance. Anyone could weave a tale about an imaginary hero meeting and conversing with Pontius Pilate. That Pilate existed offers zero evidence that that hero, or that conversation, did.

In a sense, Evans (and all other Christians who adopt this Principle of Gullibility; or even secular historians who do, even Dennis MacDonald!) is falling victim to the basic fallacy of denying the antecedent: If a story gets a lot of background details wrong, it’s probably a made-up story (a variant of the valid Principle of Contamination: see Craig vs. Law on the Argument from Contamination and Is the Principle of Contamination Invalid?); therefore, if a story doesn’t get a lot background details wrong, it’s probably not a made-up story. That’s the fallacy of, “If P, then Q. Therefore, if not P, then not Q.” “If I have a cat, then I have a pet. Therefore, if I don’t have a cat, I don’t have a pet.” Nope. The fact that we can spot fake stories by their mistaken background details, does not mean we can spot a true story by its accurate background details. Because a fake story can also have lots of accurate background details. And fake stories, in fact, often do.

We see all of this illustrated quite well in Luke-Acts. Not only is Luke-Acts filled with lots of anachronisms and implausibilities and outright historical errors (so it isn’t true that it “gets everything right”), but even the details it does get right appear to have been gleaned from historical reference books—books that never had anything to do with Jesus or Christianity. In respect to Judea we have caught Luke cribbing “background details” to color his narrative from the works of Josephus (as documented by Mason and Pervo, for example). For Luke’s account of adventures in the Aegean, it’s reasonable to suspect he used a similar historian to cull such details from to color that account, and unlike Josephus, we just don’t have any first century histories of the Aegean Luke could have been using so as to check.

It’s also possible Luke got that knowledge of the Aegean from his own personal travels there, or from real Christian narratives that he edited and embellished. So again, “that he gets some details of the Aegean right” is not evidence any of the stories he weaves those details into are true. And as it happens, we have quite a lot of evidence they probably aren’t. I document this extensively in Chapter 9 of On the Historicity of Jesus, showing how Luke rewrites history so as to contradict Paul’s actual eyewitness accounts, how Luke rewrites mythical tales and represents them as historical events, and so on. But one of the most glaring examples is the mistake that most conclusively proves Luke was coloring his narrative with details cribbed from Josephus:

When Luke has Gamaliel bring up the examples of the “past” rebel leaders Theudas and Judas in the same speech, he reverses their correct order, having Theudas appear first, when in fact Judas did, by several decades in fact; indeed, Josephus places Theudas as much as fifteen years after the dramatic time in which Luke even has him mentioned. In other words, Luke imagines Gamaliel mentioning a rebel leader who didn’t even exist yet! Gotcha. This is fiction, not history. Luke is making this all up. As with most forgers and fakers, it’s their rare mistakes that we catch them by. Not their many successes. To ignore a writer’s mistakes and gullibly trust them instead simply because they usually are better at making stuff up is exactly how historians should not operate.

That Luke should be forced to use a rebel leader before his time is best explained by the fact that he needed someone to mention, and Josephus, his likely source for this, only details three distinct rebel movements that could be attached to a specific, named, charismatic founder. And when Josephus mentions Theudas, he immediately follows with a description of the fate of the sons of Judas (in Jewish Antiquities 20.97-102), and he uses that occasion to recap the earlier actions of Judas himself. Thus, that Luke should repeat this very same incorrect sequence, which makes sense in Josephus but not in Acts, is a signature of borrowing—in this case, carelessly, by mistaking a sequence of mention for sequence of occurrence. Further evidence is afforded here by similar vocabulary: both Luke and Josephus use the words aphistêmi (“incited”) and laos (“the people”), and other incidental similarities that go beyond coincidence.

Luke then uses the third rebel leader Josephus names (and their naming exactly and only the same three rebel founder-figures is another telltale coincidence), the Egyptian; but Luke mistakenly has him leading the sicarii (dagger-wielding urban assassins), and into the wilderness. But the sicarii operated by assassination under the concealment of urban crowds, not in the wilds; and Josephus does not link the Egyptian to them at all—though he does happen to mention both in exactly the same place (see Jewish War 2.258-61 and Jewish Antiquities 20.167-9). Josephus also mentions in that passage other figures who led people into the wilderness, but not the Egyptian. So again, Luke just skimmed Josephus, and mistook proximity of discussion as historicity of connection. All these coincidences are otherwise impossible to credibly explain.

So we know Luke, and thus other Gospel authors, are not including accurate details because they just happened to be retained within accurately transmitted eyewitness accounts, but because they are using general knowledge and reference books to deliberately insert these “color details” into their stories, specifically to create verisimilitude. Verisimilitude is thus just as likely to be found in fiction as history; it is what mythographers aimed to create. “Verisimilitude” therefore cannot be evidence warranting our putting the same trust in the private, uncorroborated details of a tall tale that we can put in the public, corroborated incidentals that tale is colored with. To behave otherwise is simply to codify gullibility.

Listen to Gottschalk

Evans claimed he learned his Principle of Verisimilitude from Gottschalk’s Primer. Gottschalk, he tells us, actually defended the idea that if a source contains verisimilitude, then it is probably a trustworthy source. But Gottschalk never said that. Ever. The only time Gottschalk uses the word “verisimilitude” he is describing not a property of sources, but the goal of modern historians: we should seek verisimilitude in our accounts, by using only trustworthy sources and even then with only a highly critical mindset. Nowhere does Gottschalk say “if a source has verisimilitude, historians should trust it.” So I struggle to fathom how Evans came to believe Gottschalk ever said that. I struggle even harder to understand how Evans could have overlooked every pertinent thing Gottschalk actually says about determining reliable sources in his Primer.

In his own article on what we might call the Argument from Gottshalk (as Evans is just repeating a commonly used apologetic), Paul Jacobsen already discovered some of the telephone game that I think has infected Craig Evans, suggesting that Evans, like every Christian apologist before him who makes this claim about what Gottschalk says and insists we “read Gottschalk,” has never read Gottschalk.

From his first mention of the concept, in his section on history as a process of reconstructing a past, Gottschalk says “the historian’s aim is verisimilitude with regard to a perished past…rather than experimental certainty,” meaning, “he tries to get as close as approximation to the truth about the past as” his abilities “will allow” (p. 47). He is talking about historians today, not their sources. Gottchalk then expands on this point in his chapter titled “The Problem of Credibility,” where Gottschalk writes (emphasis his):

In the process of analysis [“of documents for credible details to be fitted into a hypothesis or context”] the historian should constantly keep in mind the relevant particulars within the document as a whole. Regarding each particular he asks: Is it credible? It might be well to point out again that what is meant by calling a particular credible is not that it is actually what happened, but that it is as close to what actually happened as we can learn from a critical examination of the best available sources [and here in a footnote Gottschalk cross-references exactly the section I just quoted above].

This means verisimilar at a high level. It connotes something more than merely not being preposterous in itself or even than plausible and yet is short of meaning accurately descriptive of past actuality. In other words, the historian establishes verisimilitude rather than objective truth. … As far as mere particulars are concerned, historians disagree relatively seldom regarding what is credible in this special sense of “conforming to a critical examination of the sources.”

… [Such that] a historical “fact” thus may be defined as a particular derived directly or indirectly from historical documents and regarded as credible after careful testing in accordance with the canons of historical method.

Understanding History, pp. 139-40

So Gottschalk did not say “sources that have verisimilitude are to be trusted,” he said nearly the opposite of that: historians today must aim for verisimilitude in their concluding accounts by critically testing their sources. Gottschalk then references his subsequent pages outlining what that critical testing must look like. At no point does anything he there says match what Craig Evans claims. He rather says quite the opposite, as Gottshalk lays out the reasons we should not be duped by texts that “seem” true in the sense Evans means. In fact Gottshalk’s entire discourse on critical method is about how not to be the gullible dupe Evans is defending being—and not only defending being, but falsely claiming Gottshalk told him to be. This is so typical a result when we “fact check” Christian apologists I confess to being surprised that I was so surprised by this.

For example, let’s look at what Gottshalk did say about how to choose what sources to trust or distrust. On page 150—literally exactly the page he told us to go read at the end of what I just quoted—Gottshalk writes the following:

[The historian] rules out no evidence whatever…provided it can pass four tests:

(1) Was the ultimate source of the detail (the primary witness) able to tell the truth? [Meaning, Gottshalk goes on to explain, could they have even known the truth of the matter: pp. 150-55]

(2) Was the primary witness willing to tell the truth? [Meaning, he goes on to explain, we must have evidence they were and would have been truthful: pp. 155-65]

(3) Is the primary witness accurately reported with regard to the detail under examination? [Meaning, he goes on to explain, we must have evidence the source we are using is accurately relating to us what their witnesses said: pp. 165-66]

(4) Is there any independent corroboration of the detail under examination? [Gottshalk even mentions the Gospels as an example of sources that don’t meet this standard: pp. 166-70]

Any detail…that passes all four tests is credible historical evidence.

Gottshalk then emphasizes that this applies only to the detail gleaned from the cited witness—not the source we are using that cites or quotes that witness. Exactly contrary to Evans, who thinks any detail meeting these tests in a document validates the entire document, Gottshalk explicitly denounces that reasoning. And even with respect to a single detail in a document passing all four tests, take note, there is no detail in the Gospels particular to Jesus that passes even one of those tests—much less all four. Gottshalk is of course describing a gold standard; sources that pass some but not all four tests, or pass the tests with less confidence, might still warrant some suspect value, depending on other critical factors. But this nowhere helps Evans, as in all his discussion of other critical factors, Gottshalk never describes the principle Evans does.

Let’s be clear on what just happened here. For a historian to trust an extant source on any specific detail, Gottschalk says, that source must themselves positively identify eyewitnesses as their source for that detail; and we must be able to establish that those sources (those witnesses) both could and would tell the truth about the matter in question (that they really were witnesses, really did have that information, and would likely be honest in relating it), and that our source is quoting or paraphrasing them reliably; and in addition to all of that we can independently corroborate that detail in another source, an additional source we can evince was not dependent in any way on the source we started with.

The Gospels do not score a single item on Gottschalk’s list of requirements for source reliability. None of them name (“positively identify”) any eyewitness sources (not even John, the only Gospel to even claim such a source, names them; and that anonymous source is an obvious fabrication: see Chapter 10.7 in On the Historicity of Jesus for more on that score; only the abjectly gullible would be fooled by this). We have no evidence that whatever sources they did have actually knew the truth or would have told the truth (and assumptions are not evidence, so Evans can’t just “assume” they had reliable, capable, honest sources). We have no evidence that the Gospels are relating anything reliably—and quite a lot of evidence they aren’t, given their rampant ridiculousness and inaccuracies. And we have no independent corroboration of anything in them pertaining specifically to Jesus. They are all interdependent on those particulars. So that’s a 100% failure on Gottschalk’s test for reliability.

True, we can confirm that a scant few generic beliefs weren’t made up by the Gospel authors; such as that Jesus was a celestial archangel who descended to become a supernaturally incarnate Davidic Jew whom someone crucified somewhere and that a few people claimed to have “seen” him afterward. But we can’t even establish those beliefs are true. Yes, probably they saw something after his death. But was it really Jesus? It does not appear to have been at all what the Gospels claim; none of Paul’s accounts match theirs. Yes, Paul said scripture tells us Jesus was crucified. But where? By whom? Did anyone see that? Or was it only learned, as Paul seems to say, from scripture? Peculiarly, none of the details added by the Gospels (Pontius Pilate, Jerusalem, Nazareth) is corroborated in Paul, or anywhere. They appear only in mutually interdependent redactions of the same one tale originating with Mark.

That even the mere historicity of Jesus is hard to reliably establish tells us a lot about how absurdly gullible one would have to be to go even further and insist Jesus really was a supernaturally descended archangel who really did magically feed and heal people and control the weather and radiate like a beam of light and snuff out the sun and mystically murder thousands of pigs and meet the Devil in the desert, and really did die and rise from the dead, and attended weeks-long post-mortem dinner parties, before flying into outer space in view of a hundred witnesses. Sure. And I have some land in Florida to sell you. If Christians were this gullible about everything else, they’d all have died in embarrassingly harebrained accidents by now.

Tellingly, Gottschalk even addresses reasoning like Evans’ directly: to again denounce it as a quite unreliable standard of judgment. “The general credibility of a document,” Gottschalk says, “can rarely be greater than the credibility of the separate details in it,” and accordingly “corroboration of the details of a witness’s testimony by his general credibility is weak corroboration at best” (pp. 169-70). So much for Evans’s principle. It’s even worse than it sounds, for note here he still means a named and identified witness cited or quoted by a source we are using, not the anonymous source itself that we merely “hypothesize” had eyewitness sources.

So Gottschalk’s declaration of Evans’s method as “weak” entails a declaration of its even far greater weakness than that, as Evans has no quoted or cited eyewitnesses even to appeal to by such an argument. The Gospels name no one. Worse, Gottschalk is declaring this method weak even when we satisfy the condition that the quoted witness usually turns out credible—a condition the Gospels never satisfy at all. They are rife with implausibilities, absurdities, and inaccuracies. So we can’t establish even their “general credibility” so as to even activate the principle Gottschalk describes—much less that of any witness they supposedly used as Gottschalk’s stated principle actually requires.

So that’s what happened here. Craig Evans tells us Gottshalk defends the Argument from Verisimilitude that really just codifies gullibility; and when we actually check, we find not only does Gottshalk never defend any such argument, he actually extensively refutes and denounces it as wholly unreliable and not at all a feature of sound critical historical method. Whereas the methods he does defend as sound, all convict the Gospels of being deeply unreliable—indeed well nigh unusable as sources. Gottshalk warns us not to be gullible. Evans then chooses to be gullible and promulgate the myth that Gottshalk agrees with him. And that’s Christian apologetics in a nutshell.

Conclusion

Craig Evans’ gullible “trust” that any new story told by a Gospel author “had a source” and wasn’t just another made up story, is right in the same wheelhouse as his gullible “trust” that any realistic detail added to a story makes the whole story “true.” In that same interview, Evans kept insisting Paul was an “eyewitness” to the risen Jesus, by just gullibly assuming only Christian “visions” are of real entities, and acting like it is science-and-evidence-based conclusions that just “arbitrarily” reject his “evidence.” Pro tip: Gottshalk denounces Evans on this point as well, declaring “conformity or agreement with…scientific facts is often a decisive test of evidence,” and then uses modern historians’ rejection of claims of the supernatural as a proper application of that principle (pp. 168-69). And so on down the line. Evans even kept insisting we have “thousands” of eyewitnesses confirming Gospel events, merely because those very Gospel legends claim thousands were there! It’s almost impossible to be more gullible than that.

I caught Evans engaging in numerous gullible moves like these not only in my two analyses of our debate, but again in Resurrection: Faith or Fact? My Bonus Reply. Time and again, Evans complains we are just “dismissing” evidence, when in fact we have presented ample and abundant evidence against the very reliability of what he is calling evidence. That’s not “just dismissing” evidence. It’s following the evidence. Evans is the gullible one, trusting far too much, and ignoring all the warning signs telling him not to. And a grown man with astute skills and knowledge in history like Evans indeed has should not be acting like this. And he doesn’t. Except when it’s his religion. And that tells us all we need to know about that.

It’s not just Evans. Christian apologetics is rife with codified gullibility, represented credulously as reliable methodological principles, yet that are never used or defended by any actual historian. The Argument from Undesigned Coincidences is yet another version of formalized gullibility being passed off as a rock-solid, reliable methodology. I even now realize John Loftus’s The Outsider Test for Faith fully illustrates this selective gullibility: as soon as it’s any other religion, their codified gullibility vanishes and they stop being so foolish, and act like a reasonable person. Once you see the trend—towards taking a principle that in any other context would describe, indeed even define, gullibility, and “re-selling” it as a reliable methodology, even “scoffing” at anyone who doubts that—you start to see it everywhere in Christian apologetics. For example, this is what’s going on in the ubiquitous practice of omitting evidence to get the results they want (a practice almost every argument for God can be defined by). Indeed, I honestly have to conclude that formalized gullibility is almost a defining feature of Christian apologetics, across the board. Once you eliminate all cases of actual lying (example, example, example), it’s the only thing they have left.