A while ago I composed Historicity Big and Small: How Historians Try to Rescue Jesus, summarizing and categorizing the main arguments pushed in a kind of phylogeny. Here I will expand on that by adding a few more arguments, within the same scheme I constructed there.

Both of these articles start from the position of honest, mainstream scholarship, which admits that we have no non-mythical sources for Jesus: the Gospels mostly contain fabrication or embellishment (and it is difficult to discern what if anything about Jesus in them is true); half the Epistles are forged and the other half speak of Jesus in highly esoteric, cosmo-theological ways that are largely divorced from any real life of Jesus; and all other sources simply trace back to those (and therefore are of no real use in arguing for the historicity of Jesus).

In that context, arguing for some mundane guy on top of whom all that myth and theology was stacked can be reduced to three broad categories of argument:

• The Argument from the Gospels.
• The Argument from General Probability.
• The Argument from the Epistles.

Within the first class of arguments can be grouped these, which are all Arguments from Evidence-Likelihood:

• Arguments from Hypothetical Sources (Premise 01, “It can be proved that the Gospels used early, eyewitness, Palestinian sources for some of their historical claims about Jesus”). Which is both false and fallacious.
• Arguments from Embarrassment (Premise 05, “Some claim about Jesus in the Gospels would not be in the Gospels unless it actually happened”). Which is also both false and fallacious.

Within the second class of arguments can be grouped these, which can all be framed as Arguments to Prior Probability:

• Arguments from “The Jews Would Never,” Variant 1 (Premise 07, “Jews would never invent a messiah because they needed their messiah to be a real historical conqueror”). Which is false.
• Arguments from “The Jews Would Never,” Variant 2 (Premise 11, “Jews would never consider a savior who is killed to be the messiah, because the messiah by definition had to be victorious”). Which is false.
• Arguments from “The Jews Would Never,” Variant 3 (Premise 15, “The idea of a messiah who would become victorious by dying, would never occur to a Jew, unless confronted by an actual candidate (like Jesus) being killed”). Which is false.
• Arguments from Founders (Premise 17, “Like all religions, Christianity must have had a founder,” therefore it must be Jesus). Which is a non sequitur.
• Arguments from Early Repetition (Premise 22, “A person mentioned many times within decades of his alleged life is more likely historical than mythical”). Which is not demonstrably true.

Within the third class of arguments can be grouped just one category of argumentation, which is another Argument from Evidence-Likelihood:

• Arguments from Explicit Indication (Premise 20, “An epistle author said something that he would not have said unless there was a real historical Jesus”). Which is valid reasoning but factually debatable.

I discuss all these arguments and why they fail and what they would need to succeed in my previous article. I also summarize what historians really need to do to make any of these arguments work in How to Successfully Argue Jesus Existed (or Anything Else in the World). Of course my direct case that there probably never was even a mundane Jesus, that in fact he started his existence as a revelatory figment of apostolic imagination, you will find in my colloquial account in Jesus from Outer Space, and in my thorough, heavily academic, peer-reviewed account in On the Historicity of Jesus.

More Arguments from the Gospels

The arguments I’ll add for consideration here are substantially weaker than the ones I summarized originally; I thus include them now only for completeness, and because people still sometimes ask about them. There aren’t really any substantially new Arguments from the Epistles; those all amount to the same argument I already diagrammed. But there are some Arguments from the Gospels I didn’t diagram that do come up from time to time, although they are not exactly good ones.

First up is what I call the Argument from Pilate. It goes something like this:

• P24. Christians were required to declare faith in a creed that included historical facts that entail Jesus probably existed, such as that Jesus was crucified by the Roman officer Pontius Pilate.
• P25. Probably no one would declare faith in a creed that included historical facts that they knew were false.
• C09. Therefore, Jesus probably existed.

P25 is plausible enough, if we assume that the Christians we’re talking about would be in a position to know whether those facts were false. Exceptions, cases where people will declare faith in things they know are factually false, are certainly at best rare and thus unlikely without specific evidence establishing an exception existed. But that required assumption is precisely the problem. Both P25 and P24 are false in the only relevant sense either could be true: if they refer to Christians who would be in a position to know. But Christian creeds conspicuously did not include any such “historical facts” for at least a whole human lifetime, possibly two. So P24 does not apply to original Christianity; and P25 does not apply to later Christianity. In neither period are both premises true; ergo the argument cannot proceed to its conclusion. It describes a combined state of affairs that never existed.

It is not until eighty-to-a-hundred or more years after the religion began that such “facts” were inserted into the creeds Christians were required to declare faith in, and then told to shun any Christians who didn’t likewise affirm them. All evidence indicates by the time we start hearing of historical facts being inserted into their creeds (sometime in the early second century: see How Did Christianity Switch to a Historical Jesus?), Christians were no longer in any position to know what was really true or false about the founding of their cult a century before (see my discussion of the methodological problems facing such Christians in Chapter 7 of Not the Impossible Faith; and my survey of evidence in Chapters 13 and 17 thereof that Christians made no effort at all even capable of finding out, and even discouraged such efforts; I summarize some of this as well in The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire, pp. 500-20).

Which actually evinces the opposite conclusion: this pattern is evidence those facts were invented, not that they were true, and that there were even Christian believers insisting those facts were false (the ones the others were told to shun; we have similar evidence of such Christians denying those facts in the forgery of 2 Peter). In other words, the actual evidence conforms to the theory that such historical facts were invented and insisted upon later and for reasons other than their being true. And wherever this is insisted upon, we see that no real evidence is ever presented that they were true, evincing the fact that there was no such evidence to present. All of this actually supports mythicism, not historicity.

Similar is the Argument from Verisimilitude:

• P26. The Gospels’ accounts of Jesus possess “verisimilitude,” correctly describing the geography and customs and personnel of first century Judea and relating encounters with substantial realism.
• P27. Persons described in sources possessing verisimilitude probably existed.
• C10. Therefore, Jesus probably existed.

I’ve already explained everything wrong with this argument in Formalized Gullibility as a Modern Christian Methodology. Neither premise is true. Even The Iliad often contains verisimilitude; Achilles is still not likely to have existed, nor the goddess Athena, who in that work actually walks up to people and has conversations with them like it’s a regular thing. And even more realistic myth and fiction than that was produced in antiquity. So P27 is false. And the Gospels actually substantially deviate from verisimilitude, getting many things wrong and describing highly unrealistic encounters in almost every scene, as much or more so than The Iliad (as I demonstrate in Chapter 6 of Jesus from Outer Space). So P26 is false. There just isn’t any sound argument to be had here.

There is one sense in which a version of this argument would be sound—but as with most attempts to apply “criteria” to the Gospels to extract history from their self-evident mythology, that version of the argument would not apply to the Gospels (see my demonstration of that for all criteria attempted in Chapter 5 of Proving History). This is the argument that when historical information is presented realistically not in a context of attempting to produce a believable or familiar context but incidentally, in passing or without any evident intention, habit, or need to fabricate, and by a person who describes how they know what they relate, and it is a plausible means of their knowing it, then we can assign a high prior probability to what they relate being true. But that prior can still be overcome by evidence to the contrary; and regardless, the Gospels are not in any way such a source (see my methodological discussions in So What About Hannibal, Then? and my articles Craig vs. Law on the Argument from Contamination and Is the Principle of Contamination Invalid?).

There are also variants of this argument that resemble the Argument from Pilate, which I will here call the Argument from Real People: “stories depicting someone interacting with real people (like Pontius Pilate) are usually true,” which is just another false instantiation of P27. Indeed Judeo-Christian mythology was especially prone to inventing fake people interacting with real ones, from the biographies of mythical Saints in the Middle Ages, to a mythical Moses interacting with a real Pharaoh, a mythical Daniel interacting with a real Nebuchadnezzar, and so on. Outside Christianity we find mythical heroes interacting with a real king Agamemnon, fictional heroes interacting with real Emperors, and so on. So the mere fact of placing real people in a story is not sufficient to evince the story itself is not a fiction.

In a sense this argument is not an argument from evidence but an attempt at an argument from prior probability, something like:

• P28. Jesus belongs to a reference class, “persons depicted as interacting with real people,” whose members are all or mostly historical.
• P29. People who belong to sets whose members are all or mostly historical probably existed.
• C11. Therefore Jesus probably existed.

But this logic runs afoul of the reference class problem I discuss in Chapter 6.5 of On the Historicity of Jesus (“The Alternative Class Objection”): Jesus actually belongs to the reference class of not just “persons” but “highly mythologized superheroes depicted as interacting with real people,” and the members of that set are not so consistently historical. Worse, the intersection of all the mythotypes Jesus belongs to (OHJ, Chapter 5) and the set of “persons depicted as interacting with real people” contains only one member: Jesus. Therefore no conclusion can be reached about the frequency of such persons being historical from that datum. So here P29 is false: it is not always the case that “persons” in such sets usually existed; it depends on what sort of “person” is being “placed” in history and how. Reference class arguments cannot ignore data. And we have much more data as to the reference class Jesus belongs to than just “the set of all persons depicted as interacting with historical figures.”

Another variant of the Argument from Verisimilitude I shall call the Argument from Name Frequency, and it is peculiar enough to be given its own description:

• P30. The names of the people mentioned in the Gospels occur at the same frequency as real names did in Palestine of the time.
• P31. As myth and fiction are unlikely to exactly replicate real name frequencies, a person whose narratives do that, probably did exist.
• C12. Therefore, Jesus probably did exist.

This is better known as “the Bauckham argument” (presented in Richard Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, pp. 67-91; for a list of critiques of Bauckham’s entire apologetic project see OHJ, p. 397 n. 20). It’s actually false. After Bauckham spells out this argument (pp. 67-84), he purports to prove it with an extensive list of data (pp. 85-91). But it’s masterfully ironic that the conclusion of his argument (p. 84) is directly refuted by his own data (pp. 85-91). I don’t know whether to conclude he is lying and just hoping no one actually checks his data, or if he is so wildly incompetent he doesn’t even know his data disconfirm his thesis.

Either way, though P31 has some merit (it could form in some cases a usable argument to a prior probability), P30 is not only false, it is so egregiously false as to sooner establish exactly the opposite conclusion: the Gospels’ peculiar failure to match real name frequencies among the people encountered is evidence their narratives are fabricated. Right from the start, as Bauckham’s own data show, “Jesus” (Joshua) was one of the most common names for Palestinian men, yet somehow Jesus spans a year or more long ministry and never once meets anyone else named Jesus. Even in the book of Acts, no one ever meets another Jesus in Palestine (the lone mythical anti-Jesus met there is actually on Cyprus, is not named Jesus or indeed any common name, but portrayed as “the son of Jesus,” and is in no way plausibly a real person).

The Gospels (and the Palestinian scenes in Acts) also ignore many other common names that mysteriously are missing (like Ananias, Jonathan, Manahem, and Annas), while including many bizarre names almost never heard of in Judea, a category of names that appears to an unusually high frequency, like Nicodemus and Bartimaeus. And the frequency of even the common names the Gospels do include is not actually peculiarly close to their actual frequency in ancient Judea. For example, there should be more Lazaruses and Matthews and fewer Jameses (Jacobs). Yet in fact so few names are used in the Gospels that the actual statistical argument Bauckham intends is not even valid. He never produces any actual statistical argument anyway, e.g. he does not determine any expected range of frequencies given the sample size to account for random variation, neither for the names in the Gospels, nor for the names that aren’t.

Most of the common names used in the Gospels are actually mythically significant Biblical names and thus already expected for symbolic resonance (so, they were popular among the actual population for the same reason they were popular with Gospel mythographers). Which evinces a cardinal rule of historical method: you cannot argue your hypothesis is probable without comparing its predictive success to that of its strongest competitor (see Advice on Probabilistic Reasoning and If You Learn Nothing Else). And the Gospels evince a tendency to choose and even invent mythically significant names, which means that hypothesis outperforms Bauckham’s.

For example, James (Jacob) is a Biblically significant name with important theological meanings we expect the Gospels to rely on a lot. By contrast, as Bauckham’s own tables show, in the actual population of Judea this name is attested in extant records only 40 times, whereas rare names (as a combined category) are attested over 500 times: so there should be over ten times more rare names than Jameses attested in the Gospels. But there isn’t. Not even close. And here I mean rare names that are themselves each attested 10-25 times more often than the bizarre names the Gospels instead use like Nicodemus. So even the rare names the Gospels do employ are bizarrely rare, not “ordinarily rare,” and yet “conveniently meaningful” (e.g. Nicodemus means “People’s Victory,” and accordingly in the legend he appears in he champions the people against elite snobbery). Which pretty much turns Bauckham’s argument against him: the names evidence in the Gospels is actually evidence of their being mythical, not historical. Still, that doesn’t mean Jesus didn’t exist. But it does mean we can’t use the Gospels to prove he did.

More Arguments from General Probability

Then there are some other Arguments from General Probability, some arguments to a prior probability and some arguments from evidence. For example, we could add a new Argument from Founders, Variant 2, which is in this case more like an argument from evidence:

• P32. The teachings attributed to Jesus in the Gospels are radically different from anyone else of the time.
• P33. If teachings radically different from anyone else of the time are attributed to someone, that someone probably existed.
• C13. Therefore, Jesus probably existed.

For example, it will be claimed that “No one else taught anyone to turn the other cheek, to walk the extra mile, that we’re all family.” That’s P32. And “no one would have invented such a character.” That’s P33, which basically amounts to “Only Founders Can Innovate.” Both are false.

There is actually almost nothing attributed to Jesus that isn’t found taught by others, contemporaries and predecessors, Jewish and Pagan (from Hillelite Rabbis to Musonius Rufus and the Cynics: OHJ, Elements 32 and 33 in Chapter 5; see for example Christians Did Not Invent Charity and Philanthropy and Your Own Moral Reasoning: Some Things to Consider). So P32 isn’t true. But neither is P33. To the contrary, if you wanted to push a radical teaching in antiquity it was actually more typical to invent the claim that some mythical god or hero had said it (see Chapter 10 of Not the Impossible Faith for the anthropology behind this). Case in point: Moses. To whom was falsely attributed the entirety of the Old Testament law and the oral Mishnah law. Similarly the Cargo Cults contrived fictional saviors to attribute their teachings to (OHJ, Element 29, Chapter 5). And we know for a fact some of the most radical stuff attributed to Jesus was composed by someone else decades later (e.g. the Sermon on the Mount was never composed by Jesus but some Greek-speaking Jew after the Jewish War: OHJ, pp. 465-68). So neither premise of this argument holds up.

Another argument from evidence to a general probability is the Argument from “We’d Have the Evidence”:

• P34. No one gainsaid the invention of a historical Jesus.
• P35. If no one gainsaid the invention of a historical Jesus, Jesus probably was historical.
• C14. Therefore, Jesus probably was historical.

I already address this in Chapter 8.12 of OHJ. Both premises are false.

Contrary to P34 we do have some evidence of people gainsaying the historicity of Jesus. But P34 also trades on the false assumption that we would have every comment and observation anyone in-the-know would ever have made about Jesus—but all evidence shows the survival of such evidence is in fact very unlikely (OHJ, Chapters 8.4 and 7.7). To the contrary, it is evident that all our sources had no sources by which to even know whether Jesus existed, or were the very ones inventing the claim that he did (OHJ, Chapters 7 and 8). So even if we didn’t have evidence of people gainsaying the matter (and we do), we still would not even know whether P34 were true, so we could not assert it as known. The argument therefore cannot follow.

Meanwhile, contrary to P35, Jesus appears to have been converted into a historical man after the Jewish War, an average human lifetime later, and when for all we can tell all possible witnesses one could even have consulted on the matter were dead (OHJ, Chapters 4-5, Elements 19 through 29). Moreover, it was invented in a foreign land, in a foreign language; and until centuries later, that invention was never popular in what would have been the native land and language of Jesus. So it’s entirely possible no one gainsaid this because no one could. Therefore it does not follow that if no one did, that Jesus must have existed. That doesn’t even follow as a probability. Hence we see in the case of other invented movement heroes, like John Frum and Ned Ludd, no one is on record gainsaying them either, thus proving no such thing can be presumed (for details, check those names in the subject index of OHJ).

Indeed we have no Jewish writings about Christianity until the Talmud in the Middle Ages, so we don’t know what Jews were saying to Christians early on—at all, much less in the first century. Worse, that Talmud says Jesus lived a hundred years earlier than the Gospels claim, demonstrating Christians outside the Roman Empire—where that Talmud was composed—were preaching a completely different mythical Jesus, executed by stoning around the time of the Greek occupation rather than the Roman (see Chapter 8.1 of OHJ). Meanwhile, in Greek we have nothing whatever outside the New Testament until long after the Gospels were circulating, and no evidence anyone had any other sources to check by but the Gospels. And on top of all that, as the evidence indicates, historicizing Christians were actively suppressing all sources that gainsaid the historicity of Jesus (see Chapter 7 of Jesus from Outer Space and Chapters 7.7, 8.4, and 8.12 of On the Historicity of Jesus), condemning and shunning their authors and preserving nothing they wrote, often not even in quotation or paraphrase. Thus we cannot establish P34 or P35.

By contrast to those, an example of a more common argument to a prior probability is the straightforward (and hopelessly fallacious) Argument from Consensus:

• P36. The current mainstream consensus of experts holds that Jesus existed.
• P37. Whatever the current mainstream consensus of experts holds is probably true.
• C15. Therefore, probably Jesus existed.

This is a fallacy of circular argument: it presumes the conclusion (that the consensus is correct) in the premises (that the consensus is correct). Though it is commonly the case that P37 is true, it is false precisely when the basis for that consensus is shown to be fraudulent or fallacious or refuted. It is also false precisely when sufficient evidence is presented against the consensus position. In fact all consensus positions have resulted from overthrowing a previous consensus in just such a fashion. So you cannot argue against a demonstration that a consensus is fraudulent or fallacious or refuted by re-citing the same consensus just demonstrated to be fraudulent or fallacious or refuted. The only proper response is to address those demonstrations.

In terms of prior probability, the reference class of “all consensus positions” is mostly filled with true conclusions, but the sub-class of “all consensus positions demonstrated to be fraudulent or fallacious or refuted” is mostly filled with false conclusions. So you have to actually address which reference class the consensus you are talking about is in. And you can’t do that by simply reasserting that consensus. See my articles On Evaluating Arguments from Consensus and The Difference Between a Historian and an Apologist and How to Successfully Argue Jesus Existed (or Anything Else in the World).

Another commonly disastrous argument in this vein is what I call the Argument from Spartacus (based on Spartacus being for a time the most common “example” touted: see Okay, So What about the Historicity of Spartacus?). I already diagrammed and critiqued this argument in So What About Hannibal, Then? but very briefly it goes something like this:

• P38. We should not doubt [x] existed.
• P39. The evidence for Jesus is better than for [x].
• C16. Therefore, we should not doubt Jesus existed.

The problem here is that P39 is never true. Any [x] you pick that makes P38 surely true ends up rendering P39 surely false. Which is precisely why we should doubt Jesus existed. Not the other way around. By this point we are getting into the pit of garbage arguments where historians make wildly false claims to defend Jesus; which is when we start to realize they are not defending Jesus because of any actual evidence but for some other reason having nothing to do with what is true. They are no longer acting as historians at that point; for whatever reason, they’ve become apologists. I have collected into one place all the examples of this argument (every known [x] attempted), and the evidence proving my point here from each one, in Chapter 5 of Jesus from Outer Space.

This is, BTW, the same argument as found even in far more ridiculous forms, like the Argument from the Holocaust Happened and the Argument from Evolution Is True. In no way whatever is the evidence for Jesus comparable to those things, so those arguments are just Fallacies of False Analogy on a grandly absurd scale.

Finally, one last argument to a prior I will diagram here is the Argument from “Conspiracy Theories Are Improbable” which goes something like this:

• P40. To maintain the conclusion that Jesus didn’t exist requires postulating an extremely improbable element: a vast conspiracy.
• P41. Any conclusion that requires postulating an extremely improbable element is probably false.
• C17. Therefore, that Jesus did exist is probably true (by modus tollens).

In other words, the person arguing this is claiming that even the most minimal mythicist thesis m must have a low prior probability because it requires postulating without evidence an extremely improbable conspiracy. That’s often true: if your theory requires assuming something extremely improbable, your theory is unlikely to be true. And here we must mean epistemic, not objective probability; as opposed to something objectively improbable that you prove epistemically probable with sufficient evidence (e.g. if you prove there is a conspiracy, it is no longer an improbable assumption).

P41 is still technically false, because any low prior can be overcome with comparably improbable evidence (see That Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence). But we needn’t query whether enough evidence exists to overcome that low prior. Because P40 is already false: m does not require any such conspiracy theory (as I explain in OHJ, pp. 276-77, 291, 303-05, and 609; see also the subject index, “conspiracy theories”). For example, there is ample evidence to prove Christians were actively forging and suppressing evidence (OHJ, Chapters 8.4, 8.12, and 7.7, and Element 44 in Chapter 5), so that degree of “conspiracy” (which required no actual conspiring, just a common cause and attitude) is probable, not improbable, negating P40.

Alternatively, one could reframe this as an argument from evidence: if such a conspiracy had occurred, then we should see evidence of it. Which is not an argument about priors but about the relative weight of the evidence (in this case, the absence of evidence otherwise expected). But in this form, both premises are false: we do have sufficient evidence of the only actual amount of conspiring required to make this state of the evidence 100% expected; and any greater degree of conspiring is in no way required to explain any of the evidence (see How Did Christianity Switch to a Historical Jesus? and A Vital Primer on Media Literacy).

By analogy, there was no conspiracy that transformed sticks and tinfoil near Roswell into “recovered a flying saucer and autopsied alien bodies” (OHJ, index). Nor any conspiracy that transformed spirit communications heard by shamans in telegraph poles into “a visit to our island by John Frum who gave us all our teachings” (OHJ, index). Nor that created Ned Ludd or King Arthur or Osiris or Moses or Aesop as historical persons (OHJ, index). Certainly, there were a lot of liars. The Gospels show a concerted readiness to make things up to convince people of things; and most Christian literature in its first three centuries is forged or doctored, even whole letters in the New Testament itself (OHJ, Chapters 7.7 and 8.12). But they did not have to “coordinate” their lying. Once one person makes something up (e.g. Mark inventing a Galilean Jesus), others could start believing it or pushing it as true, without having been told to by Mark or ever even having met the man.

This is even easier when any resistors there may still have been (e.g. Christian sects who refused to believe Jesus was a man in Galilee, who believed instead that that was a “cleverly devised myth,” against other Christian sects newly insisting on it being literally true) lost the struggle for power and thus weren’t the ones who got to decide which documents would be preserved or what claims allowed to be heard. Which also did not require a conspiracy: historicists would all have acted individually on their own to alter or suppress (or, as most commonly happened, simply not mention or preserve) documents they didn’t like. Historicists could well have genuinely believed the mythicists were the heretics and latecomers, even if it really was the other way around, simply because there was no way for them to know. Access to relevant records to decide the matter was nearly if not entirely absent by the time historicity was invented and sold.

As these are all proven facts, not mere assumptions or speculations, they are epistemically probable. Therefore P40 is never relevantly true.

Conclusion

None of these arguments really work. They represent increasingly desperate attempts to rescue Jesus with claims increasingly divorced from factual reality or that ignore the contrary arguments already refuting them. Everything I said by way of introduction and conclusion in my previous article thus remains intact and as relevant as ever.