Yesterday I debated Pastor Damon Richardson, “the Urban Apologist,” on the Dagger Squad Show (18 June 2021). The topic: “Did Jesus Exist?” You can still purchase access to view the archived video of it by emailing a request to the host Brother Garfield (free to anyone who already paid to watch it live). Here I’ll summarize the major points of the debate, correct one thing I misspoke in the debate, and then respond to Richardson’s closing statement, which the format left me no response to, yet was remarkably full of false statements that pretty much characterize the entire Christian apologetic approach to the historicity debate; yet even secular scholars will often employ the same toolbox. Because unlike historians (as in, people with doctorates in history) biblical “historians” have usually been educated in an apologetics tradition and not an actual history degree (their degrees are usually in theology or divinity or some form of biblical literature, whether so called or disguised under fancier terms like “New Testament Studies”), and still think those methods are valid. As I explored in several articles last month, they aren’t.

Correction on Philo on Pilate

As usual in debates generally, we are on the clock, so nuance is not time-available. You should always rely on anything I said in the formulation that passed peer review (in my books On the Historicity of Jesus or Proving History or Hitler Homer Bible Christ), rather than any broad-stroke, unnuanced, summary statements I make in a debate. But in one case this time I actually confused two things, crossing wires, in a way that requires more explicit correction. Late in the debate the question came up of how Philo of Alexandria knew anything about Pontius Pilate. Philo was a Jewish author residing in Egypt who wrote between the 20s and 40s A.D. and would thus have been a contemporary of Jesus and the whole origins of Christianity and its earliest missions to Jewish communities West, which could hardly have skipped Alexandria, the greatest center of Jewish thought and population adjacent to Judea. So that he mentions Pilate but not Jesus completely undermined Pastor Richardson’s argument that Pilate is less attested than Jesus and “therefore” we should on “my” method reject the historicity of Pilate, which is a reductio ad absurdum, a valid mode of argument, but effective only when sound. It wasn’t. I correctly noted in the course of the debate that it is factually wrong twice: the central premise is false (it’s actually the other way around: Pilate is far better attested than Jesus); but also, the analogy is false: Pilate is not attested only as a revelatory being from the start, nor appearing as a historical person solely in mythologies (and sources we cannot establish are independent of them), and thus the probabilities weighing against Jesus don’t weigh against Pilate—these being the two bodies of evidence I presented from the start that pastor Richardson kept ignoring in the debate, falsely claiming instead that I was offering “no evidence” against historicity.

This all began when Pastor Richardson had falsely claimed we have no contemporary attesting to the existence of Pontius Pilate (other than Pilate himself in an autograph inscription, as Richardson self-refutingly admitted—note that that alone is already more evidence Pilate existed than Jesus did). I corrected him, pointing out that Philo clearly attests to the existence of Pilate, and in fact appears to have even written a whole book on the Judean reign of Pilate—which itself unfortunately is lost; I suspect because it lacked any mention of Jesus or Christians and was thus either regarded as of no use, or even an embarrassment, by Medieval Christian book preservers. Though I didn’t mention that in the debate (contrary to Richardson “rebutting” an argument I never made, I never used an argument from the silence of external literature against the historicity of Jesus, and even explicitly said in the debate that such an argument would be unsound). But I suspect this book never mentioned Jesus or Christians, both for reasons more generally, as there is a pattern of Christian book-preservers acting like this, which I document in On the Historicity of Jesus, Chapter 8.3; but also for the specific reason that in the fourth century Eusebius, the earliest documentary historian of Christianity, tells us he had read that book (in his History of the Church 2.5-6 he informs us that Philo’s treatise on Pilate was part of a five volume set, the only two volumes surviving now being Against Flaccus and the Embassy to Gaius; cf. OHJ, p. 304), yet never quotes anything it said about Jesus or Christians, not even to rebut it, which indicates it didn’t say anything he could use or had to answer. In other words, it mentioned neither Jesus nor Christianity. Which by itself is not damning; Jesus and the Christian movement may well have been too insignificant to warrant notice or mention (a problem for Christian believers, but not for secular historians like myself who can accept Jesus was an insignificant nobody and Christianity a socially microscopic and ineffectual fringe movement). But it remains the case that Philo’s attestation of Pilate gives us a lot better evidence for Pilate than anything we have for Jesus.

Once I pointed out these facts, Richardson changed his argument into claiming I have no evidence Philo had any sources for Pilate, so by “my” method I should still reject that as evidence (thereby restoring his reductio). But this is in no way a method I ever use. Richardson kept trying to impute it to me, but could never adduce any examples; I always need, and thus always list, reasons for doubting a source’s reliability. But I answered instead by identifying Philo’s sources: he was an ambassador to Rome for the Jewish people and would have received his intelligence on these matters from his colleagues, political and religious operatives in Judea itself (including access to relevant diplomatic correspondence). But I incorrectly framed this as saying Philo led an embassy to Rome to have Pilate removed; that’s incorrect: he led an embassy to Rome to have Pilate’s compatriot Flaccus, the prefect of the neighboring province of Egypt, removed, and part of that embassy involved making comparisons to the current emperor (Caligula) between Pilate, whom the previous emperor (Tiberius) had deposed in response to a previous Jewish embassy in Philo’s day, and Flaccus. The distinction does not affect my point; Philo’s sources of information were the same as I said, and he could hardly have made such comparisons to an emperor who would well know if no such Pilate had existed. But what I did say can mislead, so it needs the correction I’m making here; I apologize for the error.

For a detailed treatment of the historical evidence for Pilate, and how it far exceeds anything we have for Jesus, I recommend Pontius Pilate in History and Interpretation (Cambridge University Press 1996). An abstract of the pertinent chapter is available from the Cambridge press. A select quote from Philo on Pilate is available at Livius (which I think shows Philo was an eyewitness to Tiberius’s reaction in Rome to the charges diplomatically leveled against Pilate; scholars do suspect Philo may have been there at the time, and might even have been the ambassador for that case as well, though as we lack his volume on Pilate where this might have been discussed, we cannot be certain). The complete text of Philo’s account of his embassy to Caligula (the Embassy to Gaius) is available at Early Christian Writings. And my summary of the evidence for Pilate that we don’t have for Jesus you can read here—likewise in a whole chapter on such comparisons in Jesus from Outer Space, all of which showing there is no one as poorly attested as Jesus who we trust existed, other than persons for whom we have none of the evidence that we have that Jesus was mythical: to wit, that the earliest sources only attest him as a revelatory being; and that the only primary sources placing him in history are patently mythical. These are two conditions that are not true for most historical persons, ignoring which produces a false analogy, which is a textbook error of logic, and thus not a legitimate historical method. It is a popular apologetic method. But apologetics is not history; it is, rather, an entire system for avoiding history.

Summary of the Debate

Pastor Richardson began by trying to invalidly frame debates about historical facts in absolutist terms, insisting that unless you prove historicity impossible, you cannot claim Jesus didn’t exist. That’s not how history works. I corrected this with a more informed summary of how probability theory actually functions in debates about history. But he repeatedly attempted this straw-man logic, trying to paint me as claiming we can be certain Jesus didn’t exist, when in fact my claim is that we cannot be certain he did. As I’ve noted before, apologists confuse those two things all the time. Real historians don’t. Likewise he insisted if any evidence for the existence Jesus existed, we should conclude he existed. This is again no part of any real historian’s logic. The correct logic of evidence is that we should favor the conclusion that has the preponderance of evidence, not any evidence. Competing theories of history often have evidence for both sides; as there is in this case. The procedure is to determine which has the most evidence, and apportion our degree of certainty to the evidence (e.g. less evidence, less certainty). Furthering his fondness for black-and-white fallacies and illogical claims about methodology, Pastor Richardson also tried to insist repeatedly that I had to produce evidence that Jesus did not exist, and that I had none to present. He repeatedly ignored the fact that I did, and presented it, and he never significantly rebutted it. But it would not even be necessary to do that: if all the evidence presented for a conclusion is proved not to exist or as not even increasing the probability of that conclusion, then we are left not knowing whether the conclusion is true. We therefore cannot assert that it is true. This is logic 101. I am sure I don’t have to explain that further.

After not buying his bogus standards, I presented the correct standards: when we are testing the merits of two theories against each other, we must attend to prior probability (what has usually turned out to be the case before in comparable situations) and to whether the evidence we have is, collectively, more probable on either of those theories. If the prior probability is inconclusive (if in other comparable cases it’s 50/50 whether someone existed) and the evidence indecisive (if it is all just as likely to exist as we have it on either theory), then we have no knowledge as to which theory is the more probable. We then have to simply conclude we do not know if Jesus existed or not. Likewise any other claim about history, faced with the same state of evidence. If on the other hand the prior probability trends toward one theory over another (if, as I pointed out, comparable savior heroes about whom mythical biographies were written placing them in Earth history typically turn out not to have really existed—which is factually the case), we must conclude that that theory is more probably true. The only way to reverse that outcome is to present evidence for Jesus being an exception to that trend, evidence that is less probable (less expected; less likely to be what we found) on my alternative theory of Christian origins than on the current mainstream theory—and so much less probable as to bridge the gap in prior probability as well. Evidence that is just slightly less likely cannot overturn an even lower prior probability. All it can do is make the historicity of Jesus less improbable (e.g. raising it from 30% to 40%), but that is not the same thing as making it probable (a 40% probability Jesus existed still leaves a 60% probability that he didn’t, which therefore remains more likely).

In the course of our debate, Pastor Richardson produced no evidence that was even unlikely on the alternative theory, much less unlikely enough to overcome the already-unfavorable prior probability: ancient savior heroes simply tend not to be real people, yet appear in “historical” biographies all the same. We have no good reason to believe Jesus is any exception. And to complete my summary of the methodological debate between us at this point, Richardson kept confusing evidence with hypothesis. A hypothesis is something you propose, and then test against the evidence. It may or may not be true, it may or may not be well supported by the evidence. If you have no evidence for or against your hypothesis, it stays at a 50% chance of being true, which is not enough to assert that it’s true. And this applies to all ancillary theories as well, so any “assumption” you depend upon, for which you have no evidence (and for which there is also no evidence against it), reduces the probability of your principal thesis by, in turn, that same 50%. If you depend on multiple such assumptions, they stack (50% of 50% of 50%, and so on). This is rudimentary logic of probability. There is no escaping it. (See Advice on Probabilistic Reasoning and What Is Bayes’ Theorem & How Do You Use It?) What Richardson kept doing (as I kept pointing out) was substituting assumptions for which he had no evidence, for evidence, claiming his unevidenced assumptions were “facts,” and then built his case from there. What I kept pointing out is that though this is indeed how the consensus on the historicity of Jesus has formed in Biblical studies, it is as invalid there as here. My entire point in On the Historicity of Jesus and Proving History is that the consensus is therefore unsound. It has not been constructed by any valid historical method. Assumptions are simply swapped in for facts; indeed, many “facts” are even made-up—they aren’t merely unproven, they are provably false (some examples came up in the debate). When, instead, we stick to actual facts—and abandon all unevidenced “assumptions”—where we end up is where I have: the historicity of Jesus is actually slightly less likely than the alternative, because the evidence in aggregate is slightly less likely on that theory compared to the alternative.

It is at this point that Richardson (as also a lot of historicity apologists) confused my theory for treating an assumption as a fact. That is incorrect. The competing theories are: Jesus was a historical man mythologized; or Jesus was a celestial man euhemerized. These theories logically entail conjoint propositions: for example, if Jesus was really a historical man, then it is logically necessarily the case that he really died and died in some witnessed place on Earth; conversely, if Jesus was only a cosmic man, then it is logically necessarily the case that he was only believed (or at least claimed) to have acquired a mortal body of flesh that then died, and that this happened somewhere else. These are not assumptions. They are the logically necessary consequences of each respective theory: if it is true that Jesus did not exist, then it is true that his incarnation and death were originally being claimed to have taken place somewhere other than where anyone really saw it happen. I am not “assuming” that. That is simply the unavoidable consequence of the theory if it is true.

One can contrive many logically possible ways this could happen, but only one corresponds to the evidence (as in, no evidence contradicts it), and bears anything other than a spectacularly low prior probability (e.g. a false claim of a man recently executed in Judea could never have succeeded in Judea at that time, without some conspicuous apologetics, which we do not find in any of the earliest literature: for this and every other logically possible example see my discussion in OHJ, Chapter 2.3). And that one remaining theory, the only one plausible and thus the one occupying nearly the entirety of the prior probability of mythicism, is the one that has the most support in Christian texts and contemporary analogs: that, like Osiris, Jesus was originally believed to have become a mortal man who was killed by dark forces in outer space, and rose from the dead into the heavens above, and, also like Osiris, the “gospel message” was then framed as a fictional historical character whose death and resurrection is depicted in myth as having occurred in Earth history. I referred to this in the debate as the Osiris model. It corresponds in different ways to other Euhemerized deities of that same era (who began solely cosmic, and were transferred into historical persons mythically). Which means this is not ad hoc: abundant evidence exists establishing that this trend in constructing divine heroes was at that very time an actual thing. That is not an assumption, it is not something I just “made up”; it is a conclusion, extensively based on evidence. (This theory is also compatible with a mythical Earth death, e.g. Jesus being killed by dark forces in some lost Earthly garden of Eden, cf. OHJ p. 563 n. 67, but that would make no practical difference to my case; and there is more evidence and precedent for the sky death model anyway, so there’s no need to consider any other.)

Now this is how the actual logic of history operates: if the evidence we have is just as likely on this alternative theory—if it is just as much exactly what we expect to have survived for us to see today—as on the traditional theory, then there is, by definition, no evidence for the traditional theory. We are left with a 50/50 chance either theory is true, which then means we cannot claim to know Jesus really existed. Q.E.D. It’s all the worse if in fact some of that evidence is actually more likely on this alternative theory—if it fits what we expect to see in that case better than what we’d expect to see on the traditional theory. Like, for example, Paul’s letters, whose content is all exactly what we expect on the Osiris model, but strange and hard to explain on the traditional model. Historicists have to conjure a bunch of implausible, unevidenced assumptions to explain away all the odd statements in Paul and all the odd silences in Paul. But assumptions reduce the probability of your theory; they do not increase it. Thinking it’s the other way around is apologetics, not a valid method of history. You simply don’t get to just make assertions, for which you can adduce no evidence, and treat those assertions as if they were facts. At best they are 50/50, and at worst they are even less likely than that; but even at 50/50 you are halving the probability of your theory with every such assumption you have to lean on to “get” your theory to fit the evidence. In this debate I leaned on no such assumptions. I simply argued from the plain facts as they actually are. The problem with the consensus is that it has not been built on that procedure—the only correct procedure in history.

So, for example, Richardson falsely claimed I was just “assuming” without evidence that when Paul refers to “Brothers of the Lord” he meant only the cultic brothers of the Lord that he does clearly refer to repeatedly in his letters: all baptized Christians. But that is incorrect. My argument is the other way around: Richardson is assuming without evidence that Paul meant biological brothers; and I am simply pointing out that that is illegitimate. You don’t get to “assume” that. In point of actual fact, Richardson has no evidence that that assumption is true, and thus does not know that it is. You can’t bootstrap knowledge from ignorance. If you don’t know, you don’t know. Thus what happens is these references cease to be evidence for a historical Jesus. They do not therefore become evidence against a historical Jesus, but that is not necessary, and not anything I argued in this debate (even in OHJ, Chapter 11.10, where I do make such an argument, it is not an argument I use for my a fortiori conclusion that there could be as much as a 1 in 3 chance Jesus was based on a real historical person). This is how the consensus has become unfounded: the consensus thinks it is arguing from evidence (“Paul mentions Brothers of the Lord”), but it is actually arguing from unevidenced assumptions (“Paul meant biological brothers of the Lord”), and invalidly treating those assumptions as if they were established facts. All I am doing is pointing this out. At no point do I have to prove Paul did not mean biological brothers. All I have to prove is that the burden now falls on historicists to prove that he did, because the evidence establishes as a fact (not an assumption, not an ad hoc assertion) that Paul knew baptized Christians as Brothers of the Lord; and historians have met no such burden, because there simply is no evidence Paul meant what they claim. Maybe he did. But “maybe” does not get you “probably.”

All the other arguments between us in the debate shake out in just the same way. Richardson relied on unevidenced assumptions that he declared to be facts; and I would point that out, and show what happens when we stop doing that and only draw conclusions from the actual facts, without treating any assumptions as facts. Richardson made several false claims to fact (such as that no contemporary attested to the existence of Pontius Pilate); and I would point that out, and show what happens when we stop doing that and replace those false claims with true ones. And I would then present the evidence for the Osiris model: that all other savior heroes were placed in history in similar “biographies” yet didn’t really exist; that Paul only ever says the teachings and facts about Jesus were known by revelation and scripture, and never mentions anyone ever having met Jesus in life or seen Jesus do anything in life, nor even places Jesus’s death or burial anywhere known to man; and that the Gospels are the only known sources for the claim that Jesus existed, yet are manifestly mythical in construction and bear no evidence of historical reliability in any of their details about Jesus. All of which Richards proceeded to ignore, or even claim hadn’t been presented. And that’s how the debate went.

If you watch the debate and have any questions about specific claims either of us made in the debate, especially if there is anything Richardson asserted I didn’t clearly address, or anything I was too confusing or imprecise about, please ask them here in comments below (please adhere to my website’s general comments policy).

The Pastor’s Closing

Pastor Richardson constructed his closing by stringing together a bunch of arguments, all of which employed a premise that was false or an inference that was fallacious (sometimes both), and some of which actually violated debate etiquette against adding new arguments in a closing statement. Granted, there is a fuzzy line between new “rebuttals” and new “arguments,” and I don’t think Richardson knows professional debate rules, so I don’t think he did this on purpose. So I’ll set that aside and just address each argument he made in line-item order:

• Richardson insisted there is “no evidence of” a Jewish belief in dying messiahs from the Second Temple period, and therefore Jews would never have thought of such a thing then. This is false. I only had time to mention the Talmudic evidence in the debate, but he is evidently unaware that there is a literal dying messiah in Daniel 9, which is a Second Temple document, in fact the very document Christianity developed its theory of a dying messiah from (see OHJ, Chapter 4, Elements 5-7). There are numerous scholars who concur this theme was not anathema to Second Temple Judaism but an available soteriological strategy: see Israel Knohl’s The Messiah Before Jesus: The Suffering Servant of the Dead Sea Scrolls (University of California 2000), Michael Wise’s The First Messiah: Investigating the Savior Before Jesus (HarperOne 1999), and Daniel Boyarin’s The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ (New Press 2012).
• Richardson’s argument is also fallacious. That mainstream Talmudic Rabbis accepted a dying-messiah soteriology without even a debate, and one that employs the exact same elements the Christians employed (right down to identifying the father of the expected dying messiah as named Joseph, even if symbolically, and expecting his death to soon be followed by the general resurrection and a final messianic victory from heaven, exactly as portrayed in Daniel 9 and 12), refutes the claim that “Jews would never think of that.” Therefore, “it’s not in the Second Temple period” does not actually support the argument that “Jews would never think of that.” That we do have this same doctrine in a revered Second Temple pre-Christian document, and in fact the very one the Christians got the idea from, only destroys this argument more thoroughly.

This is another example of what I have been talking about: here we are not getting historical reasoning from Richardson, but apologetics. He asserts falsehoods (“no dying messiah concept in that period”) and pretends he can rescue a false claim about what Jews could and couldn’t think of by conveniently making up an excuse to ignore evidence of what Jews could and couldn’t think of. This is exactly the opposite of sound and valid historical reasoning. By contrast, I am sticking to the actual facts as they are, and drawing conclusions logically therefrom. Which makes this another case of treating an assumption (about what all Jews thought or could have thought in the first century, which in fact is knowledge Richardson does not possess nor ever could) as a fact (which is improper), and then bolstering that with falsehoods (about what documents actually exist and say) and fallacies (declaring unfounded conclusions about what a document actually does or doesn’t demonstrate). It’s only the worse that he went on to conflate “all Jews expected a conquering messiah” with “no Jews expected a dying messiah,” which are not the same thing and do not entail each other. As I pointed out, the Christians did preach a conquering messiah—he was to be back to finish that up any day now! And this was likewise the case in the Danielic and Talmudic doctrines of a dying messiah—the only difference being that they imagined this would be accomplished by two messiahs (one who would resurrect the other). All the Christians did was apply Ockham’s Razor and combine both guys into one. Richardson would know this if he actually read my book. And not actually reading the book they came to debate is probably the most common absurdity I encounter in all defenders of historicity. This begs explanation.

And then:

• Richardson insisted that my argument regarding the ancient trend for these savior gods is false because “the dying-and-rising god theme” is too late a development, arising after and not before Christianity. This is false. See Dying-and-Rising Gods: It’s Pagan, Guys. Get Over It. I am genuinely sick and tired of this false claim repeatedly being made, ignoring all the vast evidence I’ve published on the point. No one who knows what they are talking about should ever be trying to pull this line anymore.
• Richardson’s argument is also fallacious. Because I never once mentioned dying-and-rising gods in this debate. So he was not with this statement even rebutting any argument I made or any evidence I presented. I stuck to the simpler point regarding suffering savior heroes; I never specified any of them were dying-and-rising heroes. Because I don’t have to. That is true, and does indeed hugely support my point (all previously advocated resurrected saviors probably did not exist yet were portrayed as if they did in mythic biographies analogous to the Gospels, so that Jesus fits this savior mythotype even more thoroughly cannot be dismissed as irrelevant). But in this debate I didn’t even burn clock citing this, to avoid wasting time arguing it. I stuck to the suffering savior mythotype, which was popular even in pre-Christian Jewish mythology (see OHJ, Chapter 5, Element 43, and my discussion of George Nickelsburg’s demonstrations of it, Ibid., pp. 430-32), as well as abundantly popular in surrounding cults the Christians clearly borrowed a lot of the structure of their sect from (see OHJ, Chapter 5, Elements 44-48, and my more thorough and concise discussion in Chapter 6 of Jesus from Outer Space).

This is a very common historicity apologetic: make false claims about the ancient world, and obsessively ignore all the evidence refuting them, all in order to attack an argument that wasn’t made. This is not how historians operate. This is baloney methodology. Otherwise known as apologetics. It’s only the worse that Richardson burned clock at this point straw-manning me by falsely claiming I was relying on the work of Kersey Graves. Not only have I never relied on the work of Kersey Graves, I have prominently refuted the work of Kersey Graves. Falsely imputing to me things I have said or argued or did that I never said or argued or did is a disturbingly common tactic. No one who had a legitimate case against anything I have actually argued would ever need to do that. Think about that.

And then:

• Richardson burned a bunch of clock on a bizarre and elaborate argument (which is not new; he borrowed it from another apologist, although perhaps made a hash of it) about how Morgan Robertson anticipated in a work of fiction the subsequent disaster of the Titanic. There actually is nothing prescient in that novella. Everything deemed a parallel is due to common maritime knowledge and well-known trends of the time (when and where and how ships usually sink, arrogant ways to name them, the skimping on safety gear in the industry, and so on). But it was not clear what kind of argument Richardson was even trying to make from this. He seemed to think it proved that “similarity doesn’t prove anything,” which is an irrational dismissal of the entire field of literary studies. No competent historian would claim literary tropes and genres and mythotypes don’t exist, nor would any competent historian think a single instance of a single work of fiction generically matching a single historical event, all of which caused by common knowledge, “refutes” the entire methodology of the entire academic fields of literary, myth, and folklore studies.
• In actual facts tropes are established by numerous, not singular, instantiations of a type which is not creditable to common knowledge (no ancient mythotype matched any common historical course of events, and all ancient mythotypes are attested by several instantiations, not just one—thus rendering “coincidence” too improbable to credit). Again, Richardson would know this if he had actually read my book, where I not only explicitly cover this very point (I used the Lincoln-Kennedy coincidences, which are even more “impressive” than the Titan-Titanic coincidences: see OHJ, p. 228 n. 187), but cite numerous experts in literary and myth and folkore studies who all have established not only the existence of mythotypes, but how to distinguish them from coincidences (besides sections in OHJ already cited, e.g. Nickelsburg, see Chapter 10.2 and 10.4; and PH, pp. 192-204).

This is another common practice of apologetics: to cite consensus when it supports them (yet ignore whether that consensus is well-founded), and then literally deny the existence of entire fields of academic study when what they say is too inconvienient to allow to be true (while again ignoring all the vast evidence establishing the doctrines and findings of those fields). I suspect what has happened here is what often does: Richardson did no research on this, he just read some hack apologetics, and “believed” what they said, and repeated it blindly in this debate. On another point I caught Richardson not being able to say whether he had consulted any of the scholars I cited in OHJ that he claimed to have read, after he made assertions about what “the scholarship” says that is actually not what any of that scholarship says. And here we have another example: no one—literally no one—who did any real study in the fields of literary mimesis, folklore, and myth would have even attempted the argument he did here. Because they would know that in fact tropes and genres and mythotypes are real and how to identify them. Anyone who claims otherwise is just an apologist denying established scholarship as absurdly as any creationist. They are not a real historian. And they are not doing history.

Richardson then closed with a grab bag of non sequiturs:

• Richardson confusingly implied Jews would never write fiction (in fact, all mainstream scholars agree, most ancient Jewish literature was mythical or fictional, and composing made-up stories is a thing they did all the time: see OHJ, Chapter 5, Element 44) and somehow this meant (?) Luke couldn’t have made anything up. No logical basis for that conclusion is fathomable. He didn’t even establish the author of Luke was Jewish, as opposed to a Gentile student of Judaism, much less that people didn’t or couldn’t make whole stories up—as in fact they did for every other suffering savior hero then known.
• Richardson claimed Euhemerus did not title his seminal book “The Sacred Sciptures” but “The Sacred History,” which is both false and a wildly unfathomable non sequitur. It related to nothing we discussed at any point in the debate (it makes no difference how he titled his book; yet for some reason Richardson seems to have been threatened by this). The actual Greek is Hiera Anagraphê, which translates literally as the “Sacred [Things] Written Down,” which is exactly what “Sacred Scriptures” means in English and this is indeed how many lexical scholars translate Euhemerus’s title (seriously). The only difference between the word graphê, “writing,” and anagraphê is that the latter pleonastically means “that which has been written down” (ana – graphê). At most one can say that that pleonasm referred more commonly to accounts of things while graphê can mean anything written, but there is no such distinction relevant to the Bible: all of which consists of accounts of things (either outright purported histories, or records of what prophets said and did, or songs that were sung, or sayings that were collected). The Bible is not a hodgepodge of post-it notes. So the distinction has no relevance here.
• Richardson went on some strange rant against MacDonald’s Homeric thesis (that the Gospel authors borrowed tropes and themes from Homer), without mentioning MacDonald but instead implying this was something I invented. In fact I never even brought it up in this debate, so it had no relevance to anything here, and I have no idea why he wasted clock time on it. I’ve found critics of MacDonald tend to always be Christian apologists and have not read MacDonald, as their arguments always show a complete ignorance of the argument and evidence MacDonald actually published under peer review. But I’ve already made the point before of how silly it is to try and attack me by attacking MacDonald—even informedly, much less ignorantly as Richardson just did.

As if to illustrate everything I’ve said here, in the course of that inexplicable rant Richardson seemed really bothered by the fact that MacDonald discovered literary use of Homeric shipwreck accounts in Luke’s construction of the tale of Paul’s shipwreck in Acts (as well as borrowing from the Latin Aeneid and Greek translations of Jonah, though Richardson omits mention of that), and ended with a segue away ranting against that, even though this never came up in our debate nor pertained to anything in our debate. Once again Richardson implies he is quoting me here, but in fact he was misquoting MacDonald. Moreover, I cited two other scholars agreeing with MacDonald on this point (OHJ, pp. 360-61, n. 4), and all three of whom have published their findings under peer review, so it was especially disingenuous of Richardson to make it seem as if this is just some silly thing I invented. It actually does matter that abundant peer reviewed scholarship finds that Luke’s account of Paul’s shipwreck is a literarily crafted story based on similar stories in myth and fiction. But that doesn’t matter for anything to do with Jesus (which is why I don’t understand why Richardson brought it up). But let’s revisit the methodological point anyway: I don’t assume this entails Luke’s shipwreck account is fiction; but it does mean you now need evidence it isn’t, before you can claim to know it isn’t. And there is no evidence of that. So we cannot claim to know Luke’s account is in any way historical. It is not itself evidence that it is true. That’s a circular argument.

This is the difference between not allowing assumptions to stand in for facts (my method), and insisting that assumptions stand in for facts (Richardson’s method). That Luke’s literarily constructed tale is nevertheless “history” is an assumption. That it is literarily constructed is a fact. Historians stick with facts; apologists choose assumptions. One of them is doing history. The other is not. In On the Historicity of Jesus I clearly don’t say I have proved Luke’s narratives are fictional; rather, I only establish that there is enough evidence they could be that we cannot assume they are factual. That same distinction I noted earlier that apologists have a hard time with. What I actually said is therefore not ad hoc, but a fact based on evidence. And it is evidence for what we don’t know—and what we don’t know, we don’t know. Hence I quote MacDonald actually saying the following—and every single thing he says here is not an assumption, but factually true (emphasis now added):

The shipwrecks of Odysseus and Paul share nautical images and vocabulary, the appearance of a goddess or angel assuring safety, the riding of planks, the arrival of the hero on an island among hospitable strangers, the mistaking of the hero as a god, and the sending of him on his way [in a new ship].

Richardson might not like these facts, but not liking a fact does not make it stop being a fact. Apologetics is just an elaborate methodology engineered to deny facts—often angrily, with emotional declarations of incredulity (“That can’t be! That’s impossible!” … thank you, Luke Skywalker). Historians use evidence and reason instead. So you have to choose which you will use before assessing the probability that Jesus existed. And then actually stick to that choice. The result will then be what anyone should have predicted: history … or apologetics. I choose history.