Last weekend the Global Center for Religious Research hosted a plethora of live online talks from various scholars and enthusiasts on the subject of the historical Jesus (myself included), mostly from the position of doubt. They ranged from the crank to the superb, and mostly fell in the latter category, or at least on that side of the shelf. The conference was very well attended. I saw scores of live audience in almost every talk; only a few (and those usually at the most difficult hours to attend) had an attendance of only twenty or so. The event was superbly run and moderated by GCRR’s Darren Slade (Ph.D., Theology & Church History). And I discovered more bona fide scholars are skeptics of historicity or, like Slade, at least consider doubting it a respectable option even if they themselves lean toward historicity (I will update my list of such in my Bart Ehrman Recap next week).

You will soon be able to purchase access to archived video of the conference talks (if not already) at the GCRR eConference Page. Each includes a worthwhile audience-and-moderator Q&A with the speaker. There were also valuable audience live text-chats that weren’t recorded. In future I recommend attending these GCRR conferences live so you can benefit from that! Here I will survey the best and the worst and advance any critical thoughts I have on what went on.

The “Not Much to Add…” Awards Go To…

As for my own talk, “Historicity: Dogma or Hypothesis, a Comparison of Methods,” I will be summarizing some of it for an article in SHERM (as I did last time), and expanding the rest for a submission to the Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus, which I have been told will refuse to publish any article that questions the historicity of Jesus no matter its merit. We’ll see. But my piece overlapped a little and was much corroborated by the presentation given by Raphael Lataster (Ph.D., Religious Studies), “Responses to Critiques of Our Jesus Hyperscepticism,” to which I have nothing to add. It very capably demonstrated its point, that historians are running in fear from the hypothesis rather than actually even learning what it is or critiquing any of its actual arguments. My talk also went into the bad methodology of amateur mythicists, before surveying the methodological failures of expert historicists. And David Madison (Ph.D., Biblical Studies) came out as sharing my conclusion about historicity in his talk “Theology Inflation and the Disappearance of Jesus,” which made the point (and quite well) that once you account for everything made-up to inflate or exploit the credentials of Jesus as a divine authority, there isn’t really much left to make a historical man of.

A presentation by amateur scholar Derreck Bennett on “Resurrection and Apotheosis in Pre-Christian Antiquity” was so superb it exceeded even my scholarship on the subject of the “dying-and-rising-god” motif and its obvious adaptation to Jesus. His arguments were air-tight, and accounted for all the usual objections, answering them smartly with quotations of peer reviewed scholarship and correctly-contextualized evidence. And this was only a précis. His corresponding chapter in the new John Loftus and Robert Price anthology Varieties of Jesus Mythicism is going to be argued with even more extensive references and evidence and is going to be worth the price of the book even on its own, yet it will accompany several other chapters of comparable merit or at least well worth a read (even if mixed in with a few crank pieces here and there). Among those are contributions by none other than William Lane Craig protege himself, John Loftus, whose presentation for GCRR was quite good and made its point quite well, that “The Jesus We Find in the Gospels Never Existed.” Just in case there was any doubt about that.

Robert M. Price gave a presentation comparing “Mythicism and Preterism,” Preterism being the view that the failed prophecies of Jesus and the Book of Revelation actually have “already” been fulfilled, and when originally scheduled at that. The arguments for it reflect the same kind of desperation historicists exhibit in trying to restore the historicity of Jesus in the face of obvious reasons to be doubtftul. Price is clear about this being the case without requiring any certainty about whether Jesus existed or not. He makes the point that even if Jesus existed, he’s so irrelevant to anything said about him in extant texts that he may as well not exist. So why is it so terrifying to suggest he didn’t? I have nothing to add here either. Likewise with respect to David Fitzgerald’s talk, “Why Mythicism Matters.” His chapter on the point in the coming Loftus volume (likewise Price’s chapter there) will have more to say on its general point, but for GCRR he focused on how the subject of historicity tracks for the legendary founders of other religions the world over, and why doubting their historicity is not a big deal, and fits within the usual aims of historical explanation, and therefore the same should be true for Jesus. I concur.

Beyond that were a few presentations that presumed historicity but discussed aspects of the historicity question, regarding which I had no substantive critique, such as J.M. Dixon’s talk on “Jesus and the Son of Man,” whose conclusions about the “Son of Man” sayings were reasonably mainstream, within the gamut of what is still an ongoing debate in Jesus studies, and make sense enough if you presume historicity, and only fall apart once you start to doubt that (see “Son of Man” in the index of On the Historicity of Jesus). Likewise, Morgan Rempel’s “Searching for the Jesus of History: Strauss, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky” only really discussed one nexus-point in the early historiography of Jesus mythicism, which seemed interesting in its own right but is outside my area of interest (and has no bearing on the actual question of whether Jesus existed or what was true of him if he did). And Zev Garber’s “Jewish Jesus, Peoplehood and Religion” had nothing to do with the historicity of Jesus at all, but consisted mainly of a long, incoherent, table-thumping tirade about the cultural appropriation of the Jewishness of Jesus and its vague connection to some sort of identity-politics issue I had a hard time discerning, though that may have had more to do with my confusion and disinterest in its topic.

On the remaining presentations, I have more to say.

Timothy Freke

I have long complained of the problematic amateurism of The Jesus Mysteries by Freke & Gandy. It’s literally the most popular and widely read book advancing a Jesus myth hypothesis, and yet is so unreliably argued it actually makes professional hypotheses harder to get accepted, because experts think it’s the same stuff being argued. It isn’t. And I used a prominent example of its methodological failures in my talk: their claim that the Christian Eucharist is nearly an exact copy from Mithraism (citing a supposed ancient “inscription” but in fact using a poorly-cited medieval Christian manuscript fabricating quotations of Zoroaster, a completely useless source), and compared it with a methodologically sound approach, which finds that not to be the case, but rather that the Eucharist merges a generic mystery religion feature common to all mystery cults, with certain Jewish understandings of the Passover ritual, and that everything distinctive about it is actually Jewish. Though it does self-evidently Judaize a popular savior cult trope of the communal meal that produces a spiritual unity to their respective godman (see OHJ, index, “Eucharist,” with notes on p. 99), we have no direct evidence any of these meals accomplished this by exactly the same symbolism and logic.

So I was concerned whether Timothy Freke would continue this poor approach in his talk, “The Jesus Parable.” I was delightfully surprised. Freke has improved his stance in three respects. First, his theory of the original Christian teachings is not offered as a known fact but a merely possible reconstruction, which is a more defensible position. Second, he admits his reconstruction is based on early “heretical” allegorical accounts, i.e. non-canonical Gospels and theologies of the first few centuries, which is likewise a more responsible admission. We do not actually know these versions of Christianity were “heretical” as opposed to merely being accused of such by the “actually” heretical “orthodox” sect that later came to dominate. In fact I suspect those “weird” Christianities are as close to the original as the supposed orthodoxy was—as in, they each retained something of the original, and they each changed things equally as much. Thus, there may be lost authentic details in those alternative Christianities, equally distorted under later evolutions as anything we find in so-called “orthodoxy.” I don’t personally believe we can recover much of it, owing to the destruction and distortion of evidence; but I do recognize the plausibility of attempts. And Freke’s psychosocial theory of the intended meaning of the allegory in these “weird” accounts is plausible. I just don’t think we can confirm that, nor tie it back to the original sect with any useful confidence. Which brings me to the third development, which is even more important: Freke concedes the methodology of the original book was a bit hamfisted and amateur, and he’d be more cautious if he were to reproduce it now.

To illustrate what I mean, I asked in Q&A whether a proposal he made, about Christianity being invented in Egyptian Alexandria before the time of Philo with some connection to the Therapeutae (see my article How To Fabricate History: The Example of Eusebius on Alexandrian Christianity), was something he was saying he can prove is true, or only a possibility that can’t be proven. He readily agreed it was only the latter. I noted one could make the same kind of argument from the Qumran library, and thus advance a Judean origin instead, and with much better evidence even, so we could instead argue Christianity was instead invented right where all our sources say it was. Paul, after all, never mentions any base of Christianity in Egypt (even the idea that the Apostle Apollos hailed from there comes only from Acts, a wholly unreliable source); and all the original founders, Paul says, were in Judea; and it is to the Judean Church that Paul literally paid homage (his letters frequently mention him bringing sacks of cash back there). There was surely a Christian mission in Alexandria (it was literally the largest and nearest population center to Judea, with a considerable Jewish presence); but I see no indication it was central, or any more prominent than missions to Arabia, Galatia, Syria, Greece, Spain, or Rome. Freke agreed one could make either case; which is more indicative of a sensible scholar than a crank (cranks tend never to admit they could be wrong).

Beyond that there are only two notable points I’d correct in his presentation:

First: the seal-stone Freke & Gandy’s book displays on its cover does not depict a “crucifixion.” Nor does it depict Jesus. The inscription upon it literally reads Orpheos Bacchikos, “Bacchic Orpheus,” then a common way to distinguish different variants of a hero or god that syncretized different cults. For example, “Tyrian Hercules” meant a Hellenized version of the Canaanite god Melqart as worshiped principally at Tyre near Judea; and presumably their stories came to be merged in various respects, on the then-popular Herodotean theory that such gods were “really” the same god as remembered by different cultures. So “Bacchic Orpheus” would mean an understanding of Orpheus somehow merged with the Bacchic mysteries. We don’t know the particulars. But as this was a high-value engraved lodestone used for impressing wax seals on correspondence and documents, I suspect it would have been the official seal stone of a priest or officiant of some Bacchic mystery sect.

Christian apologists outraged by the suggestion of any connection between this stone and Christianity lambasted Freke & Gandy for citing a forged artifact as evidence, citing the peer-reviewed literature on this stone which suggested as much (all of which I’ve read). However, that judgment I can confirm is wholly unsound. Someday I may do a proper write up on this. But there is no way this would have been forged, because it does not depict any of the things presumed, and is actually rather strange—it serves no evident purpose for a forger to fabricate this. I confirmed with the Staatliche Museen in Berlin that the stone used to be there but was lost during WWII (probably becoming some escaping Nazi’s loot, maybe making its way to South America, soon sold off on the black market to buy a bungalow and a mistress; I suspect it’s sitting in the private illegal collection of some billionaire’s palace somewhere; maybe David Green uses it as a buttplug, who knows). It was reputedly recovered by fishermen in a cove somewhere near the Aegean in beach waters from which many similar artifacts were recovered, all clustering around a 3rd century A.D. date, likely the detritus of some ancient shipwreck.

The image is of a man lashed to (or holding onto) an anchor. There is only one link in known myth that makes sense of this image: Arion, the famed disciple of Orpheus (who was often himself connected with Bacchus), renowned for being almost as magical a musician as the master himself, was in legend set upon by thieving sailors on a sea journey, who gave him two choices as to how to die, one of which being “drowned in the sea.” After singing a song of appeal to Apollo that attracted a pod of dolphins (Apollo’s patron animals), Arion threw himself into the sea, where he was promptly rescued by the dolphins who carried him ashore. That story imagines him just leaping into the water off the stern; but myths in antiquity were often variable or evolved over time, and it’s conceivable in some account the sailors lashed him to the ship’s anchor to drown him, or that he clung to or rode the anchor down himself. Or quite possibly the anchor is just an abstract symbol of his fate—an anchor being what is tossed into the sea; ergo, Arion on an anchor symbolizes him being tossed into the sea (and thus not meaning literally on an anchor). In any case, an image of Arion on an anchor would then be a recognizable Orphic symbol of salvation, exactly the kind of abstract symbolism we’d expect from an officiant of Bacchic mysteries. Indeed, the syncretism may even have extended to merging Arion’s story with Orpheus himself, hence explaining why the image seems to be directly identified on the stone as that of Orpheus, and marking him as a member of the Bacchic mysteries. I can’t prove any of this, but it’s plausible in context, and more aptly describes the image on the stone than “a crucified man.”

It’s unlikely any of this was ever connected with Christianity in any way. Christians did not adopt crucifixion symbolism until long after the religion began, and even when it did, its similarity was simply a product of universal artistic conventions (there being no artistic difference to make between a man lashed to an anchor or a cross). At most one can say this represents the ubiquity of symbols of mystery cult salvation, a generic concept inherent in Christianity as well, but that’s already well known and requires nothing as obscure as this to argue for. Even the adoption of the anchor as a Christian symbol (still a development well after its origin) need have no connection with this, as the anchor alone was then a universal symbol that meant security and hence salvation.

Second: Freke implied a demarcation between ancient and modern concepts of myth and history such that the “ancients” we are supposed to conclude did not see myths as literally true. This is a common assertion even by experts in the field, but is not quite correct. There were ancients (usually educated elites) who regarded myths as solely allegorical and not literal; but most ancients did not see it that way (even among the elite, many still regarded them as historical). At best most imagined it as being both: literally true events of the past that also carried allegorical lessons for the present. It is true that some educated ancient thinkers were more comfortable with what Freke means by “mythic truth” (this is even what the author of the Gospel according to Mark appears to advocate in Mark 4:10-13), which was not (to them) meant to be historic truth. But far more (and especially the uneducated masses) were not comfortable with mythic truth not also being historic truth, and even despised elites for their suggesting otherwise. See my article Establishing the Biblical Literalism of Early Christians. This does not wholly alter Freke’s point, which was that composers of these stories were constructing them with allegorical intent. Indeed they were (see OHJ, Element 14, Ch. 4). But they might also have intended them to be taken as historical fact as well. It was precisely their reality (such that even cosmic myths being actual was important) that gave authority to their allegory for most of a story’s intended audience (as the 3rd century Christian scholar Origen even explained, as I document in my article on ancient literalism).

Frank Zindler

I don’t have much to disagree with Zindler’s discussion of “A New Paradigm for the Study of Christian Origins.” His point is correct: a comprehensive explanation of the origin of “Christianity,” meaning the post-Nicene construct or even the present matrix of sects, requires a “braid” theory, wherein Christianity evolves out of centuries of braiding together different ideas from different sources, and continues evolving thereafter by the same process. It didn’t just “appear out of nowhere,” nor is what we often mean by Christianity actually what it looked like when it began. I just gave an example myself: the incorporation of anchor symbolism was a later development, not original to Christianity, but evolved within a century or two into crucifixion symbolism. The anchor was simply picked up as a symbol of faith and security from the surrounding pagan culture, as a convenient way to visually communicate the already-developed ideals of the Christian sect.

The only quibbles I have with Zindler’s positions in this talk regard the timing of when astrology entered Christianity as an idea-matrix, and the status of Nazareth archaeology.

• There is no good case to be made that Nazareth did not exist as a town in the early first century, nor would it at all matter (OHJ, index, “Nazareth”). All the arguments to this effect ignore contrary evidence (e.g. an inscription establishes Nazareth as one of the towns that took in priests after the destruction of the temple, which entail Nazareth had to be a well-developed town by then—indeed, not a hick village either, but a place a member of the temple elite would not be embarrassed to settle at) and derive from invalid arguments from silence (e.g. we simply have not excavated hardly any of the locality now identified as Nazareth and cannot even establish that that is the same town as anciently named—a problem also with Bethlehem, which Zindler also incorrectly said we could “prove” didn’t then exist). And continuing to insist on this unprovable makes mythicism look crank, not least because the town’s not existing would have no more to do with the historicity of Jesus than Bethlehem’s not existing would: every historicist agrees Jesus was never associated with Bethlehem outside scripturally-inspired fiction, so its not existing has zero effect on the probability Jesus existed. Jesus was clearly linked to Nazareth for the same scriptural reasons, which also means the town had to actually exist when the Gospel authors chose it as fulfilling a prophecy they themselves admitted did not actually mention it (e.g. Matthew says the prophecy was that the messiah would be a Nazorian, not a Nazarene—a fact obscured by over-meddling translations—so if they were inventing a town to match, it would have been Nazoria, not Nazareth: see Proving History, index, “Nazareth”). It’s unlikely some obscurely new village would be known to the authors of the Gospels so as to be employed this way.

• There is no evidence astrology played any role whatever in the origins of Christianity; its timing and originating features all link to scriptural apocalyptic numerology, while astrotheological components are completely absent until very late (the earliest detectable possible astrotheology appears in Revelation, and even that is vague and likely an innovation of the author; it serves no explanatory function beyond its use as political allegory). We can see this by contrast to Mithraism, whose astrotheological components and foundations are obvious and provable even from the earliest available evidence, and are fundamental to that sect, in precisely the way they are not in early Christianity, whose core foundations instead lie in scripture (particularly Daniel 9). At most we can speculate that maybe universal talk of a new precessional age helped “confirm” pro-Christian numerological calculations as divinely inspired; but that will not likely have played anything more than such a vague, indirect role. Apart from ambiguous stuff in Revelation that no one subsequently did anything with, we see no clear infusions of astrological symbolism or thinking in Christianity until after the Council of Nicea, by which point Christianity had been spreading across the Earth for hundreds of years. And even then such adoptions appear largely to be simply emulations of other pagan deities, as Catholicism “assimilated” popular religion into its matrix; by which point their astrological significance was long lost or of little interest.

On that last point, one must not confuse cosmological ontology, e.g. discussions of invisible celestial theatrics (e.g. notions of a seven heavens or cosmic entities enacting dramas there), with astrotheology, which relates that ontology to actual stars and planets. These are not the same thing. The latter directly links a religion’s teachings to real, independently observable phenomena. The former does not. Thus, Jesus being executed by Satan in the firmament is not astrotheology; nor is Satan’s previous war in heaven, or placing the Garden of Eden in the heavens, or any other discussion of angels or emanations of God acting out narrative events in the heavens no one could witness. Even Ignatius’s gospel of a great star is not astrotheology, as he identifies it with no actual celestial phenomena, much less astrologically, and he appears to be referring to Philo’s idea of God’s invisible star, which no one can see but by the eye of faith—exactly the opposite of astrotheology (see OHJ, Ch. 8.6). Nor is Matthew’s nativity star in any way connected with astrotheology—what he describes is not any identifiable stellar body or event, but only what we would today call a UFO, which he simply invents for its narrative function. It has no theological meaning. That’s why Luke could say it was just an angel. Likewise, the reason Matthew places magi in his narrative is to connect with Daniel (as he does likewise in his empty tomb story by reconstructing it to resemble Daniel in the Lion’s Den: Proving History, pp. 192-204), not to imply they were astrologers or anything about astrology. Likewise, the twelve disciples are a reference to the twelve tribes of Israel, not homage to astrological theory. Trying to explain as astrological Israel’s original adoption of that twelve tribe model does not inform us about Christianity either; those events are separated by hundreds of years. Any astrological connection there may have been, had long been lost or relegated to mere trivia.

Paul George

One of the crank bits was amateur Paul George’s talk, “Christianity Kicked Off in AD 70,” a précis of his book On Christian Origins. This was almost a paradigmatic example of amateur mythicism, committing every logical and factual error you can think of, while exhibiting a haughty refusal to even consider his being wrong about anything. All his reasoning was armchair, not evidence-based, and illogical, including hinging on the verificationist fallacy of “if I can make it fit, it must be true.” Indicative of his shoddy research, he asserted that we have evidence at Herculaneum of a “Latin cross torn out,” thereby “proving” Christianity was attested there as early as 79 A.D. This is a common baloney claim made by Christian apologists, but the artifact in question has no connection to Christianity. The wall-mount torn away most likely did contain a candelabra or cult statue, but there is no reason to believe it was Christian. Fleeing inhabitants were just expediting their removal of precious metals or revered gods, almost certainly as pagan or mundane as everything else in the city. It’s all the weirder that George did not connect this bogus claim to his theory anyway, so there was no reason to have hazarded this mistake in the first place.

Much of George’s argument hinged on an invalid argument from silence: that we have no “independent” evidence attesting to a Christianity before the Jewish War. But as we have no reason to expect there to be, this cannot evince his theory. Whereas many texts only make sense being written before that war. For example, Hebrews’ entire argument makes no sense at all after the temple cult no longer existed to “go back to” as the authors are desperately trying to persuade its recipients not to do. Likewise 1 Clement contains an elaborate multi-page homily on the folly of betrayal and never once mentions the primest of all examples, the Jews and their resulting fate (nor, incidentally, does it mention the example of Judas, likewise proving that story had not been invented yet). And all of Paul’s authentic letters operate on the assumption the temple cult still existed—had it not, his every argument for converting to Christianity would play upon it (either explicitly or by way of a forged “argument by anticipation”). Whoever wrote those letters simply had no idea the temple would be eliminated and still the world go on.

It’s all the worse that Paul’s letters reference a thriving Jerusalem community, when as far as I know, Jerusalem effectively remained an uninhabited ruin after the War until rebuilt as a pagan city by Hadrian—from which Jews were then banned. George refused to believe this and made up countless ad hoc excuses to deny it; typical crank behavior. I am open to being proved wrong about this, but we need actual evidence of anyone other than Roman legionaries inhabiting Jerusalem between the 60s and 130s AD; George instead just made stuff up. Meanwhile, the complete absence of any Christian church activity in Jerusalem being mentioned during that period (no one ever goes there, comes from there, writes to anyone there; no one ever refers to anything there) does not bode well for George’s theory. The only evidence of its occupation is by the 10th legion of Rome (whereas a remarkably scant use of Jewish graveyards outside the city in this period indicates almost none even made the journey to Jerusalem to bury their dead). Cassius Dio reports it otherwise remained a ruin until Hadrian rebuilt it, exactly as Josephus explained it would (hence decades later Josephus explained Titus had to grant him new properties to compensate for the ones he could no longer make any use of in Judea owing to Jerusalem becoming a military camp).

George also made a pseudoscientific argument for his theory, claiming that Christianity should have been much larger and more populous by the time of Pliny the Younger’s encounter with it in 110 A.D. (see my discussion in How Did Christianity Switch to a Historical Jesus?), therefore it “cannot” have originated in the 30s A.D. but must have started decades later. Goerge even cited the growth of Mormonism as proving the point. But he clearly didn’t actually do any of the math or check any numbers. Because this model has already indeed been used, by Rodney Stark, a sociologist of Christianity, and his calculations show that even a Mormon-scale growth would not make Christianity all that noticeable even after a hundred years (see Chapter 18 of Not the Impossible Faith for a thorough discussion). And if we ignore the highly unreliable and propagandistically hyperbolic book of Acts (throughout his presentation George gullibly treated Acts as if it were entirely reliable and in every respect true—apart from, inconsistently, its dating of events), the only data we have on the original size of the church is Paul’s supposed reference to there being “about” 500 brethren at that time (although I suspect that’s a textual corruption: see Then He Appeared to Over Five Hundred Brethren at Once!). Using Stark’s Mormonism model, of under 50% growth per decade, a group of 500 then growing at that rate consistently (and contrary to George’s irrationally stubborn insistence to the contrary, not all religions grow “consistently” like that) would by the year 110 number under only 9,000 across the entire Roman Empire of 60 to 120 million people, thus comprising barely one one hundredth of one percent of the population. That’s socially invisible. According to the Barrington Atlas there were some 24,000 towns and cities in the Empire. If Christian congregations numbered, let’s say, twenty or so on average, there would be no Christian presence almost anywhere; only one in fifty localities would even sport a single Christian to interrogate; and congregations would be separated by days or weeks of travel.

George also repeatedly relied on the fallacy of “Argument to Convenience,” such as insisting Paul’s reference to Aretas is an interpolation (the most dateable comment Paul makes: see How Do We Know the Apostle Paul Wrote His Epistles in the 50s A.D.?). George offers no evidence it is an interpolation. It just “has to be,” because his theory “has to be” true. Thus, all evidence against his theory he gets to simply dismiss because, circularly, his theory thereby proves it must be bogus. I have calculated the probability of any verse just “happening” to be an interpolation cannot be more than 1 in 200 and could be as low as 1 in 1000 (based on the observed rate of interpolation in New Testament manuscripts: see OHJ, p. 569, and Hitler Homer Bible Christ, pp. 370-71). So any theory that requires simply “assuming” a passage is interpolated is reduced in probability two hundred to a thousand times. This is not an effective way to argue. Your theory is probably dead the moment you have to resort to this tactic (even just once; if your theory requires multiple such interpolations, it’s doomed, as their improbabilities multiply). One therefore must have independent evidence an interpolation has occurred, and it needs to be pretty good evidence (which does not, however, have to be manuscript evidence; see: There Is No Logically Sound Case Against Interpolation in 1 Thessalonians 2). George does not appear to even have any of the skills needed to adduce such evidence. And he didn’t present any.

George’s incompetence with the evidence showed again when he claimed that Jerome dated the conversion of Paul after the Jewish War. He evidently mistook Jerome’s statement that Paul was born in “the town of Giscalis in Judea [but] when this was taken by the Romans he removed with his parents to Tarsus” as meaning when the Romans defeated Judea in the Jewish War of 66-70. That is not what Jerome is talking about. As one can tell from his immediately explaining that Paul was sent back to Jerusalem to study under Gamaliel (a claim made by Acts, not by Paul himself), whom all other sources definitely date pre-War. What Jerome means is when the Romans seized Judea and appended it to the province of Syria, which happened in 6 A.D. Jerome is probably making this all up, or else is merely repeating some legend someone else made-up; because none of this comes from Paul (even Acts says nothing about his hailing from Judea, much less any specific town there), and Gischala was not in Judea (which tanks Jerome’s entire reasoning for Paul having left there). I don’t know if George is just misreading the English or amateurishingly assuming the Latin capto means a military conquest because it looks like the English word “capture.” But that word simply means take or seize, which is exactly how it is characterized by Josephus: at the death of Archelaus the Romans simply claimed the territory for themselves; a decision many Jews saw as conquest (resulting in the rebellion of Judas the Galilean).

That reflects another mistake George often made, which was failing to consider alternative explanations of the same evidence (see What Is Bayes’ Theorem & How Do You Use It?). For example, he claims that his theory is “proved” by the fact that after the War Christians made hot use of that to promote their religion. But this is exactly what we expect regardless of when Christianity originated. It therefore cannot be evidence for any particular chronology. Likewise, he argues that Mara bar Serapion “proves” his theory because it refers to Jesus as a “king” and says the Jews lost their kingdom and were scattered after killing him, and therefore evinces knowledge that Christianity began after the War. This is a non sequitur in every way. Even if Serapion is referring to Jesus (that’s still debated), he’s just compressing popular Christian rhetoric that the Jewish War was God’s revenge for killing Jesus, their rightful king. There is nothing here about this happening immediately in succession. To the contrary, it was standard Christian rhetoric that the War happened exactly 40 years after the execution of Jesus, completing God’s scriptural math (the Jews suffering in a wilderness again 40 years, to have a chance to convert before God dropped the hammer). Serapion says nothing to contradict this. George likewise claimed he had some sort of evidence in “Halley’s Comet” though he never expounded (presumably that’s covered in his book), but there is no evidence Christians made any use of that event in their rhetoric. Any attempt to link it to anything in Christian texts, like Matthew or Ignatius, can only be speciously presumptive; no such texts describe anything like it, much less say so (Revelation 8:10 might refer to it, but places it long after the origin of Christianity, which is of no use to George’s thesis). I should perhaps remind readers that any ancient schoolboy knew the difference then between stars, planets, and comets (see Stamatina Mastorakou, “Aratus and the Popularization of Hellenistic Astronomy,” and my discussion in Science Education in the Early Roman Empire, pp. 49-50).

Paul George thus evinced exactly how not to argue Jesus didn’t exist.

Ken Hanson

One peculiar presentation, which presumed a historical Jesus, was Ken Hanson’s “Jesus, Socialism, and ‘Judeo-topia’,” in which he made a bizarre argument for Jesus being a modern Libertarian individualist (yep…the Gospel of the Supply Side Jesus all over again). Total nonsense—even in its anachronism, but especially in respect to the facts. Hanson seemed particularly disturbed by claims that Jesus was a Marxist, and so set out to prove he instead was the intellectual precursor to Ayn Rand. But in the process Hanson conflated Marxism, Stalinism, Communism, and Socialism (none of those things is the same thing as the other), and seemed completely ignorant of even rudimentary economic concepts in this respect—having never heard of, for example, an anarcho-communist, which is what correctly describes the Gospel Jesus; not “Marxist,” which entails a particular view regarding worker ownership of capital and industry; much less “Stalinist,” which is what Hanson seems to think a Marxist is, which entails a particular view of state-owned capital and industry masquerading as worker-owned, through the facade of an entirely fake democracy (at which Karl Marx turned in his grave). Apart from Jesus, the Book of Acts certainly advocates Stalinism (a murder-and-terror-enforced communism, even formulating a variant of the Marxist dictum “from each according to their means, to each according to their need”), not Hanson’s wet dream of individualism. But that’s fiction, like most of his Bible.

If we separate Jesus from “the Church” depicted in Acts, and if we assume the Gospel Jesus is historical (no one really does, other than conservative Christians), then still no case can actually be made that he was an economic individualist. He was unmistakably an anarcho-communist. This, too, I am sure is fiction; but it represents the ideals of the Christians who created and sold it. Of course their dreamy ideals were soon abandoned and the Church returned to the same hiercharchical, patriarchal, capitalist bullshit the original Christians rebelled against, not only exacerbating poverty through increasingly outrageous scales of income inequality, including absurdist expansions of slavery (through the Orwellian creation of a “peasantry,” whereby freeholders across the Empire were reduced to slaves in all but name, “as befitting free men”), but even endorsing it as God’s will. Thus we get Popes with mansions and golden shoes, softly suggesting billionaires give some loose change to the poor. For none of which you will find any support whatever in the fiction of the Gospel Jesus.

In this respect Hanson is, as they say, not even wrong. For ease of making my point, for the moment, I’ll speak as though the Gospel Jesus were a real historical person. Jesus was an apocalyptic Jew. He was an extremely strict apocalyptic Jew. Not as strict as Shammaite Pharisees, to be fair; his views are essentially those of Hillelite Pharisees, with a few nods to fundamentalist extremism more in line with Essene teachings (such as his command that remarriage after divorce is a sin; as is even so much as thinking about sex with anyone but your spouse; such that he recommends you’ll be safer if you just you cut your balls off). Jesus is clear that you cannot give up even one jot or tittle of the Torah Law until God ends the world; this means you even have to execute children for talking back to their parents. Jesus was indisputably an asshole. He would have been horrified by the United States Constitution and Bill of Rights. But one thing Jesus never advocated was economic individualism. To the contrary, he commanded everyone to give all they own away to the benefit of the poor—and damned to eternal hell anyone who didn’t. Contrary to ignoramuses who don’t know how to comprehend what they are reading, the Parable of the Talents is not about making money—the gold in that story refers to evangelizing the gospel (as most parables did), not actual currency. The few parables Jesus teaches that actually are about money, condemn all who hoard or value it (the Parable of the Rich Fool and the Parable of Lazarus are pretty darned clear about this; even the Parable of the Invited Guests). They meant it when they had Jesus say you cannot serve both God and mammon.

The whole point of Jesus’s rants on these subjects, all his commanding of extreme pacifism and non-resistance, is the fact that the world is about to end. You shouldn’t care about whether you have anything to eat or wear, because the whole world will be melted soon. And what’s the use of risking eternal damnation on a scant few years of money-grubbing and all those pointless shirts and soups, when if you just suffer through that brief moment in history, you’ll get to live forever in paradise? Thus Jesus commands to never sue anyone, never resist any assault or attack, never even prevent anyone from stealing from you—not even the shirt off your back, not even your coat in winter—to even submit to slavery and compelled labor! This is not Ayn Rand, people. And this only makes sense in its context of apocalypticism: any of these things (resisting, fighting against anything, in any way whatever—even peacefully in a court of law; or simply refusing to give someone what they ask of you even when you are under no threat by refusing, other than the threat of hell) risks committing a sin that will damn you forever. So why risk it? That’s what Jesus is saying. Just don’t even take the risk. Roll over for everyone. Suffer every misery. Because that will guarantee you get eternal paradise. And what’s infinite years of bliss to a few decades of any torment?

Hanson seems not to know his Jesus “spoke” these words:

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well. If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.

This is not economic individualism. This is the most radical of communism. Even the most fascist of Stalinists believe there should be rules enforced against excess taking and abusing; Marxists, surely; and definitely all Communists and Socialists. But Jesus is saying you should claim no property rights whatsoever; not even to your own labor. Anyone who wants something from you—free labor, all your stuff, even your food and clothing—gets it. You are commanded to hand it over.

Hanson’s argument proceeded by ignoring all the actual pertinent evidence regarding Jesus’s economic theory, and focusing instead on a fallacious argument from silence: that Jesus never said the government should get involved in caring for the poor. But that’s because Jesus does not believe in government at all. He offers no political advice ever—never once does he speak of how governments should be organized, or what they should or should not do. Because all governments are going to be melted soon. So what would be the point in trying to change them? Jesus’s point is, rather, that the only thing you can control in the next paltry few years the Earth will even continue to exist is your own individual behavior. That is not individualism as Hanson means it. It’s actually a radical anarcho-communism: disregard all government—seek to support or change or establish or oppose no government of any kind—and instead regulate your own behavior toward serving a perfect communal good (not a capitalist or “Libertarian” one). In other words, submit absolutely to collectivism (including any and all taxation). And for that you will be rewarded with a quality seat in God’s coming absolute tyranny. That’s Jesus. If you don’t like it, well, listen to my small violin; or join those of us who realize this Jesus is an idiot and a horrible person.

Though Hanson also pushed the fallacious argument that the Gospels all derive from Aramaic originals because they contain Aramaicisms (in fact, those are Septuagintalisms, which suggests he isn’t really thinking through the more obvious explanations of the same data; see my summary of the problem in my critique of Maurice Casey), I’ll note that one thing I did like to hear from Hanson is the existence of a project (albeit by conservatives) to create and publish an intertextual index of every Jewish precedent or parallel in the teachings of Jesus as found in the Gospels, essentially a directed commentary on the point. I doubt the meta-conclusions of that study will have any merit (it sounds like they want to prove Jesus is real because everything credited to him is actually an established idea within Judaism at the time, which is a non sequitur), but their extensive referencing (to such works as the Mishnah and Talmud and other Jewish literature) will make it a useful index for building more credible hypotheses with. I look forward to getting a hold of that.

One final criticism I should mention is that Hanson seems to think the authors of the Gospels can’t have known things about Essene and other fringe sects such as we find at Qumran unless they were preserving the ideas of a real Jesus who would know them. This is a double non sequitur. If Jesus could know of them, so could any inventor of the tradition, anyone born and raised before the War. This idea that “only” Jesus can innovate and form tradition and remember things to others is simply bogus. But even more bogus is the notion that the Jewish War cast some sort of magical spell that spontaneously disintegrated all Jewish books across the entire Empire. The copies of texts stashed at Qumran are not likely to be the only ones that existed. And Diaspora communities collecting these things spanned from Alexandria to Marseille. Even in Judea there will be surviving libraries across the region; and many a refugee with trunks of them will have fled. And we know this for a fact: Josephus and Hippolytus paraphrase common material about the Essenes, yet Hippolytus repeats a great deal more, indicating they had access to volumes about not only the Essenes in general but even their various sub-sects (see references in The Empty Tomb, p. 200 n. 23). And contrary to Hanson’s claim that none of the documents known from Qumran are found anywhere else, there are many overlaps with the Genizah collection centuries later, proving long continuity of survival, of ideas as well as whole books (likewise consider the Ethiopian canon’s overlaps with the Qumran library). Just because more didn’t survive to us, doesn’t mean they weren’t widely available to people in the late first century, particularly in the collections of Christian Jews themselves, all across the Empire, and even within and around Judea (not least because many Jewish cities, like Sepphoris in Galilee, surrendered and were spared and thus would have had synagogues and libraries well intact).

Vadim Krakovsky

Finally, the last presentation of the conference was the weirdest and crankiest of them all. Which is fitting. Anyone who has attended major academic conferences (like the Society of Biblical Literature, say) knows the last days or hours are often packed with the weakest tea. And this is what we got from Vadim Krakovsky, presenting “Julius Firmicus Maternus’ Crypto-Testimony on the Birth Date and Time of Jesus of Nazareth,” based on a paper he published in what he calls the ISAR International Journal in 2019 (I could not confirm that was anything other than a bogus paper-mill). As if to balance George, a crank arguing for mythicism, Krakovsky is a crank arguing for historicity! So now historicists can see how that feels.

In his talk Krakovsky weirdly claims he can prove Jesus existed (?) because of an obscure horoscope in the Mathesis of Julius Firmicus Maternus that Krakovsky claims refers to Jesus and by a variety of peculiar and elaborate suppositions we can determine that it dates the birth of Jesus to “11:14 AM” on “July 27, 7 BCE.” This is all tinfoil hat, top to bottom. Even just trying to get the vague passage he means to refer to Jesus is a job of implausible work. But Krakovsky then uses modern astronomical software to “reverse engineer” the date supposedly implied by the horoscope. But that’s based on hyper-accurate modern models and data. Those didn’t exist back then. So how do we know Maternus was using correct astronomical position data? Or even getting correct results or doing any of the math correctly? Or even knew what year he was talking about? (Maternus does not state a regnal year or anything alike to conclude he even means a B.C. date at all, much less that one.)

And that’s just the least of it. The real problem here is the most fundamental question of all: How do we know Maternus isn’t just making this all up? Krakovsky couldn’t explain how Maternus would even know any of this. What source could anyone possibly have had as to the actual birth day and even time of Jesus? Roman census records only stated a year of birth—and sometimes not even that, but things like “about” a certain year (example, example)—and no Roman census was taken before 6 A.D. in Judea or Galilee anyway. No one was recording hyperprecise clock dates down to the minute of exiting a vagina—even the absurdly wealthy, much less two-bit nobodies in Galilee. And if, by some bizarre sequence of inexplicable events, Maternus had such a source, why did no one hear of it or reference its content for hundreds of years before him? All previous Christian speculation on the birthday of Jesus echoes not one bit of what Krakovsky was talking about; most didn’t even imagine his birth could be in Summer at all. The earliest dates proposed all put him in Spring; and Winter dates started being speculated only after that. And still that’s not Summer. Christians simply never agreed on when Jesus was born; as we see Luke flatly contradicting Matthew on the point (see Chapter 15 in Hitler Homer Bible Christ).

In Q&A, Aaron Adair, an expert astronomer and author of the best book you’ll ever get on the Bethlehem Star, advanced several good questions and comments that pretty much shut Krakovsky down. This included even textual points such as that the horoscope in question says things like the subject was “crucified before the emperor,” which does not describe Jesus; at best it could match later implausible legends about Peter or Paul under Nero, but again, the horoscope doesn’t even mention its subject being Christian, and regardless, Krakovsky’s thesis requires it be Jesus. There was also some question over whether the Latin of Maternus says “17th degree of Libra” or 18th. There is just such a typo variously found in the literature, so one would have to check printed editions to be sure which was correct; and really, to be sure, also their source manuscripts, to guard against even the printed edition carrying a misprint. In fact, to be honest, these are the kinds of details highly susceptible to scribal corruption, so we couldn’t really trust the manuscripts have accurately preserved the number either. But Adair noticed Krakovsky’s paper kept saying 18th (which I think is most likely the correct reading), while the software he used to generate all his results was using 17th. Which means his results were all wrong. This was just one of many technical problems with his work. Adair also notes Krakovsky’s isn’t the first attempt to fanagle something like this out of this passage in Maternus; Michael Molnar did before, coming up with a different date. And even his case is convoluted and implausible. (New Ager José Vega came up with an even more logic-stretching attempt, and without even having to connect it to Maternus!)

One example of a problem I spotted was at one point where, like George, Krakovsky misinterprets an ancient text. He claims Tertullian dated the birth of Jesus to the 6 B.C. governorship in Syria of Sentius Saturninus. But this is a common mistake made by Christian apologists (as I explain in HHBC). In fact Tertullian does not link that Sentius Saturninus with the census in Luke 2:1; rather, Tertullian says censuses (plural, not singular) prove that Jesus had brothers, in defense of Luke 8:19-21 (sed et census constat actos sub Augusto nunc in Iudaea per Sentium Saturninum, apud quos genus eius inquirere potuissent, “But it is also well known that censuses were conducted under the Augustus in that time in Judaea by Sentius Saturninus, consulting which they can investigate his family.”). Since Tertullian believed Jesus was the first born (just as Luke says), there could not be any record of his brothers in any census taken at the nativity. Therefore, Tertullian could not possibly have been thinking of the census during which Jesus was born. He must therefore mean the other Sentius Saturninus (a descendant of the other), who was governor of Syria in A.D. 19-21 (Tacitus, Annals 2.76-81). That’s a plausible time before which Jesus’ siblings would have been born, and thus during which they’d have been recorded. Tertullian, notably, does not say he checked and confirmed this (it’s unlikely he could). He just states his certainty that anyone who did check would find it so. Which is just a faith-based supposition. Though that there’d be a family with that cluster of names in any Judean census is already likely even if Jesus didn’t exist, so it would be hard for anyone who tried to check to have confirmed they were even looking at the right family. But regardless, this affords no assistance to Ktakovsky. If there were a census record of Jesus and his family made around 20 A.D., at best it would have given the year (more or less) that Jesus was born, not the month or day, much less time. And no one ever says what year any census record reported for it; not even Tertullian, and certainly not Maternus.

Conclusion

All in all this conference was productive and informative. Even the bad scholarship was well-confronted by the academics in attendance, and thus it was refreshing to see its advocates have to formulate a coherent case and then have it, and its methods, respectfully and competently questioned. You got to see who was the stubborn crank and who was seriously willing to entertain the possibility they were wrong, and what it would take to change their mind. Even Garber’s impertinent presentation was turned back around to at least some semblance of relevance by the capable audience questioning and discussion. The best presentations were carefully limited to provable points, and the evidence well-enough briefed. And all made clear they were just giving a key summary to what is actually a great deal more to say, which the audience can usually find in published or forthcoming literature each speaker directed them to.

I end with just one closing observation. In Q&A after Rempel’s presentation it was brought up whether we are ignoring the model too much that the Gospel authors are just recording traditions coming to them or creating them. That’s actually the traditional assumption made—that all they are doing is assembling random collections of oral lore. But we are not “ignoring” that. To the contrary, that’s the assumption we have increasingly been finding is unfounded. The Gospels are so literarily crafted (OHJ, Ch. 10), and so reactive to each other (e.g. in their baptism, empty tomb, nativity stories and beyond) that there is not any evidence left for a tradition even existing. Mark is inventing tradition by reifying Paul (Mark’s Use of Paul’s Epistles). Matthew is inventing tradition to respond to Mark and recent history (e.g. it’s now the mainstream view that the Sermon on the Mount was a post-War fabrication of a Hellenized Jew: OHJ, index). Luke is inventing tradition to fix them; and John, to fix Luke (e.g. John fabricates the entire Lazarus tradition to refute Luke’s parable of Lazarus: OHJ, Ch. 10.7). The evidence actually indicates this is all being created. The Gospels are not random collections of lore; they are deliberate and coherent constructs, top to bottom.

For example, Matthew has to invent a new apologetic for the empty tomb because no one had ever heard of such a thing before Mark invented it; otherwise, Mark would have had to have done what Matthew did, as the empty tomb story would have been spread across three continents for four decades by then. But only after Mark publishes the notion do we hear an obvious rebuttal arising to it (“they just stole the body!”) that Matthew then has to answer. The same goes for the Baptism story and Nativity and everything else. There are no memories here. This is all just a late construct; and constructs responding to constructs. Which is the the only thing that can credibly explain why the one thing that is conspicuously absent from all pre-Gospel Christian literature (the seven authentic letters of Paul, and Hebrews, 1 Clement, even James and 1 Peter) is any knowledge or use of any stories about Jesus. Collections of sayings perhaps; but whenever a source of them is mentioned, we find they come from scripture or visions. Never do we ever hear of a community memory or a witness testimony or something passed down from anyone other than a revelator or a tradent thereof. Tales about the ministry or life, even parables, of Jesus simply don’t exist until the Gospels suddenly invent them. Yet this should be impossible. If those stories and parables got preserved and retold everywhere for decades, how can they never have mattered to anyone who writes about Jesus? These things are never referenced as teaching tools or sources of information or guidance, they are never repeated to shore up or respond to arguments or teach a point, they are never asked or argued about. A memory so pervasively unimportant cannot possibly have even survived forty years to be then recorded; whereas any memory that could, and so robustly and luxuriously as we find in the Gospels, cannot possibly have been so totally and thoroughly irrelevant to every prior Christian author and their audience and challengers.

So I don’t think we are ignoring the possibility the Gospels record oral lore. We simply have no reason to believe it—and every reason to disbelieve it. We’ve moved on. Scholarship needs to join us. Because until they do, all they are doing is chasing a ghost of their own making.