Last week I addressed a lame Christian apologist’s travesty of an attempt to denounce and villify doubts that Jesus existed (On Paul Krause’s Objections to Jesus Mythicism). This week I will address a more competent attempt, by another Christian apologist, Jonathan McLatchie, for Frank Turek’s online ministry at CrossExamined.org: Did Jesus Exist? A Critical Appraisal of Richard Carrier’s Interpretation of the Pauline Corpus.

That article’s subtitle alerts us to a trend I have seen in Christian apologetics as an industry since my second debate with Mike Licona: a readiness to strategically ditch the Gospels and extrabiblical sources and try to rest their case (even for the resurrection!) solely on the letters of Paul. That move was precipitated largely by having lost the debate over whether mainstream scholars “trust” the Gospels and other evidence (they don’t; and that looks bad for Christianity). The last rampart left to defend is the letters of Paul. Lose those, and you lose it all. So I totally understand why McLatchie needs to focus on that. And this is true even from a sound historical perspective: because the Gospels and extrabiblical evidence are deeply unreliable and thus unusable, the only place left to debate the historicity of Jesus, really, is in the letters of Paul. I’ve long pointed this out myself (e.g. see Historicity Big and Small: How Historians Try to Rescue Jesus).

Of course, all we do get here from McLatchie is apologetics, and a very dishonest strain of it at that. Which is typical of Turek’s ministry, which I have documented spinning the ridiculous before (e.g. The Argument to the Ontological Whatsit and There Are No Undesigned Coincidences). Accordingly, McLatchie doesn’t actually have any valid historical argument to make against my thesis—all he has is a dishonest game of “hide the facts.” But we at least get something more rhetorically careful here than the garbage vomited by Krause. So it well deserves a careful analysis.

First Trying to Avoid Having to Argue Anything

To illustrate the difference between a competent rhetorist (McLatchie) and a hamfisted hack (Krause), consider this sentence from McLatchie’s first paragraph: “While Mythicism occupies only the fringes of the scholarly guild” (it actually has almost thirty public endorsements “from the guild” as being at least plausible, which is not looking all too fringe anymore), “it has gained much better traction on the internet, where poor scholarship can be widely disseminated unchecked.” In the very next sentence McLatchie admits I published my study not on the internet, but through a genuine peer reviewed “academic publisher” (he doesn’t mention my thesis has also been independently corroborated under peer review, by Raphael Lataster for Brill). But McLatchie’s wording makes it appear as though he has accused me of publishing “poor scholarship” (yet unlike the internet, academic publishers aren’t in the habit of doing that). So he gets the benefits of an ad hominem well poisoning fallacy while still retaining plausible deniability. He can fool inattentive readers into thinking he deployed such a fallacy (thus having all its intended psychological effect), while being able (unlike Krause) to deny he did any such thing. That’s not just dirty pool, it’s devious pool. Krause could learn a thing or two.

Similarly, McLatchie goes on to construct a similarly devious (and disingenuous) analogy between the historicity of Jesus and the science of evolution–without hamfistedly saying there is as much evidence for Jesus as for evolution. Instead, he glides right over all the pertinent differences between history and biology as scientific fields, and the historicity of Jesus (a specific, poorly attested, largely unnecessary event) and evolution as a subject of knowledge (a general, vastly attested, manifest process)—and hopes his readers don’t notice or know any of that. Pro tip: there is nowhere near the evidence for Jesus as there is for evolution, and no one thinks a consensus in history is as reliable and undoubtable as a consensus in any hard science like biology.

Unlike major organizing conclusions in the material sciences, the consensus in history changes constantly. See, for example: Efraim Wallach on Old Testament Studies; Gnosticism Didn’t Exist; Imperial Roman Economics as an Example of an Overthrown Consensus; and even Hitler’s Table Talk: The Definitive Account, which documents another consensus I myself have played a key part in overthrowing. And this is particularly true in Biblical Studies, where almost everything deemed the “consensus” in the 1960s is now rejected: Moses and Abraham were not historical, the Gospels and Acts are not histories but post-war mythographies, the Israelites were never enslaved in Egypt but were actually native Canaanites, etc. And of course, even in the hardest of sciences the consensus can change, which always requires someone able to evidentially challenge it. Indeed, a consensus only has value because it can be overthrown; a consensus that can’t even in principle be overthrown is a dogma, not a conclusion of any genuine field of knowledge.

So you can’t claim every challenge to a consensus is to be dismissed. To the contrary, if it passes peer review, it’s time to take that challenge seriously (that’s what peer review is for: see On Evaluating Arguments from Consensus). Especially when the consensus being challenged is demonstrably poorly grounded (see How to Successfully Argue Jesus Existed and Historicity Big and Small). McLatchie’s article even affords us an example of this. If the consensus were well founded for Jesus, McLatchie should be able to do for Jesus what we can do for Spartacus, Hannibal, Pontius Pilate, and any other person whose historicity we’re assured of. But alas, he can’t. So he has to resort to apologetics rather than history, tricks of rhetoric that avoid having to discuss the fact that we lack all the evidence we normally have and would need to be assured of any mythologized hero’s existence. That’s why he starts with several paragraphs emotionally manipulating his readers into falsely believing I have produced “poor scholarship” (without any evidence of that) and that I don’t hold any coherent attitude about expert consensuses (by avoiding discussing everything I actually said about it, in OHJ, Chs. 1-3 and 12). Which is another example of how generating and defending false beliefs is what apologetics is for.

Ironically, McLatchie goes on in a later section to admit (quoting me) that “there is a great deal wrong with how a ‘consensus’ has been reached” on practically everything in Biblical studies. So…um, McLatchie believes it is acceptable to reject numerous mainstream consensuses in the field, and at the same time it is not acceptable only in this one specific isolated question. For…reasons? He never explains himself on this point. He readily knows consensuses in biblical studies are unreliable and often open to challenge—he just won’t admit it in this paragraph, lest it destroy the rhetorical game he is trying to play on his readers (“But, the consensus!”). Instead he only brings up his admission that he actually agrees with me that it is quite plausible to challenge a consensus in this field paragraphs later, hoping his readers don’t hear a record scratch to a halt in their heads, realizing McLatchie just contradicted himself—in the act of falsely claiming I have contradicted myself. Kafka would be proud.

Getting to Something Relevant

None of McLatchie’s opening paragraphs serve any legitimate purpose, other than emotional and rhetorical manipulation of his audience. When he gets to trying to make an actually relevant argument, what we get is a Christian apologist’s quasi-fundamentalist beliefs about the letters of Paul and the book of Acts (with one long section on each), rather than any position one can honestly defend with evidence. This is why Lataster is fond of pointing out that Christians have no business even engaging in this debate. They cannot approach it honestly. Their very salvation is at stake. Whereas atheists are under no threat admitting Jesus was yet another mythologized guru. Hence whether Jesus existed or not is really only a debate that can be honestly and productively held between non-Christians. We’ll see why as we survey this effort.

McLatchie is rhetorically competent though, so he knows he will be shooting his own case in the face if he actually tries to argue from the forged letters of Paul. He doesn’t like this, of course, so he has to include an aside about how he is sure “a formidable case can be made for Pauline authorship of the Pastoral letters” (so much for McLatchie caring about the mainstream consensus—he’s on the wrong side of the consensus on that one, as with many other positions he insists upon!). But he will not use it for his case, he admits, because “the authorship of the Pastorals is in scholarly dispute.” It’s not really in dispute; pretty much only Christian apologists evoke any dispute about it. Any mainstream reference (like the New Interpreter’s Bible) will inform you that it’s pretty well a settled fact that the Pastorals cannot have been written by Paul. McLatchie is thus letting slip here that his fundamentalist beliefs are driving his intuitions, not any objective historical method.

That leaves him to maintain the usual party line:

There are in fact quite a number of details provided by the seven undisputed letters of Paul that give the strong appearance of representing Jesus as having lived on earth. Paul tells us that Jesus was born of the seed of David (Rom 1:3); that He was born of a woman, born under the law (Gal 4:4); that He delivered teachings about divorce (1 Cor 7:10); that He was betrayed (1 Cor 11:23); that He had a last supper (1 Cor 11:23-26); that He had brothers (Gal 1:19; 1 Cor 9:5); that He had twelve disciples (1 Cor 15:5); that He was crucified by the rulers of this age (1 Cor 2:8); and that He was killed by the Jews (1 Thes 2:13-16), and that He was buried.

McLatchie knows his readers may have heard my challenges to these claims, that they are anything but “strong” indicators of Paul knowing any of these things happened on Earth. And notably, Paul never says any of these things happened on Earth. So the evidence McLatchie needs doesn’t exist. Thus, he has to invent it, by presumptively “reading in” to Paul things he didn’t say. And to effect this trick, McLatchie has to dishonestly conceal from his readers nearly everything my book actually says.

Did Paul Mean…?

Serious debate over the historicity of Jesus really does always come down to what we understand Paul to have meant when he wrote certain things in his letters. And answering that question requires adducing all the pertinent evidence in Paul that informs us as to either what he did mean, or what he could as likely have meant as anything else—and then seeing where that evidence leaves us. This is how historians operate. Apologists operate backwards: they assume all the later mythologies (never referenced by Paul and by many indications quite unknown to Paul) are “true” and therefore we can “interpret” what Paul said by reference to those later myths. This is a circular argument. You cannot assume “Paul meant what’s in the Gospels” in order argue “Paul meant what’s in the Gospels.” Alas. But this is all McLatchie does, really.

To be fair, McLatchie admits “Paul’s reference to Jesus’ teachings on divorce or to the twelve…can be interpreted in a manner that is consistent with” my thesis. So he isn’t just hell bent on gainsaying everything I say. He understands the concept that, for example, Paul’s referring to their being a “twelve” is equally likely whether Jesus existed or not—without having to insist or prove Paul did not mean what historicists need him to. This is a crucial methodological point. Apologists tend to have a hard time distinguishing between, for example, “we know the Gospels are all myth” and “we don’t know the Gospels aren’t all myth.” All I have to prove is the latter—not the former. The twelve may have been just a council running the sect (as was the case at Qumran) when Peter had his vision of the end now being nigh, changing the sect’s tack (On the Historicity of Jesus, Chs. 4 and 5). Paul never says they were “Disciples” or any group hand-picked by Jesus. And the teachings of Jesus, as Paul explicitly says, often came by revelation after he was dead; and Paul never says they came any other way. So we can’t adduce any evidence in Paul that they did. Yes, maybe some did; and yes, maybe the twelve were hand-picked disciples. But we don’t know. Because Paul doesn’t say. And that’s that.

Hence, so too, anything in Paul. I do not need to prove Paul did mean by “the archons of this aeon” demonic powers; all I need prove is that we cannot know he didn’t. Even at best, for the historicist, the evidence we have is equally likely on whether Paul did or didn’t. So it supports neither theory against the other. It’s simply unusable as evidence. It’s actually worse for the historicist’s interpretation—this wording is actually not likely what Paul would have written if he meant human authorities—as I outline in On the Historicity of Jesus (e.g. pp. 565-66). But my point here is that it doesn’t have to be for my conclusion to follow. In other words, we simply can’t use an ambiguous sentence to prove historicity, when it just as likely can have been the same sentence Paul would write if he only understood the saga of Jesus to be a celestial event and not an Earthly one. In this one moment McLatchie reveals he at least understands this point in principle. Yet we’ll see him conveniently forget about it whenever he needs to.

Seed of David

Remarkably (given how rarely this happens among any would-be critics of OHJ), McLatchie starts out by almost correctly describing my argument:

Carrier observes that, although the verb Paul uses here, γίνομαι, is used of birth by other authors, it is not the word that Paul customarily uses for birth, which is γεννάω (c.f. Rom 9:11; Gal 4:23,29). Carrier argues that γίνομαι is used of God’s manufacture of Adam’s body from clay, and God’s manufacture of our glorified bodies in heaven. Thus, Carrier argues, this is a very odd word for Paul to use if he means to indicate that Jesus was born. 

But then he straw man’s my conclusion by declaring “Carrier’s proposed interpretation of Romans 1:3 is that God manufactured Jesus out of sperm that was obtained from David’s belly, an event that Carrier suggests took place in outer space.” Actually, the following is what I said in the book McLatchie is supposed to be responding to: “An allegorical meaning is possible. But so is a literal one,” and then in a note I explain “in Gal. 3.26–4.29 every Christian comes from ‘the sperm of Abraham’ by spiritual adoption” and so “Jesus could have been understood to come from ‘the sperm of David’ in a similar way.” In fact “Paul even uses the same phrase in his discussion of allegorical heritage here (kata sarka, ‘according to the flesh’, Gal. 4.23, 29) that he uses of Jesus in Rom. 1.3″ (p. 575). So, I did not actually say the only likely thing Paul could mean here is a literal manufacture of Jesus from the sperm of David; I pointed out the text is entirely compatible with an allegorical meaning: the exact same one Paul uses elsewhere, with identical vocabulary. McLatchie never mentions this; nor ever addresses it.

I then go on to explain why a literal reading of the text—divine manufacture—is actually simpler and makes even more sense. McLatchie ignores literally every piece of evidence I adduce for that being the simpler and more plausible reading. So you’ll only learn about that evidence if you go and read my book yourself (I present more evidence for it in Jesus from Outer Space, e.g. pp. 186-87). You simply can’t trust McLatchie to have told you these things. And this is the case with the rest of his review. McLatchie’s rhetoric operates by excluding every key piece of information that leads to a different conclusion than he wants. And the only way to correct for that distortion of the evidence is to go read the book yourself that he is supposed to be informing you of (but isn’t).

As another example of this tactic of information distortion, McLatchie purports to rebut one point I make about this by saying:

Carrier has in mind here the Septuagint translation of Genesis 2:7, in which the word ἐγένετο (the aorist indicative form of γίνομαι) appears, describing the man as becoming a living creature. However, the word that is used here to describe the moment of divine manufacture is not ἐγένετο, but rather ἔπλασεν (the third person aorist indicative of the verb πλάσσω). The word ἐγένετο, rather, is used in this context to describe the change of state from non-living to living. Thus, it is not precisely correct to say that ἐγένετο refers to divine manufacture. 

In fact my argument in OHJ reads like this (emphasis now added, to illustrate all the information McLatchie is concealing from you, all the actual premises I employed in my argument):

Philippians 2.6-11 portrays this fact as an act of divine construction, not human procreation (as noted in §4): Jesus ‘took’ human form, was ‘made’ to look like a man and then ‘found’ to be resembling one (see also Heb. 2.17). No mention of birth, childhood or parents. In Rom. 1.3 (just as in Gal. 4.4) Paul uses the word genomenos (from ginomai), meaning ‘to happen, become’. Paul never uses that word of a human birth, despite using it hundreds of times (typically to mean ‘being’ or ‘becoming’); rather, his preferred word for being born is gennaō. Notably, in 1 Cor. 15.45, Paul says Adam ‘was made’, using the same word as he uses for Jesus; yet this is obviously not a reference to being born but to being constructed directly by God. If so for Adam, then so it could be for Jesus (whom Paul equated with Adam in that same verse). Likewise in 1 Cor. 15.37 Paul uses the same word of our future resurrection body, which of course is not born from a parent but directly manufactured by God (and already waiting for us in heaven: 2 Cor. 5.1-5). Thus, Paul could be saying the same of Jesus’ incarnation. (OHJ, pp. 575-76)

Now, has anything McLatchie said actually responded to my argument? Nope. Adam was manufactured, not born. And thus he “came to be” as a living mortal. Paul is describing Jesus’s “change of state” from pre-existent archangel (Philippians 2) to an incarnate mortal. That’s actually quite indisputably what he is doing here. It therefore cannot refer to a human birth, even if Paul knew Jesus had one. See the difference? By repeatedly echoing Genesis and comparing Jesus to Adam, Paul is practically advertising what I am explaining. The significant event here is Jesus becoming a mortal, not Jesus being born—even if Jesus was born, it’s not relevant to what Paul is saying. Ignoring this, McLatchie focuses on the straw man of unrelated vocabulary in Genesis, hoping to distract you from the fact that I am actually making the same point he is: ginomai refers to Jesus’s change of state, and we know from Paul elsewhere that this meant from a celestial to a mortal—which doesn’t happen by birth; unless McLatchie wants to propose Jesus, as an archangel, crawled up inside Mary’s vagina and hid out in her womb forming a mortal body over nine months before crawling back out again, wearing it.

Hence I made this point even clearer in Jesus from Outer Space, where I call to witness McLatchie’s own holy texts (emphasis here added):

It thus does not matter how “weird” the reinterpretation of the Davidic seed prophecy is that Paul may have had in mind. Christianity and Judaism are full of weird reinterpretations of prophecy when confronted with prophecies they can’t otherwise make fit the facts or their most cherished beliefs. The Gospels’ nativity narratives are evident examples: they don’t even try to depict biological Davidic descent; they instead choose the far weirder solution of direct divine manufacture of the body of Jesus. Which nevertheless is therefore still declared to be Davidic. If that’s not weird, then neither is a cosmic version of the very same thing. (JFOS, p. 186)

I then give many examples of similar weird beliefs among Jews and their contemporaries, demonstrating they weren’t in fact weird—they are weird only to us. But think about it: Matthew and Luke both unmistakably give a genealogy only of Joseph, not Mary, and then have Joseph impart no seed to Mary. How then do you think these authors were imagining the seed, of which Jesus was made in Mary’s womb, to have come from David? (As they definitely did.) There really isn’t any other way than the two I outline in OHJ: the Gospel authors (and hence also, for all we know, Paul) meant Jesus was the “Son of David” only in some allegorical sense (which then requires no actual birth), or in some literal sense (which then requires actual sperm from David to have been injected into Mary by God or his angels). Because there is no biological transmission of David’s seed through Joseph. So I am actually not saying of Paul anything on this point other than what McLatchie’s own Evangelists reveal they unmistakably believed. McLatchie’s response? Silence.

Another example of McLatchie’s rhetorical device of “information exclusion” appears in his conclusion on this point:

I will note that it is very clear from the dead sea scrolls that there was an expectation of a Davidic Messiah, and, moreover, this is likewise very evident from the Hebrew Bible as well. Therefore, the interpretation that Paul intends to express that Christ was born of the line of David is much more plausible than Carrier’s thesis that it refers to divine manufacture.

We don’t need to reference the Dead Sea Scrolls for this. Standard Prophecy established it already. And if prophecy required it, then the probability that the Christians imagining a cosmic sacrifice would come up with a way Jesus would fulfill that prophecy is 100% assured—the exact opposite of unexpected, or anything we even have to explain. So, again, I am actually saying the same thing McLatchie is: the existence of this prophecy entails Paul would say things like this about any messiah, celestial or earthly. It thus does not tell us which he meant. And that is why we cannot use this verse as evidence for historicity. It is equally expected on either theory.

In effect, McLatchie is here pretending the following paragraph does not exist in the book he is supposed to be responding to (emphasis in original):

Scripture said the prophet Nathan was instructed by God to tell King David (here following the Septuagint translation, although the Hebrew does not substantially differ):

‘When your days are done, and you sleep with your fathers, I will raise up your sperm after you, which shall come from your belly, and I will establish his kingdom. He will build for me a house in my name, and I will establish his throne forever. I will be his father, and he will be my son’ (2 Samuel 7.12-14a).

If this passage were read like a pesher (Element 8), one could easily conclude that God was saying he extracted semen from David and held it in reserve until the time he would make good this promise of David’s progeny sitting on an eternal throne. For otherwise God’s promise was broken: the throne of David’s progeny was not eternal (Element 23). Moreover, the original poetic intent was certainly to speak of an unending royal line (and not just biologically, but politically: it is the throne that would be eternal, yet history proves it was not); yet God can be read to say here that he would raise up a single son for David who will rule eternally, rather than a royal line, and that ‘his’ will be the kingdom God establishes, and ‘he’ will build God’s house (the Christian church: Element 18), and thus he will be the one to sit upon a throne forever—and this man will be the Son of God. In other words, Jesus Christ (the same kind of inference Paul makes in Gal. 3.13–4.29, where he infers Jesus is also the ‘seed of Abraham’ also spoken of in scripture). (OHJ, p. 576)

In other words, even canonical OT prophecy indicates my theory is more plausible than McLatchie’s. The Nathan prophecy failed. An eternal throne did not result from David’s offspring. But if God took that sperm and directly inserted it into Mary—as Matthew and Luke must have thought happened, unless they also rejected a literal reading of “born of the seed of David,” which conclusion doesn’t help McLatchie—then the prophecy would be fulfilled. But once we admit that this is clearly what even Matthew and Luke must have been thinking, we no longer need a “womb of Mary” in the first place. If God is building from David’s sperm a Davidic son who will sit an eternal throne out of an already pre-existent super-angel, he can just do it. Exactly as he did for Adam; and has done for our future resurrection bodies already awaiting us in heaven. And as Matthew and Luke did, Paul would here only be talking about that—whether God did it in someone’s womb or not. So Paul’s wording here just doesn’t distinguish between either.

So what sounds “much more plausible” to you now? Right. That thing you are feeling? That’s the feeling of gaining access to information McLatchie concealed from you. Apologetics generally operates by excluding evidence. And here you see that directly at work. Once you assemble all the pertinent information, it becomes clear that we cannot tell which thing Paul is thinking of here when he wrote this verse. It’s too ambiguous. It’s exactly what he’d write whether Jesus existed or not. It’s thus not usable as evidence. And yet note, on my upper margin of error I actually count this as evidence for historicity—a fact McLatchie also doesn’t tell you. That’s right. I rate this, and the next fact about being “born of a woman” each as twice as likely for Paul to have written if Jesus existed than if he didn’t, even though I don’t personally believe that but quite the reverse—and yet still my conclusion came out as Jesus probably not existing. Because even being generous, these verses are still too ambiguous to generate the kind of faith-based certainty McLatchie is in thrall to.

Of a Woman

I won’t go into as much detail for the rest of McLatchie’s article. The point of doing so above is to show you how McLatchie’s dishonest rhetoric operates, how by omitting key information and engaging in sleight of hand he makes you think he has rebutted my argument, when in fact he hasn’t even addressed it. And you won’t know that if you haven’t read my book, or don’t pick it up again and try to follow McLatchie’s purported answer to it, and then notice what he is leaving out and not answering. Which more than soundly illustrates the fact that you can’t trust his critique—you simply have to go and read On the Historicity of Jesus for yourself. (Or Jesus from Outer Space if you want to start with a quick summary; it has in back a concordance to the corresponding sections in OHJ if you want to dive further into the debate and sources.)

When it comes to “born of a woman,” and the fact that Paul most definitely is speaking allegorically there, McLatchie’s only argument is that he thinks this “is a very odd interpretation, since Paul only introduces the allegory in Galatians 4:21 — 17 verses after Galatians 4:4.” In fact that’s not true. Paul introduced the idea of allegorical inheritance several verses earlier as well, in Chapter 3, in an argument which Chapter 4 starts in the middle of, and which Galatians 4:21-31 concludes, explaining everything that preceded. That’s how ancient rhetoric operated. Paul starts with allegory, and ends with allegory. He never says he switched modes into the literal in the middle. Nor could McLatchie make any sense of that. Because on McLatchie’s view there is no plausible reason for Paul to insert such a sentence in the middle of his argument. Only an allegorical reading makes sense of his even doing that. Which is why Paul eventually admits that’s what he has been doing throughout this argument, just as he already indicated from the beginning as well.

To illustrate what I mean, here’s an example of information from OHJ that McLatchie pretends doesn’t exist, and evidently doesn’t want you to know:

Other than to reflect his upcoming allegorical point, why would Paul mention Jesus having a mother here at all? What purpose does that fact serve in his argument? It cannot be that this made Jesus a Jew, as in antiquity that fact would have been established by patrimony or circumcision (Exod. 12.48), not the identity of his mother (except in mixed marriages, which cannot have been the circumstance of Jesus—much less what Paul had in mind, as if he was implying Jesus did not have a Jewish father). As we have seen, Paul already says (even in this very argument: Gal. 3.16) that Jesus is of the seed of Abraham and David. If all he wanted to establish was that Jesus was a Jew, that would have sufficed. Indeed, Paul cannot be citing Jesus’ birth ‘to a woman’ to establish he was a Jew, for he does not even specify that this woman was Jewish—she is simply ‘a woman’. …

Even if we just assume [Paul] means a human, that is already a rather odd thing to say of a historical man—aren’t all men born to a woman? What woman does Paul mean? Why mention her? And why mention her only in such an abstract way—as simply a generic ‘woman’? The only plausible answer is the answer Paul himself gives us in the completion of his argument: he is talking about allegorical women. (OHJ, p. 579-80)

Notice how this information changes your assessment of my point. McLatchie doesn’t want you to have this information. He certainly has no reply to it (that’s why he entirely avoids it). Yet this already refutes his rebuttal. And he must know this. So that he leaves this out, and pretends I didn’t already refute him with it, demonstrates the very reason you can never trust him. He is not being honest with you.

And that is just one example. Here’s another:

McLatchie closes this section by saying “if Carrier’s theory about Galatians 4:4 is correct, then the allegorical interpretation makes sense only if we translate γενόμενον as ‘born’ rather than ‘manufactured’.” Hmmm. Are we to believe McLatchie somehow didn’t read the following in the book he claims to be answering? I wrote, “It’s obvious to me that by ‘born of a woman, born under the law’ Paul means no more than that Jesus was, by being incarnated, placed under the sway of the old covenant, so that he could die to it (and rise free, as shall we). So the ‘woman’ here is simply the old covenant, not an actual person. Paul does not mean a biological birth to Mary or any other Jewess.” (OHJ, p. 579) So, explain to us again, dear McLatchie, how my take on this “makes sense only if we translate γενόμενον as ‘born’ rather than ‘manufactured’.” Oh right. That’s not even a remotely honest description of my position. That’s what makes what McLatchie is doing here apologetics, not honest history.

Two examples is enough to make my point. There are many more facts here that McLatchie is concealing from you, which refute his attempt to deny how Paul constructed rhetorical speeches in defense of his positions, in general and here. McLatchie is basically running a con. He’s not being at all honest with his readers. You can catch up on all that in Yes, Galatians 4 Is Allegorical.

Brothers of the Lord

Here McLatchie writes “Carrier observes that ‘Paul can use the phrase ‘brother of the Lord’ to mean Christian, since all Christians were brothers of the Lord’.” He cites the wrong page number for this in his appended footnote (my discussion of this is in pages 582-92; not on page 669). He also omits mention of the fact that I go on to explain there that only baptized Christians were considered Brothers of the Lord. But these errors don’t affect his apologetic. Because his only response is the rather self-defeating assertion that “this argument is problematic since it seems unlikely that Paul is implying—as would be required on Carrier’s interpretation—that he saw no other Christian, or even no-one of importance, in Jerusalem besides Peter and James.” Not only is that exactly what Paul is saying, he explicitly says that in the very next paragraph: “I assure you before God that what I am writing you is no lie. Then I went to Syria and Cilicia. I was personally unknown to the churches of Judea that are in Christ. They only heard the report” of me. So look what has happened here. McLatchie wants to cast doubt on the idea that Paul meant he met no one at all but these two men on that visit—and doesn’t tell you that in the very next paragraph Paul explains quite plainly that he met no one at all but these two men on that visit. So now McLatchie is hoping you don’t even read his own Bible.

This should not be surprising. Paul opens his argument with the assertion that he learned the Gospel from no mortal man. He outright says he did not “consult any human being.” Not just apostles. No mortal period. It was thus vitally important that he confess to any Christian he may have met on his visit to Peter, lest he be accused of lying. That’s why he insists “I am not lying.” He cannot afford to be accused of attempting an equivocation fallacy to fool the Galatians, saying he met no man, then only admitting he met no apostle, a trick of a distinction that would not have impressed the Galatians, who would have destroyed him over such an attempt to deceive them. Paul is no fool. He knows this will lose him the argument; so he cannot omit mention of any mortal human Christian he may have met then.

McLatchie either doesn’t understand his own Bible, or doesn’t want you to. Either way, this is apologetics, not history. History reveals that, indeed, Paul very explicitly and repeatedly makes clear he most definitely means these are the only two Christians he met on that trip. This is why the latest peer reviewed scholarship, and several Bible translation committees, now admit Paul means to say here that this James was not an apostle. His choice of grammar unmistakably establishes that (see Galatians 1:19, Ancient Grammar, and How to Evaluate Expert Testimony). McLatchie never mentions this. He has no reply to what we have actually argued. Instead McLatchie wants us to believe Paul would “more likely” say “I saw none of the other apostles, except James our brother” except there is no reason to believe he’d have to. The grammar already entails he is saying this. So he doesn’t need to use the construction McLatchie imagines; he has already chosen a construction even more clear on the point (to a reader of ancient Greek). And both times when Paul wants to distinguish between apostolic and non-apostolic Christians, he gives the full title (Brother of the Lord), not its abbreviation (our brother). So we have no reason to expect Paul to have written this any differently than in fact he did.

McLatchie then goes on to confuse this James with James the Apostle. James the Apostle is the Pillar discussed in Galatians 2; Paul is taking pains to make clear that that is not the James he met in Galatians 1, by specifying (as many scholars and translations committees agree he did) that this James was not an Apostle. So this cannot be the James to whom the Lord appeared in 1 Corinthians 15:7. I make this quite clear in the very section of OHJ McLatchie claims to be responding to. In fact pages 588 through 589 refute everything McLatchie is here saying; so what we have here again is McLatchie concealing evidence from you, pretending it doesn’t exist, and then making a false accusation about my confusion, which is actually his confusion (deliberate or accidental).

Similarly, McLatchie tries to argue this “must” be the Apostle James mentioned in the Corinthian creed because “Paul received this creedal tradition upon his visit to Jerusalem some three years after his conversion,” yet Paul is in Galatians very explicitly denying any such thing (these are the exact same creeds he is talking about in both places, with entirely identical vocabulary and phrasing: OHJ, pp. 139 and 536; cf. p. 135), and therefore absolutely could not have even implied he was lying about that! Thus McLatchie’s own argument would entail Paul had even greater incentive to make clear this was not that Apostle James (I don’t buy that argument only because I am skeptical that the verse about James in 1 Corinthians was originally written by Paul; consequently I never rely on it as evidence). It is therefore another example of McLatchie’s dishonesty when he says “For Carrier to suggest that the individuals named James in Galatians 1:19 and 1 Corinthians 15:7 are different persons is special pleading involving pure speculation to save his theory.” In OHJ I present several pages of evidence and argument proving the point. That is exactly the opposite of “special pleading” or “pure speculation.” Where are McLatchie’s responses to those pages of evidence and argument? Silence. Not only has he no response, he won’t even tell you these arguments and evidence exist. Welcome to apologetics. Dishonesty be thy name. You’ll just have to go read my book to get the truth.

Similarly, there is no reason to expect Paul would prefer to write in 1 Corinthians 9 “Cephas and the other brothers of the Lord” over “Cephas and the Brothers of the Lord,” since his audience already knows who is and who isn’t a Brother of the Lord and thus why these categories are being mentioned at all, so such specificity wouldn’t even occur to Paul as necessary—as again I have several pages of evidence and argument demonstrating in OHJ, not a single point of which McLatchie even mentions, much less answers. He is, again, lying by concealment: leaving out all the actual evidence and argument, and pretending there isn’t any. You’ll just have to go read the book yourself.

McLatchie then falsely claims the Gospels are independent evidence that Jesus had a real brother named James. But that’s false. They are not independent of Paul (see Mark’s Use of Paul’s Epistles). And there is ample evidence they are inventing a great deal, indeed even using Paul as a base text to fabricate these ideas from (Ibid.). So this actually does not establish these are real brothers, or that Paul ever knew them that way (to the contrary, that they all cease to exist in the entire public history of the church in Acts indicates they never existed; they are only fabricated as a symbolic foil in the Gospels, to teach the Christian ideal of renouncing real in exchange for fictive kinship). I already explain this in detail in OHJ, so McLatchie is again dishonestly pretending there is no evidence and argument presented there that he should be responding to on this point (see OHJ, Ch. 9.3 and pp. 454, 528, 587-88). Once again, you will only learn the truth if you actually go and read my book yourself.

Rulers of This Age

McLatchie never even mentions, much less answers, any of my actual arguments about this in OHJ. Right out of the gate he falsely claims I rely on the thesis that Paul is quoting the Ascension of Isaiah, and responds to this argument I never made with “that Paul is textually dependent upon the Ascension of Isaiah seems very unlikely.” Funny. That’s exactly what I said: “The earliest version” of the Ascension “in fact was probably composed around the very same time as the earliest canonical Gospels were being written,” and thus not before the letters of Paul. What I argue was that Paul likely was relying on some other lost apocalyptic text also used by the Ascension of Isaiah, and only that “we can rightly wonder what relationship that Apocalypse had to the Ascension of Isaiah. May it have been an earlier redaction of it?” I only muse on the possibility. I never employ such a conclusion as a premise anywhere in OHJ. Whereas I give reasons for there likely being some source text (written or oral) for Paul to be relying on for this material. McLatchie makes no response to that, my actual argument.

So we’re off to a bad start here. McLatchie then contradicts himself by admitting I date the Ascension after Paul (I guess hoping his readers don’t notice that), and then claiming “Carrier offers no argument in support of this contention.” Liar. I cite numerous works of scholarship establishing that date, and even summarize and address some of their arguments (OHJ, pp. 36-37). And he can’t not know this, because that material is directly in the footnote to the very sentence he quotes, and immediately following. So, again, McLatchie just can’t tell you the truth. Similarly, McLatchie ignores all my arguments as to why the Ascension’s original text does not have Jesus crucified on Earth (literally all my arguments, all the evidence I present), thus misleading his readers into thinking I didn’t present any, and instead quotes Maurice Casey’s literally factually ignorant attempt to insist people “can’t” be crucified in the firmament (which I extensively refute in OHJ, Ch. 5, Elements 34-38, esp. 38; but McLatchie won’t tell you this). I already called Casey out for this boneheaded mistake. I needn’t go into it further here.

Indeed, by pretending my arguments and evidence don’t exist, McLatchie actually eats his own foot by supporting one of them when he insists “the subject of ‘will lay their hands upon him and hang him upon a tree’ ([Ascension of Isaiah] 9.14) is obviously people who were there at the time.” Hmmm. What “people” does the Ascension of the Isaiah say “were there at the time”? The only beings mentioned at any point up to then are demons of the firmament. So, according to McLatchie, we should conclude that’s who was meant. Right? So when the text says in 9.14 “the god of that world will stretch forth his hand against the Son and they will lay hands on him and crucify him on a tree without knowing who he is,” the text leaves no indication whatever that anyone is meant but “the angels of Satan,” or Satan “and his hosts.” You can’t just “insert” characters not present in the story. Even at best, the text is ambiguous as to who “they” are; so you can’t use this as evidence supporting any other text that says something different (like the canonical Gospels; or the Talmud, which has Jesus killed by the Jews of Joppa decades before the Romans were even in Judea). I nevertheless give very little weight to this text as evidence myself (it has almost no mathematical effect on the probability of historicity: see OHJ, Ch. p. 357). Another fact McClatchie won’t tell you.

I won’t belabor these examples. Everything else McLatchie says here is already answered and refuted in OHJ. Including his rigmarole about the words archon and aeon. Everything he says about that, already refuted (pp. 190-91, 564-66, 572-73). He won’t tell you how he was refuted, or even that he was. He just repeats the same refuted arguments, as if I had never heard of them and hadn’t addressed them already. So again, you’ll have to go read my book—and then struggle to explain why he ignores what’s actually in there. And so likewise for everything else he says.

On the Night He Was…Betrayed?

McLatchie is more honest than usual when discussing the text of 1 Corinthians 11:23, admitting “Carrier is correct that [“on the night he was betrayed”] is an interpretive translation, based on the Gospel accounts, and that ‘on the night He was handed over’—a reading that is consistent with Carrier’s thesis —would be an equally permissible translation.” So McLatchie now has to try and argue “It is, however, more likely than not that betrayal is what Paul had in mind.” Yet, predictably, he doesn’t present a single item of evidence for that. The Gospel myths cannot circularly be used to reinterpret Paul. Whether they are reinterpreting Paul or not is the question to be resolved; it therefore cannot be presumed as a premise to argue to that conclusion. And McLatchie has nothing else to mention. Nor does he mention or address any of my numerous arguments and evidence against that conclusion (OHJ, pp. 560-61; including evidence Judas was fabricated by the Gospels: pp. 143, 312, 383, 453; and see Proving History, pp. 151-55, with notes on pp. 317-18, as referenced in OHJ, e.g. p. 560). Nor logically would it matter—because if you can’t establish a historicist meaning as more likely, you can’t use it as evidence for historicity (at all; much less as “strong” evidence). McLatchie then tries to take issue with the fact that Paul plainly says he received this information directly from Jesus with the lame rhetorical question (quoting another Christian apologist) “why assume a supernatural communication when a natural one was ready at hand?” Because Paul explicitly denies that, you doof. Whereas the reason to take Paul as saying he got this from Jesus is … that’s what he says. Adding epicycles to epicycles to try and get Paul to say the exact opposite of what he said is apologetics, not history.

The Jews Who Killed Jesus

To rescue the passage in 1 Thessalonians 2 that most mainstream scholars agree was interpolated, McLatchie again acts like I didn’t refute in OHJ every single argument he presents here already. No, seriously. I do. I read all the same apologetics McLatchie cites and I addressed it all in OHJ. What is McLatchie’s response to his already being refuted? Silence. He neither mentions my refutations, nor responds to them. You can get up to speed in There Is No Logically Sound Case Against Interpolation in 1 Thessalonians 2. This is just desperate and embarrassing fundamentalism at this point.

Christ Was Buried

McLatchie’s only argument here is “Since Jesus is the firstfruits of those who will be resurrected on earth, it seems most probable that, just like all of the other human bodies that were buried on earth, Paul is envisioning Jesus as having been buried on earth.” This is a non sequitur. Paul never says what makes us similar to Jesus is where we die and are buried. The only similarity we need share is that he died and was buried; just as Adam was buried in heaven, and will be resurrected from there, so could Jesus have been. There is thus no way to leverage this into some sort of declaration of where Jesus was buried. Paul simply never says. Nor would the location be relevant to anything Paul argues. It is thus Mclatchie’s position that is special pleading. All I am doing is pointing out the simple fact that Paul doesn’t say it was on Earth, and never needed it to be for anything he argues. And that’s that. You can’t get evidence out of a vacuum. Paul simply never says what McLatchie wants.

Fundamentalism about Acts

That’s all McLatchie has. Note none of it is clear evidence Paul knew Jesus to have been on Earth. McLatchie has to conceal all the evidence against his readings, and employ special pleading and non sequiturs to create a rhetorical castle of sand. He never responds to any refutation of his every argument in OHJ; yet dishonestly represents himself as doing so. That’s bearing false witness, a crime against his own God. I guess even McLatchie doesn’t believe his own religion. But whatever. He closes his account with nothing more than a fundamentalist apologetic defense of Acts as reliable eyewitness history; a position no mainstream scholar believes anymore. All he can cite in his defense is thus the rhetoric of other fundamentalist apologists; not recent mainstream historical studies of the book of Acts, which all say exactly the opposite. I already refute everything McLatchie says here in Chapter 9 of OHJ. He makes no reply to any of that chapter’s arguments or evidence as actually presented there. Once again, case after case, he omits key information undermining what he says. So all you need do to refute his material here, is read my material there.

For example, McLatchie tries to argue the Paul of Acts referenced a historical Jesus in his “allusion to ‘the name of Jesus of Nazareth’ in his defense before Agrippa” and thus “implies that Nazareth was Jesus’ hometown.” In fact Paul there says Jesus the Nazorian, which is not a person from Nazareth. McLatchie simply won’t tell you the abundant proof of this he must well know exists (OHJ, index, “Nazareth”; see also Proving History, ibid.). He certainly has no response to it. This is the dishonest way his apologetics works (or indeed almost all apologetics works): he leaves out all the evidence against his position, and then misrepresents the facts to his audience, to build something that “looks” like an argument for his conclusion—but for it being factually incorrect and already refuted by the very work he claims to be answering. And the only way you can be told the truth is to read the work he claims to be answering yourself. Similarly, McLatchie ignores, for example, everything I say about where any author of Acts would be getting his historical color details and why it is more probable that he is fabricating in case after case, and replaces all that with a string of possibiliter fallacies (as soon as something is merely possible, handwave handwave handwave, and presto, now we can say it’s probable—without any evidence it is).

And this you have seen is how McLatchie treated everything else in OHJ. Rendering his critique completely useless, since it never responds to what is actually argued in OHJ. The cleverness of his rhetoric shows McLatchie is good at lying. But that is not praise. Krause probably told what he believed to be the truth and was simply disastrously incompetent. So, you can have an honest apologist who doesn’t know how logic works or fact-check anything; or a competent liar. This is all Christianity has to offer. And this is why Christians need to get out of the business of debating the historicity of Jesus and leave it to scholars who can be honest, competent, and objective about it.