Justin Brierley starts his discussion of the historical facts of Jesus by quoting H.G. Wells (p. 94), someone who had no degrees in history, and only remarked upon the historical effect on Well’s era of the literary character of Jesus, and merely presuming the historicity of that character (“H.G. Wells Picks Out the Six Greatest Men in History,” American Magazine 1922). For Muslims, the same remark would be made about Mohammed; for Buddhists, Buddha; for Confucians, Confucius; for Taoists, Lao Tzu; for Jews, Moses. The Greeks would have said this of Homer. The Romans said it of Romulus—even constructing a method of numbering years just like ours centering on the birth of Jesus, but theirs was based on Romulus’s mythical founding of the city of Rome.

Remarking on the central power of a myth in organizing a civilization does not really tell us anything at all about whether that myth is true, or indeed even admirable. The Greeks were already starting to notice Homer was a pretty awful moral guide. The Romans eventually noticed Romulus was a fratricide, a category of criminal that earned in Virgil’s national mythology the worst place in Hell. We now notice the Laws of Moses are hopelessly superstitious and horrifically immoral. And all mainstream historians now agree all these men were mythical; certainly as depicted, they never existed, and what’s recorded of them never happened. They all now agree this is the case as well for the Gospel Jesus. They still cling to “a” Jesus at least having existed (the lone remaining holdout for mythical heroes in the West), but they reject almost everything he is claimed to have said and done as myth. So we can’t just boast of how Western Imperialism was built on our myth of Jesus, and then claim we’ve defended that myth as anything worth our continued attention. So we have to be honest with the evidence and not special plead for Jesus, as if he was any relevantly different than any other myth-laden founder of any world religion in history. He’s not.

This will be the fourth expansion on my general summary of Justin Brierley’s book Unbelievable? Why After Ten Years of Talking with Atheists, I’m Still a Christian, illustrating again how Brierley rests his Christian faith on failures of fact and logic. I have already provided a summary conclusion about the whole book, and then covered more specifically his discussions of meaning and purpose and morality and the problem of evil, and the physics of existence. Here I’ll illustrate the same points in respect to his fifth chapter, “Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up?” (pp. 94-121), and sixth chapter, “Facts That Only Fit the Resurrection” (pp. 122-44). Because these are the first chapters in his book that even begin to explain why he stumps for Christianity, and not just some generic Deism. Up to now, all his chapters have only argued for some abstract, nondenominational entity who cares not whether you believe in Jesus or even anything in the Bible. But here Brierley finally gets around to trying to sell us on those as well.

Jesus Mythicism

The weirdest part of Brierley’s fifth chapter is how many pages he wastes on arguing against full-on “Jesus mythicism,” the more recent theory that Jesus never existed at all (pp. 94-99 and 105-11!). He really could have used those pages trying to argue against the actual mainstream consensus which has for decades now held that almost everything about Jesus in the Gospels is mythical. This is a far greater threat to Brierley’s religion, because it consists of pretty much every expert on early Christian history who isn’t a fundamentalist or Christian apologist; the majority, in fact, of bona fide, peer reviewed experts in the matter. If he was worried about the popularity of Jesus mythicism (as he mentions being), he could simply have set it aside in a single paragraph as not what the majority of mainstream experts conclude, and declared that he will address instead what the the majority of mainstream experts conclude. Is Brierley perhaps worried that this won’t long be what the majority of experts conclude? Or is he using this new theory, which is still gaining ground, as a distraction to avoid having to confront the real problem facing his religion: what the majority of mainstream experts already conclude?

I can understand Brierley being annoyed by amateur atheists pushing an Argument from Jesus Being Mythical against the truth of Christianity. But I have already explained before that I don’t think that’s a useful argument against Christianity; not least because, logically, Jesus could really have been a cosmic sacrificial agent (as the only peer reviewed Jesus Myth theory argues was originally believed) and therefore the Doherty thesis could still actually be true. Jesus Mythicism thus cannot refute “Christianity” in general, even in principle. But it carries no weight as an argument against Christianity anyway, not only because it has still to gain the approval of the majority of mainstream (hence, unbiased) experts as probably true, but more directly because the non-historicity of Jesus is not known to anywhere near the degree of certainty as the non-historicity of the resurrection of Jesus. Even I found the historicity of Jesus is as likely as 1 in 3; Lataster, as likely as 1 in 2. If we were admitting that of the resurrection, Christians would have a much stronger case for their religion than atheists claim. Hence it makes no sense to debunk a conclusion with a rather weak premise, when you can debunk it with a very strong premise instead. So stop arguing “Christianity is false because Jesus didn’t exist.” Get back to arguing “Christianity is false because Jesus didn’t rise from the dead,” even if he did exist.

Hence Jesus mythicism simply has no business being deployed in counter-apologetics. The only people who can have an honest and productive discussion of the historicity of Jesus are people who already agree Christianity is false. But the way Brierley tries to wrestle with this problem nevertheless reveals trends I have been documenting continually up to now, including a failure to do actual research, a certain methodological laziness even when he engages with the facts at all, and a peculiar blindness to his own failures of logic—thus illustrating that the only reason he rejects Jesus mythicism is that he can’t think logically nor bothers to discern what the actual relevant facts are. And that is why he is also a Christian. As we’ll see the same is true when it comes to his attempt to insist not merely that Jesus existed, but that he also rose from the dead—which no mainstream expert concludes to be likely.

To illustrate what I mean, consider that he spends over two whole pages on the crank Joseph Atwill, and the poor judgment of Richard Dawkins—a zoologist, not a historian. This is a textbook example of a Straw Man Argument. Brierley ignores the actual, academic, peer reviewed case against historicity (which is twofold now, by Carrier and Lataster), and the judgments of actual qualified experts, and instead burns several pages on amateurs and incompetents. True beliefs should not require this strategy to defend. This is therefore evidence that he actually can’t defend the historicity of Jesus. Indeed, nowhere in this chapter does Brierley ever address the contents of either peer reviewed case against historicity. He ignores the real argument, and attacks only feeble, lunatic versions of it.

Which I noted in my opening summary is particularly bizarre, because he has had me on his show twice discussing the historicity of Jesus—and yet conveniently has forgotten everything I said there (which seems to be a trend even among experts: see How to Successfully Argue Jesus Existed and Historicity Big and Small: How Historians Try to Rescue Jesus). For instance, Brierley conveniently “forgot” (p. 110) that his own Bible explains how one could be a brother of Jesus without Jesus having any actual siblings. And much else. So his “critique” of my position here is essentially useless. Which further means he has done no research whatever on this subject—he did not consult my actual peer reviewed case (Lataster hadn’t yet published his) or any of the subsequent exchanges and debates over its content. He just relies on his memory of a couple of interviews; a memory that evidently fails him, as he doesn’t remember half of what was said in them. This illustrates the common epistemic failure that keeps people like Brierley still believing in ancient superstitions.

As an example illustrating both of my points, Brierley asserts that the original Christian claim was that “Jesus Christ was Yahweh in the flesh” (p. 96). Any mainstream expert could have told him this is false. The Bible never once says this. Paul, our earliest and most reliable source, makes very clear that Jesus was not Yahweh, that he was a being created by Yahweh, separate from him and speaking for him, merely the functional equivalent of an archangel upon whom Yahweh bestowed his authority (for Biblical verses and scholarship see On the Historicity of Jesus, Element 10, pp. 92-96).

Even John 1:1, often claimed as asserting Jesus “is” God, actually only asserts the common Jewish theological view (found already in the writings of the pre-Christian Jewish theologian Philo) that the first created archangel identified by Jews as “the firstborn son of God,” “the image of God,” “God’s agent of creation,” “high priest of God’s celestial temple,” the one “assigned to be God’s prefect over the universe,” literally “the Paraclete” and “the Logos,” all titles Christians assigned to Jesus, was an emanation of God. As in, in the beginning was only God, then God started separating out of himself beings he created and assigned powers to (the angels), and the first of these was the Logos (Ibid., Element 40, pp. 200-05). This is why it matters that John 1:1-4 says that in the beginning the Logos was God—past tense. Meaning, after God then created Jesus out of himself and made him a separate Logos, and tasked him with carrying out the creation and governance of the world on God’s behalf, Jesus was no longer God (see Bart Ehrman on How Jesus Became God). Likewise, when the Gospel of John has Jesus say “I and the father are one,” in context he means “of one mind,” that they are resolved to a common purpose, having just made clear they are separate but that Jesus does not diverge from God’s will (John 10:25–30).

Brierley thus has been duped by Christian authors and peers into believing something false about his own religion. Because he never fact-checked it, he did no research on this, and thus never discovered that this was a late Christian sectarian fabrication and not the original Christian belief. Which is kind of important. It shows how easily Brierley has been seduced into delusionally clinging to a specific false worldview, and how a critical attendance to the actual facts would expose that this has happened—and thus call into question everything else he believes. How many things among the furniture of his worldview are similarly demonstrably false? How much should he be paying attention to mainstream expert scholarship on these things and not trusting Christian apologists in this field instead? Atheists are atheists because they realized these things. Brierley remains a Christian because he hasn’t.

Some might say the same of Brierley’s assertion that Jesus claimed to be the Christ (p. 97). Many mainstream experts conclude he didn’t; that this was a claim attributed to him after he died, in an innovative effort to rehabilitate his mission. But I suspect it’s entirely possible, even likely, that if Jesus existed, then he did claim this; because it would put him in company with several other men who established themselves as a “Jesus” (Joshua) and “Christ” (Messiah) in the same period (see On the Historicity of Jesus, Element 4, pp. 67-73), who may even have all deliberately tried to get themselves killed to usher in the apocalypse based on a prediction in Daniel 9 that the death of “a messiah” would indeed foredoom that very result (Ibid., Elements 5 through 7, pp. 73-87; see also my Wichita Doomsday Talk, with slides). Then our Jesus would be just one more in a trend, and simply the one that stuck—probably because his followers came up with the novel idea of preaching that he’d risen from the dead and ascended to heaven and preached the end times were thus proved nigh.

Christianity Was a Revelation Cult

More telling instead is Brierley’s repetition of the false but commonplace apologetic that although “many newer religions have emerged out of the claims of private revelations to individuals,” instead, “the claims by the first Christians about the life, death and resurrection of Jesus were all events that were accessible in the public sphere, not the result of private dreams and revelations” (p. 99). Yikes. Brierley doesn’t know that in fact that’s exactly how Christianity began as well? This betrays his complete failure to actually fact-check or research anything. He just gullibly believes what other Christians have told him.

In actual fact, setting aside the “life and death” of Jesus (there is nothing remarkable about that; many an inspirational guru and religious founder had a notable life and death, in truth or legend), “the resurrection” of Jesus was originally only known by private revelation. Possibly even just dreams; because the ancients did not commonly make a distinction in their vocabulary between seeing the gods in waking dreams, i.e. hallucinations, and ordinary dreams: they were both regarded as real visitations of the gods, and both were commonplace across ancient paganism, and Judaism (see William Harris, Dreams and Experience in Classical Antiquity; Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians; and James Tabor, Things Unutterable: Paul’s Ascent to Paradise in Its Greco-Roman, Judaic, and Early Christian Contexts).

A typical con pulled by Christian apologists (sometimes deliberately dishonest; sometimes just a result of their delusional credulity), is to conflate what our only eyewitness source said (Paul), with what anonymous foreign composers of legends about Jesus said a lifetime later (the Gospels). See Resurrection: Faith or Fact? My Bonus Reply. When we look to our only actual witness, who is observing and reporting what Christians were preaching several decades before any Gospel was written, he outright says the resurrection of Jesus (the gospel) was known only through private revelation (“not with flesh and blood” but an experience of Jesus “in me,” Paul says). In fact, that is where Paul says he was getting many of the teachings of Jesus as well: private revelations, secret mystical conversations with Jesus in his head (see On the Historicity of Jesus, “Things Jesus Said,” pp. 553-57).

This is what all mainstream scholars concur is the case. Only one time was there ever anything “public” (an “appearance” to more than one person “at the same time”), but Acts appears to relate this as a hallucinatory experience of ambiguous lights and a mere ecstatic feeling of the presence of Jesus (see Then He Appeared to Over Five Hundred Brethren at Once!), after already being whipped into a frenzy by reports of the private revelations of the first Apostles. Otherwise Paul is clear: the entire gospel was received by private revelation. Just like all those “newer” religions Brierley dismisses. The idea of Jesus showing up in a body and hanging out and having dinner with people and then flying up into the clouds was a made-up legend, built out of similar legends of other risen saviors, heroes, and founders. We do not learn that legend from anyone who was there, or even anyone who claims to have personally met anyone who was there. It’s thus no more credible than all other resurrection legends (see From Raised to Revenants in the Ancient World and Dying-and-Rising Gods: It’s Pagan, Guys. Get Over It.).

Historicity of the Gospel Jesus

It is a common Christian apologetic to go on about the historicity of Jesus and then falsely claim you have thereby defended the historicity of the Gospel Jesus. That’s illogical. But typical of what Christian belief is based on. In aid of this we get a lot more straw men. We don’t see any actual critiques of any actual expert’s peer reviewed literature. We get easy turkey shoots of hacks and loonies instead: as I already mentioned, Joseph Atwill (pp. 94-95); but also Dan Brown (p. 100); Deepak Chopra (p. 101); Kenneth Humphreys (p. 113); and Reza Aslan (p. 101; instead of, for example, the far more legit defender of a militant Jesus today, Fernando Bermejo-Rubio); even the modern forgery of the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife (p. 103); and yes, you guessed it, that farcically ridiculous Zeitgeist movie (p. 108). All straw men that Brierley should be wasting little of his time on; never anything substantial.

The rare few pages where Brierley attempts to address real scholars advancing legitimate arguments, he gets to only two, Bart Ehrman and Richard Carrier (myself), and gets nothing he says about either of them correct. Worse, when he cites experts for historicity, he doesn’t fact-check them at all, and thus ends up repeating a lot of false claims. For example, to answer some silly ideas from Deepak Chropra, Brierley quotes theologian Chris Sinkinson as saying Jesus “was crucified for what was considered blasphemy among first-century Jews: his claim that as Messiah he was the one who could bring forgiveness and transformation” (p. 101). None of this is true. There was no such law. Neither the Romans nor the Jews had any law prohibiting such claims. Which is why no one claiming that was ever prosecuted for it. John the Baptist, Theudas, the Egyptian, the Samaritan, the Impostor (see On the Historicity of Jesus, Element 4, pp. 67-73), all made messianic, transformative claims, never faced any Jewish prosecutions, and were attacked by Romans only when they literally took up arms (which is why some scholars, like Bermejo-Rubio, suspect that may have been the real reason Jesus was crucified). Except John, who openly offered forgiveness (in his atoning baptism), and was never prosecuted for it. He was executed only later, on an unrelated false charge, for political reasons.

The crime of blasphemy at the time consisted only of cursing God and equivalent defamation, which Jesus appears never to have done; and such a crime didn’t even exist under Roman law, so can’t have been the actual crime Jesus was executed for. If the Gospels are to be believed (though they probably shouldn’t), Jesus was executed for sedition: claiming to be king, which by itself wasn’t a crime, nor in fact anything Jesus is ever depicted as claiming. To be convicted of that he’d have to have actually planned or undertaken armed rebellion, or been falsely accused of such. So he might have actually been guilty of that (as Bermejo-Rubio suggests), or the victim of a trumped-up false charge of that (because the Jews couldn’t produce evidence to convict him of anything else under their own laws).

The scene in the Gospels where the high priest claims that what Jesus was preaching was blasphemy doesn’t match actual Jewish law or trial procedure of the time; it’s an anachronistic legend. So the real reason must have been something else (or the real story might have been something else: writing from outside the Roman Empire, the Jewish Talmud only knows of a Jesus of Nazareth executed a hundred years earlier, by stoning, for sorcery). A lot of theories have been tested in the literature and nothing has won a consensus. But a popular conclusion is that Jesus was railroaded into being executed under a false charge of sedition because the Jewish elite saw him as accumulating fanatical crowds that were becoming a threat to their religious authority (particularly the politico-economic authority of the temple cult). There was thus no real crime for which he was killed; it was just the oppression of a gadfly. And that means it could well have been (contrary to Sinkinson, and thus Brierley) that Jesus was killed for merely being a radical “moral teacher” (of which there are many more plausible models in the actual peer reviewed literature to contend with than any nonsense from Deepak Chopra).

A more serious factual error appears in Brierley’s rare foray into criticizing Bart Ehrman (pp. 106-07). Everything Brierley says there about problems with the New Testament manuscripts and their corruption is false. It’s just a gullible repetition of “distortions” of the truth by Christian apologists like Peter Williams, whom Brierley cites as falsely claiming only “a tiny handful of words” by or about Jesus are contested or dubious. Yikes. Try numerous cases of corrupt passages (alterations or interpolations), and hundreds of serious uncertainties regarding the original wording of the text; and that’s just counting corruption of the texts. On which see Three Things to Know about New Testament Manuscripts; and look at the footer of every page of the Gospels in the Nestle-Aland edition of the Greek text to count how many corruptions there are; and that’s not even complete. See my chapter on the ending of Mark in Hitler Homer Bible Christ for numerous examples of Biblical corruptions that are usually never mentioned; Ehrman documents many more in The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture. (And see my debate with J.P. Holding on this point, with slides.)

When we instead start talking about, for example, things simply made-up about Jesus in the Gospels (and thus in the Biblical texts from the beginning, but never true to begin with), we are looking at nearly the entire contents of the Gospels—and I am stating a mainstream statistic here. Just survey The Five Gospels and The Acts of Jesus, and Bart Ehrman’s Jesus Before the Gospels, in which one can quibble here and there for and against various conclusions, but not enough to alter the general point. Look at any modern academic (not apologetic) commentary, such as the Hermeneia series or the New Interpreter’s Bible, and for each Gospel you’ll see sufficiently comparable results. The state of mainstream scholarship on matters of Jesus simply is not being factually described by Brierley here. Which is likely a key reason he remains a Christian.

Nix the Sermon on the Mount

To give you an example of what I mean, the majority of mainstream experts agree the Sermon on the Mount is a post-war fabrication; it does not record hardly anything Jesus said or that was even circulating about him in the first generation of Christian preaching. As the New Interpreter’s Bible Commentary explains (Vol. 8, p. 172), “Although some of the sayings are from the historical Jesus,” and indeed very few as assessed by the Westar Institute (Five Gospels lists only five sentences as authentic, and a mere fourteen more as maybe derived from something Jesus said, possibly much altered; and all of those judgments are easily contested as overly generous), “the Sermon on the Mount is not a report of a speech actually given on a Galilean hillside…it is the composition of the evangelist,” that is, whoever wrote the Gospel According to Matthew (and we know not who, because they do not say), which was well after the Jewish War, one or even two average lifetimes after the time of Jesus.

Many scholars have established this, as summarized by Dale Allison in his Studies in Matthew. I summarize these findings in turn in On the Historicity of Jesus (pp. 465-66):

[W]e know [this speech] originated in Greek, not Hebrew or Aramaic, because it relies on the Septuagint text of the Bible for all its features and allusions. It relies extensively on the Greek text of Deuteronomy and Leviticus especially, and in key places on other texts. For example, the section on turning the other cheek and other aspects of legal pacifism (Mt. 5.38-42) has been redacted from the Greek text of Isa. 50.6-9. These are not the words of Jesus. This famous sermon as a whole also has a complex literary structure that can only have come from a writer, not an everyday speaker. And again, it reflects needs and interests that would have arisen after the apostles began preaching the faith and organizing communities and struggling to keep them in the fold. So it’s unlikely to come from Jesus.

Allison and other scholars also show how the text of the Sermon on the Mount matches known Rabbinical strategies for coping with the loss of the Temple Cult in 70 A.D. In similar texts prior to the fall of the temple, there was a three-fold structure of priorities, as said in the Mishnah: “Upon three things the world standeth: upon Torah, upon Temple service, and upon…deeds of loving-kindness.” The Sermon on the Mount has the same structure, but like other post-war Rabbinical texts it resembles, in the middle part, instead of instructions regarding “Temple service,” we get instructions on how to pay cult to God without it. As I observed, following Allison (Ibid., p. 467):

At no point does Jesus in this very long speech explain what to do about the temple sacrifice code in Leviticus or Deuteronomy, for example—even to reject it or avoid it or that it isn’t needed. To the contrary, the speech simply assumes that’s no longer an issue. In other words, it assumes the temple cult has already been destroyed.

This is even clear in verse 5:23-24, where Jesus speaks of what to do when “you” are offering sacrifices at “an altar” and then remember you need to reconcile with kin, and he commands that you interrupt your altar sacrifice to go take care of that first. This cannot refer to temple sacrifices, as there only priests could approach its altar and perform sacrifices. Whereas Jesus is here speaking as if any random citizen might be conducting offerings at an altar. Which means either (as Dale Allison thinks, op. cit., pp. 73-74) Jesus is using a Biblical legend and pre-temple practice as only a metaphor for present conduct, or this is a Diaspora text that recognizes a practice of family homes maintaining their own altar for minor sacrifices, a practice the Old Testament frequently references. For communities hundreds or thousands of miles from the Jerusalem temple, this may have long been a necessary adaptation, and that would have continued in communities known to the author of Matthew. But more likely, both explanations merge into one: this is a reference to the post-temple Rabbinical teaching that meals at table serve as altar sacrifices.

“As long as the Temple stood, the altar atoned for Israel’s transgressions,” but, as several famous Rabbis concurred, “Now that it is destroyed, a person’s table atones for his transgressions,” by serving from it the poor and needy—thereby explaining how Ezekiel could refer to our table as, indeed, “an altar” (b.Talmud, Barakhot 55a:3 and Menachot 97a:4). Either way, what we can be certain of is that this cannot be a reference to the temple cult; it quite conspicuously references a practice (whatever it may be) that imagines no temple cult is available. The Sermon on the Mount was thus written long after Jesus died.

The Gospels Are Mythologies, Not Histories

Mainstream scholars agree the Gospels are mythologies, not histories, and that if anything in them is historical, it is difficult to impossible to ascertain what that may be. Brierley never confronts this fact. For example, he cites Mark Goodacre favorably for disagreeing with me on the historicity of Jesus (pp. 109-10), then implies Goodacre also doesn’t share my conclusion that “the Gospels must be the accretions of mythological stories, written well after the time they purport to describe.” I must assume Brierley has never asked Goodacre this. Because, uhem, Goodacre most definitely agrees with me on that. All mainstream scholars do.

It is here that we see Brierley fail at logic again, stumbling fallaciously from “Mark Goodacre thinks Jesus existed” to “Mark Goodacre thinks the Gospels are reliable early accounts of Jesus.” Nope. Goodacre most definitely does not agree with that. Nor does any expert in the field—other than Christian apologists. It is by illogical twists of thinking like this that Brierley avoids ever having to discuss, much less come to terms with, the fact that the entire mainstream expert community disagrees with his confidence in the Gospel Jesus being real. And this all stems from an equivocation fallacy Brierley is succumbing to here: confusing “Jesus” with “the Gospel Jesus.”

This is a common error of logic sustaining Christian belief today. Just see David Fitzgerald’s Nailed: Ten Christian Myths That Show Jesus Never Existed At All. The “Jesus” in his subtitle means, more correctly, the Gospel Jesus (whereas the less-than-Gospel Jesus is addressed in Fitzgerald’s later three-volume series Jesus: Mything in Action). Similar things are exposed in Bart Ehrman’s Jesus, Interrupted, where he illustrates several ways most Christians are simply misinformed about the facts of early Christianity and its texts. Brierley reveals himself to be one of those Christians.

For example, Goodacre also agrees with me “that all extra-biblical accounts of Jesus are simply trading off a pre-established Christian myth, or have been doctored by later Christians” (p. 110), or at least that we cannot establish that they aren’t, so as to use them as evidence. That’s why in our debate on Brierley’s show, Goodacre never referenced any of that evidence. Yet Brierley implies that Goodacre disagrees with me on this, simply because he disagreed with me on the mere historical existence of Jesus. This is the same illogical step of equivocation, by which Brierley once again avoids confronting the fact that all mainstream experts, including Goodacre, actually agree with me on these points, not with Brierley.

There are other respects in which Brierley repeats apologetics rather than the latest mainstream scholarship. For example, he claims the earliest “copies” of the Gospels are “dated to around AD 100-150” (p. 111). That’s incorrect. Brierley evidently doesn’t know that (1) there are no “copies” of the Gospels at all until well into the 200s A.D., (2) the earliest manuscripts are not “copies” of the Gospels but only tiny scraps of a few sentences from the Gospels, (3) even the few of those scraps that had once been dated to “100-150” A.D. have all been re-dated to 200-250 A.D., and (4) all the manuscripts we have derive from a mid-2nd century edited version of the entire New Testament that was constructed to combat the original New Testament, that of Marcion, also assembled mid-2nd-century, which no manuscripts of survive.

This ignorance of the actual facts of the field gets particularly bad when Brierley cites as if real those mythical “fragments” of Mark “discovered in an Egyptian death mask” that have been “dated to the late first century” (p. 111). Every single thing he says there is false. Brierley was duped by a confab of frauds and liars (see The Mummy Gospel Isn’t Even a Mummy Gospel!? Updates on That Supposed First Century Manuscript of Mark). This is so common in Christian apologetics that I have come to no longer trust anything that industry develops anymore. Brierley only remains a Christian because he hasn’t wised up to this fact yet. He should never have trusted these people. No one should. Even before this con was exposed in 2018, it was never credible. And he would have known this even as far back as 2015 if he had a habit of actually doing research, of checking facts before affirming them. That he doesn’t have that habit is why he is still a Christian.

Actual mainstream experts, by contrast, admit that the Nativity and Resurrection stories are legendary accretions, as are countless miracle accounts (such as Jesus walking on water, murdering thousands of pigs, glowing in the dark, withering a fig tree, raising the dead, and on and on); and, as I already noted, nearly everything Jesus is claimed to have said. The Gospels are myths. They are no more historically reliable than the labors of Hercules, the travails of Achilles, the travels of Apollonius, or Romulus suckling a she-wolf. And no true belief system can be based on treating myths as history.

Doing Real History vs. Gullible Bauckhamism

Because Brierley never fact-checks anything but just gullibly believes what other Christians tell him (some of whom are lying to him; others are just dupes like him who also don’t fact-check these things), he makes the false claim that the evidence for Jesus is “extraordinarily strong compared to other historical figures of the time” and we even have “far better historical evidence for the life of Jesus than we do for the crossing of the Rubicon by Caesar” (p. 112). This is all false. The reverse is the case. And he’d know that, if he would actually check before spreading bogus viral memes like this.

The crossing of the Rubicon is clearly attested by multiple eyewitness and contemporary documents and accounts. Even the existence of Jesus—far less anything actually remarkable claimed of him—is not that well established. And for other historical figures, even minor ones, if we are confident they existed, it’s because we always have more and higher quality evidence for them than we do for Jesus. See my discussion of Hannibal for a key example, and many more are linked in the first paragraph of my similar discussion of Spartacus; likewise, for Brierley’s weird error of counting copies of the same piece of evidence as multiple items of evidence, see my treatment of Julius Caesar (all of these, and more, are discussed in Chapter 5 of my book book Jesus from Outer Space).

In On the Historicity of Jesus I cover all the evidence for Jesus and why it is unusually weak, and not just weak, but often falsely described by Christian apologists today. For example, Brierley mentions Pliny as among those “putting the existence of [Jesus’s] life and ministry beyond question” (pp. 115-16), yet Pliny never mentions Jesus even being a historical person, much less corroborates any fact about him, like having a “ministry” or even a “life.” Brierley has been duped by his less-than-honest Christian peers here. Likewise over and again, in every case he cites. If he had checked their facts instead, he would be reaching a different conclusion.

Christian faith is always based on a false description of historical reality. Illustrating that point, precisely because Brierley doesn’t fact-check and discover the truth, he instead just gullibly repeats another false Christian apologetic meme: that atheists demand a level of evidence for Jesus that they don’t for anyone else (p. 114). The contrary is true: they are asking for exactly the same level of evidence as convinces us other persons existed. This is what I document in all the examples linked above. That Christians lie about this—and Brierley foolishly believes them—does not change the fact of it.

An example of Brierley’s gullibility here appears in his unfortunate reliance on the apologetic propaganda of Richard Bauckham (pp. 115-16). Brierley must have fallen victim to Bauckham’s own hype, because he falsely credits Bauckham’s apologetics as having “shifted” the academic ground in the field. In actual fact, Bauckham’s propaganda on this point has been universally rejected by the mainstream consensus and has had no effect on it whatever. To the contrary, the field has continued in the opposite direction. See my discussion of Burridge studies at a recent SBL Conference for a prominent example; and recent reluctant admissions of the actual direction of mainstream scholarship in such surveys as Jesus, Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity by Chris Keith and Anthony Le Donne, and How the Gospels Became History: Jesus and Mediterranean Myths by M. David Litwa. Even the desperate attempt by Christian apologist Dale Allison to resist this trend in scholarship concedes almost all of it in Constructing Jesus: Memory, Imagination, and History.

Bauckham’s failed attempt to make Christian apologetics the new mainstream consensus (instead of what has actually happened) was already pretty much killed back in 2008 with the publication of volume 6 of the Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus, which was almost entirely devoted to meticulously refuting his entire case; likewise the critical review of Dean Bechard of the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome in Biblica 90 (2009, pp. 126-29). The failure of Bauckham’s argument to impress anyone outside Christian apologetics is well summarized by Thomas Brodie in the Beyond the Quest for the Historical Jesus: A Memoir of a Discovery (2012, pp. 115-36). Instead, we find mainstream scholars moving in the other direction (e.g. John Crossan’s The Power of Parable: How Fiction by Jesus Became Fiction about Jesus and Richard Miller’s Resurrection and Reception in Early Christianity; and all those surveys cited above). This is especially the case regarding the Gospel of John, which, contrary to Brierley’s gullible reliance on Bauckham wishing it were not so (p. 116), is admitted by pretty much all Johannine specialists today to be a late, multiply-redacted tract that contains even more fiction than any of the other Gospels (see the evidence and scholarship I cite on this point in Chapter 10.7 of On the Historicity of Jesus). Real history is going entirely the other direction from apologetics. You might want to pick up a clue there.

Both of the examples that Brierley gives of something in Bauckham’s propaganda that impressed him (thus keeping Brierley committed to Christianity) illustrate what happens when you just naively believe Christian apologists rather than checking the facts—and thus discovering they’re conning you.

• Brierley says “Bauckham records how the writings of an early church father, Papias, show that Mark’s Gospel is based primarily on the recollections of Simon Peter” (p. 115). Brierley has here lost track of the difference between “showing” something and merely “claiming” it. Papias did claim this. But he nowhere shows that it’s true. To the contrary, mainstream scholars know it is certainly false: Mark is an anti-Petrine Gospel, based on the Epistles of Paul, Simon’s rival. It can no way have been associated with or endorsed (much less dictated) by Simon Peter.

• The Gospel of Matthew, by contrast, is a Torah-observant Gospel; and was probably even written to refute and replace the scandalous Gospel of Mark. Matthew is the only Gospel actually in line with the known sectarian positions of Simon. So we can conclude Papias had no reliable information about either Gospel. Which doesn’t surprise, as Papias admits he did no research and just repeated whatever unsourced rumors he heard, and exhibits many other errors of fact (and an embarrassing gullibility), to the point that the Church Historian Eusebius even complained of his stupidity (see my section on Papias in Chapter 8 of On the Historicity of Jesus).

This is the kind of “evidence” apologists like Bauckham “spin” into more than they are. Once again, Christian faith is always based on a false description of historical reality.

• Brierley also describes Bauckham’s claim that the name frequencies in the Gospels match historical reality and therefore the Gospels must record memories, not fictions (p. 115). This is false. And is obviously false to anyone who checks. The exact opposite turns out to be the case: there are an unusual number of unattested names in the Gospels, and the other names found there greatly deviate from statistical reality. As just one example, Jesus was one of the most common names at the time, yet no one in the Gospels ever meets more than one person of that name—a rather glaring signal of fiction, not history.

This gullibility extends even to rudimentary procedures of hypothesis-testing. Brierley wants to propose a hypothesis, that “God has been working in the background to provide a written record for multiple generations about who he is and why he came in the person of Jesus” (p. 118). But this is a hypothesis that entails predictions; and they aren’t the ones that bear out. If the Bible is just another collection of mythology and bad ideas, we expect exactly what we observe: the rampant corruption of its text over time, and its dubious storytelling even from the start, and its often repulsive moral teachings (e.g. recommending even mutilation, tearing apart families, and oppressing women, to upholding slavery as a moral model, and more—as I discussed before), and profound ignorance (e.g. Jesus didn’t even know about germs, as I also pointed out earlier on; he thus didn’t know the catastrophic importance of recommending rather than condemning personal hygiene).

This is a problem. Because if, as Brierley hypothesizes, the Bible were a crucial message to us from a God who actually wants us to be saved thereby, then this isn’t what we’d observe. We’d more likely find that Bibles would be miraculously unalterable by anyone, and would never decay, thus proving they contain divine and not human wisdom; and they would not contain so much evil and ignorance; nor would they require us to believe anything we couldn’t verify ourselves—as in no way do we need to trust anyone’s third-hand testimony to receive this salvation: we could have been given access to it directly, as the Christian’s own myth depicts of other doubters. And any God who really wanted us to have that, would ensure this. Making excuses for why God made Bibles look exactly like books no god had anything to do with only demonstrates how false your religion is. You can’t claim God wanted us to treat these books as from him, and then claim he deliberately arranged for them to look like they weren’t. That’s simply irrational. Delusional, honestly.

Evidence for a Resurrection?

When Brierley gets around to trying to argue Jesus also rose from the dead, he first tries the testimonial method (pp. 125-26), which is popular with apologists but honestly embarrassing to see attempted, because it’s popular with every false worldview that exists. I already went over how the “I feel Jesus” argument vindicates every religion (including my own past Taoism), and therefore vindicates none of them. And how many a flat-earther “tells tale” of how they were once a convinced “rounder,” even a scoffer at all flat-earth claims, until they “investigated the facts” and were “converted” to the realization that the Earth really is flat—and a secret cabal of Jews has been keeping this a secret from everyone? Countless.

The worst thing you can do is cite previous failures to get the facts right convincing people as an argument “for” your false belief. As every false belief has that to claim for it. It’s worse when the stories you tell aren’t even all that true. Lee Strobel has been less than honest about his actual journey to faith; and the evidence doesn’t bode well that Frank Morison was either, as he appears to have long been a devoted Christian, so his tale of once being a skeptic doesn’t really track. The same can be said for others making similar claims. Morison at least can’t be blamed for the later false rumor that he was a lawyer or a journalist; he was neither. He was a salesman and a government propagandist. But that only illustrates how these legends continue to grow even after the first fibbing is done.

Brierley then moves on to try and build on his previous chapter’s fallacy of leaping from “most scholars think Jesus existed” to “the Gospels are reliable histories” (which in fact most scholars don’t think) by claiming the “Gospels were written down within the lifetime of Christ’s followers” (they weren’t) and are “a product of first-hand testimony” (they aren’t) and “not as anonymous second-hand recollections.” In fact we have no idea who the authors were. The texts never say; while their assigned names don’t use the formula of authorship, but source; and are still not identified (see Three Things to Know about New Testament Manuscripts). And their accounts are at best third- or fourth-hand even in what memories they might preserve; but they were almost entirely preserving nothing, but in fact fabricating; and embellishing, altering, or exaggerating the rest. This is what all mainstream scholarship has come to conclude. Brierley is acting like flat-earthers when he denies this. They, too, will cite their own compatriots as authorities, and ignore the conclusions of the entirety of mainstream scholarship on the matter. Christians are behaving the same.

In fact, the average lifetime in antiquity, for anyone who survived childhood, was 48. Even if the Disciples were only twenty years old when Jesus started preaching around 30 A.D. (and that’s unlikely), we could still expect half of them to be dead by the year 58, and all of them by the year 80 (as fewer than 1 in 12 people then survived beyond the age of 70). Matching these expectations, there is no evidence any Disciple survived beyond the Jewish War (which raged from 66 to 70 A.D.). The Gospels, notably, were all written after that; most, decades after—by all mainstream estimates: Mark, no earlier than the 70s, Matthew the 80s, Luke the 90s, and John sometime in the second century. And none were published in Palestine so far as we can tell. Indeed, our redaction of John—which modern scholarship has established was rewritten by two more subsequent authors after the original composition (which is entirely lost)—was probably completed a century after Jesus would have died.

The reality is that the Gospels were written in foreign lands, in a foreign language, a lifetime after the facts, by unknown authors, all of whom either admit they had no personal sources or mention none, and who compose entirely implausible narratives front to back. That is literally the worst kind of evidence you can have for anything in antiquity. Even John, the lone Gospel to even mention a source, says it was some other written Gospel (now lost), and not any person they actually knew—and that person was already likely fictional (see my discussion of the evidence and scholarship in Chapter 10.7 of OHJ). Luke says he had some tradition handed down, but not by whom or how many stages removed, whereas we know in fact most of what he is using as his “sources” are just other Gospels (including Mark and most likely Matthew). Mark and Matthew say nothing at all as to how they know anything whatever.

It’s also not true that the “gospel” the Disciples preached was “at odds with their typical religious expectations” (p. 126). To the contrary, it was exactly in line with them (see Chapters 4 and 5 of OHJ)—particularly for any anti-establishment sect, which they clearly were and, as such, were in the company of dozens of other sects at the time, including the one whose documents have been recovered from the caves of Qumran. So there was nothing out of expectation here. Indeed, the anthropology of religious movements worldwide, and the syncretic cultural context of first century Judea, actually fully predicts something like Christianity would arise (Ibid.). Nor is Brierley’s implied premise true that no one fanatically launches a religious reform that would have “brought so much trouble their way.” To the contrary, that’s typical in the world history of religions. Almost every new fanatical religion endures persecution; the more so under fascist regimes. That evidently never deters anyone. To the contrary, the same anthropology of revolution cults (OHJ, Chapter 5, Element 29) predicts those are precisely the conditions under which such movements often arise (I cover many aspects of this, including the role of persecution culture in forming new religions, across several chapters in Not the Impossible Faith).

Minimal Facts?

So Brierley is here relying not on any actual facts—none of his premises so far are anchored in reality, scientific or historical—but just gullibly unexamined apologetical tropes. Then he tries to get to something that should actually matter: actual evidence that Jesus rose from the dead. Or so we’re supposed to believe. He instead resorts to repeating more apologetical tropes at this point, leaning on Gary Habermas’s amusingly deflating “minimal facts” approach to resurrection apologetics. This is funny because the basic idea, that you can argue to an actual resurrection from just facts that most mainstream scholars agree upon, started with “twelve” such facts. Then as Habermas’s con was exposed (scholars don’t actually agree with hardly any of them), they shrank to just “six” and now a mere “four.” None of which are the “empty tomb” that Brierley depends upon. Habermas abandoned that years ago, admitting it was not believed true by most scholars. (And when he was still trying to deny that, it was by either complete dishonesty, or extraordinary incompetence.)

I can only assume Brierley didn’t check back in on this, and thus doesn’t realize Habermas has dropped the empty tomb from the minimal facts apologetic (and in fact did so years ago). This would be in line with Brierley’s general practice of never fact-checking anything; and would explain why Brierley cites Habermas’s old statistic of “75%” scholars agreeing the empty tomb was factual—he later “corrected” that to 67%; and then eventually had to abandon the idea altogether because his math was wrong. In actual fact by far most scholars do not agree the empty tomb is an established fact.

Brierley also repeats the claim that Josephus mentioned the crucifixion of Jesus, which is widely disputed (and frankly, unlikely: see Josephus on Jesus? Why You Can’t Cite Opinions Before 2014), but also irrelevant, because even if he did, it can’t be established that he had any source for that but the Gospels. And a mere copy of a source can’t corroborate that source. To the contrary, there is even considerable evidence the author of that passage was in fact using Luke (Ibid.)—who composed after Josephus (which is one more reason of a dozen that we doubt that passage was ever written by him). Not being able to competently evaluate historical evidence is another common cause of Christian belief.

This claim is also illogical. The only point in referencing attestations to the death of Jesus as a premise in the minimal facts argument is to establish that Jesus didn’t survive or fake his death or arrange a lookalike to die in his place (and there is weirdly actual evidence in the Gospels themselves that supports these hypotheses, which is an odd way to compose a tale meant to disprove them: see Robert Price, “Explaining the Resurrection without Recourse to Miracle,” in The End of Christianity). But none of the evidence Brierley cites for this would be competent to confirm that requisite detail (p. 128). The Gospel authors wouldn’t know; nor would Josephus or any other later historian. They’d just repeat what they heard.

There was no doctor, no forensic id-check, no inquest. So you really can’t establish this premise to the certainty required for the case. Mistaken diagnoses, mistaken identities, remarkable survivals, cons and bribery frauds are all well established things in the world—in precisely the way resurrections are not. This is why you can’t get to “resurrection” with feeble data like this. Which is further evidence that no God had anything to do with this. A God would arrange a much more provable miracle, had he need of one. Whereas if he had no interest in this miracle being provable, it certainly can’t be used as evidence of anything. For even God has then signaled that he literally doesn’t want you to.

When we get to Brierley’s “second” minimal fact, “the empty tomb” (pp. 129-30), we already noted this has been abandoned as likely by most scholars now. Even Habermas has conceded that. More notably, Habermas has also conceded that one particular argument often advanced for the empty tomb’s authenticity, that no one would put women in the story, is false. Guess which argument Brierley leans on as proof of the empty tomb. Oh no. Yeah. The women thing. The idea that no one would invent women as the first witnesses to the empty tomb is false on multiple levels, factual to literary (see Why Did Mark Invent an Empty Tomb? and my detailed analysis of the evidence in Chapter 11 of Not the Impossible Faith). I now understand why Brierley was desperate to get N.T. Wright, the most incompetent stumper for this apologetic, to try and defend it on his show a couple years ago against its devastating refutation: page 130 of Brierley’s book is hosed without it! Wright failed (see N.T. Wright Demonstrates the Bankruptcy of Christian Apologetics in Under Nine Minutes).

As his third minimal fact, Brierley of course cites the “appearance” traditions (pp. 130-32). But to count as a minimal fact for this argument, a majority of scholars have to endorse it as true. But the only version of this premise that meets that criterion is the agreement—indeed by most mainstream scholars now—that the first believers had private revelations convincing them of Jesus’s resurrection. But this has ready scientific and cultural explanation. Witnessing and conversing with gods, angels, ghosts, and revenants in visions and dreams (as well as claiming to have even when you haven’t) was normal back then, across all religions; it evinces nothing supernatural. So this cannot then operate to argue for a supernatural cause. You would need some other evidence for that. And there isn’t any. I already covered Brierley’s mistake here above.

Brierley’s fourth minimal fact is the “conversion of sceptics” (p. 132-33), to which he claims Paul and James the brother of Jesus. But there is actually no evidence James was a skeptic. This is often asserted by Christian apologists today, but you won’t find any mention of it in any ancient source, least of all the Bible. It’s nowhere in Acts either, yet that book covers the entire thirty year history of the Church from the first resurrection appearance, including before the supposed moment of James’s conversion. Acts 2 includes the only mass visitation “to all the brethren,” which according to Paul preceded any particular appearance to anyone specifically named James. And yet he does not say that that James was a skeptic in need of conversion, or that it was the brother of Jesus either. So even if Paul wrote that line it does not support any such statement of James being “a sceptic.” Whereas according to Acts, the entire family of Jesus, his mother and brothers, were already believers by then.

Nevertheless, this wouldn’t prove anything anyway, because countless “skeptics” in history have been converted to new worldviews by various, even anomalous experiences; often fallaciously; sometimes dishonestly. Brierley I am sure does not believe Joseph Smith was really converted by an encounter with the angel Moroni; or Mohammed, by an encounter with the angel Gabriel; or Ngo Van Chieu, the ghost of Victor Hugo; or the island shamans claiming to have received their fabulous cargo gospel from a magical appearance of John Frum, thereby abandoning both their colonial Christianity and their native religion for a new, radical cult. Even I was converted from doubt to belief in an entirely foreign religion, without evangelism from a missionary even—but from an unexpected, spontaneous, ecstatic experience of the Tao (as I explained before). Yet Brierley must admit I must have been deceived. So such an event offers no evidence any such experience is real, or any such worldview is true. It therefore cannot function logically in Brierley’s argument to a real resurrection; any more than my conversion argues for the truth of Taoism (or Smith’s, Mormonism; or Mohammed’s, Islam; and so on).

To the contrary, this evidence flips the other way. If remarkable numbers of committed skeptics were converted (and not just in legend, but for real), then Brierley might have the beginnings of an argument. For instance, if it were factually true (not just a made-up claim, but something documented beyond reasonable doubt) that every time persecutors went after Mormons, within mere days they were converted by visions of angels to fanatical faith in Mormonism, and that this happened dozens of times without fail over the course of decades, there would almost have to be something supernatural happening. If the entire United States legislature abandoned their traditional Christian faiths and spontaneously converted to Mormonism in a single day, likewise. If the Pope suddenly closed up shop and became a Mormon, and all his archbishops with him, and he donated the entire wealth and property of the Vatican to the Mormon enterprise, surely something powerful would be afoot. But what instead do we see across all false religions? A rare occasional skeptic or enemy converting. Every false religion has these to claim. But they are rare. So what we should expect to observe if Christianity is a false religion is not “no” skeptics converting, but that such a thing rarely happens. Lo, that is exactly what we observe. This evidence therefore confirms Christianity is false. Not the other way around.

Brierley’s fifth minimal fact is the “explosive growth of the Christian church” (pp. 133-34). But this is a myth. The actual data show that Christianity grew at exactly the same rate as all false religions (Islam, Mormonism, even Scientology). I cover the scholarship and evidence in Chapter 18 of Not the Impossible Faith. But it has been confirmed by none other than Christian apologist (and trained sociologist) Rodney Stark, along with several experts in ancient history (like Keith Hopkins). If false religions produce exactly the same evidence, then that clearly cannot be evidence of a true religion. Brierley thus fails here both as to the logic (he doesn’t know how to test a hypothesis with any valid method of reasoning) and fact (he doesn’t know there is nothing remarkable about any of the facts he is claiming are remarkable—because he never fact-checks anything).

Why Fact-Checking Matters

Brierley repeats other Christian apologetic tropes that are false, such as that “it would have been a very un-Jewish thing” to preach that one guy rose from the dead ahead of the general resurrection of all Israel (p. 133). This is false. Jewish resurrection beliefs were highly diverse, and among them was a belief in a staged resurrection: first Adam, then the Patriachs, then all who are in Palestine, then the rest of the world, was one such scheme (see The Empty Tomb, p. 107). The Talmud preaches that there will be a penultimate Messiah ben Joseph who will indeed be killed and then resurrected by the ultimate Messiah ben David, and then the general resurrection would follow (OHJ, pp. 73-75). And so on. Staged resurrection ideas were thus not un-Jewish. Moreover, the Christians preached the resurrection of Jesus precisely because they insisted it was an apocalyptic sign that the general resurrection had indeed begun. This is why Paul calls the resurrection of Jesus the “firstfruits” of that general resurrection, and has to increasinglty two-step his way around the failure of that general resurrection to come after decades of thus expecting it (e.g. see 1 Thessalonians 4).

Likewise Brierley doesn’t understand how the death of Jesus, seemingly a failure, could be so soon converted into a magnificent success. This reflects his ignorance of the psychology of religion. The modern theory of cognitive dissonance originated in the close study of exactly such a dynamic in a mid-20th century UFO cult (see the classic account in When Prophecy Fails). They experienced a decisive and devastating failure; and immediately converted it into a magnificent success, and this actually increased their belief, fervor, fanaticism, and (importantly) evangelism. Because convincing others to share your belief is one documented tactic for escaping cognitive dissonance, as it reassures you that you “must be right.”

That this worked for, and occurred in, an obviously false religion from Brierley’s perspective once again illustrates that arguments like he is deploying are actually unsound. And he would know that if he would bother to check these things. Has anything like this dynamic been observed in psychology? Is it especially common in religions? And once you’ve gathered the answering evidence, you can ask whether this dynamic therefore is evidence of a religion “being true.” You will by then of course realize the answer is no. And that is the difference between gullibly defending a faith from the armchair, and doing actual research to test your hypotheses by.

The converse argument doesn’t work either. Just because this effect is observed in only a fraction of cults and movements, not all of them (because there are multiple ways to escape cognitive dissonance, and some will meet with more luck than others), means we should expect it to be a rare but inevitably observed phenomenon in any society. So you can’t say “but this seems only to have happened to one failed messianic cult of several at the time; therefore this cult is the one true faith.” To the contrary, that only rarely will such moves succeed is again exactly what we expect to observe of false religions, too. After all, most UFO cults didn’t exhibit this same behavior model either; yet Brierley will admit he can’t use that fact to argue The Brotherhood of the Seven Rays were therefore preaching the one true religion. Just as he can’t use the willingness of the entire Heavens Gate cult to die for their faith (yet another frequently evident way to resolve cognitive dissonance) as evidence Marshall Applewhite was the One True Messiah. When you go looking for comparable models of religious dissonance, you don’t get the results Brierley wants.

Similarly, Brierley naively repeats another Christian apologetic trope, that because the Christians relocated their religious observance from Saturday to Sunday, that therefore something real must have happened to cause that, and therefore “Jesus rose from the dead” (p. 134). To anyone competent at logic, this is an obvious non sequitur of course. But the important point to make here is that Brierley once again didn’t check. He thus doesn’t know that there is no such thing as a Sunday service in the Bible. No one mentions it. It’s not in Acts or Paul or anywhere. The notion appears to be a second century invention; in other words, long after the first Christians were dead. So you can’t use this as evidence of anything that happened in their own day. It appears more likely a decision made by later generations, long removed from the original movement. Similarly, the notion that Jesus even rose on Sunday is nowhere in Paul or 1 Clement or Hebrews or 1 Peter, arguably our earliest sources for the Church. So even that may have been a late belief.

When you actually check (again: actually check) to see what the earliest Christian references to the observance being moved to Sunday say was their reason for that (OHJ, pp. 425-26), you will find a frequent discussion of Sunday being the First Day of Creation (as indeed it was, according to Genesis and popular Jewish belief), and Christians preached that the church body now was a new creation. The resurrection of Jesus was likely placed on a Sunday in the Gospels for much the same reason, to represent this idea symbolically; or for a confluence of reasons including both scripture (most conspicuously the Psalms) and the very ideological need (just noted) to declare Jesus the “firstfruits” of the general resurrection—because the Jewish celebration of Firstfruits always took place on a Sunday. It’s also possible the original revelations did indeed match this calendaring for the same reasons; but we can’t confirm that. We don’t know that the notion of Jesus rising on a Sunday existed then.

There may also have been a political reason for the shift. After two deadly wars with Rome had lost the Jews all credibility with the wider imperialist society, it is well documented that many Christian sects began distancing themselves from their Jewish roots. Getting rid of the Torah Sabbath by taking over a new Holy Day instead would be one prominent way to separate themselves. It’s entirely possible Torah observant Christian sects stuck with a Saturday Sabbath observation (and hence the Lord’s Day in Revelation may indeed have referred to a Saturday); but those sects died out, leaving us with only the later Gentile innovation. In any event, there are numerous reasons for this revolution cult to change up their central holy day. None of them require an actual resurrection from the dead. And anyone who checked their facts before deciding what to believe would know this.

Dodging the Obvious

That’s all Brierley has to convince himself that one of the dozens of ancient mythical resurrections from the dead is true. None of it is logical. None of it is factually correct. All of it is long-refuted Christian apologetical machinery invented to dupe people like him into staying in the fold. Falling for it displays a failure of critical thinking. What we get instead is the opposite. “Apologetics” of course means in this context “defense,” and so Brierley does have to defend his illogical, fact-challenged delusion against critical attacks. So he ends his chapter on the resurrection spending several pages on that (pp. 135-44). But we see here all the same things: he picks easy-to-shoot straw men, and omits any well-researched steel-man arguments against his belief; he argues illogically; and he struggles to get anything factually correct—once again, by never fact-checking anything.

He starts with the low-hanging fruit: rationalization hypotheses. These were popular in the 19th century and occasionally still come up in counter-apologetics. The basic methodological idea behind them was to preserve as much of the data as possible and come up with a more probable explanation of it, given that a supernatural explanation always begins way behind the starting line of any competition, as it is well-documented to be literally the least likely thing that ever happens. So, for example, the “stolen body” theory allows you to take nearly everything in the Gospel narratives as true (and thus “save the data”), and still explain it all by just positing that some secret stuff also went on behind the scenes. This of course is also what supernatural explanations do, since all the cosmic machinations and even existence of angels and gods and magical powers is likewise, weirdly, always secret. But the natural explanations are far more probable, because they have well-established precedents. For example, we have countless well-documented cases of stolen bodies and pious conspiracies. We have no well-documented cases of magical tissue reanimation. All the same can be said of the two other rationalization hypotheses Brierley spends time on (the “mistaken tomb” theory and the “swoon” theory).

This is all true. But rationalization hypotheses, as interesting as they are as logical exercises, actually violate sound historical methodology. This was discovered in the mid-20th century, during a whole realignment of historical methods toward sounder principles (see History Before 1950). The entire procedure has since been abandoned as illogical. Not because they aren’t sound arguments—logically, they are all fully sound and valid arguments a fortiori. In other words, if they are unsound at all, supernatural arguments are even more unsound, for exactly the same reasons. So an apologist can’t escape their consequences by citing the fact that their underlying methodology is invalid; because the apologist is relying on exactly the same invalid methodology. Modern historical method acknowledges the empirical fact that historical data is often unreliable, especially in contexts of religious propaganda, and thus ought not be preserved (hence the penultimate theory Brierley tries to dodge is the “legend” theory). Modern historical method also acknowledges that historians need to attend more closely to the actual science of human behavior (hence the ultimate theory Brierley tries to dodge is the “hallucination” hypothesis).

To illustrate the first point: in early Christian literature there are actually half a dozen different Acts, dozens of Gospels, and hundreds of Epistles, almost all of which are completely forged (OHJ, Chapter 5, Element 44). In other words, completely making stuff up was the normal mode of literature production among the earliest Christians. This logically entails that this is the far more likely explanation of any incredible story Christians ever produced (see Proving History, index, “smell test”). It is almost impossible to overcome this overwhelming probability. One would need really extraordinary evidence to establish that somehow “our” Gospels are the honest ones, among all the dozens of fake ones. There really is no such evidence. And there’s just no escaping this fact.

To illustrate the second point: we have a very well developed science of hallucination in world cultures now, and it has toppled every trope in Christian apologetics. We now know, with extensive empirical documentation and scientific study, that seeing gods, angels, revenants, and spirits, even having whole detailed conversations with them, is actually normal (OHJ, Chapter 4, Element 15). Western cultures are actually W.E.I.R.D. and consequently cannot be used as a benchmark by which to anachronistically understand how ancient people thought or behaved. And in this respect in particular, Western cultures demonize and suppress our natural tendencies toward hallucination and fantastical thinking, whereas most cultures in the past elevated these tendencies as indicative of genuine encounters with the numinous.

As just one illustrative example of that point, Westerners regard dreams as just random fantasies. Many ancient thinkers did not. They regarded them as often a real interaction with a supernatural world. Seeing and talking to gods in one’s dreams could often be taken as having really met the actual god visiting you in the dream world. And as I already noted (per William Harris, Dreams and Experience in Classical Antiquity), in ancient vocabulary, “seeing” a god, having a “revelation,” did not inherently distinguish between what Brierley means by a hallucination (experienced while awake), and what we now distinguish as merely a dream (experienced while meditating or asleep). Nowhere in the letters of Paul does he ever clarify which he means when he and the first Christians “saw” the Lord after his death. So he actually could be referring in every single case to dreams (with one exception I’ll get to). This is a cultural, scientific fact that Brierley remains ignorant of and thus never takes into account. And that is the difference between doing history empirically, with attendance to culturally contextual facts and pertinent science, and doing it, instead, “apologetically,” and hence ignorantly, from the armchair. Christianity requires the latter. True beliefs require the former.

The same is true of waking hallucinations. We have well-documented conversational encounters with gods and spirits from countless cultures and religions, including in Greco-Roman antiquity: Jews routinely had such experiences, as did pagans; always, of course, verifying some belief they were already desperate to embrace—or promote. Because we also have documented examples of people pretending to have such hallucinations precisely because their cultures respected them as real. This was, in fact, the most common mode of public persuasion before the invention of rational-evidential argument (I cover the anthropological science of this fact in Chapter 10 of Not the Impossible Faith). And it’s often impossible to tell these apart; real cases sound exactly like the pretended ones. Because pretenders were deliberately emulating the real cases. But even real cases could include mass hallucination. For example, the Fatima sun miracle.

Mass hallucination tends to have an ambiguous quality; they don’t match the Gospel narratives of group encounters, but rather the ones narrated in Acts (see Then He Appeared to Over Five Hundred Brethren at Once!). Which is why it is crucially important, if you want to evaluate what “actually happened,” to have accurate narratives of what in fact did happen. And we simply don’t have this for Christianity. And it is conspicuously odd that we don’t. As I just noted, Brierley argues God wanted to leave us a record to confirm the reality of the resurrection to us. But if that were so, why did he forget to leave us actual first hand testimonies with actual substantive details? Why did he forget to tell Peter and Paul to write down what exactly they saw and heard for us? Instead, we only get that in faked letters (like 2 Peter and 3 Corinthians). That’s an odd decision for a God. Whereas it is exactly what we expect if no God was behind any of this, and Christianity is just another false revelatory cult like every other in history.

Which gets to that one exception I mentioned: the only group appearance of the Lord Paul says ever occurred. Paul indeed specifies this as a lone exception: only once, he says, did Jesus “appear” to the brethren “all at once.” And what he there describes comes close to only one narrative that survives: the Pentecost ecstasy of Acts 2. Which happens to closely match the scientific evidence of what mass hallucination actually looks like: an ambiguous notion of everyone seeing a vague magical light and feeling the presence of the Lord within them, and taking that as “seeing” him (see Then He Appeared to Over Five Hundred Brethren at Once!).

It is important to notice that Paul says Jesus appeared “at the same time” only on that one occasion of mass ecstasy to all the brethren, and that Acts tells us this was just a vague seeing of dancing lights interpreted as being the presence of Jesus. Because that means all the other appearances were to private individuals, and thus most likely identical to Paul’s own, which he says was an inner experience of Jesus, not an external meeting with a flesh-and-blood man. And indeed Paul knows of no difference between the nature of his revelation and that of the other apostles. The only case he knew to be different, he specifies as such: that one mass ecstasy. Yet the Gospels simply do not relate such a thing. Nor do they match the sequence of visions Paul says was so well-established it was even in his day the actual creed of the church. Nowhere in Paul is any fanciful detail in the Gospel narratives corroborated.

We therefore have no basis for taking the Gospel accounts as honest or reliable. They don’t go back to any original account. They are as made-up as every other of the dozens of Gospels Christians fabricated. Any reliable historical method compels us to treat them the same as all other fantastical myths across world history. And even if you want to reject sound historical methodology and return to the invalid methods of the 19th century, you still can’t get where Brierley wants to go. Because even then you cannot establish that the Gospels being mere legends is less likely than a miraculous reversal of biology and physics. And that’s what kills any argument for the resurrection having actually happened. Odds always are better that these were just superstitious people in a superstitious culture who took universally attested psychological events of personal “inner experiences” as real encounters with the divine, rather than as what they were: their imagination’s creative effort to escape their cognitive dissonance and find meaning and purpose amidst dissatisfaction and despair. And that a lifetime later, in a foreign land and language, promoters of a cult that they inherited made up mythologies to support their mission, as every other religion on Earth has done.

Christianity Is Based on Falsehoods

To grasp what I am saying here (if you don’t already) see Resurrection: Faith or Fact? My Bonus Reply. The short of it is that Brierley has no logical method here. He conflates late legends with actual eyewitness accounts that paint a completely different picture, one that matches the known science and anthropology of all other false religions that involve encounters with supernatural beings. And Brierley has no competent grasp of the actual facts either. He just gullibly repeats bogus Christian tropes, such as that “There’s simply not enough time for an urban legend to have spread so quickly and strongly that it replaced all other accounts of what actually happened” (p. 137). Which tells us he didn’t check his facts. Because if he did, he’d know that what he just said is demonstrably false (see No, Mr. Christian, A.N. Sherwin-White Didn’t Say That. And Even What He Did Say Was Wrong.).

Likewise for Brierley:

• He would know it is false that “most psychologists agree that mass hallucinations don’t occur” (p. 138). Brierley is again conflating the Gospel narratives with actual narratives of mass hallucination, like the Fatima “sun miracle” that matches the narrative in Acts 2. Correct that error, and psychologists would tell him that that kind of thing is actually well-documented.
• He would know it is false that “the disciples had no pre-existing expectation of a rising Messiah.” Brierley’s own “historically reliable” Gospels depict Jesus priming them constantly toward exactly that expectation. So Brierley is even contradicting himself here, thoughtlessly repeating a Christian apologetic trope that undermines his own arguments elsewhere, a common sign of delusional belief-defense.
• He would know that it is false even that no such expectation existed in Judaism or would arise there. As I just noted, we find just such an expectation in several Jewish sources. So one cannot say “Jews would never think of that.” And the way science has established cognitive dissonance works tells us that even if they did innovate this, it’s among the very sorts of things they could innovate to escape that dissonance.
• He would know that “bereavement hallucinations” have a lot more to them than he seems aware, but also, more importantly, that religious hallucination is an entirely different category. Thus he is ignoring the most important body of evidence for what we can expect false but vindicating “encounters with the gods” to look and feel like; another example of Brierley’s depending on straw men, rather than fact-checking what he should be looking at instead.
• He would know it is entirely false that Paul preached “a flesh-and-blood, grilled-fish-eating Jesus.” He in fact explicitly denounced any such storyline: he denies any flesh-and-blood encounters occurred, indeed he argues that was literally impossible. He is instead quite clear they were private inner visions, and that only once was there a mass ecstasy—at which, by our only account, no body even appeared, much less ate fish.

The oddest thing here is that Brierley admits the resurrection is one of the most debated subjects on his show (p. 139), yet somehow he has never learned any of these things. This gets back to my original point that I suspect he is delusionally erasing from his memory any information that would force him to seriously question his beliefs. He must have been told at least half this stuff at some point. Why then doesn’t he remember any of it? Of course, if he would actually fact-check his beliefs, then he would know all of this stuff. But fact-checking poses too great a threat to any delusion. It becomes then the least likely thing you’ll do. And lo, this is exactly what we see from Brierley.

Brierley also doesn’t know anything about the formal logic of why natural explanations always start with a vastly higher prior probability than supernatural explanations—even the least likely natural explanations exceed the probability of the supernatural (see Crank Bayesianism: William Lane Craig Edition). Though historians are more interested in the most likely explanations; which is why we know what most likely happened is that Christianity began like all other revelatory cults in history and evolved later fantastical legends of their origins like all other religions have done. But if you want to see why even the least likely natural explanations are more likely than Brierley’s, even using the exact same data as he is, then you can explore that elsewhere:

I show why the body-theft and mistaken-tomb arguments survive every naive criticism Brierley attempts in The Empty Tomb (in “The Plausibility of Theft” and “The Burial of Jesus in Light of Jewish Law”; and see my follow-up material in the associated FAQs and my response to Stephen Davis); and Robert Price has shown why the swoon theory does as well in The End of Christianity (in “Explaining the Resurrection without Recourse to Miracle”). In all these you will discover a lot of facts Brierley never mentions that deeply undermine his entire reasoning for rejecting these explanations. But rejecting them is still fine. Because we already know what most likely happened. And it wasn’t a resurrection.

Consider Brierley’s recourse to the standard apologetic trope that the authorities could have just “produced the body” to refute claims of a resurrection. The facts rule this out. But Brierley never checks facts. If he did, he’d have learned:

• Paul actually says Jesus rose in a different body than he died in. So producing the corpse that Jesus left behind would not have impacted Christian preaching at all.
• Exhuming and parading a corpse would have been a death-penalty crime. The authorities would not have made themselves criminals or foster public outrage.
• As Acts relates, Christians did not begin preaching their creed until almost two months after the fact. No such corpse in that environment then would be recognizable.
• Jewish law in fact held that no corpse could be reliably identified even after a mere three days. And fifty days is a lot more than three.
• Cognitive dissonance and delusion compel beliefs resistant to all evidence. So any evidence the Sanhedrin presented would simply be dismissed as a trick anyway.

That last point is even confirmed by Brierley’s own Bible. Weirdly, Brierley falsely claims “no ancient sceptic even claimed” the body was stolen (p. 135). Um. According to Brierley’s own “historically reliable” Gospels, they did. This is probably false. Matthew’s stories are not even remotely believable; and the entire history of the Church in Acts, even depicting multiple criminal inquests, omits any reference to even the claim that the tomb was empty, much less that a body might have left it. But the point is that somehow Brierley couldn’t even get this simple fact right. He didn’t even check his own Bible.

Brierley’s logic is also hosed here. For Matthew’s story about the theft being a bribery-induced lie could simply be the cover-up of what was in fact an actual bribery-induced theft. In other words, the claim the soldiers related might have actually been true (for which they might have taken some lashes, but they’d have had no way to avoid that outcome); and Matthew’s convenient tale about them being bribed to say this instead could be just another made-up armchair apologetic defense of a delusional belief. Brierley can produce no evidence that this isn’t, in fact, what happened. So he’s pretty much screwed. You simply “can’t get there from here” as the saying goes. There simply isn’t enough evidence surviving to rule out countless far more plausible explanations of the data than “magic.” And all the evidence we do have actually confirms a completely different explanation than any of these. Belief in the resurrection of Jesus is therefore only a delusion. It cannot be logically defended from any actual facts in evidence.

We see all the same failures of fact and logic in Brierley’s reliance on the old apologetic trope that “no one would die for a lie” (pp. 136 and 144). That’s illogical, as there is no evidence anyone who died knew the truth of the matter (see Did the Apostles Die for a Lie?). It could well be that only a couple of minor Disciples, or even someone else who wanted to boost Jesus’s messianic claims, stole the body and never told anyone. It’s also not factual. History is replete with examples of people who are willing to die for their lies (Joseph Smith, Jim Jones, David Koresh). Indeed, we have no evidence that confessing to anything would even have saved anyone. Grave robbery was a capital crime. So if you’re going to die either way, you may as well stick by the cause you believe in, and give your death power in advancing the cause by its very example. In all these respects it’s clear Brierley doesn’t even notice how illogical his “defenses” are. He doesn’t even think any of this through. This is signature behavior of someone trapped in a delusion.

Another quite glaring example of this is Brierley’s bizarre claim that the Gospel narratives of the resurrection only contradict each other in “peripheral details” (p. 140). One account has an armed guard and a descending angel casting death spells; the others, no such things stand in the way of entering the tomb. Two accounts have Jesus appearing in or around Jerusalem; two accounts adamantly insist he only appeared several days’ march away in Galilee. One account has Jesus telling the disciples to handle snakes. The others somehow never heard of that. And so on. These are not “peripheral details.” The story also grows in the telling, a classic sign of legendary development. Just an empty tomb and a boy preaching within, becomes over time an armed squad paralyzed by a flying monster, which evolves eventually into Jesus eating dinners and throwing cuddle parties, which evolves eventually into the most ridiculous tale of Thomas answering all previous readers’ inevitable doubts by actually conducting an autopsy of the animated corpse. Only the delusional will be duped by any of this.

Conclusion

Mainstream scholarship is unanimous in not agreeing with Brierley’s statement that “the Gospels are generally historically reliable” (p. 118). The opposite is the case. Brierley ignores this fact and instead cherry picks fringe scholars like Richard Bauckham, whose attempts to “shift the sands” of scholarship soundly failed and have been unformly rejected by the mainstream. If that is grounds enough for Brierley to reject Jesus mythicism, then rational consistency requires him to accept that as grounds enough to reject the claim that “the Gospels are generally historically reliable” as well. Whereas if you wish to reject the consensus (on whatever basis) and stick with fringe scholars attempting to change that consensus, then you have far more reason to agree with Jesus mythicists than Bauckham. Unlike Bauckham’s, our case is based on true facts, not false claims; and is gaining sympathy with objective mainstream scholars, and is usually only rejected by scholars who don’t actually examine the case.

But hypocrisy aside, you needn’t accept Jesus mythicism to realize why the mainstream consensus is now correct to regard the Gospels as highly unreliable mythology, and not “reliable histories” of anything (least of all Jesus). That Christians won’t accept this thoroughly-demonstrated fact is why they are still Christians. The rest of us base our beliefs on the actual facts. We likewise are careful to avoid being illogical. And we’ve seen numerous failures of logic and fact here. I’m a little embarrassed on Brierley’s behalf, for example, to see him basing his Christian faith on C.S. Lewis’s disastrously illogical and ignorant “Lord, Liar, or Lunatic” argument (p. 119-20). Which is illogical because it is a false trichotomy: Lewis left out “Legend” (e.g., as I just noted, mainstream consensus now holds that Jesus never actually claimed to “be God” in the sense Lewis premised his argument on) and “Lemon” (as in, someone whose epistemology is so bad that they are merely mistaken—as humans, being fallible, often are). And it’s ignorant, because it doesn’t even correctly apprehend how mental illness, or the moral psychology of hucksters and gurus and “pious liars” throughout history, actually works in practice.

This has all been pointed out for ages (I shall blog on it again later this month). So there is no excuse for Brierley to be so naive here. He really ought to have thought this through, and fact-checked its premises, before ever repeating it in this book, much less declaring it a pillar of his faith. Doing so only makes Christianity look like it’s built on ignorance and a failure of reason. Just as with every other example in these two chapters I have surveyed. Brierley is really promoting atheism here, by cataloguing and advertising how ill-founded and illogical Christian faith is. Like parents who try to control their children by lying to them (about history, about sex, about drugs): those kids are eventually going to find out they were lied to. And that will only destroy, not bolster, any authority their parents may ever have had. The surest way to destroy Christianity in the long run, is to try and sell it with illogical arguments and false claims to fact. And that is exactly what we see Brierley doing here.

What Brierley doesn’t know, or refuses to admit, is the very thing that keeps him a Christian. He doesn’t know how to test a hypothesis reliably. He doesn’t know how to vet the logic of an argument. He doesn’t know that so many of his beliefs—about history, science, the world, even his own Bible—essential premises in nearly all his arguments—are factually false. He doesn’t know that when we have detailed evidence of what converts people (even skeptics) to Christianity, it is always illogical and epistemically poor. Always we find some fundamental role of ignorance and failures of reason. As we have seen already with Brierley. But we see this again, and again, and again. I show countless examples from antiquity in Not the Impossible Faith (see Chapters 7, 13, and 17). And so far I have found this holds for any Christian, even today, from whom I have anything close to an honest and reliable narrative of their conversion process (inordinately often, the story starts with a cute girl—I’m not joking: this is weirdly common in Christian conversion stories, from Josh McDowell to William Lane Craig, all the way to Brieley himself; her name was Lucy: p. 3).

Christianity is a delusion, a strong and unwavering belief in the face of overwhelming evidence against it, just like flat-earth theory or QAnon. And there is no way to escape it until you confront your emotional reasons to avoid genuinely questioning and testing it; and then finally actually do question and test it with a persistent attention to sound logic, critical reasoning, and honest fact-checking.

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