Earlier this year I presented at the Pacific regional Society of Biblical Literature conference. My paper’s title in the program was, “Field Update on the Case Against the Historicity of Jesus: Recent Peer-Reviewed Publications For and Against.” Which is now listed in my professional cv. Recently a reader asked that I discuss what went on there for those who couldn’t attend, since it wasn’t recorded nor intended as a journal publication (though I will eventually produce one of those, it won’t be identical to this presentation). Here I will explain the handout (The Historicity of Jesus: 2022 Status of the Debate). But the content overlaps a lot of what I presented at the GCRR conference last year. And both were presented more formally to their respective audiences; here I’ll be colloquial.

Audience Response

The response was minimal, so I won’t have much to discuss on that point. A few dozen scholars attended, but the few responses posed after my presentation were either merely inquisitive (asking for clarifications, or my positions on matters not discussed in the presentation) or eye-rolling. One woman asked what the point was (after an entire presentation explaining what the point was). And one guy, in an angry huff, shouted that “his good friend” Dennis MacDonald had declared mythicism too implausible to explore—after I had just cited direct quotes of MacDonald saying it was improbable but at least plausible. While I was using public documents, and he private, I have since then learned MacDonald has indeed pulled this 180. I’ve already revised my list of supporting scholars accordingly, and I’ll blog later this week on what has changed with MacDonald and why.

State of Publication

As noted on my handout, it is still the case that the most recent peer-reviewed study dedicated to a defense of historicity remains the now-century-old, and horribly outdated work of Shirley Jackson Case, The Historicity of Jesus: A Criticism of the Contention that Jesus Never Lived (University of Chicago Press 1912; 2nd ed. 1923). This I already address in my peer-reviewed book, also the first in over a century dedicated to questioning historicity, in On the Historicity of Jesus (Sheffield-Phoenix Press 2014: pp. 592–94). But unlike the critical position, no new peer-reviewed work has yet to be published updating the defense. Whereas now two full, peer-reviewed academic studies have been published questioning historicity (mine, and Raphael Lataster’s Questioning the Historicity of Jesus, Brill 2019). One might add Thomas Brodie’s Beyond the Quest for the Historical Jesus: Memoir of a Discovery, Sheffield Phoenix Press 2012, but that is not a full study of the question but just a personal memoir explaining autobiographically how Brodie came to doubt; it doesn’t offer or test any alternative theory of the origins of Christianity without Jesus, nor systematically examines all the pertinent evidence on either side of the debate. Carrier and Lataster are the first to accomplish those tasks.

Instead of responding to this, scholars continue to resort to what they have always done on this question for a hundred years now: simply assume historicity is unquestionable, or devote a page or two barely exploring it, or publish crappy pop market books on it that would never have survived any honest peer review (e.g. Bart Ehrman’s Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth, Harper 2012; and Maurice Casey’s Jesus: Evidence and Argument or Mythicist Myths, T&T Clark 2014), neither of which addresses either Carrier 2014 or Lataster 2019 (or even Brodie 2012). This does not bode well for their position. Since then, attempts to “respond” in academic journals to the peer-reviewed studies questioning historicity have been illogical or dishonest, and make no real effort to address the actual arguments, nor themselves make any actual case for the historicity of Jesus. This bodes just as ill.

One thing that has become clear to an attentive observer of this debate is that there does not seem to be any logically sound empirical case to make for the historicity of Jesus, necessitating that dubious or dishonest apologetics be deployed in its place. If, by contrast, a genuine case could be made, it should have been made by now. So…where is it?

Academic “Reviews”

Instead of taking this seriously and producing a proper, comprehensive, peer-reviewed monograph in defense of historicity (leaving their score so far at 0 for 2), the only peer-reviewed replies attempted have been largely useless, brief, and disingenuous “book reviews.” Normally book reviews in proper academic journals would present a useful evaluation of the content of a new theory. But what these reviews have done is markedly different from the usual. And this is actually now evidence of the bankruptcy of the historicist position: they can’t develop any honest case; and so have to resort to cons, trickery, or legerdemain. Why this is allowed remains a secondary question; it reflects poorly on Biblical studies as an academic discipline, and on the journals that degraded their reputation by allowing themselves to be used this way. (Of course not all the academic reviews were negative.)

There are, to date, no academic journal reviews of Lataster 2019 or Brodie 2012. But there have been four attempted critiques of Carrier 2014 (one of which being a few pages in a book rather than a journal, but functionally the same):

• Christina Petterson in Relegere 5.2 (2015): 253–58. On which see A Bizarre Review in Relegere.
• Daniel Gullotta. “On Richard Carrier’s Doubts.” Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 15.2–3 (2017): 310–46. See On the Historicity of Jesus: The Daniel Gullotta Review.
• Simon Gathercole. “The Historical and Human Existence of Jesus in Paul’s Letters.” Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 16.2–3 (2018): 183– 212. See The New Gathercole Article on Jesus Certainly Existing.
• M. David Litwa. How the Gospels Became History: Jesus and Mediterranean Myths (Yale University Press: 2019): 22–45. See Litwa’s Confused Critique of Mythicism.

More on these in a moment. I don’t include Chris Hansen on this list only because their promised peer-reviewed monograph on the subject hasn’t been published, they have only reviewed Jesus from Outer Space which is not the peer-reviewed study of Carrier 2014 (although for my response nevertheless, see Chris Hansen on Jesus from Outer Space), and their various critical journal articles don’t directly address the question but skirt around it. But they do use all the same invalid or dishonest tactics (see Chrissy Hansen on the Pre-Existent Jesus). But so far, there’s been no organized response to OHJ from them.

Crucially, there have been several critical responses to scholars deploying the kinds of rhetoric found in these reviews, making the point that doubting historicity is actually more plausible than they aver, and that their resort to unscholarly tactics to hide this is a black mark on the field that isn’t helping their case:

• By Philip Davies, in “Did Jesus Exist?” The Bible and Interpretation (August 2012).
• By Raphael Lataster, in his review of Carrier 2014 in the Journal of Religious History 38 (2014).
• By Justin Meggitt, in “‘More Ingenious than Learned’? Examining the Quest for the Non-Historical Jesus.” New Testament Studies 65.4 (2019).
• And of course by Richard Carrier and Raphael Lataster, in separate presentations at the 2021 International eConference on the Historical Jesus.

Each of these scholars make important points historicists would do well to heed—especially regarding the bogus circular deployment of “argument from consensus” as an excuse to not even look at the evidence. The whole point of passing peer review is to establish that the consensus needs to be re-examined and defended against that actual challenge, not simply presumed and used as an excuse to ignore the challenge. That is dogmatism. A field is only respectable if it takes peer review seriously; which entails taking peer-reviewed challenges to the consensus seriously. If such challenges won’t even be examined, much less addressed, then a consensus has no epistemic value.

Moreover, contrary to what this tactic pretends—for example, Bart Ehrman still to this day lies to the public by claiming “no” scholars in the field take this seriously—doubting historicity is becoming mainstream: as of this writing, there are twenty experts (people with relevant PhDs, most even sitting or emeritus professors in a Biblical studies field) that have since gone on the public record agreeing that Jesus might not have existed—admitting either its plausibility, or their agnosticism, or outright doubt. As of this point in 2022 these include:

1. Thomas Brodie (Op cit.)
2. Richard Carrier (Op cit.)
3. Raphael Lataster (Op cit.)
4. Justin Meggitt (Op cit.)
5. Philip Davies (Op cit.; and personal testimony to Carrier and Lataster)
6. Robert Price (e.g. The Christ-Myth Theory and Its Problems)
7. Thomas Thompson (e.g. The Messiah Myth)
8. Hector Avalos (Ames Tribune 2 March 2013)
9. Zeba Crook (Facebook 30 December 2017)
10. Arthur Droge (CAESAR 2009)
11. Tom Dykstra (Journal of the OCABS 2015)
12. David Madison (public remarks to Carrier at GCRR 2021)
13. Darren Slade (Ibid.)
14. Steve Mason (remarks to Harmonic Atheist at min. 28:30)
15. Richard Miller (in Varieties of Jesus Mythicism)
16. Kurt Noll (in Is This Not the Carpenter?)
17. Emanuel Pfoh (Ibid.)
18. Francesca Stavrakopoulou (Twitter October 2016)
19. James Crossley (in Lataster 2019)
20. Carl Ruck (Mythvision interview May 2022)

That is roughly the same list I presented at Brea, but to keep up with changing developments see my ongoing List of Historians Wo Take Mythicism Seriously. This has grown from a mere handful ten years ago. So it cannot be claimed that “no” scholar takes this seriously—or even that only “fringe” scholars take it seriously. And these are only the experts who have gone on record. Of course, the negative opinions of scholars who have not read either Carrier 2014 or Lataster 2019 can carry no weight, because they don’t know what the evidence and arguments are and thus can have no informed opinion of them. But among scholars who have read them, and still even some who haven’t, quite a few are abandoning blind adherence to the dogma of historicity. Whereas those who claim to have read either book and remain opposed to this concession are almost all Christian apologists—the least reliable experts to be polling the opinion of on this.

Defects of the Responses to Date

On the Brea handout I called attention to several blog articles here for further information. But the general points I made in the presentation were that:

• The academic responses so far do not address the arguments actually in Carrier 2014 or Lataster 2019. Not even the academic book reviews do this, which is particularly strange, as that is literally the one thing a critical book review is supposed to do.
• They instead make false claims about the arguments in same. Which people familiar with logic will recognize as the straw man fallacy: misrepresent an argument into a form easily rebutted, and then attack that false target, and claim to have dispatched the real one.
• They will sometimes “respond” to statements in same, but only by ignoring the rebuttals already therein. That is, they will make an argument as if it wasn’t already rebutted, will not tell the reader what that rebuttal was (or even that it exists), and won’t explain how they get around it.
• They will often employ psychological fallacies, like poisoning the well and ad hominem. Which suggests the absence of any real response. If you have to resort to those kinds of arguments, you are advertising that you don’t have any credible arguments to make instead.

These four features recur so often—even in formal academic writing on this subject—as to establish a pattern. This is a field-wide behavior.

At Brea I gave the following examples (though many more are given in the hand-out’s links):

• Gathercole falsely claims “the only real solution for the mythicist is to regard [Paul’s statement that Jesus was] ‘born from a woman’ as an interpolation” (contrast with the actual content of Carrier 2014: 575-82). This is so blatantly false a statement as to be categorized in no other way than a lie. Carrier 2014 actually contains an explicit argument ruling out the interpolation theory—exactly the opposite of what Gathercole claims. And by falsely claiming OHJ makes an argument that in fact it rejected, he ignores all the actual arguments it makes about this passage (that “Brothers of the Lord” just as likely means cultic brethren rather than physical, Ibid. 582–92). Readers of Gathercole won’t know what those arguments are, or how Gathercole proposes to rebut them. He thus “erases” the actual content of OHJ, and responds to content that doesn’t exist there instead, while representing to his readers of having accomplished the reverse. Gathercole does this repeatedly (compare his review with the actual content of OHJ on Jesus being a Davidic heir, Ibid. 575–77; and even on the Eucharist account in Paul, Ibid. 557–66, despite my actual position being the same as that of many mainstream historicists, from Gerd Lüdemann, whom I cite, to Antonio Piñero).
• Gullotta falsely claims that OHJ only considers the “Gospel” Jesus’s historicity (when in fact it explicitly rejects that and only considers plausible, mainstream reconstructions of historicity); that it relies on MacDonald’s Homeric thesis (it doesn’t); that it doesn’t count passages in Paul as evidence for historicity (it does); and that it is “incompetent” because it does not address some argument or other—that in fact it addresses.

This is dishonest. And that provokes the question: why use all these dishonest tactics to rebut the book? Where are Gullotta’s and Gathercole’s honest responses to the arguments actually in the book? Are we to conclude they don’t have any? The same approach is found in Petterson and Litwa, only worse. This is not a respectable or acceptable way for the academic community to behave. And yet on this issue it is so far the only way it has behaved. This means the whole field needs to clean up its behavior and start addressing its own peer-reviewed literature with honesty and objectivity.

The Needed Change of Behavior in the Field

At Brea I presented and explained four things the field needs to start doing differently:

1. Actually read the peer-reviewed monographs critiquing historicity.
2. Do not misrepresent or ignore their arguments.
3. Compare their actual contents with these existing critiques and responses.
4. Redress the deficiencies in the latter, or acknowledge merits of the former.

Until this happens, no rejection of the thesis of Carrier 2014 or Lataster 2019 can claim to hold any epistemic merit, and Biblical Studies as an academic discipline cannot claim to be a professional discipline at all—it is simply a cult of apologetics defending a dogma. If anyone in the field wants to change that, they have to actually do it. And that means actually heeding all four of these procedural changes. No more ignoring the argument. No more engaging it dishonestly.

-:-

Important Links

• List of Responses to Defenders of the Historicity of Jesus
• How to Successfully Argue Jesus Existed
• Historicity Big and Small: How Historians Try to Rescue Jesus
• On Evaluating Arguments from Consensus