I just published a formal academic review of the new book Varieties of Jesus Mythicism (ed. by John Loftus and Robert Price, Hypatia 2022) in Socio-Historical Examination of Religion and Ministry (SHERM) 4. 1 (Summer 2022): 171‒192. You can buy the review there for $1.99 (as I’ve said before, it’s worth it to support that journal, and the whole business model of affordable academic article buys). What I will be doing here is expanding on some of the points I made there, so I won’t be replicating the content of that review. I’ll just summarize some of it and then expand here where I have more to say. So you might want to read that review before, or after, reading this extended commentary.

General Overview

The review abstract captures the overall gist of my review:

The edited volume, Varieties of Jesus Mythicism, aims to present diverse approaches and theories to the debate on Jesus’ historical existence. While it includes several enlightening and worthwhile contributions, there are too many amateur contributions employing dubious claims and methodologies. The result is that, apart from the few worthy contributions, the book as a whole is only useful for comparing poor with genuine scholarship. And some advice on how to make such a comparison, so as to distinguish the one from the other, is here provided.

Its opening sentences complete the picture:

The theories presented in this book range from the completely crank to the serious and credible. They often contradict each other, but it was not the intention of the editors to produce a coherent case for its main thesis, but rather to sample the different kinds of cases that are being made for Jesus Mythicism. This is both an asset and a problem for the anthology.

I start with generally critical paragraphs for why the whole project of mixing good with terrible proposals like this is a bad idea that should never have been attempted. You can get my take on that there. The only good side of this is as I state in the review:

If someone wants to spend (or some might say, waste) their time debunking the crank theories presented [here], this volume gives you the best starting point for doing so. You receive each theory’s “best elevator speech” in about twenty pages, referencing its principal bibliography that you can use to dive into the particulars.

I then discuss the bad chapters and what’s wrong with then, and then I get to the value of the good chapters in this volume, as not all of them are crank nonsense, and some could even be described as required reading for someone who wants to be thoroughly versed in this subject. In those sections I survey the chapters of the book and what’s in general good or bad about them. And in the process I emphasize a practical theme: I use this as a teaching example for how to tell the difference between crank and competent scholarship. All of that you can get from the review itself. Here I will essentially just add extended footnotes to many of the points made in the course of that argument. I won’t bring up here every author in the book (in some cases the review says all that’s needed), only ones on which I want to add points or material not in the review.

What you’ll also get in the review is more detail on what I now call my “Grand Unified Theory of Crankery” (or GUTC), a set of “procedures” offered “with total and unquestioning confidence to be the correct method to use in history but which in fact is exactly the opposite of any competent or sound historical method.” I outline three of the many “rules” the GUTC typically consists of: relying on obsolete rather than the latest scholarship; relying on the possibility fallacy (anything even remotely possible, is therefore automatically probable); and ignoring important evidence against one’s thesis and instead only cherry-picking evidence in support if it. More details, and examples, are in the review.

Lockwood

Michael Lockwood’s chapter tries to push the claim that Christianity derived from Buddhism. Nothing in it supports that conclusion. If this is the best that thesis has, it’s a dead thesis. Move on. One of my examples is Lockwood’s illogical argument that because we can find “miraculous literacy” in Buddhist traditions, therefore Jesus’s literacy in Luke-Acts is borrowing the idea from Buddhism. Even apart from the basic methodological problems (e.g. Lockwood does nothing to establish the relative chronology of the pertinent texts), this argument is a blatant non sequitur.

Just because people all over the world imagine gods surely must be able to read, does not mean they all got the idea from each other, or anyone at all. It’s just an obvious inference for anyone who believes in divinely wise or inspired beings (surely God and his angels can read his own Word). And the myth of Jesus being able to read already has well probable explanations in local facts, like indeed that mythographers wanted to ensure Jesus was understood to be as competent as the Apostle Paul; or that, indeed, Jesus simply was literate. He is routinely called Rabbi in the Gospels, and only the literate could claim such a title (so he might, in fact, have actually been literate; and even if not, since he had to be at least as wise as a Rabbi, he “had” to be as literate in any tale told of him); whereas rewriting literate persons as having been illiterate to make their achievements seem more divinely inspired is another known motif in religious myth-making.

This happened to Mohammed—a son of the wealthy mercantile elite would not have been illiterate, but claiming he was forms a seed of apologetic propaganda endorsing the Quran as miraculous (on questioning his historicity, see Did Muhammad Exist? (Why That Question Is Hard to Answer)). And in his Epistles Paul would surely have made much of the fact that Peter, James, and John were illiterate, and thus unlike Paul could not read the Scriptures—had that been the case. Which means it wasn’t. So the later contrivance (in the Gospels and Acts) of the Apostles as illiterates looks to be the actual myth here, and not the other way around. In any case, with readily available, highly plausible theories already in place, there is no logical way to get to “Luke got this idea from Buddhism.” Maybe (Buddhists had visited the West by then). But there is no evidence at all that he did. And it’s already the least likely hypothesis of those already on the table. And that’s not only because Luke is writing sixty to eighty years after the religion began—so what he thought would be neat to add or claim can’t really inform the origin of Christianity in the first place.

Another example I didn’t bring up in the review is how Lockwood frequently skips over glaring problems, such as the fact that we have the letters of Paul testifying to having personally met Peter and James and John in Jerusalem; so how can Lockwood claim they are actually mythical constructs based on the historical disciples of Buddha? (As Lockwood claims, p. 74.) Does he not know we have earlier documents containing eyewitness testimony to their historicity? Or does he have some other elaborate unstated theory as to how all these letters were forged? (Pro tip: That’s unlikely.) Crankery is based on epicycle after epicycle like this. Rather than its thesis being a straightforward result of accumulated facts and evidence, it requires a dozen other bizarre, unattested things to be true, requiring elaborate argument after elaborate argument. Rather than attempting to establish one remarkable controversial conclusion from plainly presented or widely accepted evidence, cranks have to present a dozen of them, one after another, just to get the one final conclusion they want to hold up. When you pay attention, you’ll realize this is all an exercise in anti-falsification: “explaining away” all the evidence against their conclusion, rather than simply accepting its effect on their conclusion’s probability.

Atwill

There is nothing even plausible about Atwill’s thesis. And it is only ever defended with falsehoods and non sequiturs. It simply isn’t at all believable that the Roman imperial administration forged the entire New Testament to simultaneously pacify and mock the Jews. All the evidence contradicts this. And it has no basic plausibility even in the general behavior or Roman administrations. It’s just an exercise in lunatic tea-leaf reading on a par with any random Bible Code nonsense. I survey examples of Atwill’s distortions and bad logic in my review, and discuss there how they reflect my GUTC. Here I’ll add a few more examples to drive home the point.

In this chapter, right after arguing one verse in Luke 9 emulates an event in the campaign of Titus (which I address in the review), Atwill claims the Samaritan waylaid by robbers in a parable told in Luke 10:25-37 “symbolizes” the 12th legion in Josephus’s narrative of the same war against the Jews. That Luke uses Josephus as a source text for narrative color is well established. But there is no evidence of his ever imitating anything about Titus or his strategic narrative like this. There is a reason Atwill can never get any of these claims past peer review (whereas those other claims have passed; note the difference not only in that outcome, but how they achieved it). As in this case: Atwill will just skip around among verses in Luke looking for anything he can make fit his fever dream, ignoring intervening material or even the order Luke puts anything in, and also just randomly switch time periods in the supposed parallelism of the war (by Atwill’s reckoning, Luke 10 jumps back in time to before the events of Titus emulated in Luke 9, and for no intelligible reason). These are signs of retrofitting, the same trick pulled by spirit mediums and “psychics” to try and make the audience think some amazing bit of knowledge has been gleaned when in fact the odds of a random hit were just jacked up by techniques like this: increase the number of chances for a random hit by disregarding textual and temporal order, and all your misses, and absurdly expanding the number of “ways” a hit can be claimed. This isn’t just crankery, it’s quackery.

Titus was not involved in the massacre of the 12th legion; he wasn’t even in theatre yet. So why is this supposed to exemplify Atwill’s thesis that the story follows Titus? Nor does Josephus ever mention Titus “rescuing” and reconstituting that legion as Atwill claims. After its destruction, the next we hear of it is that it was stationed with Titus at Caesarea when he marched on Jerusalem (Josephus, Jewish War 5.1); we’re told nothing of how it came to be there or who rebuilt it, and Titus still later punishes it for its cowardice by sending it to a remote outpost after the war (Ibid., 7.1), hardly creating any intelligible parallel with Jesus’s parable. And Josephus can’t have intended parallels he himself failed to signal.

We clearly aren’t supposed to think too hard about Atwill’s thesis here, which would require the Gospel of Luke to follow Josephus’s account of Titus’s prosecution of that war point-by-point, not skip around incoherently. And never mind that the Samaritan in the parable was waylaid while “going down from Jerusalem to Jericho,” whereas the 12th legion was going in exactly the opposite direction, from Jerusalem to Antipatris (northwest, towards the coast; not inland, east). And never mind there is no specific reference to Samaria in Josephus’s account of the legion’s destruction, nor any allusion to the twelfth legion in Luke. Nor do the stories bear any alignment of messaging. They don’t even mean the same thing (nor its deliberate opposite). So how can a parallel be intended in his supposed composing of Luke? The actual author of Luke is having Jesus tell an ahistorical story about neglecting one’s neighbor in need despite social prejudice; Josephus is telling a historical story about the mismanagement of an army advance, its desperate retreat, and a remarkable victory of the Jewish forces over Rome. These tales have nothing in common. They don’t even happen in the same place. Yes, both stories involve people “stealing” something (the Samaritan’s money; the legions’ banners and equipment). But there are thousands of ancient stories of theft, even using the same word for thieves or theft. There is nothing linking these. This is just random. Noise, no signal.

Because of all Three Rules of Crankery, nothing Atwill describes comes anywhere near a real argument for his thesis. Like when he discusses Josephus’s account of his three friends he found being crucified and asked they be saved, but only one survived (p. 105): Atwill tries to spin this into evidence Josephus wrote the scene in Mark where Jesus is crucified with two thieves and only one (Jesus) survives (Mark 15:27-32). Rule One: Atwill never discusses any real, contemporary scholarship on the reason Mark had two men to the right and left of Jesus (such as that it’s a deliberate irony, reversing the earlier scene in Mark 10:35-40). Rule Two: Atwill conflates possibility with probability (there is no evidence the author of Mark is the same as the author of the Life of Josephus, in which this story appears, or that he derived any element from that story). Rule Three: Atwill ignores all evidence against his thesis, and cherry-picks and distorts anything else he can twist to support his account instead.

Josephus never mentions the ones “to the right and left” being the ones to die, yet this is a crucial component of Mark’s story; in the Gospels, all three men die, and the only one removed is even reported as confirmed to be dead—that he rises from the dead days later is certainly no parallel to Josephus’s story, where all three are removed, and the one who survives never died; and Josephus says all were taken down and attended by doctors, yet no such thing happens in the Gospels, not even for the one taken down. Even if there were still a parallel intended, Jesus is not being mapped to Titus in the Gospels here, contradicting Atwill’s entire thesis: the parallel, if it existed, would be of Titus to Pilate, as those are the men who heed a request to order men taken down (Titus wasn’t the one on the cross); moreover, Pilate is only asked, and only gives an order, for one to be taken down, and only after confirming he was dead, which completely annihilates any parallel with the Titus story from Josephus. 

There are also no unusual verbal parallels, no parallels of messaging, and no unexpected parallels of ordering; nor do the differences between the two stories produce any apposite interpretation, as happens in real mimesis, and neither are they incidental (for actual professional criteria here see Proving History, pp. 192-204). The differences of detail are rather fundamental to each story and its purpose and message. It is true there is evidence Mark knew the Wars of Josephus, but only as a target of mimesis (not evincing common authorship), and not from Titus to Jesus (Mark has his Jesus emulate another Jesus instead: Jesus ben Ananias, who died in the siege of Jerusalem; cf. On the Historicity of Jesus, index). Their authorial style is otherwise too different to conclude they are at all likely to be the same person, so there isn’t support even for a significant prior probability here (on stylistics and Mark, see Hitler Homer Bible Christ, Ch. 16). So in the end, the stories are too different, do nothing to explain each other, and don’t track Atwill’s thesis of typing Jesus onto Titus. It is standard for stories emulating models to incorporate many differences and changes, but they are either incidental to the point of the story, or the changes are part of the point. Atwill produces no such reading. He literally doesn’t know what he is doing; the parallels he finds are random and meaningless, exactly the opposite of real literary mimesis.

Ignoring all that, Atwill cherry-picks and distorts evidence, such as by claiming a coincidence of names alone is otherwise too unlikely: two men named Joseph request of a Roman official that “someone” be taken down from a cross, and both even seem similarly nicknamed: the man from Arimathea is apo Arimathaias, which is close to Barmatthias, “son of Matthias,” and Josephus happens to be the “son of Matthias” (Life 1). But if this were intentional, Mark would say “Barmathias” or hou Matthias (as Josephus does), not apo Arimathaias. The spelling isn’t even the same (Josephus follows a tau with theta; Mark has no tau). An author colluding to create a parallel doesn’t screw it up like this. Whereas Josephus and Matthias are both common names, appearing hundreds of times in ancient sources; and Mark already has an expected reason to say apo Arimathaias: it means “from Best-disciple-town” or “Best-doctrine-town” in Greek, aptly describing the character’s behavior (in following Torah regarding the treatment of the dead), and aligning with Markan irony, two common features of mythography. Indeed, the final dying messiah in Jewish lore (at least as later documented in the Talmud, b.Sukkah 52a-b) was expected to be the son of Joseph, which would give us another Markan irony: he has a non-relative fulfill the role expected of a father, just as he switched which Simon would carry his cross, and which men would sit at his right and left in his day of glory. So the coincidence of similar names simply isn’t “too much of a coincidence” to believe. It’s as commonplace a coincidence as any.

This is the problem with arguing from a multiple comparisons fallacy, as all tea-leaf-reading cranks do: the parallel is allowed to fail in so many ways that it would be impossible not to find a story somewhere that would match, if you get to pick just any parallels that do match to count, no matter how incidental or how much of a stretch or how little they actually track your thesis. As long as you allowed that many failures to still count, a coincidence such as Atwill finds here is essentially inevitable. Only cranks refuse to grasp this point. You won’t find this stuff in serious peer-reviewed scholarship. There, disciplined methods and criteria are used when examining potential cases of literary emulation to ensure the probability of combined coincidences is substantially lower than of interpretable—and thus intentional—meaning. Atwill will refer to the conclusions of such serious work to bolster his own; but he never uses the methods producing those conclusions. This is precisely the sort of con game peer review exists in our field to prevent it publishing. Which is why Atwill avoids it.

R.M. Price

I give more mixed reviews of Robert M. Price’s contributions to this book. Like his Chapter 12, which I point out “contains many assertions of fact that are really just unproven, and sometimes questionable, speculations.” Is the symbolic blood-drinking of the Eucharist the result of fertility-god logic? Or is it actually just a natural extension of Christian corporate-body logic, literally communion through the sharing of a common body and blood? Was Yahweh a dying-and-rising god? Or is that just a speculative idea lacking in sufficient evidence? And so on. Rarely does Price back such claims with evidence. He just asserts them; maybe on occasion he gives a few hints of possible reasons to suspect them, or cites some obscure scholarship, but nothing that counts as actual evidence—as in, facts that increase the probability of his assertions over that of alternative explanations of the same evidence. 

Price often makes rather startling assertions like this—such as an elaborate description of an ancient king-humiliation ritual that he never identifies the specific cultural or historical provenance of, nor cites any sources for (p. 296). Yes, in his notes we find some obscure and sometimes worryingly old works cited that lack more recent corroboration, but none I could discern contained this material as he presents it, and though I hadn’t the means to exhaustively check to be sure, really, he needs to be doing this work for us. If you are going to make an extraordinary claim like this, you have to cite solid, recent scholarship, or summarize the evidence by which it established the claim; ideally, both. There are several instances of this across his twelfth chapter, and I have found this problematically typical of Price’s work. In my experience, some of his assertions prove out when checked; some do not. But when we aren’t even clearly told where we are supposed to look to fact-check things like this, the whole work loses utility. 

This is a serious defect. Proper scholarship needs to be meticulously and carefully cited when claims are made that are remarkable or, to most in the field, novel, so readers can back-check everything and verify or critique the merits of what is claimed (or indeed even be able to build on it if it checks out), as well as ascertain that the sources and scholarship have been correctly described, and soundly make the case as claimed. Price’s twelfth chapter lacks this essential feature (contrast this with my recent series, here on this blog, analyzing typical peer reviewed history papers to illustrate just what quality argument looks like, and why). Many of Price’s claims are well-referenced. But still too many are not; and those, usually, are the most startling and thus most in need of proper citation. A good editor would have prevented this, and insisted all his claims get properly cited and referenced, and evidence properly discussed, or peer-reviewed discussions of it properly identified—or else openly admitted to be speculative. The resulting chapter would have been exceptionally useful. Instead we get something barely of any use. 

Price does this again in Chapter 14, like when he proposes an elaborate theory based on so-called “Gnostic” teachings about a primordial crucifixion of Jesus (pp. 333-34): he cites no primary sources nor any modern scholarship on the narrative that he relies on, again rendering this entire section essentially useless to readers. It’s also not very logical—Paul says the crucifixion of Jesus, occurring just three days before his resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:3-4), had started the recent, not ancient, doomsday clock (Christ is “the firstfruits” of the general resurrection, proving the end was now at hand: 1 Corinthians 15:20-28) and only recently unlocked powers against Satan and his forces (Romans 5:13-14, Hebrews 9-10, Romans 8, 2 Corinthians 3, etc.); and of course Jesus cannot have been the “Seed of David” or “Root of Jesse” or “predicted to come” in Scripture when he died, if he died thousands of years before David, Jesse, and those Scriptures even existed (Galatians 3:16-29, Romans 1:1-3, 3:21-26, 15:12, 1 Corinthians 2:6-10, etc.). His chapters still sport many good arguments besides these. But by indiscriminately mixing sound arguments with bad arguments, these chapters do not come out well. (I discuss in the review a couple other chapters by Price that are better, but only because they are less ambitious.)

Oder

I actually include Danila Oder’s among the good chapters. I explain why in my review. But I also mention there are caveats. And I’d like to say more on that. “Her overall thesis,” I explain in the review, “is that the Gospel of Mark was originally composed as a play, to convey the message of the gospel (small g) rather than to relate anything anyone actually thought happened,” and she adds to this “some additional assertions about who commissioned it that are more crank than the main body of her thesis, but on which her main thesis doesn’t depend.” Her approach has the merit of making clear, usually, when she is speculating and when she is asserting a fact, so even when it goes off the reservation, even a lay reader is signaled to know that might be happening.

Oder’s thesis has been attempted before. She cites previous, indeed peer-reviewed scholarship on the possibility that Mark was composed for dramatic reading—to which we could now add Thomas Boomershine’s First-Century Gospel Storytellers and Audiences: The Gospels as Performance Literature (Cascade 2022)—but she rightly notes this is not exactly the same thing as her thesis; and on that point she does cite many real scholars who have suggested there might be a stage play behind the text, but without developing that notion further, as she does. But her actual thesis (in generalities, not particulars) was previously advanced as more than a passing suggestion by another amateur, Gary Courtney, in his self-published book Et Tu, Judas? Then Fall Jesus! (2004). Which I even cite in my peer reviewed work On the Historicity of Jesus as one of the few amateur efforts to warrant attention (Ibid. pp. 53-54), even though I am ultimately, again, not persuaded. There are two main reasons: one, Mark is not formatted like a play (and we have countless plays from the ancient world to compare it to); and the thesis that it ever had been does not explain earlier Christian writings (of Paul, Hebrews, 1 Clement, maybe even 1 Peter) or the origins of Christianity. So without more evidence than there is, this thesis can never rise beyond an unproductive “maybe.”

But on top of these same defects, Oder throws in conclusions wildly beyond any evidence to prove, like that Mark’s “play” was “performed in a Greek-style, two-level theater in Rome in 90-95 CE” (not a single one of those claims is backed by any evidence) and that it was funded by “Flavia Domitilla, niece of the emperor Domitian,” whom Domitian forced into exile for being a Jewish sympathizer (and this possibly the event leading to his assassination). But there was no actual connection between this Domitilla and Christianity (or any Romano-Jewish catacombs either, I should add). That was entirely a fabrication of mythographers centuries later. And in any event, there is no evidence of her “funding a play”; at all, much less this one. There is also no evidence that this play was performed “only in private” to select persons, and so on. In short, Oder is hugely over-stepping what any evidence can establish. Had she not done that, she would have something at least plausible to recommend: that Mark’s intent might have been related to an effort at constructing a passion play (as we know existed for similar religions, such as the cult of Romulus, who had annual passion plays performed in public). This isn’t ridiculous to suspect. It just lacks adequate evidence to confidently affirm.

Nevertheless, Oder’s chapter is an example of how to do this sort of thing correctly: she does not conceal evidence against what she says; she makes clear to the reader when she is speculating and when she has evidence for some assertion (and what that evidence is); she relies on up-to-date scholarship; and all her ridiculous claims (such as I just surveyed) aren’t essential to her thesis and thus even once we purge them we still have an argument left over worth the time considering. Even her methodology is sound, but for her disregard of the logical role of evidence in establishing a conclusion’s probability, and yet even that is self-evident to any reader and thus won’t mislead. Her failures of logic are transparent and thus assessable to anyone reading her case, unlike many other chapters in this book. For example, Oder is aware of the problem that our text of Mark is not formatted as a play; she proposes that it is a literary redaction of the original formatted play. This complicates her thesis, and reverts it back to speculation (as there is no evidence of this reformatting), but this at least indicates she knows what she is talking about. 

Likewise, when Oder lists markers of an underlying theatrical basis for our text of Mark, any reader can tell those markers could be there for other reasons (and it is true that there is no evidence to prove either reason more likely, so one’s assessment has to be made on other factors). And when she openly describes her methodology—assuming Mark was based on a play, and then chucking everything in the text that doesn’t match, even the ordering of events, as later literary embellishment, and seeing if what’s left matches her assumption—any reader can tell this is circular. It essentially cannot fail to get the result she wants—it would have this result for any text that shares any features in common with playwriting, whether actually based on a play or not. This circular methodology is actually quite common among serious mainstream Jesus scholarship, too, so Oder is actually in good company here. It’s still fallacious. 

Indeed in some places her mistakes could even be corrected by an expert in her favor. For example, at one point Oder says she thought it plausible the play would be performed in the private residence of a wealthy patron (and this is plausible, once you grant all her other assumptions), but rejected that conclusion for a multi-level theater because a private residence could not provide a location for an “upper room” scene (enacting the Last Supper). In actual fact it could. A wealthy patron’s villa in Rome at the time could easily have a two-story atrium more than adequate to serve. But this is just the plausibility of a speculation for which there is inadequate evidence, not a confident conclusion anyone can reach. There are too many underlying premises here that lack justification (that it was ever a play, that it was funded by a wealthy patron, and so on). Overall, this chapter is rewarding to read, but ultimately doesn’t land.

R.G. Price

The chapter by R.G. Price is another one I actually include in my review among the better chapters, even though it ultimately doesn’t persuade me. I have good things to say about it in the review. But here I just have a couple notes to add. Including the fact that in the review I too hastily said “R.G. Price rightly thinks … internal evidence indicates Mark knew only and exactly the seven letters of Paul now independently determined to be authentic,” because I should have mentioned one could challenge even this (I give examples of possible lifts from the Deutero-Pauline letters in Mark’s Use of Paul’s Epistles). Likewise I think R.G. Price gets overly speculative sometimes, especially when his thinking about the Gospel of Luke (pp. 124-25) becomes too gullible. Really, it’s as likely that Luke invented his patron Theophilus, the conveniently named “Godlover,” as a pose to frame his own missionary propaganda, than that any real Theophilus paid Luke to produce a new Gospel. Price’s reading here also overlooks known findings in the scholarship as to Luke’s apologetic aims. For instance, Luke appears to intend to gloss over conflicts in the Church to promote unity, to present Christians and even Jesus’s family as law-abiding citizens, to update the Kings narrative of Elijah-Elisha to promote more modern values, to explain and resolve growing apologetic problems (e.g. he invents the Parable of Lazarus to explain the absence better evidence for what Christians are claiming; he invents a narrative of the resurrection to “refute” Pauline opponents on the nature of the resurrection body), and so on. But I needn’t dwell on these points here. You can keep them in mind if ever you read his otherwise decently-argued chapter.

Doherty

Everyone knows I find Doherty’s work to be the best among the amateurs to date. But they might also know I think he goes too far, such that I have to trim a ton of fat to get to what he has argued that will survive peer review. A kernel in there still does (and both myself and Raphael Lataster have gotten that kernel through peer review to prove it). But that doesn’t rescue the fat that Doherty lards it with. And so I still do have criticisms of his work, including of his chapter in this volume. I mention this in my review, and give an example, but here I will add more.

As another example, Doherty argues that it’s significant that Hebrews puts ancient Scriptures into the mouth of Jesus in the present tense (p. 243); for example, in Hebrews 2:12: “He says, ‘I will declare your name to my brothers and sisters; in the assembly I will sing your praises’.” Doherty appends a footnote here, noting that this is accomplished with “the Greek present participle legon.” Though omega should have been demarcated from omicron here, i.e. legôn, the editors should have caught this, and it’s trivial. The real problem here is that Greek emphasizes aspect over tense, especially with participles. The word legôn in Greek means “saying” as an ongoing fact, in continuous aspect. Since the Scriptures still exist in the present, saying they still speak to us in the present is an ordinary form of expression; it does not imply present action. Simply anyone who wrote something in an ancient book could be described as “saying” things in the present; you’ll notice this is a common idiom even in English (e.g. “As the Psalmist says, ‘I will declare your name to my people’.”). So no conclusion can be drawn from this that the author is still around, as Doherty implies. This is another example of how being an amateur hurts your ability to correctly frame and discuss the evidence, and lay readers won’t know this.

Of course Doherty is still correct in his conclusion—clearly Christians got many “sayings of Jesus” by simply reading the Scriptures and believing those were words he spoke to the Prophets during his archangelic pre-existence, and that Jesus is still around to endorse these statements today (see The Original Scriptural Concept of ‘The Lord’ Jesus); and more importantly, Christians seemed at this point in history (when Hebrews was written) to have no idea that Jesus said anything in any other way, than either by post-mortem revelation or pre-mortem whispers to ancient prophets, which still calls into question his ever having had an earthly ministry exactly as Doherty argues—but that conclusion derives from the context, not the grammar; which is a point Doherty still also illustrates quite well. 

The same holds for Doherty’s discourse on Hebrews 10:5-10 (pp. 244-45): the Psalms were already by this point widely regarded as prophesies of future events, so there is no grammatical distinction between saying this “is” what Jesus said when he fulfilled the prophecy, and saying this is what the prophet predicted Jesus “would” say when he fulfilled the prophecy. We therefore can’t discern anything about this from the grammar as Doherty argues; we can only get an understanding of what is meant from the context—as Doherty also argues. So in each case, in Doherty’s treatment of Hebrews 2 and Hebrews 10, we have a slight error, and one expected of an amateur, but it doesn’t affect his actual point once corrected. Which is a good example of the kind of error that would likely have been corrected before publication by peer review, which illustrates another reason to value rather than avoid proper peer review.

That stands in distinction to arguments that might merely be wrong but that are well-enough presented. For example, one can judge for themselves the merits of Doherty’s argument that the book of Hebrews’ silence on the Eucharist signifies ignorance of it (pp. 250-53), because everything there is to say on the matter is here presented, and one can check the verses referenced. There is nothing peer review would have to correct here, since it is not the job of peer reviewers to reject conclusions they do not share, but to ensure those conclusions are reached by a competent procedure (such as proper citations and the address of counter-arguments). I myself don’t see what Doherty sees here, but that’s okay. We don’t have to agree with his every point. But we do have to have responses to his every point, which then is the value of reading a chapter like this. Whether Hebrews “would” have mentioned the Eucharist had its authors known of it is something even lay readers can judge for themselves; as also the consequences either way.

For example, even after rejecting this one argument, I still don’t think any argument for historicity results; even if Doherty is wrong about what the text of Hebrews would or would not have said, there still is no clear reference to a Last Supper as an earthly event in Hebrews. So my disagreement on this point still does not affect his overall point, and any capable reader can come to that same conclusion. I don’t think the Eucharist is at all relevant to the points being made in Hebrews (whether in its chapter 9 or elsewhere). And Hebrews is not an introductory treatise for new converts but an appeal to well-worn Christians. It therefore has no need of detailing anything about the Eucharist; its audience will already have been practicing it for decades, and thus will readily understand key terms (like “the body” and “the blood” of Christ) and pertinent background teachings (like what the Eucharist ritual’s function and relationship to the Melchizedek priesthood were), so they could easily see the Eucharist already implied in passages discussing their role; so there is no rhetorical reason to repeat them here.

And we should expect something like this, as it’s very unlikely the author of Hebrews had never heard of Paul’s foundational revelation of the Eucharist (1 Corinthians 11:23-25; hence itself a vision, and not the memory of any actual historical event). Hence I think Hebrews 10:19-29 is talking about the Eucharist ritual—at the abstract level, in terms of its spiritual effects on those partaking of it, which is the only important point to the author(s) of Hebrews, with allusions its readers will readily understand. Exactly as it does the ritual of baptism (Hebrews 10:22); and surely we can’t imagine the author of Hebrews had never heard of the Christian baptism ritual, simply because it is never “directly” mentioned. 

So I don’t think as much can be made of Hebrews’ silence on this point as Doherty contends. But he still makes the best argument one can for his position; and it deserves a serious response. And you’ll notice my response is no more secure than his. We neither of us have a smoking gun establishing our case, and yet we both have a stronger point to make here than historicists can muster. Because at the end of the day, there is still no mention here of a historical event in the life of Jesus (Baptism or Eucharist). All the same can be said of Doherty’s attempt to argue that the author of Hebrews never tries to reconcile his earthly-celestial argument to Jesus’s death in the earthly realm (whether actually on Earth or above it: pp. 256-60), and “therefore” the author had no idea of such a thing. I disagree—Hebrews 13 specifically advances this very apologetic (cf. 13:11-14), trying to fit the one idea into the other with a typical exercise in excuse-making, complete with rhetorical pivot. Critics still need to contend with Doherty’s argument. And in the end, they still don’t end up with anything definitely historical (Hebrews never actually says Jesus was killed on Earth). Much of what Doherty argues, here and elsewhere, operates like this.

Conclusion

I have mostly focused today on some (not even all) of the bad chapters of this anthology, expanding on what I already said about them in the review. But I have good things to say about other chapters. And in every case, more is said there than here. To have a real sense of my take on the book as a whole and its every chapter, you’ll still have to read my review. But this article can help expand on what I brief there, to see the force of my points. I also have more to say about the one astrotheological chapter of this book, by Bill Darlison, but it’s enough to warrant a blog post of its own, so that will be my next article this month (that will go live tomorrow as Please No More Astrotheology).