I mentioned in my last article (What I Said at the Brea Conference) that I first became aware there that Dennis MacDonald has switched from saying that doubting the historicity of Jesus was improbable but at least plausible, to insisting it’s not even plausible. He has since said this in public interviews. I already revised my list of supporting scholars accordingly, but here I will discuss what (so far as anyone can tell) has changed with MacDonald and why.

The Change of Play

At the Brea conference I cited a public interview when Derek Lambert asked Dr. MacDonald, “What is your probability on historicity? Is it still 80 to 20 like you said [before]?” MacDonald replied, “No, it’s probably like 92 to 8 probability; but historians are not going to commit themselves to a 100 percent,” and “I have to be open to things I don’t understand, but for me the evidence is compelling that there was a historical Jesus, who very early on, in various ways was mythologized.” Which amounts to saying the odds Jesus nevertheless didn’t exist are respectably 1 in 12. At Brea, a scholar claiming to be MacDonald’s friend (and thus, we might presume, someone with influence on him) angrily shouted about how MacDonald thinks it’s poppycock, and no one who thinks otherwise should be listened to, clearly giving the impression of trying to intimidate the audience into not taking the proposition seriously. And lo and behold, months after that Brea conference, MacDonald has publicly switched to calling mythicism “preposterous” and “not even worth” discussing (after having happily discussed it multiple times before then, so this is quite a change of opinion).

MacDonald hasn’t stated any reason for his change in position, other than to imply he doesn’t like the professional blowback from having admitted it was plausible. Because the closest thing to a reason given has been his strangely complaining that I “misuse” his work to argue for the conclusion that Jesus didn’t exist. Which is not true; I have never used MacDonald’s work to argue for any increase in the probability Jesus didn’t exist. I find that the Gospels overall have no effect on that probability (cf. On the Historicity of Jesus, pp. 506-09), apart from mythic content not associated with MacDonald (Ibid. p. 395). I have only barely used MacDonald’s work at all, and then only to support the argument (backed by numerous other scholars I rely on even more extensively) that the Gospels are literary mythical constructs and not histories (cf. On the Historicity of Jesus, pp. 436-40). To understand how bizarre this all is, in the same interview where MacDonald makes this false claim, he totally affirms the conclusion that the Gospels are literary mythical constructs and not histories. So I have to confess, the man is making no sense.

The State of Play

There have now been two interviews of Dennis MacDonald by Edouard Tahmizian, Vice President of the Internet Infidels Board of Directors, and creator of the Internet Infidels’ first YouTube Channel, the Freethinker Podcast. The Infidels run The Secular Web, which was the first central warehouse of freethought literature on the internet. I was a contributor and editor there for years, and eventually ran the site as Editor in Chief, but retired to move on to my own work some twenty years ago or so. Now on their podcast, MacDonald announced the change of play in June that I just described. He doesn’t give any examples there of anything he claims. He doesn’t explain how I have ever used his argument for the literary construction of Gospel myths to argue that Jesus didn’t exist, nor does he explain how or why he has changed his probability estimate for a non-historical Jesus from his previous 1 in 12 (which was admittedly already a downgrade from his even earlier estimate of 1 in 5), to something presumably below hundreds or thousands to one (guessing from his less precise choice of words). Whereas he does make a case for his conclusion that the Gospels are mythical literary constructs and not histories. Which is literally the only conclusion of his that I have ever employed.

In fact, just like MacDonald does, I explicitly make clear that the Gospels’ being mythical constructs doesn’t argue Jesus didn’t exist: “my conclusion is that we can ascertain nothing in the Gospels that can usefully verify the historicity of Jesus [but] neither do they prove he didn’t exist. As evidence, they simply make no difference to that equation” (OHJ, p. 509). MacDonald would disagree (he thinks he can still extract some evidence from the Gospels; and we’ve debated this twice), but since I don’t use anything he argues to counter that disagreement, there simply isn’t any sense in which I use his position on the Gospels to argue that Jesus didn’t exist. Even the one sense in which I use the mythographic nature of the Gospels to establish a lower prior probability that their main character existed (OHJ, Chapter 6) involves nothing MacDonald has ever argued. What I observe is that most people who became the central subject of this kind of mythography didn’t exist (and that’s most, not all; I construct a range of frequencies from the data). This is nothing MacDonald has ever argued; he has never even addressed the question of the relative frequency of mythography subjects being historical; and none of the data I use to determine that frequency come from MacDonald.

Following the Ideological Nutrient Gradient

Ironically (or perhaps not, if MacDonald’s change of position is emotional rather than epistemic), the argument critics make is usually the other way around: that my reliance on MacDonald for the literary mythology thesis discredits my case for a mythical Jesus because his defense of that thesis is (supposedly) ridiculous. In other words, people use the (undeservedly) bad reputation of MacDonald’s work to try and “contaminate” the reputation of mine. But here the actual thesis in question is simply the one MacDonald and I still completely agree on—and, frankly, so do most mainstream historians now. Even M. David Litwa and Dale Allison have surrendered to it (and see my discussion of this in response to Justin Brierley). That the Gospels are myth and not history is not controversial. It’s the normal position of most historicists, and is only frowned on now by fundamentalists and other Christian dogmatists.

So trying to “taint” my work by waving the name “Dennis MacDonald” around is not even implicitly logical. MacDonald’s conclusion on this, the only actual point I used his work for, is simply the mainstream consensus. The only thing about it that critics can’t abide is that he also allows literary emulation of Hellenic literature, not just Jewish; but that has no relevance to the conclusion. These critics accept even extensive literary emulation of Jewish literature in the Gospels, as do I. So what does it matter whether there is a little Homer in there as well? This is the emotional reaction of an offended Christian faith community, not a logically relevant or even competent objection to anything.

This doesn’t stop someone like Daniel Gullotta contradictorily arguing that I only address the mythical Jesus of the Gospels and not the sensible reconstructions of modern historians (which is false; I do exactly the opposite) and (!) that I dismiss the mythical Jesus of the Gospels for sensible reconstructions instead by relying on the work of Dennis MacDonald (when in fact I don’t; I rely on an extensive array of mainstream scholarship all of which concurs on this point). So Gullotta can’t even maintain a coherent description of my book’s argument. At one moment it supposedly ignores historical reconstructions that admit the Gospels are mythography (which is all mainstream reconstructions now); at another moment it is to be criticized for relying on historical reconstructions that admit the Gospels are mythography. But it can’t be both. Nor can Gullotta consistently maintain both. Either he thinks we should adopt the fundamentalist position (and take the Gospels as reliable histories) or that we should reject the fundamentalist position (and take the Gospels as embellished mythologies). He can’t stand on both grounds. So when Gullotta tries to taint my work with a well-poisoning fallacy, by suggesting that my citing MacDonald’s Homeric thesis must entail my poor judgment and therefore warrants dismissing all my conclusions (even when they are mainstream), this is truly farcical (see Why Are We Talking about Homer?).

Nevertheless, this kind of illogical and dishonest behavior from critics might be having an emotional impact on MacDonald. The disingenuous argumentation of the likes of Gullotta does intentionally try to create the impression that I am “using” MacDonald’s work to “argue” that Jesus didn’t exist. But this is an incoherent fabrication of Gullotta. He is deliberately conflating the fact that I only use MacDonald (alongside a dozen other scholars) to argue for the mythography thesis—which I then conclude doesn’t argue Jesus didn’t exist—with his desire to criticize any mainstream scholar suggesting mythic material might come from somewhere other than Scripture. Gullotta conveniently pretends I didn’t cite ten times more material on Gospel emulation of Jewish literature, and even more conveniently pretends that it doesn’t exist and that the only scholar arguing for emulation at all is Dennis MacDonald. All because MacDonald is “unpopular,” so linking my name with his is supposed to warrant harrumphs from the peanut gallery.

This is all dishonest, disingenuous bullshit. And that’s the case even before we get to the point that this denigration of MacDonald isn’t even deserved—his Homeric thesis is solid. But remove it entirely from OHJ and all the same conclusions still follow: the Gospels are extensively mythographical, and this is the mainstream consensus now. So Gullotta’s abuse of MacDonald here is a red herring. It doesn’t have anything actually to do with my work or his. But we must still consider the emotional effect this kind of behavior must be having on MacDonald. Who is talking to him; who is telling him what; what is he seeing; what is he afraid of. Because there are many indications of influence and emotionality here.

MacDonald’s Second Interview

After MacDonald’s first interview with Tahmizian in June, I did an interview on the same show in August. One of the things we discussed was my perplexed reaction to what MacDonald had said there, which was basically what I just said in the Change and State of Play sections above. MacDonald then went back on Tahmizian’s show a week later to respond. In that second interview, MacDonald repeats the same assertions, in even more emotional terms (doubting historicity is “intellectually bankrupt” and “preposterous” and built on “one forced argument after another,” without giving any coherent argument for this being the case), while adding yet more bizarre claims, such as that I deny the Gospels are primarily based on Jewish precedents and ideas (in minute 15; I actually extensively argue the opposite), or that my thesis is a conspiracy theory (in minute 26; in fact, it involves no conspiracies: OHJ, index, “conspiracy theories”), or that I am “dogmatic” about “the mythic Jesus” hypothesis (in minute 8, where this whole segment begins).

Since I find as much as a 1 in 3 chance Jesus existed (OHJ, Chapter 12), it’s not really possible to say I’m “dogmatic” about Jesus being a myth. So this distorted view of the facts suggests MacDonald is not operating on reliable judgment here. He doesn’t even seem to know anything about what I have actually argued. This is especially clear in their confused exchange over the Davidic seed passage in Romans 1 (in minutes 27 to 28), where nothing either of them say correctly describes anything I have said (see Empirical Logic and Romans 1:3). They literally don’t know what my argument is, or any of the evidence I have presented for it, or my responses to any of their armchair rebuttals (as if I had never thought of those things myself: see On the Historicity of Jesus, pp. 575-82; supported now by even more evidence in Jesus from Outer Space, pp. 171-90). They aren’t even aware of the fact that their methodology is logically backwards (see OHJ, pp. 512-14), or that I actually count this as evidence for the existence of Jesus! That’s right. On my upper error margin I rate this passage as increasing the probability of historicity (OHJ, pp. 581-82, 593-94). That neither of them knows this, indicates neither of them know what my argument even is—which their failure to get right any of its details confirms. This is deeply unprofessional. MacDonald should full well understand criticizing an argument you’ve never even read or taken any bother to correctly understand is shameful—it happens to him often enough that I should think he of all people would be getting this ethical standard right. Which leaves us to wonder why he isn’t. Why has MacDonald now adopted the unprofessional behavior of his own critics? (The very behavior I shamed last week.)

Even if by calling me “dogmatic” MacDonald means (though I don’t think he does) that I am only dogmatic about taking the question seriously, I base that conclusion on the state of the evidence, so it can’t be described as a dogma. The evidence for historicity is immanently questionable. Which is not to say that it is immanently doubtable. There is certainly debate to be had as to whether the evidence is strong enough to reach either or any conclusion. But there simply is no straightforward evidence for Jesus. Everything there is has to be jacked up with numerous underlying interpretive premises before it assures us of any conclusions. This is very much unlike every other significant historical figure in antiquity (see Chapter 5 of Jesus from Outer Space for a demonstration). To deny this is to deny very clear evidence of the fact. That’s being dogmatic. And yet MacDonald never presents any evidence for the contrary assessment. He just asserts the new dogma he has adopted. He doesn’t even seem interested in presenting evidence for that dogma.

So what does MacDonald offer by way of explaining either (a) why he thinks I use his work “to argue for” a mythical Jesus or (b) why he has changed his mind about whether that conclusion is probable enough to “take seriously”? Well, nothing. He ignores the question. And then spends his time merely explaining why he thinks there is evidence enough for a historical Jesus; he never gets around to answering (a) or (b). But if we accept his change of subject, then I’ve already explained why his purported evidence doesn’t hold enough weight to carry the conclusion—and none of my explanation “uses” his work, nor is any of this new, so as to explain his change of position. His 1 in 12 estimate came in our second debate, the third time he has reviewed our respective cases for relative probability. These three ([1][2][3]) include our discussion of his strange insistence, here repeated in minute 23, that 1 John isn’t a forgery building on John 20-21 as most scholars think but is a real eyewitness account of meeting Jesus (!), his wild claims about Papias, repeated in minute 25, and his “I just can’t think of why they’d make this up” schtick (in minute 16), which I’ll get to below. There is nothing new in this interview, except his ignorant bungling of my argument about Paul’s Davidic Seed theology (which I just addressed), and one really weird argument that is actually old Christian “empty tomb” apologetics (which I’ll get to next).

But that still doesn’t get to what we are asking for. Saying “I think I can build a case for the historicity of Jesus on the evidence we have” is simply not the same thing as saying you have proved that evidence to be entirely straightforward and not in any need of interpretive framing to get it to do that. MacDonald always has to build that interpretive framework, thus proving my point, not his. We shouldn’t have to build a complex interpretive framework to extract historical data for someone’s existence—unless the evidence is indeed unclear and thus “immanently questionable,” and thus in fact in need of debating, rather than that debate being “preposterous.” That doesn’t require concluding the debate won’t come out for Jesus in the end; it very well could. But there still has to be a debate. MacDonald shows no awareness of the distinction. He conflates “I can make a case for Jesus” with “I have proved there is nothing to debate about that case.” MacDonald not only never justifies that leap of logic, but he seems unaware that you even have to. And that is a dogma. As to why Dennis MacDonald is now being dogmatic rather than empirical, that remains to be explained.

Wait, What?

This mystery gets even weirder when the only actual argument MacDonald makes for historicity in this review is a piece of Christian apologetics: that Matthew says the Jews argued over the fate of the body; therefore there historically had to be a missing body! (In minute 12; then starting again at minute 20.) Oh boy. Atheists will be scratching their heads here. Mainstream scholars the world over already refuted that argument decades ago. I should not have to go over this again. But, sigh, let’s do it once again: there is no evidence of Matthew’s contrived and implausible story about the Jews worrying about where the body went; it is wholly unknown to Mark, and wholly abandoned by Luke and John; and it’s completely absent from the earliest “history” of the church we have, the book of Acts—despite it being narratively impossible to exclude it from the sequence of events and trial speeches there (OHJ, pp. 368-71). By contrast, there is an obvious and intelligible reason for Matthew to invent this story, by emulating the narrative of Daniel in the Lion’s Den (as this legend indisputably does: Proving History, pp. 199-204), to create an apologetic for the Markan empty tomb story (Ibid., p. 128), and conveniently depict the Jewish elite as law-breaking connivers (The Empty Tomb, pp. 363-64). And yet no one else thought this made-up tale plausible; not even the other Evangelists. We’d have to be pretty dumb to fall for it ourselves.

As I wrote in Proving History (p. 128):

Matthew’s stated excuse for introducing guards into the story of the empty tomb narrative … reveals a rhetoric that apparently only appeared after the publication of Mark’s account of an empty tomb. For Mark shows no awareness of the problem. It clearly hadn’t occurred to Mark when composing the empty tomb story that it would invite accusations the Christians stole the body (much less that any such accusations were already flying). Which should be evidence enough that Matthew invented that story, as otherwise surely that retort would have been a constant drum beat for decades already, powerfully motivating Mark to answer or resolve it (if his sources already hadn’t, and they most likely would have). There can therefore have been no such accusation of theft by the time Mark wrote. The full weight of every probability is against it. Mark simply didn’t anticipate how his enemies would respond to his story.

Which further entails no empty tomb story existed before Mark. Had it done, these polemics would already have arisen decades before, requiring Mark to address them. The book of Acts also makes clear there was no empty tomb claim made in the early decades of Christianity—because it never comes up, either as anything they claimed, or anything the Jews had to rebut, or even put Christians on trial for (again, see OHJ, pp. 368-71). Meanwhile, by the time Matthew is composing, it is lifetimes away from the original events, in a foreign land and foreign language, far beyond anyone’s ability to “check” things like whether Jesus really lived—any more than they could check things like whether he showed up for dinner parties after he was dead, or magically fed thousands of people, or flew up into the sky before a hundred witnesses. So we can’t make arguments about what the Jews of that time actually were saying anyway; because nothing they’d then be saying would be informed in any relevant way. Yet we still don’t have any evidence that this is what they were actually saying, much less that it was the only thing they were saying; the evidence actually points to the opposite.

Because we can add to all that the evidence of what Jews appear to have actually been saying: for Justin reports they did question the historicity of Jesus (Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 8.4; notably, Justin’s Jewish opponent never mentions any claim that Christians stole the body, or even any reference to the empty tomb as a point of controversy, confirming Matthew made all that up). We can even add to this that 2 Peter 1-2 reveals that even some Christians questioned the historicity of Jesus; and the same concern to answer them (and the same method of doing it) appears in 1 John 1 and 4, and 2 John 7-11. This is why all of a sudden historicizing details became essential to the creed, and all Christians were declared anathema who denied them. Yes, MacDonald would want to “spin” all this evidence a different way; but that he has to is why this is not preposterous to debate. His spin denies the plain meaning and context of the words of these texts, replacing them with layers of presuppositions transforming their plain meaning into something else; all just to get the result he wants. This is what it means to say there is no straightforward evidence for Jesus. It’s all debatable. And anyone who does not admit this is the dogmatist. (On this whole subject see OHJ, pp. 349-56 and Jesus from Outer Space, pp. 152-70.)

Now, which do you think carries more weight? All this evidence against the story in Matthew being true? Or MacDonald’s mere assertion that it must nevertheless be true? Notice the mountains of presumptions he has to build up, one after another, in order to create an interpretive framework not only to explain away all the evidence I just piled up, but also to invent excuses to read the remaining evidence as still making the result he wants not merely possible, but probable, and not only that, but so probable as to declare ourselves confident that we have here evidence for the existence of Jesus. That this is how historians argue for a historical Jesus is how we know there probably wasn’t one. They have only apologetics; no actual evidence, nor any viable logic, supporting their declared confidence. They ignore all evidence against them, build rafts of presuppositions to implausibly reinterpret what little evidence they do have, and then, “Presto!”, claim to have so decisively proved Jesus existed as to render any further debate “preposterous.” We, meanwhile, just follow the evidence, embracing only ever the simplest, most obvious, and best attested frameworks for understanding it.

To illustrate this declining judgment, and its replacement with hasty apologetics, in minute 16 MacDonald offers the argument that “he can’t imagine” why anyone would make up stories about Jesus. Not only has he himself extensively written on why people made up stories about Jesus, but one could say the same silly thing of Moses, Abraham, Israel, Elijah, Samson, Hercules, Osiris, Romulus, Aesop, King Arthur, John Frum, Ned Ludd. Any historian of those mythologies could quickly shoot his argument down. There are lots of reasons people invented mythical mouthpieces for their ideas, especially ones conveniently named—Jesus, after all, means “Yahweh’s Savior.” Do we really need to stretch our imagination to ascertain why someone would rewrite the story of one mythical hero, Moses, into a new mythical hero, Jesus, to market their ideas? Particularly when “reifying” celestial and spiritual deities into historical figures was fashionable in exactly that time, in exactly the language-community this literature was written by and for? (OHJ, pp. 214-222) Even in Hebrew the Jews did that with Moses. So, why, again, wouldn’t they do it with Jesus? This is what ancient mythographers did. And MacDonald knows this.

So when it now comes to historicity, MacDonald’s competence has strangely fallen into curious slumber, as he falls back on old, gullible Christian apologetical arguments and naive handwaving, rather than anything that would survive real scholarly critique. This isn’t a good look for him.

Conclusion

I’ve never used Dennis MacDonald’s work to argue Jesus didn’t exist. The only way I have ever used his work is to support his own (and generally now the mainstream) conclusion that the Gospels are mythographies, not histories. Which I have always made clear does not argue Jesus didn’t exist. And while MacDonald has radically dropped his probability estimate for a Christian origin without Jesus, he has still given no legitimate epistemic reason to have done that. He gives no reason why its probability is now supposed to be that low—as opposed to, for example, his conclusion last year that its probability was at least 1 in 12. And he gives no reason why we are supposed to not even take the possibility seriously anymore. He offers no new evidence, no new logic, other than junk like old-fashioned fundamentalist “empty tomb” apologetics so dubious we are only left to wonder what has happened to his judgment. Nothing else epistemically appears to have changed.

Which leaves only emotional hypotheses to explain MacDonald’s new attitude. It must simply make him uncomfortable to admit to anything sensible here, because he is worried about the apologetic abuse even merely the association of our names has attracted upon him. Which is a typical cause of denialism in the field generally. I suspect quite a lot of historians don’t go on the record admitting to the plausibility of a Christian origin without Jesus precisely because they fear the consequences to their work and career. Not because those consequences would be justified; but simply because they would exist. Which is an example of Bart Ehrman’s ad baculum fallacy having its intended effect: don’t you dare admit to anything, or we will destroy you. And yet, if that is the argument you have to make, then you have already admitted to losing this debate. Fear of the cudgel is the only thing stopping people saying so.