I’ve had a lot of queries about what I think of the recent MythVision interview of Christian apologist James McGrath (12 August 2022). I’m kind of over him, to be honest, because he’s had ample chance to honestly engage with the peer-reviewed literature on this, and repeatedly refuses. He never actually reads anything that’s been said about this under peer review; he ignores all the evidence and arguments there; and makes false statements about it all that betray his ignorance of basic facts. So he really has fully discredited any chance he could possibly have had of having a respectable opinion on this subject. Because of this, what we now know is that we should just ignore him. He has no new arguments—nothing that wasn’t already refuted under peer review—and he has no interest in engaging with ours. So why do we care what he thinks about this subject?

I’m not just claiming this. I have thoroughly documented every point I just made, with direct quotations and linked evidence. See McGrath on OHJ: A Failure of Logic and Accuracy and the list of articles at the start there. Now in this interview McGrath (as I documented him often doing before) pretends he didn’t make the arguments he has, and reverses himself. For example, now he claims it’s respectable to debate Mythicism (minute 16-17) and that his job would be safe if he admitted Jesus didn’t exist (minute 9). This is the same McGrath who wrote that “Ehrman rightly puts it” that “anyone holding” to a Mythicist thesis “is as likely to get a teaching job in an established department of religion as a six-day creationist is likely to land on in a bona fide department of biology.” McGrath fully endorsed Ehrman’s ad baculum fallacy that Mythicists should get fired. Now he suddenly has forgotten he said that and is claiming the opposite.

Yet even in this interview McGrath again disingenuously claims that Mythicism is just like Young Earth Creationism (it is not). Remember, Mythicism has passed peer review—twice now. That alone destroys any claim that it’s “just like” YEC. We also have as of this writing twenty-six fully-qualified scholars, including many reputable professors in the field, admitting Mythicism is a plausible position, which also does not sound like YEC. But even more obviously one can tell the evidence for evolution is outrageously better than for a historical Jesus. So why continue pushing this dishonest analogy? And yes, doing this is dishonest. It simply is not true that they are similar. And yet if historicity were actually defensible, would such dishonest defenses of it be necessary? Please seriously ask yourself this. And no, we are not using “the same methods” as Young Earth Creationists. That is a lie. Nothing he claims being done was done in our peer-reviewed work.

McGrath also resorts to his usual Genetic Fallacy, dismissing Mythicist arguments not on their merits but solely on the basis that “he thinks” Mythicists are all ex-fundamentalists who have swung to the other extreme (minute 10-11). This describes none of its peer-reviewed proponents. I was never a fundamentalist (or even substantively a Christian—my only declared faith growing up was in Taoism). And I am not advocating anything extreme—I fully allow a respectable 1 in 3 chance Jesus did exist after all. Lataster was never a fundamentalist either; he was a liberal Catholic, and is even less committed to Mythicism than I am: he concludes a 1 in 2 chance Jesus nevertheless existed. So McGrath again makes false claims (this time about Mythicists themselves) in order to defend historicity. So once again, why would historicity require a defense built on falsehoods like this? Inquiring minds want to know.

McGrath Is Losing His Audience

Eventually Derek, the host, has to prod McGrath to stop making these fallacious arguments and actually talk about evidence—to give some credible reason why he still believes in historicity even after the publication of two peer reviewed monographs doubting it. That’s when McGrath reveals he has never read my peer-reviewed study on this subject (much less Raphael Lataster’s), yet dishonestly pretends to have responses to it. I’ll turn to that segment next. But I’ll prime you with a bit of foreshadowing, by quoting at you the top-ranked comments by viewers of this video:

Top of the list:

Travis: “I take issue with [McGrath’s] comparing Holocaust denial to mythicism. It’s not a slippery slope. For a historical Jesus, the evidence is just really weak. That’s completely unlike events that are well attested. It’s not crazy to think that someone who is obviously 99% myth and [with] no good evidence for the 1%, that this person might be 100 percent myth.”

Ugh. Yes. We have that to look forward to in this video: McGrath will dishonestly compare Mythicism to the Holocaust. In case it bears repeating: the evidence for the Holocaust is extraordinarily vast. In no way would we be debating the historicity of Jesus if we had that kind of evidence for it. So it is most definitely dishonest to claim these are analogous. It’s also a cloaked well-poisoning fallacy, attempting to morally taint Mythicists with an alleged proximity to Holocaust denial. McGrath should be ashamed of himself for this. If he isn’t, then his dishonesty is shameless, and that can only discredit any opinion he has on this subject. We cannot be hewing to the opinions of someone so unashamed to misrepresent.

Second on the list:

The Empty Cross: “Derek, please, when you ask scholars, don’t ask about their opinion on mythicism … ask about their opinion on peer-reviewed published mythicism. Usually people you interview mainly criticize a straw-man version of mythicism.”

Ugh. Yes. We also have that to look forward to in this video: McGrath will ignore the peer reviewed literature of his own field and attack straw men instead. And yes, he does this (I’ll document it shortly). Ask yourself: Why? Is this an honest way of engaging with the argument?

Third on the list:

Molkien: “It’s remarkable how little of this conversation was about arguments for Jesus’ existence or responses to mythicists arguments (and those that did barely touched on or badly misrepresented them) and how much of it was on the ‘tone’ of mythicists, or how mean they are in YouTube comments or equating their reasoning to that of flat earthers / evolution or holocaust deniers or questioning their motives.”

So, more than one person noticed this, and their comments were deemed the most useful. McGrath is uninterested in actually debating the peer-reviewed literature and instead really only wants to advance dishonest arguments against it (like that it is the same as Creationism or Holocaust denial, or that tone has anything to do with facts). Why? He instead wants to just winge about people who rightly complain about his continuing to ignore the peer-reviewed literature and make dishonest arguments instead. McGrath is pissing people off with this behavior. And he does not have the right to complain about them getting pissed off. It is his behavior that is censurable. Their anger at him is justified.

And if McGrath were a good person, he would want to do something about that, wouldn’t he? “How dare you point out my misbehavior” is not a good look, Dr. McGrath. Time to get the plank out of your own eye here. I have extensively documented this as a pervasive problem across our entire academic field (What I Said at the Brea Conference; as even more recent examples, see On Paul Krause’s Objections to Jesus Mythicism and On Jonathan McLatchie’s Objections to Jesus Mythicism, and my ongoing complete list of examples in List of Responses to Defenders of the Historicity of Jesus; and again I have numerous articles documenting this for James McGrath in particular, who pulls all the same dishonest stunts). This needs to stop. James McGrath needs to start being honest and actually engaging with the peer-reviewed arguments in this subject. Then people will stop denouncing him as a slandering liar.

McGrath’s hypocrisy is most clearly on display when he winges overlong on how academics like himself are being accused of bias (minute 18-21). But he gets the sequence of events wrong. It would be correct to complain that dismissing evidence because of mere claims of bias in the academy is indeed fallacious; and that is, I am sure, why he attempts to deploy this argument. But that isn’t what is happening in Mythicism today. What is actually happening now is this: Mythicists keep catching the academy ignoring evidence and arguments and deploying dishonest and fallacious defenses of historicity instead (just like McGrath does in this very interview), and then they adduce an explanation for why academics might be doing that. Bias is an obvious one. So Mythicists are not dismissing evidence on a charge of bias; they are explaining historicists’ dismissing of evidence (and replacing it with dishonest and fallacious argumentation instead) with a hypothesis of bias. This is what makes McGrath a hypocrite: he is the one fallaciously dismissing the Mythicist case not by properly evaluating it but instead ignoring all the pertinent evidence and arguments, and replacing them instead with a false claim that Mythicists are doing what in fact he is the one doing.

Another example is when McGrath gives lip service to what in fact he himself never actually does, like “treating your own view that you prefer with the same level of skepticism” (minute 21-22). He makes clear he means coming up with your own counter-arguments to all your own positions before publishing them. This is exactly what I did in On the Historicity of Jesus. To this day, no substantively new arguments against my conclusions have been advanced that I didn’t already address there (see Historicity Big and Small: How Historians Try to Rescue Jesus, and A Few More Attempts to Rescue Jesus, and Desperately Searching the Epistles for Anything That Attests a Historical Jesus). Instead, scholars like McGrath simply ignore my refutations of their arguments—either out of direct dishonesty (they know those arguments exist but want to pretend they don’t) or indirect dishonesty (they don’t know they exist, so as to know what they are and thus respond to them, because they lied when they said they read them). Yes, claiming to have read a book and yet revealing you know actually nothing argued in it is lying. And complaining about being caught lying, rather than correcting that behavior, is even worse than lying about it in the first place. So you might want to stop doing that, Dr. McGrath.

Everyone viewing these interviews and blog exchanges is not being fooled by this dishonesty and deflection. McGrath is losing his audience with this stuff. It is not bolstering his case, or his reputation. It is tanking both. And he might want to see to that.

What Is His Actual Case Exactly?

When McGrath ever gets around to actually talking about the evidence for or against historicity in this interview, his every example proves the above analysis. His core thesis is that there are things that “really resist explanation in terms of people making stuff up” (minute 11-12), which in Bayesian terms would be a valid argument: “facts that resist explanation as myth or fiction” is just intuitive-speak for “facts that are substantially less probable on a hypothesis of myth or fiction, than on a hypothesis of historicity.” This is indeed what historians need to establish historicity. But I spent six years on a post doc research grant trying to find stuff like this. And I didn’t find any. I then published my results under peer review. Raphael Lataster then published an analysis of the debate years later and found—also under peer review—that there still wasn’t any. No one has challenged us under peer review. There is still no peer reviewed book comprehensively defending historicity against these peer reviewed challenges to it (and hasn’t been in a hundred years or so). There have only been a few academic reviews—that lied about the contents of our work; evincing that, evidently, that was the only way left to challenge it. That does not bode well for historicity. McGrath should be worried about this, rather than trying to replicate it.

As a minor example of what I mean (we’ll get to some major ones soon), early on McGrath deploys an unintelligible argument about the invention of a Bethlehem birth for Jesus (minute 17-18). He seemed to be saying that that has to be true because the “conspiracy” to invent it was too poorly executed, such as by endorsing contradictory stories for it. This makes no sense, of course. No mainstream scholar believes Jesus was actually born in Bethlehem—all agree that that was, in fact, made up. And no mainstream scholar would buy the argument that it “can’t” have been made up because later Christians accepted contradictory fictions of it. So either McGrath misspoke, and meant to say that this is an example of a successful “conspiracy” to fabricate a Bethlehem history for Jesus, thus proving such “conspiracies” existed and commonly succeeded, or McGrath meant to say that the entire scholarly consensus is wrong about this…and therefore, uh, Mythicism should be rejected because…um…the scholarly consensus should be against Bethlehem being a fiction but isn’t? Try to find any semblance of logic in there. Good luck. There isn’t any. (And if he stumbled and meant to be arguing something about Nazareth, you might want to actually consult what has been said about that under peer review first: see On the Historicity of Jesus, index, “Nazareth.”)

Eventually, though, McGrath gets to listing actual reasons he remains convinced of historicity. Let’s see what he has…

The Argument from Trajectory

McGrath starts with the claim that “the overall trajectory of how things developed” supports historicity (in minute 23). He’s a bit muddled in his presentation here, but the gist is clear: he thinks the Gospel trajectory goes toward, and not away from the celestial Logos doctrine in John, “therefore” more likely that stuff was invented later. This is directly refuted by the fact that all that stuff is in the very earliest documents of Christianity, the authentic Epistles of Paul (and Hebrews), which predate even the Gospel of Mark by decades, and include references to credal declarations and hymns establishing this cosmic pre-existence theology that most mainstream scholars agree go back to the original formulation of the religion under Peter and the Pillars (while, note, those same documents lack any reference to Jesus being a teacher, exorcist, or miracle worker). Even Bart Ehrman concedes this now. So McGrath’s description of the evidence is false. His premise is false. Consequently, no true conclusion can derive from it.

And McGrath should already know this. Because he claims to have read the peer-reviewed study On the Historicity of Jesus, in which I establish, from a whole gamut of mainstream peer-reviewed literature as well as abundant direct evidence, not only that fact, but also that the Gospel of Mark is thoroughly mythical and doesn’t appear to insist upon the historicity of anything it relates but even the reverse: it looks like we are to treat Mark’s tales like Jesus instructs his Apostles to treat his parables; and subsequent Gospels only expand on his project. This is a conclusion also reached by John Dominic Crossan in The Power of Parable, and even M. David Litwa in How the Gospels Became History, and Robyn Faith Walsh in The Origins of Early Christian Literature, and Richard C. Miller in Resurrection and Reception in Early Christianity, and beyond; I already cited dozens of others in OHJ.

Only come Matthew do we get references to Jesus “fulfilling” prophecies, suggesting an interest in selling the tales as historical, but even then we get no explicit declaration of that until Luke gives us a fake preface suggesting what he is writing is indeed history. And yet even then Luke is vague as to whether it is history or merely tradition he is recording (those are not the same thing). Only by the time we get to John (and only our last redaction of John) do we run into a repeated and explicit insistence that everything recorded there actually happened (and we had better believe it or be damned). We see this also in the creeds: from Paul, where they lack any historicizing information, to Ignatius, when suddenly, a century later, any Christian must include that historicizing information in those creeds or be condemned and shunned (why would that be, do you think?). The trajectory is thus the opposite of what McGrath claims: just like the creeds, the Gospels become more historicizing (and less “like” mythology) over time (see How Did Christianity Switch to a Historical Jesus? whose content I expand on in Chapter 7 of Jesus from Outer Space; and see Chapter 10 of On the Historicity of Jesus for a thorough breakdown). Meanwhile, all the celestial pre-existent Jesus stuff long pre-dates those Gospels—thus establishing that they are concealing it under allegory, until they tire of doing that and just put it front and center, as we find in the final redaction of John.

Now, one can argue this point. The relevant point here is not that “I’m right” about this. I could be wrong. The relevant point here is that McGrath just acts like there is no point to argue—like I never refuted his argument, that I never said any of this, and thus he can just lean on his conclusion, undefended, to justify believing in a historical Jesus. This is dishonest. It is either dishonest in the sense that he knows I rebutted him but doesn’t want to tell anyone about that, much less attempt a counter-rebuttal (and thus deliberately conceals the fact that he has no argument to defend his position by); or it is dishonest in the sense that he lied about reading my book, and didn’t really, and that is why he doesn’t know I already rebutted his argument there, and thus he doesn’t know he needs to actually defend his premise, rather than just declare it as if it were a given. Which is not only dishonest, but incompetent: genuine scholars don’t act like lazy pontificators; they try to check whether their arguments hold up before declaring them in public. Remember McGrath himself claiming we need to do that? Well, here he is, not doing that. He didn’t ask, “Am I actually right about this? Are there any counter-arguments to my belief that the trend is away from rather than toward historicizing Jesus?”

That makes McGrath a hypocrite (as well as lazy, and therefore unreliable). But the real question here is why is he doing this? Why is it so hard to actually read the peer-reviewed literature? Why is it so hard to actually check what responses exist to your arguments before resting any conclusion on them? Why is McGrath not doing any of these things? Three guesses. But he won’t like your answer.

Freaking Out Over Sperm Again

Then in minute 25 McGrath goes on to winge about the “celestial sperm bank” hypothesis, by which a celestial Jesus can acquire a mortal body made of Davidic flesh as prophecy required, ignoring the fact that this is only one of two hypotheses in my book, both well supported in the evidence, and both in fact matching even mainstream Gospel accounts, whereby no biological inheritance of that lineage is described, but in fact denied, leaving only one possibility: God inserted that seed into Mary by the Holy Spirit, which is the same thing I am saying happened—only we know God doesn’t need a mother to make a body: he will make our resurrection bodies without one, and made Adam without one, and Paul consistently uses the same vocabulary of such for Jesus. So we can’t tell which he means for Jesus. This is not “out on a limb.” That God must have made Jesus’s body through some sort of spiritual transport of the seed of David is mainstream, indeed even canonical fact. See Empirical Logic and Romans 1:3 for a full treatment of this point. The upshot of which is this: “that he had a body inherited from David” is simply non-determinative as to historicity. That’s the actual peer-reviewed argument. McGrath simply doesn’t describe anything I actually argued regarding this correctly, leaves out all the evidence I presented for it, and declares there to be no evidence or argument for it. That is dishonest. So why does McGrath have to defend his position with dishonesty? Would the truth require such an approach? Why can’t he mention and respond to the actual argument in his own field’s peer-reviewed literature?

But Who Thinks of Dying Messiahs?

In minute 26 McGrath repeats his argument that “no one would invent a crucified messiah” which I already refuted multiple times, including in the peer-reviewed study he claims to have read (see §7 and §20 in my Ehrman Recap, and my summary analysis in Argument from General Probability; cf. OHJ, pp. 73-88, 141-46, 153-63, 168-73, 209-14). And, of course, as you might have expected by now: McGrath does not ever even mention those refutations, much less respond to them. He simply pretends they don’t exist. How is this an honest way to argue your case? Why should anyone waste any time listening to this guy, if he isn’t ever even going to address anything he is supposed to be responding to? Is this not therefore a completely useless interview? Why is he doing this?

Resurrection How Again?

McGrath then gets to something somewhat novel, even though it is also already refuted in the peer-reviewed study he is supposed to be responding to, toward the end of minute 26: that Paul’s conception of the resurrection of Jesus is “just like” that of the Pharisees, and that entails he understood Jesus to have been a mortal earthly human. This is both false—Paul’s metaphysics of the resurrection is directly in refutation of the Pharisaic conception (see my thorough analysis of the differences in The Empty Tomb, pp. 114-18; cf. pp. 107-55)—and illogical: that Paul imagined Jesus’s resurrection as the “firstfruits” of the general resurrection does not require it to have occurred in any particular location, but only that it occurred, and would match ours. And that is what my thesis entails: Paul believed God gave Jesus a mortal body to die in, and then brought him back to life in his new celestial body just as we’d all enjoy (2 Cor 5; 1 Cor. 15:35-55). Thus all the required conditions were met. “Where” this happened has no relevance to any point Paul had to make or anything he believed or expected his congregations to believe. So there is simply no argument here. And this has already been pointed out (see OHJ, index, “incarnation of Jesus” and “resurrection”). So why is McGrath simply ignoring everything he is supposed to be responding to? Why does he not already know this argument is ineffective?

Which Woman Now?

Likewise, in minute 27 McGrath deploys the standard “born of a woman” argument, without any evident awareness of the arguments against it—the very arguments that he falsely claims to have read (OHJ, Ch. 11.9; see Yes, Galatians 4 Is Allegorical). That McGrath lied about reading this part of my book is confirmed by his having no knowledge of the rebuttals he needs to answer here in this interview, and by the fact that he never mentions the “born of a woman” argument at all in any of his supposed responses to the book (see McGrath on OHJ: A Failure of Logic and Accuracy). He doesn’t even know he is supposed to be responding to an argument here. Instead he acts like I never heard of this passage and that I must have just left it out of account. Which is dishonest.

Even when Derek finally presses him on one point (Paul’s idiom in his use of the vocabulary of birth vs. manufacture, in minute 28), McGrath shows no sign of knowing what my actual argument was, and thus his “reply” completely fails to address what I actually said (see, again, What Did Paul Mean in Romans 1:3?; and my response to McLatchie on the same point; see also What Happened Looks Really Suspicious). Which is further proof that McGrath never read my book, despite claiming to have. He literally doesn’t know what’s in it. Yet he bears false witness, violating his own God’s Commandments, by falsely representing himself as knowing that, and falsely representing his answer as a response to it (more on this point below). So we have to ask why McGrath has to keep defending historicity with such dishonesty. If it were actually defensible, he wouldn’t have to do that, right? Why won’t he just learn what the actual arguments are so as to respond to them honestly? And what use is an interview with someone who hasn’t even read the book they are asked to rebut, and has no knowledge of what they are supposed to rebut, and consequently never respond to it? Can you see why we are all tired of this?

And that concludes McGrath’s case. Seriously. That’s all he has. At minute 30 Derek gets into the audience Q&A which runs another hour and a half.

The Q&A Hodgepodge: Hour One

The audience Q&A starts with a question about the “Jesus is a solar deity” nonsense, and they both allude to the fact that even I do not buy that, which is a rare breath of honesty from McGrath. There is no peer reviewed defense of any such thesis. So we really shouldn’t waste any time asking about it. They should dismiss it and move on. And they do. They quickly segue to the more serious question of the High Christology debate, which is whether Paul and his Christians already believed Jesus was a pre-existent archangel descended into mortal form, indeed even the actual creator of the universe at God’s behest, and so on. McGrath says he sides with Ehrman, which means he agrees with me on this point (see Bart Ehrman on How Jesus Became God). Indeed, in every particular. I disagree with one thing he says about the vocabulary in Philippians 2; Paul’s Greek explicitly distinguishes between actual form, morphê, and appearance, schêmati—there is no biased translation here—but where McGrath sides on this is where I land anyway, so we have no disagreement beyond that triviality. Sharing God’s (or a god’s) form does not entail being identical to that God, and the passage goes on to very clearly indicate that is not what is meant (and this is supported by several other passages in Paul: see OHJ, pp. 92-96).

By minute 37 they are back into the question of Paul’s idiom in his use of the vocabulary of birth vs. manufacture, where again McGrath simply shows no awareness of anything pertaining (like the evidence of Paul’s own idiom in his use of these words, scribal attempts to “fix” this, the particular evidence of the contexts he employs these words in, and so on; see my links above), so he just harrumphs his way out of even answering the question again. A waste of everyone’s time. He’s just ignoring the entire argument, and dishonestly pretending there isn’t one, again. For example, he dishonestly implies I just cherry-picked a definition from the lexicon and employed an incompetent argument to my conclusion. That is actually slander. And he should be ashamed of this. In fact I conspicuously did not do that, but followed the correct procedure in the field (which is why, by the way, it passed peer review), by analyzing Paul’s specific practice (his idiom), and building a case from context of use (see OHJ, Chapter 11.9; summary, again, in Empirical Logic and Romans 1:3). McGrath ignores all that and lies about it, claiming I deployed the incompetent argument instead. There is a reason this pisses me off. It would piss him off if I pulled that shit on him. But the Golden Rule is also clearly not a lesson from his Lord he actually believes in or endeavors to embody.

In minute 42, McGrath deploys the usual Well Poisoning fallacy to try and browbeat people into disregarding the mythicist thesis: that atheists should not embrace minority positions in scholarship because it makes them look bad (and thus discredits atheism)—which is obviously a fallacy because one should embrace what the evidence indicates, not what is popular. On both points see On Evaluating Arguments from Consensus and Fincke Is Right: Arguing Jesus Didn’t Exist Should Not Be a Strategy. It’s really embarrassing to see someone try this. It suggests they are not actually interested in what is true, but only in what looks good; that one has to take positions that will protect their social status, and not positions they find actually defensible. Which casts into doubt his motives for maintaining historicity. He has here told us he cares more about his social status than the evidence, as confirmed by his complete ignorance of and disinterest in any of the actual peer-reviewed arguments in this case. He wants people to stop talking about this; not to actually investigate it. That is not admirable.

Around minute 45 the question turns to what McGrath’s theory of historicity is, which is a fair question but isn’t entirely pertinent to our debate, and he doesn’t really answer the question anyway. Most of what he says just strings together a bunch of apologetics explaining away scholarly disagreement on that. He never touches on what I have said about this (OHJ, Chapter 2; Proving History, Chapters 1 and 5). But he wasn’t asked to. So this was mostly a waste of clock. Until he does mention one specific belief, that he thinks Jesus maybe did praise John the Baptist and was even a Disciple of his and may even have been boosted by John and believed it; which is all plausible, but McGrath doesn’t say why he thinks any of that’s true and not just convenient propaganda contrived by the Evangelists. And again, he doesn’t address what I have argued regarding this (Proving History, index, “John the Baptist”), but wasn’t asked to (ditto his brief confused digression on the “twelve thrones” saying and the historicity of Judas: see Proving History, index, “Judas Iscariot”).

That’s all fine, as he wasn’t asked to respond to my peer-reviewed arguments on those points. But he gets back to me when someone asks about the Rank-Raglan mythotype in minute 50, where he either gets everything about that wrong or simply asserts as rebuttals what I already said myself and accounted for. So he still doesn’t know what my argument from this even is; and consequently, literally nothing he says here is relevant to my argument (see McGrath on the Rank-Raglan Mythotype; and, for example, my discussion in response to Kamil Gregor, and in Doing the Math and Jesus and the Problem of the Fraudulent Reference Class). So again McGrath is just wasting our time, ignoring the arguments he is supposed to be answering, and making instead arguments that we have already refuted; and then acting like that’s all he has to do. Useless. Likewise in minute 55 he goes on about trying to explain why Paul is so weirdly silent about Jesus—where all McGrath does is straw man the argument, never responding to or addressing or even mentioning any of my actual arguments and examples (see OHJ, Chapter 11); all of which, notice, he simply ignores and pretends doesn’t exist, so as to pretend what he does say is even relevant to the point, when it’s not. This is a waste of everyone’s time.

In minute 57 he even makes up an excuse never to debate me: that I might prove he lied and made mistakes! He pretends I have never documented that. I have documented it every single time I said it. And here even you have several documented examples. This isn’t “just being rude.” Lying about my work is what is rude. To react to being caught doing that by accusing me of complaining about it is just the height of insult. It’s morally disgusting. So I am not surprised he won’t debate me. Because he has already committed to never telling the truth, never correcting his mistakes, never actually addressing my work despite being asked to time and again, yet pretending that he has done this—which is lying. And I am not just “claiming” he is lying. I have proved it conclusively dozens of times. See for yourself. Compare what he says here with what I actually say in On the Historicity of Jesus. Fact-check every other time I’ve caught him pulling this same dishonest, immoral shit. Then ask yourself: who is the liar here? Him or me? And if you confirm it’s him, ask: Why? Why can’t he just honestly engage with my peer-reviewed work? Why is he instead acting like this?

The Q&A Hodgepodge: Hour Two

The rest of the video hardly relates to my work at all. From minute 3 of the second hour McGrath makes some vague incoherent argument about Galatians 4, where he simultaneously says Paul can’t argue from Jesus that Gentiles don’t need to be circumcised and that he is arguing from Jesus being circumcised. It’s a muddle. McGrath goofs by overlooking the point that Paul makes no mention of circumcision here and isn’t talking about that, nor could being “born of a woman” refer to it. So I could not discern any intelligible argument here to critique. The audience clearly intended him to answer the question of how being born of a woman subjects one to the law (as Paul says) when the Torah says only circumcision does that. Since you are by Law circumcised on the eighth day, no one is “born” under the law. So what is Paul talking about here? McGrath misses this point and thus never answers the question. But nothing McGrath says here relates to my arguments anyway, and that’s fair because that’s not what he was asked.

In minute 4 the audience asks McGrath to assess the significance of Josephus never including Jesus in the many messianic figures he does relate. He warbles through this one, coming to no definite answer (and pointlessly exhibiting his ignorance of the fact that the so-called “Arabic Testimonium” argument has already been conclusively refuted: see The End of the Arabic Testimonium; on the Testimonium Flavianum generally, see Josephus on Jesus? Why You Can’t Cite Opinions Before 2014). But note that if I were asked this, I’d simply say that this means, if Jesus existed, he wasn’t all that popular or well known. There were probably lots of these guys Josephus didn’t mention. In fact, he only mentions ones who caused wars or otherwise got large numbers of people killed; so Jesus wouldn’t even meet his criteria of historical importance. So we can’t conclude from this any evidence against a historical Jesus (only against a Jesus as popular as the Gospels depict). And this is how I treat this evidence in my peer-reviewed study (OHJ, pp. 67-73 and 245-46; cf. Ch. 8).

In minute 6 McGrath warbles around the question of the James passage in Josephus, surprisingly claiming “there’s evidence either way” as to its authenticity, which is not an admission I’d normally expect from him. But nothing else he says about this is informed (proving again he still has never read my book despite falsely claiming to have; for a summary see “What Did Josephus Mean by That?” A Case Study in the Relationship between Evidence and Probability). Ironically, he earlier insisted I should get things published under peer review (an egregiously dishonest insult given that he is supposed to be talking about my peer-reviewed study in this interview), and a study on this passage is exactly one of the things I got published under peer review. (BTW, I would appreciate if instead of buying that article from the journal who pays me zero, you please get it from my anthology, Hitler Homer Bible Christ, on which I make a commission; double commission if you buy through that link. This is how I make a living.) And yet, when I do what he wants, he ignores me. That’s also a bit insulting. And it demonstrates he doesn’t really mean any of this. He won’t read what I write no matter how much it passes peer-review. So he is being disingenuous when he insists I get it peer-reviewed. I already have.

In minute 7 of the second hour McGrath is asked about his liberal theology. Which is off-topic but a good question and it’s worth hearing his answer (although it’s no more coherent or intelligible than any other liberal theology you may be familiar with). In minute 10 he is asked about why he cares whether Jesus existed, given that he doesn’t believe Jesus was God (given his self-described theology), and he answers, “I want to get history right.” Which is my answer as well. Ironically, he then says “rejecting evidence” is wrong; and yet that is exactly what he does through this entire interview: not only have I accounted for all evidence for the historicity of Jesus (rejecting none), I have presented a ton of evidence for the doubtability of Jesus’s existence, and I have presented it under peer review as he himself said I should, and still he ignores every single item of it. McGrath is thus violating his own stated ethics here. Why?

This is the point where McGrath makes the dishonest comparison of doubting historicity with doubting evolution or the Holocaust. That that is dishonest I have already demonstrated earlier. This is also one place he accuses doubters of being reactionary ex-fundamentalists. Which I also already explained describes none of us who have published under peer review; so it’s not only a Genetic Fallacy, it’s another shameless lie. It’s after this, in minute 15, that he is asked “what he takes from” our critiques of his arguments on this topic (mine and Raphael Lataster’s, e.g. Lataster vs. McGrath: Jesus Must Be Real…Because, Reasons), which was unfortunately too vaguely worded to get any useful answer from him. He basically doesn’t give an answer. He just complains about being called out for lying and making mistakes. He never admits to or corrects any of those lies or mistakes—nor mentions any substantive thing he learned from us. When he struggles to give an example, he says something about my supposedly correcting him on which Targum was being discussed (in a conversation long pre-dating my peer-reviewed study he is supposed to be talking about). But, uhem, that wasn’t me. By contrast, the only mention I’ve made of targums in my articles responding to McGrath after he is supposed to have read On the Historicity of Jesus is this. Check that out. You’ll notice I document some grave dishonesties in his behavior there. Yet has he corrected those? This is what I am talking about. It’s reprehensible.

Closing Out

The questions then devolve into some irrelevancies (like the Shroud of Turin) and redundancies (like more Genetic Fallacies about reactionary Mythicists, none of which describe the actual scholars arguing for it) and moot points (everything McGrath says about the uncertainties of history I myself have already said) before returning to anything worth discussing. By minute 37 McGrath is asked if agnosticism is warranted because the evidence, even for historicity, is weak. But he mostly dodges the question, and nothing he says pertains to anything I or Lataster have argued on the point; so, more useless content.

There follows some unrelated discussion of McGrath’s work and blog I have no comment on. And then around minute 53 McGrath is asked if a celestial archangelic sacrifice is plausible for second temple Judaism (as I demonstrate it is in OHJ, pp. 178-214). He sort of waffles on the actual question, which was as to its plausibility, not what he thinks is its probability (so he never really answers the actual question). But even then nothing again he says here addresses anything I have said. Even his claim about the name of Jesus ignores everything I said about it in OHJ—not only including the fact that, um, sorry Dr. McGrath, but Jesus did have an angelic name ending in El: Emmanuel; but several other pertinent facts besides, which all complicate your narrative (e.g. OHJ, p. 242, 200-05, 533-34; see the last section in Lataster v. McGrath: Jesus Must Be Real…Because, Reasons; also cf. Was Jesus-Is-Michael an Early Christian Mystery Teaching?). This argument cannot be made so flippantly and carelessly. That’s why you need to take seriously what has actually been said under peer review, and stop this dishonest behavior. Stop lying about what we have or haven’t said. Stop ignoring the literature and the facts and arguments in it. Stop claiming you are responding to it when you don’t even know what it says and have continually refused to even find out what it says. Do your damned job.

Then, and only then, will I tender you respect as a scholar.

And then, and only then, will you be able to say anything on this topic that anyone will have any reason to waste any time listening to.