I recently did a show with Godless Engineer on M. David Litwa’s bizarrely ignorant declarations about the obscure apocryphon The Ascension of Isaiah. You can watch that instead if you prefer video conversation as a medium. But I will expand the essential points here for wider consumption and consultation. And you’ll find that the profound display of scholarly incompetence Litwa evinces in this case is an embarrassing irony given that he was attempting to claim my treatment of this text was incompetent (without explicitly naming me). Alas, it’s the other way around. And while I expect an amateur to make this kind of arrogant mistake—pontificating on a subject they have actually not read anything on and know nothing actually about—a scholar of Litwa’s station should never be behaving like this. It’s not just disgraceful. It’s also immoral. His own Lord’s commandments prohibit “bearing false witness.” And representing yourself as knowing things you don’t in order to slander a peer is “bearing false witness.” It’s a form of lying. And this really needs to stop.

Do I Even Rely on This Evidence?

Opponents of Mythicism (the view that Jesus began as a revelatory being only mythically pressed into history later) are so disturbed by the actual contents of the Ascension of Isaiah that they freak out whenever it is proposed to evince Mythicism—and freak out way beyond any sensible measure. Because we don’t actually consider this very strong evidence. That they think it’s very strong evidence (and therefore they have to make this evidence “go away” with various slanderous polemics) evinces their absolute panic at the facts. Whereas Mythicists aren’t really that impressed with it.

To correctly understand this, you need to have actually read my academic study of the subject (On the Historicity of Jesus, index). Litwa has not done this, despite falsely representing that he has (see Litwa’s Confused Critique of Mythicism). The present case only confirms he hasn’t. He literally does not know anything I have actually said about this. Still. After being told repeatedly he really needs to check. If he had, he would know that despite his false framing of the matter as “the Ascension of Isaiah” being the key evidence for Mythicism, it isn’t. No peer reviewed study has claimed it to be.

Here is an exact quote from my book, where I assess its weight as evidence in that regard:

Here I will be very generous and say the odds are 4 to 5 that we would still have both (the curious cosmic Jesus material in Ignatius, and the curious cosmic Jesus material in the Ascension of Isaiah; and their corroboration in Irenaeus and Justin) if [historicity] were true rather than [not], which can be translated into a 100% chance on [non-historicity] and an 80% chance on [historicity]. Though I personally believe these odds are closer to 1 in 2, as I think there could hardly be more than a 50% chance both these clues would exist if Jesus did. 

OHJ, p. 323

In other words, on the upper end of my error margin, I deem it 80% likely we’d have all these texts exactly as we have them even if Jesus existed. Which means I count this evidence to be very weak. It’s nowhere near enough to establish Jesus didn’t exist. And that’s all the evidence here: a curious “star Gospel” passage in Ignatius that looks like it might be quoting the missing section of the Ascension of Isaiah (more on that in a moment), or some derivative or ancestor Gospel thereto, and admissions in Irenaeus and Justin Martyr indicating they, too, knew that lost Gospel and regarded it as authoritative. Irenaeus especially references its “year and a half” of revelations from Jesus after his death, the many gates of heaven he traversed, his descent into the firmament, the concealing of all this from the demonic powers until his resurrection, and Jesus rising from the dead as a glorious star outshining all others, and which all other lights and powers in heaven were then compelled to worship, and the fact that all creatures of the many heavens took notice upon his reascent. Justin alludes to the same. Ignatius paraphrases what appears to be something close to the underlying text.

If we plucked the Ascension of Isaiah out of all that—if we didn’t have all those other references bundled together here—then its probability of existing on historicity substantially increases. Because the laws of probability entail that if accumulated evidence is eliminated and only one piece of it survives, the weight of the surviving evidence must necessarily go down (not up, nor stay the same). So the probability we’d have only the current text of the Ascension of Isaiah if Jesus existed has to be somewhere in the vicinity of 90%. Which is pretty well near 100%. So its impact on the probability Jesus existed is quite small; only barely measurable in fact. Even when bundled with all that corroborating evidence, it still weighs feebly. It thus has almost no effect on my concluding probability that Jesus existed.

As I wrote in Doing the Math: Historicity of Jesus Edition:

I am counting the effect of the Ascension of Isaiah at almost nil—less than half [in fact, closer to a quarter] of the 4/5 relative odds gets us close to 9/10 relative odds again [or rather, 95/100]. Its impact only rises to an 80% chance of this evidence still existing if Jesus did when combined with the material in Ignatius [and Irenaeus, and Justin]. Whereas by itself, it would barely rate as [95/100 or a 95%] chance this evidence would exist if Jesus did, which is not very much different from saying it’s 100% expected and thus not evidence really of anything.

On the mathematical logic of evidence see Empirical Logic and Romans 1:3. But a strong likelihood ratio, evidence that weighs well for a conclusion rather than feebly, should be in multiples, not fractions. For example, a 5:1 relative odds; even a 2:1, which is still weak but at least substantive. So 9:10 is hardly a tick [and 95/100 even less]. Evidence with a likelihood ratio of 5:1 is on that evidence alone five times more likely to be true than it would be without it; at 2:1, twice as likely. But at 9:10, the conclusion is barely 10% more likely on that evidence than without it [and at 95/100, barely 5%]. That’s weak tea. Hence as I wrote in my peer-reviewed discussion of the Ascension of Isaiah, it is too late and too compromised to weigh strongly for any conclusion, and therefore, “Here my aim is not to argue that this theory is true, but to explain what this theory is” (OHJ, p. 48). In other words, I only use this text to illustrate what the hypothesis (of Jesus not existing) would look like. I don’t use it as very strong evidence for the conclusion; I present a great deal else for that (across four other chapters, 8 to 11; I only go into the Ascension in Chapter 3, where all I do is describe the hypothesis, not argue for it).

So the fact that people like Litwa are so obsessed with and panicked over this document tells us they are far more terrified of it than we are confident in it. They might want to ask themselves why that is.

Look, People, I Did Cite and Answer Norelli

This all came up in an awkward interview of M. David Litwa on the History Valley show, starting late in minute 28. In minute 29, Litwa declares his opinion that “the Martyrdom and Ascension of Isaiah is definitely not evidence of Mythicism” because “there’s a lot of misinformation out there.” But as he proceeds, it is only Litwa who fills the audience with misinformation. First, he claims Mythicists “don’t really even cite [Enrico] Norelli, and it’s quite sad that they’re actually not really up on the scholarship.” Um. I cite Norelli (OHJ, p. 36, n. 1; in case you didn’t know, as perhaps Litwa doesn’t, vols. 7 and 8 of the Corpus Christianorum are “Norelli”). Because I did read Norelli. And I based my chapter’s entire discussion of this on a review of all the evidence and scholarship (not just Norelli), and I there present an argument against every substantive opposing thing Norelli (and others) said. So, right out of the bat, Litwa is slandering me with a false accusation of ignoring the latest scholarship.

Litwa is disinforming the public here. He is claiming I don’t (whereas in fact I did) answer all of Norelli’s pertinent arguments. And in the ensuing discussion, at no point does Litwa give any indication that he has any idea what my responses to Norelli’s arguments are, nor does he make any effort to answer them. In fact, Litwa does not appear to even know what Norelli’s arguments are (he certainly never mentions any of them); which makes his claim that “one ought to” particularly galling here. This is inexcusable behavior from a scholar. Litwa is apparently the one who didn’t read Norelli and doesn’t know what Norelli argued; whereas I did, and do, and addressed it. Why does Litwa not know this? Because, apparently, he never researched any of this. He didn’t read my peer-reviewed monograph. He didn’t read Norelli’s. He has no idea what he is actually talking about. But he presents himself as an authority who did all these things. That’s dishonest. Which is actually what’s sad.

What appears to be happening here is a typical move of not scholarly behavior, but Christian apologetics: rather than actually checking any facts, just cherry pick any scholar you can find who says the opposite of what you want to oppose, and falsely claim that “proves” your opponent is wrong; and for good measure, you can smarmily declare it “sad” that they didn’t “do their research” and know that. This is the kind of slime we get from the likes of William Lane Craig. It has no business coming from someone who wants to earn respect as an honest, informed voice in the matter. You can’t just list the scholars who agree with you. Because lots of scholars don’t agree with them. So just naming people is a waste of our time. What we want to know is not what Norelli concluded, but why he concluded that, and whether his arguments outweigh the arguments of opposing peer-reviewed scholars—like me. Because if his arguments don’t pass muster, then citing him is doing you no good. People like Litwa who treat history as a prestige game, where simply naming people matters and not facts or logic, will only discredit history as a profession. If we granted that method any merit, then academic history simply becomes a propaganda mill, and not a legitimate source of knowledge.

For the record, I only follow facts and logic. And nothing Norelli argues in respect to this case passes muster by that standard. And you would know why I think that, if you actually read what I said and what Norelli said and compared them on the facts and the logic. So anyone who doesn’t know either, should admit they don’t have an informed opinion to offer in the matter. Postscript: I will also add for the record that I believe Litwa normally doesn’t behave like this, that he is a fully competent scholar who usually does excellent work and usually knows what he is talking about. It’s just when it touches on Mythicism, he drops all his usual competencies and professional standards. A not–uncommon phenomenon.

No, People, That’s Not Why Anyone Came to Those Conclusions

By the end of minute 36 Litwa insists the only reason any scholars (and there are a lot of us) concluded the Ascension of Isaiah is multiply redacted and interpolated is not “because there’s some parts of [it] that they don’t like, okay?” Nope. They all advanced legitimate, evidence-based, philological, textual and discourse analysis arguments for their conclusions. Litwa explicitly claims the reverse. Which means either of two things: he doesn’t know what any of those arguments are, that they even exist much less what they consist of (and thus is lying by claiming things don’t exist that in fact do, because he never checked and doesn’t even care if they really do exist), or he does, and is outright lying to the audience by concealing those arguments from them and dishonestly declaring none exist. A real scholar would (a) know what those arguments really were and (b) explain why they are sound or offer a rebuttal. Litwa does neither. He just makes up this buillshit about there being no arguments to rebut. That’s shameful.

In OHJ, the peer reviewed literature Litwa is morally obligated to have read before discussing this subject but immorally chose not to, I survey the evidence for these conclusions (which, contrary to what Litwa implies, does not come from mythicists but some prior peer-reviewed experts on the Ascension text). I even answer common rebuttals to that evidence, including rebuttals one will find articulated in the volumes of Norelli that I cited. But the arguments I am relying on include (but are not limited to):

• The Ascension (§6-11) is never aware of or acknowledges the Martyrdom (§1-5), whereas the Martyrdom is aware of and acknowledges the Ascension;
• The Ascension does mention “the martyrdom” of Isaiah, but only as a known legend, it conspicuously doesn’t realize there are five chapters about it in the same book that it should refer to (and would have, had they originally been there), nor refers to any detail peculiar to that account;
• There are further stylometric and philological reasons that scholars have all concluded (and this includes Norelli, by the way) that those two pieces were written by different authors at different times;
• There are actual manuscripts that lack those first five chapters and exhibit no knowledge of their existence;
• Meanwhile, the disputed centerpiece of the Ascension, where we have a pocket gospel story going all the way from Mary’s miraculous birthing of Jesus to some King crucifying Jesus on a tree in Jerusalem, radically deviates from the content and discourse style of the rest of the text, which evinces a different author;
• It also does not match the surrounding text in narrative content either, which content had told us in advance what we are supposed to see and read here but no extant manuscript contains all that material, meaning it was removed and lost, and thus all that is here now cannot be original;
• There are actual manuscripts that lack this pocket gospel—and guess what? They happen to be exactly the same manuscripts that show no knowledge of the Martyrdom either, which does refer to this pocket gospel, indicating it was either added at the same time by that same author, or in between the separate composition of both halves of the current text;
• And yet those manuscripts also lack the material we know (from earlier sections) was originally here, and also show no knowledge of the pocket gospel, but solve the problem (whatever problem the deleted text posed) by replacing it with a single sentence instead of a summary gospel;
• And attempts to explain this away are illogical: for example, any “anti-docetist” who disagreed with the content of that pocket gospel would just change or delete the few specific details they didn’t like, not delete the entire thing, so this hypothesis cannot explain the complete absence of this gospel from those other manuscripts;
• And even in those manuscripts’ replacement of the missing content with a single sentence, quite the opposite problem is created from those other manuscripts with the inserted the pocket gospel (where its elaborate specificity and language disagrees with the discourse style of the rest of the text, evincing a different author composed it): the single vague sentence they place there instead is too un-elaborate and in-specific to match either the content or the discourse style of the rest of the text, evincing a different author composed even that as well;
• And that ambiguous sentence they put there also fails to contain any of the content the earlier text told its readers they should see here, so it clearly can’t have been written by the original author.

This accumulated evidence is simply too decisive to escape. Litwa seems completely unaware of all of this. And yet his opinion is completely refuted by it. I mention all of it in my own peer-reviewed treatment of this text. So Litwa never read what I actually said about this, in his own field’s peer-reviewed literature, and consequently can’t possibly have any informed opinion as to its merits. His opinion is literally useless.

The missing material is the most important here. The Ascension text (unlike the Martyrdom) is built in a peculiarly repetitive tripartite structure, whereby Isaiah ascends through seven heavens, is told what he will see when Jesus descends through those seven heavens, and then Isaiah sees Jesus actually fulfill what he was told. In the section where Isaiah is told what he will see are various details that then don’t appear in the fulfillment section in any manuscript. The most conspicuous details missing are these: what happens when Jesus descends “to the angel in Sheol” to “become like” the angels there (10:8-10; cf. 1 Peter 3:19-22) and that “they shall not know” he is the Lord of Glory “until with a loud voice I [God] have called [to] the heavens their angels and their lights, and my mighty voice is made to resound to the sixth heaven” (10:12; and at this point, BTW, Jesus shall also be glowing with a “glory surpassing that of all,” a “glory great and wonderful,” 9:27) and then “from the angels of death” Jesus will ascend (10:14), and then “the princes and powers of this world will worship” him (10:15).

So we are told, along with the fact that “they” will crucify Jesus on a tree because they won’t know who he is (because he shall be in inglorious disguise), that Isaiah will also see Jesus descend even to Sheol and become like the angels in Shoel, and then ascend from Sheol, and radiate like a star, and God’s voice will echo across all the heavens below him, and all the “angels and lights” of the fallen (Satan and his demons) will then worship him in wonder. But apart from that last event (11:23), none of the other things Isaiah is told he will see occur when he actually “sees” what he was told unfold. The pocket gospel (11:2-22) mentions but never describes a trip to Sheol, and doesn’t mention Jesus’s ascension beginning there, and never mentions God’s voice resounding across the heavens announcing what has happened. So something has been deleted. More likely, it was the original textual description of what had been the predicted events to be seen in Chapter 10. What that description contained is precisely what is in question. Why was it deleted? Why was it replaced with something more “acceptable”? What did it originally say?

The earlier description (in §10) pretty much says it will be a crucifixion by Satan and his demons in the embattled firmament that Isaiah is introduced to earlier (any other reading requires twisting the words into saying something else, and importing assumptions into the text that aren’t supported by it); it never mentions any events occurring on Earth. So we have no reason to expect to see any events on Earth. By contrast, while what was originally here has been deleted (though I think Ignatius knew that deleted material, and possibly also Irenaeus and Justin, as I point out in OHJ, Ch. 8.6), it has been replaced by a story nowhere predicted to be observed in the earlier chapter, written in a dense and detailed style not at all resembling the rest of the text. In separate traditions, instead of adding this, a single sentence is used to replace the deleted material, but that sentence suffers the opposite problem: its ambiguity and lack of specificity is so far less than the surrounding text it also cannot be by the same author (and at any rate, it refers to none of the things the text predicted would be there).

To be clear, not only does the “pocket gospel” lack all that Isaiah was told he would see, there is also no mention in §10’s predicted list of things Isaiah shall see in §11 of any of the “pocket gospel” details either (like the descent from David, the birth, Mary, Joseph, Bethlehem, Nazareth, Jerusalem, miracle working, sending of the Twelve, a killing by a King). Moreover, the predictive text only says “none of the angels of this world shall know” who Jesus is (10.11); it never says “none of the Jews” or “none of the authorities in Israel” or “no people on Earth” or any such thing (despite that being inserted at §11.19). When you add this all up, there is simply no way to believe the “pocket gospel” was in the original text. It is stylistically too different and doesn’t fit the text’s own literary cues.

Norelli pretty much just ignores all these facts and builds a contrary thesis on a pile of unevidenced conjectures about the supposed community he believes wrote this text and edited it over time and their motives and circumstances, all of which Norelli just “makes up” and then circularly argues proves his thesis. By contrast, I only reach conclusions from the evidence, and then rebut dumb arguments to dismiss it like the “anti-docetists did it” rigmarole, because that’s illogical and does not explain any of the actual state of the text. But Litwa clearly doesn’t know any of this, even so as to defend Norelli’s arguments against mine. He literally does not know what he is talking about.

Nope

As if to give us the most solid proof possible for this conclusion, after vaguely mentioning the “anti-docetists did it” argument (which as I noted is illogical), Litwa actually says (around minute 39) “it’s still clear that Mary the virgin of the line of David had a baby named Jesus, okay, even in the shortened version, okay, so that doesn’t go away somehow, okay, it’s just been shortened.” This is false. The manuscripts with the “shortened” version (an odd way of saying “the manuscripts completely lacking this entire vignette and having in its place a single entirely different sentence instead,” in other words the Latin and Slavonic tradition) do not say anything whatever about Mary, David, birth, or babies. Litwa has literally just made a completely false statement.

How Litwa could do that escapes my comprehension. Maybe he is confusedly repeating some garbled telephone-gamed apologetic he heard somewhere on the internet, which would convict him of rank incompetence on multiple levels. But one thing we can be absolutely sure of: he didn’t check these texts, and has read none of the scholarship on this point—including Norelli. Otherwise he’d know there is no such material in those manuscripts, and thus he could never honestly say what he just claimed. So he is basically lying. Or as Harry Frankfurt would say, “bullshitting” us, not actually even caring whether what he is saying is true or false. Because he can’t—he knows he didn’t check. So he doesn’t even care if it’s true.

Around minute 40 Litwa says something that could be the beginning of the telephone game that got back around to him (probably on Reddit or some other stupid place) in the dishonest bullshit form relayed above: he says “an earlier section of the book, okay, which is, um, back in chapter three, and you can have again, uh, a section on the birth mentioning the birth of Jesus and the, uh, crucifixion, okay,” so “it’s not as if if you were to get, if you were to get rid of chapter eleven, that all of a sudden the Ascension of Isaiah would just be about, you know, Jesus descending into the region of the moon and being crucified in the sky by sky demons, okay, uh, that’s just, it’s just misinformation.” Well, again, it is this statement from Litwa that is misinformation. He is here glossing right over the fact that everyone—including Norelli!—agrees the section he is talking about, “chapter three,” is in the Martyrdom not the Ascension, and was not written by the author of the Ascension but by someone later on. Since all scholars agree on this, you can’t use what’s in the Martyrdom to “prove” what was in the Ascension. Because we don’t know which version of the Ascension they are reading or attaching their new material to; nor can we be confident they aren’t the very ones doctoring the Ascension.

Norelli advances a fanciful theory about the second author maybe being part of the same “community” and thus, presumably, replicating stories the first author was therefore aware of. But there is no evidence of that. And I don’t repeat things for which there is no evidence. I only work from the evidence. Like most other scholars, and for all the reasons I laid out above, I do not believe the author of the Ascension ever knew any of the content of the Martyrdom, and at the very least, I have no reason to believe he did (so I can’t base any conclusions on such a conjecture). I even suspect the author of the current text of the Martyrdom could be the one who added the “pocket gospel” to the Ascension (and maybe even deleted the original content there); other scholars suspect in fact a third redactor of the Martyrdom added both the pocket gospel in the Ascension and references to it in the Martyrdom (this is the “Jewish Text Redacted by Christians” thesis). I’m not as certain of that, but they do cite evidence for their point; they didn’t just “make that up” as Litwa falsely avers. But regardless, that the author of our text of the Martyrdom also knew our text of the Ascension proves nothing against all the evidence we’ve cited that our text of the Ascension cannot have been the original text. All it proves is that that author knew our version (the redacted one). And that’s it. You can go no further.

This second boner error, where Litwa misinforms the audience about all the scholarship regarding the Martyrdom and Ascension (getting wrong, ironically, even what Norelli said), might explain the first boner, where he completely makes up a false story about there being certain material even in the Latin and Slavonic: the apologetics about Mary and David and Baby Jesus being in the Martyrdom, through suitable distortions in transmission, could plausibly end up being garbled into the mistaken apologetic that even the Latin and Slavonic contain Mary and David and Baby Jesus. But remember, those manuscripts lack not only the pocket gospel, but the entirety of the Martyrdom. Someone stupid who didn’t know that could easily have botched the one apologetic into the other. And Litwa, having checked no actual facts nor read any of the scholarship, could have heard that garbled poop somewhere and just believed it, thinking it appropriate for a scholar to not actually check any of this or do any of the work they are morally obligated to do. And thus we end up with that total cock up. Which is inexcusable.

No, Seriously, You Really Should Do the Work

By minute 43 Litwa really puts his foot in his mouth by not only showing he knows nothing about any of the evidence, arguments, or scholarship concerning the Ascension of Isaiah, but he also knows nothing about ancient Jewish cosmology either—even though I have extensive sections documenting it with primary evidence and modern scholarship (OHJ, Elements 34–38). Yet he acts again with completely dishonest certainty, projecting to the audience the lie that he actually knows what he is talking about, that he actually checked. Bearing false witness. Conduct unbecoming a scholar.

Litwa says regarding the “sky demon hypothesis” (note, the Ascension explicitly mentions demons in the “sky,” using both the terms Aër and Firmament, so this is not a hypothesis; it’s a fact of the text), “the author says directly in Jerusalem ‘I saw it’, okay, and this ain’t no heavenly Jerusalem, okay, this is right here on Earth, where the trees grow and where you have crucifixes, and as far as I know there’s no other parallel in Christian or any other literature of crucifixes and crosses being in in the sky or in outer space.” This is a garbled pile of nonsense that is hard to interpret even his intended meaning of. Best I can make out, he is conflating two different things, the supposed fact that the text (sans pocket gospel?) mentions Jerusalem, and the supposed fact that there was no ancient idea of copies of things on Earth being found in the firmament (and thus the air; and in every heaven besides). So we must treat those two claims separately to untangle all his mistakes.

When Litwa says “the author” says Jerusalem, if Litwa means the whole text, that can only mean its mention of where the prophet Isaiah started from, not where any of the events in his vision occurred. Whereas if Litwa means the pocket gospel, he is ignoring all the evidence against that being authentically from the original. Either way, his statement is a non sequitur. It’s simply non-responsive to any argument I’ve made, since I have never said anything about a heavenly Jerusalem in this context. And since I clearly conclude the pocket gospel is interpolated, that it says Jesus was crucified in Jerusalem is not relevant to my thesis. Once you accept the conclusion of interpolation (and those scholars who suspect this rest that conclusion on a lot of evidence), Litwa’s claim about the text simply becomes false. And that’s our entire point. Once you take that out, the text literally does say Jesus was crucified on a tree by demons in the sky.

It is more relevant to claim that is impossible because the idea of celestial objects and locales didn’t exist, and so my hypothesis is relying on an unproven conjecture. This would be a valid objection, insofar as if its premise were true, so would its conclusion be: without such proof of concept, the prior probability of Mythicism must drop. But, alas, Litwa’s argument is unsound, because his premise is false. When Litwa goes on about things in the sky, remember my book has an entire detailed section refuting his claim (again, OHJ, Elements 34–38; that’s why that’s there: as a responsible and ethical scholar, I produced the evidence backing my hypothesis; I don’t just “make shit up”). Litwa seems completely unaware of that. He doesn’t even know his own Bible confirms this: as Hebrews says Earth contains copies of things in the heavens. The Ascension of Isaiah is even more explicit: “as above so on the Earth also; for the likeness of that which is in the firmament is here on the earth” (7:10). There are many ancient texts referencing this fact, including the Life of Adam and Eve that Paul references in 2 Corinthians 12, and the Talmud, and so on. Note that the Ascension does not say “cross,” either. There is no “crucifix” in that text. It says “tree.” And we have ample documentation that it was believed trees, and gardens and soil and even graves, existed in the various levels of heaven. If, as Hebrews and the Ascension imply, there are copies of all things on Earth in the Heavens and Firmament, that would include trees, soil, tombs, wood, everything. All Things. And many other texts attest to this being the case. So you can’t say “except crosses.” You are then the one going against the background evidence of popular belief at the time; you are then the one making an assertion without evidence.

(Possibly Litwa, like Maurice Casey, has a cripplingly low IQ such that he literally can’t reason out something like this. But more likely, I think he’s just being lazy and irresponsible, and resorting to armchair apologetics rather than sound methodology—because that’s his training, which is a pervading problem with the field of Jesus studies: few of these guys are actually historians.)

You’re the One Being Anachronistic

Litwa pulls another boner like this immediately after that one: he claims “it is anachronistic to refer to outer space and just slap it onto an ancient text,” because “outer space, our concept of outer space, uh, when you look it up in the dictionary, it’s a, it is a space, that is, we view space now as sort of almost an infinite expansion out into nothingness of galaxies” where “there’s just emptiness and void, okay, but that isn’t at all how the ancients viewed heaven.” Face, meet palm. This is another one of those places where Litwa conclusively proves he lied when he claimed to have read my book. And lying is immoral. It is disrespectful, dishonorable, and disgraceful. I am insulted and disgusted by this behavior. He should be ashamed of this.

I’ll just quote my book, the one Litwa bore false witness to his readers by claiming to have read:

I shall mean by outer space everything above the atmosphere as presently known. In ancient understanding this included (a) everything in or under the ‘firmament’ (also known as the aēr or ‘sublunar sphere’) extending above the highest visible clouds all the way to the orbit of the moon, and (b) all the heavens beyond (also then known as the ‘ether’ or ‘ethereal realm’). The notion that any of this region may have been a vacuum did exist at the time, but only as a controversial theory rejected by most religious cosmologists, and only embraced typically by atomists and others generally hostile to the supernatural. Most people of the time thought the aēr extended all the way to the moon (while everything beyond that was filled with a breathable ‘ether’), when in fact (as we now know) the real atmosphere extends only a minuscule fraction of that distance.

So when they spoke of beings and events ‘in the air’, they were often speaking of what we mean by outer space. This is even more obvious when they spoke of beings and events in the spheres of heaven above the moon. Accordingly, if an ancient author was speaking of what we call outer space, I will say ‘outer space’. This does not mean I attribute to them a modern knowledge of the extraterrestrial vacuum. It only means they were thinking of realms beyond the terrestrial domains of mountains, clouds, and birds. For it was already common knowledge among the educated of the time that the moon’s distance from the earth was hundreds of thousands of miles (see Element 34). So when they used terms that we often translate as ‘air’, they were often not referring to what we mean by ‘the air’ today but a far more vast and frightening realm of fantastic possibilities, which many thought was trafficked by gods and filled with strange animals or spirits (see Elements 36-38). 

OHJ, p. 63

Mic, dropped.

Get your shit together, Dr. Litwa. And stop lying about my claims and arguments.

I explain in more detail why it is anachronistic not to refer to the ancient heavens as outer space in the opening chapter of Jesus from Outer Space. The modern word “heaven” most commonly refers to an extra-dimensional place, another plane of existence, that has no physical location in our universe. You can’t fly there in a rocket (or, as Lucian imagined in the 2nd century, a magical flying boat). No such concept existed in antiquity. So the word heaven is anachronistic. Not the other way around. We only correctly capture what the ancients were saying when we say “outer space,” as in, everywhere outside of the Earth and its atmosphere: a physical place you can fly to in a rocket or magical boat. It is literally up there, visible to the naked eye, but for its vast distances making its many mansions and thrones and vaults and gardens and demonic battles invisible to us.

The idea that space was “a vacuum” was not even established until the 20th century. So “outer space” in no way entails such a descriptor. The “outer space” of Maxwell and Newton was as full of an alien ether as it was to Ptolemy, Galen, or the Apostle Paul. Although both Ptolemy and Galen, being good scientists, knew it was possible it was a vacuum, that wasn’t their assumption (any more than it was Newton’s or Maxwell’s), nor was that believed by the faithful. What’s in outer space does not define it. It’s where it is that defines it. Litwa would know this, if he would just do the work and study what he is supposed to be talking about, rather than pull this lazy armchair bullshit on us. I must say the same of his gobsmackingly stupid winge (around minute 45) that “this comment that Jesus comes from outer space, I don’t know if it’s meant to suggest that Jesus is some kind of alien being, I don’t know, but that would be another level of anachronism,” because “the ancients never thought of little green men either or that Jesus was one of them,” so “I hope [that] will lay to rest this very tired misinformation campaign about the Ascension of Isaiah.” Again, the only misinformation campaign here is all Litwa’s.

Seriously. How does Litwa “not know” what I mean? He seems to be confessing here that he never read my book and literally has no idea what my thesis is. How then can he honestly consider himself qualified to assess it? An honest scholar would say, “I haven’t read his argument here so I can’t evaluate it.” A liar, says all this shit instead. As anyone who isn’t a liar knows, because they actually read my book, and thus actually know what my thesis is, I thoroughly document how even Paul believed Jesus was manufactured by God and sent down from outer space, from the highest heaven, which in ancient understanding would be occupied by the stars. So we aren’t talking about little green men. But we are talking about extraterrestrials in the literal sense: in ancient conception, outer space, and all the planets and even the sun and moon, were all inhabited by extraterrestrials. The word extraterrestrial means “outside of Earth.” It doesn’t mean “colored green.” These ancients believed those extraterrestrials were created beings, manufactured by God; usually angels, or in the case of demons, their progeny. But they are still extraterrestrials. They live in outer space, beyond Earth. And this is not “my theory,” this is an extensively documented fact of what they then believed, as I extensively prove in OHJ. Many scholars concur (in fact, every scholar who has actually studied this).

Indeed, Litwa really doesn’t know what he’s talking about twice over here. Because not only did he miss all that, but, contrary to his false claim, there was then also a belief in extraterrestrials in our modern scientific notion as well: as in, a belief that there were alien peoples, arising by random processes and natural selection, completely independently of us or any gods, living on distant planets, even distant planets orbiting distant stars in a literally infinite vacuum—and the stars in that model were correctly deemed suns so far away they looked small like they do. But people who believed this were typically the anti-supernaturalist atomists; theirs wasn’t a view popular with religious types, who deemed extraterrestrials as created agents of God and didn’t accept the atomist heliocentrism of the time or the idea that the stars were distant solar systems, but rather as adornments on the ceiling of God’s celestial mega-palace, because the atomist view challenged their egocentric conception of God. But this was merely a disagreement over the nature of extraterrestrials, not their existence. All ancient peoples agreed all the planets, even sun and moon, and maybe even the spaces in between, were inhabited by extraterrestrials. They only disagreed on how they got there and what they were like. (For more on this, you can take my course on Ancient Science, my actual dissertation subject, received from pursuit of an actual history degree.)

Conclusion

Litwa literally doesn’t know anything he is talking about. Yet he arrogantly—and dishonestly—represents himself as a studied expert. This is shameful and immoral—and extremely angering. He doesn’t even know what Enrico Norelli argued, or my rebuttals to it, despite complaining that one ought to know those things; he lies about my not referencing Norelli or responding to his arguments; he doesn’t know what my thesis is, or anything I argue or documented under peer review about this subject; he has completely garbled and amateur notions about the Ascension of Isaiah as a text; he has completely incorrect notions of how Mythicists see and employ this text; he doesn’t know anything about ancient cosmology, yet pretends to, and in result, lies about it; and he doesn’t know any of the arguments by multiple scholars (including myself) across the peer-reviewed literature, or any of the evidence they rest on, as to why most of us reject Norelli’s fanciful conjectures about this text. I don’t think Litwa even knows what Norelli’s arguments are. He certainly doesn’t know anyone else’s. Scholars ought to be moral and honorable, and skilled and competent, and therefore well know that they should not weigh in on things they know they have not studied, much less make confident assertions about them. As just one more example of countless, this illustrates, yet again, a pervasive lack of ethics, and of epistemic standards, in Jesus studies.