There was a recent internet storm over Gnostic Informant’s (Neal Sendlak’s) attack video “Refutation of Richard Carrier & the Church of Mythicism,” which is so disjointed and inept (and until its subsequent editing, slanderous and unhinged), all I thought very uncharacteristically for Neal, that I didn’t even deem it worth the bother of a response. When it made any pertinent assertions at all, they were already refuted by what he was supposed to be responding to (my academic monograph On the Historicity of Jesus), so anyone who actually read the book would immediately know he was making no relevant arguments. The worst critique you can ever deliver is one that has already been refuted by the material you claim to be criticizing. This just advertises that you didn’t do adequate homework and literally don’t know what you are talking about. All I have to do to respond is direct people to the relevant content of the book.

But Neal’s behavior (which was not limited to the video—his private and online community messaging and conduct over this was less than commendable and can only be described as unproductive and inflammatory) led to an internet war among competing “factions” until all truth was distorted into an unrecognizable gordian knot. I didn’t involve myself in any of this. But Neal wanted to clear the air over some of it at least and invited me onto his show to discuss it. What resulted was a mostly productive exchange that seemed to clear much of the air on the matter: “Addressing Richard Carrier & Clearing up the Air.” It didn’t resolve everything, but it looked like we made some progress.

I don’t think Neal learned much, though. And his remaining arguments still made no sense. But I at least was able to explain some things that internet denizens needed to hear and did my best to warn Neal off of being so careless in his research and argumentation in the future. Certainly, if he is going to do more emotionally-driven hit-pieces for clicks like this—which he all but admits to being his continued intention near the end of our discussion. I warned him of the Dark Side there, but he listened less than Anakin, so I’m not optimistic. But if that’s your business plan, you really need to have the goods: your criticism needs to be impeccable and well-supported in evidence, not sloppy and speculative, much less fallacious. And if you can’t tell the difference, you really need to listen to your critics, not your yes-men. Fact is, I continuously question my own conclusions and arguments; that’s how I keep them solid. The world would be a more functional place if everyone did that.

A Correct Model of Discourse

Neal was essentially triggered by a completely separate matter: my demonstration in M. David Litwa, the Ascension of Isaiah, and the Problem of Incompetent Scholarship that Litwa slandered me on another show, History Valley (hosted by Jacob Berman), in “How Scholars Know Jesus Lived – Dr. M. David Litwa,” falsely claiming I was spreading “disinformation,” was not up on the latest scholarship, and didn’t know basic facts regarding The Ascension of Isaiah. I proved, with evidence, that Litwa was the one spreading “disinformation,” was not up on the latest scholarship, and didn’t know basic facts about that text (whereas my position as to the state of the text is actually a common position in Ascension scholarship, and not some incompetent fringe claim). Which errors are impossible (literally near zero probability) if Litwa actually had read any of the scholarship on the subject he was declaring confident assertions on, as I show. Had he done, he’d not have made the rudimentary mistakes he did in attempting to awkwardly form arguments against me.

Litwa was thus falsely representing himself as being an expert on this text when he knew he wasn’t—because he must know that he read none of the peer-reviewed treatments of this text; and we know he didn’t, because otherwise he’d not have made all the mistakes I documented. Misrepresenting yourself as having read up on the literature on an issue while belittling and denigrating a peer who actually did do the relevant research is immoral. If Litwa never corrects himself and never apologizes for misleading Berman and his viewers on this, then Litwa is simply a dishonest person willing to lie and misrepresent the facts to serve whatever ends he desires. You therefore now have to fact-check everything he says to make sure he isn’t pulling that kind of stunt again. Which is weird, because Litwa is an excellent scholar who usually does reliable work; just when it comes to this one subject (so far as I know), he drops all his professional skills and ethics. And this is a trend we know because he slandered me with the same type of incompetent lies before (see Litwa’s Confused Critique of Mythicism). You need to be wary of that.

This is relevant because it was my demonstration that Litwa lied about me that triggered Neal into composing his unhinged video, which he toned down with some edits only later, although the final edit still barely makes coherent sense and rarely engages with my actual work. This was also weird, because none of this even happened on Neal’s show. Caught up in some Cult of Personality surrounding M. David Litwa, Neal decided to slander me to “defend his man” rather than actually checking if I was right. He thus ended up spreading disinformation about what I’ve argued, while claiming I was the one doing that, and not up on the literature, and making basic mistakes—the same thing Litwa did; though this time, I believe, out of incompetence rather than dishonesty, as Neal has no Ph.D. and exhibits no skills sufficient to even approximate one. I think he literally didn’t know what he was doing; whereas Litwa definitely is well-enough trained to know better. Litwa doesn’t have Neal’s excuse.

But this is still censurable behavior. The correct response to being triggered by an attack on someone you like is to check whether that attack is true or not. In other words, Neal should have done a video investigating my claims about Litwa, and either actually defending Litwa (if my claims are found to be provably false) or joining in the criticism of Litwa (if my claims are found to be provably true) or coming to no conclusion as to which of us, Litwa or myself, is right (if Neal can’t confirm either of us is correct). Instead, Neal completely ignored the question of whether Litwa lied or made gross mistakes while slandering me—he evidently didn’t care whether that was true or not—and chose instead to respond with a textbook tu quoque fallacy and slander me as reprisal.

This is not a valid pattern of discourse. People need to care about the truth, not celebrity; facts, not some toxic honor code. You need to be more outraged by liars than by those who demonstrate they lied, and more concerned to criticize mistakes than the people who catch them out. Even when the target of such accusations is someone you like: you should check to find out if the accusations are true first, and explain your position once you do. Of course this is also the case if the target is someone you don’t like. Because then you need to responsibly confirm any accusations are actually true in order to control for your bias against them; just as you need to diligently fact-check the converse case when it’s someone you like, as then you have a converse bias that you need to responsibly account for.

Correct discourse always requires adhering to the first principle: caring about the truth. If you skip over the question of what’s true merely to “attack the messenger,” you are already behaving too irrationally to take seriously. It’s not a good look. Nor is it productive. I believe if you think carefully about it you’ll realize that you will prefer a reputation as a careful fact-checker who puts the truth above all else, over that of a careless fact-disregarder and unproductive shit-talker who puts clicks and emotions above all else. I can’t make people learn this lesson. All I can do is teach it—and hope someone listens.

Addressing Neal’s Slanders

I won’t respond to any of the ad hominem in Neil’s original edit. None of it was true or relevant. Given that I adhere to the first principle of caring about the truth, I am only interested in pertinent disputes and the facts pertaining. Even though my being wrong about some unrelated matter still has nothing to do with whether Litwa messed up on the basics of Ascension scholarship, I’ll set that non sequitur aside (my original article already covers it) and act like Neal meant to just randomly critique some arguments of mine, and that the Litwa dispute had nothing to do with that.

Much of what I’ll say here has already been covered by others, including Dr. Aaron Adair on Neal’s show, in a lengthy and often frustrating discussion between them in “About The Jesus Mythicism Controversy,” which repeats some things Adair had already published on his blog (see Litwa Carrier Bible Christ) but adds more, and in direct dialogue with Neal. Godless Engineer is also producing a series of critiques that are quite good and on point, beginning with @Gnostic Informant TWISTS Historical Information About Philo (which Neal denigrated but hasn’t yet responded to and, based on my questioning in our chat, didn’t seem to really have watched), and most recently Gnostic Informant Struggles With The Truth. These contain fair criticisms and go into more detail than I will bother with here, so if you want a deeper dive on any of this I recommend keeping up on that too. Do note that I have not meticulously checked everything Godless says in his videos, so maybe there are some flubs, but it looks to be few, and in any case, he usually does a good job of making clear where all his facts come from and which assertions are inferences and by what logic those conclusions are being reached, so you can fact-check him yourself.

I should also add that in our discussion Neal exhibited false beliefs even about what happened in recent weeks, for example claiming Godless Engineer and I had questioned the legitimacy of M. David Litwa’s Ph.D., which did not happen; yet Neal seemed unable to accept that his belief was false. To the contrary, I said I find this behavior from Litwa to be uncharacteristic, because he has all the needed competencies and usually deploys them to produce good work. I’m thus concerned that Neal might have a tendency to leap to conclusions and then remember it as if they were “facts.” Godless has illustrated this with M. David Litwa Gets The Ascension Of Isaiah COMPLETELY Wrong and again in Gnostic Informant Struggles With The Truth, which together reproduce every moment we might have discussed such a thing (while also showing some of the inexplicable mistakes I claimed Litwa made), revealing we made no such claim (or you can test Neal’s claim yourself against the whole original video Godless and I did, M. David Litwa is Wrong About The Ascension Of Isaiah w/ Dr. Carrier, which I can assure you has not been edited: the current edition contains everything we said in its original broadcast, and you won’t find us doing what Neal claims anywhere in it).

This means you need to fact-check anything Neal says before trusting it. Because he does this a lot. For example, in his original video around minute 16:50 he claims “what Carrier has done and other mythicists have done is, they said, oh, look the word branch in Hebrew” in Zechariah 6 “is netzar, but the Hebrew version of Zechariah doesn’t use the word netzar it uses the word zema so that falls apart too,” but I have never made any such argument. Why he believes I did is beyond me. But it is essentially just slander to accuse me of a mistake I never made. And in any event it’s simply false to say I ever argued this. Likewise around minute 17 Neal claims Pliny the Elder attests to the Galilean town of Nazareth. False. Nazareth is nowhere mentioned by Pliny. Neal has confused Pliny’s discussion of a tetrarchy, not a town, in Syria (in fact a kingdom across the river from Syrian Apamea), not Palestine, identified as of the Nazerini, a tribal group with no connection to Christianity or even Jews, as a mention of a Jewish town in Galilee. A more incompetent blunder I cannot imagine. I also don’t doubt Nazareth’s existence (OHJ, p. 258 n. 8 and p. 400 n. 30), so imputing any such doubt to me would be another false claim anyway. Notably, this even replicates a mistake you’ll soon see he makes a lot: he didn’t even bother to find out what real evidence he could have cited for Nazareth’s existence, but cited a completely bogus claim instead; this is how shoddy his work is. Likewise, around minute 19 Neal asserts that “the real source of this quote,” Philo’s “Behold a man who is the East,” “is from numbers 23:7,” which is provably false, and quite an astonishing error. Then in his discussion with me he repeatedly insisted this isn’t what he said, and “changed” his argument on the fly into something else. But video doesn’t lie. You can watch it yourself. It’s what he said (not only in minute 19 but minutes 26 to 27 as well). Neal is thus not a reliable reporter. He makes false claims often and with impunity. You now have to take this into account whenever dealing with anything he says. You can’t trust him.

You’ll see more examples of that problem below. And while some people credit this as dishonesty on Neal’s part, in my opinion it’s a result of his poor ability to keep track of any argument that involves more than two premises, compromising his memory, and his ability to assess, much less produce, any argument of greater complexity. He probably really does believe we denigrated Litwa’s degree, because he forgot that he had only inferred it and never actually saw us do it—and I think he may have erroneously inferred it because he can’t follow complex arguments well enough to have grasped our actual point (such as that Litwa is failing to apply his doctoral skills in this one case, not that he doesn’t have them). If you watch the discussions between Neal and both myself and Aaron, you’ll see many examples of these kinds of confusions on Neal’s part, which makes having a conversation with him extremely difficult, especially when he lets his emotions rather than his reason govern what he believes or thinks.

What Did Philo Mean?

First example: Philo. Neal would have done well to have read my article The Difference Between a Historian and an Apologist before attempting to fly off the handle criticizing what I’ve argued about a passage in Philo of Alexandria, one that appears to say he knew of an archangel already named “Jesus” that possesses all the same peculiar attributes of the Jesus attested in early Christian literature (the “image of god,” god’s agent of creation and “firstborn” son, and celestial high priest). Note that Jesus, while also being a common Jewish name at the time (it’s actually the name Joshua; we just spell them differently in English for no good reason), also happens to conveniently mean “God’s Savior” (OHJ, Ch. 6) which Neal admits Philo elsewhere attests is the name above all names (“Moses also changes the name of Hosea into that of Joshua” in Numbers 13:16, Philo says, because “Joshua means ‘the salvation of the Lord'” and is “the name of the most excellent possible character”), in concurrence with what one might read out of Philippians 2:9 as the reason Jesus was assigned this name—which change of names to suit his role, I pointed out in our discussion, is just as likely of a historical Jesus, and therefore is not evidence for Mythicism (just read, for example, the recent article on this point by David Mitchell, “The Name of Jesus,” at Bright Morning Star).

Which is a broader point Neal seemed not to understand: not a single fact-claim I make in OHJ, Chs. 4-5, the “background” elements, is evidence for Mythicism, but evidence equally expected on both Mythicism and Historicism, but which any theory of either must take into account, or be explained by or compatible with. This is the only role my Philo inference plays. It matters for the Mythicist position only in respect to defeating apologetic arguments like that the Christians didn’t have any basis for making up a man named Jesus with all these angelic attributes (including being an eternal pre-existent being). But honest historians have no business making such arguments anyway.

In my Difference article I articulate the actual logic of the argument I present in OHJ for this conclusion, which Neal was surprised by in our discussion—revealing he didn’t actually know what my argument was, or even that it was an argument. Because in his original video (with his discussion of the whole Philo subject beginning around minute 10 or 11) he falsely claimed I was lying to people by claiming Philo “says” the angel’s name was Jesus; that is not what I have actually said. Neal relied on a video clip where I only brief the argument, referring to it as Philo “telling us” this information, and he then mistook that as my claiming Philo said rather than attested to this. Never assume an oral brief by a scholar constitutes the entirety of their argument; arguments and evidence take far too long to be related in every nuanced detail at a podium. If you want to take scholarship seriously, you are morally obligated to go and check the complete peer-reviewed version of any argument you only see or hear briefed somewhere, before responding to it. This will forestall such errors as misunderstanding the nuances of spoken sentences, and not knowing on what evidence or arguments those briefed conclusions are based. Surely you know such errors are commonplace, so you should know it is not acceptable to bypass this procedure. You need to make sure you know what you are talking about, before talking about it.

You’ll find in the discussion we had that Neal had a hard time following my arguments or even articulating his own. He even tried insisting that we can’t infer things about what authors think or mean from what they write (pro tip: the reason we can indeed do that is because that’s what writing is for). Neal had a really hard time grasping that authors continue to believe things they say in one treatise when writing another treatise, and then (contradictorily) insisted he knew better how Philo would think than Philo’s own text indicated, and thus insisted Philo “should” have made clear to us what we are inferring, when there is no evidence supporting Neal on that point. Claiming such psychic knowledge of authorial desires and intentions without evidence is conversely not a valid literary procedure; for examples of what I mean, see The Backwards and Unempirical Logic of Q Apologetics and Reading Josephus on James: On Valliant Flunking Literary Theory. Philo doesn’t care about the things we care about; he won’t have anticipated questions other people will have two thousand years later. He has his own business.

Hence it matters that the only evidence we have of what Philo did care about and did intend to explain here is quite the contrary. In the contended passage (On Confusion of Tongues 62-63) Philo’s only stated interest is to explain the name “Anatolê” being assigned to his “angel of many names” (as he is about to contrast this use of Anatolê with another, in § 64-65, a key point we’ll get to shortly), leaving no reason to digress on any other name this angel had, or to insert a detailed treatise here on “all” the attributes he believed this angel to have. Moreover, Philo nowhere tells us all the names this angel had; in fact, he rarely mentions any of its names, in accord with a common Jewish practice (witnessed in both Philo and the Qumran scrolls) to not just casually mention angelic names. So Neal’s insistence that Philo “should” have catalogued “all” of this angel’s names is exactly contrary to the evidence, which clearly shows Philo was against such a feat (as he never performs it, despite discussing this angel many times across his copious surviving works). It was enough for Philo’s stated purpose to make clear which angel he meant here—which he does, more than adequately.

The rest can then be validly inferred, because that is how all authors think, being a fundamental fact of human neuroscience: if you state your belief that a person immutably possesses some attributes in one place and other attributes in another place (and there is no reason to believe you changed your beliefs in the interim), we can conclude you de facto believe that person has both sets of attributes. That’s how “beliefs” work. It was bizarre of Neal to try and deny this, and I cannot explain why this was so hard for him to grasp in our discussion. As I said there, just as Paul only identifies Jesus as God’s agent of creation in 1 Corinthians and as the “image of god” in 2 Corinthians and the “firstborn” son of God in Romans, it still follows that Paul believes all three things about Jesus, even though he nowhere states all three of them in one place.

And we can further infer yet more things from that fact. Like that Paul believed his Jesus was the same archangel Philo is talking about—because otherwise we have a highly improbable coincidence on our hands, even without the coincidence of name. No other explanation makes likely the agreement that these two beings were the creator, image, and firstborn son of God. All the more so when you add other early Christian evidence: Hebrews attests that Christians believed Jesus was the high priest of God’s celestial temple, and John attests they also believed Jesus was the Logos and the Paraclete, all of which Philo also assigns to this very same angel (see citations in OHJ, Ch. 5, Element 40). Which is an even greater improbability if you wish to declare it a coincidence, rather than accepting it as fact that Christians thought Jesus was this very angel (thence become incarnate to fulfill God’s secret plans).

This rudimentary principle of literary analysis, accepted and routinely employed without blush, across all peer-reviewed work in history and Biblical Studies, entails that Philo thought the angel he mentions in Confusion 62-63 was the high priest of God’s celestial temple (just as Hebrews concedes was true of Jesus; cf. Was Jesus-Is-Michael an Early Christian Mystery Teaching?). This is a fact. Just as it is a fact that when Paul says Jesus created the universe, he also thought that same Jesus was the image and firstborn son of God as well. Because that’s how human minds work. So when Philo says the one called Anatolê in Zechariah 6:11-13 (per Confusion 62) was “fittingly” so-named because they are the “firstborn” son of God (and indeed this same particular “incorporeal” eternal being he describes many other places), we can infer that Philo thinks this person is fittingly so-named because the person he thinks is being so-named is the one identified in that passage as a “son of God” (“son of Jozadak” meaning “son of the Righteous God”) and “high priest.”

Otherwise we have an improbable coincidence: that Philo knows there is a person in Zechariah 6 called “son of God” and “high priest” yet doesn’t mean his “son of God” and “high priest” that he claims is mentioned in this verse is that same person but someone else—someone not even mentioned in that verse. Because in case you hadn’t noticed, the verse as we have it identifies no other person present. The only people said to be at this event are Zechariah and Jesus, i.e. the “high priest” Joshua ben Jozadak, “son of God the Righteous” (and possibly the “household” of Joshua, although none are named, singled-out, or identified). And since this is also true in the Hebrew, which predates the Greek translation, it’s very unlikely Philo was seeing any substantially different text than we do now.

The person Philo means can’t plausibly even be, as Neal tried to insist, the angel speaking to Zechariah, because the angel is telling Zechariah to do this in the future—the angel isn’t mentioned as being present when he actually goes and does it. So all we have left are coincidences Neal can’t explain but that I can. And improbable coincidences are by definition improbable. Whereas if Philo is reading this verse as saying Jesus, the very “son of god” and “high priest” it mentions, is here being called Anatolê, the ultimate “son of god” and “high priest” Philo says is being so named, then every detail is 100% expected. Which is the opposite of improbable. This entails my conclusion is substantially more probable than any attempted by Neal (see Advice on Probabilistic Reasoning and “What Did Josephus Mean by That?” A Case Study in the Relationship between Evidence and Probability for demonstrations of this unavoidable logical principle).

In his original video Neal never describes this argument, and never responds to it. Instead he confusingly muddles around between different contradictory alternatives and never tests the probability of any. For example, he spent an inordinate amount of time insisting that the Anatolê in Numbers 23:7 should inform our understanding of Philo’s interpretation of Zechariah 6. But that is directly refuted by Philo himself in the very next sentence, where in § 64-65 he says that Anatolê is a different being, in fact an evil one in opposition to the one he thinks is being discussed in Zechariah 6. So Philo is telling us directly he does not think the Anatolê in Numbers 23 at all informs us about who the Anatolê is in Zechariah 6. This is a concrete fact. Philo says this explicitly. So there is no possible way to argue as Neal does. Yet Neal couldn’t understand that Philo refuted his own theory in the very next sentence, or why this was relevant.

In fact Neal had a really hard time in our discussion grasping the distinction between (1) our determining what the author of Zechariah originally meant and (2) our determining what Philo (and any other Jewish exegetes sharing his view) believe Zechariah meant. The original meaning we know is not that this Jesus is an incorporeal archangel, but rather the first high priest of the second temple—an actual, and entirely ordinary, historical person; and possibly the passage originally said Zerubabbel, the first king of that era, is whom Zechariah was declaring this of, although if so (and that’s still only conjecture) that reading had been lost centuries before Philo and thus cannot inform our reading of Philo. To the contrary, the evidence conclusively proves Philo does not believe that Zechariah meant what we think Zechariah meant. He believes Zechariah was claiming this weird mystical thing that in no way was even on Zechariah’s mind. And in Philo’s time, that was typical; Jews rarely read their Bible as saying things they originally said, but as containing cryptic mystical messages wholly bizarre by our modern standards. Indeed, read all of Philo’s works (as Neal claims he has done) and you’ll see this in spades: Philo almost never reads verses in their original sense. He almost always extracts some bizarre interpretation instead.

So it is a complete waste of time arguing what Zechariah “originally” meant here. That’s irrelevant. Philo has no such interest as we have in determining that, nor any analogous skills for doing it. All we can determine is what Philo thought this passage in Zechariah meant. And all the evidence we have as to that points to it not being what Zechariah originally meant, but something altogether else—especially if the passage has become corrupted, a fact Philo would then have no knowledge of; that’s purely a modern conjecture, based on modern methods of paleography and literary analysis. Otherwise the passage as we have it is plain in its meaning: there is only one person said to be present that Zechariah could be telling all to behold, and that’s Jesus. Philo thought Jesus was the Anatolê.

Philo obviously uses entirely different methods for interpreting the Bible, ones that allow him to imagine, and with total confidence, that Zechariah 6 was talking about an eternal incorporeal archangel; an angel who was the “son of god” and celestial “high priest”; and who created and governed everything, including God’s celestial temple, at God’s behest (thus entailing how Philo might even be reading verse 6:13). Once you admit this, Neal’s attempt to replace what Philo thought with the conjectures of modern scholars as to what Zechariah thought makes no logical sense. It’s entirely a non sequitur. And it ignores entirely my whole argument. His theory requires an improbable coincidence. Mine does not. The more probable theory prevails. There is no other.

In the end, Neal, like most lazy critics who don’t spend any time actually trying to understand the arguments of scholars they want to disagree with, didn’t even grasp that it is a fact (not some theory we have to argue for, but an established fact) that this archangel Philo mentions here is the same being the first Christians believed Jesus to have been an incarnation of. To deny this is to rest your case on a coincidence, of the conjunction of peculiar assigned attributes, so improbable that the fact as otherwise stated is hundreds of times more likely. This is true no matter what Philo thought the angel was named. The bulk of my Element 40 in OHJ is establishing this, not its name. I then add an argument (not a “sneaky assertion” or any of the false nonsense Neal claimed) that Philo also must have thought this angel was named “Jesus” (among its many other names). I am explicit that this is an argument and not a plain fact, and something we can infer about what Philo believed, not something Philo explicitly said. So it is slander to claim I didn’t make all this clear in the peer-reviewed work I summarize in my podium talks. And it is morally irresponsible not to consult the work being summarized in a brief. That would be like using the abstract of a science paper to refute it while ignoring what’s actually in that paper. That can only be described as gross incompetence. That is not a procedure to be defending, much less using.

Neal’s failure to consult the actual work being summarized crashes him into a number of moral failures, such as calling my claims “a blatant lie” and “outright lies” and “borderline dishonest” (original video, c. 23:29, 23:35, 15:02). He presented no evidence of that. And when I called him on this in our discussion, he denied doing it (so, either he is lying, or his memory is catastrophically untrustworthy; neither bodes well for his reliability). Worse, Neal didn’t even know that this was a conclusion I argued to. I never said Philo “said” it but that we can infer it from what he said. He also didn’t know that the archangel and all its properties is provably both what Philo is here talking about and what Christians believe their Jesus to have been. And he also didn’t know that its being named Jesus is an additional inference made on strong evidence, none of which evidence Neal rebutted with anything but complete non sequiturs, such as his nonsense about Numbers 23, where he failed to notice that Philo explicitly repudiates that argument; whatever modern scholars believe, whatever Zechariah was thinking, Philo did not think that. And he also didn’t notice or appreciate the fact that Philo does not seem to be aware of anyone who thinks otherwise, as he assumes his belief is a fact requiring no defense. Another thing Neal didn’t know: the notion that Philo also refers to human high priests as the image of God is true, but again irrelevant, as Philo makes clear he means here the incorporeal firstborn, his archangel of many names, not any human.

So Neal’s attempts at rebutting me all ignore the fact that Philo himself explicitly refutes every single one of his own arguments, and that my interpretation of what Philo means is supported by evidence, whereas Neal’s is supported by none, depending instead on non sequiturs and improbable coincidences that my interpretation avoids. So he’s trying to argue for adopting the less probable conclusion—the opposite of sound reasoning. Why?

By contrast, there are many scholars who simply accept my conclusion without even seeing any need to argue for it. For example, in The Johannine Exegesis of God (de Gruyter 2004), Daniel Sadananda simply says “in Zechariah 6 God commands” Zechariah “to crown ‘Joshua’ the High Priest as King” (p. 31), and hence the Anatolê. He cites several scholars concurring, e.g. Wayne Meeks, The Prophet King: Moses Traditions and the Johannine Christology (Brill 1967), pp. 71-72 explains that yes, originally the passage may have referenced Zerubbabel but by the time of the first century that reading was lost, and the passage at that time said “to crown Joshua the High Priest as king.” And so on. Indeed, I am not aware of anyone in the peer-reviewed literature who discusses this passage in its first century messianic context (as opposed to its original context) who disagrees with my reading here, that Philo (and even other Jewish exegetes) probably read Zechariah 6 as declaring Jesus the Anatolê.

I welcome any counter-examples from the peer-reviewed literature in comments below (as well as more examples of scholars concurring with me). But it’s deeply misleading to call my conclusion “sneaky” or even “dishonest” when it’s a mainstream, multiply peer-reviewed conclusion across the field’s expert literature (it has passed peer review at least four separate times: in Meeks, Sadananda, Carrier, and now Lataster, Questioning the Historicity of Jesus, pp. 303-08, also, like Meeks, published by Brill; I have since publishing this article found many more examples, so this has passed peer review no less than twelve times—how many times do we need, honestly?). And especially since I give a more extensive argument for this conclusion than much of that literature had even previously felt need to; and yet Neal never describes nor ever responds to my argument, instead insisting on alternative theories that Philo himself rejects. This is not the way to critique an argument.

Lesson: Know what the fuck you are talking about before going on a slanderous rant about it. Make sure you have strong evidence for your claims; which means, when your claims depend on your target “not” saying something or “not” arguing something, you have to actually read what they wrote so as to be sure they didn’t say or argue it. Make sure your arguments are even logically relevant (e.g. don’t confuse the project of inferring what Zechariah meant with the project of inferring what Philo thought centuries later). And check if maybe your opponent’s position is already a mainstream expert view before trying to claim it’s an idiosyncratic cheat that can be dismissed by an unqualified amateur.

What Does the Talmud Say?

In his original video (starting in minute 31) Neal made a bunch of “the Devil planted all the fossils” type of arguments against my use of the Talmud, contradictorily claiming I avoid discussing the Talmud and that everything I say about it is false (you really have to pick a lane there). In fact what I say about it is mainstream, not my own fringe claim. It’s plainly what the Talmud says (see OHJ, Ch. 8.1): Jesus the Nazarene son of Mary lived and died in the 70s BC, not the 30s AD, and was stoned by the Sanhedrin on the day before Passover at Lydda, not crucified by the Romans at Jerusalem. And this dating is confirmed by Epiphanius as what Jewish Christians in that region called “the Nazorians” were indeed teaching (in a digression about a belief that Jesus came to power when Alexander Jannaeus died).

None of Neal’s attempts to make this go away bear any plausibility. Aaron Adair already made this clear enough, and I have nothing more to add to his take-down. Of course I disagree with Adair’s concern that I catch too many people lying or behaving in unhinged ways—I present evidence in every case, so one still has to check if that’s true, and be concerned that it is so often true rather than so often demonstrated. Shooting the messenger is the wrong way ’round here. Adair also missed the weight of my actual argument about Philo. Both points I already briefed above. He also incorrectly relies on a conclusion, albeit in support of my position on the Talmud, that the Jews couldn’t carry out executions in the 30s A.D. but, IMO, the evidence suggests that was a later myth and not the actual legal situation at the time. But everything else he says is spot on:

• “I don’t know why Neal says mythicists don’t like to talk about the Talmud,” because they are the ones who point out that “different groups get[ting] different time periods for Jesus is less expected on historicity. And Carrier talks about this point for several pages in OHJ, pp. 281-285.”
• “That there is a scribal error,” Neal’s first attempt to invent Satan’s fossils here, “is unlikely because we find Jesus being described as under Alexander Jannaeus in multiple places in multiple books and in both Talmuds,” across two empires, and “we have another source on this,” Epiphanius.
• “That the text only means that it was the Sanhedrin established by Alexander,” Neal’s second attempt at Satanic fossils, “is faulty because none of the story makes sense if this were true,” as “he is never handed over to the Roman authorities,” “he is tried and executed by the Jewish authorities,” explicitly stoned, and indeed at Lydda, not Jerusalem; and in “the Toledoth Jesu, a medieval counter-gospel, the timeframe is explicitly during and immediately after the reign of Jannaeus,” moreover Epiphanius corroborates this, and “in b.Talmud Sanhedrin 107b, we are told that Jesus was with Joshua ben Perachiah,” even fleeing to Egypt with him to escape Jannaeus, a dating all other sources confirm for ben Perachiach. So there is no way to get Neal’s explanation to work.
• Finally, “that the Talmud changed when Jesus lived to avoid persecution by the Roman Empire controlled by the Christians” can’t work as an argument because the Babylonian Talmud was composed outside the Roman Empire. Whereas the Toledoth Jesu was transmitted across Europe (including content dating back to antiquity) and is unmistakably an attack on Christianity without blush; not some attempt to pretend it wasn’t. And don’t forget Epiphanius, who attests to actual Christians teaching this, not just anti-Christian Jewish polemics. Neal thus imputes motives that not only couldn’t exist, but demonstrably didn’t exist. That’s the very definition of a bad explanation.

Neal just isn’t doing any homework here. He doesn’t know basic facts, even though they are related in detail in my book. And he proposes wildly implausible theories not only backed by no evidence, but extensively refuted by all the evidence there is. This is crazy town, Christian apologetics stuff, total “Satan buried the fossils” kind of reasoning. What on Earth is Neal doing arguing like that? If he were acting like a responsible scholar, he’d know none of his arguments can be found in the peer-reviewed literature on this; and he could instead have tried rehabilitating the arguments that actually are, such as articulated by Robert Van Voorst, against my rebuttals (OHJ, pp. 282-84); but that would require actually reading what I wrote, and actually engaging with what I argued (likewise Van Voorst). Neal chose to do neither. This makes him deeply unreliable, even at the most fundamental level of methodology, as well as facts. He is completely hosing everything. That begs an explanation. Because this is all very weird.

Lesson: Do your homework. Actually read the peer-reviewed literature, not only against your position but on your side; actually interact with it; and get it right. And make sure your theories survive the test of the available facts before asserting them. Don’t just “make shit up” and never even check to see if it makes sense given the available evidence. And certainly don’t do that and claim you can outdo peer-reviewed scholarship that way. That’s the behavior of a Young Earther, not a reliable critic.

What about the Rank-Raglan Mythotype?

Neal then tried to attack my use of the Rank-Raglan Mythotype….without ever mentioning how I actually use it or on what basis; and worse, by resorting to parody literature rather than peer-reviewed scholarship. Peculiarly, in fact, he uses a completely ridiculous document produced by an internet rando that very conspicuously did not pass peer review. As you can tell by comparing the unhinged list of absurd examples Neal relies on with what did pass peer review (see Chris Hansen, “Lord Raglan’s Hero and Jesus” in the Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism). This is the most telling of egregious errors Neal exhibits in that video, because here was a peer-reviewed argument he could have made, and instead he ignored even that and made instead a completely illogical, unhinged, and obviously fallacious argument instead. Why would he do that? I cannot explain this by any ordinary hypothesis. At best, his epistemology is completely broken and wholly unreliable. He should fix that, stat.

Again, Aaron Adair pretty much already covered this:

• “Neal … suggests that, actually, dozens of historical people fit the [Rank-Raglan] mythotype, so it cannot even make the non-historicity of Jesus a starting point” but he makes several mistakes when doing this. “Neal isn’t clear which points,” for example, “Alexander [the Great] does have and how he justifies that,” instead it looks like Neal “is giving points to Alexander that his stories do not confer,” for instance, “Alexander is not spirited away to live in another country,” and indeed he can’t be, “because there are no stories of attempts on his life as an infant,” even “in the highly-legendary Alexander Romance.” We are also “told several things about his childhood, including his taming of horses and his education under Aristotle” and several other things besides.

So Neal can’t get the count he claims. He’s fudging. He’s creating a fraudulent reference class, as ridiculously as any Christian apologist might attempt. His methodology is broken. What is especially weird about this is that Neal could have used the peer-reviewed attempt at this, which tries to get a high score for Alexander the Great, for instance, by allowing “half points” into the scoring (see Hansen, ibid., pp. 138-39). That actually doesn’t work (for reasons of the logic of set theory which I’ll get to), but it’s at least a respectable attempt at a critique. It suffers in its misunderstanding of the logic of set theory, and in its ignoring of the fact that I already allow up-scoring of four historical members into the Rank-Raglan set, so proving even as many as four members were historical would actually agree with me, not contradict me (see OHJ, pp. 243). So it doesn’t actually help to try and squeeze, say, Alexander and Mithradates in (on which see OHJ, pp. 231-32 n. 193). That’s just two people. Not even four. But to know this you’d have to actually read my book. And Neal has committed, evidently, to never doing that. So he never knows what my arguments are, even so as to rebut them competently.

Again, Adair:

• Worse, “when Neal says that 50 historical people fit the mythotype, he goes to some unspecified PDF as his source, which he scrolls through and stops for the occasional name,” yet “even a fast inspection indicates Neal should have known better than to use this PDF to refute Carrier” because, for example, it “cites Francis Utley’s ‘Lincoln Wasn’t There, or Lord Raglan’s Hero'” (1965). And “that’s a problem” because “those who cite Utley against mythicism haven’t read Utley,” whereas “I have, and the thing you realize reading it is that Utley is writing a satire or parody,” not serious scholarship; yet “if one takes a parody for actual belief or scholarship, then one cannot take their work seriously.” And while this might be chalked up to Neal’s carelessness and poor methodology, “there is another example that should have stopped Neal immediately from believing what he was reading,” the claim that “Donald Trump fits the Rank-Raglan scale.”

Adair goes on to demonstrate this is ridiculous. And it should have caused Neal to immediately doubt his source. Trump isn’t even dead—and that loses him five points alone. Moreover, “no one has claimed Trump had unusual circumstances at his birth” either, or that his mother was a virgin, or that anyone tried to kill him as a baby, or that his father had been President of the United States (or any kind of sovereign), nor did Trump “flee from” or “go to” his future kingdom, because he has always lived in the United States; nor did he reign “uneventfully” (to the contrary: wars, riots, and plagues characterized his reign). It’s also hard to claim he ever “lost favor with his subjects” (fanatical Trumpers remain unmoved; and a majority of the population actually already voted against him even the first time around). But even granting him that, he scores nowhere near even half, much less “twenty out of twenty-two.” You really aren’t someone we can take seriously if this is how you choose to argue.

Beyond those mistakes, however, there are two more important errors that Neal commits here: first, Argument from Anachronism; second, Argument from Fraudulent Reference Class.

As for the first error, Neal incorrectly uses facts from an entirely different period of history (modern times) to assess conditions in another (the Greco-Roman era). Even with honest scoring this is not valid in history, without particular evidence that the analogy is still applicable. In this case it isn’t. After Christian imperialism governs world cultures for centuries, and fiction supplants myth as the principal form of speculative and allegorical social discourse, and modern tools like newspapers, photographs, and government records make fabricating persons more difficult, it can no longer be said that the rate at which “the story of Jesus” gets mapped onto historical persons today informs the rate at which “the story of the Rank-Raglan hero” got mapped onto people like Jesus. The only base rate that is applicable is the rate before all those changes occurred, which means essentially before Christians mapped Jesus to that model. Thus only figures before the second century, fourth at the latest, can count for estimating the expected base rate of that happening to a historical person at that time. So all attempts to drag modern persons into the set are invalid for this purpose. And that’s even before we get to the additional fallacies of bullshit scoring (like claiming Donald Trump is in the set, or Cleopatra of Egypt) and cherry-picking (ignoring all the modern fictional people who might also so belong, from Darth Vader to Superman). Neal really needs to grasp this before he can make any competent argument against my use of the Rank-Raglan set.

As for the second error, Neal is engaging in what I had already demonstrated to be fraudulent reference classing. So he didn’t even check so as to keep up with what he might need to address here. Surely he must know he’s not the first person to attempt critiques like this. A responsible critic would go and find out what their target of criticism has already said about the arguments they plan to deploy. Skipping that step renders you largely useless as a critic. This is more excusable if that material is hard to find or access or learn about; but my blog is free, and Neal well knows where it is, and should (I hope) know how to use its search engine. It’s not even as if “Rank-Raglan” is so common a phrase as to generate any irrelevant hits, much less “too many” to sort through for relevance. Neal failed at critical thinking 101 here. But in any event, I already “refuted” him, as if I had psychic powers, in Jesus and the Problem of the Fraudulent Reference Class (as well as in other articles linked there). I published that a year ago. Come on, Neal. You couldn’t even be bothered to find that out first before taking my argument on?

To be fair, I am not surprised by Neal’s mistake here, being self-evidently an amateur and bad at logic, but it’s not unexpected even for a PhD in history (a degree rarely conferring training in logics at all, much less set theory or probability theory). So at least here a calm and rational debate can still be had. But you actually have to have that debate before claiming to already have won it.

Fraudulent reference classing is the fallacy of claiming something in a subset belongs to a superset and therefore does not belong to the subset. This is illogical. Obviously belonging to a superset in no way “removes” a thing from its subset. It still belongs to the subset. And all consequences of that still follow. For example, showing that Harry Potter meets the criteria of being a fictional superhero, and thus belongs to that subset, cannot be undermined by someone then coming along and saying he “also” fits the superset of being an English schoolboy, and is therefore historical because most English schoolboys are historical (h/t Joel Pearson here). That’s illogical. The fact that Harry Potter belongs to the superset of “English schoolboys” (and he does) does not make the fact “go away” that he still belongs to the set of “fictional superheroes,” and hence the subset of “English schoolboys who are fictional superheroes.” The Venn diagram does have Potter in both sets. But we all know his being in the fictional set is more pertinent to determining the prior probability that he ever really existed (and the entire Harry Potter franchise is just a covert op to reveal the secret world of wizards). If you recognize how illogical that argument is, you’ll start to get how illogical Neal’s argument is—and likewise anyone else’s, who uses the same move (like, indeed, Chris Hansen).

Creating new supersets by broadening the Rank-Raglan criteria is exactly the same error. It does not matter if you can do that. Jesus still belongs to the subset of narrower criteria. That doesn’t go away. Harry Potter belongs to both the superset of all English schoolboys and the subset of magical English schoolboys. And when you belong to that subset, the prior probability that you are real is small. The fact that that probability is far larger for the superset is logically irrelevant. You still have to face the consequences of Potter belonging to a highly fictionalized set. Because he is not in the set of “non-magical English schoolboys.” I already made this point in OHJ (see “The Alternative Class Objection,” Ch. 6.5), using the example of the Josephan Christs reference class (a real set Jesus does indeed belong to, and which IMO is the most likely version of Jesus if he did indeed exist: he was another one of those guys, just less famous). That Jesus belongs to the Josephan Christs class does not remove him from the Heavily Mythologized Figures class. And any Josephan Christ who ended up in the Heavily Mythologized Figures class would also be of doubtful historicity. You can’t make subsets go away by finding supersets. So you can’t avoid the consequences of someone’s belonging to the subset.

Neal (and Hansen and other critics like them) don’t realize that you can invent any reference class you want (using even absurdly broadened Rank-Raglan criteria, for example), since all sets exist. As long as your facts are correct, of course; Neal’s use of Donald Trump and Cleopatra are examples of placing people in a non-existent set, because the fact-claims he is making about them to accomplish this are false, and the defining feature of a thing that is false is “it does not exist.” So those sets don’t exist. And so you cannot use them. But setting those cases aside, as long as one doesn’t fake the evidence like that, as long as the facts really are as required to belong to a set, that set exists. So there is nothing fraudulent about stating someone belongs to any set, even sets you completely make up with random lists of criteria (see my discussion of the example of the Lincoln-Kennedy Coincidences set: OHJ, pp. 228 n. 187). You can redefine the Rank-Raglan criteria any way you want, and as long as you don’t fake any facts, the sets that result are real. Their members really do belong to it.

One can broaden the criteria to include Alexander the Great, for example, without fudging any facts; and that set will really exist, just like any other supersets would that Alexander belongs to, like the set of all humans claimed to exist in history, the set of all people whose name starts with A, the set of all things predominately filled with water. But that does not allow you to ignore other sets that he belongs to—or doesn’t, like the actual Rank-Raglan-Dundes set (since I am using the work of Alan Dundes here, a fact often overlooked, since I cite his work under its editor, Alan Segal, in OHJ, p. 230 n. 191: see In Quest of the Hero, “The Hero Pattern and the Life of Jesus” by Dundes, pp. 179ff.). So, you can change the RRD criterion that “someone tries to kill him as a baby” to “someone might have maybe thought for a moment about killing him as a baby,” creating a larger superset, but the subset still exists: there are still people who really did face that threat in stories told of them. And the frequency that they are mythical remains the same. Belonging to the superset of “maybe thought about it” has no logical effect on this conclusion, any more than “Harry Potter belongs to the superset of all English schoolboys” has any effect on the prior probability of Potter being fictional, which follows from the narrower set of “magical English schoolboys” to which he still squarely belongs.

Indeed, the act of “removing” the very things that are peculiarly mythical from a myth-identifying set is an inherently illogical way of trying to get someone’s story not to be mythical, when you well know it is mythical. If you subtract “magical” from “magical English schoolboys” you are essentially “erasing” crucial facts about Harry Potter. Just as changing “an attempt is made on his life as a baby” to “someone maybe thought about that once” is erasing crucial facts about Jesus. That an actual attempt on his life as a baby is narrated for him is in fact peculiarly mythical. And that is what we are trying to get at: how often at that time were people that heavily mythologized historical? Not how often “in some other era.” Not how often members of any supersets of this set were historical. But how often were members of that set historical. It’s pretty obvious that between two sets, people heavily mythologized and people not heavily mythologized, far fewer members of the first set are going to be historical than in the second set. You already know this. So the only question is to ascertain how often that’s the case. You have to take this seriously. Otherwise you’re just ignoring basic facts about Jesus and the ancient proclivity for inventing religious heroes, saviors, and founders, rather than engaging with those facts.

No one doubts Jesus was heavily mythologized. Even in the first Gospel, Mark, Jesus does impossible or implausible things repeatedly in every chapter, from rending the heavens to meeting the Devil to glowing in the dark to psychically killing thousands of pigs and withering fig trees and raising the dead, even mundanely unbelievable things, from attacking with impunity a temple grounds that was acres in size and guarded by a battalion of troops, to convincing a dozen guys to abandon their jobs and family and fanatically follow him with just a couple sentences and no pedigree, or their even having heard of him before. Jesus was heavily mythologized. Fact.

All we then need to calculate is: how often were, in that era, “heavily mythologized people” historical? I grant a third may be. So that would already include the likes of Alexander the Great (as I already noted). I am already granting what Neal thinks is a rebuttal. It’s not. It’s actually agreeing with me: maybe a third of these guys really existed before the dawn of Christianity. Neal is simply saying the same thing I already did. So if you want to argue it’s more than a third, you have a job of work to do. Neal doesn’t even know this is what he needs to do. Of course he’s also being disingenuous, as his bullshit claims about Cleopatra and Trump illustrate; he needs to start being serious before he can be a critic anyone should pay any attention to. But being serious still wouldn’t be enough: you have to also do the work required to make the case for a different base rate than I arrive at. And you have to do that with pre-Christian-influence not post-Christian-influence examples—as the latter are no longer causally pertinent. And you have to do it with the actual set as defined—the set we actually found. Because defining different sets—finding different sets—will never make that set go away. You still have to face its music.

I think the intuition people are trying to express with these illogical and ill-formulated rebuttals to my use of the Rank-Raglan-Dundes set as a proxy for the set of all Heavily Mythologized Persons is that maybe I am somehow gerrymandering this, that there is therefore no correlation between their belonging to the set and their being historical or not. But that is mathematically impossible (as I already explained to Kamil Gregor). If the criteria were arbitrary, then most members netted in by it should be historical, because that’s what would happen when you pick people at random: from among all people claimed to exist, most existed, and indeed by quite a wide margin. A random criteria list will show this. But this isn’t the case with heavily mythologized persons; notably a lot of them aren’t historical. So the fact that no clear member of the RRD set is plausibly historical is impossible—unless this isn’t a random (and hence can’t be an arbitrary) set, and thus is indicative of its members not tending to be historical.

What secures this conclusion is that so many people end up in the set—were it much fewer, we would be less certain, but there is no way to “arbitrarily” gerrymander any set to include 14 members who weren’t historical and have Jesus still fit that set unless fitting that set really is proxying the set of Heavily Mythologized Persons. We thus have to heed this discovery. There is no way around the fact that we have a large set that Jesus does belong to none of whose other members really existed. That is a fact. And it has consequences. Fabricating supersets (like by broadening the criteria) can never make any of that disappear. So Neal’s entire enterprise is impotent. He simply can’t get there from here. It has no logical impact on my point at all.

Lesson: Of course you can still choose to die on that hill, by declaring it “just a coincidence” that Jesus belongs to a set of fourteen people none of whom existed. But that amounts to admitting your position has a very low prior probability—because the improbability of the coincidence you are requiring logically commutes to any conclusion you reach using this premise. Needless to say, my position requires positing no such improbable coincidence, so by whatever amount your position is improbable, my position is that many times more probable than yours. You thus are defending the least probable theory rather than the most. Historians ought to be doing the latter. So no more wasting of everyone’s time with faking facts and fabricating irrelevant supersets; no more anachronistic cherry-picking. I did the actual work. Now it’s your job to do the work—if you are intent on finding any other conclusion to be true than mine. Otherwise, stop pretending you’ve done any real work on this at all.

From Whom Did Paul Learn the Eucharist?

Adair points to other strange mistakes by Neal, noting that he’s “at a loss,” for example, “concerning Neal’s statements about 1 Corinthians 11 and the Lords Supper.” Neal is apparently “adamant that this was a historical tradition and not a revelation,” even asking “where in the text does it say anything about it being a vision,” yet “that is precisely said by Paul [in] 1 Cor 11:23,” where he says “I received from the Lord…” (cf. Galatians 1, 1 Corinthians 15, 2 Corinthians 12, Romans 16). Here Neal isn’t even interacting with the arguments he opposes. He’s just “gainsaying,” the most ineffective methodology of all. In any event, I have already thoroughly covered this elsewhere, including citing scholars who concur with me (in OHJ, p. 558 n. 59; see my whole discussion in Ch. 11.7); one can easily add to the list there: Paul Davidson, Robyn Walsh, Antonio Piñero, and more.

I am not taking some fringe view here. I am taking a popular view in the field today. I don’t know if it’s the majority view yet (I think it’s growing), but it certainly has a large number in its support. So Neal has a lot more work cut out for him if he is going to take on a legion of published experts over this. At the very least he has to interact with my argument (since he is supposed to be talking about me here). But he interacts with no one’s argument. That’s just bizarre. And it establishes that he is completely unreliable. You can’t count on him to tell you even basic truths, such as that this is a common conclusion among mainstream scholars and has evidence in its support (and that his position has even less evidence to claim than that). He won’t tell you what the actual arguments are. He won’t respond to them. He will just kick up random noise that doesn’t engage at all, and pretend to you that he has rebutted multiple experts far more qualified in the matter. He won’t even use peer-reviewed arguments for his position—he isn’t even interested in finding out what they might be (pro tip: I know what they are, and I responded to them in OHJ and subsequently; so if you do plan to use them, you also need to be able to answer how they’ve already been rebutted, as otherwise you are still just gainsaying rather than engaging). In other words, Neal is acting like a Christian apologist; indeed, a rather incompetent one. That begs explanation. Why?

Lesson: Don’t make arguments that ignore their already-published refutations. Interact with those rebuttals, and honestly test their merits, before making any declaration.

Conclusion

I could go on. For example, I already refuted everything Neal says about Romans 1:3 and Galatians 4:4, in articles Neal clearly has never read (see Empirical Logic and Romans 1:3 and Yes, Galatians 4 Is Allegorical). Likewise his complaint about rapid legendary development (refuted in OHJ, Ch. 6.7, “Rapid Legendary Development”); his comparison with Socrates (refuted in OHJ, Ch. 8.2, “The Socrates Analogy”); and his false or illogical claims about the passages in Josephus (see Josephus on Jesus? Why You Can’t Cite Opinions Before 2014 and “What Did Josephus Mean by That?” A Case Study in the Relationship between Evidence and Probability). Indeed, my argument in that case, against Neal, unlike Neal’s, has passed peer review three separate times: in my article about it for the Journal of Early Christian Studies, reproduced in Hitler Homer Bible Christ; in my book On the Historicity of Jesus, by the respected academic press Sheffield-Phoenix; and in Raphael Lataster’s book Questioning the Historicity of Jesus, published by Brill, one of the most prestigious academic presses in the world. Neal replies to none of them. His critique is thus 100% useless to you. Just as, you can now tell, everything else he said.

Simple takeaways:

• Care about the truth, not cult of personality. If someone makes a claim about a scholar’s mistakes or dishonesty, don’t get triggered like a superfan; fact-check the claim and find out if those claims are true or false, and respond with what you found. Don’t start pointless shit-talking epicycles that completely ignore whether the claim was even true to begin with.
• If you find the evidence supports those accusations of error or dishonesty, criticize the scholar who produced those falsehoods and correct them; don’t criticize the scholar who caught and demonstrated them. Don’t justify the fallacy of false equivalence: disprovable or even poorly evidenced accusations are not “the same” as very-well-evidenced accusations.
• Embody the virtues of carefulness and responsibility when aiming to criticize someone’s arguments. Actually go find out, so as to make sure you have a full and correct understanding of, what their arguments are and on what they are based. And find out how they have already responded to the arguments you intend to make. Then seriously fact-check your own sources and logic-test your own arguments before publishing them.
• Correct your mistakes when they are caught out; and revise your conclusions once your premises have thus changed. Don’t try to “save face” by dodging all this. Own the error—and explain what you will do in future to avoid making the same kinds of mistakes again. Otherwise, you will deserve the rep of someone who makes mistakes and never corrects them and thus can’t be trusted. If you don’t want people to think you’re that guy, don’t be that guy.

Neal didn’t follow any of these principles. And the result is as expected: Neal is wholly unreliable. I clocked well over a dozen false claims just in his original video alone. He frequently fails to correctly describe the evidence, the scholarship in the field, or the arguments he is supposed to be responding to. He can’t even correctly remember, so as to correctly report, what he himself said a week prior. He doesn’t even know what the arguments are regarding Paul’s source for the Eucharist, much less respond to them. He doesn’t even know how the Talmud, much less additional evidence, already refutes his every implausible armchair theory about it. He doesn’t know how Philo himself explicitly repudiates every theory Neal has about what Philo meant and thought when interpreting Zechariah 6. He doesn’t know how set theory works, or why this matters for a correct use of the Rank-Raglan set; he shows no knowledge of any of my arguments regarding this, and most strangely of all, uses wildly ridiculous (indeed, outright embarrassing) source material instead of actual peer-reviewed critiques (!). Even where there could have been a calm, productive debate (such as between the peer-reviewed arguments of Chris Hansen and myself on using the Rank-Raglan set), Neal doesn’t even attempt it. This is all very strange. Neal isn’t usually like this. But when it’s this subject, suddenly all competence, carefulness, responsibility, and logic vanish. How you set about explaining that I leave up to you.