I have successfully produced several debates on the historicity of Jesus with qualified PhDs (live and online; see: Crook; Evans; Goodacre; Waters; and twice now with MacDonald; in Akin and Horn, Horn has multiple masters degrees). But I have long wanted to get one into a book format. I have at long last succeeded—but alas, only in Italian! Just recently published is Gesù resistente, Gesù inesistente: Due visioni a confronto (Manni 2022), “Jesus the Rebel, Jesus the Nonexistent: Two Views in Debate,” to which contributed myself, Robert M. Price, Fernando Bermejo-Rubio, and Franco Tommasi. Price and I argue against; Bermejo-Rubio and Tommasi, for. More particularly, they argue for Bermejo-Rubio’s particular theory of historicity: that Jesus was a militant who actually preached rebellious violence against Rome, and who was only later whitewashed into a pacifist. This book is available currently only in kindle form in the U.S. But the attractive physical book is available through Amazon Italy and possibly elsewhere (you’d have to go searching online for another vendor; or order it through your local brick-and-mortar bookshop). All our contributions are in Italian, however (Tommasi translated). I do have the rights to produce an English-language edition of this, which I hope to start making happen next year.

I used some of the material from this debate in Jesus from Outer Space (see my comparison of the mythicist thesis with Bermejo-Rubio’s in chapter 3). But the whole debate here is a valuable read. I will of course announce when it is available in English. But anyone who can read Italian can get a jump on that. Tommasi’s singular contributions (preface and epilogue) were particularly well-formulated, where he correctly describes each side of the debate and its plausibility, and sets it in the context of an academic field that needs to do a better job of taking this debate seriously. Then Bermejo-Rubio and Tommasi co-wrote all the defenses of historicity in between. And Price wrote one entry against; and I, three (opening, rebuttal, and closing). It has a scripture index and concludes at around 150 pages. There is also a kind of précis of the book written by Tommasi for the magazine Saggistica, which concludes (my own rough translation), “Honestly, I must say our book seriously defends the view that a Jesus engaged, in some sense, in anti-Roman resistance is the only one that can credibly rescue Jesus from the fog of historical non-existence, and that when placed along with” a plausible mythicism “these two theories actually cover the entire space of probabilities,” owing to the fact that (they argue) other theories of historicity (and mythicism) don’t merit a large enough probability even to consider.

I don’t agree with them on either point of course (though I do agree it’s plausible, I don’t think the militant Jesus hypothesis is even the most likely model of historicity, much less more likely than ahistoricity altogether). But it is notable that they do. Because Fernando Bermejo-Rubio in particular is a renowned and well-published Jesus historian—who nevertheless agrees the Jesus myth hypothesis is plausible; and indeed, he and Tommasi argue, more probable than any other notion except theirs. Yet theirs is as fringe a position in the field as ours. I have long noted this is an interesting point to observe. The consensus has not rallied to the militant Jesus theory, but it has granted its plausibility—it’s a serious proposal worthy of examination, meeting the basic standards of argument. Certainly the minimal Doherty thesis, the only mythicist hypothesis to pass peer-review (and that’s twice now), deserves at least comparable respect as a viable possibility worthy of serious inquiry and debate. And indeed, this is gradually becoming the case.

I have written in response to Bermejo-Rubio’s case on my blog before (see On Bermejo-Rubio’s Dispassionate Plea for a Historical Jesus). But that was before On the Historicity of Jesus was published—so in the article I was responding to there, he was reacting to the state of popular mythicism then, when no substantive theory of a mythical Jesus had passed peer-review in over a century. This volume comes after the publication of OHJ (and, indeed, Lataster’s peer-reviewed evaluation of it), so it reflects a more informed position on their side. And unlike most other critics, who simply ignore and thus get wrong everything argued in OHJ when purporting to respond to it, Bermejo-Rubio and Tommasi rarely show any such error in their approach. They might get the logic of an argument wrong (while employing logically weak arguments themselves), but they don’t absurdly claim OHJ doesn’t argue things that it does or that it argues things that it doesn’t; nor do they misrepresent what it argues, or present an argument it already rebutted without even being aware of (and thus not even responding to) that rebuttal (except in respect to not understanding an argument; but that’s not the same thing as not even knowing of it). They thus did a decent job of taking the work seriously. Which is nice to see for a change. They faithfully follow at least half the recommendations in How to Successfully Argue Jesus Existed; and at least try to follow the other half. This far exceeds any other attempt made to respond to OHJ yet in print.

Where they falter is consistently in regards to logic rather than fact. For example, as I wrote (Gesù, p. 88):

Tommasi and Bermejo-Rubio falsely claim that my conclusion depends on the passages in Josephus or Tacitus being wholly forgeries—when in fact that has no effect on my conclusion either way. They thus ignore my actual argument [in this debate]: [as I wrote earlier in this volume] these authors “give no indication of having any other source of information but the Gospels or informants relying on the Gospels,” and therefore cannot corroborate them, a basic principle of historical reasoning. 

Similarly (Ibid.), they argue that we “need” it to be the case that every pericope in the Gospels is “provably” mythical (they use the example of the names of Simon of Cyrene and his sons, showing they actually read OHJ and mostly correctly describe what it says); but as I already argued in OHJ, we don’t. All we need is the odds to be 50/50 either way whether something (like that) is mythical or not. Once we are in that position, we cannot use that pericope to argue for mythicism; but neither can we use it to argue for historicity. Because it’s equally likely to be there on either hypothesis, and thus it cannot be cited as evidence for either. I have noted the difficulty many people have with this fact before: arguing that we don’t know a pericope is historical is not the same thing as arguing it is not historical. And we only need to argue the former to get to mythicism. If everything is equally likely as fiction or as history, it just isn’t usable as evidence. We’re done. This does mean we need to do better than arguing for something merely being possible (as “possibly, therefore probably” is a fallacy of logic: see Please No More Astrotheology and The Problem with Varieties of Jesus Mythicism for examples of the invalidity of this approach); but we don’t need to argue that it’s more probable than not. If we can only get it to be just as probable, we’ve done enough to eliminate it as usable evidence.

This argument to plausibility (which is stronger than an argument to mere possibility) does not work the other way around, however. Which is the eternal problem with making assertions over doubting them: you don’t need evidence to doubt something; you need evidence to believe it. Thus arguing that a historical basis for a passage or saying or pericope is plausible simply does not get you to historicity. Because mythicism already grants the plausibility of historicity; so arguing to its plausibility doesn’t get you to its probability. To make historicity probable—as in, more probable than myth—you need much more evidence than that something is plausible. You really do have to argue that it is the most probable explanation of the data. And yet most of the data, we argue, is indeterminate—it is not demonstrably more probable on either theory and thus isn’t usable to argue either way. And of what remains, we observe, none of it is more probable on historicity than myth (or at best too weakly so to carry the case), whereas a considerable amount is more probable on myth than historicity. Even where we might grant a weak argument for historicity (like what Paul meant when he referred to “Brothers of the Lord”), it’s still not enough to outweigh the rest. The concluding balance of evidence leaves us doubting historicity rather than affirming it.

Interestingly, they agree: but for the militant hypothesis—if that falls through—then the next most likely explanation of the evidence of early Christianity, they admit, is indeed the mythicist one. This is a scary thing for most historicists to hear, because they think the militant Jesus hypothesis is false—which on the position of Tommasi and Bermejo-Rubio entails Jesus most likely didn’t exist. This throws most historicists into a Catch-22, a seriously horned dilemma: they have to rescue their alternative model of historicity against Tommasi and Bermejo-Rubio’s arguments for a militant one; but I am pretty sure any effort to do so will be self-defeating.

For example, the main criticism I have of their entire case (repeated in detail in Jesus from Outer Space) is that they are relying on circular arguments against well-known authorial practices: by assuming their thesis is true, they can “extract” data from the Gospels as historical (such as what they argue proves Jesus was a whitewashed militant), and then use that data to prove their thesis is true. Yet this requires not only arguing in a circle, but also assuming authors behaved in ways authors never do: like including material that contradicts their purposes (without rebuttal), or that does not serve their authorial aims. But authors never include things they don’t want to. Every word, every line, serves a purpose. Even if they produce something incoherent, contradictory, or illogical, it will still be a result of pursuing their purposes—each part they wanted to be there, they chose to include it, even if they didn’t think through the consequences. If your theory is ignoring that fact, and adducing no credible purpose for an author to choose to include what they did, then your theory has failed to explain the evidence. In any event, to rebut them in all this, you have to rebut their method. But it’s the same method all historicists depend on to build their models of the historical Jesus. Once you realize it doesn’t work for the militant hypothesis, you’ll be forced to realize it can no more work for any other. Historicists will end up in a pickle here.

This failure at the point of logic rather than fact is exhibited again when they try to argue that historicity is the simpler hypothesis (even though their model of historicity—that a militant Jesus has been elaborately yet somehow imperfectly whitewashed as a pacifist—is anything but simple). To get this they actually overlook the large number of assumptions they too have to embrace to get their conclusions. As I wrote (Gesù, p. 88):

They accuse us of leaning on auxiliary hypotheses, then invent a bunch of auxiliary hypotheses (1) to explain away the very bizarre silences in Paul and the rest of the historical record; (2) to invent a new version history for the Testimonium Flavianum; and (3) to decide which passages of the Gospels to regard as fossils and which fabrications—all so as to conveniently match their predetermined conclusion that Jesus was [something like] a Zealot, a conclusion almost as unpopular in the field as our own, and only achievable, as I noted in my previous entry, by circular reasoning. Their theory is not simple. It’s wildly complex. It requires dozens of hidden assumptions. No fewer than ours. 

This is a problem I have noted before—it was my third point in response to Bermejo-Rubio the first time around.

As I wrote then:

Historicists also need a lot of “out of the blue” assumptions to make sense of a lot of the data: the trial of Jesus makes no sense as-is (Proving History, index “Criterion of Crucifixion”), and therefore one has to devise a complex hypothesis (and I mean complex: no simple hypothesis fits, any more than [Aristotle’s] four elements can fit the evidence of chemistry) about what actually happened and how it got altered into the stories we now have; likewise the betrayal and suicide of Judas (Proving History, index “Judas”); or how a crucified convict could be so immediately quasi-deified by Jews; even more so to explain how Christians east of the Roman Empire believed Jesus was executed a hundred years before the Gospels claim; or how no clear mention of the historical impact of Jesus appears anywhere in Paul’s 20,000 words (Paul appears to know only of a celestial Jesus known only by revelation and scripture); and so on and so forth. In short, historicity is plagued with ad hoc auxiliary hypotheses. It is therefore not a simple hypothesis.

The same is true for how historicists have to explain the development of the resurrection stories, from private internal visions (Galatians 1) to weeks-long dinner parties with a reanimated, manhandled corpse (Luke 24-Acts 1). Any explanation you land on for that, works equally well to explain the development of a visionary Jesus into a historical one; so we don’t need to adopt any more ad hoc hypotheses than you just already granted. “Hence in On the Historicity of Jesus, I show that a minimal mythicism can rest on far fewer ad hoc auxiliary hypotheses” and “Mythicism thus becomes the simpler hypothesis, ceteris paribus. That’s why it’s compelling.”

For example, we don’t need to import any assumptions to read Paul’s references to Brothers of the Lord as meaning non-apostolic Christians: we just need to read what he says, plainly as he says it. It is the historicist who has to “import” the assumption that he specifically means biological brothers—because Paul never says he does; but he does say all baptized Christians are Brothers of the Lord, the only kind of Brothers of the Lord Paul ever specifies his knowing. Likewise, we don’t have to assume anything to conclude Paul is not giving us any useful information about the historicity of Jesus in Romans 1:3, as either way, what he is saying is historically false (no one could then have known Jesus was really “of the seed of David”; that’s in either case a convenient theological fabrication), and is equally expected whether Jesus existed or not (because prophecy required that it be true). It is the historicist who has to import the assumption that Paul is referring to ordinary biological descent—because otherwise, he does not say “descent,” nor anything specifying it, and even uses vocabulary that in his own idiom is contrary to it. We just need to read him at his word. Historicists need him to have said something else.

By contrast, there are only a very few places where Tommasi and Bermejo-Rubio make false statements, albeit statements you can find in the literature and thus believe if you don’t really fact-check them. For example, they claim no Jewish exegetes had ever read Isaiah 53 as prophetically about the coming messiah’s death and resurrection; there are half a dozen studies now proving otherwise: see the scholars and documents I cite in OHJ (pp. 73-87) and those now cited by Jason Staples (in The Idea of Israel, p. 163). Likewise they claim Matthew didn’t deliberately change Mark’s messaging—even though the fact that he did is so well evidenced it’s practically the mainstream conclusion of the entire field (see David Sim’s The Gospel of Matthew and Christian Judaism and Ulrich Luz’s Studies in Matthew and his Hermeneia commentary series on Matthew). They also make a lot of wild assertions about the Testimonium Flavianum, although those are more matters of illogical interpretation than fact. And that kind of thing characterizes pretty much the rest of their case.

In all these respects (and others I document in Gesù), Tommasi and Bermejo-Rubio mostly stumble repeatedly on logic, rather than facts. They almost never assert something is true that is not, or that something is not true that in fact is (in contrast to the repeated behavior of Bart Ehrman, for example). They mostly only err in logic. Their own logic (for example, their case depends on circular reasoning and embracing improbable premises about authorial practice and overlooking their own auxiliary hypotheses when determining comparative theoretical simplicity) or mine (as they get wrong the logic of several arguments for mythicism, as I just surveyed examples of). This is to be expected. As historians tend to be poorly educated in logics. So I think what they’ve accomplished here is to foreshadow the fact that this is the last hill that historicism will die on. Once historicists stop lying about facts, and the arguments they are supposed to be rebutting, all they will have left is what logically follows from a true accounting of the pertinent facts and arguments. But if historicity doesn’t logically follow from that, staking your reputation on defending illogical arguments is all you’ll have left. Or else you’ll have to admit: historicity is weak tea. It’s actually far more doubtable than has been conceded heretofore. What then will you do?