It’s the growing consensus in Jesus studies now that the first Christians believed Jesus was the incarnation of a pre-existent celestial being. Even Bart Ehrman has gotten aboard this trend (see Bart Ehrman on How Jesus Became God); and even Larry Hurtado, who was irrationally against semantically allowing Jesus to be called an “angel”, admits across numerous works that Jesus was nevertheless regarded as the incarnation of some kind of pre-existent celestial being: “Paul’s letters show the belief,” Hurtado writes, that Jesus “had been ‘pre-existent’ and was the agent through whom all things were created (e.g., 1 Corinthians 8:4-6 [and Philippians 2:5-11]),” and indeed this means “the idea was already known and uncontroversial in early Christian circles within the first few years after Jesus’ crucifixion.” And these scholars all document the existence of angelic or other celestial creatures who already existed in Jewish theology that Jesus was believed to have been. This is no longer controversial. Take note.

This does provide a foundation for doubting the historicity of Jesus: if so much could be believed with total conviction of such a mythical person (the “Jesus” who predates and post-dates his Earthly life), then why would it take any more effort to believe it of a wholly mythical person? After all, no mainstream scholar believes any such Jesus exists. The Jesus regarded to have been around since creation and subsequently reside with God and his angels in outer space is definitely mythical, although ancient Christians nevertheless believed it. They were not selling that as a myth. But it was. All experts today who aren’t Christian believers agree with this. But that leaves a tiny slice of Jesus’s purported incarnated life for us now to still go on insisting was real. But if all the rest of his history wasn’t, how can we be sure even that tiny slice of his timeline was an exception rather than just more of the same? The same argument holds for the post-resurrection Jesus: if he was mythical, why are we to assume the pre-resurrection Jesus was any more real? (See How Did Christianity Switch to a Historical Jesus?) Neither of these points is an argument for Jesus being entirely mythical, though. These particular facts are equally likely either way. So this merely brings that hypothesis back into play.

Worried about this line of reasoning, Chrissy Hansen (who still has no graduate degrees, nor any degrees relevant, but does exceed amateurs in capability) has composed a brief attempt to “make it go away” in a new peer-reviewed article (“Re-examining the Pre-Christian Jesus” in the Journal of Early Christian History 2022) which is the first to actually come at least close to answering the case made for doubting the historicity of Jesus in my peer-reviewed study On the Historicity of Jesus. It still doesn’t do that. Nowhere in this new article (or any other she’s published) does she lay out its argument and critique it. Nowhere does she argue for a different assignment of any probabilities, and thus a different conclusion as to the final probability. When she critiques anything in it at all, she doesn’t even accurately represent anything argued in the study. Which I find is the typical, and apparently only, way scholars can respond. Honest, actual rebuttals are apparently impossible; so that is never what gets published. See What I Said at the Brea Conference for documentation of that trend.

A Problem with the Truth

There I also noted that I don’t usually include Chrissy Hansen on lists of respondents “because their promised peer-reviewed monograph on the subject hasn’t been published.” Instead she has formally reviewed only the colloquial, pop-market summary Jesus from Outer Space. Although for my response to that nevertheless, see Chris Hansen on Jesus from Outer Space, which illustrates her ongoing problem with the truth. Read through my analysis there and you’ll concur: “Hansen builds everything they say on errors, misreadings, misconstruals, and harmonizations—and one might strongly suspect, outright lies—to construct a fake version of what is argued in JFOS, and thus a fake assessment of its merits.” This does not bode well for any future treatment she might eventually attempt for my actual peer-reviewed study in OHJ.

We see this looming already with Hansen’s review of Raphael Lataster’s Questioning the Historicity of Jesus in the McMaster Journal of Theology and Ministry (2021), which is full of emotional apologetics, misrepresentations, and unsupported claims (often in the form of the genetic and well-poisoning fallacies typical of this kind of response). For example, Hansen tries to sully Lataster’s reliability by “accusing” him of “accusing” Maurice Casey of lying and bad research—without mentioning that Lataster does not merely accuse him of this, he documents it with evidence. Ignoring the difference between an accusation and a demonstration in order to “poison the well” with fallacious Arguments from Prestige is a standard trope now in historicist propaganda (“How dare you catch us lying and making serious mistakes!”). As another example, nearly everything Hansen says about Lataster’s “use of the fragmentary quotations of Marcion’s text of Galatians to argue that Gal 1:19 and 4:4 (which mentions the brother of Jesus, named James) were inauthentic” is false. And I don’t mean only that there is no mention of a brother of Jesus in Galatians 4:4 (I charitably take that to be a minor error of description, a symptom only of Hansen’s fatal brevity) or that Hansen appears to take the position of a Christian apologist (claiming, for instance, that sources that report impossible events without blush should be regarded as no less reliable than sources that don’t; when in fact, that criterion of downgraded reliability is a mainstay of modern historical methodology). Rather, I mean: Hansen does not correctly represent Lataster’s arguments, nor responds to them logically.

First, Lataster gives multiple arguments regarding the evidential value of these verses in Galatians, not just for their being interpolations; and note in my own study I never argue for these passages being interpolated, and Lataster is well aware of that and cites my and other alternatives. Falsely claiming we rely on these passages being interpolated is another common propaganda tactic of untrustworthy historicists like Hansen. Second, the way Lataster presents evidence for his case already addresses the rebuttal Hansen attempts; which rebuttal is also illogical. Contrary to Hansen, the fact that evidence for the absence of a text in Marcion’s copy of Paul argues against its authenticity (though does not prove its inauthenticity either) does not mean that evidence for the presence of a text in Marcion’s copy of Paul argues for its authenticity. Apologists tend to struggle with truth and logic.

That, by the way, is a fallacy of denying the antecedent: if P then Q, therefore if not-P then not-Q (if P “it was not in Marcion” then Q “it was not in Paul,” therefore if not-P “it was in Marcion” then not-Q “it was in Paul”). Obviously an interpolation can pre-date Marcion. Since this one references the destruction of the Jewish nation, it could have been interpolated anytime after the year 70 (see There Is No Logically Sound Case Against Interpolation in 1 Thessalonians 2). Marcion published his version of the Epistles in the 140s (“115 years” after Tiberius), then well over a lifetime later. Hansen likewise proposes excuses for all of Lataster’s evidence, yet gives no argument for those excuses being more probable (the fallacy of possibiliter ergo probabiliter being typical of Christian apologetics; and whatever her religious affiliation, Hansen frequently argues like an apologist). Yet if there is even a 50% chance Lataster is correct on this point, this halves the probability of any case for historicity that depends on these passages’ authenticity (I don’t think Hansen comprehends math). Hansen even falsely claims “the current consensus” is that the long-disputed material in 1 Thessalonians 2 is authentic. That a few Christian apologists have published defenses of it lately does not make that “the new consensus.” In fact There Is No Logically Sound Case Against Interpolation in 1 Thessalonians 2.

All of which indicates that Hansen has no interest in actually responding to Lataster, or in being honest. She only wants to give the false appearance of this, in an evident hope this will discourage readers from checking to find out what Lataster actually argues (or what any of the pertinent facts actually are; or how to even reason logically about them). This dishonest intent is also reflected by Hansen’s repeated insistence that Lataster’s study “isn’t” scholarly and “ignores” leading scholarship; in fact his book was published by Brill, one of the top academic presses in the world, and has a bibliography of cited scholarship literally 27 pages long.

We get the same in Hansen’s attempt to impugn Lataster’s discussions of Philo and the Ascension of Isaiah, even though that represents no less than the second time these interpretations have passed peer-review yet received no competent rebuttal (again nearly everything Hansen says about these things is false: see my recent discussion of Hansen-style propaganda on Philo and the Ascension). Likewise, Alice Whealey’s illogical argument in defense of the Testimonium Flavianum hasn’t gained much traction in the field, and thus barely requires the reply Hansen claims: see The End of the Arabic Testimonium and Josephus on Jesus? Why You Can’t Cite Opinions Before 2014. Ironically, in an article published the same year, Hansen concurs the Testimonium is false, yet she doesn’t address Whealey’s defense of it either. So Hansen doesn’t really think one is supposed to; this is just disingenuous well-poisoning rhetoric. Yet Lataster does mention her work (citing Steve Mason’s review of it: Questioning, p. 193); and none of his arguments are actually rebutted by Whealey so as to require any further response than that.

Likewise Hansen’s claim that Romulus “wasn’t resurrected” is another instance of Christian apologetics quite soundly refuted by Richard Miller in Resurrection and Reception in Early Christianity (published by Routledge in 2014), which of course Hansen never cites. Because while accusing Lataster of “not citing” or responding to opponents even though he frequently does, Hansen almost never cites opposing scholarship, and thus is more guilty of this crime than anyone she accuses; another rather typical behavior of a Christian apologist: simply cherry picking the scholarship they like and declaring it “the unrefuted consensus,” and harrumphing when others don’t agree. In any event, see my direct refutation of Hansen’s propaganda on this point. Indeed, Romulus, like Jesus, was a mythical person historicized who was claimed to be a pre-existent celestial being who became incarnate, died, and returned to life to rule on high. Scholars are coming to agree now that this indeed influenced the development of Christianity. Time to get on board.

Hansen treats the rest of Lataster the same way. I expect she’ll treat my study similarly. You simply cannot trust historicist critics of these studies. You have no recourse but to actually read what we argue, and compare it to their distortions and illogical replies. Though I will give nod to one thing Hansen concedes here that critics might want to take note of: she admits “the most impressive, and in my opinion convincing element is” Lataster’s “rebuttal to Ehrman’s questionable use of hypothetical sources to establish Jesus’s historicity.” Amen.

An Ongoing Trend

Hansen does this across her entire opus. As I noted before, her “various critical journal articles don’t directly address the question” of the historicity of Jesus “but skirt around it,” although “they do use all the same invalid or dishonest tactics” and “so far, there’s been no organized response to OHJ from” her. Hence she’s written many articles on the periphery of the subject, but never any actual critique of On the Historicity of Jesus. And yet even in those peripheral arguments, Hansen continues their pattern of illogical, disingenuous, and sometimes dishonest approach to every issue, rather than producing honest and well-considered scholarship, much less a proper rebuttal to any actual argument for the invention of Jesus presented in OHJ.

I’ve documented this before. See Chris Hansen on Jesus from Outer Space and Tim O’Neill & the Biblical History Skeptics on Mythicism. For example, in “A Thracian Resurrection: Is Zalmoxis a Dying-Rising God who Parallels Jesus?” in the Journal of Higher Criticism (2019), Hansen includes a lot of useful data, but then commits a lot of embarrassing mistakes in using it. For example, she gullibly believes later embellishments on Herodotus count as independent evidence derived from real sources (there is no evidence of that, and the material Hansen presents indicates quite the contrary to any competent observer), she completely misreads Mircea Eliade, and gets wrong almost all there is to know about ancient resurrection beliefs (for example, she doesn’t recognize the difference between never dying and rising from the dead later, conflates the latter with reincarnation, illogically thinks a mere “immortal soul” would be so peculiar a belief that Herodotus would designate it as remarkable, and doesn’t know Herodotus knew what reincarnation was and thus would have said that had he meant it). I have to conclude Hansen literally did not know what she was doing in that article. But at least here we are only looking at incompetence rather than dishonesty; and given its date of publication, it would have been, literally, the work of a college freshman.

Things start to slide towards disingenuous or even dishonest approaches in her later work. For example, in “Lord Raglan’s Hero and Jesus” in the Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism (2020) she not only commits logical errors but omits a lot of rebuttals to her own arguments that exist in the very work she claims to be responding to. Compare what she writes there, for example, with what I point out in regards to Neal Sendlak’s even more incompetent treatment of the subject, as well as in Jesus and the Problem of the Fraudulent Reference Class and McGrath on the Rank-Raglan Mythotype. Hansen doesn’t make all their same mistakes; but she repeats some, and you can discern which by comparing her work to these. Notice Hansen also never mentions the specific form of my mythotype argument in Jesus from Outer Space in her review of it. That was designed to rebut her. Evidently she has no rebuttal.

There are other slips of honesty; for example Hansen claims “Lord Raglan’s work has since been widely dismissed by folklorists and mythologists” but cites for this claim only two scholars, Zumwalt and Dundes, neither of whom attest to this claim, but in fact attest the opposite. Zumwalt actually supports Raglan’s mythotype and critiques only his assumption of a ritual foundation behind it. Dundes literally published a defense of applying the Rank-Raglan mythotype to Jesus; and in the work (and very page, 231) Hansen cites, Dundes endorses the mythotype explicitly as reasonable. Hansen is lying. Either she is lying about what Zumwalt and Dundes said. Or she is lying about having checked what Zumwalt and Dundes said. Either way, we are looking at the behavior of a Christian apologist, not a scholar. And it’s worse than that, of course. Any search of scholarship for the use of the Rank-Raglan mythotype finds numerous studies employing it, and almost no one scorning it. Exactly the opposite of Hansen’s claim. As just three examples picked at random: the mythotype is taken as rote in The Heart Is a Mirror: The Sephardic Folktale published by Wayne State University Press in 2007; “The Legend of the Jewish Holy Virgin of Ludmir” published in the Journal of Folklore Research in 2009; and “Josephus’ Portrait of Moses” by famed Josephus expert Louis Feldman, published in The Jewish Quarterly Review in 1992. So Hansen didn’t even check (or lied about what she found).

Hansen’s lying here is even more egregious than this: in her subsequent review of my book Jesus from Outer Space, rather than claiming this mythotype has been abandoned, she cites an old work by Alwyn Rees affirming it (“The Divine Hero in Celtic Hagiography,” Folklore, 1936)—evidently, like William Lane Craig, changing position whenever it suits her and hoping no one notices. More to the point, she cites that article as if it rebutted my claim that “no one” sufficiently satisfied the Rank-Raglan criteria, by claiming Rees found historical persons matching it. What Hansen doesn’t tell you is that Rees “found” examples solely in medieval Christian hagiography—stories of Saints many of whose historicity is not only doubted, but whose being conformed to the model of Jesus is already causally expected and thus of no use in determining the probability of this happening to a historical person when Jesus was conformed to it (the error of anachronism: wrong historical period, means the wrong base rate).

This happens again and again. I may go into these more in future blogs, but just compare Chris Hansen’s “You Invent for Yourselves a Trypho: Addressing Radical Reinterpretations of Trypho and Canonical and Non-Canonical Scriptures” in the Journal of Biblical Theology (2022), with my recent remarks on the subject; and Chris Hansen’s “Romans 1:3 and the Celestial Jesus” in the McMaster Journal of Theology and Ministry (2021) with my analysis in Empirical Logic and Romans 1:3. Hansen also attempts all kinds of disingenuous polemics, for example in “The Christ and the Discourse: A Critique of the Historiographical and Rhetorical Trends in the Christ Myth Debate” in the Northern Plains Ethics Journal (2020) she attempts to claim my harsh critiques of the crank amateur Dorothy Murdock exemplified misogyny—as if I were nicer to male cranks; and again ignoring the distinction between accusations and demonstrations (that Murdock was a crank is a documented fact); and of course ignoring all the evidence of my support for Murdock as a person (see D.M. Murdock Battling Cancer & Needs Support and Help D.M. Murdock Get Her Facebook Account Reinstated), and even my defense of her as a scholar when she was right. Hansen of course also lies there about the false accusations made against me, and has attempted this ad hominem to get my scholarship dismissed more than once. She even falsely asserted I “hosted” a Neo-Nazi on my website—but that people who post comments on my blog might “happen” to be Neo-Nazis, despite never mentioning it, does not really warrant that claim.

Hansen has a serious problem with the truth. And it shows across all her work.

I don’t have much interest in Hansen’s even more tangential writings, like “The Christ Myth Debate in Marxist Literature” in the Alternative Spirituality and Religion Review (2022) and “Christianity Without Christ: The Phenomenon of Christian Mythicists” in Fieldwork in Religion (2023). But if anyone can get a copy of these to me, and then brings it up in comments below, I will give my assessment. But there aren’t any Christians or Marxists who have published peer-reviewed theories of the origins of Christianity without Jesus, or systematically evaluated under peer-review all the evidence for and against the historicity of Jesus (for example, Thomas Brodie only published an autobiographical memoir that did neither, but only confessed some of the reasons he personally doubted the historicity of Jesus; and the USSR ran all its publications as propaganda mills, not legitimate scholarly enterprises). So I doubt there will be anything actually relevant in these articles, but who knows?

The One (Almost) Exception

The only worthwhile article I have found from Hansen is “Jesus’ Historicity and Sources: The Misuse of Extrabiblical Sources for Jesus and a Suggestion” in the American Journal of Biblical Theology (2021). There Hansen admits that historicists are too often over-playing the evidence for Jesus (claiming he is the “best attested” figure of history is “untenable and misleading”), that both the Testimonium Flavianum and the James passage in Josephus are interpolated (“the present author does find it likely that these were wholesale interpolations” and “all” of their attempted “reconstructions are purely hypothetical,” and therefore the first passage is “of virtually no use at all” and for the second “we have little to no reason to suspect that it was independent of Christian tradition at all”), and that “none of the extrabiblical sources that we have can, under scrutiny, be said to be independent witnesses to the life of Jesus” and thus all of them (from Suetonius to the Talmud) have no use for establishing historicity. Indeed, other than Pliny and Tacitus, “none of those references, in the opinions of the vast majority of academics, can be said to be independent of Christian tradition.” So Pliny and Tacitus warrant closer look. But even then Hansen concludes for Pliny that “ultimately the passage may not be of usage to historicists, Jesus agnostics, or mythicists” owing to its ambiguity. Pliny never really says anything about historicity; and he explicitly says he was entirely dependent on what would then be post-Gospel Christian tradition—Pliny didn’t “fact check” anything the Christians he interrogated told him. And Tacitus can’t be used, Hansen concludes, because his remarks cannot be established as independent either.

There is a footnote in this paper against my demonstration that the passage in Tacitus is likely an interpolation, but Hansen there cites no actual reasons to reject my conclusion, which contrary to what Hansen implies, does not derive from the form of the word in the manuscripts of Tacitus being “Chrestian,” but merely trades on a possibility of its relevance (see my summary in Chapter 8.10 of On the Historicity of Jesus and my full study in Chapter 20 of Hitler Homer Bible Christ). Hansen mentions none of the actual evidence I cited, which was unrelated to that point; and she instead relies on a possibiliter fallacy, that “other” explanations of the form Chrestian (and its disagreement with Christus) are “possible,” which is to mistakenly think one can rebut what I only argue is possible by exhibiting another thing is possible. That is a failure to grasp basic modal logic. One has to establish probability, not mere possibility. None of the other scholars Hansen cites address my actual evidence either (see, for example, Blom on the Testimonium Taciteum; the other scholar she cites, Ivan Prchlík, commits the same mistakes as Hansen and Blom, but I might blog more fully on that in future). Likewise, Hansen favorably cites my argument that Tacitus would most likely have gotten his information from Pliny, although Hansen then fails to mention this is actually the argument I rely upon in On the Historicity of Jesus, not the interpolation argument. Hansen’s wording even comes close to lying about this. But as that is an ambiguous sub-point, it’s hardly significant. Hansen agrees with me that Tacitus is unusable as evidence for the historicity of Jesus, the only point that actually scores in OHJ.

Hansen then lays into her usual apologetic arguments about Trypho, to argue that we “should” have more evidence of doubting the historicity of Jesus; which isn’t true, but it’s at least an argument worth exploring. Since Hansen does not say she is “rebutting” my argument regarding this in my peer-reviewed study, but only implies she is, she skates on the charge of misrepresenting it, but this is still playing close to dishonesty. Again, see my discussion elsewhere; but you’ll notice Hansen’s arguments regarding the remarks Justin attributes to Trypho operate by possibiliter fallacy, ignoring the context of those remarks, and straw manning what is actually an ambivalent position on historicity into an adamant denial of historicity that is not what is rhetorically being advanced in Justin’s text. Likewise, Hansen’s rhetoric on the Ascension of Isaiah also comes close to dishonest, but in any event, has already been answered. Hansen says nothing here about the evidence in 2 Peter or the evidence of Ignatius, or the impact of the problem of silence, a problem that undermines her own case on this point as much as she admits it undermines any case for Mythicism that also depends on an argument from silence—which mine does not: in Chapter 8 of On the Historicity of Jesus I agree with Hansen, and adduce it has no effect on the probability Jesus existed. On why the argument from silence kills Hansen’s argument as well, see, Ibid., Chs. 7.7 and 8.12; to neither of which does Hansen offer any reply.

So even when Hansen finally gets mostly honest about the evidence and arguments she is supposed to be responding to, she still doesn’t have any argument. She ignores most of the arguments and evidence she is supposed to be responding to, straw-mans what few she does even mention, and opposes them with illogical rhetorical moves rather than sound reasoning. This looks exactly like Christian apologetics. Which is the opposite of legitimate scholarship.

The “Pre-Existent” Jesus

Which brings us to Hansen’s latest attempt. Up to now I have extensively documented the fact that Hansen tends not to be honest or reliable in addressing or describing scholarship she wants to oppose. So you need to be on your guard against anything she publishes: always check it against the original scholarship she cites or claims to be answering. The new article has the same advantages of the others: Hansen assembles a useful bibliography and often makes side-points of merit. Even if the project is one-sided, there is a lot of research here, as in, time spent gathering citations to relevant literature, which can be of use to build on or explore. But the most pertinent question is: does she have anything correct or relevant to say about the peer-reviewed case for a mythical (or even historical) Jesus?

The side-points should not be merely granted, however. As we saw with Hansen’s bogus citation of Zumwalt and Dundes, you cannot trust Hansen to tell you the truth even about those. For example, in a footnote in the new paper Hansen says “Nicolas Wyatt,” in “The Problem of ‘Dying and Rising’ Gods: The Case of Baal,” published in Ugarit-Forschungen in 2017, “makes a convincing case that Baal is the only [sic] dying-and-rising god who can be properly categorised as such in the ancient Near East.” That is a false statement. Wyatt does not discuss any other such gods in that article. The entire article is only about whether Baal was a dying-and-rising god. Wyatt’s treatment is marvelously thorough, and comes to a positive conclusion: yes, he was (and Hansen has noted before that she agrees). But Hansen has converted “Wyatt convincingly proves Baal was a dying and rising god” into “Wyatt convincingly proves only Baal was a dying and rising god.” That is a lie. And it is typical of the way Hansen tells lies. As here, so anywhere else in this, or any, article of Hansen’s. Never trust her. Always check.

Notably, Wyatt also claims to have disproved the assumption that Baal was an agricultural deity or that his death-and-resurrection cycle had anything to do with agricultural cycles. I have no opinion either way. But I note this because this flippant dismissal of pre-Christian resurrection cults remains too common. It’s not even generally true, and was not at all true by the Hellenistic period, the era when Christianity arose (see, again, Dying-and-Rising Gods: It’s Pagan, Guys. Get Over It.). Hansen citing Wyatt favorably might mean (if she is honest) that she also agrees this apologetic should be abandoned. Be that as it may, this is a caution about all of Hansen’s “side-points.” The scholarship and evidence she cites might not only contradict her, it might undermine her apologetics elsewhere and in other ways.

The main thesis of Hansen’s paper is not to challenge the growing scholarly consensus that Christians from the start believed Jesus was a pre-existent superbeing from space descended into human form, but rather, the hypothesis that before Christianity there was already a belief in such a being. Although that, too, is the growing mainstream consensus. Hansen never correctly articulates this theory as advanced by any published author; she just garbles a bunch of ideas into her own (again) straw man. For example, Hansen credits the idea to early 20th century authors, and falsely implies my peer-reviewed study is based on their theories. It is not. She also lumps my study in with the claims of scholars who haven’t published any such theory under peer review: Robert Price, and the Soviet critic Iosif Kryvelev, who only ever published his views in Soviet-era propaganda tabloids, collected into a book published by the editors of the Soviet propaganda journal Sociology and Today (which is now a real academic journal, but no such thing existed under the totalizing mission of the USSR; indeed, earlier in life Kryvelev was literally a paid Soviet propaganda minister against religion).

This matters, because it is easy to rebut work from a century ago and that hasn’t passed peer review. It is disingenuous to associate what has actually passed peer review (twice now: Carrier 2014 and Lataster 2019) with such work. It’s disingenuous even to associate Price with Soviet propaganda. But here I’m only concerned with what Hansen has to say about the peer reviewed literature on this subject. Nothing else matters for the point (other than what may be discussing that same literature in turn). I also am not interested in bogusly alarmist posturing, like Hansen’s panicked declaration that “If this pre-Christian Jesus concept were correct, then it would call into question the entire legitimacy of any quests for the historical Jesus.” That’s simply not true. As I have noted many times before, there having been a pre-Christian being Jesus was rapidly associated with does not affect the probability that Jesus existed at all. It is, by itself, equally compatible with a real man being declared identical to that being. Instead of recognizing this, Hansen’s emotional panic belies an “all hands on deck” apologetic motive. This is also apparent in Hansen’s worry that accepting this would destroy memory studies; as if that wasn’t already being destroyed by historicists themselves. But it also isn’t true. It’s entirely possible for people to remember things about a real man whom they also believed was an incarnated angel or other denizen of the heavens above. Just as believing that a real man supernaturally killed thousands of pigs does not of itself evince the conclusion that he never even existed. You need more than that.

Hansen is correct, however, that recent trends in the field do bolster mythicism, but only because they are abandoning indefensible apologetic tropes, not anything ever actually established. For example, by finally abandoning the bogus apologetic that Christianity was not at all influenced by extra-Judaic cultural forces, much of what mythicists are arguing comes back “into play.” But as that was always bogus, it was never a valid argument for historicity. So losing it won’t affect the actual, evidence-based probability that Jesus existed. It will tank disingenuous apologetic defenses of historicity; but not legitimate ones. And I’m only interested in the latter. Hansen is also correct that (emphasis mine) “the question of whether or not Jesus existed should be answered first, to know what direction this quest,” the quest for the truth of Christian origins, “is to take with regard to the methods and assumptions that it will be based on.” That is definitely true. It’s the very point I made in the final section of OHJ (Ch. 12.5). Admitting that this question actually has to be shored up now is quite a concession for a historicist today; Hansen is basically surrendering to the fact that mythicism is a respectable argument now, one that actually needs to be addressed and hasn’t been yet. This is quite a turn from “that’s ridiculous, no one takes that seriously” (dozens of experts take it seriously).

But that’s it for being right about anything. The moment Hansen actually gets to her thesis, she is making false statements right out of the gate, claiming I “made use of Philo of Alexandria to argue that Jesus did not exist.” I never have done this. I can’t speak to what Kryvelev the Russian propagandist said in Soviet tabloids. I don’t see any point in reading such material, much less answering it. But if you are going to respond to a contemporary peer-reviewed study (Carrier 2014), particularly that has been independently confirmed by a subsequent peer-reviewed study (Lataster 2019), you really should be getting correct what this literature even argues first, before you can claim to have any useful response to it. Hansen also stumbles into the same semantic weeds as Neal Sendlak, confusing such sentences as “Philo called his Logos Jesus” (Hansen, “Re-examining,” p. 24, n. 30) with “Philo believed” this and “interpreted a passage that way.” In OHJ I never say Philo “said” this, as in literally said those words. I very clearly explain this is an inference we should make from the evidence we have, hence I present an argument for that conclusion (OHJ, pp. 203-04). To wit (emphasis now added):

We can safely conclude Philo (or his source) was aware of the fact that this cosmic firstborn son was named Jesus. Because denying that (no matter by what excuse) requires asserting a series of improbable coincidences, whereas affirming it does not.

No one who actually reads my section on Philo can be confused by this unless they are quite profoundly incompetent.

Moreover, this is only regarding the name of the creature in question. That this creature, regardless of its name, was believed to exist is explicitly stated by Philo and cannot be doubted. Philo believed there was an “archangel of many names” who was the Logos, Paraclete, Image of God, Firstborn Son of God, God’s Agent of Creation, God’s Appointed Lord over the Cosmos, High Priest of God’s Celestial Temple, and the One whom we all ought to imitate (and who was predicted in prophecy to “arise,” anatolê and anatelô; OHJ, pp. 200-05). And we know this because Philo literally says all this. And early Christian literature assigned all of the same attributes to Jesus. Which is impossible as a coincidence. To believe Jesus possessed all eight of these bizarre attributes can only plausibly be because Christians believed Jesus was this same angel Philo was talking about. This cannot be rationally rejected as being a fact. The only thing one can argue over is whether Philo understood this creature to also be named Jesus. But denying that also stands on improbable coincidences: that the character named Jesus in Zechariah 6 is just “by coincidence” called both the son of God (ben Jehozadak) and high priest and yet Philo says the character that he is talking about in that passage is fittingly named because he is also the son of God—and elsewhere Philo tells us (repeatedly) that this creature is also God’s high priest.

Hansen thus starts from both false claims about my argument. She confuses the archangel (with all its attributes) with the name. And she falsely thinks I argued (or indeed that one even could argue) that this makes a historical Jesus less probable (when in fact a real person can just as easily have been believed to have been that creature, just as most scholars agree he was believed to be some creature already found in Jewish literature at the time). I have already refuted these kinds of arguments in The Difference Between a Historian and an Apologist. I won’t duplicate what’s there. Hansen is basically arguing like an apologist and not a scholar: she wants improbable coincidences to exist (as I explain in OHJ and that article), in order to get her result; but we don’t need those coincidences to get ours. There is no logical leg left for Hansen to stand on. Her argument is simply dependent on improbable assumptions, and is therefore itself improbable. And that’s the end of it. Does Hansen ever answer this point? No. It never comes up. And when it comes to the rest of my argument—that the early Christians believed their Jesus to be the same pre-existent cosmic entity regardless of its name—Hansen has no reply at all, other than to suggest these terms meant slightly different things to both groups, but that’s a common way terms got coopted, and its not even relevant to the probability argument: Hansen still requires a remarkably improbable coincidence; we do not. No response.

That point I already deal with in my refutation of Neal Sendlak’s hopelessly garbled “telephone gamed” version of Hansen’s case. Hansen does not make all the embarrassing mistakes Sendlak did. But she does make some of them. Most of her arguments are non sequiturs and possibiliter fallacies; she never addresses my argument to probability, which refutes them all. So reading through my discussion with Sendlak really already answers Hansen’s every argument. So I won’t duplicate what’s there either. Needless to say, I never argue Philo thought this “archangel of many names” ever did or ever would become incarnate. That is solely the Christian innovation on top of this angelology. Which is why we cannot tell from this whether they innovated it of a historical man or an imaginary one. Either is as likely.

So the mere fact that Christians thought their Jesus was a particular archangelic creature also attested in Philo does not affect the probability that their Jesus existed. And accordingly, it never does in OHJ. It is merely something we must take into account when explaining Christian origins. The historicist has no viable theory of historicity if it is not compatible with this fact. But since the growing consensus among them is that it is (Jesus was believed a pre-existent superbeing from its launch), this is clearly no difficulty for them. It shouldn’t be for Hansen. And ironically, she contradicts herself by even admitting this: “a historical Jesus that was deified and the belief in a second power in heaven that was then applied to him seems a more parsimonious explanation of early Christian origins.” My point exactly. And whether that actually is the more parsimonious explanation depends on other evidence; not this.

Hansen then spends a whole section on certain theories of Robert Price that I have never argued, nor that have ever been argued under peer-review. I am uninterested in such things, so I won’t evaluate them. I can say only that I concur with Hansen that I don’t see enough evidence to believe what Price argues. But whether Hansen has also misrepresented Price’s case, left out evidence, made illogical arguments, and the like, I haven’t wasted my time to determine. Anyone interested in that, though, may want to apply themselves to it, knowing what you now do about Hansen’s unreliable modus operandi. But I suspect after you correct any errors there may be, there still won’t be any case left over for Price’s claims to be probable (other than merely possible, which is insufficient to declare them true).

Finally, Hansen closes with a paragraph I suspect was overlooked from an earlier draft. She says what she has refuted was “the idea that a god named ‘Jesus’ was worshiped prior to the development of Christianity,” but nowhere in her paper does she ever mention such a claim. I never claim Philo worshiped the archangel of many names, or thought anyone had; or that it was a “god.” And in Hansen’s treatment I didn’t see any clear statement from Price about this either; though Price advances so many contradictory theories it can be hard to keep straight in which model he imagines a pre-existent being to have long been named Jesus (or worshipped as a god), and in which the name Jesus (or worship or designation as a god) was assigned after his resurrection (as Price sometimes interprets Philippians 2:9-11 to mean; and I think he could be right about that, though it falls short of provable). Hansen also just admitted the historical Jesus could have been connected with a second “god” in heaven found in Jewish thought of the period (citing Schäfer’s Two Gods in Heaven), so it is Hansen who is claiming there was such a prior “god” (just not that it was named Jesus or worshipped). So I can only assume this sentence escaped revision in the final draft.

But I am delighted to see Hansen admit in her conclusion that “recent scholarship has demonstrated that Christianity was quite aware of and influenced by its neighbours,” even “possible mimesis with Greco-Roman sources (which [Dennis] MacDonald and others have explored in detail),” and “even possibly the resurrection belief and its portrayal being based on Greco-Roman models.” This is an extraordinary turnaround for Hansen. She’s actually moving in our direction now, and admitting that the field has actually already been moving in our direction for years already. We noticed this. Historicists balked. Then whined when they realized they were the ones who were wrong. As always, once you start telling the truth, things start going badly for the historicity apologist.

Conclusion

Once you cut out all of the material in Hansen’s new paper that isn’t about any peer-reviewed defense of a non-existent Jesus, all you have left is a garbled argument against there being a creature in Jewish angelology already named Jesus who had all the peculiar attributes assigned to Jesus. But as is typical of apologetics, by equivocation fallacy Hansen has confused this with an argument against there being a creature in Jewish angelology who had all the peculiar attributes assigned to Jesus. Once you subtract the single dispute over what names it had, Hansen has no case to offer. She doesn’t even mention this fallback theory, much less offer any relevant rebuttal to it.

So there is still a pre-existent Jesus the Christians picked up from Jewish angelology as attested in Philo. Maybe they were the first to name him Jesus (after all, the name means God’s Savior, and that describes who they started claiming that angelic creature secretly had been, and was recently declared, per Romans 1 and Philippians 2). That impacts the Jesus myth hypothesis not at all. But there is actually evidence for that creature already being known by the name Jesus, evidence pertaining to its probability, evidence Hansen never addresses, in an entire article that is supposed to do that. And that impacts any competent historical Jesus hypothesis not at all.

So when it comes to my thesis regarding Philo, Hansen never even articulates it correctly, and never mentions my actual arguments for it, and never responds to any of them. She also neglected to check how many scholars agree with Lataster and me on this point. In my response to Sendlak I cited Sadananda and Meeks concurring with us (and subsequently added others). They make points like ours that Hansen never mentions or addresses. If one did a full literature search, I suspect you’d find more examples. Hansen didn’t do any search at all. This tells us one thing: Hansen is not interested in what’s true, or what scholars have found; she is only interested in making an uncomfortable finding go away, by whatever device, no matter how illogical or disingenuous.