Recently Tim O’Neill once again engaged his usual arrogantly dishonest methods and lied about the evidence in the very act of denouncing an actual expert (me) as incompetent, but in the process proving he was incompetent and I was not. Which is standard operating procedure for him (example, example, example, example). He never learns competent methodology. He just lies and bluffs his way through repeated amateurish mistakes, while falsely accusing real experts of being incompetent. Really, no one should be listening to this guy anymore. He never reforms. He never learns. He never becomes competent. And he never becomes honest. Even when he corrects himself, he lies about it. I’ll illustrate all this here with this new example. But the main objective of this article is to educate on an underlying point of methodology: what is a competent person supposed to be doing here, that O’Neill never does?

What this all illustrates is how gullible YouTubers are in believing anything O’Neill says, and how historicity can only be defended with lies—a fact those YouTubers should start to question: if mythicism can be “destroyed” only by lying, isn’t it historicity that is actually being destroyed? This is the lesson YouTubers need to start learning. And grasping the methodological fail here, and how a proper methodology would have avoided these mistakes and revealed a completely different answer, will help with that. So here it goes.

Summary of the Debacle

In a recent episode of Reason to Doubt, Tim O’Neill was trying to criticize David Fitzgerald (something he has never done honestly before); and in the present case of concern (starting around 16:44), he was trying to criticize Fitzgerald’s summary of the expert, multiply-corroborated, peer-reviewed literature on the question of what Paul means in Galatians 4:4 (Richard Carrier, On the Historicity of Jesus, Sheffield Phoenix 2014, pp. 575–82; Raphael Lataster, Questioning the Historicity of Jesus, Brill 2019, pp. 267-70). But nothing he says about what Fitzgerald writes indicates Fitzgerald got the expert literature wrong; O’Neill is thus really criticizing the expert literature here, not Fitzgerald. All Fitzgerald did is what O’Neill himself said he should do: consult and rely on experts; the one thing O’Neill didn’t do. So his criticism of Fitzgerald is false and is actually a denunciation of himself.

This is typical for O’Neill. For example, he once tried to criticize someone else for claiming the same word (ginomai in Greek) is used in both Romans 1:3 and 1 Corinthians 15:37:

Evidently he had not yet learned anything about Greek so as to recognize this is false: it’s the same word indeed, just inflected grammatically. Not knowing that Greek is an inflected language is the rankest of incompetence. Worse, he didn’t even know how to use a Strong’s Concordance, the standard way for a lay person to check a claim like this. Subsequently pwned for that arrogant mistake, O’Neill learned and changed his tune, now claiming to be an expert who recognizes the same word is used in both places. But now he wants to argue that it can’t mean “manufactured” or “made,” even though that is literally the only thing it can mean in 1 Corinthians 15:37. After all, Paul did not imagine our resurrection bodies will come out of any womb or vagina. There is only one way they come into being: by being made by God. The same is true, Paul says, of Adam, who “came to be” (ginomai) only by being manufactured, not born.

It is in this context that in Reason to Doubt O’Neill said the following (starting at 16:44):

[David Fitzgerald] finds that some of the verses that [are] used to indicate that there was a historical Jesus, he finds them a little bit weird, and he mentions one in particular, which was in Galatians 4:4, where Paul says that Jesus was born of a woman. What he actually says is born of a woman, born under the law. So what he’s saying there is that he was a Jewish man born under the law as a reference to the Jewish law, the Torah. And the whole of Galatians is an argument about whether or not you need to follow the Jewish law in order to be saved. And Paul is arguing vigorously that you don’t, and this is something that is very important to him.

And Fitzgerald says, well, look, this is weird. Why would he say “born of a woman” now? That’s a very strange thing to say. And if you don’t actually understand the material you’re dealing with, it probably does sound kind of weird. Except born of a woman is actually a very common Jewish phrase. We find it all the way through a whole lot of of the Old Testament; we find it in the Dead Sea Scrolls; and we also find it a couple of times in [the] gospels. What born of a woman means is, it’s a Jewish phrase meaning, or emphasizing, someone’s humanity.

So you could, I could say, well, “Jared, why did you eat the last piece of chocolate cake.” And you could reply using this phrase, saying “I am but one born of a woman.” You basically [are saying] I’m only human. Or I could say, you know, “Of all those born of woman, Jordan has the most amazing bow ties.” It’s kind of a poetic way of emphasizing someone’s humanity, or their place within humanity. So what Paul is using it for here is to emphasize that Jesus was, apart from whatever else he thought he was, a Jewish man. And he was like us. He was one born of a woman. He was like us. That’s kind of what he’s saying.

But Fitzgerald, when he was sort of talking about how this is weird, it’s not weird. It’s just that Fitzgerald doesn’t understand everything I just said. Because he is not familiar with the material. But he also said, well, he doesn’t say he was born of a woman. He says that he was “made,” and that’s just wrong. That’s not true. The verb is genomenon, which is a form of the verb ginomai, and it means to come to pass, to come to be. It’s a very broad verb commonly used in Greek, used in a whole range of different meanings, including being born.

So, we’ve got several examples of it being used in that way. In Genesis, for example, it’s used several times. We find it in Josephus. We also find it in Plato’s Republic, in the Life of Thucydides. This is a phrase that is sometimes used to mean, a word sometimes used to mean, to be born. But what it doesn’t mean, though, anywhere, “is made.” That’s an argument that Carrier makes, based on some highly devious linguistics. But you can search the Corpus of Greek literature in this period, and you won’t find this verb meaning “made.” So this is the kind of thing that he does. He makes these statements. And if you don’t know what, if you don’t know the linguistics (because he doesn’t), you would kind of think, wow, he just said something really profound there. But it’s factually wrong.

So his argument about “born of a woman” doesn’t stand up. Because it actually does make sense. It is a common phrase. And the way Paul is using it makes sense. And his argument that it’s, oh, it’s “all symbolic,” it’s not. The whole argument of Galatians is who was born under the law and who wasn’t. So it’s all about lineage. And he’s saying Jesus was born of a woman. He’s not saying it symbolically. He’s talking about a guy who’s actually born. And this is, so, this is not some weird phrase that doesn’t make any sense. It actually makes perfect sense—it makes more sense, better sense—if there was an actual dude.

And this highlights the issue with someone as a layman. If I try to interpret things just using my own 20th century American understanding of what’s being written, [I’ll be wrong], because these—the Gospels, the letters of Paul—they weren’t written for me. They were written in the first century, by a first century person, for other first century people. And so that’s why it’s super important to us, as skeptics, to talk to experts or to read the literature of the people who study this time period. Because you know, there’s a lot of things that would seem weird to us that were completely normal to them.

The language thing is an issue. Because we’re not just dealing with English translations of, in this case, Greek texts. We’re also usually dealing with Christian translations of the Greek text. This is why going back to what the Greek actually says, so it’s not being filtered through theology, is important as well.

…

And this is why I was sort of saying, as you just said John, you need to get that technical background, in order to be able to see where the flaws and these arguments often are.

About half of what O’Neill said here is false; while the other half doesn’t respond to any actual argument that Fitzgerald (and, under peer review, I and Lataster) have made. We actually agree that Paul believes Jesus was given a mortal Jewish (indeed even Davidic) body, and that “born of a woman” was a common phrase meaning mortal, and that Galatians 3–4 is all about Gentiles not having to subscribe to the Torah covenant, and that you should follow the experts rather than try to pretend to be one yourself (something, you’ll soon see, O’Neill definitely has not done, but that Fitzgerald totally has).

A really excellent refutation of O’Neill was undertaken by Godless Engineer (John Gleason). I will be analyzing the methodological differences between these two approaches, because it really demonstrates what people need to learn—more so even than getting the facts right, is getting the methodology right. But Gleason establishes in his video all the things O’Neill just said that weren’t true, and which indicate O’Neill does not even know what he is talking about. Such as:

• It is false that Paul (or anyone then) believed you were in the Torah covenant by being born.

You could only be subject to Torah law by being circumcised. That established the covenant. The covenant was how you escaped death. If you didn’t enter the covenant, you stayed dead, and wouldn’t be resurrected to eternal life. That is what Paul means by what O’Neill (following most modern Bibles) wants to translate as “born under the law.” Paul means: subject to death unless you enter the covenant and follow its strictures. He does not mean you are automatically, by birth, a covenantal Jew. To grasp the importance of this distinction, which is lost on O’Neill because he is an amateur who hasn’t actually studied the ancient context in which Paul is writing (despite insisting one must), you can read my article on The Incompetent Crankery of the Israel Only Movement.

This should already have been obvious, though, because Paul does not even say this woman was Jewish. How does merely being “born of a woman” make you Jewish? Or subject to Torah? Everyone is born of a woman, including the very Gentiles Paul is trying to dissuade here from converting to Judaism by seeking circumcision and submission to Torah. So this phrase cannot mean what O’Neill pretends. Paul is referring to everyone, not just Jews: we are all born “under the law” in Paul’s intended sense here (as he explicitly says across his whole ensuing argument, literally beginning at the next verse, from Galatians 4:5 through 4:31), that we are all doomed to death unless we enter a covenant and adhere to the law. Paul is arguing Jesus already cleared that for us, so we can enter that covenant without adhering to the law. So, yes, Jesus’s mortality is what Paul means here; but he is not even referring to his Jewishness (even though Paul was sure he was Jewish), but to his being subject to the elemental powers of death. That’s the only sense in which Jesus and Gentiles could be “born under the law.” Because there was no such thing as being born into the Torah covenant. Clearly, O’Neill doesn’t know this.

• It is false that Fitzgerald thinks it’s weird that Paul would use a phrase designating Jesus as mortal.

What Fitzgerald (and, under peer review, I and Lataster) find weird is, rather, two other things: (a) Paul never even mentions this woman was Jewish, and being born of a Jewish woman didn’t make you Jewish anyway, so why is Paul saying, generically, “born of a woman” precisely here in the midst of his argument across Galatians 3 and 4, and (b) Paul strangely and inexplicably changes that common Jewish phrase from “born from a woman” to “made from a woman” (here in Galatians 4:4 and also in Romans 1:3; see also Philippians 2:7).

O’Neill would try to tackle the latter point (that was his closing move); but even then he never admits that what he said is literally false: in Greek the metonymic idiom across the Old Testament and other texts always uses genaô, not ginomai, a fact O’Neill conspicuously doesn’t tell his hosts and audience—to the contrary, he dishonestly ignores this point, and gives the false impression that Paul is using the exact phrase and not changing it in precisely the way we rightly find peculiar. But in addition to dishonestly engaging with our second point, as I just noted, O’Neill totally misses our first point, because he incompetently doesn’t know birth did not make one subject to Torah; it made one subject to death, from which entering the Torah covenant was one way to escape—while another, Paul is arguing, is baptizing yourself into the death and resurrection of Jesus (as Paul explains, e.g., in Romans 2:25 and Romans 5:12-25; etc.).

• It is false that “you can search the Corpus of Greek literature in this period, and you won’t find this verb meaning made.”

This is O’Neill’s most incompetent error, and the most important methodologically, because he claims you need to “know the linguistics” and “you need to get that technical background.” O’Neill here demonstrates he has neither. And when he was caught making this amateurish mistake, he tried to save face with a dishonest correction (which I’ll analyze below). But his correction blows right past his methodological failure: his assertion demonstrates O’Neill doesn’t know how to do this. He doesn’t know that you can’t claim “you can search the Corpus of Greek literature in this period, and you won’t find this verb meaning made” without checking the Corpus of Greek literature in this period; he doesn’t know how to check the Corpus of Greek literature in this period; and he didn’t check the Corpus of Greek literature in this period—even though he rattles off the names of authors and books he supposedly checked. Which is what makes this an example of O’Neill’s characteristic tactic of lying, not just sucking.

As we’ll see, O’Neill would later backtrack and claim he only checked the Liddell & Scott Lexicon, and purports to have been misled by its not including this translation. Which is false, and thus another lie (it very much does include it, it’s under § I.2, “to be produced,” of which “made” and “manufactured” are common English synonyms). But he was already lying in the video itself when, instead of saying something closer to what he now purports to be the truth (“I checked the Liddell & Scott Lexicon and didn’t see it there,” which still would reflect either lying or gross incompetence, because it is there), he said, rather, that he checked “the Corpus of Greek literature,” and even specific authors like Josephus. That’s a lie. He didn’t check. And this is the most important thing to learn here…

Methodological Point Number One: Actually Check a Claim Before Asserting It

What O’Neill later claimed he did, in fact, was amateurishly incompetent: he only checked the dictionary (competent linguists check the corpus, not just the dictionary), and then he didn’t even get right what that dictionary said—it very much includes the definition of ginomai (“produced,” LSG, §I.2) that he falsely claims you can find nowhere in the whole corpus of ancient Greek. This is so impossible (missing a whole central paragraph in a dictionary you claim to have checked?) that I suspect O’Neill never did check the Liddell & Scott Lexicon. He’s simply lying to save face; to come up with some excuse, dishonestly blaming the dictionary for his mistake, rather than his own incompetence. He didn’t check if his claim was true. But he confidently asserted it was, made a deliberate impression that he verified it, and even made a point about this being a matter of linguistic competence. This makes O’Neill a liar, not just an incompetent amateur. Mere amateurs will at least tell the truth about whether they checked something, and how—particularly if they are going to make this a dispute over who is competent. Amateurs also know how to read a dictionary.

Being someone who actually translates ancient Greek, I knew what O’Neill said was false the moment I heard it. Face, palm. Remember, I am an actual expert with a Ph.D. in the subject and a whole cv of peer-reviewed publications in it, and who even got this specific claim to pass peer-review. O’Neill is an incompetent amateur, who doesn’t even check many facts he chooses to assert, yet who dishonestly pretends to be an expert. But to illustrate how someone actually does competent linguistic inquiry, I decided to check at random and see how easy it was to fact-check his assertion—the very thing he should have done, and which he deliberately misled his hosts and audience to falsely believe he had done. I decided I’d just ramble through the Jewish Antiquities of Josephus, because he used that as an example (one that he even implies he checked), and it’s a first century Jewish text, just like Paul’s letters, and it contains a lot of text, so surely, if I would find examples anywhere, I’d find some there.

First, I found an easily searchable translation (the standard Whiston) and searched the phrase “was made,” and then found the corresponding sentence in the Greek to check what word was being used to indicate something thus being made. Although to do a thorough survey, I would search other tenses and synonyms as well (“made” in English is not the only word that means “made,” and “is made” and “will be made” are also possible forms, and so on), and I might check various and more current translations, and other texts (not just Josephus). But my reasoning here was a fortiori: by checking for only a subset of potential hits, if I still nevertheless found many examples, a fortiori, O’Neill is an idiot. Because he could have done this; and were he at all honest and competent, he would have done this. But he didn’t. That he represented himself to his hosts and audience as nevertheless having done it makes him dishonest. That he didn’t do even as little as this makes him incompetent.

Well. Guess what? I literally laughed out loud when my first hit in the Antiquities was Book 1, Chapter 1, Section 1 (§27-28). Right after the Preface. I kid you not:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. But when the earth did not come into sight, but was covered with thick darkness, and a wind moved upon its surface, God commanded that there should be light: and when that was made, he considered the whole mass.”

Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἔκτισεν ὁ θεὸς τὸν οὐρανὸν καὶ τὴν γῆν. ταύτης δ᾽ ὑπ᾽ ὄψιν οὐκ ἐρχομένης, ἀλλὰ βαθεῖ μὲν κρυπτομένης σκότει, πνεύματος δ᾽ αὐτὴν ἄνωθεν ἐπιθέοντος, γενέσθαι φῶς ἐκέλευσεν ὁ θεός. καὶ γενομένου τούτου κατανοήσας τὴν ὅλην ὕλην.

Both times indicated in bold, the verb is ginomai; both times, the reference is to something being made. Light came to be by being made by God. Everything else came to be by being made by God. Yes, the verb at root means “came to be,” but that’s the point of a word’s valence: that can mean “made / built / manufactured,” and frequently referred to exactly that fact, as it is doing here. Likewise, §36 in the same section: where Josephus says of Eve, “whereupon Adam knew her when she was brought to him, and acknowledged that she was made out of himself” (καὶ ὁ Ἄδαμος προσαχθεῖσαν αὐτὴν ἐγνώρισεν ἐξ αὑτοῦ γενομένην), again ginomai, referring to manufacture. Obviously. Eve was not born; she did not spontaneously pop out of Adam; she was built by God. Yes, one “can also” translate this as “came from” or “came to be from,” but there is a reason Whiston felt at liberty to choose “was made from,” which is the fact that this is what Josephus is talking about. It’s the valence of the word “came to be” here.

Ginomai can also in many authors mean “came to be” as in “born,” a fact no one has questioned (neither Fitzgerald, nor me, nor Lataster), so O’Neill’s implying we didn’t know this or didn’t admit it is more of his usual dishonesty. But even more dishonest (and incompetent) is his insisting the converse, that it never meant, instead, “made.” To the contrary, it can also mean “came to be” as in “made,” not born. So this is why it is important (and a fact central to our argument—and thus it is peculiar, and indicative again of dishonesty, that O’Neill never mentions this or addresses it) that when Paul only ever uses ginomai to mean “made,” and then of actual births only ever uses a different word, genaô, we should follow Paul’s idiom: he is making this choice for his own personal, intentional reasons, and is consistent in doing so. Competent linguistic analysis heeds a fact like this. Incompetence ignores it.

This was in fact so obvious that Medieval Christians tried changing the texts of Paul, to switch out his preferred word for “made” for his preferred word for “born,” conspicuously in both Galatians 4:4 and Romans 1:3 (they thus recognized their problem existed in both verses). This fact is also mentioned by us in our argument, and was also dishonestly ignored and was never mentioned or answered by O’Neill in that video, even though it proves that Medieval Christians understood exactly what I am saying. They agreed Paul’s idiom was as I am explaining; and they knew therefore that they desperately needed to change what he said, to change his careful selection of verbs to match his own consistent idiom and still say what they wanted him to say: that Jesus was “born,” and not, like light, the world, and Eve, “made” (these kinds of telltale changes, to “create” evidence for a historical Jesus, are evident across Christendom: the second century Ignatius also tried swapping these verbs out, for example, among much else to historicize Jesus). More on this shortly.

When Gleason caught O’Neill ignoring this evidence, O’Neill responded in his characteristically dishonest way, by claiming this was just some claim I made, rather than acknowledging that in fact this was documented by Bart Ehrman, a fact Gleason had explicitly proved with a screenshot of Ehrman’s peer-reviewed book The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, where in fact he documents it (p. 239). So O’Neill is systematically ignoring what experts say, exactly the opposite of what he insists one is supposed to do. Pay attention to this tactic. It’s what pegs someone as dishonest; as someone you cannot trust. (He eventually concedes this claim is true, and tries to wriggle out of it. But I’ll get to that shortly.)

Okay. So, all that. Nevertheless, I kept going. The next example in the Antiquities that I found was in Book 2, Chapter 16, Section 4 (§342). The Antiquities comes in twenty books, in case you were wondering. There we find Josephus saying “the Egyptians entered a road made especially for the Hebrews” (Αἰγύπτιοι δ᾽ ἐλάνθανον ἰδίαν ὁδὸν Ἑβραίοις γεγενημένην). Ginomai. Made. Then, Book 3, Chapter 7, Section 5 (§162): “it was made in this way” (γίνεται γὰρ τοῦτον τὸν τρόπον), referring to how a Jewish temple priest’s clothes are manufactured. Then, Book 8, Chapter 5, Section 1 (§5), regarding Solomon’s construction of a palace: “God, for whom it was made, cooperated” in its construction (καὶ θεοῦ συνεργοῦντος, εἰς ὃν ἐγίνετο). And so on. I could keep going, but really, these examples are enough to prove the point. I didn’t even have to get through half of one ancient text by a first century Jewish author to find six examples of ginomai being used to mean “made.”

This is the difference between an incompetent liar and an honest expert: I did the work, I checked to make sure, and I knew how to do that; O’Neill didn’t, but claimed to. Of course, as Gleason himself would point out, one can find examples refuting him even in the New Testament (e.g. Matthew 4:3; Mark 2:27; one could add John 1:10; Hebrews 11:3; and so on). And the King James translators themselves chose “made” to render this same verb in Galatians 4:4 and Romans 1:3 and Philippians 2:7. So did its Catholic competitor, the Douay-Rheims translation of the Vulgate. Which further reminds us that Jerome himself, the 4th century translator who created the canonical Latin text of the Catholic Church, did the very same: Galatians 4:4 (factum ex muliere, factum sub lege), using the Latin for “made”; likewise, again, Romans 1:3 (factus est ei ex semine) and Philippians 2:7 (in similitudinem hominum factus). Ooops.

Methodological Point Number Two: Don’t Try to Lie Your Way Out of Being Wrong

I’ve made mistakes, and corrected them. When I do, I admit I made the mistake, give an honest account of how that happened, and do not try to tell more lies to keep my argument alive. If being wrong nixes an argument, I admit it, and drop the argument (a lot of my positions today resulted from doing exactly that; indeed, I used to be a rabid historicist); I also commit to doing better, because I take seriously the question of what methodological error I must have succumbed to (not just the resulting factual error), so I can update my epistemology. This is the behavior of an honest person. O’Neill never does these things. He never asks what his methodological error was so he can commit to never employing that methodology again, but employ a revised, reliable method instead. He never admits that being wrong about a key premise means he must also be wrong about his argument and its conclusion. He never updates. He just keeps using the same crap methods, and the same refuted arguments. And he does this by making up lies about his mistakes, instead of duly correcting them, from method to argument (again, example, example, example, example). This is the behavior of a crank, not a real scholar.

The argument that O’Neill desperately wants to go away (and thus keeps lying in his attempts to make it go away) I have already outlined in detail in Yes, Galatians 4 Is Allegorical (with relevant support in Empirical Logic and Romans 1:3). I have even countered O’Neill’s lies on similar points before (because this behavior of his isn’t new: see What Did Paul Mean in Romans 1:3?). John Gleason’s video provides an accurate and succinct summary. He follows O’Neill’s own advice: he listens to experts, endeavors to correctly understand them, verifies to within his means that what they are saying is correct, and builds his case on that. Ironically, O’Neill rarely follows his own advice. He often simply ignores what experts say, and makes no honest effort to understand it, and tries to joust with it instead with armchair lies, asserted with haughty confidence—hoping, like Donald Trump (or any preacher or psychopath in history) that he can compensate for not checking anything or knowing what he is talking about by simply displaying total confidence that he did and does. People will then believe him. Because they are dupes, and don’t know they should fact-check an amateur, or stop trusting someone once they’ve been caught doing this over and over again.

We see all this now in a pinned comment O’Neill left on the original video where he made these mistakes and told these lies, after Gleason caught him out and schooled him. This is what O’Neill now claims (I am including its entire content, but with interruptions to fisk each point):

I think it’s a good idea to always admit if you’re wrong about something and to own your mistakes. So I was grateful to a couple of people who noted a response to a point I made in the video above about Gal 4:4, particularly the meaning of the word γενόμενον (genomenon) there, which is usually translated as “born of”, rendering the key phrase “his Son, born of a woman”. Fitzgerald claimed that this word, a form of the very common and very broad verb γίνομαι (ginomai) means “made”, not “born of”.

That is a lie.

Fitzgerald did not claim the word simply means “made.” He claimed there is evidence Paul was using it in this instance to mean that; and he presented a bunch of that evidence—not a single item of which O’Neill mentioned in the video (take a look: Jesus: Mything in Action, Vol. II, pp. 144–46). As O’Neill well knows, Fitzgerald is only briefing my peer-reviewed work (and anyone who can follow an endnote knows this as well), which is even more explicit about all this. So it is important to notice that O’Neill is not arguing that Fitzgerald got what I said wrong; he is arguing that what I said was wrong. So quibbles about Fitzgerald’s exact wording are irrelevant to what O’Neill was actually claiming.

This means the difference between Fitzgerald claiming “the word means ‘made'” and “the word means ‘made’ in this particular instance” is crucial. Because half of O’Neill’s entire argument was that “it can also mean born,” as if Fitzgerald didn’t already concede that and thus as if this was criticizing something Fitzgerald said. That is dishonest. Fitzgerald never argued that it “never” means “born.” And consequently, half of O’Neill’s argument is simply disingenuous. It is also nonresponsive. Once we see that Fitzgerald made an argument for this point, but O’Neill neither mentions nor answers any part of that argument, but instead acts like Fitzgerald simply claimed it never means born (an argument Fitzgerald never made), this becomes lying. Needless to say, you are not a “good skeptic” if you are literally ignoring every argument your opponent makes, and replacing it all with an argument he never made, and then claiming you’ve proved them incompetent. This is unethical, not “skeptical.”

O’Neill continues:

I made the categorical statement that this verb could not have this meaning. I was wrong. I was working from memory (always a bad idea) and had forgotten that I’ve been over this with someone before and knew that, in fact, this was one of its possible meanings. My too-quick check of the Liddell-Scott-Johnson Greek Lexicon the night before this interview seemed to indicate it didn’t have this meaning (LSJ doesn’t list it among its entries), but I was reminded of several examples of it doing so via email this morning. My mistake.

This is probably all a lie. “I forgot I knew everything I was saying is false” is not a believable excuse. Watch the video: O’Neill speaks with absolute confidence, and even accuses anyone who disagrees with him of incompetence. This is not someone who “forgot,” as if this was some minor or spontaneous side point. This is half of O’Neill’s entire multi-minute response. Moreover, before he posted that comment, he posted this slightly-different claim on Twitter:

Notice two things here: first, he claims “this doesn’t really affect the rest of my argument” (but there is no “rest” of his argument; apart from this, and his false claim that Fitzgerald said the word never meant born, he made no other arguments); and second, he claims “the usually reliable” Liddell-Scott-Jones Lexicon led him astray (he also misspelled Liddell, and confused the premiere LSG with the unrelated Johnson English, but I will chalk that up to just over-quick typing). In other words, O’Neill started by implying the dictionary made the mistake, not him. O’Neill does this again in the video comment, by revising his previous assertion that the “usually reliable” Lexicon “doesn’t give that meaning” into, now, the Lexicon only “seemed to indicate it didn’t have this meaning” or the “LSJ doesn’t list it among its entries,” which is even more carelessly contradictory—which, after all, is it? It “seemed” to not have this meaning, or it “doesn’t”? Because it does.

How after two attempts at revising his own story does O’Neill still not know the LSJ includes this meaning in §I.2 (“to be produced,” literally the second formal meaning listed there)? This cannot be someone who actually looked at the LSJ. I have to conclude he is lying even about that. He did not read the LSJ entry on this word. Ever. Much less after the fact. Even less before the fact. But also, he is lying about the entire narrative: he did not say in the video “I checked the LSJ and it’s not there.” He describes checking the entire “corpus” of Greek, naming numerous texts and authors, and then says it’s not there.

So O’Neill is lying even about his original lie. He cannot simply admit he didn’t check this at all, and that he did not know whether it was true or false when he nevertheless confidently asserted it was true, and even accused everyone else of being incompetent for saying otherwise. Notice the failure here is not just his being wrong about a basic fact of Greek (that’s also the case), but his entire methodology: he did not check a basic fact—at all, much less properly—and despite knowing he didn’t, he went on to make adamant assertions representing himself as an expert who checked in detail, and even insulted real experts as incompetent for being, it turns out, correct. The reason he fucked this up so badly is he didn’t even follow a competent procedure. And that is the most important lesson here.

O’Neill continues:

Of course, Mythicists like to seize on this kind of thing when they can, so the guy who calls himself “Godless Engineer” has already posted a typically gleeful video showing (correctly) I was wrong and declaring that this means everything I say can now be dismissed.

Yes, we like to note when you make enormously incompetent errors and lie about it. Because that’s unethical, it spreads disinformation, and it correctly calibrates the reputation you should actually have—the very things skeptics should be making note of. This was not a minor side-point, again; this was literally half of his entire argument, and he even used it to slander real professionals. He does not have any right left to complain that he’s getting publicly, and deservedly, criticized for that. Of course, Gleason actually catches O’Neill in numerous errors in his video response, not just the one O’Neill is admitting to. Take note as we go: O’Neill will ignore almost every other error he was caught on, as if it never happened, and only engage disingenuously on the rest.

He goes on…

While I’m happy to own my mistake, it doesn’t actually affect the point I made much at all. Fitzgerald was also pretty categorical: he declared that the verb in Gal 4:4 doesn’t mean “born”, it means “made”. The fact it *can*, perhaps, mean “made” isn’t sufficient to claim that the use of the verb here is “weird” or somehow inexplicable.

Lies. Fitzgerald did indeed say it “can” mean “made.” But that means he never said it “never” means “born.” And he never said this was “sufficient,” he gave two pages of arguments for it, all of which O’Neill is here dishonestly claiming he didn’t produce—he is instead lying, claiming Fitzgerald simply said it was “weird” that Paul used here a word that meant “made.”

And again, trying to change the argument to “Fitzgerald’s wording was confusing” is dishonest. O’Neill never argued that in the video he is being pwned for. He knows Fitzgerald’s two pages on this are only a brief of my peer-reviewed argument. He literally says so in the video. And O’Neill only argued against my argument, not Fitzgerald’s wording of it. O’Neill is thus lying again, by trying to “change history,” making it sound like he argued something else, such that really this is all about Fitzgerald’s choice of wording and not Fitzgerald’s actual argument. False. Indeed, O’Neill still does not mention any of Fitzgerald’s actual arguments for his conclusion, even here. Worse, he lies, claiming there aren’t any. So O’Neill is still lying about what Fitzgerald argued as well as what I argued. So even in his attempt at a correction, O’Neill can’t stop himself repeatedly lying about what actually happened. Consequently, O’Neill is not learning anything from his mistakes. Because he won’t even admit they happened.

O’Neill goes on…

After all, even “Godless Engineer”, following Richard Carrier (both He and Fitzgerald depend on Carrier for all of their arguments after all) admits that forms of γίνομαι can also be used to mean “born”. And I’ve argued at length elsewhere that Paul seems to have deliberately used this broader, more ambiguous term, deliberately rather [than] more specific alternatives like γεννᾰ́ω (gennáō – to give birth). This seems to be because he saw Jesus as having a heavenly pre-existence and so he came into being through a woman, but existed before this.

This also looks like lying. Because what O’Neill is saying here doesn’t make any sense—and also isn’t anything he said in the original video, which makes it look like a face-saving rewrite of history. In the video he insisted there was nothing weird about this. Now he is admitting there is something weird about it, and offering his own (albeit incoherent) theory as to why. The problem with this (apart from it being not in fact the position he took that he got pwned for) is that it actually completely changes what he should have been arguing: if he really knew this, and really thought it when he was making his argument in the video, he would have had to explain how his theory of why Paul changed the idiom with an unusual and peculiar choice of verb is any different from ours. Because it isn’t clear to me how it can be.

I fully agree the reason Paul says Jesus was made rather than born is indeed because he believes Jesus was a preexistent being. How, after all, does one of those end up a fetus in a womb? That’s not impossible to conceive (pun not intended), and indeed it’s what the Gospel Nativities would later imagine, having God manufacture the body of Jesus in a womb. But if we are admitting Paul can’t use his preferred word for human birth because Jesus preexisted, aren’t we admitting Paul might actually think the mortal body was created for him and not something he was born into? After all, if he was born into it, why not just use genaô? Why change the idiom at all?

Of course, we have a handful of other, more persuasive evidences to this point—all of which O’Neill continues to ignore and even falsely claims don’t exist—but my point here is: if O’Neill actually thought this (rather than only invented it after the fact to retcon his personal history to save face), why was this not the argument he actually made at the time, rather than dishonestly claiming ginomai never means “made,” but is always part of the Jewish idiom for “mortal,” and is thus not an ambiguous or unusual verb choice for Paul? Crickets. I have to conclude O’Neill is simply lying here; especially in light of all the other indisputable instances of him lying. And still, he is not addressing any of Fitzgerald’s actual arguments (or mine), nor does this newly made-up theory even respond to us—it really just supports our position.

O’Neill then continues:

“Godless Engineer” notes, again following Carrier, that early texts of Gal 4:4 sometimes changed the γενόμενον of Gal 4:4 to a form of γεννᾰ́ω. This is true, but pretty well known and something else I’ve discussed elsewhere. It could be that the scribes of these variants simply thought they were correcting an earlier scribe’s error, but it’s very likely these changes were made in response to the Christological disputes of the second and third centuries. In these disputes, orthodox believers were defending against Docetists who said Jesus only had the illusion of a body and wasn’t fully human at all. So some scribes “adjusted” certain Biblical texts to try to make ambiguities like Paul’s verb in Gal 4:4 more in line with the orthodox view. The key point here is they are changing an ambiguous word “become” to an unambiguous word “born”.

O’Neill showed no sign of being aware of this fact in the video—else why did he not respond to it? Worse, if he did know this, he is now confessing to lying in the video, by not addressing it there. It is, after all, one of Fitzgerald’s arguments—he even endnotes his citation to Bart Ehrman. O’Neill here is claiming only John Gleason and I said this, and falsely claims the notion comes from me. It comes from Ehrman. How does O’Neill not know Fitzgerald actually cited this evidence, and cited Ehrman in support of it? It is gratifying that he will admit to it being true now—only after being caught ignoring it—but he is so compulsively dishonest he can’t even admit that folks are relying on Bart Ehrman here, not “Carrier.”

At any rate, now that he was caught ignoring an argument in Fitzgerald and thus has to retcon his personal history so that he “didn’t” do that, he has to come up with some way to dismiss this argument. This was no part of any argument he made in the original video. But let’s deal with it, now that he is, in desperation, attempting it. He wants to say that scribes changed these words to combat Docetism. But that is not a response. Because that is exactly what we are saying. Think about it. How does changing these words combat Docetism? Because Docetists supposedly said Jesus’s body was made by God (as a simulacrum), not born. So “Orthodoxists” needed Paul to have said “born” and not “made.” And thus they deliberately altered the word in both places (Gal. 4:4 and Rom. 1:3, proving this was no idle accident but quite ideologically deliberate).

This proves our point: these scribes knew these words had different meanings in Paul, and thus had to be changed to fix the implications of that. O’Neill has thus not offered any alternative explanation; he is simply agreeing with us: this evidence proves ginomai in Paul was readily understood to not mean “born.” Thus refuting O’Neill’s argument that it can only have meant “born.” In the original video, O’Neill denied that it could mean something other than born, and insisted it was in no way ambiguous; now he claims he meant all along that it could have meant something other than born, and that the word Paul chose to use is ambiguous. That makes no sense of his original argument. So he is obviously lying. If he knew Fitzgerald had evidence for his conclusion that the word meant something other than born, why did O’Neill claim Fitzgerald had no evidence for that conclusion? Only when Gleason caught him in this lie did O’Neill try to save face by inventing a new lie. But the new lie is nonsensical; it essentially concedes our point rather than responds to it. This is not a competent reaction to being caught fucking up.

O’Neill continues:

Fitzgerald’s categorical statement that the verb here is “weird” because it means “made” is not something that can be asserted as he does.

Lie. As we already established, that isn’t how Fitzgerald argued. He gave numerous lines of evidence for his conclusion, and O’Neill keeps pretending that he didn’t. But we already covered that. Next…

It could mean that grammatically (contra my erroneous dismissal), but does it mean that here, in this context?

Good question. What evidence have Fitzgerald and I presented that it does? Will we hear any coherent response to that evidence? Will any of it even be mentioned? Holding my breath…

As I noted in the video above, the expression “born of a woman” was a common one used to emphasise someone’s humanity. Examples of it include Job 14.1, Job 15.14, Sirach 10.18, 1QS 11.21a, 1QHa 5.20b and in Greek in Matthew 11.11, Luke 7.28, Thomas 15, Josephus Antiquities XVI.382 and Wars IV.460. So it seems to be the expression Paul is using here, noting Jesus’ human aspect. The examples above in Greek or in the LXX translation of the Old Testament mostly use forms of γεννᾰ́ω (gennáō – to give birth), but Josephus doesn’t in Antiquities XVI.382 – there he, like Paul, uses a form of γίνομαι (ginomai – to become, in this case γενομένους), and he’s definitely talking about birth there. So the “born of a woman” expression can use either verb.

This almost looks like he has finally learned how to correctly do this—actually look for examples. But there are two problems here.

The first is that his proposed example is extremely rare, thus refuting his own point. There is a reason Fitzgerald and Gleason and I list several arguments, several pieces of evidence, converging on our conclusion (all of it ignored by O’Neill). We are supported by the fact that almost no one reworded the idiom like Paul did. So we have to explain why Paul did that; and explain it in context. And no one (not even Josephus) follows the same consistent idiom as in Paul—where he repeatedly uses ginomai to mean manufacture (Adam; our resurrection bodies) and unlike Josephus he never uses it to mean born, but instead always chooses genaô for that. It is incompetent to try and argue to what Paul’s idiom was, by appealing to a completely different author’s idiom. Only Paul is relevant to Paul here. So finding a rare example in Josephus actually carries no competent weight against our point.

The second problem with this is—once again (sigh), O’Neill is lying. There is no such phrase in Josephus, Antiquities 16 §382. That’s right. O’Neill just tried to con everyone by claiming the Jewish idiom “born of a woman” as a stand-in for “mortal” is there, and there employs ginomai instead of (as everywhere else he found) genaô. But he’s such an idiot, it didn’t occur to him that we might, you know, check. Methodological rule number one: always check. This passage is not in the voice of Josephus, mind you, but is a speech placed in the mouth of one of his characters (and it was de rigueur in antiquity to try and change up one’s idiom to make speeches sound like someone else spoke them). But still, in the course of their speech they say (per Whiston), “Wilt thou slay these two young men, born of thy queen, who are accomplished with every virtue in the highest degree…?” (δύο νεανίσκους ἐκ βασιλίδος γυναικὸς γενομένους εἰς πᾶσαν ἀρετὴν ἄκρους ἀναιρήσεις).

This is not the idiom “born of a woman” so as to mean “mortal.” It is a straightforward factual statement that these kids were the children of Herod’s queen (in particular, his basilidos gunaikos, “royal wife”), and thus proper royal blood (and not bastards). Moreover, because this is the specific point the speaker is making, it is more relevant to say this is where they came from rather than how they were born. Thus ginomai makes more rhetorical sense here. Remember, context matters. That’s why the context of what Paul says also matters: that he unusually changed the verb in a common idiom while engaging an extended argument about allegorical fathers, seeds, and mothers (from Galatians 3:23 to 4:29), wherein what kind of mother you figuratively have (Hagar or Sarah) relates to what kind of metaphysical fate you can expect (death or eternal life); that Paul consistently never uses ginomai of birth but always of manufacture, while always using genaô of real births; and that later scribes well knew this. Paul’s reason to change the idiom (and unlike O’Neill’s false case in Josephus, Paul is using that idiom, indeed specifically to mean “mortal”) thus follows from Paul’s own context, just as Josephus’s choice of word follows the rhetorical context he has created.

That is how you do competent linguistic analysis. O’Neill is just pulling reckless apologetics.

He goes on…

Fitzgerald’s (actually Carrier’s) attempt to claim the γενόμενον of Gal 4:4 somehow means “made” tries to ignore what this expression generally means …

Lie. Note he just admitted the opposite: “generally” the idiom uses genaô, not ginomai. Inserting ginomai is not “generally” part of the expression at all; it’s weird. And that would be true even if O’Neill had found an example in Josephus, though as we just saw, he didn’t. If the word is rarely switched out, you have to explain why. We have lots of evidence as to why Paul switched it out. O’Neill won’t respond honestly to any of it; nor has any coherent alternative explanation to offer.

He continues…

…and [this] assumes the Mythicist idea that Paul saw Jesus as a purely celestial being whose body had been “made, manufactured” in the heavens.

Our argument does not “assume” this. This is part of an extensive argument involving dozens of items of evidence. Indeed, so far from “assuming” it, in On the Historicity of Jesus I even score it to the contrary—counting this passage as evidence for historicity; albeit weak evidence, owing to its demonstrable oddity and ambiguity, which even O’Neill has now couchedly started admitting. Fitzgerald does not take that approach; he uses my a judicantiori estimates instead of the a fortiori (which is still 50/50, ultimately the position that “we don’t know for sure either way, so we can’t use this as evidence” for or against the historicity of Jesus). But that’s still the result of argument, not assumption—an argument O’Neill still has never coherently replied to.

By contrast, it is O’Neill who has falsely assumed this requires assuming Jesus’s body was made “in the heavens.” As I have repeatedly noted, it could also refer to God’s manufacture of a body for Jesus in the womb of Mary, exactly as Luke and Matthew attempted to claim (see, again, Empirical Logic and Romans 1:3). So we don’t need to assume our theory is true to conclude as we do that Paul is categorizing the incarnation of Jesus as creation rather than birth. We have a cumulative empirical case for that conclusion independently of our final theory. But O’Neill has the entire logic of evidence backwards anyway: if Paul thought a mortal body for Jesus was manufactured, this is assuredly what he would say (he would change the idiom precisely as he does); whereas if Paul thought Jesus was born, this is less likely to be what he would say. It does not matter how less likely—any less, and it is evidence for the conclusion that Paul thought Jesus was made and not born, regardless of where he thought that happened. That’s literally how evidence works.

O’Neill has no actual response to that, our actual argument. Instead he says…

This in turn depends on Carrier’s convoluted and rather bizarre “Cosmic Sperm Bank” thesis re Rom 1:3, where Paul uses another common expression to say Jesus was “descended from David”. Carrier can’t have Paul saying Jesus was a human descendant of a human ancestor, so he invents a complex reading of this simple reference that has Paul saying (but not actually saying) Jesus’ celestial body was manufactured from semen gathered from King David’s testicles on earth and then stored in heaven to make Jesus out of. Carrier (and his followers like Fitzgerald and “Godless Engineer”) thinks this is a great reading of Rom 1:3. Pretty much no-one else on the planet does so – see my detailed critique, which includes a lot of what I’ve noted above [Editor: I have already refuted all that in What Did Paul Mean in Romans 1:3? and Empirical Logic and Romans 1:3 — R.C.].

This is another lie. I do not depend on the “sperm bank” hypothesis; I advance two hypotheses, that and allegory (just as Paul speaks of Gentiles being “the seed of Abraham” allegorically in Galatians 3: see, again, Empirical Logic and Romans 1:3 and Yes, Galatians 4 Is Allegorical). I also do not simply “propose” the sperm bank hypothesis; I advance a bunch of evidence for it (more even in Jesus from Outer Space). And again, none of this has to do with whether Paul meant “made” and not “born.” Even the Gospels of Matthew and Luke adopt a cosmic sperm bank hypothesis: God manufactures a body for Jesus out of Davidic seed—they are both quite explicit that it does not come from Joseph “by descent,” so where do you think that seed came from?

Regardless, all we are arguing here is that Paul more likely thinks God made the body of Jesus; this requires no commitment as to where he thought it was made. That’s our point: this is not evidence for mythicism; it is simply not evidence for historicity. O’Neill, like most bad thinkers, seems to have a really hard time grasping the difference. And in any case, none of this has anything to do with what he said in the original video. He is trying a “whack-a-mole” apologetic now, trying to change the subject, as if we were all talking about something else. We aren’t that stupid. Nowhere does Fitzgerald’s argument about Paul meaning in Galatians 4 that Jesus had a mortal body made for him require or even mention a “cosmic sperm bank.” Whether that played any role is an entirely separate, and separable, question.

Yet O’Neill even does this, again, by lying: the phrase in Romans 1:3 is not “another common expression,” at all, much less “for descent.” It is, in fact, a really weird expression, not the typical way descent would be described. In fact, there is no passage in all of Greek literature that uses this construction. There are plenty of cases where ek spermatos [plus an ancestor’s, rather than father’s, name] means descent; but none that use ginomai (or even, in fact, genaô). And yes, I checked—with a comprehensive word proximity search in the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (of course, examples of later Christian authors quoting or riffing on Romans don’t count here). It’s possible I missed a rare example, but I doubt it, and in any event, such extreme rarity would only prove my point. Only one passage in the Septuagint even comes close, and it is precisely the passage I used under peer review to prove my interpretation of this verse to be as probable as any other; indeed it is almost certainly the passage Romans 1:3 is based on (see, yet again, Empirical Logic and Romans 1:3). But remember, we were supposed to be talking about Galatians 4. So this pivot to Romans 1 is an apologetic distraction that you shouldn’t be so foolish as to fall for. But it is still indicative of my whole point that O’Neill can’t even be honest when attempting specious apologetic tactics that don’t even require dishonesty to deploy.

Then O’Neill closes with:

Sorry for the length of this, but I did make a statement that was wrong and I wanted to correct it. But it doesn’t actually affect the main point I was making.

Needless to say, this is false. Maybe O’Neill is lying here, or maybe he is just not very bright; but he only had two arguments in the video, only two “main points” he was making: (1) that “born of a woman” is an idiom meaning “mortal” (which we observed is moot; Fitzgerald and I never argued otherwise), and therefore (handwave handwave handwave) it also means a Jew bound to Torah law (which we observed is false; only circumcision creates that condition); and (2) that ginomai can mean “born” in some authors (which we observed is moot; Fitzgerald and I never argued otherwise) and never means “made” in any authors (which we observed is wildly false). That’s it. Those were O’Neill’s only two arguments.

O’Neill had one other assertion (that Galatians isn’t allegorical), but he never presented an argument for it. And in any event, it’s provably false: Paul is explicitly using allegory across his entire argument from Galatians 3 through 4, from declaring Gentiles allegorically the “seed of Abraham,” to outright saying the “women” he is talking about people being born to are “allegories” for mortal and immortal existence. But O’Neill never addressed any of this; he made no arguments, just an undefended assertion. He only made two actual arguments: the one about Paul’s phrase meaning mortal (which does not rebut Fitzgerald), and the one about ginomai never meaning “made” (which he now admits was false). So what argument remains? What point remains for him to stand on? I do not see one. Yes, he has now added a bunch of new arguments; but those weren’t his arguments in the video. And those new arguments, as we’ve seen, are also moot or incoherent; they can’t rescue any point he was trying to make.

This is the most dishonest and incompetent way to argue anything. Yet if this is what it takes to defend the historicity of Jesus, you really should give up on the idea. It clearly can’t honestly be defended.

Conclusion

Tim O’Neill is an unreliable liar. He has proven repeatedly that he is not competent to even weigh in on these kinds of debates. No one should trust him. He neither grasps any correct methodology, nor correctly grasps the pertinent facts, actual or contextual. He rarely honestly represents his opponent’s arguments, typically omitting key premises, pretending they don’t exist, or inventing premises they never affirmed. And he does all this while declaring actual qualified experts incompetent. The man is a waste of your time. But what I hope you will take away from today’s analysis is not just that Tim O’Neill is an asscrank. I’ve documented that extensively for years. Rather, the most important thing to learn here is to recognize and use sound methodology:

Don’t make stuff up and hope to get away with it; always check a claim before asserting it, and acknowledge that the only way to reliably do that is to earnestly try to prove it false and fail (see Advice on Probabilistic Reasoning and The Scary Truth about Critical Thinking; and for similar examples to learn by, see The Curious Case of Gnostic Informant and How Not to Act Like a Crank). Also sincerely aim to correctly diagram someone’s argument and its logic and premises before thinking you can rebut it. And don’t lie about anything. Honestly say what you did to check a claim; honestly portray your opponent’s case; and honestly admit to your mistakes and how they happened and what you need to do differently to avoid repeating them. If you cannot do these things, you have no respectable position to defend.