A few months ago, secular philosopher John MacDonald (a Vice President of Internet Infidels) wrote an article for The Secular Web, titled “Jesus Mythicism: Moral Influence vs. Vicarious Atonement—and Other Problems,” which he bills as “in part a response to Richard Carrier’s books On the Historicity of Jesus and Jesus [from] Outer Space,” which he correctly describes as arguing “that original Christianity believed Jesus never existed on Earth and was crucified in outer space by sky demons.” His abstract mentions some stock rebuttals that my readers will already know fail (like trying to defend the James passage in Galatians 1 as referring to a biological rather than cultic brother), but mostly centers his response on a bizarre theological (rather than historical) argument: that (somehow) the theology Christians soon invented about Jesus can only (or only best) be explained with a historical Jesus behind it. So we’ll take a look at that today. And yes, it’s weirder than it sounds.

James the Brother?

But first the standard stuff. MacDonald wants “James the Lord’s Brother” to mean biological brother, even though Paul never mentions Jesus having biological brothers, but repeatedly mentions all baptized Christians being the Lord’s brothers, and in Galatians 1 he uses a convoluted grammatical construction that indicates that’s also what Paul intends there, simply distinguishing apostolic from mere rank-and-file Christians (see Galatians 1:19, Ancient Grammar, and How to Evaluate Expert Testimony). His is a standard argument we’ve all heard before. MacDonald tries to get around the evidence against him here by inventing yet more bizarre hypotheses and treating them weirdly as if they were facts.

For example, MacDonald insists Paul can’t have met only two people (even though he swears up and down that he did), because “Paul would have met another Christian, Peter’s wife.” How does MacDonald know that? We don’t really know Peter then had a wife. Acts has no knowledge of Peter having a wife, and she appears to be deceased even in the Gospels—only his mother-in-law lives with him. Peter could have remarried, or contrary to the Gospels gotten married later, but we don’t know he had done by the time Paul is referencing (it’s also not certain that 1 Corinthians 9:5 is referring to wives, rather than assistants; gunaika simply means woman, and is thus ambiguous). But more importantly, we don’t know Paul would have met her. Paul does not say “I visited Peter’s house” or “I saw Peter’s family” or anything the like, only “I stayed with him fifteen days,” no mention of where (except that it was in Jerusalem; but the Gospels locate Peter’s household in Bethsaida or Capernaum, in Galilee, over a hundred miles away). Paul’s wording also means James only met Paul briefly—as it is only Peter alone (“with him”), not his family or household or any other Christians, that Paul says he stayed with. We don’t know and cannot say where this was or who else might have been there. We simply don’t have this information. And information we don’t have cannot be evidence in an argument. “Making stuff up” is what crank mythicists do. Historicists should steer clear of the practice.

But set that aside. Paul clearly says he met no one else. He swears by it. He says he stayed only with Peter, no one else. He adds an aside that, oh yes, I met one other guy. But that’s it, “I swear.” So the most MacDonald could be arguing here is that Paul lied (or, maybe we can be charitable and say, “forgot”). That has no effect on anything I have argued. That Paul’s grammar means this James was not an apostle is a fact, a fact completely unaffected by how many other Christians Paul might have met and isn’t admitting to here. That Paul says the Lord was “the firstborn of many brethren,” that all baptized Christians call God “Abba, father,” and thus become co-heirs to God’s kingdom with Christ because they are the adopted sons of God and thus his brothers, is a fact, a fact completely unaffected by how many other Christians Paul might have met and isn’t admitting to here. That Paul never mentions Jesus having biological brothers, nor ever distinguishes any as biological rather than fictive, the only kind of brothers of Jesus Paul does repeatedly describe, is a fact, a fact completely unaffected by how many other Christians Paul might have met and isn’t admitting to here. So MacDonald’s argument isn’t even logical, much less based on any established fact at all. He’s arguing fallaciously from made-up facts. I’m arguing soundly from actual facts. Which of us do you think is more likely to be right?

This bizarre trend continues when MacDonald tries to argue “the apparent Caliphate of James in Acts” (no such thing exists in Acts) “matches too well with the blood brother of Jesus” (Acts identifies neither of the men named James in its narrative as the brother of Jesus) “to be mere coincidence” (as neither thing MacDonald just claimed is true, there is no coincidence to remark upon). So, made-up facts. Fallacious argument. Likewise when MacDonald says “James is portrayed as a skeptic” and “to go from skeptic to leader of the Jerusalem church makes sense” if he was real family, but this is a circular argument: it starts from the presumption that James was Jesus’s biological brother (leaning on a story in the Gospels), in order to conclude that James was Jesus’s biological brother.

There is no mention of any James being a skeptic anywhere but the Gospels. Yet obviously if the Gospel stories are true, Jesus existed. Once you drop that assumption, then you lose the “fact” of any James having been a skeptic during Jesus’s life. So you have to argue in a circle. In fact the Gospels strongly indicate none of Jesus’s family became believers (Mark’s rejection scene has Jesus renounce his family and declare believers his family; Mark seems not to know that any of this renounced family would later become believers, and no other Gospel says they did either). And this is confirmed in Acts, in whose public history (starting at Acts 2), the entire family of Jesus vanishes from history altogether. The only men in it named James are unrelated to him—the brother of John and the son of Alphaeus. 1 Clement also has no knowledge of Jesus having brothers. And early legends of it imagine impossible things, like James being a priest in the Jerusalem temple (OHJ, pp. 326-32), suggesting no real history there. I covered all this already (OHJ, pp. 371-75, 587-88; cf. pp. 310, 453-54), so MacDonald is evidently not taking any trouble to actually read the books of mine he claims to be responding to.

Does MacDonald respond to any of my actual arguments? Does he rebut my grammatical point? Nope. Does he rebut my point that Paul repeatedly describes fictive brothers of the Lord but never biological? Nope. Does MacDonald respond to my point that the brothers of Jesus actually don’t appear in the public history of Acts, but mysteriously vanish there? Nope. That they are missing from 1 Clement and all other New Testament literature, apart from two stylized literary scenes contrived in the Gospels? Nope. That the Gospels appear to have no idea that any of the brothers they use as props ever became Christians? Nope. All the evidence for my position, he ignores. All the evidence for his position, he makes up. This is how historicity is defended.

Seed of David?

This is another stock argument. And MacDonald commits all the same fallacies other critics have been taken to task for: he ignores the fact that I advance two possible meanings that he has to rule out, not just the one he doesn’t like (God physically stored the seed of David for the purpose, just as was done for Zoroaster), but another that could well be true (allegory; just like we are all “the sons” and “seed” of “Abraham,” cf. Romans 9:7-8). After all, the Gospels of Matthew and Luke must also have believed one or the other (because they explicitly rule out descent by not having Joseph impregnate Mary). But above all, MacDonald fails to grasp that if mythicism is true, then this passage is 100% expected either way. It therefore can’t be “more” expected on historicity (see Empirical Logic and Romans 1:3). No matter what, messianists had to say this (it was Nathan’s prophecy). So that they would come up with a way it would be true is guaranteed, not improbable.

That MacDonald didn’t read the books he claims to be responding to is thus made clear when he asks, rhetorically, “How did God attain the sperm!?” Never mind that he’s God. Does one really need to work out how The God of All Creation would find or hold on to stuff? He’s frickin God. Obviously he knows where everything is and can do anything with it that he wants. But more telling is that, uhem, MacDonald evidently doesn’t know that in Jewish lore God had an angel specifically tasked with doing this:

In the Babylonian Talmud, Niddah folio 16, we are told “the name of the angel who is in charge of conception is Laylah” (the Hebrew word for “Night”) and this angel named Laylah takes up every “drop” of semen to heaven “and places it in the presence of the Holy One” and asks, “Sovereign of the universe, what shall be the fate of this drop? Shall it produce a strong man or a weak man, a wise man or a fool, a rich man or a poor man?”

JFOS, p. 186

So, that’s how.

The funniest thing here is that to argue against a nonliteral translation of Romans 1:3, MacDonald proposes…a nonliteral translation of this verse! He claims the Gospels say “Jesus is adopted into David’s royal line, not by blood.” They don’t actually say that; adoption is never mentioned. But that doesn’t matter. Suppose that’s what they mean by “son” and “seed” of David (cf. Acts 13:23; Matthew 12:23, Matthew 21:15, Matthew 22:41-45; Luke 1:32, Luke 20:40-44). Well…um…then so could Paul mean that. Mark depicts the baptism of Jesus as God’s adoption of Jesus as his son, an etiological myth for baptism generally: as Paul explains, baptism is a ritual that secures our adoption by God as his sons. This is an example of an allegorical interpretation. If Paul means by “seed of David in the flesh” adoption into the role of being David’s son (and hence Jesse’s son and so on), he can say that of a cosmic man as much as an earthly one (see Can Paul’s Human Jesus Not Be a Celestial Jesus?). Adoption is adoption. It requires no biology. God simply need decree it. Then in Jesus’s body of flesh he can be the adopted son of David (satisfying scripture); and in his risen pneumatic body, the adopted son of God (satisfying theology). The parallelism is complete.

There is no way to get to “Paul means biological descent” here. And consequently, there is no way to get to “Paul knew of a real historical Jesus.” This argument gets you nowhere. That’s why this verse is of no help to historicists. We simply can’t tell if Paul means here biological descent or something else. These points are already made in the books he is responding to, so he clearly didn’t read them.

Atonement or Scapegoat?

So, MacDonald can’t argue logically, doesn’t read what he is supposed to be rebutting, and makes up stuff to cram into his premises. Not a good sign.

But MacDonald’s main idea is that insofar as Jesus was imagined to be the scapegoat in a cosmic Yom Kippur, and thus didn’t die to atone for sins but to defeat Satan with a mere display of righteousness that would merely “inspire repentance,” there can’t be any explanation for where Christians got these ideas other than their man being unjustly mocked, abused, and killed by the Earthly authorities (but for its bizarre premises, an otherwise stock historicist argument). But this is just a stack of fallacies. Jesus can be mocked and abused and killed (and mistaken and treated like a scapegoat) by Celestial authorities just as easily. Displays of righteousness inspiring repentance don’t have to happen on Earth. And none of this requires an actual man to have done any of it; all Peter (the apparent originator of this idea) had to come to was the realization of how this cosmic drama would solve a number of pressing problems (from temple-related violence to God’s delaying the apocalypse: see OHJ, pp. 85-86, 153-59). Any imagined mockery and death would then do. Which is why the earliest literature to explicitly describe this conjunction, e.g. 1 Clement and, I believe, 1 Peter, can only find evidence of it in Isaiah, not in any actual witness testimony or lore; it’s learned of only in scripture, which was only discovered by revelation.

Nevertheless, to build the premises in this stack of fallacies, MacDonald starts with a wildly erroneous claim that Doherty is wrong to interpret Hebrews 9 as saying Jesus replaced the Yom Kippur goat, the annual universal atonement for sins (Leviticus 16), when in fact that is explicitly what it says:

But he has appeared once for all at the culmination of the ages to do away with sin by the sacrifice of himself. Just as people are destined to die once, and after that to face judgment, so Christ was sacrificed once to take away the sins of many.

Hebrews 9:26-28

The whole chapter explains how Jesus’s sacrifice replaced the temple sacrifices (in which a priest offers blood “for himself and for the sins the people had committed in ignorance,” Heb. 9:7), so we don’t need those anymore (because Jesus “did not enter by means of the blood of goats and calves; but he entered the Most Holy Place once for all by his own blood, thus obtaining eternal redemption,” Heb. 9:12). Thus “the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself unblemished to God, cleanse[d] our consciences from acts that lead to death” (Heb. 9:14), and this is because Jesus “died as a ransom to set [us] free from the sins committed under the first covenant” (Heb. 9:15). That this means the Yom Kippur is clear: Jesus’s once-for-all sacrifice replaced the once-per-year sacrifice (Hebrews 9:7, 25) and this atoned for sins (as all the above verses indicate). There is no other temple sacrifice the author can be talking about but Yom Kippur. And he is explicitly equating Jesus with the goat whose blood reaches the altar, which is the atonement goat, not its twin, the scapegoat (whose blood conspicuously never approaches the altar). There is nothing whatsoever here about “merely inspiring repentance.”

So right from the start, MacDonald is wildly deviating from plain facts. It’s only worse that in his support he cites Robert Price’s theory of “Near-Eastern kings” engaging in scapegoat rituals, without noticing that Price does not actually have any evidence for that theory. It’s questionable any such thing existed, and more questionable that Price’s reconstruction or understanding of it is correct (I’ve taken him to task for this before). MacDonald also relies on John Dominic Crossan’s equally dubious theory about Jesus being originally conceived as the Levitical scapegoat rather than the atoning sacrifice. There is no evidence for this anywhere in the New Testament. Indeed, as we just saw in Hebrews, the earliest Christian view was exactly the opposite of that. Even the 2nd century letter of Barnabas argues that Jesus was mistakenly treated like the scapegoat (a fact MacDonald correctly mentions but fails to grasp the significance of), but was really the atoning goat, the thing the powers who killed him didn’t understand (1 Corinthians 2:7-10). A century later Origen would explain this in detail (OHJ, pp. 402-08).

It may be that ideas changed over the centuries. But to access or test what the first Christians thought, we have only three sources: Paul; Hebrews; and 1 Clement. We might be able to count 1 Peter (which I suspect may be authentic and early, but I can’t prove that: see OHJ, pp. 263-64, 528-31) and maybe the earliest Gospels: Mark and Matthew. Luke and John are now widely agreed to be second century, and John later than Luke and multiply redacted, and in its final form a dogmatically historicizing Gospel, so a very poor source for reconstructing original Christian beliefs (see How Did Christianity Switch to a Historical Jesus? and Why You Should Not Believe the Apostle John Wrote the Last Gospel). But we might be able to infer something from Mark and Matthew.

The Gospels, however, allegorize everything and attempt to hide true meanings (Mark 4:10-13), and are literarily creative (e.g. see Mark’s Use of Paul’s Epistles and Robyn Faith Walsh and the Gospels as Literature), so we can’t rely on them to be straightforward. Their typing Jesus as the mistaken scapegoat (and Barabbas as the real one, hence “they know not what they do,” as Origen explains) appears to be the first time in Christian history such a notion was actually narrated, and even that makes clear Jesus isn’t really the scapegoat. There is no simple equation of Jesus and the scapegoat in the earliest literature. It’s not in Paul or Hebrews. And while 1 Clement and 1 Peter allude to such a notion in their use of Isaiah 52-53, they (like Barnabas) make clear Jesus is not actually the scapegoat, but the goat of the altar (1 Clement 16:7-14; cf. 7:4, 12:7, 21:6; cf. 1 Peter 1:18-19). Hence Romans 3:25-26, which is explicit on this point; likewise Hebrews 9, as just noted, and Hebrews 2:17.

Nevertheless, MacDonald wants to create a dichotomy between this, which all earliest Christian literature clearly says, and the additional notion that the sacrifice of Jesus magically empowered him to overthrow demonic forces, including death. But this is a false dichotomy. The sacrifice accomplished both. So MacDonald’s argument trades not only on a wildly false claim (that Christianity wasn’t built on Levitical atonement theory) but also on a fallacy of false dichotomy. Adducing evidence the earliest Christians believed the empowerment thesis (which they did) does not constitute evidence they didn’t believe the atonement thesis (which, we just saw, they clearly also did). They believed both. How do we know that? Because they said so. They repeatedly say they believed both things. So their believing the one cannot be evidence against their believing the other. This is just a failure at basic logic on MacDonald’s part. His entire argument collapses on the ruins of this one fallacious premise.

There is also no evidence Satan was conceived as the scapegoat, either, as MacDonald also tries to argue, proposing as he does that somehow Jesus transferred that status to Satan. This is nowhere in any ancient Christian literature, neither New Testament nor anything for centuries after. Rather, Mark and Matthew have Barabbas, not Satan, as the “true” scapegoat (he bears the sins of Israel, “murder and rebellion,” and is driven into the wild mob, we know to his inevitable death). There is a definite sense in which Jesus is the inverse twin of Satan. For example, the Philippians hymn is clearly crafted to tell the story of Jesus as the exact opposite of the story of Satan, thus undoing its damage (Satan tries to equate himself to God and rebels, bringing sin and death into the world; Jesus refuses to equate himself to God and obeys, defeating sin and death in the world), just as Jesus undoes the failures of Israel in the Exodus by reversing them (the Temptation has Jesus act opposite the Jews under Moses, across the Jordan in the wilderness, for forty days symbolizing the forty years: OHJ, pp. 468-69).

But there is no point in any of the earliest Christian literature where these dualities are articulated in terms of Satan being the scapegoat. It isn’t in Hebrews 9. It isn’t in Romans 3. It isn’t anywhere. Likewise, while obviously Satan (and demons generally) were regarded as the ultimate instigators of sin and death, this does not make them into “the scapegoat,” a very specific ritual vessel. This is why Barabbas is the scapegoat in the Synoptics: he represents Israel (and its penchant for choosing violent messiahs), not Satan. One could say Satan has something to do with that being the case; but that’s not ontologically the same thing as saying Satan “is” Barabbas (any more than Satan “is” Israel—or even “is” Judas, as MacDonald also tries to argue; Judas is Judah, i.e. the Jews, not Satan: Proving History, index, “Judas”).

So that is all a non-starter. MacDonald has no argument here. Everything else he tries to lay down, such as that the Gospel Jesus is depicted in many ways as an antitype of the Roman Emperor, has no relevance to this debate. That’s entirely true whether Jesus existed or not. That’s how mythology worked. Mythic figures get typed and antityped to spell out messages regarding social and political values (OHJ, Ch. 10.3). That doesn’t make mythical characters real. Likewise, MacDonald’s claim that if the apostles were claiming “a celestial being … would rule the Earth instead of Caesar” then “they would have been executed for treason,” but obviously we know that’s not true: all messianic Jews preached this. None were ever executed for it. They only were killed when they actually took up arms. Merely saying an army from heaven would one day do it did not make you a traitor. It just made you a whackadoo. Hence how Paul is treated when he makes this very claim to the Roman and Jewish authorities in Acts 26, and how Pliny regards the Christians he only executed for the unrelated crime of illegal assembly—their teachings were merely a “base superstition” not really worth killing them for. And Trajan agreed. So there isn’t any argument here either.

So MacDonald’s entire argument rests on pretending the earliest Christian creed did not say “according to the scriptures Christ died for our sins” (1 Corinthians 15:3). Since the first creed did say that, and no creed ever said anything about Jesus’s death “merely inspiring repentance,” MacDonald’s argument is nuked. The whole idea of Jesus’s death being a public spectacle was invented by the Gospels. It exists nowhere in the literature before them. In pre-Gospel literature, Jesus’s death is only known (and only known to have been awful) because it could be found in scripture; and it could only be found in scripture because this was learned by revelation. Nowhere is any other model or understanding of the death of Christ to be found in Paul, Hebrews, 1 Clement, or 1 Peter. And even the first narrative of his execution (in Mark) deliberately constructs Jesus as the atonement goat, not the scapegoat; and the scapegoat as Barabbas, the false messiah who embodies militarism, hence violence and rebellion, while Jesus embodies obedience and submission. People who choose the wrong messiah, will die. Those who choose the right one, will live. There is nothing here about anyone being shamed into repentance. That does not happen anywhere in Mark’s narrative, figuratively or literally.

The soldier, for example, who declares Jesus the son of God, does not repent of any sins. So that cannot be what Mark intends by his doing that, as John MacDonald illogically claims. More likely Dennis MacDonald is correct here: the soldier is joking, and thus telling the truth only ironically, just as when Pilate is tricked into declaring Jesus king. But whether or no, the one thing Mark does not do here is indicate any message about repentance—at all, much less as Mark’s imagined model for salvation. Likewise, Paul is not referring to the scapegoat in 2 Corinthians 5:21, as MacDonald implies. As Biblical commentaries will point out, someone “who knew no sin” nevertheless “being made sin” does not mean “being a sinner” or having sins within oneself, but being a “sin offering,” a fictive stand-in for sin. That’s the atonement goat. Not the scapegoat. The scapegoat contains the evils and is thus evil, and therefore deserves the ritual mistreatment it receives. That does not describe Jesus—in Paul’s mind, or any Christian’s.

Indeed, the parallel structure of that verse makes this clear, where in the second half the same thing is said of us, only in reverse: we will “become the righteousness of God,” which does not mean we will “be” righteous or magically take over the role of God’s righteousness; it merely means we will represent it, our fate having fulfilled it (see Ho Hyung Cho, “The Second Use of [hamartia] and [dikaiosounê theou] in 2 Corinthians 5:21 Revisited,” Journal of Biblical Text Research 38). Hence likewise 1 Peter 2:24, which does not say (as some translations put it) that Jesus “bore” our sins in his body on the cross, but “offered them up” that way. His body is a stand-in for sin, so that his death is a stand-in for atonement, exactly like the altar goat. Just as the altar goat’s blood purifies anything it is sprinkled upon, so Christians imagined the blood of Christ sprinkled upon them. They are identifying Jesus with the goat of atonement. So MacDonald’s argument here is quite definitely done for.

Did Clement Say He Learned Things from a Historical Jesus?

That’s the bulk of his article, which is mostly just droning on about all that, without any pertinent evidence for it. But there are a few more side-points worth addressing.

MacDonald argues that I note “1 Clement is not purely quoting scripture,” but has other sayings credited to Jesus, “so there are also sayings not from scripture which suggests a possible historical source,” as if MacDonald did not actually read what I wrote: “It would appear there may have been only a collection of very brief sayings attributed to Jesus (all of which could have been learned by revelation)” (OHJ, p. 311, emphasis added), and since there are only two examples (a point MacDonald conveniently neglects to mention), against dozens of examples where we know scriptures are being quoted instead, this “leads us to wonder if in fact” those two unknown sayings are also “a quotation of a lost scripture,” which we know was a thing, not only in general (OHJ, Element 9, pp. 88-92), but specifically from Clement, who sometimes says he is quoting scripture—yet what he quotes is not from any scripture we have! (OHJ, p. 313.) So MacDonald clearly hasn’t read what he is talking about.

I wrote that “either way there is no evidence here of a Jesus having taught” these things “while ever alive and walking” around. MacDonald is thus the one who has to present evidence for these sayings coming from a historical Jesus. Without that evidence, we know (because Paul outright says, repeatedly) that many sayings came from Jesus through revelation and scripture, and never mentions any coming from any other source. So the burden is on someone who wants to insist upon an exception. Once again, instead of presenting evidence, MacDonald just “makes shit up,” and insists (on no evidence) that Clement has some sayings from a historical Jesus. We literally do not know that. And what we do not know, we cannot argue from.

This is a logical failure common among historicists: they often fail to tell the difference between saying “this is evidence Jesus didn’t exist” (which is not what I said) and “this is not evidence Jesus did exist” (which is what I actually said here). You cannot rebut the latter by mentioning what’s possible. That’s the fallacy of possibiliter ergo probabiliter (“possibly, therefore probably”). By contrast I don’t need to argue for either conclusion here. All I have to show is that we don’t know where these sayings came from, yet are told in many places that sayings could come from scripture and revelation. So we need evidence to identify any saying as not from scripture and revelation. MacDonald has none. He thus has not even responded to my argument.

Why Is There an Unforgivable Sin?

MacDonald has a lot of difficulty with logic and context. For example, when Jesus says blaspheming the Holy Spirit is the only blasphemy that won’t be forgiven, this does not mean, as MacDonald claims, that Jesus is contradicting atonement theology by admitting his sacrifice does not forgive all sins. To the contrary, Jesus is literally describing that atonement theology: Jesus’s sacrifice only atones for the sins of those who accept him into themselves through the Holy Spirit. Those who reject this offer in absolute terms (“blasphemy”), don’t get a second chance. God then will not reissue the invite. They had their shot—exactly as explained in Hebrews 6:4-6 and Hebrews 10:26-31, which even says, “If we deliberately keep on sinning after we have received the knowledge of the truth, no sacrifice for sins is left.” Sacrifice for sins. Atonement. Reject it in no uncertain terms, and you’re done.

This notion is actually adapted from the Mishnah, Avot D’Rabbi Natan 29.5, which says all sins will be forgiven, except: “Someone who profanes the heavenly Name has no possibility of repenting and waiting for forgiveness. Suffering will not cleanse him. Yom Kippur will not atone for him. They are all held over until death comes and cleanses him.” Which means the sin will still be forgiven—eventually—but not by the Yom Kippur sacrifice, which otherwise is said to atone for all sins, just like Jesus. General Rabbinical thought was that sinners in the grave suffer from rotting in the ground while conscious for a year, a horror so grave (pun intended) as to atone for all remaining sins (I discuss this in my chapter on the Burial of Jesus in The Empty Tomb).

Note this connects with Jesus talking about a “worm that never dies” (those awake in the grave experience being eaten by worms) and a “fire never quenched” (decaying cadavers appear burned like charcoal, so it may have been imagined rotting felt like being burned). Whether the author of that verse was speaking hyperbolically (they didn’t mean literally forever) or not, the concept is the same: sinners suffer in the grave. In Rabbinical thought, that fact alone could atone. Which negates any role for Jesus and thus destroys the entire Christian religion. So what the author of Mark is doing is revoking even that consolation. He is saying, nope, once you’ve crossed that Rubicon, no one is coming to save you. Like Paul, Mark might be an annihilationist; but also like Paul, he is not a universalist. That he has a harsh “line in the sand” does not contradict the fact that Jesus’s death atones for all sins except the one of decisively rejecting that very atonement.

Obviously not everyone is saved. Only those who baptize themselves into the Spirit of Christ will be saved, through the Fellowship of the Spirit (2 Corinthians 3:3, 2 Corinthians 13:14, 1 Corinthians 6:11, Galatians 3:14, Philippians 1:19, Philippians 3:3, Romans 15:16, and above all, Romans 8). Thus, blaspheming that Spirit, rejecting it, means rejecting the salvation Christ is offering. So yeah, those people won’t be saved. MacDonald seems to think Christians taught that everyone, Christian or not, was automatically saved by Christ’s sacrifice. That’s exactly the opposite of what all early Christian texts preach. Only those who embrace the Spirit’s offering of union with Christ benefit from this sacrifice. The opposite of embracing that Spirit, is spurning it—hence, blaspheming it. Those waffling in the middle do have a chance always to repent and sign up for the escape capsule (until they die; then it’s too late). But those who say “fuck your escape capsule” God is writing off for good. That’s Mark’s message. It is not contradictory. (Though note this message is not in Paul. So it may be a Markan innovation.)

Why Did God Have to Trick People into Killing Jesus?

Another example of MacDonald revealing he didn’t read the books he claims to be responding to is where he illogically claims that when 1 Corinthians 2:8 “suggests the rulers were tricked into crucifying Jesus,” that this “is an irrelevant detail for Paul to be stressing if vicarious blood magic atonement was the issue.” Evidently, MacDonald skipped this part of On the Historicity of Jesus:

[W]hat is key here is that the ‘hidden things’ Paul is talking about are the fact that Christ’s death rescued us from the wages of sin and thus secured us eternal life. In other words, that Jesus had thereby ‘atoned for our sins’ (1 Cor. 15.3). Paul is saying that if ‘the rulers of this age’ had known that that would be the effect of his death, they would not have killed him.

This cannot mean the Jewish elite, or the Romans, or any human authority. None of them would have been dissuaded by knowing such a fact; indeed they would either have gladly gone through with it (to save all mankind) or not cared one whit (if they didn’t really believe it would have such an effect). There is only one order of beings who was invested in preventing such a result: Satan and his demons, those who reveled in maintaining death and corruption in the human world, the only beings uniformly set against God’s plan.

It is not plausible to suggest that Paul really meant the Jews wanted to prevent our salvation and deliberately thwart God’s plan. Such an anti-Semitic notion is not found anywhere in Paul’s letters. Moreover, Paul does not say ‘the Jews’, but the ‘rulers of this age’, as a collective whole. This cannot mean just Pontius Pilate and the Sanhedrin. This is everyone in power: they killed Jesus, and did so only because they were kept from knowing their doing so would save the human race. This entails a whole world order whereby if any of ‘the rulers of this age’ had known what would happen, they would have told their peers and stopped the crucifixion, to prevent its supernatural effect. This does not describe any human world order. This describes the Satanic world order, the realm of demons and fallen angelic powers.

…

The same could not be said of Pontius Pilate or the Jewish Sanhedrin, who did not possess the requisite supernatural knowledge. And even if we imagined they did (if God had revealed it to them, for example), why would they then stop the crucifixion? Obviously they would see its value and recognize it as what the supreme God of all peoples wanted; and if they didn’t, they would have no reason not to kill Jesus anyway.

OHJ, pp. 564-65

Or this page:

[J]ust like we saw in 1 Pet. 2.13-14 (in §3), in Romans 13 Paul appears to have no knowledge of the fact that Jesus was unjustly executed by earthly authorities. For here Paul insists repeatedly that all earthly authorities are chosen by God and only serve justice. ‘Those in power (archontes) are not a terror to good work but to evil’ (Rom. 13.3), as they only visit God’s wrath on the unjust (13.4). This seems an impossible thing to say for someone who believed Pilate and the Sanhedrin had conspired to kill Jesus without honest cause. Such a notion could not have existed in Paul’s time. Otherwise the Christians he is writing to would have balked. If the authorities only wield the sword against the evil and unjust (13.3-5), then Christ must have been evil and unjust. As the latter is impossible, yet Paul asserts the former, it cannot have been believed at the time that Jesus was killed by any earthly authorities. This passage in Romans is therefore improbable on minimal historicity, but exactly what we could expect on minimal mythicism.

OHJ, pp. 572-73

MacDonald has no reply. He clearly doesn’t even know this material exists. Alas, it refutes him. Evidently I’m psychic. I predicted a future argument he would make, and destroyed it in the very book he claims to be rebutting. My TARDIS is strong. The bottom line is, the “rulers” in 1 Corinthians are beings with magical knowledge about the cosmos, who would recognize a supernatural sacrifice, and would want to thwart God’s plans if they knew this. This cannot be the Romans and Jews; even Paul says it cannot be, as he says they would only carry out God’s will, not be so dead set against it that they had to be fooled into doing it. Only Satan’s demonic order fits the description here. Only they would recognize at once what Jesus’s death would do, and want to stop it.

Does the Rank-Raglan Mythotype Not Exist?

I’ve noted MacDonald often reveals he didn’t read my books. Like when he tries to rebut my Rank-Raglan argument, and yet his rebuttal shows he didn’t read it, because it already refutes the very argument he is attempting here! That mythotype, and the method of mythotyping generally, is widely accepted. MacDonald’s claim that it isn’t is false. As I had to patiently explain recently:

[Chrissy] 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: [for] 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).

So, nice try, John MacDonald. But we are doing real scholarship here. Not armchair apologetics.

Even more damning, though, is that MacDonald makes only one other argument here, which is that “we could just as easily call Jesus a messianic claimant type, all of which from that time period existed in history,” proving he didn’t even notice I have literally an entire numbered-and-named section addressing, and refuting, this very objection (“The Alternative Class Objection,” OHJ, Ch. 6.5). I’ll leave you to read that if you care to understand how what MacDonald just said is a major failure of logic. Or you can read my latest explanation of it (because this mistake is common among amateurs).

The Argument from John the Baptist?

This one is so common, it’s astonishing MacDonald doesn’t know it’s already been thoroughly refuted. He should know it has an entire devoted section in Proving History (index, “John the Baptist”), because the book he didn’t read (yet claims to be responding to) told him so (OHJ, p. 32). But here we go again. MacDonald argues that “it’s hard to imagine the early church inventing Jesus saying that John the Baptist was greater than Jesus, or that the turning point in history was John, not Jesus.” Well, his imagination being that of an uninformed amateur who didn’t check any of this, we can understand his difficulty. Those of us who check, however, know the reason John is made to be the turning point is that he is taking the mythic role of Elijah who comes before and proclaims the coming messiah (Mark 9:11-13). As any Bible commentary will tell you, Mark’s opening description of John pegs him as Elijah. That’s for a reason.

One might suspect political reasons as well, given that John’s cult is one that the Christians would be most keen to coopt, and that is exactly what Mark does: he has the famous John proclaim Jesus his superior and successor. That’s a rather convenient thing for him to do, don’t you think? Especially considering the fact that no one else ever heard of him doing this. Which reminds us that MacDonald has his facts hosed top to bottom here. What was this about the Gospels claiming John was greater than Jesus? Nope. They say the opposite. Yes, even Matthew and Luke, whom MacDonald cites. Read Matthew 3:11-15 and Luke 3:16-17; and Luke 1:17 and 67-79; and even Luke 7:18-28, which MacDonald quotes a line from out of context, distorting its meaning; likewise, Matthew 11:2-15 (from which Luke’s text derives). So, MacDonald’s argument is based on two false claims, a false claim about why John is inserted into Jesus’s story (it’s not because it happened; it’s because it is narratively and politically convenient, coopting a famous minister for the required Elijah character) and a false claim about the Gospels claiming John was superior to Jesus (they claim the opposite). This shows MacDonald does not even read the Bible he is talking about, nor studies the religious or scriptural context of Christianity.

Why Is an Invisible Man Foolishness to Gentiles?

MacDonald continues in this same mode of posing ignorant rhetorical questions, typical of apologetic methodology but counter-indicative of serious scholarship, when he asks, “how” can Carrier “claim Jesus is just another dying/rising God if the [G]entiles considered ‘Christ crucified’ [as] foolishness?” Evidently MacDonald did not read Acts 26, which is all about answering that very question: Felix, representing the Greco-Roman Gentiles Paul was talking about, finally breaks down and just calls Paul crazy: “You are out of your mind, Paul! Your great learning is driving you insane.” That’s an exact quote. The reason is that Paul seems to be getting all kinds of secret coded messages from the Bible, and is hearing voices. Hence in the immediately preceding hearing we get the different Jewish reaction: “We find nothing wrong with this man,” they said. “What if a spirit or an angel has spoken to him?” The Jews believe spirits talk to people and secret messages from God really can be found in books. They just required they be verified by supernatural signs (hence the Jews “expect a sign”). But elite Gentiles thought all that was silly—literally, foolish. Because they tended to be rationalists who expected better (and less insane) evidence than that in order to believe something as wild as that there is a new supergod in the universe (see Plutarch’s “On Superstition,” likewise Seneca’s “On Superstition” quoted in Augustine, City of God 6.10; Pliny’s letter on the Christians; and every treatise on theology written by pagans: I discuss this fundamental difference between Jewish and elite pagan theology in nearly every chapter of The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire). This dichotomy between Jewish and Gentile expectations is all over the letters of Paul. Quite simply, going around saying a new god is talking to you and hid codes in a strange book is, indeed, foolish.

MacDonald also repeats the old trope here that the Jews expected a victorious messiah, not a dying one. But that’s false. There is abundant evidence to the contrary. Indeed the Talmud takes the suffering and death of the messiah as so standard a belief it doesn’t even have to be argued. But I covered all this in OHJ. MacDonald just didn’t read it. And my bibliography there has grown; numerous other experts have published studies confirming my point. Indeed, one of them was supervised and passed by Bart Ehrman himself: Jason Staples, The Idea of Israel in Second-Temple Judaism (Cambridge University Press 2022), p. 163 n. 79. He adduces considerable peer-reviewed scholarship establishing that suffering and dying messiahs were a feature of pre-Christian judaism, and his list supplements mine (OHJ, pp. 73-87).

So no, the reason “the cross” was a stumbling block to Jews was’t necessarily that they balked at dying messiahs. Even apart from the fact that the Christian messiah is dutifully also a violent and victorious one (just in the looming future), Jews could also readily grasp the idea of a dying messiah heralding the end of the world. That’s in Daniel 9 after all. And it was imagined in many other places (including Isaiah 52-53, which is where Talmudic Jews say they get the idea of it; and that explicitly contains the atonement theology Christians were selling, which was already popular among Jews). Whereas going around and saying this great magical sacrifice happened “invisibly” would be a stumbling block to Jews. Why? For the reason Paul himself says: they expect divine signs to confirm it, and Christians weren’t offering them anything beyond weak tea. “Christ died for your sins.” “Says who?” That’s what Paul is talking about. Just read the entire Dialogue with Trypho for how this argument was playing out over a century later.

Note that this is true regardless of whether Jesus existed—even if he did, his being a martyr signaling the end times and atoning for Israel would not be a stumbling block to Jewish audiences by itself (sure, to some, but not generally). But there being no credible evidence his death did anything special would be. If God isn’t giving them signs, it’s just another false prophecy. Why believe it? It’s all the harder to believe if what you are selling is a guy no one ever really met, because everything he did happened in the sky, out of human sight. Then it’s even, “How do you even know that happened?” And the response (as we just noted) looks crazy; it’s certainly not convincing. Bible codes and voices others couldn’t hear weren’t just “believed” by Jewish audiences. But even if Jesus was well-known to have been executed for sedition (or blasphemy; the Gospels are inconsistent on the point), that by itself wouldn’t be a stumbling block. But the inability to present any sign that he wasn’t just another fly-by-night pretender would be. And Paul pretty much says that was the obstacle (“the Jews want a sign”).

So MacDonald’s argument makes no contextual or logical sense here. He stumbles even more egregiously into fallacious reasoning when he tries to argue that “If the [G]entile elites regarded gods on Earth as a foolishness, and they saw Paul’s teaching about Christ as a foolishness, then the most natural explanation is Paul was teaching Christ lived on Earth!” This is a textbook fallacy of Affirming the Consequent: if p, then q; q, therefore p. If the Gentiles thought terrestrial gods were foolish, then they would think Paul’s god was foolish; they did think Paul’s god was foolish; therefore, it was because Paul was preaching a terrestrial God. Illogical. The Gentiles thought any new gods based on superstitious secret voices were foolish, even celestial ones. So we cannot infer what type of god Paul was preaching this way.

It’s also not true that the Gentiles thought terrestrial gods were foolish. There were quite a lot of those widely believed (from the Caesars themselves, to Hadrian’s lover Antinöos, to Glycon of Abonuteichos). In fact, most pagan gods followed that trajectory, having been Euhemerized into deified historical persons, men elevated upon death to godhood (from Dionysus to Hercules). Many started out gods from birth; some even were, like Jesus, pre-existent gods! Romulus, for example, told Proculus he pre-existed his birth as the god Quirinus, and deigned to become a mortal human through a virgin birth and then slough off his mortal body to rise again as a god to proclaim a gospel of empire (see Dying-and-Rising Gods: It’s Pagan, Guys. Get Over It.). The Bacchae says much the same of Dionysus (“I have put off the god and taken human shape”). So, no. MacDonald doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

It’s equally inept of MacDonald to claim Jesus can’t have been a pre-existent being because he was exalted after his sacrifice. But that he was so exalted comes from the same hymn that says he was pre-existent. So clearly the one does not contradict the other. That hymn says Jesus humbled himself to lower status. He therefore had to be re-exalted to reign afterward. So no further explanation for that happening is really even needed. But we already know from Hebrews 1 that he was exalted to an even higher status than he previously occupied. And it, too, explicitly says he was a pre-existent being, indeed literally the creator of the universe (as Paul himself confirms); so he had a fairly high rank already, God just bumped it up a tweak. So there are no contradictions here.

I won’t bother elaborating on James McGrath’s incompetent argument on this same point, since MacDonald only endorses it, he doesn’t describe it or link to it—except by hinting at it with the line “Jesus was like other humans, not God or a great angel,” which betrays a total ignorance of my book’s entire thesis. Those interested can see my refutation of num-nuts arguments like that in Can Paul’s Human Jesus Not Be a Celestial Jesus? and Desperately Searching the Epistles for Anything That Attests a Historical Jesus (as to all the evidence of Jesus’s prior divine status, see OHJ, Chapter 4, Element 10, and Chapter 5, Element 40; it is a majority consensus position now in the field).

It’s even more inept when MacDonald claims Jesus must have proclaimed himself the messiah because, where else would his followers get the idea? This of course is also contrary to a majority of mainstream scholarship today, which concludes the opposite: that Jesus didn’t make this claim, and that it was made of him after the fact to try and revive his movement, and resolve cognitive dissonance. But it’s the fallacy I’m more interested in. Because I agree with MacDonald that if Jesus existed, he probably did sell himself as a messiah, and even deliberately got himself killed to usher in the apocalypse (see my analysis of this in my Wichita Talk). Although unlike MacDonald, I don’t believe we can prove that. The dominant model in the field today is also plausible.

But you can’t argue this in reverse. That’s, again, the fallacy of Affirming the Consequent. There are plenty of other ways his followers could get the idea of Jesus being a messiah other than his having claimed it in life. And indeed it’s kind of important that they actually tell us where they got this idea: scripture and revelation; indeed, after his death. So much for MacDonald’s thesis. Since this is what they say, we actually cannot argue as MacDonald wants; the evidence is actually directly the contrary of his premise. It’s possible we are nevertheless right, and if Jesus existed he did sell the idea, and it was only imagined to have been confirmed by post-mortem revelations and scripture. But that’s speculation. And speculation in, speculation out. Since MacDonald can’t establish this as a fact, he has no premise to anchor his argument. (Note, I would have loved to be able to prove this, and it would have been the thesis of On the Historicity of Jesus—if all the evidence hadn’t gone the other way.)

Conclusion

MacDonald litters a bunch of other lame arguments throughout, fact-challenged and fallacious, showing he hasn’t actually read the books he is trying to respond to—like the Argument from Nazareth (refuted in OHJ, index; summarizing my whole named section on it in Proving History, index). But by now you get the picture. As with that example, so with any other: to answer him, you just have to read the books he is rebutting. As if by miraculous powers, they already refuted him before he even composed.

Other arguments you don’t even need to do that with, because they are so patently illogical, anyone can see they are hosed without even checking. Like when he argues (again by rhetorical question), “Why would you invent a story that Jesus was going to restore the Davidic throne but then doesn’t do it in any visible sense?” Um. Because there was no Jesus? The only kind of messiah you can invent, is one who didn’t exist. “Otherwise, everyone would notice no divine being had militarily liberated Israel and resurrected all the world’s dead.” We’ve already been here. If you or your subconscious mind needs to invent a messiah to sell your social message and herald the end of the world, your only option is to imagine him. And where would they get that idea? Again, they told us: scripture and revelation.

All of MacDonald’s disorganized rebuttals fail to show he even knows what he is talking about—he doesn’t know what my books argue, he hasn’t fact-checked anything pertaining, his thinking is rife with fallacies, and he is not very well informed on the historical context or the Bible. His one main argument rests on a premise that is completely false, and thoroughly refuted by the earliest Christian literature we have, and also on completely fallacious logic: even if it were the case (and it is not) that Jesus effected his defeat of death by shaming people into repenting by his willingness to endure a horrible end, there is still no need of him to actually exist. He just needs to be believed to have existed, and to have been willing to humble himself and endure a horrible end. And a celestially enduring and sacrificing hero will do just as well for the purpose—particularly when all anyone can cite as to even how they know he existed or did any of this is scripture and revelation. That’s kind of a giveaway. Don’t you think?