Bart Ehrman has almost entirely avoided discussing “the historicity question” for years (I continually catalogue everything, and my responses, in Ehrman on Historicity Recap; some people have mistaken an article on his blog on this as recent, but in fact it is being misdated by his software and is over ten years old, and long-since rebutted). But just recently he dropped a forty-eight minute interview with Megan Lewis of the Misquoting Jesus Podcast, in which he spends about thirty scattered minutes on the subject of historicity. Let’s see what’s new.
The Framing
The substance starts at minute 3:25. They are not talking about challenges to historicity (what she more or less correctly defines as “mythicism”), but just, straight up, why Ehrman thinks there is enough evidence to be sure there was at least a guy, even though he agrees most of what we’re told about him is mythical. The subject is mainly: How much can we trust the sources we have? Ehrman does throw some shade around minute 4:20 with his usual false claim that mythicism isn’t seriously debated by experts, despite the fact that two peer-reviewed monographs and forty bona fide experts, and to date zero peer-reviewed monographs establishing historicity in response, refutes his disingenuous rhetoric on that point. Clearly it is debated, and indeed remains an open debate in the field. He just wants to ignore it.
Ehrman instead defaults to the same old position all historicists adopt, which is to just “assume” Jesus existed, and then ask what we can know about him, rather than establishing that Jesus existed before building on that assumption. It’s “skip a step” reasoning. Which is a crucial gap in the field. If Jesus didn’t exist, then how we interpret the sources and how we reconstruct the early history of Christianity substantially changes. If you disregard that and just assume Jesus existed, without a secure proof, you’re looking for the wrong thing, and building an edifice on sand.
This is one of the reasons, I suspect, that historians like Ehrman don’t want to look at this. They’ve built careers and massive bodies of literature on this assumption. It would be devastating—earth-shattering, disorienting even—to cast it all aside. Of course no one could then build their pet theories, either, since every historian needs Jesus to exist so they can promote their version of what he really said and did, and thus their version of what Christianity “really was” and thus now is. Of course none want to deal, either, with the harassment, vexation, and peer pressure they’d face from Christian peers, institutions, and funding sources if they were to cave on this and reverse course and rebuild the story of Christianity as something more akin to Mormonism or Islam, where the founder is an angel and not a real person, and the real “founders” just their prophets, imagining everything (or—God forbid—lying about it all).
Assumptions Substituted for Facts
Ehrman starts off with the obvious survey:
- We have “no information” on most ancient persons (Jew or Gentile). True. And we don’t expect to. Most persons did not launch intercontinental religions from the efforts of dozens of friends and peers convinced they were a celestial superbeing. Those kinds of people tend to produce records. Still, we can plausibly account for why Jesus didn’t.
- “We don’t have contemporary records” on Jesus, by which he means, “people who knew Jesus at the time didn’t leave us any writings about him.” True. I would count Paul (and possibly even the authors of Hebrews and 1 Clement) as contemporaries; but they didn’t know Jesus. I suspect the author of 1 Peter would have, had Jesus existed, but Ehrman deems that a forgery (I am less certain). But whether any of these authors knew of Jesus as an earthling (rather than an entity known only by revelation) would be the point of debate. Of course Ehrman assumes, earthling.
- “We have sources of information” on Jesus “far beyond what we have for most people” of that time. Also true. The question is only whether that information pertains to a real person or not. Ehrman would agree most of that information is bogus. The only difference, then, between him and mythicists, is how much of that information is bogus.
For example, all sources say Jesus was raised from the dead and appeared to people; the Gospels even construct detailed historical narratives of this. Ehrman would agree the Risen Jesus in those documents and histories, even claimed eyewitness testimonies, is a myth; no such events occurred, no such man existed. That all records agree as to that man’s existence, and that we have lots of such records, Ehrman agrees still does not support the conclusion that he existed. He didn’t. There was no real Risen Jesus. That’s a myth, something people merely imagined. As Paul says (our only extant eyewitness reporter), he saw this guy only in a revelation, inside his mind, and spoke to him only in his mind, not out in the real world. So Ehrman knows you can have tons of “records” of something that nevertheless isn’t true. The Risen Jesus didn’t really exist. Despite all our “records.” So Ehrman knows (but won’t admit) that this argument can’t establish the historicity of the pre-risen Jesus any more than it does the post-risen Jesus. Because the quality of evidence is not any better for either (e.g. Paul seems to only know of either Jesus the same way: by revelation); and that’s the problem we have to confront, but that Ehrman wants desperately to avoid (see How Did Christianity Switch to a Historical Jesus?).
And avoid it he does. Ehrman simply presumes, for example (at minute 7:15), that “Paul knew Jesus’s brother” (even though the only kind of Brother of the Lord Paul ever mentions knowing was fictive, not biological). By not addressing mythicism, Ehrman can just pretend there is no evidence against what he is saying, and thus never have to respond to any of that evidence. This is argument by assumption. He is simply assuming his interpretation of what Paul says is correct; he is not making any evidence-based argument for that assumption being correct—much less certain, or even probable. This is the difference between historicism and mythicism now: historicists ignore the evidence, and replace it with questionable assumptions; mythicists attend to the evidence, and abandon questionable assumptions.
The same happens again (at minute 7:28) where Ehrman says Paul knew Jesus’s Disciples. Which is another questionable assumption, not a fact. Paul never mentions “Disciples.” Only “Apostles.” And Apostles, to Paul, are persons receiving a revelation of the Risen Jesus: this is explicit in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8 and 9:1, in light of Galatians 1:11-12, which uses identical language, and Romans 16:25-26, which mentions no one learning anything from or about Jesus in life, only by revelation (hence when Paul says he “received from the Lord” the Eucharist scene, he evidently means directly, in a vision—not from “Disciples” who were there, which in his account they conspicuously aren’t). By using the word “Disciples” Ehrman is disingenuously implying Paul confirms these were people who sat at Jesus’s feet and were selected for leadership before his death. But that is precisely what we never find confirmed anywhere in Paul. He doesn’t seem to know about any interaction with Jesus before his death. That’s the problem Ehrman is skirting past, with a questionable assumption instead of facts or arguments.
The same happens when (around minute 8:35) Ehrman claims the Gospels, merely by existing, prove there were numerous lines of independent oral traditions floating around. This is another questionable assumption, not a fact, nor anything for which there is even any evidence—in fact, there is evidence against it (no such tradition appears to exist in the preceding generation: nothing in Paul, 1 Clement, Hebrews, or even 1 Peter, outside revelations and hidden messages in scripture; everything seems invented de novo in the Gospels: see Robyn Faith Walsh and the Gospels as Literature). And yet Ehrman declares this “multiple independent oral traditions” as if it was a fact. But it actually isn’t. None of the Gospels even say that’s what they had. They never mention disparate oral traditions at all, or say that’s what they were collecting—Luke says he has a tradition, but we know he means the books of Mark and Matthew; and the final redactors of John claim they had a source, but it too was a book, and probably an imaginary one (or a forgery); even Q, if it existed (and it probably didn’t), was a book. We also can’t distinguish oral traditions of the revelations of the Risen Jesus (Paul says they were ongoing) from oral traditions of any real Jesus. Nor can we distinguish oral traditions from the Christian belief that old Jewish scriptures contained quotable sayings of Jesus (see The Original Scriptural Concept of ‘The Lord’ Jesus; and the example of the millstone woe in Clement).
Historicists simply adopt this as an unproven assumption, and build everything (even their methods) on top of that assumption. They have never presented any evidence for this assumption being true, or even probable. This is a serious problem. All mythicists are doing is pointing this out (and we’re not the only ones who are: see, again, Walsh). All Ehrman is doing is ignoring the problem, skipping a step, and just “declaring” this assumption a fact—ironically the very bankrupt procedure he himself has taken amateur mythicists to task for doing. And he’s right: sloppy or crank mythicists do that a lot, and it’s not a valid procedure. So he shouldn’t be following that same procedure. His own case against doing so applies with the same force to himself. He just won’t acknowledge this (much less inform audiences of it, like his host Megan Lewis and her viewers).
This makes historicity a circular argument: you must presume oral traditions were circulating, which entails presuming Jesus existed (as how else could oral traditions of him be circulating), in order to use those oral traditions (as conjectured to survive under layers of redaction in the Gospels) as evidence Jesus existed. A dog chasing its tail. Proper method would be to first prove there really were such oral traditions (and that they weren’t just of post-mortem revelations or coded readings of scripture, and that they didn’t just derive from the Gospels themselves, like Papias’s absurd myth of Judas swelling to the size of a wagon trail and exploding into a worm-bomb). And then try to locate what in the Gospels derives from it. Though that second mission could fail for its impossibility even if the first mission succeeded—and it hasn’t, so we are two steps removed from any usable data here. But even if we were only one step away, it can still be the case that the Gospels had oral traditions, but we now have no way to determine which things derived from it. And we aren’t just that one step away. We’re two. In fact, three—when you add the fact that Ehrman declares these oral traditions were independent of each other, which is yet a third claim that no one has ever demonstrated to be true—different, after all, does not mean independent, as traditions evolve independently like species (as we well know from studies of urban legends and ghost stories, even the Roswell myth).
But you won’t hear any of this from Ehrman. Oz must keep hiding behind the curtain. It’s all the more hyperbolic when he says (around minute 9:31) that the Gospels are “just as valuable as historical sources as any other historical source,” which I know he does not actually believe. He has repeatedly explained elsewhere (and even here goes on to admit) that they are highly compromised by myth and fiction—something one cannot say of, for example, the letters of Paul or the histories of Josephus or Tacitus, much less ancient inscriptions and autograph documents. So the Gospels are not “just as valuable” as other kinds of sources; they are, in fact, far more legitimately questionable as sources than almost anything else we could have. We definitely could have had far better records, as indeed we do for every other historical person we are confident of (I survey a slew of examples, and why the evidence for them is convincing yet lacking for Jesus, in Chapter 5 of Jesus from Outer Space).
Another example is when Ehrman glosses over the ongoing debate over the existence of Q (around minute 15:40), again simply declaring that an undisputed fact, and not (as it actually is) a questionable hypothesis (even famed Q-scholar John Kloppenborg gives it only 50/50 odds, and he’s being far too generous). Ehrman does briefly mention the possibility that Matthew just made stuff up and added it to Mark, and Luke just lifted and modded that material from Matthew, but he acts as if no one thinks that (a lot of experts think that now). This is important, because Ehrman invents a lot of hypothetical sources this way: rather than asking whether material unique to Matthew (M) and Luke (L), or even John (J and S), was just embellishment and construction, not “independently sourced” content, he simply assumes the latter. Questionable assumptions, based on no evidence, replacing facts—even probable facts.
That the Gospels make stuff up is actually extensively established, in precisely the way their having independent sources has not been. See, for example, my summary in my critique of Brierley of Dale Allison’s demonstration that the Sermon on the Mount is a post-war invention, indeed an invention in Greek with no Aramaic antecedent, and not derived from any oral tradition going back to Jesus. But one can point to the examples of the Nativity and Resurrection narratives: these are wholesale fictions, not “orally sourced” (see, for example, my discussions in Resurrection: Faith or Fact? and How Did Christianity Switch to a Historical Jesus?). Likewise all the places where stories about Jesus just replicate tales of Moses and Elijah (and other literary characters), or make no sense as anything anyone saw or even reported seeing, but only as deliberate inventions of the Gospel authors themselves (see, for example, Why Did Mark Invent an Empty Tomb? and Mark’s Use of Paul’s Epistles; and as for Mark, so for Matthew, Luke, and John). We know they fabricate. We do not know they used oral sources.
This reliance on the questionable assumption of prior sources is a central theme of Raphael Lataster’s study corroborating mine in justifying doubts about the historicity of Jesus altogether. It simply is not logically valid to do what Ehrman does here and just declare any new thing said about Jesus as “having a source.” And that his belief in historicity rests on illogical declarations like this is why his belief is not credible; it is, in fact, highly questionable. You know you cannot trust his judgment here, because he has popped the hood and let you see how he is arriving at this judgment, and you can see for yourself that it is not logically valid. So neither are his conclusions. This is the problem with historicity. So now there are only two kinds of people: those who notice this; and those who don’t (or won’t admit it).
For example, Ehrman tries to argue (around minute 17:15) that Jesus must have taught parables involving seeds, because we have different examples of him doing so in the Gospels. This is a non sequitur. First, that he taught in parables at all is challenged by the complete absence of any knowledge of any such mode of teaching in any documents prior to Mark. Paul, never heard such things, never references them. Not in some 20,000 words about Jesus and what he taught. 1 Clement quotes Jesus a lot (almost always, actually, hidden sayings extracted from Scripture); not a single instance of parables as a mode he taught in. Hebrews, not a single example. Nor anything in 1 Peter either (though Ehrman would reject that as early). This appears, therefore, to be an innovation of Mark. Once he started the trend, now everyone starts inventing parables for Jesus to teach in. This is the more probable (and certainly no less probable) “source” of Jesus’s parables. Ehrman has no evidence otherwise. So he cannot rest on any assumption otherwise. And yet, that’s what he does. This is illogical.
The seed parables of Jesus appear to be creative fiction invented by the Evangelists, out of teachings not of Jesus, but of Paul (see 2 Corinthians 9, and 1 Corinthians 3, 9, and 15; Mark derives a lot of inspiration this way), following a model first contrived by Mark, inspiring Matthew and Luke (and even John) to rewrite Mark’s or even compose their own on inspiration from Mark’s. There is even evidence for this (and Ehrman knows that). Ehrman would have to present evidence that this isn’t what is happening, before he could declare that it isn’t what is happening. But he has no such evidence. He just replaces evidence for his conclusions with brute assumption instead. But brute assumption is not a valid mode of argument.
Eventually Ehrman gets around to discussing the Method of Criteria (starting around minute 18:50), claiming that it’s the same method used in other fields of history. That isn’t true. You won’t find hardly any of this elsewhere. It was almost all contrived for Jesus studies. Even when there are parallel methods across fields (like things comparable to the Criterion of Embarrassment), they are constructed and deployed differently. And this is a real problem. My entire book, Proving History, especially Chapter 5, surveys that problem, finding that literally every other formal study of these methods in Jesus studies that has ever been made agrees it’s a problem. Jesus historians are actually conspicuously avoiding the actual methods used in other fields of history (just compare what they do, with actual surveys of real historical methods: I provide a bibliography). And I suspect one reason for this is that real methods don’t get any results they want. For example, in no other field are “hypothetical sources” contrived, used, or relied on in the way we find in Jesus studies. Nor is any principle like “simpler versions of a story are earlier” (real historians well know abbreviation, truncation, and paraphrase are ordinary).
What Can We Know?
So what does Ehrman conclude from that? Skipping past literally every study on the reliability of the methods Ehrman thus describes (all of which challenge it), Ehrman declares they lead to some things “99%” of experts agree on (around minute 20:15):
- Jesus was from Galilee. (Yet no such fact is mentioned before the Gospels; while the Gospels all are following Scripture on that point, and even have literary reasons to invent it, to get the right metaphorical geography: OHJ, pp. 411-18, 440, 464.)
- Jesus came from Nazareth. (Ditto. In fact, there is evidence this was a telephone-gamed distortion of something completely else being said of him: see both Proving History and Historicity, index, “Nazareth.”)
- He was lower class. (As were many mythical heroes at some point in their lives. See Not the Impossible Faith, Chapter 2. The Gospel Jesus was even modeled on the slave-heroes Moses and Aesop: see OHJ, index.)
- He left home to begin an itinerant preaching ministry. (Ditto.)
- He had people who followed him around. (Ditto.)
- He thought he was an important teacher—possibly even a prophet or messiah. (This was already true of the imaginary Risen Jesus as well.)
- In the last week of his life [later Ehrman adds “during a Passover week”] he went to Jerusalem to proclaim his message. (Where Scripture required the gospel and messiah to go. There is no basis for believing “the last week” or “Passover” part of this, either, as all things calendric here are a literary device of the Gospels.)
- He fell on the wrong side of the law. (Necessary for the story whether he existed or not; other heroes the Gospel Jesus was modeled on also fell afoul of the law, e.g. Aesop.)
- He apparently offended the Jewish authorities and was handed over to the Roman authorities. (Which does not make a lot of historical sense, but was required by the Scriptural and literary aims of the Gospels. Paul never mentions this; only forgers. And the Talmud has only the Jews involved, decades before the Romans were even there.)
- He was crucified by the Romans for claiming to be the future king of the Jews. (Ditto. Indeed, the Talmud never heard of this; there he is killed for sorcery. Paul never discusses the charges, or who did the killing; he seems to think supernatural agents did it.)
I will agree that if Jesus existed, these are indeed the most likely facts of him—although I’m less certain of the Nazareth connection, as that appears to have evolved from a different moniker; and few of these facts need to be true of him. Even if the whole Galilee connection was invented later, that in itself would not mean Jesus didn’t exist, just that he came from and preached somewhere else than legend had it. But as there are well-evidenced reasons these things would be invented or said of a mythical Jesus, they do not require a historical Jesus, or even (by themselves) increase the likelihood of one. One can generate similar lists for every mythical hero of antiquity, all of whom had elaborate biographies written, and indeed with similar functions to the Gospels. So what Ehrman is saying here isn’t very convincing.
One Weird Error
Other than all these failures of logic, Ehrman makes one confusing error of fact, which is mysterious to me as I know he knows the information that he is screwing up here: at one point (around minute 22:34), Ehrman gets into the weeds trying to use Pontius Pilate as an example of an unattested person comparable to Jesus. He’s not, and bizarrely Ehrman even admits he’s not (so how is he an example of Ehrman’s point?), by mentioning that we have an autograph inscription attesting his existence—a far sight more than we have for Jesus. But then he says, incredibly, “If you talk about other people writing about him, there’s no written record of him in the first century, at all” (24:10). Um. No. Josephus writes about him extensively in the first century, indeed only forty years after the fact. And Philo wrote about him—and he was a contemporary!
Ehrman has inexplicably made this mistake several times before. But what’s weird here is not only that in Did Jesus Exist (pp. 43-45), Ehrman mentions all of these things (and even complained that he did, when I called him out for omitting them from his Huffington Post article, even though I acknowledged that at the time), but also that even in this video, in the very next sentence (24:58), he also mentions these facts. Though he incorrectly says Philo was writing twenty years later (no, Philo is writing just a few years later, and about his own contemporary memories of Pilate’s actions), he nevertheless concedes Philo and Josephus wrote about him in the first century (he is vague as to Philo being a contemporary; but he was). So, what’s going on?
I can only infer that when Ehrman said “first century,” he meant, rather, “when Pilate was alive” (Pilate died after the year 37) because even “early first century” would be false, as Philo wrote about Pilate c. 42 A.D. The important point, however, is that this is far better attestation than we have for Jesus: a contemporary, writing about him unambiguously, just a few years after; and a critical historian writing from good sources just a few decades later; and corroborated by other historians not far removed (Tacitus wrote independently about Pilate around 116 A.D.). This is far better evidence than the Gospels. Ehrman really should not have used this example (he has better examples; I’ll revisit his argument in a moment). It completely undermines the point he was trying to make (and yet needn’t have).
Q & A
The interview concludes (starting around minute 32:20) with a brief audience Q&A, which is loaded with decent questions, only one of which bringing to the forefront the points I just made, the rest simply stipulating historicity rather than querying it.
The first question asked was, if all we had was Mark (not Paul, nor any other Gospel), then how confident would we be that Jesus really existed? This catches Ehrman at his poor methodology, because he answers that having one lengthy biography of a person is far better than we have for most other people. But we have (or know they had) lengthy biographies of many mythical persons (Romulus, Osiris, Aesop, Hercules, Bacchus, Inanna, Moses, Abraham, and on and on). So Ehrman’s reasoning is illogical. Merely having a biography of someone doesn’t tell us whether they existed—at all. But this is the same kind of illogical reasoning he keeps resting his confidence in a historical Jesus on.
The best one could do is argue that, if we have a mundane and credibly constructed and content-filled biography, prior probability favors historicity (even if not to a certainty, certainly to a probability; there were many bogus biographies of real people, too, but they tended to be rendered plausibly at least). But Mark is not a mundane and credibly constructed and content-filled biography; it is rather an implausible, overtly fictionalized mythography filled with unbelievable events, sequences, and behaviors (see Jesus from Outer Space, Chapter 6, esp. pp. 129-48). When we look at the body of other works of that time like that, most are of mythical, not historical persons. So in the reference class Mark is actually in, prior probability favors non-existence (even if not to a certainty, certainly to a probability; there were some fantastical biographies of real people, but they weren’t as common). Ehrman is thus ignoring the correct reference class, and all its contents.
Even Ehrman’s selected analogy is poorly chosen: historians aren’t that sure of the historicity of Apollonius of Tyana, and rest their odds favoring it on external facts, like that Lucian says he met a student of one of his Disciples (and unlike Paul, Lucian actually says that). As Maria Dzielska explains in her introduction to Apollonius of Tyana in Legend and History, “a historian assuming that Apollonius of Tyana existed solely as a hero of an extensive legend…would not stray far from the truth,” and the only reason she favors a hypothesis of historicity is that there is evidence external to the Life we have of him, scant as it is, that is sufficient to tip the scale into at least minimal historicity. In the question Ehrman was asked, it was stipulated that we would have no such evidence backing Mark. It is clear were that the case, Dzielska would be more doubtful. And so should Ehrman be.
So what would my answer be? Under the conditions asked, I would say the probability Jesus existed would stick around 1 in 3, at both ends of my error margin. So my a judicantiori estimate would substantially rise, but my a fortiori estimate wouldn’t, because we’d lose under those conditions all evidence supporting historicity, as well as all evidence casting it into further doubt. On “just Mark,” the historicity of Jesus would be comparable to that of Aesop: a plausible but probably fictional culture hero. He would beat the likes of Hercules, Bacchus, Moses, or Osiris only because for them we have additional evidence casting them in doubt, which on the question’s stated conditions we would not have for Jesus.
The second question was about whether the sayings the Gospels attribute to Jesus declaring the end is nigh go back to Jesus or were made-up (citing John Meier as a major scholar who thinks the latter). Ehrman’s answer is reasonable. He’s working from an assumption that Jesus existed, and if we grant that, then it is indeed more likely Jesus preached that than that someone made it up later. If anything, the Gospels are trying to spin an apologetic around that saying to kick that can down the road, a problem they wouldn’t face if that prediction weren’t popularly known. And since it’s in Paul, we know it predates the Gospels.
If we assumed, instead, that Jesus didn’t exist, we wouldn’t get a substantially different answer: it is clear Paul believed the Risen Jesus was telling him and the other Apostles exactly this, either in direct revelations—which means (to us) dreams or hallucinations—or through messages they believed Jesus anciently hid in Scripture. We could say “Jesus didn’t say that” only in the sense that their imaginary Jesus wasn’t real; but to them, the Jesus of their dreams, trances, and secret Bible codes was real, and thus he did say or communicate this. We can doubt the exact wording (that “this generation would not pass away” first sounds like apologetic can-kicking to me; and Paul would have cited it in response to those asking him when the end would come), but not the gist (the first Christians clearly believed Jesus had told them the end was nigh).
The third question was interesting but premised on historicity: was the historical Jesus suffering delusions of grandeur, or did he have a more decent, humble understanding of himself? Ehrman takes the position that makes sense given his model of the historical Jesus, that Jesus didn’t make the aggrandizing claims attributed to him, but rather, they arose from “visions” and “interpretations” after his death—in other words, this aggrandizement started with his followers after he was gone, and not with him. I think that’s a reasonable model, particularly if you adopt Ehrman’s also-reasonable hypothesis that Jesus didn’t even expect to get killed (as the Gospels depict he did) and wasn’t claiming to be a supernatural agent of God. But it’s also reasonable, as Ehrman hypothesizes, that Jesus did believe he’d be crowned king by God and rule Judea, which would be a bit full of himself.
I happen to think it’s more likely that (if he existed) Jesus did expect to get killed, and even did everything he could to cause it, because he believed he was the dying messiah of Daniel 9 whose sacrifice would unlock the apocalypse of Daniel 12 (placing him in the company of several other suicidal “Jesus Christs” who appear to have been on the same game, as I explain in my Wichita Talk), which doesn’t require him to have believed he was a superbeing or future king (though it is compatible with it). But I don’t believe the evidence is solid enough to say I must be right about that and Ehrman’s model is wrong; it’s also plausible. What isn’t plausible is the Christian apologetical triumphal model where Jesus was going around claiming he was a god who would soon burn everyone to death with cosmic deathrays. Odds favor any of that rubbish being a post-mortem imagining of his distraught followers.
The fourth question was also interesting, and neutral to the question of historicity, which is (my paraphrase here), “Did anyone produce anything claiming to be written by Jesus? And if not, why not?” Ehrman mentions one, the Letter to Abgar. But I think the questioner meant, why not then a full Gospel? I think the reason so few attempts were made to forge such things is because it would be too hard to pull it off. Trying to claim you found a lost letter from Jesus in a royal archive is more believable, as it comes with a plausible built-in story as to how it never was made public until then. But a Gospel? After so many revered Christian texts circulated with no knowledge of it, indeed even proto-canonized writings with no knowledge of it, you’d be hard pressed to convince anyone your “sudden discovery” of a Gospel written by Jesus Himself wasn’t a fraud. This is why Gospels tended to be attributed to semi-obscure persons (not always, but usually); it was harder to sell the notion that a renowned person wrote something no one had until then heard of.
Ehrman took the question more as whether Jesus was literate, and what he says on that is reasonable, even if I don’t fully concur. Ehrman’s doubts could be defensible, on a well-enough developed theory of how an illiterate could be taken seriously as a prophet. Otherwise, a historical Jesus almost certainly had to have been an educated Rabbi. That’s the only way he could market himself as an expert in the Scriptures and therefore an authority anyone should heed—if he couldn’t even read them, he’d be outed as obviously not inspired by God from day one. And as it happens, the Gospels never say he was illiterate, and continually refer to him as a Rabbi.
I think the same must be true of (at least the leading) Apostles. Peter had to be literate, for example, or else he could never win any argument with Paul, who could read and thus interpret the Scriptures—and Paul would have made constant hay over this. That Paul instead repeatedly acts like Peter is his equal means he must have been—and thus, actually, just as educated. Only Acts says they were illiterate; the Gospels only describe them as fishermen, which was probably fiction (to contrive the “fishers of men” metaphor), but even if true would not indicate, as all Rabbis were required to ply manual trades (see my discussion of this in Not the Impossible Faith, Chapter 2). I think Acts trying to spin them as illiterates is the same turn that painted Mohammed as illiterate to make his achievements seem more miraculous (and thus genuinely of God), even though all accounts of him peg him as a top-level elite, whose actual illiteracy would simply be improbable. So, too, Jesus and the Apostles.
The last question was unrelated to the historicity of Jesus (and his summary of the discussion starting around minute 45 doesn’t add anything), so I’ll conclude here. You might notice Ehrman skipped a lot of arguments he was attempting ten years ago; and nothing he settles on here is new; and neither is he responding to any refutations it, but simply ignoring them (see Ehrman on Historicity Recap).
Conclusion
Despite all that, Ehrman is still correct when (around minute 8:18) he emphasizes that we cannot dismiss the Gospels, for example, merely because they were collected into what is now the Bible. They were written apart from it, and only collected into that edition later. Yes, that collection was deliberate propaganda serving the interests of a singular sect or conglomerate (see Three Things to Know about New Testament Manuscripts). And yes, that poses unique problems (the risk of doctoring and editing; selection bias; the inclusion of forgeries). But it does not of itself simply “rule out” its contents as source material. So it is not reasonable to demand sources “outside the Bible.” That would be immensely useful, and it is still a fact that we don’t have any (independent of the Bible anyway). But we can still use what was gathered into the New Testament, just with adequate critical caution.
For example, I think the Epistles of Paul—of which none exist (today) outside the Bible—are very useful historical sources. They weren’t just wholesale fabrications (half of them were; but the other half, not: see The Historicity of Paul the Apostle and How Do We Know the Apostle Paul Wrote His Epistles in the 50s A.D.?). And they contain some reliable data about the origins of the religion, even if in some respects vague or compromised (e.g. see Dating the Corinthian Creed and Then He Appeared to Over Five Hundred Brethren at Once! and even Galatians 1:19 and Romans 1:3, and all the verses I have cited even here today). The fact that these documents are “in the Bible” is not sufficient reason to conclude they have zero weight as evidence. And the same must apply to the Gospels. If we are to dismiss the Gospels as unusable, we need evidence other than the mere fact of what collection they ended up in.
Likewise, Ehrman correctly throws cold water on the opposite tack as well, when he explains (around minute 10) how the Gospels are not eyewitness records, nor reliable (nor by anyone who “lived in Israel” or “spoke Aramaic,” or had eyewitness sources—but, at best, only highly distorted, anonymous, untraceable “oral traditions”). His first correct admission threw cold water on mythicist extremists (who want to claim everything is forged or void of historical worth); his second, on historicist extremists (better known as Christian apologists). There is even in this section of the video a great description of an experiment he runs in his class to prove empirically to his students that “verbatim agreement” between accounts is evidence of copying, not independent attestation (starting around minute 12:46).
Similarly, Ehrman is quite correct about the Argument from Silence (minute 21:40): as long as we abandon the tall tales of the Gospels (in which Jesus was famed even “across Syria”, and managed to successfully storm and escape a heavily guarded temple, and murder thousands of pigs, and so on), all we have left is a minor nobody. Other messianic pretenders made far bigger splashes (OHJ, Ch. 4, Element 4), and yet even they barely won mention (and none contemporary that survives; though contemporary records must have been made for Josephus to know of them). Jesus could easily have been another one of these guys, only far less effectual (see my Wichita Talk on the best case for this possibility). Ehrman is likewise correct that we have no contemporary attestation of Josephus either (his historicity is only established by the evidence of his own writings, and later readers of them; what Ehrman then says about Pilate here, however, is false, as I already mentioned).
So there was no reason even for many contemporary records to have been made for Jesus, much less survive. For example, there would be government records (of the trial and its judgment, for example; even census records), but even Christians would not have had access to those, they aren’t likely to have survived the wars of the region (or even regular archival housecleaning), and certainly won’t have made it to the present day (almost no such records did; even less so from Judea). So we cannot argue Jesus didn’t exist from the mere poverty of evidence (hence in OHJ, Chapter 8, I find this has zero effect on the probability he existed; although having had such evidence would definitely have increased it).
But then Ehrman stacks up questionable assumptions as if they were established facts, to get “information” about a historical Jesus. The problem is that this is what he has to do. If the historicity of Jesus were a securely establishable fact, we should not have to resort to this. And yet, take away every premise conjured this way (every time he just declares an unevidenced assumption, or even a counter-evidence assumption, as a fact), and he has no arguments for a historical Jesus. This should worry you. Because the fact that this is the only way Ehrman can get from the data to a historical Jesus is itself evidence that we should doubt the historicity of Jesus.
Other than his possible trip to the third heaven statement, did Paul write that he was unsure of one of his visionary experiences (in is authentic letters)? Thanks.
Paul never expresses doubt or uncertainty about any of his religious experiences or communications from Jesus.
You know, I’m not sure I believe in Superman but all these Superman stories prove there are numerous lines of independent oral traditions floating around. I guess it’s just Zod who makes me doubt.
The fact that this is the default mode of debate for historicists really is one of the most compelling arguments for mythicists.
In areas where we have massive certainty, like in things like the social construction of race, there’s no need to evoke the fact of the scholarly consensus beyond just noting it. The reasoning is so ironclad, and can be laid out simply, that it means that all challenging ideas have to respond with non sequiturs or facts not in evidence. There’s never a need to just jump to the assumption.
If one can’t succinctly explain why a position is valid, that position is likely not as certain as it looks, especially in the social sciences.
I would say they can “succinctly explain” why they think their position is valid. It’s just that all the premises they use to do that are not empirically established but just assumptions; which they present as empirical facts. Lay people won’t know that.
So deconstructing their assumptions-as-fact rhetoric is a job of work. Like all apologetics, you have to unwind all the “apologetics” they surround their assumptions with. If you just point out there is no evidence for that, they’ll guffaw and throw up an bunch more assumptions posed as facts, which requires you to fact-check them, which is laborious, and vexing because after you spend all that labor you find they weren’t telling you the truth, that all the “evidence” they claimed to have is just more assumptions and not actually evidence, and yet they made you do all the work to find that out.
This is exceedingly annoying. But it’s why On the Historicity of Jesus is so long (and why it spends a hundred pages just establishing background evidence). It takes a lot of evidence-presenting to show to people that there is no evidence for any of their assumptions, and often even evidence against them. And also to show (and defend against all apologetic attacks) that they are leaving crucial evidence out.
Like Ehrman classifying Mark as “just another biography,” a glaring reference class error, as even experts in his own field could have schooled him on. But “overcoming his resistance” to that requires presenting tons of evidence to finally overcome his refusal to believe it, a process not necessary for other historians, who already know and accept these facts.
This is the difference between historicity apologetics, and just any other historical subject, and thus why it takes so much work to tear its rhetoric down. You don’t have to do this in almost any other subject.
Ironically (given that historicists often try to accuse us of this), it’s really a lot like trying to persuade a Holocaust denier that they are wrong: it can’t be done succinctly because they refuse to believe everything you say, or just gainsay it, requiring you to haul out vast reams of evidence until they are so overwhelmed by it that their “tactic of guffawing” becomes too obviously inept and they have to abandon it. And then usually rather than accepting defeat and admitting they were wrong, they just run away, refuse to engage with you anymore, and go on saying the same refuted shit they were before.
This describes what Ehrman is doing to a T. It does not describe what we are doing. And by “we” I mean mythicists who go through peer review (or follow what has), not the cranks and amateurs, who often act exactly like Ehrman—like Atwill, who, like Ehrman, corral’s his belief with apologetics, histrionics, and hyperbole, and thus is immune to being refuted by any amount of evidence.
This is itself evidence they have no case. But this puts it on the objective observer to discover this, and finally see the Emperor Has No Clothes.
The most compelling argument I’ve heard against the argument of silence from Paul was that Paul was trying to portray himself as the new prophet of God. The idea was that to the people of the time it didn’t matter if you talked to the physical Jesus or the spiritual Jesus, both would carry the same weight. If Paul directed his audience though to the physical Jesus words then he would by effect become a second hand source instead of a primary one, which would beg the question of why they should listen to him. By claiming that everything that he received was only by revelation, he was always the primary source. This is why Paul never uses Jesus words from the apostles as doing so would delegitimatize his own authority and question his attempt at being the new prophet of God.
That is a good example of an assumption being represented as a fact. This assumption not only has no evidence (it’s just something they made up to explain away actual evidence they don’t like), but is abundantly refuted by the evidence. I spend several pages refuting it in OHJ.
The bottom line is, there is no evidence Paul thought this, all the evidence that would have been produced had he thought this is nowhere to be found in his letters, the passages sometimes used as evidence for it are taken out of context and actually prove the opposite, and there are many more passages that prove the opposite. As well, the assumption fails to explain a great deal (it cannot logically explain every silence in Paul), so it doesn’t work even if it were true.
So the assumption is not only unfounded (already a problem), it’s provably false (a much more serious problem), and incapable of getting the results claimed for it (an even more serious problem).
This is what historicists are stalwartly ignoring and never want to address or engage (you’ll notice they always just repeat the assertion, never engage the refutations of it, and focus on debunking other trivia, pretending this evidence doesn’t even exist), because they know it won’t turn out their way, and they think they can hoodwink laypeople (and perhaps themselves?) by just asserting the assumption as a fact and appealing to their PhD and prestigious academic appointment as the only reason you should believe them. It’s the people who nevertheless don’t believe them, and check first, who find this is all a con, and get understandably pissed.
Then the con men blame their marks for getting angry, like a bully complaining to the authorities about you punching them in self defense. And round and round it goes.
I’ve wondered something about Paul. It always seems to me that for a man who was active for so long he is remarkably short on letters. 7 letters in over a decade of work seems peculiar. Especially since most of those are one letter per community. Galatians get one, Philippians get one, Thessalonians get one, with only Corinthians get 2. I’ve wondered if one letter was enough to resolve the issues with most of these churches or did Paul frequent them often enough that he only needed one, or did the later church see content in those later letters that they had a problem with so didn’t preserve them?( like a 2 Galatians or a 2 phillipians as an example)
Also, I’m curious about he cost of travel in Paul’s time especially comparatively to that of writing a letter.
Travel and letters were expensive. But in his letters Paul mentions getting tithes and goods-and-services-in-kind from his churches, so he was running a financially sound enterprise.
On the question of letter count: in OHJ I discuss the scholarship and evidence establishing two things: (1) Paul refers to letters we don’t have (and we don’t have any of the letters he is responding to), so we know a lot is missing (we only get to see what was selected for publication, probably by Marcion or someone before him); and (2) the letters we have are pastiches.
For example, 1 Corinthians is not one letter, but pieces of many letters, smashed together, to look like one, and with parts missing, e.g. watch the transition from 8 to 9: the material is thematically related but in 9 Paul is responding to some other argument, and the part where he explains the argument he is responding to is missing. There are several examples like this. You’ll also notice many letters have multiple endings, showing that the editing was not very astute and often just slap-dash.
We know we don’t have his whole corpus, either way. But we don’t know: if pieces of the known (or unknown) missing letters are in these pastiches; or if the pastiches are consistent to destination, i.e. are all the bits forming Romans from multiple actual letters to Rome, or just the sections that mention a Roman audience? For instance, we have “1” and “2” Corinthians; is this a two-scroll pastiche of parts of all the many letters he sent to Corinth, or are some of the bits of these from letters sent elsewhere and just being passed off in this edition as two big letters sent to Corinth?
In addition to Richard’s point, the a priori logical problem with this argument is precisely that it is assumed . It’s not in the text .
If Paul had said “Yes, I did not hear Jesus speak in the flesh, but that doesn’t matter because I heard Him in revelation”, great. Mythicism would be done and dusted.
Paul isn’t just talking to a bunch of rubes or absolutely new converts. He is making arguments, and detailed ones, about doctrine and ideology. The fact that he never needs to even defend himself against what would be a fatal problem with his argument is weird on historicity. And the fact that it is never useful for Paul to say, even in the kind of spin doctor language people actually in that position would use, “The Lord not only said this in revelation and in scripture, but even in person”. And there are absolutely times in Paul’s letters where he has to acknowledge things that are politically or theologically inconvenient for him, including rival groups.
If, say, on the circumcision issue, Jesus had gone either way , Paul would have had to address that when defending his take. It would just be conceding the argument to not even try. Yet he didn’t need to.
The fact that there never once would be a point that Paul even had to address the distinction , even in a veiled way or even as defense, is the problem, and this ad hoc assumption doesn’t save it.
That’s correct, and I discuss this in OHJ, Ch. 11.
There are many places in Paul’s letters where he would have had to defend himself against this argument, yet he never has to. He, rather, repeatedly assumes the opposite: that one had to claim revelation to be an authentic apostle, and so he is desperate to defend himself as having received a revelation just like everyone else. Which means “apostles” (lit. “those sent”) only existed after Jesus died; it wasn’t something Jesus inaugurated when he was alive.
There is much more to be said on this point, but it’s all in the book.
To be historically a fact one needs more than a ” if A is true then B must also exist. It seems to me there is never really solid “A” is absolutely true on its own referenced by other A’s that also stand alone thus pointing to a very high probability they are all true. The whole Jesus trip is a strawman of ” CLAIMS” built on other claims with very little established FACTS that are not dependent on other sources of validatikn that provide a “clouded vision” of possibilities “only”. There should be a whole field of categorizing each line in biblical texts that conclude based on thorough examination that it is HIGHLY TRUE or PROBABLY TRUE, or HIGHLY FALSE or PROBABLY UNTRUE.
I wonder how that would line up so we could all see those categories clearly.
Ehrman’s claims sound an awful lot like Habermas’ “minimal facts” which aren’t facts at all.
That’s actually an apt analogy I hadn’t thought of before. You are right, the tactic is very similar.
If Josephus did write of Christians . . . which kind of Christians were they?
In his 75 AD (variously titled) Jewish Wars, doesn’t mention Christians at all.
In Antiquities 94 AD, the long-argued over Testimonium (the reference to James easily identified as some other Jesus’s brother) Christian sects were tiny (historians estimate: by 100 AD around 7,500 Christians).
The earliest Christians only had Paul (writing 50 AD) to go by. Paul says God created Jesus in the heavens using seed of David on un-named woman.
Earliest Christians would see Jesus as descending fully formed at Capernaum.
This earliest celestial Jesus version would’ve had five decades to gain steam. (Gospel of Mark arrives 66 AD earliest but contains no childhood history of Jesus.)
The historicized church appears not to have begun solidifying until turn of the century.
So it’s entirely possible Josephus encountered Christians before 94 AD publication.
However, far more likely to be of the “celestial Jesus” persuasion.
Had Josephus written about THAT, the later Eusebius of course would need to change it.
Josephus lived through the time of the supposed meteoric rise of Christianity.
Josephus would’ve scoffed at the stories contained in the gospels, knowing them fiction.
His father Mattias, a Jerusalem temple priest, would’ve directly witnessed Jesus events.
Josephus couldn’t have simply spent his life completely ignoring Christianity.
He could never have attained/maintained his status as eminent Roman/Jewish historian.
The rest you propose is overly speculative. But this one point is hard to argue with. We don’t see concrete reliance on a real Jesus until John. He becomes historicized gradually after Mark, but only in John are we told we have to believe in his narrative or be damned. Which tracks the reactionary movement we see in the second century (e.g. Ignatius, 2 Peter) against Christian sects denying it. So I’d say close to 100, +/- 20 years, is when historicism arose and took hold (and started batting down competitors after that). See How Did Christianity Switch to a Historical Jesus? for more on this point.
This doesn’t mean Josephus would have understood Christianity of the 70s-90s variety, however. As Mark 4 explains, outsiders were meant to be duped by their historicizing narrative and only insiders told the truth. This matches the Osiris cult: historicizing stories were meant to dupe outsiders, and only insiders were taught that it was all allegory for a purely celestial life, death, and resurrection (see my discussion in Jesus from Outer Space).
So even if Josephus encountered celestialist Christianity, they would not have told him that. At most he’d have access to their Gospels, and would just presume they were making those claims literally. Similarly, hearing of a famous member like James called a Brother of the Lord, he would sooner assume they meant actual brother, and not know about the fictive kinship model (adoption by God as their sons and thus becoming heirs to his kingdom) that their entire religion was built on. Especially since their “Jesus Christ” sounds a lot like all the others he wrote about (although this is how we know he never wrote on Christians: he would have described them in the same terms as all the other parallels he wrote about, because that’s what he did with all of them).
Though Eusebius might do that, Origen couldn’t. When Origen tries to find attestations of Christianity in Josephus to address in his rebuttal to Celsus, he doesn’t find even that kind of passage. If he had, he’d be compelled to address it with apologetics, because otherwise he is asking Celsus (and thus all readers he is trying to inoculate against Celsus’s critique of Christianity, the entire point of his writing that book against Celsus) to read Josephus; so if Josephus contained any problematic material about Christianity, Origen would have to inoculate readers against it, otherwise his entire rhetorical tactic would become self-defeating. By contrast, Eusebius isn’t asking readers to consult Josephus; he is presuming to have already done that for them. So lying about what’s in Josephus would not inherently be self-defeating for his mission.
There is no evidence his father was alive when he wrote the Antiquities (or even the War), and he never mentions consulting him for information. Average life expectancy then (for anyone who survived childhood) was 48. Josephus was born in 37. Even assuming his father was absurdly young when he had him, he’d still on average be dead before Josephus wrote either book (Josephus might imply in Life 41 that his father died during the War, but it’s unclear). And as Christians were clearly too trivial for anyone to even remark upon, it’s doubtful they’d ever come up in conversation. He might have information about the other “Jesus Christs” (messianic recapitulations of Joshua; see OHJ, pp. 70-71) from his father, as they were splashy enough to provoke comment.
But there were dozens of Jewish sects in that day and Josephus only mentions four of them. He clearly was poorly inclined to research any of the dozens of others, and Christianity would have been the most insignificant of all. Especially then; and yet still even in the 90s: see, again, How Did Christianity Switch to a Historical Jesus? for how unsuccessful Christianity actually was—it was not exploding like gangbusters. That was their own myth. Moreover, it was least successful in Judea (it pretty much failed there in the first century), so would be of even less relevance to anything Josephus was writing about.
Thanks . . .in referring to Josephus’s father what I meant and should have included was he would’ve been there to directly witness Jesus events “had they actually occurred.” Meaning if a real historical Jesus had trashed the Temple and been tried and crucified, at some point this would likely have come up in conversation between father and son as Josephus grew up and became interested in his country’s religion and history. If as claimed by the early church the religion immediately spread like wildfire after the crucifixion, would have been impossible to ignore Christianity. By the time Josephus was in his teens or 20s there would’ve been Christians all over the place wearing crucifixes around their necks badgering each and every jew to convert, including Josephus. That’s the version the religion wants us to believe, and the reality of Josephus versus all their fictions is a huge roadblock. So I wasn’t saying Mattias would have somehow told Josephus about the “celestial” version. As you say, Mattias might’ve been dead before Paul’s words started to gain any appreciable number of converts.
Note your assumption: that Jesus trashed the temple.
That’s a myth. No such thing happened. So obviously Josephus’s father won’t have witnessed it.
Even if Josephus later read a Gospel (and the congruences between the TF and the Emmaus narrative in Luke prove its author read Luke), his father would be long dead by then. As also anyone else he could ask about it (especially as he is writing in Rome at this time, thousands of miles away).
In reality, Jesus won’t have been even remotely memorable to elites in Jerusalem. He would just be one of hundreds of bogus prophets getting themselves killed over crazy claims.
It also isn’t true that “by the time Josephus was in his teens or 20s there would’ve been Christians all over the place wearing crucifixes around their necks badgering each and every jew to convert.”
First, crucifixes didn’t exist until the Middle Ages. Crosses didn’t become a Christian symbol until the 4th century at the earliest (and even then they were chi-rho symbols, for CHRist, not “crosses”), and Christians didn’t “wear” them.
Second, Christians were an extreme minority. Almost non-existent even by the time of Pliny (see, again, How Did Christianity Switch to a Historical Jesus?). They were socially invisible. And they were catastrophically unsuccessful in Palestine (they made headway only in the Diaspora).
As I noted, there were dozens of sects (we know of thirty two by name, and even if some of those names overlap, there were at least ten distinct sects). Josephus mentions only three (Sadducees, Pharisees, and Essenes; his inclusion of a “fourth” sect, the Zealots, is artificial, that wasn’t a sect but a political movement drawing adherents from many sects).
So there are seven to twenty nine sects he completely ignores. Christianity will have been smaller than all of them. Consequently, Josephus would no sooner bother mentioning them than he would the Masbothians or the Nasaraeans. He doesn’t even discuss the Baptists as a sect, even though he discusses their founder. Nor does he discuss the entire sect of the Galileans (yes, there was an entire Jewish sect distinct to Galilee, the country Josephus even defended in the War). So why would he discuss Christians?
Also I don’t understand why secular scholars just don’t call it quits when faced with the reality of Josephus. Guess I shouldn’t be surprised . . . not all that long ago they were some(?) or all (?) refusing to admit the gospels are fiction. Then again, so long as they can tenuously cling to the Testimonium, even tho their arguments supporting it fail every test, and the USA corporate media continues to refuse to question . . .
Doesn’t appear I can reply to your last comment so I’ll try here. I apologize if am not making myself clear. In my last reply and as part of my original comment, I merely meant to say if there HAD been a REAL HISTORICAL Jesus condemned by Rome/Pilate etc Mattias would have witnessed it and passed the story on to his son, additionally I would think that would be a momentous enough event to enter local history regardless. Clearly such things never happened, the same way Josephus doesn’t record Herod killing the babies, nor does Herod record Nero persecuting the Christians, those things never happened either. Part of the point I was trying to make, if Christianity as history was correct then it would have been something Mattias would have shared with Josephus and then the eventual presence of some number of Christians in Josephus’s life by the time Josephus reached his twenties (that never happened either, because they did not yet exist). So all I’m saying is as part of my case which I’ve been arguing to others is ZERO evidence of any of this regarding Josephus/Mattias helps prove the Christian history is not history, just more fable. I probably confused things intertwining the celestial Jesus with the attempted historical Jesus. Anyway this generated a lot of good information so thanks for everything. I bought one of your books for Kindle and will be starting it soon
Why? Not everyone attended every crucifixion. Priests I doubt would even attend any (too much risk of ritual impurity). And Josephus records zero reports from his father about any crucified person, not even one. Yet there will have been hundreds and hundreds of them. And dozens and dozens of pretenders among them. Jesus wouldn’t even be noticed in that crowd.
The two events are not commensurate. The random execution of one nobody among hundreds is not the kind of thing a historian bothers to record (clearly, as Josephus records none of them). But a holocaust of babies and toddlers definitely is the kind of thing a historian bothers to record. That would be a once in a millennium event of massive infamy that would have indelible repercussions on the entire politics of the region.
Josephus doesn’t record other major events in Rome affecting Jews (the Claudian expulsion of Jews, for example). So he was clearly inclined to not mention atrocities against Jews in Rome (and in 64, Christians would be classified as Jews). So we can’t use this argument for silence either.
The bottom line is that if Jesus existed, he had to be a nobody. Nobodies don’t get mentions in histories. Because they are nobodies.
It’s doubtful Matthias ever even heard of or saw Jesus (any more than he will have heard of or seen any of dozens of other nobodies executed for the mere perception of inciting rebellion); even less likely he’d ever think it worth the bother of mentioning to his son; and even less likely his son would see any point in including it in his histories (because it will have been too irrelevant and trivial; compare the messianic pretenders who get killed that Josephus did include: all make far bigger splashes than Jesus, so Jesus simply wouldn’t make the cut).
I should also add that a historical Jesus doesn’t require a crucifixion either. The Talmud has Jesus stoned to death, and not in Jerusalem but a different city, and not for sedition but sorcery. And, yes, a hundred years earlier, when Romans weren’t even there; but suppose all they have wrong is the date. If Jesus was “really” executed for sorcery by stoning, like many another poor soul, even in Jerusalem much less elsewhere, he’d be even less on anyone’s radar, and thus even less likely to be mentioned anywhere.
So there is no way to attack minimal historicity with your line of reasoning. It rests on too many improbabilities.
The most you can make out of this is that Jesus can’t have been as famous as the Gospels portray. But that’s what minimal historicity means. And most mainstream scholars are already on board with that.
Dr. Carrier I was just watching your recenty interview “An Easter Chat with Richard Carrier”. At the 58:30 minute mark there is a Chat question that pops up on the screen that asks the following:
“Would you go on Matt Dillghunty’s ‘The Hangup’?
I listen closely but I think you guys were so caught up on your slavery in the Bible discussion at that very moment that you never actually answered that specific question. I would personally like to see that happen because I think Matt (like most Atheist’s) are of the position that while there was no gospel Jesus there was most likely (if not most certainly) an historical figure.
I would like for someone like Matt to hear out your argument and see voice whatever objections or doubts that he might have on mythicisim after hearing your argument.
I did get to saying later (if you wait for it in that stream) that I’d be delighted to be on Dillahunty’s show. He just has to ask. He knows I’m down for it. So it’s up to him.
Bart Erhman remains a distinguished academic who single handedly made textual criticism a popular topic and brought about counter apologetics. His wide range of books are though and full of useful reference material.
Which makes it more a pain to hear him spin things one struggles to feel he accepts: eg, source of gospels, Q, brother of the lord, people meeting Jesus, external sources (there are none), etc etc.
I lament that I feel like a conspiracy nutter when I observe such flaws.
The next person that says “all scholars agree” … They can’t even agree on when Easter is!
Your comment inspires me to add that when it isn’t a subject he is arrogantly sloppy with or dismissive of, Ehrman does sterling work. All his peer-reviewed monographs are decisive studies in their respective subjects (from Orthodox Corruption of Scripture to Forgery and Counter-Forgery). And even most of his pop-market books are decent surveys of what they aim at (not sterling, and experts can disagree here and there, but not disasters like DJE: see my review, for example, of How Jesus Became God).
It’s when he doesn’t want to do the work that he does poorly. Like when he sloppily assumed Acharya S “made up” the penis-nosed statue she spins yarns about. He didn’t even check (a cardinal sin for any real scholar). And then tried to lie about not checking when he got caught—rather than simply admitting he didn’t check, apologizing for the error, and revising his argument. Which attempt at a rebuttal to being caught making a mistake is also lazy and arrogant.
Why this subject inspires such indolence and irresponsibility in him I do not know. But it’s so well documented now, that that is what is happening is a fact beyond reasonable dispute. Frankly, it’s bizarre.
Hello Dr. Carrier. I hope you are well and congratulations on your new life changes.
Great article. I was listening to the Ehrman podcast about historicity. At timestamp 7:30 Ehrman says: “Matthew, Mark and Luke did not know they were writing the Bible. They weren’t writing scripture.”
To me this seems like a very slippery issue given mimesis of Hebrew scripture that informs much of the mythology in the synoptics. I guess technically he is correct that they weren’t aware that their literary works would eventually become part of a New Testament. But I’m not so sure we can say that they weren’t intending to write scripture given their sources and method of composition. it seems that they intended to reveal the culmination of the Hebrew tradition of salvation history. This seems like writing scripture to me.
Anyway, I just wondered what you thought about this.
Thanks.
What Dr. Ehrman means is that they were not conscious of scribing sacred books to be included in “a canon” of god-breathed Scripture. They were just writing stories. And they were not conscious of what they were writing being packaged with anything else. And they were not conscious of what they were writing then being declared god-breathed Scripture, a “New Testament.” That was all invented after the fact.
He does not mean they were not conscious of using the same techniques as the composers of Scripture or that they were not conscious of deliberately emulating its content and genres and modes, or that they were therefore “just objective historians.” Ehrman is quite clear he agrees they are religious propaganda, built on a model of familiar Scriptures, and even emulating them in various ways.
I would argue they were hoping to supplant them in some sense. But they don’t declare that their purpose, and that isn’t what Ehrman is talking about. Remember, when they wrote, there was no Old Testament either; that was invented in the second century. Before then there were just scattered Scriptures, and everyone disagreed on which ones to revere as god-breathed.
Rather, what Ehrman means is that each Gospel author was writing their own Gospel, for their own audience, in their own place and time, separately from the others’ control or concerns (they are intentionally responding to each other, but they aren’t colluding; to the contrary, they are trying to supplant and disprove each other’s differing aims). So they were not writing material “for inclusion in the New Testament.”
Therefore, we cannot dismiss them as all just “chapters in the New Testament,” as all just parts of one book. They aren’t. They were turned into that only long after their authors died.
With respect to “Brother of the Lord” passage, did the Greek language at that time have definite and indefinite articles? In other words, does the passage translate as “a brother of the Lord”, or “the brother of the Lord? Or is there simply no article in the original? Thanks!
They lacked the indefinite article. And used the definite article differently than we do (e.g. Christians are often addressed as “the brother” in Paul). So it’s not possible to use the article to answer questions like this.
See my discussion of the effect of definite articles on usage of “brother” in OHJ, pp. 589-90 n. 99 (cf. pp. 583-84 n. 93).
Again, many thanks!
Could I try out one last one on you? If is not worth your time no need to respond and others reading here might get something out of it. Or if you can find any fault with the argument. This is an argument I’ve been making to Christians online, instead of acknowledging the timeline they hide behind dogma. Thanks again!
If Jesus didn’t exist, the apostles didn’t exist
(Catholic Church admits those named did not write the gospels, including even Luke)
Had apostles existed their primary teaching would have been the dual bloodlines
To prove Jesus was descended from David, in order to fulfill prophecy
Dual bloodlines the whole basis of the religion, had it come down through apostles
Matthew doesn’t know of the two bloodlines
Matthew needs a bloodline, so invents Joseph (who never existed) descent from David
Bad news, Joseph wasn’t Jesus’s dad. . .
So Matthew has to infer Jesus “a legal adoption” to have him related through Joseph
Apparently that wasn’t good enough for some Christians, or potential Jewish converts
So years later along comes Luke to patch yet another hole in Matthew:
Luke invents a bloodline from David through Mary (she also never existed)
“Heli must have been the father of Mary”
In this way Jesus can be both descended from David & avoid the curse placed on Jeconiah
So Matthew who should have known about both bloodlines, doesn’t
Luke suddenly comes up with new information never previously taught
If, as the early Church claimed, the religion spread like wildfire after Jesus crucifixion
The two bloodlines would have been basic knowledge for every Christian
Instead all the evidence points to a history of Jesus being invented on the fly
That is a non sequitur. If Jesus didn’t exist, the apostles were having revelations of him. Because we have good evidence they existed, precisely the kind of evidence we don’t have for Jesus; and explicit evidence that they met him in revelations.
The Evangelists (the authors of the Gospels) are not the Apostles. They probably weren’t even alive at the time. And obviously they existed too (someone wrote those books); they just will have had different names than were later assigned.
Also a non sequitur. There is no reason they would need that. There are half a dozen different ways to be convinced someone was the Scion of David. And there is no evidence of their ever teaching that particular one.
Actually, Matthew has to satisfy Philippians 2 by having Jesus made by God and not produced by sex. So he invents a genealogy to at least give the veneer of a connection, while still preserving the divine miracle he wanted to sell. If he cared about bloodlines, he’d have given the genealogy of Mary. That he didn’t means he didn’t care about it.
Note that it was a Jewish lore that the dying messiah would be a “Son of Joseph” (and the final messiah, who would resurrect the other one, a “Son of David”). That’s per the Talmud. There are hints of such a doctrine already at Qumran. Christianity just merged the two messiahs into one. That’s why the name “Joseph” is picked to be Jesus’s father, and why Joseph is then linked to David. This appears to be a Christian innovation, although the idea may already have started before them in other fringe sects like at Qumran.
He does not.
That’s not in the text.
Luke wrote: “He was the son, so it was thought, of Joseph, the son of Heli.” No Mary.
Thanks . . never occurred to me something like Cephas visionary group might go forth as “apostles” as did Paul. “Heli must have been the father of Mary” . . . I got that from a believer website ebible.com article below if the link goes through. Not saying you’re wrong, just noting the contrast. The author, who I now see might not be any kind of expert, seems very important to him that Matthew doesn’t provide enough of a genealogy — “The two problems with that geneaology.” Then he goes on to say: “Since it would have been necessary for the fulfillment of Messianic prophecy for Jesus to have been biologically (as well as royally) descended from David, Luke’s wording indicates that Heli must have been the father of Mary, and thus the father-in-law of Joseph, which would have made Joseph Heli’s son from a legal standpoint, as recorded by Luke.”
https://ebible.com/questions/21536-who-was-in-the-lineage-of-jesus-nathan-or-solomon
Never trust Christian apologists. This one is lying. As they oft do. Luke never says any of this. And there were several ways to achieve Davidic status, not just that one (as indeed the Gospels outright depict).
What is the best recent book that goes into detail on the many Jewish sects that existed before 70 A.D.? Thanks!
There is no one-stop shop for that.
I had to scour dozens of books and articles and sources to collect my list in The Empty Tomb (Heady Days section in the chapter on the Spiritual Body). To my knowledge, no one else has ever done this.
So your only option is to get that book, check those pages, and follow up the sources and reference books cited.
But do note, we know almost nothing about almost all of them. Usually all we know is that they existed and what they were called. Sometimes we get some peculiar fact or two about them. Only a handful do we have more information on.
I was disappointed that Bart didn’t address any of the mythicist objections. But the fact that he’s even talking about this is a sign that mythicism is gaining popularity. Bart said a few years ago he wasn’t intending on talking about this topic again.
I was attacked (4-5 years ago) in The Atheist Experience FB group by an admin for daring to say that Jesus may have not existed (I didn’t even say that he didn’t exist). I cited your book, and she said “Richard Carrier isn’t a scholar of early Christianity”, to which I replied, “He’s book is peer-reviewed”. That was the end of it. I don’t think I would get attacked for this today though.
Anyway, as a layman one of the most interesting issues regarding the gospels is the origin of the information that’s in Matthew and Luke that isn’t in Mark, and the information that’s in Luke that isn’t in Matthew. Most scholars think they were using some secret sources, whereas you think they made it up, right?
If there were using independent sources, would you say that proves that Jesus was historical?
The theory isn’t “secret” sources, just lost sources. But given that…
(1) No. I don’t think they had sources. And I’m not alone in thinking that (e.g. see Robyn Faith Walsh and the Gospels as Literature).
(2) No. Even if they had sources, that in and of itself would not even increase the probability of historicity. You have to build a much larger stack of assumptions (or prove those assumptions probable with evidence, but still it will be a stack) to get from “sources” to “historicity.”
For examples of what I mean see my Ehrman Recap on points §27 and §28 and my discussion in this article above of the Sermon on the Mount (if Q existed, it was a post-war, foreign, Greek text essentially just as fictional as Mark).
(3) I should add that I do think the Gospels used literary sources (Paul’s epistles; the Septuagint; etc.). But I think that isn’t the question you were asking (as that could not even in principle support historicity). See for example Mark’s Use of Paul’s Epistles and How We Know Acts Is a Fake History.
(4) And do note, my Ph.D. is in ancient intellectual history with a specialization in religion in the Early Roman Empire (one such religion might come to mind), my dissertation included a study of ancient Christian education, I completed courses in New Testament Greek, and Paleography and Papyrology and ancient Greek Linguistics, I have defended three papers on Christianity to Society of Biblical Literature conferences, and I have published five peer-reviewed studies (two of them full monographs) on ancient Christian history. I am a scholar of early Christianity.
By contrast, Bart Ehrman has not even a single degree in history. All his degrees are in theology and textual criticism. So if Ehrman counts as a historian of early Christianity, so do I. Indeed, my focus better prepares me to evaluate the historicity of things, as it extensively includes study in the actual literary, cultural, religious, and historiographical context of early Christianity and its writings (indeed, one of my PhD majors was literally ancient historiography). The attempt to invent a “No True Scottsman” dismissal of my work I have already denounced in sections §2 and §21 of my Ehrman Recap (cf. §22 as well).
Why do so many scholars think they had sources? (they even named them: Q, L, M, etc.) Even many secular scholars support this theory. Maybe it’s because it’s been considered an established fact for a long time and most take it for granted, like Jesus’s historicity?
I think the criticism of your credentials is insincere. Anyone with a PhD in ancient Roman and Greek history should have the skills to study the origins of Christianity! LMAO! Even without the courses in Christianity and the NT that you did! I think people like Bart are going after you for that because they’ve built their entire careers on the assumption that Jesus existed. I don’t think they would have said anything about your credentials if you were a historicist. And you defending your credentials feels like a small win for them.
BTW, I usually receive email notifications when you or someone else replies to my comments on your blog. I didn’t receive one this time or the time before this one. Just letting you know.
I don’t know how to fix that technical issue. The feature has been dropped from my WordPress theme. I don’t know how to get it back. These things have become too impossibly technical for normal people to fix without large wodges of cash to pay people to fix them. So alas, it’s just a dead feature now.
This is a test message to see if it will be accepted.
I don’t know what you are testing. But my Comments & Moderation Policy is here.
Hi Richard, watched about 20 hours of your you tube content this week | Ive always been familiar with you but Im curious about a couple things | Ehrman says he doesnt know any historians who use bayes theorem except you and swinburn | I realize this is just a claim about his personal knowledge | You seem more in the skeptical and scientific camp (as well as a historian) and on the face of it it seems perfectly normal to suggest that all historians use bayes theorem subconsciously to make statements about probabilities etc but you go one step further by taking it a mathematical/logical route instead of just subjectively labeling 10%/20%/60%/95% certainties etc
can you link anything to read up on that show using bayes theorem as a historian is not as fringe as ehrman makes it seem? or any peer reviewed articles where logicians/mathematicians make it clear it is perfectly acceptable for historians to use it? or that they accept your usage of the math in your books as correct and not wrongly applied?
What I like about you is you appear to be very logical and rational in your approach | I always liked Ehrman too so I had to put aside my bias about him and listen to your arguments with an open mind and honestly you make a lot of great points | namely the fact Pauls writings are actually quite wtf weird shit going on and maybe its not so simple to interpret his words in ways that are currently the “consensus” | and you make very good points about the “consensus” being tainted by so many centuries of christian “scholars” etc | like habermas making a huge deal about WOMEN being the ones who discover the tomb and how its IMPOSSIBLE for the story to be fake because NOBODY would have invented the story because women’s testimony was WORTHLESS blah blah blah (even with no knowledge at all I can just tell that is a bullshit laughable claim) – like do we expect all the children and husbands and brothers of all women to tell their mother/wife to STFU if she tries to spread the gospel or teach her experience to them inside their own homes etc LMFAO WLC/habermas both use this argument and its just ridiculous
anyway nice content I really enjoyed it all and got me thinking a lot
It is correct that few historians use Bayes explicitly; but all use it implicitly, and don’t realize it (as proved by Aviezer Tucker, who is a philosopher of history and thus closer to “a historian” than Richard Swinburne who has no relevant qualifications in either history or philosophy of history, and is a crank).
There are some of us though. Apart from historians writing in stylometrics (an obvious place to use it but one that feels more like statistics than history), in Proving History I cite archaeologists not only using it but arguing for its wider adoption. I also cite an example of political historians using it as analysts in the CIA.
Indeed it is employed in almost every field concerned with matters of fact—history is one of the bizarre last resistors, largely because humanities majors are terrified of math. Even though probability is math, and history is about determining nothing else.
More recently, I wrote on Bayes’ Theorem’s employment by historian Efraim Wallach in historical eristics (the study of the arguments historians make and positions they take), indeed on a matter close at hand (the abandonment of reliance on the historicity of Moses and the Exodus in Biblical studies).
Fear of math (or worse, even logic, and the mathematics of probability is the logic of probability) is indeed a serious defect holding back history as a field, making it over-reliant on “intuition” and “prestige” as core methods rather than anything properly empirical. This was the subject of historian D.H. Fischer’s book Historians’ Fallacies.
ty for the reply
I am curious if you have ever considered writing a book that does a comparative analysis between 3 or 4 ultra famous figures of history | such as genghis khan, alexander, caesar, napoleon etc and comparing them to the evidence of Jesus
I am not sure if there even are books that are written about the existence of alexander, Caesar or w/e bc maybe it truly is akin to arguing flat earth etc
but if you believe the evidence for jesus is so weak as to conclude it is more likely he does not exist than does | Id loooove to see how your methodology is used to treat other historical figures
I would buy this book immediately and maybe there are others that would interested in such a book
I already did! I devoted a whole chapter to such examples in Jesus from Outer Space.
In OHJ I already did Alexander the Great and Socrates. I repeat those and do more examples in JFOS.
That thing about Pontius Pilate reminds me of the 10/42 nonsense: “If you ignore all the best evidence for this other guy and only focus on what’s comparable to what we have for Jesus, then there’s more evidence for Jesus!” But then even that turns out to be false.
It seems to me that a figure like Ehrman is ideally placed as controlled opposition, giving a reasonable erudite appearance (what passes for it in U.S. religious studies I guess) while upholding Christian ideology. One of these more sophisticated methods of defense you’ve mentioned? Remember Evans citing Ehrman as a “skeptic,” clearly his go-to voice of neutrality. Seems a lucrative and comfortable role for someone enmeshed in Christian circles. A centrist who can play challenger while not being too challenging. Taking a critical stance to make his ultimate conclusion—locking in the narrative Christians depend on— not seem so foregone.
A bit like how I think of our two-party system suggestive of multiple viewpoints—democracy!— despite the parties differing very little when it comes to their core assumptions about the role of the U.S. in the world, established elitist hierarchies, capitalism, business, Wall Street.
On a different note, I’m curious what milieu you picture the Greek writers/compilers of the Bible moving amongst. Ultra-conservatives hoping to quash unseemly wild or upstart elements they saw in society by reviving fantasies of stern desert patriarchs?
To be fair, I think Ehrman is just stubborn and arrogant and uninterested in seriously considering the issue. There may be motives underlying those things, but too many are possible to know which.
But yes. The Gospels are socio-political propaganda, although their agendas are more bizarre than most today (closer to the modern Armageddon Lobby than to MAGA, for example), and not analogous enough to modern political devisions to place them.
By modern notions they are both conservatives attacking liberals and at the same time radicals attacking conservatives, and yet are not describable in any way as centrist; their beliefs lie on both extremes, willy nilly, with no clustering that matches modern sociopolitical divisions. Like, Quaker Fundamentalists or something.
And such extreme and wacky ideologies would be all the more likely to crop up at a time of tremendous upheaval, like with the rise of the Roman empire and the impact of that on Greek society?
That is essentially my point in OHJ, Element 29, on the anthropology of “revolution cults,” which relates to the condition of a recent imperialism by a more advanced civilization upon a traditional one, forcing change in reaction.
But the effect could be expected in other conditions of similar construct. QAnon is in many ways a revolution cult, produced by merging a traditional way of life now increasingly rendered obsolete (Christianity in particular; traditional conservative values in general) with the “ways of the empire” that are making it obsolete (in this case, secularism, scientism, globalism, and social progress), to try and produce something superior to both. It’s delusion all the way down. But so was Christianity, which was just a supernaturalist conspiracy theory, which is now being replaced by secular ones.
I have OHJ now. Great read so far. I look forward to that part. I’m beginning to think that positive revolutions have no chance with our species. Even the so-called Enlightenment was twisted to the ends of capitalist patriarchy et voilà our age of unprecedented destruction. Apocalypse cults rejoice, I guess.
It is true that quantum leaps are not a real thing in human history. Progress is slow. And a corrupting resistance is persistent. But net progress is still measurable.
The ups and downs of gay rights over the last two hundred years reflect the point: progress, backlash, progress, backlash; but like global warming, the trend is nevertheless still up. This is most clear when comparing the state of things in 1925 with now (particularly in in socially advanced countries that are not the United States, but even in the United States).
MLK’s analysis was correct: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” It’s just that noticeable progress takes longer than a human lifetime, and not on all fronts at the same time; and people with a moral spirit are justifiably impatient.
Yes. And I suppose momentum can build quickly. Sometimes even in a positive direction. I guess we would just need the critical mass of consciousness.
(Your article ‘…Walsh and the Gospels as Literature’ is also providing great context concerning the Bible writers.)
Do you see any rhetorical value in responding to this with “Well, even better than that – Paul was Jesus’s brother!”?
I suspect this goes straight into the too-clever-by-half bin…