Youtuber Captain DadPool recently published a short video (Responding to Godless Engineer’s Recent Attacks) that so aptly captures the backwards methodology of defenders of the historicity of Jesus it will be productive to analyze. Especially as it supplements my last article on Ehrman’s inept methodology (Did Jesus Even Exist? Bart Ehrman’s Latest Take), which consists of substituting assumptions for facts, and ignoring evidence against everything he says.

I plan to use this article as a model in future, because it captures everything wrong with historicity scholarship today, from the internet to academia. And it is a useful teaching tool regarding sound vs. unsound method. So for utility I’ll provide a table of contents:

• Just Like Christian Apologetics
• Analogy: Resurrection Apologetics
• How to Fail at Debate Prep
• What Mythicism Supposedly Hinges On
• Tricks vs. Facts
• How Clear Is Romans 1:3?
• Emotional vs. Rational Thought
• How to Do This Like a Rational Person
• Who Says Galatians 4:4 Is Allegory?
• What’s Up with 1 Corinthians 11:23?
• Who Are the Brothers of the Lord?
• Josephus and Tacitus Said What?
• Confusing Possible with Probable
• Facts Are Not Workarounds
• Arguing from “What’s Popular”
• Conclusion

Each discussion will take some time, because it always takes a great deal less time to make a false claim than it does to prove it false (one of the reasons YouTube is such an unreliable medium).

Just Like Christian Apologetics

DadPool employs the same toolbox used by Christian apologists that I called out in my other article this month (How We Know Acts Is a Fake History), which I summarized as:

(1) straw man (don’t describe or respond to the actual arguments of real experts, but only fake arguments that are easy to tear down); (2) then leave evidence out (everything that undermines your narrative and you can’t explain away, don’t mention it); (3) then argue backwards: rather than subjecting a hypothesis to bona fide falsification tests, decide what you want to be true, and then cherry-pick any evidence you can spin to support that narrative (ignore everything that doesn’t fit; distort anything that can be made to fit; and fallaciously argue from whatever is left to the conclusion that you need to be true). If you feel you have to, you can deploy a fourth rule: (4) make up whatever you need…

DadPool adds a fifth tactic common to apologists (and DadPool isn’t a Christian mind you; he’s just borrowing their methods here): accuse your opposition of doing a thing that they actually aren’t doing but you are. The main theme of DadPool’s apologetic is that mythicists are “dismissing data,” such that if you put the data back in that they are disregarding, their conclusion crumbles. But in actual fact, we aren’t doing that—we are including all the data and drawing the conclusion that then follows; DadPool is the one leaving data out to get the conclusion he wants. Historicists are the ones dismissing data.

That this is “Apologetics 101” I document in Bayesian Counter-Apologetics: Ten Arguments for God Destroyed. If the only way to get your conclusion is to ignore information, it is your conclusion that’s false (or unfounded). This is why it is so important to test your beliefs by trying your darnedest to refute them first. If, instead, you are trying your darnedest to avoid such falsification, you are an apologist protecting a dogma, not a critical thinker desiring to know the truth (see The Scary Truth about Critical Thinking). Taking up and using the apologist’s toolkit is not unique to Christians. Most secular conspiracy theories and political ideologies are defended with that same toolkit. There are apologists for everything, from Libertarianism to the Anti-Nuclear Movement. Christianity is not the only false belief defended this way.

Accordingly, my focus today will be on Captain DadPool’s methodology, the way he (at least claims he) is arriving at his conclusions. Of course in the process we’ll see his arguments debunked as well. But you won’t have learned anything (nor will he), if you miss what I am saying here about method. I will also add the caveat here that, whatever DadPool may have in mind, I am only talking about peer-reviewed mythicism, not “internet mythicism” or “amateur mythicism” or “crank mythicism,” but only the serious kind, that has passed formal academic review (and thus I am only defending people, on the internet or elsewhere, who are in turn only talking about that). Conflating these two things is another common apologetic tactic, a standard deployment of straw man rather than steel man argumentation. So I will expect anyone claiming to objectively assess this debate will heed this fact.

Analogy: Resurrection Apologetics

Doubting historicity, I have pointed out before, is exactly like doubting the resurrection of the corpse of Jesus (see How Did Christianity Switch to a Historical Jesus?). There is, literally, no more evidence for the one than the other; and there is evidence against both; and attempts to “rescue” one as a fact are identical to the attempts made to rescue the other. For example, “someone would have gainsaid it” doesn’t work for resurrection apologetics any more than it does for historicity—and (importantly) for all the same reasons. Of course, the resurrection has the added hit that its prior probability is vanishingly small, whereas a historical Jesus is totally plausible (which is why I find the probability of historicity to be trillions of times higher than the probability of the resurrection). But this just means we are comparing two plausible theories: a real man mythologized, or a mythical man historicized. Unlike resurrections, we have tons of examples of both real men mythologized and mythical men historicized, and tons of evidence that creating the latter, particularly within religions, was a fad in the very era Jesus appears. So neither theory is extraordinary. Both have a fair shot at being true. It just depends on the evidence.

But imagine if a Christian apologist came up to you and said you were just “dismissing” all the evidence for the genuine resurrection of Jesus, like, “We have five hundred witnesses!” You might answer with something about hallucination, exaggeration, hearsay, and so on. Then the Christian scoffs at you and says, “You are just making all those things up to explain away the evidence.” See, you are just “assuming” these five hundred witnesses hallucinated Jesus hang out and have dinner with them. Worse, they say, “Hallucination doesn’t work that way. You can’t have five hundred people hallucinate the same thing like that. So what you are assuming is bonkers even—a wild assumption, laughably contrived!”

How would you respond? Well, if you are smart and informed, you would calmly present all the evidence that they are the ones assuming things without evidence—like that these witnesses “hung out and had dinner with Jesus,” rather than just hallucinated a nebulous light in the sky during an ecstatic trance and believed it was Jesus (see Then He Appeared to Over Five Hundred Brethren at Once!). “But,” they mockingly say, “you don’t have any evidence they hallucinated a nebulous light in the sky, you are just making that up!” To which you would reply that you don’t need evidence of that (obviously accounts of what these people actually saw were not preserved for us to answer this question so conclusively). All you need is evidence that that is the kind of thing that does happen, and that it would explain the entire content of this testimony—since 1 Corinthians 15:6 doesn’t mention “hanging out” or “having dinner”; those were legends first appearing lifetimes later (see Resurrection: Faith or Fact? My Bonus Reply).

And so it would go. They would say, “You are just assuming those are legends that arose later!” You would say, “No, we are merely describing the fact that they appear only later—you are the one assuming they predate the first we ever hear of them.” And so on. At every turn, we are forced to produce long lists of evidence: of the science and history of religious trances and ecstasies; of the nature of hallucination in religious contexts; of the actual words present and absent from the text of Paul; of the late date of anything more fanciful; even ancillary supporting evidence, such that in the Book of Acts Jesus only ever appears in the form of amorphous lights, that Paul says Jesus appears “inside” of people, that Paul would have used details from those later legends, had they existed then, to argue his points about the nature of the resurrection body in the very chapter he mentions these witnesses. And so on.

Then the Christian says:

Oh, good sir. You have all these convenient little ‘tricks’ to try and dissuade yourself from believing that these five hundred witnesses actually met and had dinner with a physical Jesus, even though that’s plainly what the evidence says. At every turn you just explain away that evidence with whatever assumptions you need to get it to go away. And you try to dazzle us with long strings of unrelated facts, like about other religions or what Paul said on other topics, and you recite them all at the same time in Latin while you spin around and throw salt over your shoulder, and boom! That’s where you get a bunch of crazy Christians confusing lights for Jesus. Whereas we have five hundred witnesses to his physical bodily presence among them, touching and handling, and eating together! Ha!

And then you face-palm their dumbitude. Of course, they are the one relying on assumptions. And all those “long strings of facts” you presented them are actually relevant to establishing the plausibility of the alternative explanation of one sentence in Paul that you are proposing. Sure, those facts don’t “prove” those “hundreds” of witnesses saw an amorphous light (they might have seen any number of other things, from a Jesus inside their hearts, to someone else they mistook for Jesus—the New Testament, after all, attests both those things happening). But they do prove the Christian needs enough evidence to rule that all out before they can “rule in” the miracle they want to believe in. And they have no such evidence. That’s our point: because that possibility can’t be ruled out, resurrection can’t be ruled in. This does not require “ruling in” the alternative explanation. We only need show the Christian cannot know from that one sentence in Paul whether it was an actual resurrection and not a natural occurrence of a kind widely documented. We aren’t “pulling tricks” to “get around” the evidence. We are pointing out defects in the evidence, and doing it not with assumptions, but with additional facts.

Keep this analogy in mind as we proceed. And note the analogy holds no matter what thread you prefer. If you don’t like hallucination theory, maybe you think it’s more likely there were no “five hundred witnesses” and you want to focus on that being made up, all the same reasoning follows. How you would have to defend that point; how they would respond. It’s all the same. They will accuse you of “tricks,” of relying on too many “assumptions,” of “making stuff up,” of “explaining evidence away.” And the reasons these dismissals of what you are saying are false or impertinent will again be the same.

How to Fail at Debate Prep

After an introduction (minute 1), Captain DadPool’s argument flows as follows:

• Minute 2: He more or less says that Neal Sendlak made the best video to crib from if you want to win a debate with me on the matter of historicity.

This is a very strange thing to say, because Neal’s video was incoherent, unhinged, and didn’t actually address any of my arguments, or even describe them correctly (see The Curious Case of Gnostic Informant: Reaction vs. Research). So it would be a disaster if you used that to prep for a debate with me on the subject. This is indicative, because it foreshadows DadPool’s inability to even correctly state his opponent’s position (failing the Dennett Rule right out of the gate). Because if he could do that (and as we’ll see in the next bullet, he can’t), he would know there is nothing in Neal’s video that is even usable to debate me with, and in fact much that is so embarrassingly false (like, that Donald Trump scores as a Rank-Raglan hero, or that that would even matter, or that Pliny mentioned the town of Nazareth, or even that I ever argued Nazareth didn’t exist) that you would look particularly stupid using it in a debate.

This isn’t so much an argument as a punt (“Go see Neal’s video for the arguments”), but the methodological fail here is the key takeaway: DadPool is giving bad advice, because he doesn’t fact-check anything. He doesn’t know Neal’s arguments didn’t address mine, that they relied on factually false premises, and weren’t even coherent, and were often wildly crank (Trump is a Rank-Raglan hero and Pliny mentioned Nazareth!). Which should warn you off trusting anything he says, much less recommending it. But the only way someone could miss all this is if they aren’t even checking if what Neal said was true. That is the cardinal sin of bad methodology. Good method is doing the opposite. Always check.

We’ll see DadPool fuck up this Rule Number One several times. But first let’s look at what a rational approach would produce:

(1) DadPool would first ask himself if Neal is even correctly describing my arguments. And thus he would check first (and he claims to have a marked-up copy of On the Historicity of Jesus, so he should be able to do this). He’d then notice Neal isn’t even mentioning, much less responding to my actual arguments (Neal only mentions my conclusions; not any of my arguments to those conclusions). That would immediately red flag his video as unusable for debate prep.

And…

(2) DadPool would also ask himself if anything Neal is saying is even true. And thus he would check first, before trusting any of it. He’d then notice Neal’s arguments are often resting on explicitly false premises: Trump cannot score as a Rank-Raglan hero, he’s not even dead; I never argue Nazareth didn’t exist, but in fact have publicly debunked that claim; and Philo cannot mean he sees the same creature in Zechariah 6 as in Numbers 23, because in the very same place he explicitly says one is good and the other his evil enemy; and so on.

What Mythicism Supposedly Hinges On

The first actual argument Captain DadPool himself offers begins thus:

• Minute 3: “The mythicist position hinges on taking a passage from Philo […] and a passage from the Ascension of Isaiah and combining them, and reciting them both at the same time in Latin while you spin around and throw salt over your shoulder, and boom! That’s where we get a sect of Jews that believed in Jesus specifically as a pre-incarnate being that would be executed in the firmament.”

Notice the explicit straw man: I use neither passage to prove Jesus didn’t exist; while literally none of the evidence I did use to argue that is listed in this sentence—a sentence supposedly describing what “the mythicist position hinges on.” This is exactly what Christian apologists do. Make up a completely false argument, claim it is our argument, debunk the fake argument they just invented, and then claim to have debunked our actual argument. I cannot believe I have had to say this repeatedly now, as it is explicitly already said in the book DadPool held up and claims to have read: I do not use any passages in Philo as evidence Jesus didn’t exist; and I weigh the evidence in the Ascension of Isaiah so weakly that it has almost no impact on the probability Jesus existed.

My case rests, instead, on completely different evidence:

1. The rapid mythologization of Jesus into a class of usually mythical savior-heroes.
2. The strange omissions in the Book of Acts and the Epistles of Paul, Clement, and Hebrews.
3. And a cluster of oddities in Hegesippus, Ignatius, and the Ascension of Isaiah.

See Doing the Math: Historicity of Jesus Edition for a run-down. Neal mentions none of these (except for an incoherent stab at the “usually mythical” argument). So his video will not prep you to debate me on this at all. But more importantly, the third bullet on this list I find carries fairly little weight, and that’s even with all three items together; alone, their effect would be nigh invisible. So trying to argue that the Ascension of Isaiah proves nothing would be futile in a debate: I’d just agree with you (as I already do in the book: OHJ, pp. 45, 48, 357) and then knock you on the evidence I actually rely on. Similarly, we’ll shortly see DadPool trying to rehabilitate some passages in Paul as evidence, indicating that he somehow doesn’t know I also agree there too: I count most of them as evidence for historicity. All we’d be arguing in a real debate is how much (all things considered) that evidence weighs. Which is also nothing Neal’s video will prepare you for (or DadPool’s for that matter).

So notice that none of the actual evidence, nor any of my actual arguments from it, are in DadPool’s summary of what my case “rests on.” He has fabricated a fake version of my argument, made childish fun of it (replacing all my actual arguments even pertaining to these passages with “mumbo jumbo,” and thus falsely implying there aren’t any), and then claimed victory. This is exactly the same behavior of a Christian apologist. The methodological rule to learn here is: get your opponent’s argument right. No straw men. Only steel men. You need to be able to correctly state what their argument is, before you can claim any competence to rebut it. Until you learn that rule, and live it, you’ll just be generating vacuous drivel, not actually rebutting or proving anything.

And yet DadPool can’t even describe the theory correctly, much less the arguments and evidence presented for it. “A sect of Jews that believed in Jesus specifically as a pre-incarnate being that would be executed in the firmament” is incoherent. How does a pre-incarnate being get executed? Obviously that can only happen post-incarnation. That the first Christians believed Jesus had been a pre-incarnate celestial being (and became one again after his death) is a mainstream position many scholars concur on and is stated explicitly by our earliest source, Paul, multiple times (see Bart Ehrman on How Jesus Became God and Chrissy Hansen on the Pre-Existent Jesus).

So the only part of the mythicist thesis that even differs from mainstream historicism is that this sect of Jews believed Jesus’s incarnation and execution took place in the sky (the lower part of the heavens subject to corruption and death). Plutarch outright says this is what was believed of Osiris, the immensely popular savior God known all over the empire and especially in Egypt, a province directly adjacent to Judea. Public stories had Osiris as a historical man on Earth; private stories held that that was all allegory for his incarnation and murder in the sky. So the question is, could this be what happened in the evolution of Jesus cult as well? That’s the theory DadPool is actually supposed to be answering. But you can’t answer that by ignoring all evidence pertaining to it; and least of all if you aren’t even capable of describing it.

Tricks vs. Facts

Near the end of minute 3 and into minute 4, Captain DadPool starts his second argument:

• Minute 4: Mythicists “have all these convenient little tricks to try and dissuade you from believing that they’re actually talking about a physical Jesus.”

DadPool goes on to admit to his faulty wording: we do not say they didn’t believe in a physical Jesus, we say the opposite. But that’s not the methodological goof here (since he corrects that). The methodological fail here is that DadPool doesn’t give any examples of what he means. He doesn’t present a single “trick” that is supposed to answer to this charge. There is a reason “Citation Needed” has become a joke on the internet. People often just declare things, but give no examples of it that people can then check, to see if what they declared is even true. Are there any “tricks” we deploy? DadPool just skips over that and jumps to some examples of passages he thinks support historicity that we find less convincing, but he never mentions any of the evidence we present for our take, nor seems to understand that his own evidence, the evidence he goes on to present, sometimes doesn’t even exist.

I’ll start with that, because it happens in his first example, and once we see how DadPool acts irrationally there, it will be clear how he does the same thing in the rest, so I can just refer back to the same general points. But notice one thing throughout what follows: I am not adding assumptions; I am adding facts, facts DadPool left out; facts that when brought back in, change every conclusion.

How Clear Is Romans 1:3?

In his attempt to give an example, Captain DadPool first comes up with this:

• Minute 5 (part 1): “They actually did believe he had a physical body, he just never came down to Earth. See, that’s how they explain away passages like Romans 1, specifically where it says Jesus was born of the Flesh and of the Seed of David: that seed was actually kept in a cosmic sperm bank in outer space.”

DadPool shows a translation of Romans 1:3 on screen here, underlining the phrase “born of a descendant of David.” I cannot tell if he knows if that translation is false or not, but the words he shows on the screen do not exist in Romans 1:3. The word “descendant,” not there. Nor is there any descendant “of” David. This is fake evidence (although DadPool isn’t the culprit who faked it), designed to produce the conclusion he is defending. Sound method would lead him to check if that translation is even true. And when he found it wasn’t, sound method would lead him to ask why those words aren’t there.

The actual words there are “came to be from the sperm of David.” The word that is there? Sperm. And not “sperm of a descendant of David,” but literally “the sperm of David.” And rather than saying Jesus was “begotten” (born) of that sperm, Paul oddly switches that usual idiom by choosing a different word, a more ambiguous word, that is non-specific as to whether this happened by birth or some other means. So this passage is not as clear as DadPool is making out. And that is a fact, not a trick. It is a fact he is ignoring, and not responding to, or even mentioning. But it is a fact we are paying attention to.

DadPool is also straw-manning our actual argument, by again falsely implying that we claim this passage entails or proves that Paul means Jesus had a body manufactured for him in the sky. That is not our argument. Not only have we allowed it could have a metaphorical meaning, whether it happened on Earth or not, and not only have we said this could refer to physical manufacture on Earth (just as is depicted in the Gospels), but we have also said this could just be an awkwardly weird way of indeed saying Jesus was a descendant of David. It is awkwardly weird: Paul’s unusual choice of vocabulary violates the standard idiom he is using, and he goes out of his way to be vague. So there is something “off” here. But that is the extent of our argument: not that Paul can’t or doesn’t mean “descendant of David,” but rather that we can’t be sure he does. Because he has chosen a very strange way to say it, a way that is actually ambiguous. That it is strange, that it is ambiguous, is a fact. It is not some trick we made up. And we have to attend to the facts; not ignore them like DadPool does.

DadPool is actually the one adding “assumptions” here (about what Paul means); we are the ones not adding assumptions. So when he accuses us of relying on more assumptions than historicists do, it’s actually the other way around: we are abandoning all assumptions and seeing what follows from just the facts. Historicists do this a lot: ignore all the assumptions they are relying on, while accusing us of adding assumptions that actually are facts (see my discussion in Kamil Gregor on the Historicity of Jesus). You’ll notice this happens all throughout his video, as we go through it below: each time, he is basing his conclusions on assumptions. We are instead asking what follows when we don’t adopt any assumptions, but ask solely what the facts are. Historicity thus rests on assumptions; Mythicism, on facts. (See my discussion of prominent and common examples in Did Jesus Even Exist? Bart Ehrman’s Latest Take.)

So, back to Romans 1:3: there Paul says (translating literally), “Concerning the son [of God], who came to be from seed of David in respect to flesh.” There are lots of things Paul could be saying here. Paul could be saying what the Gospel Nativity stories say: God manufactured a body for Jesus in the womb of Mary (or whoever his mother was), and yet somehow it still miraculously comes from the Seed of David (even though the Gospels explicitly say Joseph imparts no such seed; so where did God get it from?). Or Paul could mean something magical or metaphorical, that the body of Jesus becomes Davidic by adoption or divine miracle. Or, yes, he could mean “descent.” It’s just that the idiom “from sperm” (ek spermatos) in reference to ancestry would not ordinarily incorporate the word “come to be” (or even “born”). And nothing more specific is said. So Paul is being weird. And that’s a fact, not a trick. It is a fact you cannot ignore. Yet, DadPool ignores it, even pretends it doesn’t exist. Just like a Christian apologist. (And when confronted with this fact, dollars to doughnuts he will do exactly what a Christian apologist does: try to immediately invent some excuse from the armchair to make this fact go away; rather than what we do, which is look for facts and draw conclusions from the facts we do and don’t find.)

And remember: that things other than descent are entirely compatible with Paul’s unusual choice of words is not thereby proved to be what Paul meant. Our argument is that it only undoes any proof that he didn’t mean that. Its strangeness entails we can no longer assume what he means. A common straw man is to convert what was an argument against a thing being known to be true, into an argument for it being false (as the Christian did in my example regarding “the five hundred”). Those are not the same thing. Proving “we don’t know it’s true” takes less (and different) evidence than proving “it’s false.” And if DadPool were following a rational method here, he’d recognize they weren’t the same thing, and thus steel-man rather than straw-man what we’ve argued.

The actual fact is: Romans 1:3 is too ambiguous to use as a premise. Fact. Not trick. There is no handwaving or salt throwing here. The ambiguity is being proved with evidence (and I’ll present even more evidence in a moment). It is an actual fact that we can’t tell whether Paul is talking about Jesus being born as a descendant of David, or if he is talking about a cosmic act of God to produce the result required by Scripture, as later Gospels portray. And indeed, Paul appears to be alluding to that very Scripture here by this very choice of words, the prophecy of Nathan that the messiah would be directly produced from David’s sperm and not a mere distant descendant. Scripture required it. So obviously it would be believed, whatever it took to conceive how God would make it so (see Empirical Logic and Romans 1:3 and What Did Paul Mean in Romans 1:3?).

Emotional vs. Rational Thought

Ignoring all this, our actual evidence and argument, DadPool just doesn’t like the idea of allowing God to store material for the purpose (the “sperm bank” he is talking about), even though obviously God can do that. Not only because “all things are possible with God,” and medieval Jewish lore imagined even demons stealing and storing sperm, but as I documented in Jesus from Outer Space, Paul’s God already has an angel named Laylah, according to the Talmud, who brings God every sperm in every man’s testicles on Earth for God to inspect, and brings it back again—a fact DadPool won’t tell you. And Ahura Mazda, the equivalent God of Zoroastrianism, a religion that had considerable influence on Judaism, used a magic lake to bank the sperm of Zoroaster for a thousand years—another fact DadPool won’t tell you. He pretends we just made this up, and hides the fact that we have presented evidence that it was a going belief at the time that this was the kind of thing gods did. So here we are: deploy Rule 2, hide evidence, so you can deploy Rule 1, straw man (“they just made this up”).

DadPool also straw-man’s our argument by pretending we have proposed only this. That way he can ignorantly make fun of a concept that was actually normal in antiquity and not something we invented. Again, we base our beliefs on facts; DadPool ignores them. In truth (and DadPool would know this if he actually read the book he holds up to the camera), I point out that it could be that’s what Paul was thinking (just as his Zoroastrian peers or Talmudic Rabbis could), or Paul could be referencing something more magical or metaphorical. It is also a fact that Paul says all human beings can “become” the “Seed of Abraham,” and if that can happen by magic or metaphor (as Paul clearly meant), so can Jesus become the “Seed of David.” No sperm bank required. Divinely banked sperm was just a known thing back then, so (we keep pointing out) it was available as a concept. But if you can’t handle that being a fact (because sperm is icky, therefore Laylah and Lake Kasaoya didn’t exist in ancient belief, a dumb—and purely emotional—way to argue), there are still other ways Paul can intend God’s act to work. So you can’t escape this fact merely by making fun of God’s angels handling sperm.

As I’ve explained many times now, it had to be something, as this was required by Scripture; so it cannot be argued Paul couldn’t have thought this. He had to have thought one of these things, if he thought the incarnation was in another world (again, see Empirical Logic and Romans 1:3). So this passage cannot argue for a historical Jesus. But neither does it argue against one. It is too ambiguous to argue either conclusion. That’s our actual argument. And you have to steel man it thus, if you want to actually respond to it. And that means admitting this isn’t a trick we are pulling. We are simply pointing out a well-evidenced fact of the matter—evidence DadPool ignores, but we attend to. Just as if he was ignoring that “he appeared to more than five hundred brethren” was ambiguous, and claiming we were thus “inventing workarounds” when in fact all we are actually doing is pointing out a fact.

It is possible (and I suspect probable, from other videos of his I’ve seen) that Captain DadPool doesn’t understand how evidence works. The only way any fact can be evidence for one theory or explanation over another is if it makes that theory or explanation more probable than the other (and the weight of that evidence is then represented by how much more probable it causes a theory or explanation to be). If a fact is equally expected—and thus equally probable—on either theory, then that fact is not evidence for (or against) either theory. What one might try to argue, then, is that the fact in question is only “just as expected” either way if you “add an assumption not in evidence.” But that is not happening when background facts are presented establishing that what is here being called an assumption is actually normal in the time and place in question. Then it is not an assumption; it is a fact. People could speak that way. People could think that way. So now, if we want this fact to be evidence for or against either theory, we need further evidence that that isn’t what they were saying or thinking. We can’t just assume we know.

For example, if you overheard me say, “I hurt my head when I bumped into a dog,” you cannot assume I mean I tripped over an animal. Because hatch latches on ships are also called dogs. So I could mean I bumped into a metal latch. Normally you would determine what’s most likely by context and prior probability. So, for example, in what context did I utter my sentence? Do you know whether I am or am not talking about my life on a ship? Because I am; I lived on one for a year, and indeed in my early days I bumped into the odd dog until I got my sea legs and could navigate the metallic gauntlet of a ship at sea with ease. So. What if whether I am talking about life at sea or not is the very thing you are trying to determine? Then you cannot assume I am or am not talking about that. You need evidence for one or the other. And without that evidence, you cannot claim to know.

Hence you cannot circularly refer to my statement as evidence for or against my talking about an animal or a latch. “He must be talking about tripping over an animal, because usually that’s what a ‘dog’ is” is invalid reasoning when there is evidence I might be talking about my time at sea. Not even conclusive evidence, either; just merest hints are enough to establish that all bets are off. You cannot simply argue, “He tripped over an animal, and you are just inventing ‘tricks’ to claim he might mean a metal latch instead,” when what you mean by “tricks” is actually evidence that I might be talking about a ship. That wouldn’t be a “trick.” Those would be facts. Then the possibility that I might mean that would not be an “assumption.” It would be a fact. Sure, only a modal fact; as it is a fact about what “might” be the case rather than what “is” the case. But that’s still a fact. And it still affects what we are entitled to assume.

In terms of the logic of evidence, when there is evidence that renders the context of my conversation ambiguous—like any time you are arguing over whether I was discussing my life at sea or not when you overheard me say that thing about bumping into a dog—when the evidence (in this case, the sentence I uttered) is equally expected on either theory, it cannot be evidence for or against either theory. It is simply indeterminate. Since that sentence is exactly what I would say if I was talking about bumping into a latch during my time at sea, and it is also exactly what I would say if I was talking about tripping over an animal, there is nothing in the sentence itself that can help us determine which it is that I am talking about. You simply can’t claim to know. You will have to go elsewhere for evidence.

Okay. Follow me so far? Now imagine you discover sufficient evidence to establish that I was paid to say that sentence when you overheard me say it, and indeed I was paid not to mean anything at all either way by it. Now you can’t say I meant “dog” as in animal or latch, because now you know I’d have said it anyway, no matter what. So it actually cannot support either theory. It is simply out, now, as evidence.

Hopefully from this you have a fair sense of how the logic of evidence works. Now let’s see how DadPool screws this up…

How to Do This Like a Rational Person

Other critics have screwed this up and been corrected, so there is no excuse for DadPool not to get it right. If you want to prep for a debate, actually prep for the debate. If you want to know what your opponent’s arguments are, go read your opponent’s arguments. Which in this case entails searching my blog for the latest pertinent articles. Because any competent debate prep would proceed as follows:

1. Determine what your opponent is actually going to argue;
2. Check what the best critics have said in response to it;
3. Then check how your opponent has answered those responses.

Then, and only then, will you be prepared to debate the point. Because it is that third step that ensures you know how to steel-man your own argument against them: by constructing your argument to already address, and thus be immune to, what you now know will be their rebuttal. If DadPool had followed that procedure, he wouldn’t be making these mistakes, thereby readily looking ignorant and silly by a presentation of crucial facts he left out. And yet, DadPool chose to do the opposite. But notice: he had to leave these facts out, that I just brought back in (and in a moment, I’ll bring in even more), for his case to stand. Which looks suspiciously like apologetics. Rule 2: Leave evidence out that, when put back in, would weaken or even topple your case. He has no case here, once the evidence he left out is brought back in. When we have the facts in view, it becomes clear Romans 1:3 is ambiguous. And not only ambiguous, but weird. Is Paul referring to some claim of ancestry there—or to the doctrine of Philippians 2, where it is said Jesus descended from outer space and “was made” into something that looked like a human?

So we actually can’t tell just from Romans 1:3 what Paul means. We know he can mean it magically or metaphorically (as he does with “Seed of Abraham”); and we know he can mean it straight-up literally (as he does when he says Adam “was made,” same word; or that our future bodies will “be made,” same word; and just as in his summary of Genesis Josephus says Eve “was made,” same word; and just as Paul outright says Jesus “was made,” same word, to look like a human; and so on). We aren’t making this up. These are facts. And you have to attend to them. Likewise it is a fact that Paul usually uses a different word when speaking of human births; and it is a fact these idioms (in both Romans 1 and Galatians 4) don’t normally have the word he chose to use instead; and it is a fact that early Christian scribes knew that and were so worried by it as to try changing the words back to the one Paul prefers when saying “born.”

You cannot ignore these facts. And yet they are sufficient to establish ambiguity. This is not ambiguity by assumption. It is ambiguity by summation of fact. You can only get this to be “an assumption” if you leave out these facts. Put them back in, and everything changes. And yet these facts still do not establish the converse; they do not prove Paul meant anything other than ancestry. They prove only the weaker point that it is not knowable whether he means ancestry. Just as if you caught wind that I might have been talking about my life on a ship when I said I bumped into a dog: well, now you no longer know whether I meant animal or latch, because now there are hints I might have been talking about either. Or just as if you found out I was paid to say that sentence and not mean anything by it: well, now you can no longer claim I meant animal or latch.

Since Scripture required Paul and the first Christians to believe Jesus’s mortal body “came from David’s sperm” no matter what they believed about how that body came to be, you can no longer claim Paul meant descent rather than something else, as that would be circularly presuming one theory over another, to get the evidence to support that theory over the other. Which is illogical. This is directly equivalent to learning I was paid to utter that sentence about a dog: now you know I would have said it regardless of what I meant. So now that sentence is out as evidence of anything. Just like Romans 1:3 (see, again, Empirical Logic and Romans 1:3). It would be one thing to claim the “ship” argument was just “made up,” but when there is evidence hinting that that might be the case, it isn’t being made up. Ships really do have metal dogs. I actually have on other occasions spoken of my life at sea. And I really was paid to say that sentence and mean neither. These facts change our conclusion.

Hence sound method would move you to admit all these facts (rather than hide them), and respond to these facts, and the actual argument we are making from them, which is to a conclusion of ambiguity, not to sky manufacture (or magic or metaphor). Instead, DadPool ignores these facts. Whereas we are the ones who are attending to the facts and not ignoring them. We are drawing our conclusions from the facts. That is not a trick; that’s presenting evidence for a conclusion. It is DadPool who is straw-manning (thus avoiding the real argument), hiding evidence (thus avoiding facts), and arguing backwards: by trying to force the evidence to fit his position—that what Paul said “clearly” means ancestry—rather than subjecting it to the legitimate falsification tests that we did—which would discover: Paul is not being at all clear about this, and he has said similar things without meaning ancestry, and prophecy did require him to say it no matter what he imagined it to mean, and there were known concepts in his day that he could imagine it to mean other than ancestry.

Sure, if we didn’t have any of these facts, then we’d just be explaining away the evidence. But we do have these facts. Indeed, that is why we are coming to a different conclusion than DadPool: those facts logically compelled us to drop the historicist’s assumption that Paul means what they want him to mean. Because we admit the truth: that in actual fact we can’t tell.

Note also the logic of evidence here, which is the logic DadPool is skirting: because Paul has to believe this (Scripture requires it), this can never be evidence against mythicism. The passage we have here cannot be unexpected on mythicism; and yet it has to be unexpected on a theory to be evidence against it. Thus, if Paul had said “born from the seed of David,” using his preferred word for human birth (a word that indeed can only mean born; unlike the word he chose to use instead), and hence the word early Christian scribes indicated by their meddling that they wished he had used, that would be unexpected, and then this passage would be stronger evidence against mythicism (hence why Ignatius tried to invent it). Likewise if he’d said simply “Jesus was a descendant David.” If Paul had said either of these things (the things one usually would then say, as they are the standard idioms for the purpose, widely evidenced in ancient Greek), then this passage would be decent evidence for historicity. Instead Paul chose to say something that is needlessly (and thus weirdly) ambiguous.

And yet, for all that, I actually still count this as evidence for historicity (OHJ, p. 594), in my most favorable case for it. Another thing DadPool won’t tell you. So I am already agreeing with him that this passage could support historicity. The only thing we actually disagree on is how much it supports historicity. I say it is only as strong as 2 to 1 in favor because of all that evidence of ambiguity (which is unexpected on historicity, but expected on mythicism)—which is again evidence, not “tricks”—and because we have evidence for available alternative meanings (and I mean evidence, not “stuff I made up”): Paul’s “Seed of Abraham” argument proves he can use such a phrase non-literally; Paul’s “came to be” usage for Adam and our resurrection bodies and even Jesus (in Philippians) proves he can mean divine manufacture by that same word; the Nathan prophecy not only fits those interpretations as well as anything, but read literally, actually says the messiah’s sperm would come from David directly, not an ancestor; the Laylah and Lake Kasaoya (and other) myths prove sperm-banking was a going belief in the pre-modern West; and indeed the Jewish belief that God can do all things, likewise.

This is evidence. And presenting evidence for a conclusion is not a trick. But leaving all this evidence out, and presenting fake arguments instead of your opponent’s real arguments, is a “trick.”

Who Says Galatians 4:4 Is Allegory?

So, now, keep all that in mind as we quickly go through the rest of Captain DadPool’s arguments. In the middle of minute 5 he gets to his second example:

• Minute 5 (Part 2): “What about passages like Galatians 4, where it says that Jesus was born of a woman, born under the law? Well friends, stop me if you’ve heard this one: Paul was being allegorical here.”

That’s Captain DadPool’s entire argument here. The implication is, again, that we just made this up. But, um, Paul actually says the women he is talking about are allegorical; in an argument, from Galatians 3 to the end of 4, that is entirely allegorical, and is actually explaining his opening allegorical use of “Seed of Abraham.” These are facts. Facts DadPool is ignoring. All in order to construct a straw man of our actual argument, rather than a steel man of it. We did not just “declare” this allegorical, so as to make it go away. We aren’t handwaving. This isn’t voodoo. Paul says it is allegorical; and the whole argument is allegorical, from beginning to end (see Yes, Galatians 4 Is Allegorical). Paul is also again using the strange, weird version of an otherwise popular idiom here—indeed, in this very same section, he uses his preferred word for “born” of humans, but when he says the same of Jesus, he switches it out for the ambiguous word instead, violating the usual idiom, a fact so disturbing to early Christians they tried to change it back (see A Primer on Successful vs. Bogus Methodology: Tim O’Neill Edition). These are facts. Facts DadPool is ignoring.

So, again, we are the ones just taking the facts as they are; he is the one trying to make facts go away to get a different result. He is doing the thing he is accusing us of. We are not. It is a fact that you can’t use this passage to prove historicity because Paul makes clear he is not talking about biology in this argument. Even if Paul believed Jesus was a normal human born to a mother, he isn’t talking about that here, so we can’t tell from here what he believed about that. And this is not something we made up. It’s something plain from the entire structure of his argument (from Galatians 3 to 4), and his own plain statement that he is speaking of mothers figuratively. This is a conclusion arrived at from facts. This is not salt over the shoulder. This is evidence-based reasoning. Whereas DadPool has to snatch the verse entirely out of context to get it to mean what he wants (both its textual context—the argument Paul is making from Galatians 3 through 4—and its stylometric context—evidence of how Paul uses words).

And yet, for all that, once again, in my most favorable case I still count this passage as evidence for historicity (OHJ, p. 594). Another thing DadPool won’t tell you. So I am already agreeing with him that this passage could support historicity. The only thing we actually disagree on is how much it supports historicity. As with Romans 1:3, I say it is only as strong as 2 to 1 in favor because of all this evidence of ambiguity (which is unexpected on historicity, but expected on mythicism)—which is again evidence, not “tricks”—and because we have evidence for available alternative meanings (and I mean evidence, not “stuff I made up”): Paul outright says he is speaking of mothers allegorically here, and he makes an allegorical argument throughout Galatians 3-4, beginning with an allegorical sense of our all potentially becoming the “Seed of Abraham” that again involves no ancestry, no mothers, no matrilineal biology.

If only Paul had said something more specifically ensuring that he was breaking into a literal statement in the midst of this allegorical argument, like if he said where Jesus was born, or to whom. Then the weight this would have as evidence for a historical Jesus would skyrocket (it would increase by some even if all Paul did was use for Jesus his preferred word for “born” rather than his preferred word for “made,” exactly as later scribes thought). All we are doing is pointing out that that hasn’t happened. In context, what Paul chose to say instead is hopelessly ambiguous, not at all clear. And that’s simply a fact—indeed, a weird fact. And that all the evidence historicists have is weird and ambiguous is itself weird, such as would warrant suspicion in any objective observer.

So DadPool is not honestly representing our actual argument, nor honestly responding to it. He’s trying instead to make it go away by leaving out all the evidence, and misrepresenting us as just “making stuff up.” But that means he’s the one making stuff up. He’s the one throwing salt over his shoulder.

What’s Up with 1 Corinthians 11:23?

I won’t belabor his remaining points, because Captain DadPool is simply ignoring everything in the very book he claims to be responding to, so all I need do is refer you to that book. On the Historicity of Jesus already has full sections on every point he makes, giving you back all the evidence DadPool is leaving out, and thus showing how the conclusion changes when you put that evidence back in.

But in brief…

Around the end of minute 5 and into minute 6, Captain DadPool says:

• Minute 5 (Part 3): “What about First Corinthians 11:23, where Paul says Jesus was betrayed. By whom? If he never left the firmament, who betrayed him? Well, they’ll point to the beginning of this passage, where it says this is just something that Paul received from the Lord. Why did Jesus also say in the same passage “break bread, this is my flesh; drink the wine, this is my blood”? Oh, I forgot, he actually does have a physical body. I don’t know why I keep forgetting that.”

If DadPool were being honest, and actually read and thus actually meant to reply to what I argue in the book he held up on camera, he would know this:

Translations often render this as ‘in the night in which he was betrayed’, but in fact the word paradidōmi means simply ‘hand over, deliver’, which is too ambiguous to assume that what underlies it is the implausible Judas narrative found in the Gospels. It most likely means when he was handed over to be killed (when he was ‘offered up’), as Paul says elsewhere (‘he was delivered up’, Rom. 4.24-25; ‘God delivered him up’, Rom. 8.32; ‘he delivered himself up’, Gal. 2.20; all the same word).

OHJ, p. 560

So we have a perfect analogy to resurrection apologetics here: DadPool is doing exactly the same thing as Christian apologists, by simply assuming anything said by Paul is describing what’s in the Gospels. Thus, five hundred witnesses hung out with Jesus and had dinner with him; therefore, “handed over” means Judas and the kiss and the thirty pieces of silver. This is not legitimate reasoning. It’s apologetical reasoning. The evidence shows the opposite: Paul does not know about these stories in the Gospels.

And accordingly in OHJ I go on to discuss (and cite further discussions of) how the Judas narrative did not plausibly exist in Paul’s day. But it’s more important to note that Paul never mentions any such thing—but he does say God handed Jesus over (paradidōmi). If we are to interpret Paul in light of Paul (the only correct procedure), when Paul says Jesus “was handed over” in 1 Corinthians 11, he must mean the same thing he says in Romans 8:32: that this is when God handed him over (which is the same as, also, Jesus handing himself over, per Galatians 2:20, because Jesus was the voluntary agent of God’s plan). Many translators agree (NAB, YLT, LSV, SLT, DLNT, CPDV, DARBY, ANT, ERV, EXB, ICB, NCV; cf. ASV, NLV, NIRV). To assume Paul completely changed his mind and now, suddenly, is talking about Judas, when he shows no knowledge of that anywhere else, is to go against the evidence—to literally replace evidence with assumptions. Note it is the historicist who has to do this. It is DadPool replacing facts with assumptions here. Not us. We are abandoning all assumptions and simply following the facts.

Now I dare DadPool to go all Gary Habermas on us here and start shouting, “You are just assuming the Judas thing is just a legend that arose later!” as if he doesn’t know I just warned him of my rebuttal: “No, we are merely describing the fact that it appears only later—you are the one assuming it predates the first we ever hear of it.” And indeed, assuming against all the evidence that Paul meant God handed Jesus over, and against all the evidence the Judas story didn’t exist yet (e.g. Paul says the twelve were still intact to see the Risen Jesus immediately after his death; 1 Clement writes a whole treatise about betrayal with many biblical examples—but never heard of Judas; and Judas conspicuously means “Jew,” betrays Jesus for an implausibly low but Scripturally significant sum of money, and it makes no historical sense that the Sanhedrin would even need him: see Proving History, index, “Judas”). There is no difference between “Judas betrayed Jesus” and “five hundred witnesses had dinner with him after he was dead.” Both are Gospel fictions Paul never mentions. Both are things Paul himself says completely different things about (visions happen inside the mind; God is the one who handed Jesus over).

Again the most important lesson here is methodological: DadPool rhetorically asks, “If he never left the firmament, who betrayed him?” DadPool either knows the answer to his question (if he read OHJ, he read the paragraph I just quoted from it) and is thus being dishonest with his viewers by pretending we have no credible answer to “who” handed Jesus over (Paul literally tells us the answer to that question: God), or he doesn’t know the answer to his question, and is thus being dishonest with his viewers by merely pretending to have read the book he told them he had read.

So the question cannot be avoided: Why? Why does historicity have to be defended dishonestly? If it’s true, can’t DadPool mount an honest defense of it? I encourage you to all go and ask him what’s going on here (either by comment on his video or on Twitter). Did he “forget” what’s in OHJ on this point, or did he not really read it? Why did he not know the answer to his question when he shot that video just a few weeks ago? More importantly, even if he did forget, why did that not prompt him to go check first? Why didn’t he ask himself, “Wait, I can’t remember, how do they answer this question?” And then go check so as to find out. And then craft his video around that, the actual answer. Sound method would be to always check first. So why isn’t DadPool following any sound or responsible method? Ask why. Because you do need to know.

The rest of DadPool’s rhetoric is equally demonstrative of his dishonesty (either hiding our actual answers to his rhetorical questions, or not knowing what they are and thus pretending to have read the book he didn’t actually read). Like, why does DadPool think food has to be real in a vision? Would he argue that Peter can’t have had a vision of a meal being presented to him (Acts 10; yes, also detailed in OHJ, pp. 361-62), because physical food can’t exist in the sky? If Peter wrote a letter referencing that vision, would DadPool insist that that has to have been a real historical meal Peter attended, and Jesus (“the Lord”) therefore an ordinary historical human he had dinner with, because meals can’t exist in visions? I mean, these would be stupid arguments. But honestly, what on Earth was DadPool thinking here? Or was he just not thinking at all? And if so, why? If historicity is credible, why is this the bonkers kind of argumentation DadPool has to rest his belief in a historical Jesus on?

In any event, the facts (not assumptions) establishing it’s as likely or more that Paul is talking about a vision he received from Jesus here, in which Jesus is speaking to all future Christians just as he does with Peter in the dinner vision of Acts, are summarized in my article on Mark’s Use of Paul’s Epistles. If you want to prep for a debate with me, you might want to read that. As well as, surely, my entire peer-reviewed section on it in OHJ (Chapter 11.7, “The Eucharist”).

Who Are the Brothers of the Lord?

Then Captain DadPool says:

• Minute 6 (Part 1): “What about when Paul says he knows Jesus’s brother? Oh, well, it doesn’t actually mean ‘brother’ brother, he just means, like, follower.”

Again he implies we are making this up. But that Paul knew all his fellow baptized Christians as Brothers of the Lord is a fact. He literally says it, and repeatedly explains why that is. We did not make this up. It’s not even an inference. It’s explicitly stated by Paul. So. Now that you know I lived on a ship and dogs are latches, do you see why it is no longer clear whether I mean an animal when I say I bumped into a dog? And so, now that you know Paul says all baptized Christians are Brothers of the Lord, do you see why it is no longer clear whether he means a biological brother when he says he met one? Yes, if Paul hadn’t said that, then we’d just be explaining things away. But he frackin did say it. And that changes everything. We can now no longer assume—as DadPool wants to—that Paul means biological and not Christological brethren here. We have replaced DadPool’s assumptions with facts. Not the other way around.

It’s all worse than this, of course. That Paul repeatedly speaks of Brethren of the Lord as baptized Christians (and constantly calls them “brother” for this reason) but never of his having biological kin; that Paul would have to specify which he meant here if he knew both kinds were walking around (and yet, he conspicuously doesn’t—so he clearly didn’t know about the other kind); that all the legends of Jesus having brothers appear only quite late (later even than the source material Acts must have employed, since it knows of no such brothers in the first thirty years of Christian history either); that 1 Clement never heard of Jesus having brothers either; and so on, these facts (not assumptions, but real, actual facts) stack up against DadPool’s assumption. But even without all that, Paul’s mentioning Christological but not biological brethren puts DadPool’s assumption that he means the latter in the same boat (pun intended) as his assuming I meant an animal when I said dog—even after being shown evidence I constantly refer to latches as dogs!

The rest you can get from my section on this in OHJ and my chapter on it in Jesus from Outer Space. All the armchair apologetical arguments against me that you are inventing in your head right now? Trust me. I already refuted them. Go look and see. Hence the importance of Rule Number One: always check. DadPool didn’t. He doesn’t even know any of this. Which means he lied when he said he read my book. Don’t lie. Please. Just read the book. For frack sake. And don’t lie about what it says when you do. Subject your beliefs to honest falsification tests. Don’t resort to apologetical defenses of conclusions you’ve pre-decided have to be true. Act like a responsible critical thinker—not an apologist.

Josephus and Tacitus Said What?

Then Captain DadPool says:

• Minute 6 (Part 2): “What about the two mentions of Jesus by Josephus? Well one of them’s a forgery, and the other one’s talking about a different Jesus.”

Again, he implies we just “say” this. He never mentions that we have a shit ton of evidence proving it. He is the one relying on assumptions, to explain away all our evidence. While we are relying on zero assumptions. We are just gathering all the evidence and drawing conclusions from what we find. You can see my summary of this abundant evidence (all of which he pretends doesn’t exist) in OHJ, Chapter 10.9. But you can grasp a summary (including even more damning evidence scholars published after that) in Josephus on Jesus? Why You Can’t Cite Opinions Before 2014. DadPool ignores evidence, even pretends it doesn’t exist, and replaces it with assumptions; we draw conclusions only from the evidence. Note the difference. And ponder.

Then Captain DadPool says:

• Minute 6 (Part 3): “What about Tacitus? Oh, he’s not actually talking about Jesus either.”

Here it is hard to tell again if DadPool is lying about my book, or lying about having read it. Because this is not the argument I make there. In OHJ I provide merely one paragraph mentioning the evidence Tacitus didn’t write about Christ here, but conclude it with this sentence: “However, we need not rely on that conclusion for the present analysis, and to demonstrate that I will simply assume for the sake of argument that this passage is entirely authentic as received” (p. 344). I then present three pages on my actual argument, which is that we cannot establish Tacitus learned this from anywhere independent of the Gospels, rendering it useless as evidence.

Because, remember, the logic of evidence: if Tacitus learned this from Gospel-quoting Christians, the probability he’d repeat it even if false is 100% (to Tacitus it would be too delightfully embarrassing to risk spoiling with a fact-check), and therefore cannot be improbable if Jesus didn’t exist. It therefore can never be evidence he did. I have a whole section in OHJ, Chapter 7.1, on what dependent evidence is and why it is of no use. So to “make this go away,” DadPool has to assume that Tacitus had some sort of source independent of the Gospels—but he has no evidence that he did. There is even evidence that he didn’t, as I outline; but we wouldn’t need that: the burden of evidence is on the claimant. So DadPool is the one resting on an assumption. We are not. We are resting on the plain facts as they are. Historicity depends on assumptions. Mythicism scraps them.

Confusing Possible with Probable

Then Captain DadPool says:

• Minute 6 (Part 4): “What about the Q, M, and L documents that were used in conjunction with other sources to write the gospels? Oh, those are just hypothetical documents, they don’t exist, even though I’ve literally heard Carrier say, yes, it’s possible that the gospel authors used multiple sources, but not Q, M, or L.”

I never said that. So DadPool is either lying or bad at English. I never said it “wasn’t possible” the Gospels were using those (or any) sources. I have repeatedly said—and said in OHJ—that it’s possible the Gospels indeed used sources, which we would indeed identify as Q, M, and L. Because those letters are just tautologies for generic “sources,” those used by [M]atthew, those used by [L]uke, and those used by both—hence [Q]uelle, the German word “Source.” These could all be the same source (just as Matthew and Luke each don’t use material from Mark, they could also have differently omitted material from Q, so it could all just be Q). But regardless, the key word here is possible.

Do you know what one of the most common Christian apologetical tactics is? To conflate “possible” with “probable,” producing the fallacy of possibiliter ergo probabiliter, “possibly, therefore probably.” DadPool just did this. Straight up. Yeah. It’s “possible” there was a Q (and so on). And? If you argue from a premise as to what’s possible, you can only get a conclusion as to what’s possible. And no one disagrees it’s “possible” Jesus existed. You simply can’t get to “Jesus probably existed” from “Luke possibly used a Q source.” Possibly does not get you probably. What you need is evidence that there really was a Q—not conjectures and assumptions, evidence. All DadPool has are conjectures and assumptions. All we are doing is pointing that out. We are not the ones relying on assumptions here. The historicists are.

I already covered this last time. But that these are hypothetical—and therefore not real—sources is a fact, not an assumption. This is not some “trick” we are pulling. We’re simply stating the fact of the matter. There are many other problems, of course. For example, Q has to have been a post-War text written in Greek, and therefore is no earlier or more reliable than Mark (and if you just realized that describes Matthew, penny for the pretty lady). So even if you could prove Q existed, that still doesn’t get you evidence that Jesus did. And so on. But the methodological point here is that DadPool is describing his own reliance on assumptions, not ours. He is assuming reliable sources existed, rather that presenting any evidence that they did. We are sticking to the evidence—the actual evidence. We are the ones who are not relying on assumptions. He is the one relying on assumptions.

Facts Are Not Workarounds

Finally, Captain DadPool says:

• Minute 6 (Part 5): “Mythicists will insist you give them their very generous interpretation of the extra-biblical Old Testament text” [I don’t know what he is referring to here] “but when confronted with the New Testament text they have all these convenient workarounds.”

These aren’t workarounds. Every single thing I have pointed out are facts. It is DadPool who is creating “convenient workarounds” by ignoring all those facts, wishing them away so they don’t muddy his neat and tidy evidence for five hundred witnesses dining with the risen Jesus … er, I mean, for there being a Jesus before that one was made up. It is DadPool who is discarding data. It is DadPool who is relying on assumptions.

Because, you know. “Obviously” Paul means a human birth in Galatians—if you ignore literally everything else he says in that same section, and the fact that Paul explicitly says Jesus has a body made for him in Philippians, and the fact of his strange but corresponding distortion of common idioms when alluding to this in Galatians and Romans, and the fact that early Christians panicked about this and tried to change his wording. “Obviously” Paul means a descendant of David in Romans—if you ignore the fact that he never says “descendant of David,” and the fact that he chose to use instead an awkwardly strange Greek construction, and the fact that what he chose to say instead is hopelessly ambiguous, and the fact that he has to say it anyway to confirm Nathan’s prophecy no matter how he thinks God effected it, and the fact that Paul speaks of being the Seed of Abraham metaphorically in Galatians and thus could be speaking of the Seed of David that way in Romans, and the fact that elsewhere Paul normally uses the word he chooses to insert here to mean God-built bodies and not bodies that are born (including explicitly of Jesus in Philippians), and the fact that Paul never specifies what he means even though he can mean any of these things. And so on. Yes, if you delete all the facts, then you can say we are just dismissing inconvenient evidence. But if you are the one deleting facts to get to your conclusion, you are the one who is wrong.

So “of course” these passages are evidence for historicity—as in fact I already count them as! All you have to do is ignore the question of how strong an evidence they are, given all the actual facts. Sure. Let’s not actually debate the real question—how much this evidence weighs. Let’s pretend I argued something else, and never address that question. Let’s never ask why we should count these passages as strong evidence, when there is a mountain of further evidence telling us they are weak. This is all just apologetics DadPool is throwing up. Straw-man. Ignore evidence. Argue backwards. Don’t test your position against the facts. Embrace any assumptions you need; evidence is irrelevant. And when cornered, make stuff up. This is DadPool. By contrast, serious mythicists are simply drawing inferences directly from the facts—the facts as they are; not cherry-picked facts, hiding everything that undermines our position, like DadPool is doing.

Arguing from “What’s Popular”

Captain DadPool then spends half a minute explaining that, in this video at least, he isn’t appealing to what’s popular. And ostensibly, he didn’t; what he appeals to happens to be what’s popular, but that’s not the same thing as actually arguing that that makes it true. Up to now, I didn’t see him argue that in this video (I can’t vouch for what he might have argued elsewhere). But by minute 7, ironically right when he insists he isn’t making this argument, he immediately, elaborately, makes exactly that argument.

Pay close attention…

At this point DadPool goes through describing how new theories are supposed to go through a process before being accepted. He doesn’t ask, though, whether the process is actually working in this case or not. He just assumes it is. But remember: you need to check (see On Evaluating Arguments from Consensus). If you are just assuming it is working, then you are in fact relying on an argumentum ad populum. So the question is: what happens when you check? If you find that all the resistance even from prestigious experts is relying on exactly the same apologetic tactics as DadPool is—if it is misrepresenting the arguments posed, ignoring evidence, arguing backwards rather than actually testing their own theories and assumptions, and even making things up that aren’t true (or relevant)—then you can no longer appeal to your faith in that process for your conclusion, can you? Such a conclusion is actually then convicted of being false. Because you don’t need to resort to these tactics to defend a true theory. Only false theories require this treatment.

It is therefore crucial that DadPool actually, properly check first. And anyone who honestly does, will not be happy with the result (see What I Said at the Brea Conference). Instead, what DadPool does is say, in effect, “I don’t have to check. I can just declare the mythicists as making stuff up when they document all of these tactics being used against them.” This is the methodology of a dogmatist. A rational person would check first. If a mythicist says an expert is ignoring evidence, arguing fallaciously, or misrepresenting an argument, or even lying—well…did they? Find out. Go look. See what is true. Follow that standard procedure every professional knows to follow in debate prep: read what the mythicist actually said; then read what a critic of it said; then read what the mythicist said in reply. Then fact-check them both, so you can find out which of them is not making logically valid arguments or true statements of fact.

Only then can you conclude whether mythicists are incorrect in these claims, and whether the process is working, or has been hijacked by dogmatists doing the exact same thing DadPool did: straw man, ignore evidence, and argue backwards from conclusion to evidence rather than from evidence to conclusion—rather than testing their assumptions against the evidence, trying instead to keep their assumptions alive despite the evidence.

What DadPool does is just declare they “can’t” be doing this, because they have the right kind of degrees and prestige. “How dare I” criticize Bart Ehrman for enormous errors of fact and logic. DadPool doesn’t care if Ehrman actually did commit enormous errors of fact and logic. He simply declares Ehrman can’t have, because he’s too famous and educated. That’s a disastrous methodology. A rational method would be to find out—to check. Did Ehrman make the mistakes, the specific actual mistakes, I have caught him at? Did I present adequate evidence that he did? Find out. Don’t just insist I can’t have, because, like Luke Skywalker said hanging on a pole, “That’s impossible!” DadPool pulls the Luke Skywalker. He doesn’t check. He just assumes I am wrong and Ehrman is right because Ehrman is more famous than I am. Argumentum ad populum. That’s what DadPool was accused of; that is what he denied doing; and yet that is exactly what he just did here.

Representing this ironically well, Captain DadPool in minute 8 mistakes a ten-year-old article on Ehrman’s blog as recent. Ehrman’s system is misdating it; that is the exact same article I rebutted a decade ago. Nothing in it to my knowledge has changed (see Ehrman on Historicity Recap). Clearly, then, DadPool does not care what evidence I presented of Ehrman’s errors and mistakes. He doesn’t even want to know what it is, much less know whether it actually establishes anything I really said about Ehrman’s work. This is the method of a dogmatist. A genuine critical thinker would want to know. They would read what I said, read what Ehrman said originally (to check whether I am fairly representing it), and then read our back-and-forth to its conclusion—and if any questions remain in their mind, fact-check them. Which of us is making false statements? Which of us is relying on fallacies? And which of us isn’t? Only then would you know whether, indeed, Bart Ehrman is not being honest with his audience, or logical in his use of evidence—or it is I who am not. You cannot simply presume either.

Any judgment rendered without such a review of the evidence is worthless. That means your own beliefs are worthless if they are not the product of that review. You can declare yourself uninterested, and thus pass no judgment on who is erring or lying. But if you are going to pass that judgment, you are morally obligated to base it on a fair review of the evidence, and not on who you like more, or agree with, or think is more famous. In a double irony, rather than use Ehrman’s antiquated blog post to do any of this, all DadPool does is use it to show Ehrman doing the same bankrupt thing: complaining about being criticized, but not mentioning whether those criticisms were founded on evidence or not, and what that evidence was, or why it’s wrong. Ehrman just winges about criticism. He doesn’t respond to it. And that’s what DadPool is doing. He is uninterested in whether anything claimed about Ehrman is true. He is only wingeing about it having been said. That’s a Christian methodology.

For those of you who want to take up a real methodology, one that can actually discover the truth, you need to know the answer to one central question: whether historicity can only be defended by lying about or misrepresenting what has or hasn’t been said against it, and by leaving out evidence and replacing facts with assumptions. Because if that’s the case, isn’t it likely that historicity is the indefensible position? If it could be defended, shouldn’t someone by now have been able to defend it honestly? Why is it always and only the same three-step, “straw-man, ignore evidence, avoid falsification tests”? This is the question you need to start asking. And if you don’t trust the premise, you need to investigate it to find out if it’s true or not: Who is making false statements? Who is straw-manning? Who is ignoring evidence? Who is actually relying on assumptions rather than facts? Check. It’s the only way you’ll find out.

Conclusion

I’ll make a prediction here. Watch what happens. Dollars to doughnuts, DadPool will ignore every strong point I made here, pretend they don’t exist (maybe make up some flippant, high-school-drama excuses for why he is ignoring it all), find some minor or trivial point to nitpick, and try to make this all about that, to distract everyone from his actually being thoroughly refuted and made to look foolish. As soon as he does that, you know he’s done. By that very response he will have just tacitly admitted he has no real argument for the historicity of Jesus. Just apologetics. Small odds, by contrast, on his doing what an honest, genuine critical thinker will do: actually respond to my substantive points, correct his errors, and try again—and do a better job now that he actually follows a sound method rather than a crap one.

I rate that unlikely because it will require him to admit he screwed up, that it is DadPool, not us, who is ignoring evidence in order to “work around” the actual facts, and rescue his position. He is the one piling up assumptions. He is the one “dismissing data” (in fact, pretending it doesn’t even exist), rather than drawing his conclusions from the actual data. Whereas we are the ones putting the data back in that he is leaving out, and dropping rather than embracing assumptions, and only then coming to a conclusion. That our conclusion is different is not because we designed it that way. Our conclusion is different because we abandon the unevidenced assumptions DadPool depends upon, and we take into account the facts DadPool is ignoring. When you entirely replace assumptions with facts, you should expect to get a different conclusion. And so we do.

Captain DadPool thus chose to argue like a Christian apologist. He is acting exactly like that Christian I modeled at the start who goes on about five hundred witnesses proving the resurrection, and dismissing all our reasons why that’s a bad argument as “tricks” and “assumptions” and “stuff we made up.” Whatever his reason for acting like a Christian apologist doesn’t matter. He simply did it. He deploys the whole standard apologetics toolkit: he repeatedly straw-manned the mythicist critique of historicism; he did that by leaving out all the evidence that would lead anyone to a different conclusion than he promotes; and he avoided all falsification tests, instead choosing his conclusion in advance, and manipulating the evidence any way he needed to get that conclusion.

That’s the kit. Rule 1: Straw man. Check. Rule 2: Ignore evidence. Check. Rule 3: Argue backwards—make evidence fit your position, rather than subjecting your position to real falsification tests. Check. And Rule 4: When you need to, make stuff up. Also check (e.g. the word “descendant” isn’t in the Greek of Romans 1:3; the word used there and in Galatians 4:4 is more ambiguous than “born”; the word in 1 Corinthians 11:23 is more ambiguous than “betrayed”; I never argued it “wasn’t possible” the Gospels used sources like Q, M, or L; I never used Philo’s angel to argue Jesus didn’t exist; that the first Christians thought Jesus was a pre-existent angelic being is a common position in academia, not something we made up; etc.).

And finally, do seriously ask why. Why does DadPool have to do this? If there were a credible, non-apologetic case for the historical existence of Jesus, can’t that be what he presents in his videos? Only a false belief requires the tactics he deployed here. So the fact that historicists can never present an honest case, can only argue by deploying the apologetic toolkit of straw-manning, ignoring evidence, and arguing backwards rather than subjecting their position to genuine falsification tests, is itself evidence Jesus didn’t exist. If he did, it should be provable without that. It’s been ten years now. And no such proof has come. All we get is this: assumptions replacing facts, the ignoring of all actual pertinent facts and arguments, and emotional wingeing about us continuing to point this out.