I just published the English edition of my debate with Fernando Bermejo-Rubio and Franco Tommasi, Jesus: Militant or Nonexistent? Two Views Compared (Philosophy Press, 2025), including a chapter by Robert Price, and originally published in Italian as Gesù resistente Gesù inesistente: Due visioni a confronto (Manni, 2022). See last week’s announcement for a description and details. The present article is merely an appendix. So you may prefer to bookmark it now and read it after reading the book.

What Is This?

The original debate was word-count limited. And it was not appropriate to pad the new edition with a more detailed response that won’t enjoy the benefit of their reply. So I am publishing that here, and merely refer to it there (and their replies to this will be linked at the bottom). What follows is, instead, a supplementary fisk of their chapters in that volume. Word limits in the debate, and limits on our time, forbade any such production there. But for those who enjoy or clamor for such a thing, here you go. This will proceed item-by-item where any disagreement remains that I didn’t already address in the book (so it is not a complete fisk by itself: most of that is already in the book).

There are nine chapters in all, two of them being a fair and balanced introduction and epilogue by Tommasi, leaving seven chapters in the debate proper, one of which produced by Robert Price before he withdrew from the debate for reasons not known to me (but which I then proceeded to take up the defense of in subsequent chapters). Of the six remaining chapters, there were three from each of us: three entries co-authored by published enthusiast Franco Tommasi and noted biblical scholar Fernando Bermejo-Rubio; and three by me. So the organization of this fisk will proceed in three sections, one for each of their chapters: “What We Don’t Agree With,” “The Most Credible Jesus,” “And If We Remove the Cornerstone…?”

I will also not here elaborate on general theories and overall conclusions, or mention every disagreement already answered in my chapters. For all that, you will have to consult the book. This will simply be a list of additional quotes and responses that aren’t already covered in it. As such, it will not stand alone as a defense or a critique of either of our theories and should not be treated as such. To really understand our respective positions, much less evaluate them, you will have to explore beyond this article, which represents merely an appendix or tool for the debate, not the debate itself. I will also not cover punts. For example, they claim (pp. 60–61) that Price’s and my destruction of the “method of criteria” is not to them “persuasive,” but make no argument for why, they just punt to a citation. I already refute that punt with my own, citing a far more thorough reference that I can already vouch topples theirs (p. 98). No further comment is needed here.

But I will make one general observation here: though I sternly argue against it in this debate, you should be aware that I think they make a very good case for the plausibility of their militant-Jesus hypothesis—not with every thing they argue, but their overall case is good enough that historicists need to be able to explain why they are wrong before affirming any alternative theory of the historical Jesus in its place. Indeed, I suspect some version of their hypothesis (which they agree is compatible with an apocalyptic prophet model) is the next most likely after mine. If Jesus did exist, then the best explanation of him (and the stories distorted or embellished into the Gospels) is that he was an apocalyptic prophet who deliberately tried to get himself killed to unlock the apocalypse according to his reading of scripture, so that God would liberate Israel from heathen rule and resurrect the dead (such as by combining Daniel 9 with Isaiah 53 and Zechariah 3, 6, and 12-13). I do think that would make the most sense (as I describe in my famous Wichita Lecture): Jesus deliberately tried to create the impression that he was a threat to Rome specifically to get himself killed, even if he did not do that with direct violence but with provocation and dangerously coded rhetoric, and perhaps by ensuring he attracted known militants into his entourage and audiences. Which my co-authors would recognize as satisfying the Bermejo-Rubio thesis.

On the other hand, their chapters ignore half of my and Price’s points. Sometimes they ignore over half of what we presented to prove a point (and thus straw man our argument), and sometimes they ignore half or more of our points altogether (and thus evade our argument). I give examples in the book, including how they straw man Price’s argument that Mark’s passion narrative emulates the Josephan fable of Jesus ben Ananias (where they ignore almost all the evidence for this and then claim there isn’t enough evidence for it: compare Price’s argument, p. 25, with their reply, p. 60, and my defense of Price, p. 108), and how they evade my entire multi-evidenced argument from Paul that the religion began with revelations, not a historical martyrdom (they make a brief reply, but don’t respond to any of my specific evidence).

If you were to professionally “flow” this debate, you’d be counting so many “drops” on their side that you’d probably just stop scoring and record their side as a loss. Here all I can do is pickup my own drops, although I did address every one with general arguments covering multiple examples (like these) under one umbrella, so they wouldn’t necessarily officially score as drops—that would depend on how clearly you think they fall under the umbrella arguments I made.

Now to the line-by-line.

What We Don’t Agree With

The first two examples that I’ll list I did cover in the debate. But organizing those thoughts and links here can orient you to the ongoing theme of the remainder:

• “a negative evaluation of Jesus can be still discerned” in the Testimonium Flavianum (p. 55; cf. pp. 129–30)

This isn’t true. As I state in my response there, nothing in the TF is “negative.” They circularly presume neutral statements when taken out of their current context are negative in order to argue that they are negative. But there is nothing negative about them, even out of their context. As Goldberg has proved, every element fully fits a paraphrase of Luke 24 (see The TF derives from the NT and Goldberg’s Attempt to Rehabilitate the Testimonium Flavianum) and entirely resembles an (albeit poor) Christian attempt to emulate the style of Josephus (see Allen’s New and Illogical Theory of the Testimonium Flavianum). To explore all the other issues with the TF (rendering any of it impossible from Josephus) see Josephus on Jesus? Why You Can’t Cite Opinions Before 2014.

They give three examples:

• (1) “The text contains an expression of surprise and/or disappointment for the survival of the ‘tribe of the christians’.” There is no surprise or disappointment in the text; it reads just as well as a statement of Christian triumphalism (indeed in peculiarly Eusebian language, not Josephan).
• (2) The phrase “a certain Jesus” is “very likely the original, since its potentially disdainful meaning makes much easier to explain its suppression in the manuscripts by pious copyists troubled by its presence.” This presumes without evidence that the original Christian composer, who was trying to emulate Josephan style (and this phrase is indeed Josephan style, as demonstrated by Godlberg) had the same interest as medieval copyists. He could just as easily have the opposite interest: to make this passage look more authentic from a Jewish historian, within the constraints of brevity and his own limited intelligence. “A certain Jesus” sounds like a disinterested Jewish historian.
• (3) “The variant ‘he was thought to be the Christ'” is “very unlikely to be introduced by a Christian copyist.” To the contrary, any copyist with the same interest as its composer would want to do this to improve its plausibility coming from a Jewish historian; and the text-critical evidence proves that it is exactly what happened: see The End of the Arabic Testimonium.

There simply is no evidence of a lost “disdainful” version of the TF. This is a fabricated hypothetical. And fabricated hypotheticals cannot be used as evidence. It’s just HIHO (mere hypothesis in, mere hypothesis out). This broken methodology is, however, typical of Jesus studies as a field. This point is a recurring theme in Lataster’s study, Questioning the Historicity of Jesus, which thoroughly documents it to be as a tool used to get bizarre results by both Bart Ehrman and Maurice Casey. And one of my own recurring points in Militant or Nonexistent is that Bermejo-Rubio is using all the same broken methods as mainstream biblicists—which is why he gets a weird result. Bad methods can produce any result you want. Good methods, by contrast, lead you to what is more likely despite what you want. And this means biblical historians must abandon the use of merely hypothetical sources as evidence.

• “Origen states in two different works that Josephus did not believe Jesus was the Christ” so it is likely “Josephus wrote a disdainful passage on Jesus” (p. 56; p. 129)

The opposite is the case. First, that Josephus did not accept Christ is simply how anyone would describe a self-proclaimed Pharisaic Jew (per Josephus, Life, appended to the edition of the Antiquities Origen would be reading). It does not even imply they ever mentioned Christ. They wouldn’t have to. It’s just a way of saying “he wasn’t a Christian.” Second, Origen scoured Josephus for things he could discuss against Celsus about Jesus; so had Josephus written a disdainful account, Origen would be compelled by his own argument to rebut it. Otherwise his opponents could use Josephus against him, and so his calling attention to Josephus’s testimonies to John the Baptist and (he mistakenly believed) Jesus’ brother James would only draw attention to a polemic that Origen will thereby have failed to answer—in a book entirely dedicated to answering anti-Christian polemic. At the very least this reality counter-balances any probability the other way, and so it’s a wash. Origen’s remark cannot support any conclusion.

That’s all that need be said on the Testimonium Flavianum here.

• “deducing too much from what’s lacking in Paul’s epistles may be prone to the fallacy of an argumentum e silentio” (p. 56)

They support this with no evidence. They list a bunch of speculations (hypotheses to explain the silences I documented), but then act like speculations are evidence.

I pointed that out. But it’s important to understand how important this is, because (as I also note there) they do this a lot. And it’s very representative of all historicist scholarship. They are using the same bankrupt methods as their opponents—and they don’t know it, because they have never studied even logic, much less the logic of probability. Tommasi at least has some education in the subject, but never applied it here. Instead they are both just using the methods they “see” their peers in the field using, “assuming” they must be valid. But those methods derive ultimately from faith-based apologetics. That secular historians are still trusting and using those methods is because, well, guess who trained them? Look where they studied, or where their professors studied. Guess whose preceding work in the field they are modeling. It’s all apologetics, or derives from apologetics.

The method they use here is a quintessential apologetical device: inventing excuses to make evidence go away, which actually greatly reduces the probability of their hypothesis by adding a bunch of epicycles (what they call “auxiliary hypotheses”) to it (and in light of all the evidence I cited, and not just mentioned, even more epicycles than they list are required to carry their point). By contrast, I am just describing the evidence as it is. And as it is, it is 100% expected on my theory. To get it to be at all expected on their theory, they have to invent a bunch of excuses.

But for that to logically work they need to present evidence that those excuses are true—and indeed, enough evidence to be confident they are true. Otherwise, they are each less than 100% likely (since guesses and speculations are not “100% certain” to be true), and that reduction compounds. For example, if you have five excuses, each even as much as 80% likely (much less 50/50 or worse as actually may be), then the probability of their hypothesis is reduced by a multiple of 0.80^5 ≈ 33%. In other words, their hypothesis is then a third as probable as it started. Since my hypothesis suffers nothing to explain this evidence, it is on this evidence three times more likely than theirs. My hypothesis is therefore a much better explanation of the evidence than theirs.

For example, they say Paul “may have written for believers who already had such information,” but they never show this can explain any silence in question, much less all of them, and even less explain a total silence across 20,000 words. Their speculation is not even plausible. Because the evidence refutes it. As I show in OHJ, Paul repeatedly—and I mean repeatedly—repeats information his readers already know precisely when it is relevant to the point he is making. He only omits obvious information when it isn’t necessary to his arguments—or the arguments he needs to rebut. And many of the things they did or could not have known they would even have been asking Paul about or arguing over requiring Paul to settle the dispute. The first Apostles would be saying things about the historical Jesus that Paul would need to refute or make fit his views. And so on. There is no way Paul could “hide” all this because then he would automatically lose every argument. You can tell from his letters Paul was keen on always winning any argument against him, not conceding it. (I cover all this in detail in ch. 11 of OHJ.)

So their epicycle simply isn’t even probable in the cases I call attention to, much less supported, even less confirmed, by any of the evidence we have. The same follows for every other armchair excuse they invent to make the actual evidence disconfirming their theory go away (here and everywhere else):

• Can we explain this pervasive and complete silence with the speculation that Paul “may have had not enough information”? No. You can only explain certain, not all, silences this way. Which is exactly the point we are making: for Paul to be this pervasively ignorant is simply improbable.
• Can we explain this pervasive and complete silence with the speculation that Paul “may have omitted the information he had for apologetic reasons”? No. Because he would have these things argued at and against him all the time, requiring him to answer. Moreover, it is statistically improbable that literally every single thing he could ever have said about a historical Jesus was against his agenda. Wouldn’t he have instead built his agenda to more conform to that data than in every single respect contradict it? And wouldn’t the latter approach get him into endless weeds arguing why he is still to be believed? How likely is it that every single such thing was, by extraordinary coincidence, something no one ever argued at or against him so he could safely ignore it? The improbabilities here stack too high.
• Can we explain this pervasive and complete silence with the speculation that Paul “may have written more in epistles we do not possess”? No. Too many silences are particular, i.e. we should expect Paul to mention things where we see him discussing them. And though he certainly did write more than we have, historical data should be randomly distributed across this letters, not bizarrely entirely all packed into material that was deleted or cut. The NT (even Marcion’s) was compiled by editors with exactly the contrary motive (to preserve, not conceal, historicizing information about Jesus; even if they wanted to delete “some,” it is not at all likely they would delete “all” of it, not even to keep so as to “change” some). So now we have to posit some secret weird motive, somehow controlling Paul’s entire opus, that we have exactly the opposite evidence for—or a really unlikely coincidence. Neither lends probability to the hypothesis.

These are just unevidenced claims to which no appreciable probability can be assigned as an explanation of every curious silence noted. This is apologetics: invent an excuse to make evidence go away; present no evidence for that excuse even being true at all, much less in every case it needs to be; then declare the evidence is entirely in agreement with your theory. The method is invalid (designed, as it is, to instead defend a belief rather than arrive at the truth) because stacking “auxiliary hypotheses” (least of all improbable ones, and especially ones already contradicted by the evidence) to “save” a theory from being falsified by the data as-it-actually-is only reduces, not increases the probability of the theory defended.

And anyone facile with the logic of probability and evidence would notice this. This is why historians never being trained in that is a scandal, and largely to blame here.

• The “portrait” that “can be reconstructed” by “piecing together the disiecta membra contained in the Gospels“ is “incompatible with that of a purely celestial Messiah and offers an anchorage” in the “reality of Roman Palestine” in that period, yet “to claim that this figure is a mere invention of the evangelists strikes as rather implausible.” (p. 59)

I noted in general, but I can say here in particular, that this is not implausible at all. It is the design of historical fiction commenting on a period and its politics to represent and comment on the salient features of that period and its politics. Thus deliberate mythmaking predicts all this content exactly as much as their theory does. I document extensively in OHJ that reifying cosmic and universal concepts into concrete earthbound tales was the norm for ancient mythography. I used the similar example of the neighboring cult of Osiris, which they completely ignored and never replied to, and for the whole book simply assumed was never provided.

So there is nothing even unexpected much less implausible about this. I have to conclude they simply don’t understand the mythographic theory and have not examined the literary context that informs it. Instead they are operating from modern anachronistic assumptions about how novels and stories are written, and fossilized faith-based assumptions about how we are supposed to read the stories in the Gospels (a fossil already thoroughly smashed by Robyn Faith Walsh, Dennis MacDonald, Thomas Brodie, Randel Helms, and so many others—including myself, in Ch. 10 of OHJ).

• “That thoughtful and critical scholars who emphasize so much the fictitious character of a great part of the Gospels … admit at the same time the historicity of their protagonist is something that should give much food for thought” (p. 59)

This coming from scholars who think all of the people they named before this quote are wildly wrong about almost everything to do with the historical Jesus. Clearly “food for thought” is not an argument for embracing any conclusion they adopt. They already admit those scholars are wrong about a lot of things. So we cannot conclude they are any less wrong about “the historicity of their protagonist.” This is a fallacy of argument from authority. Authorities you already admit are wrong about things clearly cannot simply be cited for the truth of a thing. You have to go back to the evidence.

Indeed, the reason those other scholars are wrong about this one thing is the same reason these defenders of the militant hypothesis are wrong about it: they are all still using the methods taught to them in schools (and monographs) whose traditions and methods derive from apologetics, not real history. The people they name are making the same mistakes they are. So citing them as evidence that that isn’t happening is a non sequitur. By contrast, I can (and I do) extensively cite the evidence that establishes those things they are right about (and that I refer to them for).

In other words, when I name them, I am not arguing that you should agree with them because they are prestigious (or whatever). I am citing them as where to go to examine the evidence establishing the point I am making. My argument depends on that evidence being there; not on there merely being scholars to name. Confusing those two things is another common device in apologetics, whether it’s Christian apologetics, Muslim apologetics, or secular historicist apologetics.

• Things like “the interrogation and the flogging of suspects was a typical and relatively common procedure for the Roman occupying force” (p. 60)

Where do you think authors of historical fiction get their ideas? Particularly when they are writing to comment on precisely those kinds of things? This argument is prototypical: it is an apologetical method to simply cite agreement with circumstances as evidence of historicity. Historians in other fields have been trained not to do that. Though some still do it, they’re usually Christians. Obviously fiction will emulate the things it is talking about and will mold its literary models to current phenomena. Indeed—and I can attest to this, as I was trained at Columbia University in history, not “theology” or “divinity” or any of the other confessional degrees most biblical scholars claim yet that are dominated by the Christian faith community or pedigrees thereof—historians in every other field usually use this kind of evidence in exactly the opposite way: we look at fiction to gain evidence of the conditions and events and beliefs and customs and politics of their time. Not the other way around.

For example, in my doctoral dissertation (and thence in my book The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire) I made the point (and cited other historians making the point) that Christian scholars had misused the comedy of Petronius to argue something it depicts was historically real, when of course it was a joke—that it wasn’t real was actually his point. By understanding how fiction works, properly trained historians can extract knowledge about the times the author is writing about and commenting on, without gullibly believing it is anything but fiction they are reading. We know the character Eumolpus is depicted historically accurately as emulating the Julian-era Equestrian class in his clothing and behaviors (despite being ineligible to), and indeed we learn things about those historical facts from that depiction—but we don’t then claim Eumolpus must be a real person or that any of that narrative actually happened. Fiction always contains historical accuracies, and accordingly properly trained historians know to use fiction to extract exactly that kind of historical knowledge; they don’t go around then claiming it’s not fiction.

So when my co-authors conclude their inept point by declaring, “It is surprising that mythicists overlook such an elementary observation,” the irony is painful: it is surprising that they overlook such an elementary observation. We’ve overlooked nothing. We’re actually the ones doing this correctly.

• “Alfred Loisy remarked more than a century ago, ‘one can explain Jesus, but not those who would have invented him’” (p. 63)

We not only can explain them, we have done. This is an example of a drop: Price and I both explained why the historical Jesus was invented and indeed in precisely all the ways he was. Bermejo-Rubio and Tommasi simply ignored all that and made no reply, and here even claim we never even made the argument. Which is false twice over: we made that very argument in this debate (half our opening entries were on this); and we extensively proved it in the studies we cited for it.

• “many traditions about Jesus point to the existence of a kind of oral transmission” (p. 63)

This is literally false. And accordingly they cite no evidence of it (why can no one ever cite any evidence of it?). Their footnote contains citations only to late fiction and propaganda, evincing no actual oral tradition going back to Jesus. This is another one of those “faith beliefs” that has become fossilized as unquestioned dogma even in secular biblical studies, even though no one has ever presented any evidence for it, everyone just bangs the table and insists on it, and rages when you don’t find that persuasive. Walsh’s study is indeed on exactly how this happened (how the false belief arose and fossilized—and not only without any evidence, but even against what evidence there is). So if you are still falling for this, you absolutely need to read that.

• “mythicists uproot Jesus from his Judaic context” and “neglect the concrete sociopolitical reality of Palestine under the Roman rule” (pp. 65–66)

We do not. I already do respond to this point adequately enough (pp. 105–06). But they are showing here that they are not paying attention to what is really going on here: we do not “uproot Jesus from his Judaic context” but in fact more squarely situate him in that context. All our direct and background evidence shows that a revelatory angelic messiah is not only thoroughly Jewish, but is very peculiarly apt in precisely early first century Palestine when the religion began. A de-Judaizing interest only arose generations later with the Gentilizing Gospels (e.g. Mark and Luke). Likewise, we do not “neglect” the sociopolitical situation but in fact thoroughly situate both Paul and the first apostles, and (later) the Gospels, in exactly that situation.

The politics of Jesus were the politics of the shamans claiming to talk to him, and their situation (just as with the shamans who invented John Frum and his parallels in Melanesian cargo cults, or Joseph Smith and even Mohammed); and “his” solution was their solution. Christianity indeed cannot be understood apart from this political context (e.g. OHJ, Ch. 5, §23–29). That is our very point. But the political context of Christianity is not the political history of its angelic founder’s state execution, but the political circumstances of those receiving his epiphany (as attested in the Epistles), and later (in the Gospels) of those explaining and coping with the ensuing destruction of Judea that didn’t bring the expected end of the brutal Roman order.

The Epistles and Gospels are political reactions to those political realities, and cannot be understood in any other way. There is no need of an incidental founding martyr in all this. That was already in the pre-Roman Scriptures and a commonplace in ancient savior cults. An atoning savior unlocking the apocalypse was an obvious idea at the time and of obvious convenience. A crucified Jesus never needed to be historical to be useful.

The Most Credible Jesus

They then present thirty five items of evidence for their thesis. None support their thesis.

• “The mocking of Jesus by the soldiers” etc. “indicates that Jesus claimed to be a king,” and likewise other instances of “king” talk in the passion narrative (their points (3) and (4): pp. 69–70).

In the book I already address all their examples (even numerically) with an umbrella argument to the same points I am about to make (e.g. pp. 95–99). But I will use this as a paradigmatic example first to illustrate in more detail, and quickly go through the rest. Because the same analysis follows for every other example they give.

First, notice the circular argument: they have started by assuming this describes a historical scene, and then use that assumption as evidence confirming that it was—and therefore, indeed, Jesus “claimed to be a king,” so must have been historical.

But fiction writers wishing to depict their character as claiming to be The King (indeed of the cosmos), and the Romans as blindly mocking rather than understanding that fact, all to reify creed (Philippians 2:7–8), prophecy (such as Isaiah 53:3–5, 7–8, proclaims, to bring about 53:10–12), and ritual (the scapegoat in Jewish atonement ritual was similarly treated, e.g. Barnabas 7.6-10, and see Jesus as Scapegoat in Matthew’s Roman-Abuse Scene), would produce exactly the same story. So why are we concluding it happened? It is just as obviously a contrivance of Mark to illustrate all the things he wanted to say: the irony of Roman incomprehension, the complete humbling of Jesus that was ritually and scripturally and creedaly required, the contrast between the petty tokens of worldly power and the invisibility of real power (to conquer death itself, and even, ultimately, the entire cosmos: 1 Corinthians 15:12–28).

So why are we just “assuming” this “must” have happened and “therefore” Jesus claimed to be king and “therefore” he existed? This is non sequitur after non sequitur. It doesn’t make sense as a logical argument. It isn’t even true that Jesus “must” have claimed to be king even if this happened. Mark had a precedent in the mockery of the lunatic hobo Carabbas as reported by Philo (In Flaccum §6). Yet Carabbas did not claim to be king. He was mocked as one anyway. In-story, that was to actually mock the real king. But the general point is that one could be subject to this treatment for any reason. If the soldiers merely believed (or were told) he was a pretender to the throne (for example, if despite finding no evidence Pilate convicted him of this simply out of expediency and frustration or indeed even his own sick humor), they would have “done a Carabbas” on him. So their behavior does not entail Jesus made any claim at all.

But the story is not plausible as history anyway. Who was there to have seen any of this? Mark says they took Jesus away into the private palace to do this, and describes no one present but the soldiers. And had something so remarkable been done (or indeed even reported) publicly, why would Josephus not have received the report and used it (just as Philo did of Carabbas)? Moreover, even having heard of such meticulous details as Mark relates, why would anyone even bother to remember and pass it on for Mark to have heard of it? Why does Mark bother to record it? Why is this story being told here?

To be clear, I am not saying these are certain outcomes, only that the probability is not 100% that this occurred in public (it is not so described) or that it would not get to (or would be ignored by) Josephus or that anyone would keep this strange detailed memory alive for generations or that Mark would see any point in repeating it—and so you are borrowing on some improbability to get all this to be the case. Whereas the thesis that Mark invented this to his purpose suffers no such improbabilities. It fits all the evidence we already have. It is fully explained by all the reasons I just stated, which we can adduce ample evidence for as his motives across his Gospel (so that is effectively 100%), and by all the sources we can show, with evidence, he was drawing on to construct it (so that is effectively 100%), sources which one can adduce ample evidence existed and were or would be known to Mark (so that is effectively 100%). Our assumptions are simply background facts, not suppositions. And they fully entail the story as we have it. Why, then, are we trying to find some other explanation?

This is what evidence proves Mark routinely did. And it is what we can prove with evidence he actually did here. So aren’t we done? To toss all that aside as if it didn’t exist and replace it with a giant stack of unevidenced assumptions to get it back as a historical event is the purest example of apologetical methodology—not historical methodology.

• “Jesus was crucified” (point (1): p. 69)

Already creed, by prophecy and revelation (1 Cor. 15:1–8, Gal. 3:1, Phil. 2:8). So, ex hypothesi, if the belief was that Jesus was crucified by demons in outer space (just as Osiris is killed by demons in outer space), how else would a mythographer reify that in a historicizing narrative? Osiris’s murder was placed on Earth as a straightforward (if bizarrely executed) political coup by earthly assassins and usurpers, but was understood really to occur at the hands of demons in outer space. But the context in which an earthly narrative was invented for him was, indeed, as one should expect: Egyptian and set historically where it was most apposite (the Age of Pharaohs).

The entire point of Christianity was that, unlike other gods, Jesus’s unique death started the movement recently, as an actually expected sign of the imminent end of the world (1 Cor. 15:20, per Dan. 9:25–27, 12:1–3, 12:11–13). And it began in Judea, in the political context of Roman dominance of Jerusalem and its temple that Jesus was to replace. So…where is a mythographer going to set the death of Jesus? Has to be a crucifixion (creed, scripture). Has to be Judea (and most fittingly should be Jerusalem). Has to be the 30s A.D. when the celestial death was announced as recently accomplished.

There is no option left to our author Mark: this has to be mythologized as a crucifixion by Romans (by contrast, Jewish Christians outside the Roman empire were free to set the death of Jesus as a standard Jewish stoning and crucifixion a hundred years earlier: OHJ, §8.1). And Mark’s choice afforded him a plenitude of tropes to make every sociopolitical point he wanted, too. So we already expect this datum on mythicism: if mythicism is true, a Roman crucifixion in Jerusalem was guaranteed to be what Roman mythologies would describe.

So this cannot evince any other theory. It supports all theories the same. It therefore supports none over any other. This is a rudimentary principle of evidence. And I am seeing too many historians not understanding it.

• “two lēstaí (not “robbers” or “thieves” but “brigands,” in the Roman sense of “political rebels”) were crucified along with Jesus” (point (2): p. 69)

This is a distortion of the facts in more than one way. I already cover these there (pp. 102–03, 140–41), but in short, no, that word does not entail “political rebels,” and the evidence indicates Mark does not intend you to imagine they were cohorts of Jesus. They are not said to be precisely because they weren’t. This is an example of the bizarre lengths to which they go to “invent” facts that don’t exist and then use those duly invented facts as evidence for their thesis—while literally ignoring all the evidence against it.

Which my readers may recognize as a very common mode of argument among Christian apologists. Bermejo-Rubio and Tommasi are not even Christians. But they have been “trained” on a literature and by a system entirely created by them. That they think this is a logical way to argue is because they were told it is—by Christians, or the thralls of Christian role models. “It’s what everyone else in their field is doing. So it has to be correct, right?” This is why even secular historians in biblical studies are so easily led to fallacious conclusions and can’t get out of them. They haven’t learned the entire methodology they have been sold is bogus. It is instead a system for defending beliefs, not for discovering which beliefs are true.

• “a heavily armed party was sent to seize Jesus secretly and at night” (point (5): p. 70)

I repeatedly make the point in my reply that you have to ascertain the reason an author includes any detail like this. Their theory does not provide one. If Mark’s intent was to conceal the military nature of the story (as they admit), then he would have left this out. So their theory can’t explain why he included it. Why is this here?

Mark chose (and yes, chose) to say Judas brought “a throng” (ochlos, meaning “mob, throng, crowd,” not, notably, “army” or “cohort,” whatever exaggerations ensued in later retellings) sent by the Jewish elite to arrest Jesus. Even if Mark chose to say all this “because it’s just what people told him,” he still has to choose to write down what people told him. So you still have to explain why Mark is choosing to say these things—merely saying “because it happened” does not in fact explain the text of Mark. You have to explain why Mark is reporting it. Indeed, reporting it without even apologetic or expedient distortion, if indeed it was some garbled story about a military raid (you also have to explain why anyone was still telling this story, since the only tradents Mark would likely trust would have essentially the same motives and beliefs as him on this matter, but let’s just focus on Mark for now).

One thing historians trained in a history program are taught is that authors usually tell you why something is there. Ancient authors especially, as that is how they were trained to compose stories. They won’t necessarily just blurt it out (that was poor style, low art; or administrative rather than artful discourse), but they will make it clear, by the way they construct the story, what they surround that story with, by prominent symbolic markers, even by emulative markers (such as when an author alludes to or transvalues some other tale in the literature), and other like devices (for examples see Reading Josephus on James: On Valliant Flunking Literary Theory and Like, Can You Rebel Against Rome with Only Two Swords?). So, armed with this method, what do we find?

Well, Mark tells us why he wrote this: Mark has Jesus declare, “Am I leading a rebellion, that you have come out with swords and clubs to capture me? Every day I was with you, teaching in the temple courts, and you did not arrest me. But the Scriptures must be fulfilled.” Well, there you go. Scripture must be fulfilled. Mark does not tell us which one, and though it doesn’t matter (they even had more scriptures, and scriptures that said different things, than we have now, so we cannot expect to know—they did, because they had all that stuff and were familiar with it), but we can surmise it’s the same one Mark uses a lot to construct his entire passion narrative: Psalm 22, in particular verse 16, where, you guessed it, a “crowd” of “villains” surrounds the hero being led to death (and the Psalm even mentions swords, v. 20, and the combination “swords and clubs” evokes Proverbs 25:18, “Like a club or a sword or a sharp arrow is one who gives false testimony against a neighbor,” which seems an apt allusion to make here). There may be more verbal and conceptual parallels here, but that’s enough to establish the point.

And I am not speculating—that Mark uses Psalm 22 for elements of his passion narrative is an abundantly established fact, that it actually has this detail is a fact, and that the corresponding Proverb fits the authorial intent of the scene is also a fact. The scripture even says “synagogue” (congregation), here translated “crowd,” thus evoking the Sanhedrin and Priests and Scribes, hence Mark has them the ones who send the armed villains. So why do we need any other explanation? We simply don’t.

And Mark, being the brilliant author he is (as ample evidence proves: OHJ §10.4), exploits this scripturally-mandated motif to make a political point exactly in line with his entire agenda: the armed mob gives him the opportunity to have Jesus denounce the entire concept of armed mobs as a political tool, and emphasize the hypocrisy and underhandedness (armed mob, at night) of the Jewish elite. Jesus gets to say he did everything publicly and peacefully, to contrast his mission and its message (as Mark wants it to be) with the doomed and despicable path of violence the elite are leaning on—both narratively, and thus by intention, societally. Mark is commenting on the entire ethos and machinery of the world’s elite. He has woven a story by which to do that, giving Jesus a suitable zinger that’s totally on-message, out of the very scripture chosen as his template to build this tale from in the first place.

• “According to Luke 22:36, on a critical occasion, Jesus ensured that his disciples were armed, by ordering them to buy swords” (point (6): p. 70)

I’ve already covered this one in detail (Like, Can You Rebel Against Rome with Only Two Swords?). (I have an even more detailed analysis in a forthcoming book, but I’ll announce that when it’s available.)

• “At least some disciples of Jesus, if not all of them, went about with weapons” (points (7) and (8): p. 70)

In fact only one does in Mark, and that a fictional character. Luke makes it two for a particular reason (per above). Later authors embellish. But in the original story, it’s not even said to be a disciple who is armed, just “someone nearby having drawn a sword,” which should suggest one of the thugs who came with Judas, not one of the disciples (the only people the narrator has established even have swords is the arrest party). Does Mark imagine the sword is already out, and in the ruckus to “seize” Jesus one of the swordsmen accidentally strikes off the “ear of the high priest’s servant”? Perhaps. The role was transferred to disciples only in later retellings. But even as just a random defender of Jesus (friend or disciple), this had symbolic meaning, as argued long ago by Benedict Viviano. That Mark writes this has no other observable purpose, because he doesn’t do anything else narratively with this action: the one just witnessed committing felony assault is not arrested or even addressed, and we never hear about this bleeding servant again. It’s a single, bizarre event with no follow up. It occupies literally only eighteen words. No lead up. No follow up. It just suddenly happens and the story moves on as if it didn’t.

Again, we must ask, “Why did Mark put this here?” It serves no obvious narrative purpose. “Well, I dunno, it’s just what people said happened” is not a reason. Even if it was what people were saying, why would Mark choose to write it down? It must have some purpose in his story. It must say something Mark wanted to be said. But why did he want this to be said? All the historicizing reasons don’t work, because they all entail Mark would say more about it (who did this, what happened to them, what happened to the servant, what did anyone, even Jesus or his captors, say about it?). But Mark is cryptic. Which logically implies a cryptic intention. It’s similar to the unnamed woman who implausibly anoints Jesus with priceless funeral oil before he is dead, or John’s 153 fish, or the precise numerology of the pots at Cana or Mark’s loaves, baskets, and fishes.

Cryptic tales usually have cryptic meanings. And the most plausible one we know is Viviano’s: the severing of the high priest’s servant’s ear corrupts the priest’s ability to carry out sacrifices, thus symbolizing the end of legitimate sacrificial cult precisely as Jesus is set aside for sacrifice. Viviano documents that this office was not actually held by a slave but an assistant, and a position of some high station, who “serves at the right hand of the high priest in the temple.” And in the Septuagint text of Leviticus 21:18, severed ears (ώτότμητος) is specifically listed as one of the disqualifying blemishes for any such office. So we have every component of why someone might invent this story: Jesus is arrested, and someone decides to make a political statement by disqualifying a vital temple functionary. Mark has been well documented to have a continuous anti-temple throughline, emphasizing its corruption as the reason God abandoned it. This is simply a component of that same theme. It is thus significant that the word used for sword here also had a double meaning as butcher’s knife, i.e. the same knife used to perform the temple sacrifices.

Mark’s story is not believable as history, but is intelligible as myth. Matthew riffed on it into a more stalwart exposition against violence, and Luke outdid Matthew by developing a whole mythic construct explaining that point (as I document in Like, Can You Rebel Against Rome with Only Two Swords? and my forthcoming book). There is simply no reliable way to get any evidence out of any of this that any actual disciple was ever actually armed. The apologist ignores the awkwardness of their thesis (the story as told in Mark makes no sense as a historical account and does not explain why Mark wanted to include it) but defends it anyway. The historian looks at the trendlines of the author’s practices and intentions. Mark is a mythographer. This has all the hallmarks of myth. And as myth it makes far more sense—both as a story, and as a reason for Mark to have included it.

Once you get to your umteenth example of stories in the Gospels always turning out this way (OHJ, ch. 10), you might start to get a clue.

• “the Temple episode involved some sort of forcible activity” (point (9): p. 70)

Because Jesus invaded the temple with an armed force exactly as not narrated by anyone? Or because the mythologization of Zechariah 14:21 and Jeremiah 7:11-15 and Mark’s anti-temple storytelling required the scene he actually narrated? I think you see where this is going. This story we have makes no sense as history. Yet is completely explicable as mythmaking (already well-explained by R.G. Hamerton-Kelly: OHJ, pp. 156, 433–35, 453).

• “The entry into Jerusalem was a prearranged action and involved a high messianic temperament and clear political claims” (point (10): p. 70)

Because that’s the story Mark wanted to tell. It all comes from his designs and messaging, his mythological models (of the returning king), and his scriptural sources (e,g. Zechariah 9:9, Genesis 49:11, Psalm 118:25-26) and literary models (e.g. 1 Maccabees 13:51 and 2 Kings 9:11-13), as we’ve long known (Deborah Krause, “The One Who Comes Unbinding the Blessing of Judah”). So why do we need to think it’s historical? We already know why it’s here. Myth nails every detail. While history is ad hoc and implausible (such a grandiose event would not likely escape mention in Josephus; and that entails some improbability).

• “Several passages in Mark (11:1–6, 11, 19; 14:12–16) describe preparations and Jesus’ activities in Jerusalem which presuppose secrecy and caution, clandestine connection with supporters within the city, and even the use of some kind of password” (point (11): p. 70)

This one is a little ridiculous. No, going in and out of town is not a sign of criminal activity (this sounds like “having concerns” about the Mexicans going to and fro next door). And no, a mini-prophecy is not a password. It’s a miracle. Mark is describing miracles, in which mention of the Lord produces compliance with his plans. He is not garbling a bunch of espionage reports.

Remember, you have to explain why Mark is writing this down. “It happened” does not explain that. So why is Mark choosing to include these things? There is no credible answer you can give on which “it was a secret password in an elaborate conspiracy op to procure a donkey and a table at Joe’s.” Obviously Mark does not think so, because that’s not what he wrote. So he wrote what he thought. And that means he had some other reason to write it than that. You need to investigate what Mark thinks he is saying. Because that’s the only actual reason these texts are here. And that can’t be “because Mark, who wants to whitewash Jesus as an innocent pacifist, wanted to preserve clues to Jesus plotting a criminal conspiracy.” That’s self-contradictory.

• “According to John 11:47–50, the possibility that Jesus remains untroubled is connected by the high priest with a virtually certain intervention of the Romans, with serious consequences” (point (12): p. 71)

A detail that would be obvious to any author of fiction set in that context, especially fiction specifically written as commentary about that context. Indeed this is just an elaboration on Mark 3:4–6 and is in fact a retcon: the context is the resurrection of Lazarus, a completely fictional event (as I document in OHJ §10.7), and a story, and motive for killing Jesus, that completely deviates from all the Synoptics. So John is just writing a more elaborate fictional commentary than they.

• “According to John 18:19, the high priest questioned Jesus not only about his teaching, but also about his disciples, which betrays a certain apprehension regarding Jesus’ circle” (point (13): p. 71)

John is writing after Acts. Which is all about that happening. So he has been handed this concern narratively. It is by then, in other words, canon. So he puts it in. This evidence is therefore equally expected on either explanation. It therefore supports neither.

• “The preaching of the imminent arrival of the Kingdom of God had an unmistakably political character,” esp. “on earth” (Matthew 6:10/Luke 11:2) so as to “leave no place for Roman rule, as it entails the longing for an approaching national deliverance” (point (14): p. 71)

Christians preached since the days of Peter that God was soon to melt the Earth and the Romans and restore the world to only the resurrected. So there is no need to imagine they “instead” thought it would be a mundane military victory. Ditching that idea was always the distinctive teaching of the Christian sect from the day it formed. And my opponents here admit the Gospel authors have this motive (to transport the deliverance to God from men, an anti-militarist message). So the only reason the Gospel authors would include any of this language is precisely because they are staying on-message: God is going to do it (Mark 13:14–35). There is therefore no evidence here of any alternate plan ever having existed. The Gospels are entirely consistent with the Epistles on this.

• “Jesus promised that his disciples would sit on thrones to rule Israel’s twelve tribes (Matthew 19:28; Luke 22:28–30), which implies the disappearance of the actual rulers of Israel (Romans and Jews)” (point (15): p. 71)

Yes, Because God was going to melt them. The thrones would be in the new world of celestial power (Revelation 20:4; cf. Revelation 4:4 and Revelation 11:16). Paul already said this: “Do you not know that the Lord’s people will judge the world? And if you are to judge the world, are you not competent to judge trivial cases? Do you not know that we will judge angels?” (1 Cor. 6:2–4). And my opponents admit he is not a militarist. So this evidence affords them nothing.

This is an example of how evidence that is consistently against them they take out of context to pretend it supports them. Back in context (e.g. Paul’s declaration, and the Gospels’ description of the actual timeline and contents of the apocalypse, and the complete absence of human military action in bringing its final outcome) it becomes evidence against them. Leaving evidence out that, when put back in, reverses your conclusion is literally the most common tactic of Christian apologetics. Yet here this method is being used by secular historians. Why? Because they were taught to. Either directly (by university) or indirectly (by learning from books as exemplars).

• “The concrete socio-political, material dimension of the kingdom of God expected by Jesus and his disciples is further proved by the hopes to grant and receive material, this-worldly rewards (Mark 10:28–30, 35–41; Luke 22:24, 30; see Mark 9:33” (point (16): p. 71)

Yes. Just as Paul said. Until the end, the Christian community will flourish by God’s grace, and after the end will receive everything, including immortality. Because everything will be awesome in the new world God will build after laying waste the current one. This was always the Christian message: God would do this, not human war. Every statement they cite only confirms this, not the contrary.

• “According to the disciples’ own statements, Jesus’ aim was to restore the kingdom to Israel. Both in Luke 24:21 and Acts 1:6, Jesus does not revise his disciples’ view of the kingdom” (point (17): pp. 71–72)

The whole point of the gospel, from Paul to the Evangelists, is that this would be accomplished by divine act, not human violence. The two passages here cited were written to represent the Disciples not understanding that. This is a literary device. Not a callback to some real event. Once again they ignore context and thereby miss the author’s entire point. And contrary to their assertion here, Jesus does correct his disciples in both scenes: Luke 24:25–27, 44–49; Acts 1:6–11. Another example of leaving out evidence that, when put back in, reverses their conclusion. Standard hallmark of apologetics.

• “Several sayings attributed to Jesus, with an early ring about them (the disparaging words addressed to the Syro-phoenician woman in Mark 7:26–27, and the passages reflecting a low esteem of—even contempt for—pagan people: Matthew 10:5, 15:24, 18:17) reveal the circumscription of Jesus’ preaching to Israel and his nationalistic, not to say chauvinistic, tones” (point (18): p. 72)

This is the viewpoint the authors themselves are representing or commenting on. Mark does not just have Jesus snap at a pagan. He has her make an appeal that changes his mind, thus justifying the inclusion of pagans in the Christian brotherhood. This is the entire point of Mark’s gospel (see OHJ ch. 10.4 which details how Mark repeatedly makes this point). In other words, Mark wrote a story in which Jesus begins with the attitude people accuse Jews of, and ends having abandoned it, after a single sentence of argument. That is too convenient to be real. But is a perfect example of myth. Notably, the authors of Matthew have exactly the opposite opinion on this, and indeed rewrote and one-upped Mark specifically to combat its pro-Gentile messaging. My co-authors are ignoring the diverging perspectives of these two authors (despite this being well established in the field), and in one case even the rest of the story they cite. This is invalid methodology. Though it is typical in apologetics.

• “Even if the belonging of some of Jesus’ disciples to organized groups of anti-Roman resistance is doubtful, the violent disposition of at least some of them is well attested in the tradition. The title ‘Boanerges’ for James and John (Mark 3:17) suggests a rowdy reputation and a hot temper which are significantly displayed in Mark 9:38, and more harshly by their desire to resort to violence against a village of uncooperative Samaritans (Luke 9:51–56).” (point (19): p. 72)

This is false. In neither case is military violence being called for. And no “rowdy reputation and hot temper” is ever depicted for James and John. Better explanations for their nickname abound in the literature. Indeed their epithet as “sons of thunder” likely literarily inspired Luke to invent a story about them trying to cast a weather spell (so they have the order of causation backwards).

But in Mark 9, they just want to stop a poser (an entirely clinical concern), and Jesus tells them not to, because anyone expelling demons in his name is doing God’s work. This is a classic chreia, a literary device these authors would have been taught in school: to tell a story illustrating a message, teaching, or value. The author wanted to have Jesus teach what he wanted practiced: to not interfere with anyone doing God’s work (and thus not divide the world between “us” and “them,” but between Satan and God). So he invented a story doing that. There is no evidence of early “militarism” in this at all.

In Luke 9, they want to summon power from heaven, not descend with swords. The reference is to a story in 2 Kings, when Elijah actually did this (some manuscripts of Luke even make this reference explicit). Elijah was not a militarist nor commanding an army or leading a rebellion. He was just a wizard. So you can’t infer anything else here.

Again, this is a chreia. A going question the Christian mission would face is one often brought up in the Gospels: if God is behind you (such as to unleash miracles, as Justin Martyr would later boast and Paul already described, e.g. in 2 Corinthians 12:12, 1 Corinthians 12, and Romans 15:18–19), why can’t they escape persecution and abuse by just summoning fire from heaven like Elijah? So Luke “told a story” (a little parable) whereby Jesus is conveniently given a circumstance to answer that question, which is basically, “How dare you suggest that!” (“But Jesus turned and rebuked them,” the implication being that that is for God alone, at the right time—and, as he will explain, that hour “is unknown”). Some manuscripts make this explicit (showing they got the point and were worried some readers might miss it), by adding, “You do not know whose sort of spirit you are!” (wishing violence, vs. humble patience, comes from the wrong spirit).

The Greek work for “rebuke” here (epitimô) literally means “put a value on it,” which can be negative or positive in sense. The context thus means Jesus is putting a negative value on their suggestion (and even their thinking to suggest it). You can imagine this literally happening. When someone throws some such taunt at a missionary (“Why not just summon angels to defend you, if God has your back as much as you say!”), the missionary can say something like, “Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time Jesus was on a mission with his disciples just like me, and they said the same thing, and Jesus rebuked them. The lesson of the story is that we are not to wish violence on anyone. Because God will restore us in the end, so it does not matter what afflictions we suffer now. Wishing violence, even from heaven, is selfish. And the gospel says we are not to be selfish. That is not what we value. And that is why God is on our side.” Jesus is thus better than Elijah (as Luke routinely used the Elijah narrative to argue, as extensively documented by Thomas Brodie).

Every pericope in the Gospels has some lesson-hook function like this. Like cue-sheets for music. These are lesson books, missionary manuals. As I put it in Proving History (pp. 155–56):

That Jesus had enemies who slandered him, that Jesus went to parties with sinners to save them, that Jesus’ family rejected him, and so on, all face the same problems of self-contradiction (had they been a problem, they would have been removed or altered long before Mark even wrote), ignorance (we don’t really know whether these stories were embarrassing to the communities who told them at the time they were first told), and self-defeat (any reason to preserve them if true can be just as much reason to fabricate them, and in every case we can easily construct plausible motives for their invention, which often make even more sense than the stories being true)

As here, it is not even remotely plausible the disciples of a historical Jesus actually thought they could summon fire from heaven, much less asked Jesus “for permission” to. This is a mythical tale. The only motive for this story even to be contrived (much less written down here) is to communicate some point, not to record the military ambitions of Jesus.

Instead…

For example, Jesus being called crazy aligns too well with the fact that Christians themselves faced this charge [e.g. 1 Corinthians 14:23 and Acts 2:12–15, 26:24–25]—so how apposite to depict their Lord as being unjustly accused of the same, and then supplying him with clever speeches refuting it. That’s simply too useful to be a statement against interest. Christians similarly faced conflict from their families, which statistically must have involved on occasion the same charge of insanity or demonic possession from them; so depicting their Lord as trading his family in for a new one in result (Mark 3:21–35, and that in the very same scene), is again too convenient. Similar tactics have been employed by many a cult throughout history, dividing members from their established family, and representing the cult as their new “true” family. So “Jesus did it, too” would not be a statement against interest. To the contrary, it reinforces exactly what Christians wanted to preach (hence Luke 14:26).

Failing to even understand what these authors are doing, why they even wrote at all, is a major problem in biblical studies. And here we see this plaguing these scholars, just as much as all the others I document making the same mistake in Proving History. If you do not understand ancient fiction and mythography—what it was for, how it was composed—you will never understand the Gospels. You will instead get false results like “not summoning fire from heaven means Jesus was promoting armed resistance.”

• “Jesus impressed upon his followers that discipleship is synonymous not only with conflicts, sacrifice and suffering, but also with danger of death (Matthew 10:34–39; Luke 12:4, 14:25–27)” (point (20): p. 72)

Yes. In martyrdom. Not the battlefield.

• “The saying about ‘taking up the cross’ (Mark 8:34–35 and paralleled in Luke 9:23 and Matthew 16:24; cf. Gospel of Thomas 55b)—and the mention of the cross in Matthew 10:38/Luke 14:27—indicate an acute awareness of the superpower’s repressive violence, and hostility between Jesus and the Empire” (point (21): p. 72)

Or it indicates an awareness of the creed (Philippians 2:8–9). It was always a symbol for submission earning the reward. It was never any actual political commentary on the brutality of execution procedures or on Jesus being a militant. It had the opposite meaning: “the superpower’s repressive violence and hostility” to the Lord and his people was to be met by bearing it (carrying the cross, rather than taking up arms against it). There is no evidence anywhere of any other message. So there is no way to extract any history here. This is all allegorical pedagogy.

• “Several of Jesus’ followers—Peter (Mark 14:29, 31/Luke 22:31–33) and the Sons of Zebedee (Mark 10:38–39)—expressed the commitment to die with him.” (point (22): p. 73)

This willingness to die for the Lord was credal since Paul. It’s central to the gospel. It therefore had nothing to do with military ambitions.

• “The Gospels witness an antagonistic relationship between Jesus and Herod Antipas” who “kept a watchful eye on Jesus and his followers” and “wanted to kill” Jesus who “repeatedly … fled or hid from him” (point (23): p. 73)

As any historical fiction commenting on the politics of the era would depict. And even as history this required no militarism on the part of Jesus. Any vocal critic of the regime would entail this cat-and-mouse relationship (look what happened to John the Baptist just for calling out the king’s bedroom games).

Even now notice how evil regimes will target people as “terrorists” merely for having tattoos or writing an editorial or chanting in the street. You do not need to be a militant to be targeted as one in any fascist regime, and thus have to exercise the same games and cautions as an actual militant would. Many a complete pacifist gets executed as a rebel. That has never been a weird outcome in history. And the authors of the Gospels knew that then as surely as we do now.

• “There is evidence indicating that Jesus opposed the payment of tribute to Rome. A reading of Mark 12:13–17 in the sense that nothing whatever is owed to Caesar is strongly supported by Luke 23:2” (point (24): p. 73)

This is false. And I already addressed it (pp. 100–01).

• “According to Luke 23:2, 5, 14, the main charge leveled against Jesus was that of instigating sedition and ‘subverting our nation’” (point (25): p. 73)

As the fictional narrative required. Jesus is mistaken for the militant despite preaching the opposite, just as the actual militant (Barabbas) is mistakenly chosen to be pardoned. Only one of them is actually guilty of the crime. And it’s not Jesus. This whole theme is designed to explain that Christians aren’t preaching violent messianism even if their apocalyptic language (adapted from an originally militant scripture) sounds like it. This in no way requires Jesus to have ever actually been a militant.

• “The episode of the Gerasene exorcism (Mark 5:1–13) seems to have a double political reference: the name of the unclean spirit is ‘Legion’ (which implies a negative view of the Roman army), and the Old Testament background is the drowning of the oppressive Egyptian army in Exodus 14:22–15:19” (point (26): p. 73)

Since this obviously can never have happened historically, they clearly are not reading this author’s intent in telling this story correctly at all. As I already explained there (pp. 96–97). They are again failing to answer the question of why Mark chose to include this story. He must have thought it meant something other than secret military ambitions. And if he thought that, so could it’s author (who is probably, in fact, the same person). We therefore can’t trace this back to any secret militarist sense. It is actually mythographic: it is part of a series of replicating the miracles of Moses (and this, the one they indeed identify), necessitating the designation of the demons as a heathen army (see OHJ §10.4).

• “Several passages establish a link between the preaching and healing activities of Jesus and popular uprisings (John 6:15; Mark 14:2: “tumult of the people”; Mark 6:30–45). The crowd is reported to have sought forcibly to install Jesus as king.” (point (27): pp. 73–74)

All in line with the narrative point of the fiction: the misunderstanding of the elite and the people of God’s actual plan, and hence of the gospel. This is the same point since Paul (it’s the “stumbling block,” submission rather than revolution, the very thing that distinguished the Christian message from day one). So it can’t be traced back to any militancy of Jesus. It is, rather, all part of the Gospels’ anti-militancy messaging.

• “Luke 1–2 abounds in nationalistic longings which contemplate the subjugation and humiliation of the Gentiles (esp. 1:32–33 and 1:51–55, where the maiden Myriam speaks as a Maccabean)” (point (28): p. 74)

It all transfers this notion to God’s wrath, not men’s. This is all anti-war messaging, not “militancy.” This is particularly bizarre for them to claim as they admit Luke is a pacifist yet he entirely composed these chapters himself. It makes no sense to say that Luke is pushing pacifism and “therefore” he wrote two whole chapters promoting war. This can only be a complete misunderstanding of Luke’s entire point in writing these chapters.

• “Luke 2:2 defines the time of Jesus’ birth by the census, an event that in the chronicles of Josephus (Antiquities XVIII 1–10) is significant as a watershed in then-recent Jewish history, which heralds the birth of the anti-Roman resistance movement” (point (29): p. 74)

Which is precisely not how Luke uses this detail. If you want to understand an author, you have to attend to what that author’s point was, not someone else’s. It has been well demonstrated that Luke used this detail to sell exactly the opposite point: to criticize the revolutionary attitudes toward the census by depicting Jesus’s family entirely obeying the law. That Luke makes many of the changes he does to Matthew’s Nativity this way to sell the very point (common across his Gospel and Acts) that Christians and their mission are peaceful, lawful, and submissive has been well enough explained by Robert Smith (OHJ, pp. 472–73).

• “In Acts 5:35–39, Gamaliel compares Jesus and his followers with Theudas and his movement as well as with Judas the Galilean and his movement” (point (30): p. 74)

And screws it up (one of the reasons How We Know Acts Is a Fake History). So this never historically happened. Luke made it up. So you have to explain why he made this up. It can’t be to promote or remind people that Jesus was a militant. They admit Luke has exactly the opposite motive: to conceal this and promote the reverse. And when we observe Luke’s practice throughout (from the Nativity to the end of Paul’s trial at Rome), and the context here, the point of this invented story is clear: to sell the idea that the Christian movement was never militant. It is not like those others. And the logic of (the here fictional) Gamaliel is that even if his peers “mistake” them as violent revolutionaries, it still commends no action on their part: their leader was killed, so the movement will fail on its own if it is not of God (just as all those others did); and if it is of God it cannot be stopped anyway.

This is a convenient tale for Luke to tell. Anytime anyone makes the argument that the Christians should be suppressed “like” those other movements were, a missionary can retell this convenient story about how the “ever wise” Gamaliel explained why they should instead be left alone. Such a story is too convenient to be history. We also know why Luke is telling it (and no one had before): Luke is using (and indeed reacting to) the Antiquities of Josephus, and constructs Gamaliel’s speech out of its content.

• “Jesus made several critical and ironical comments on the rulers (Luke 22:25; Mark 10:42–45; Luke 7:25/Matthew 11:8), as tyrannically exercising absolute domination” (point (31): p. 74)

Exactly the perspective of the authors. So it’s exactly what they’d depict him doing. And in context this is obvious: the point of having Jesus say this is so he can immediately say “But you are not to be like that” (Luke 22:26). That’s literally the gospel.

• “The messianic overtones in Jesus’ story betray a politically charged claim: see, e.g., Luke 23:2 (“saying that he himself is Christ a King”); Luke 4:16–19 (the messianic prophecy of Isaiah 61:1–2 refers to liberation of the oppressed)” (point (32): p. 74)

In context these are all part of the storytelling that literal interpretations of these things are not correct, that God meant we should not rebel but submit and then he will avenge us and we will be rewarded. So the people and elite who don’t understand this won’t be saved. None of this entails any historical origin. It is all exactly what we expect from their intended mythmaking.

• “The tradition betrays the disciples’ deep fears of being arrested and presumably executed (both in the flight depicted in the Passion narrative, and in the account of Peter’s betrayal)” (point (33): p. 74)

Exactly the purpose of the fiction: to represent fears in the faithful and their possible outcomes. If we look at, for example, the tortures and executions of Christians carried out by Pliny the Younger, we find that Pliny did not do that because they were or were even believed or indeed even accused of being militants (and Trajan even responds making that clear), but for a sadly more mundane reason: they were flouting the law against illegal assembly (in a province that was denying even firefighters a license to assemble). So fear of being railed or killed by the state did not (and would not) entail militarism in anyone’s mind. (See again my remarks above.)

• “Mark 15:7 and Luke 23:19 mention a well-known insurrection in Jerusalem (stásis), supposedly shortly before Jesus’ arrest, in which the rebels (stasiastaí) had caused fatal casualties” (point (34): pp. 74–75)

Which is put there to contrast them with Jesus, not to associate Jesus with them.

• “The Book of Revelation has preserved the memory of a conception of Jesus/Christ as the fierce warrior par excellence, ‘clad in a robe dipped in blood’ (Revelation 19:12–16; see Revelation 14:20). In it, the sword is the symbol of the Christus triumphans (Revelation 1:16; 2:12, 16; 19:15, 21)” (point (35): p. 75)

This is false. This does not report any memory. It describes a future event, which is exactly already what was predicted since Paul (“Then the end will come, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death.”) and even Mark (who describes Jesus descending from heaven with a devastating army of angels). Yet Paul is not a militant. Nor is Mark.

This is precisely what distinguished Christianity from day one: they transferred secular hopes of revolution over to a divine one. War is thus denigrated, and replaced with wrath entirely from heaven. There is no evidence any Christian (including Jesus) ever taught anything else. Even in Revelation’s predicted future Christians are not in the armies that end the world. The wars there depicted involve heathens and unbelievers fighting each other, until Christ descends with his legions of angels to mop them all up. This is not evidence Jesus was historically a militant. It’s evidence Christians transposed messianic militancy to a future heavenly invasion in which the faithful would not raise a single weapon.

• “this material is at odds with the overall impression conveyed by the evangelists, according to which Jesus was a spiritual master having nothing to do with the dirty matters of politics in first-century Roman-controlled Judaea” (p. 75)

It is not at all at odds with that. It is exactly in line with it. As just surveyed. They have ignored context, ignored all evidence of authorial purpose and intent, and failed to explain why any of the things they claim to be there are there (that is, why each author chose to include it). All to get this false conclusion, through the devices of circular reasoning and leaving out all the evidence against it, so as to get to completely the wrong understanding of these texts. This is typical of Jesus studies. It is not their own unusual approach. It is the same broken method every Jesus historian employs.

And If We Remove the Cornerstone…

I respond already in my final chapter to everything in this, their final chapter. But three points can benefit from elaboration.

• Evincing their theory is that John “the Baptist praises Jesus declaring the Galilean preacher’s superiority” but “later his followers are portrayed as skeptics and confused on this matter (Jn 3:25–28)” and “the Baptist himself appears confused about recognizing Jesus’ superiority (Jn 1:20)” and “in Mk 11:27–33, Jesus himself acknowledges the divine inspiration of John’s activities” and “in Lk 7:31–35 Jesus puts himself and John on the same level.” (pp. 117–18)

No such thing exists in the texts. They do here the same thing they did with the Testimonium in Josephus: assume their theory is true, in order to “reinterpret” things that are, of themselves, entirely neutral, as instead ominous; and then use that result as evidence for their theory. Which is a circular argument. I already pointed this out, but let’s look closely at each cited example:

• Mark 11:27–33: Mark needs John’s celebrity endorsement to hold authority (that’s why he invented it), so of course he will have Jesus acknowledge John is with God. Fully motivated as fiction.
• Luke 7:31–35: Mark does not have Jesus claiming John his equal here, but his analog. “John is with God and was abused, and so am I.” Mark is trading again on John’s celebrity to boost that of Jesus. Fully motivated as fiction.
• John 3:25–28: In context, this depicts John correcting their uncertainty. Exactly as that author would want. And indeed, John the Baptist does this in the same flowery, prolix, mystical, and ridiculous style of the author of that Gospel (thus telling us this never happened; the author is making this up).
• John 1:20: This doesn’t say anything they claim. John is emphatically clear here, not “confused.”

That last error might reveal another common error among biblical scholars. I suspect they didn’t check the Greek and are reacting to a confused translation, not to a confused John—or like the confused translators, they are following confessional dictionaries rather than more legitimate ones: the verb ἀρνέομαι without a predicate means “refuse,” not “deny.” This is why bad translations confusingly say John “confessed, and did not deny, but confessed, ‘I am not the Christ’,” while better translations say “He did not refuse to confess, but openly declared, ‘I am not the Christ’.” It is thus not John who is confused, but modern language translators. John is showing no confusion here. John did not refuse to say it, nor refuse to answer them, but outright said it: he is emphatically not the Christ. This is not confusion. It’s emphatic clarity.

Even the most erudite experts often don’t check things before believing them (I have a lot of examples but especially of translation, though that problem is not unique to this field: From Homer to Frontinus: Biased Translation Is Not Unique to Biblical Studies). So Bermejo-Rubio and Tommasi saw a translation that said what they wanted the text to say, and then used it as evidence; they did not think to check first, and ensure the passage actually says what they were told. In the actual Greek the text is not at all ambiguous about what John thought. It is actually making a specific point that he was not.

Indeed none of the passages they cite say any of the things they want. They are simply “reinterpreting” passages in light of their theory and then using those new interpretations as evidence for their theory, which is that same circular reasoning again.

• “the ‘super-apostles’” were “seen as pretentious and loathed guardians of the tradition, the gospel revealed by heaven vs. that revealed by the flesh,” hence this is “the repudiation of Jesus’ acquaintance ‘in the flesh’” (p. 122; similarly, p. 128)

This is false. This is in fact a very common dogma in biblical studies, one of many examples of made-up modern faith-doctrines that keeps being repeated as an evidenced fact, yet, when you check, the evidence confirms none of this and in fact something else.

There is not a single instance in any of Paul’s authentic letters where any dispute or difference is ever raised or mentioned or addressed about “the gospel revealed by heaven vs. that revealed by the flesh” (not once, ever) or “the repudiation of Jesus’ acquaintance in the flesh” (not once, ever). Paul never mentions (even to rebut it as an argument against him) anyone ever meeting Jesus in the flesh. Ever. In fact Paul repeatedly indicates no one ever saw or heard anything from Jesus until after his resurrection (1 Cor. 15:3–8; Rom. 16:25–26; and Rom. 10:12–15, which is even clearer on this point in the Greek as explained in OHJ; and the same is implied in Galatians 1 and 1 Cor. 9:1-5, as also shown in OHJ).

When Paul jabs at his colleagues with the term “superapostles” he is referring to their eloquence, their ability to speak well in public, which he (humblebrags) that he can’t compete with. The evidence suggests he certainly could, but this kind of maneuver was common in ancient rhetoric (“Oh, my friends may be more eloquent than poor humble me, but that does not change the fact that…”). How do we know that? Because Paul frakkin tells us: “I do not think I am in the least inferior to those “super-apostles”; I may indeed be untrained as a speaker, but I do have knowledge…” (2 Corinthians 11:4–6). Likewise when he says (in the next chapter, but continuing the same argument) “I am not in the least inferior to the ‘super-apostles’; even though I’m no one, I persevered” in proving myself with miracleworking (2 Corinthians 12:7–13). The word “no one” here commonly meant in such use a “nobody” as in someone unimpressive or of low station, or even “good-for-nothing,” as in, unskilled.

In the context of the whole letter we know Paul means unskilled—as a rhetor. Indeed this very line is in reference to “the thorn in his side” being the thing that makes him this good-for-nothing, which context thus suggests was a speech impediment of some kind (OHJ, p. 527) or perhaps autism or some other disorder that made social interaction or oratory difficult for him, as suggested earlier in this same letter: “I came to you in weakness with great fear and trembling,” and hence “my message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power” (1 Cor. 2.3-4).

Biblical scholars all too often simply don’t check things. And here is a classic example. Bermejo-Rubio and Tommasi simply “believed” a modern Christian apologetical myth that Paul is talking about his not having sat at the feet of Jesus. When if they had checked, all the evidence is extremely clear that, instead, he means he is not as good an orator as them—and that’s it. I mean, honestly. He explicitly says this three times. Why are we still confused about it?

• Is it “probable” that “some very imaginative guy invented a crucifixion to make it appear as the fulfillment of a prophecy which didn’t make the least reference to it?” (p. 124)

But it does make “the least reference to it.” More than.

Criminal execution was commonly crucifixion, even in Judaism (even the stoned were hung on a pole, hence “crucified,” and the words are identical, as numerous scholars have proved: OHJ, pp. 61–62; see Joshua 8:29 and 10:26-27, Deuteronomy 21:22-23, which is even referenced in Gal. 3:13, and Esther 5:14, 7:9-10, and 8:7). And the criminal execution of God’s chosen atoning hero is explicit in Isaiah 53:1, 5, 8–9 (and explicitly said of the messiah in Daniel 9:24–26, which along with 12:1–4 many scholars agree is an interpretation of Isaiah 53). It is in fact even described as being “pierced” (53:5; in the DSS, also in 53:10) which any exegete would (including the Talmudists, who did) find is confirmed in Zechariah 12:10 (and read exactly that way even in standard Judaism: b.Sukkah 52a-b; and that Isaiah 53 was taken to be describing the messiah was also standard: b. Sanhedrin 98b). Likewise in the DSS version of Psalm 22 (Shon Hopkin, “The Psalm 22:16 Controversy: New Evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls”), which is also well known to be a riff on Isaiah 53.

Again, they didn’t check. Yet all this was already explained in OHJ (as I also note in this volume). Biblical scholars cannot hope to arrive at correct conclusions about things if they don’t even check the resources that would inform them before making confident declarations that evidence can thus immediately be adduced to refute. But historicists do this all the time. It’s annoying. But the important observation for you to make here is this: they based their theory on a premise they now know to be false. So, will they update their beliefs? Or will they double down and continue defending their now-undermined theory? One of those is the method of the historian. The other is the method of the apologist. Watch and see which they reveal themselves to be. And then ask yourself: who should you trust more in any debate, the historian or the apologist?

That completes the fisk. As I said before, this does not substitute for the debate. They made points, and I made points, that I have not listed here. And we each developed and explained our theories there (which I have skipped past here). So there is no substitute for reading the entire debate and not just this article.

Conclusion

Overall, as I already explain in this book, Bermejo-Rubio and Tommasi’s reliance on “the criteria” of “convergent patterns, embarrassment and historical plausibility” are indeed standard methods bolstering every theory of a historical Jesus, yet are just three circular modes of argument:

• Talking about “convergent patterns” simply means selecting what you want to be true and rejecting the rest. But then your desire for “what is true” has caused the convergence of your results. Pick a different theory that decides different things to count and you’ll get a different convergent pattern. And so on. So there is no way to tell which convergent pattern is true this way. It’s all just spinning yarn.
• Likewise they “reinterpret” everything as embarrassing by assuming their theory is true, and then use this interpretation as evidence their theory is true. But on some competing theories those things aren’t embarrassing. Often in fact the evidence already makes plain that they were not. The Argument from Embarrassment requires very specific conditions to ever actually carry any merit (I extensively go over this, and why, in Proving History). They never meet those conditions.
• And then deciding what to keep simply with “historical plausibility” would create a history out of any myth. This is like going through the myth of Hercules and removing everything you don’t think is “historically plausible” and then acting surprised that what you have left is “all” historically plausible—and then treating that self-fulfilling surprise into the fallacious conclusion that therefore Hercules existed, and all those plausible things are true. Never mind that every fiction and myth will contain lots of plausible things. They’re supposed to. That doesn’t make those things historical.

Their method is fundamentally broken. It is logically fallacious from top to bottom. It cannot get at the truth. And until Jesus historians realize this and recognize this and stop using these methods and start, instead, reasoning logically, we’ll still always have bogus theories of a historical Jesus, whether of Jesus as a pacifist reformer or Jesus as a militant revolutionary. It’s all the same bogus outcome from the same bogus methods. I have done all I can to explain this and make it known. It’s on them now to listen. Or on you now to realize they won’t.

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For replies to the above see “(Last) Remarks on Richard Carrier’s ‘Thorough Fisk'” by Fernando Bermejo-Rubio and Franco Tommasi.

There is also an interesting review of Jesus: Militant or Nonexistent by Nicholas Covington (of Hume’s Apprentice) that illustrates why even when wrong it remains the only serious debate of the subject in print and well worth reading and engaging with.