In further preparation for my upcoming defense of On the Historicity of Jesus at the SBL regional meeting, someone clued me in to an awful piece on the historicity issue published by BAR: Lawrence Mykytiuk (I assume that means this guy), “Did Jesus Exist? Searching for Evidence Beyond the Bible” (January/February 2015). It’s so awful it hardly warrants a response. But hell, I’m high on wine right now, so fuck it…

I gave up my own subscription to BAR many years ago when I realized it wasn’t academically rigorous or reliable, and was basically just a profit-seeking Christian propaganda mill that also served as the personal propaganda vehicle for whatever weird thing Hershel Shanks wanted to promote (who for a long time seemed basically to control the entire publication), including things he has had his own hand in behind the scenes, like the James ossuary fiasco. I caught them in inaccuracies several times (some close to outright lies, IMO), and despite my sending letters pointing this out, no corrections were issued that I recall. (Jim West has had similar issues.) So I’m not surprised that BAR would publish such a crap article from Mykytiuk.

Most notably, this article takes no notice of, nor responds in any way, to my book On the Historicity of Jesus. Even though that was published by a major respected peer reviewed biblical studies press nearly a year before Mykytiuk’s article was published. So, if someone thought this BAR article was a response to my book, well, so much for that. It’s not even aware of my book. But even apart from that, what is typical about this as a BAR article is that it is antiquated and doesn’t interact with current literature on its subject at all. It simply doesn’t inform readers, or advance the discussion, or even describe the current state of the discussion, nor is it in any relevant sense up to date. It’s therefore useless. I’ll illustrate…

Tacitus

Even though Mykytiuk cites Van Voorst, he doesn’t even discuss any of the debate surrounding the passage in Tacitus that is recounted by Van Voorst, nor even mentions much less discusses challenges to the authority of the passage. To the contrary, Mykytiuk’s only argument for its authenticity, that the passage is in Tacitean Latin (an argument I myself once thought decisive), betrays the fact that he doesn’t even know what the peer reviewed literature challenging its authenticity says–which concedes almost all of the passage was written by Tacitus, just not one short line. No article is worth writing about this passage in Tacitus that does not describe and address Jean Rougé’s devastating critique of it in 1974, which I expanded on in Vigiliae Christianae a whole year ago (“The Prospect of a Christian Interpolation in Tacitus, Annals 15.44,” vol. 68, 2014). How does a librarian miss the latest peer reviewed research on the subject he is writing on, published a whole year ahead of him, in a leading biblical studies journal? Much less the top papers on it forty years ago that even his own source (Van Voorst) cites and references?

Consequently, Mykytiuk’s discussion is useless and uninformative. You can find my VC paper in Hitler Homer Bible Christ. And you can find my treatment of the utility of the passage even if authentic (answer: none) in On the Historicity of Jesus, chapter 8.10. Notably, Mykytiuk even concedes Tacitus’s source was Gospel-using Christians. He has very little respect for the fact that this erases its value as evidence because it cannot independently corroborate the Gospels if it is simply just repeating what Christians in the 2nd century were saying was in the Gospels. Sigh.

Instead Mykytiuk says ridiculous things that a Tacitus expert would laugh at. And without citing any evidence in support. Such as that “Tacitus was certainly among Rome’s best historians—arguably the best of all—at the top of his game as a historian and never given to careless writing.” Good Christ. No Tacitus expert would say any of that. Tacitus is actually regarded as of middling reliability (except on straightforward political reporting), and as not trustworthy on many details (see Michael Grant’s Greek and Roman Historians: Information and Misinformation, a standard in the field). Likewise the notion that Tacitus “characteristically would have wanted to verify [scandalous information] before accepting it as true.” There is no evidence of that at all, not of the general idea of it being characteristic of Tacitus to double-check scandalous claims he loved to hear (historians generally doubt that), nor of it being the case in this particular instance (his good friend Pliny didn’t verify the information, he just believed what Christians told him; and Pliny is in fact Tacitus’s most likely source, as I show in OHJ). Nor even of it being possible. (What records does Mykytiuk imagine Tacitus would spend pointless hours checking to verify it? Let me remind you before you read his answer, that the libraries and state archives of Rome burned to the ground not just once but at least twice after the time of Jesus. See OHJ.)

Ironically, though in a note Mykytiuk admits that the passage in Tacitus probably originally spoke of “Chrestians,” not Christians, it does not occur to him that this calls into question the subsequent line mentioning “Christ.” For Tacitus cannot have written that the name “Chrestians” came from the name “Christ.” You have to choose. Either Tacitus wrote Christians (unlikely, for the reasons Mykytiuk’s cited scholarship admits), or he wrote Chrestus (if he named the man here at all), and thus was not originally talking about Christ. Precisely Rougé’s point, which he supports with considerable circumstantial evidence. And his argument I demonstrate is probably correct in my article for VC. So if you want to be up to date on this passage in Tacitus, throw Mykytiuk in the trash, and get my VC article instead (it’s in HHBC if you don’t have journal access).

Josephus

Just a travesty of out of date nonsense. Mykytiuk doesn’t even cite or discuss the single most important paper on the subject of the Josephan testimonies to Jesus, that of James Carlton Paget, published in the Journal of Theological Studies in October of 2001. No discussion of these passages can be called authoritative that does not reference and discuss Paget’s treatment. How can Mykytiuk not know of this? Or completely ignore it and claim to be writing an up-to-date piece on the subject? (In any half-decent college today, your paper would get a big fat F if you did that.) Similarly, no mention of, or response to, Ken Olson’s rather famous and authoritative attacks on the main passage’s authenticity–especially, most recently in the field’s news, in Eusebius of Caesarea: Tradition and Innovations (2013, pp. 97-114), which led to a significant follow-up article on a major trade blog. No mention of, or response to, G.J. Goldberg’s “The Coincidences of the Testimonium of Josephus and the Emmaus Narrative of Luke” in the Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha (vol. 13, 1995). Both of which refute Mykytiuk’s claim that the main passage is in Josephan and not Christian style (it is in fact in Lukan-Eusebian and not Josephan style). And though he cites Alice Whealey on an unrelated point, he continues to claim the Arabic testimony to the main passage in Josephus goes back to Josephus and not Eusebius, even though Whealey thoroughly refuted that years ago: it’s just a derivation from a Syriac translation of Eusebius.

But again, how does a librarian miss the most recent peer reviewed research on this subject? My article on the Josephus passages in the Journal of Early Christian Studies was published in Winter of 2012 (also available now in Hitler Homer Bible Christ). No mention of it. No responses to its evidence or arguments. What use is his article then? None.

For example, Mykytiuk ignorantly uses the argument “All surviving manuscripts of the Testimonium Flavianum that are in Greek, like the original, contain the same version of [the central] passage, with no significant differences.” In point of fact, “all surviving manuscripts of the Testimonium Flavianum that are in Greek” derive from the same single manuscript quoted by Eusebius two centuries after Josephus died (this is self-evident, but proved anyway in my article for JECS). They therefore cannot be used to corroborate Eusebius. They are just copies of the same manuscript he then had. Likewise, he audaciously claims, “even more important, the short passage … that mentions Jesus in order to identify James appears in a later section … and implies that Jesus was mentioned previously,” even though that’s exactly the opposite of correct: it is precisely because the James passage doesn’t have an expected back-reference to the previous passage (even though such back-references are typical, especially when weird or obscure facts are involved, as I show in OHJ) that scholars doubt both passages. Not the other way around. So Mykytiuk is actually using the unexpected lack of a back-reference, as evidence of a back-reference (!?), that he then uses to bolster the authenticity of the (non-)back-referenced earlier passage. Imagine my cartoon head spinning with bewilderment.

On top of all that, Mykytiuk provides no reason to believe Josephus, even if the passages are authentic, independently verified anything. As Goldberg shows the main passage is dependent on Luke, it clearly is not independent of the Gospels. It is therefore useless as evidence. The James passage might bolster historicity a little…until you realize it didn’t exist in the time of Origen, a Josephan scholar writing a century before Eusebius, who is the first to have “discovered” it. As I demonstrated in JECS. It also cannot have been written by Josephus as we have it, since he would then need to explain what a “Christ” was, and why James being his brother would cause anyone to kill him, and then cause the Jews generally to be outraged by his being killed! And that’s just the tip of the iceberg of problems scholars have noted in recent and essential literature, none of which Mykytiuk mentions or addresses, rendering his paper useless and obsolete, even before the magazine rolled off the presses.

For a far more comprehensive, more careful, and up-to-date treatment of the Josephan references than anything Mykytiuk provides, see OHJ, chapter 8.9.

Rabbis (i.e. The Talmud)

Mykytiuk briefly says “Nondenial of Jesus’ existence is particularly notable in rabbinic writings of those first several centuries C.E.,” by which he means the Middle Ages (the Babylonian Talmud, which is what he actually means, not being written until the 5th-6th century). How one confuses “those first several centuries C.E.” with “the Middle Ages” I can’t fathom. But anyway. The real stinger here is that the Talmud uniformly knows of only one “historical” Jesus: one who was executed by stoning a hundred years before Pontius Pilate. This is a serious fucking problem. One Mykytiuk completely ignores, neither mentioning it nor attempting to cope with the problems it creates for trying to claim this counts as an independent corroboration of…what, the Gospels? How can they have independently corroborated the Gospels…and ended up thinking Jesus was executed in 75 B.C. before Romans were even in Judea? Cartoon head still spinning. For a more up-to-date and honest treatment of this evidence, see OHJ, chapter 8.1.

Seriously?

Mykytiuk then goes on to claim Lucian counts as corroborating the Gospels, even though Lucian wrote after 160 A.D. and even says he is using what Christians then claimed as his source. So, in what sense is Lucian at all relevant to establishing the historicity of Jesus? (Sound of wind and crickets.) He then mentions Celsus. Who also wrote after 160 and explicitly used the Gospels as his only source. (And yet, incidentally, though Mykytiuk fails to mention this, Celsus was Lucian’s friend, and thus Lucian’s most likely source of information.) He mentions Pliny the Younger, who also explicitly says he just believed what Christians told him, and that as way late as 110 A.D., and didn’t fact check anything. (He also, BTW, doesn’t say anything that identifies Jesus as a historical person.) He admits only in a footnote that Suetonius’s mention of Chrestus might not have anything to do with Jesus. “Might” is being disingenuous. It almost certainly has no such connection. See OHJ, chapter 8.11. He cites Mara bar Serapion. Oh good Christ. As Mykytiuk says, “other documentary sources are doubtful or irrelevant.” Um, that includes Mara bar Serapion, a vague, late source containing no evidence of being independent of second-century Gospel-tradition, or even of certainly saying anything about Jesus at all.

Oh, Right.

The most embarrassing thing, and perhaps the biggest tell, is that when Mykytiuk admits there are some scholars who deny or doubt historicity (he names only Wells and Martin, not a single major actual proponent, like Thompson, Brodie, Price, Carrier, Avalos, Noll, Droge, or Doherty), his cited authority is none other than the fundamentalist Evangelical apologist, Gary R. Habermas. Really? Mike drop.