One of the more common arguments among online supporters of the Jesus Myth thesis is an argument from silence: “There are no contemporary references to Jesus, therefore he did not exist”. Unfortunately this naïve argument is based on an ignorance of the nature of ancient source material and of how an argument from silence is sustained. As a result, while it may initially seem to have some rhetorical force, it is not an argument that would be accepted by historians.

“Contemporary or STFU!”

Given that many online news and opinion articles have comments sections, it is interesting to read the comments on any article that mentions Jesus as a historical person. It usually does not take long to find comments like these, found on a (not particularly good) article about why we can accept that a historical Jesus existed (see Simon Gathercole, “What is the historical evidence that Jesus Christ lived and died?”, Guardian, Fri 14 Apr 2017)

“The Romans are pretty well known for keeping good (though obviously biased) records at the time that JC was supposed to have been around, especially when it came to anyone they considered a threat to their empire, and we can find meticulous records off all kinds of criminals and trials, yet not a single whisper of this prominent Jesus figure. …. Sorry, but there is no contemporary evidence for the existence of Jesus at all.” (goldenbollocks, 14 April 2017, 23:39)

“the earliest surviving works of josephus are from the 11th century and if they are genuine would still have been written 40 years after jesus’ death. tacitus some 80 years afterwards.no contemporary records.and jesus of nazareth? there was no nazareth.” (Fez Parker, 15 April 2017, 0:07)

“For me, the key doubt as to Jesus’ existence is the lack of any contemporary Roman records, from an empire that kept extensive records. That Pilate, whose existence is beyond doubt, never reported the turmoil in his province or that it was not otherwise noted seems odd. That Josephus, a century later, is the first Roman other than St Paul to comment on Jesus is at odds with the detailed knowledge we have of minor figures in some of the most remote parts of the empire. For example, know what rank & file troops eat, did or wrote home about while stationed on Hadrian’s Wall. We have intimate knowledge of the invasion and suppression of the British tribes just a decade or so after Jesus’ death but nothing such from Judea.” (HarringtonJaquet, 14 April 2017, 23:47)

“But there isn’t [ evidence for his life]. There is not a single contemporary mention of him, nor even of any of the events that supposedly happened.” (Poppy Palais, 15 April 2017, 0:11)

“[Gathercole] admits that there is no contemporary Roman account of Jesus, even though there were plenty of Romans writing about everything under the sun.” (TonyChinnery, 15 April 2017, 0:27)

And so on. And these are just a sample of such comments from a single article; examples could be multiplied almost endlessly. Like most Mythicist arguments, the idea that the lack of contemporary references to Jesus should make us at least somewhat suspicious about his historicity has a long pedigree. Writing in his 1909 book The Christ, the American sceptic John Remsburg famously listed 42 ancient authors who he says were “mysteriously silent on this god-son saga”. Remsburg was not himself a Mythicist and noted in his opening chapter “it is not against the man Jesus that I write, but against the Christ Jesus of theology” (Remsburg, p. 13). So his list was not so much “mysterious silence” about the existence of Jesus, but silence about a Jesus who performed the wondrous deeds detailed in the gospels. Despite this, his list and versions of it have been taken up with great enthusiasm by a range of actual Mythicists, including the New Age writer “Acharya S”/Dorothy Murdock, amateur polemicist David Fitzgerald and biologist Frank Zindler.

Resmburg’s list was recently expanded greatly by an aerospace engineer, Michael Paulkovich, whose hobby is writing books about how bad Christianity is and always has been. One of these is No Meek Messiah: Christianity’s Lies, Laws and Legacy (2012), which is mostly a catalogue of Christianity’s many historical sins (both real and imagined) mixed in with some eccentric and predictably weird private theories about the origins of various Christian beliefs (the Buddha, Krishna, Attis and others were involved, apparently). Paulkovich hedges his bets slightly on the existence of a historical Jesus, saying “Jesus may indeed have been a real man wandering around desert towns in the first century” but he goes on to say “I simply find it fascinating that, among the horde of reliable writers of the times and of that very region none who is credible ever recorded his life, interactions with the Jewish or Roman world, or any ‘Biblical’ event.” (Paulkovich, p. 200) Obviously this is closer to Remsburg’s position than full Mythicism per se, but he goes on to note not only that there are no references to support the miraculous, divine Jesus of Christianity but also that there is not “even proof of Jesus simply being a charming chap dunked in a river by one of the many first century Johns, preaching to masses two thousand years ago in a jerkwater and largely illiterate region of Judea”. So while he makes a grudging admission that a historical, non-miraculous Jesus may have existed, he still expects there to have been contemporary mention of him and is surprised there is none. He then gives a greatly expanded version of Remsburg’s list, running to a full 126 writers who he says “should” have mentioned Jesus. And he made this list the centrepiece of his publicity for his book, writing an article focused on it for Free Inquiry, vol 34 issue 5 and an introduction to it for jesusneverexisted.com’s predictably gleeful Kenneth Humphreys, where he aligns himself rather more closely with key Mythicists. His list got enough publicity for him to be cited as a great authority on the matter ( a “historian”, no less) by that august scholarly journal, the Daily Mail (3 April 2015).

A slightly more modest list can be found in David Fitzgerald’s self-published book Nailed: Ten Christian Myths That Show Jesus Never Existed at All (2010). In a section entitled “They Should Have Noticed”, Fitzgerald mentions 12 contemporary writers or other figures who he claims “should” have mentioned Jesus and discusses six of them in detail: Seneca, Gallio, Justus of Tiberias, Nicolaus of Damascus and Philo of Alexandria. He follows this with a further 14 near contemporary writers or works whose silence on Jesus he also finds suspicious. And he does not hold back in assuring his readers that these writers “should” indeed have mentioned Jesus:

“There were plenty writers, both Roman and Jewish, who had great interest in and much to say about (Jesus’) region and its happenings …. We still have many of their writings today: volumes and volumes from scores of writers detailing humdrum events and lesser exploits of much more mundane figures in Roman Palestine, including several failed Messiahs.” (Fitzgerald, p. 22)

Strong stuff. So, given these lists of writers who “should” have mentioned Jesus but did not and given their enthusiastic endorsement by Mythicists, it is small wonder people find this argument persuasive. After all, the argument makes at least some kind of  prima facie sense. Unfortunately, there is a valid way to construct this kind of argument and the Mythicists and their friends fail to do it every time.

Arguments from Silence

Of course, legitimate arguments from silence certainly can be made coherently and usefully in historical analysis and such arguments are often made by historians. It needs to be noted, however, that historians always use such arguments with caution and try to construct them with due care. This is because, as we will see, a poorly constructed and weakly supported argument from silence has no weight. Several historiographers have outlined the proper structure for such an argument. For example:

“To be valid, the argument from silence must fulfil two conditions: the writer[s] whose silence is invoked in proof of the non-reality of an alleged fact, would certainly have known about it had it been a fact; [and] knowing it, he would under the circumstances certainly have made mention of it. When these two conditions are fulfilled, the argument from silence proves its point with moral certainty.” (Gilbert Garraghan, A Guide to Historical Method, 1946  p.149)

Langlois and Seignobos formulate this kind of argument in much the same manner, though perhaps constrain it more strictly:

“That which is conclusive is not the absence of any document on a given fact, but silence as to the fact in a document in which it would naturally be mentioned. The negative argument is thus limited to a few clearly defined cases. (1) The author of the document in which the fact is not mentioned had the intention of systematically recording all the facts of the same class, and must have been acquainted with all of them …. (2) The fact, if it was such, must have affected the author’s imagination so forcibly as necessarily to enter into his conceptions. (C. V. Langlois and C. Seignobos, Introduction to the Study of History, transl. G. G. Berry, 1898, p. 256)

In his classic paper on the subject, John Lange comments on Langlois and Seignobos’ formulation and is careful to note that these more restrictive conditions “are proposed with respect to the conclusiveness of a given instance of the argument” and says that some sound arguments from silence may not meet these exacting criteria and so not be said to be totally conclusive but may still be persuasive (Lange, “The Argument from Silence”, History and Theory, Vol. 5, No. 3 (1966), pp. 288–301, p. 290 pp. 290-1). What is essential to all historiographical formulations of an argument from silence, however, is that it is not the silence that is key, it is the argument that there should not be silence. The strength of this kind of argument lies in showing that there is silence in the sources where silence should not exist. Any attempted argument that does not do this or does not do it competently will immediately fail. And here is where the naïve Mythicist argument always collapses.

The naïve form of this argument, as found in most the examples from the Guardian article quoted above, usually simply notes the absence of any contemporary references to Jesus and leaps straight to the conclusion that, therefore he did not exist. This seems to make sense to many people who have not studied ancient history, given that pretty much all modern people have a long paper trail of contemporary documentation of their lives, both material and digital, that stretches back to their birth. But this naïve form of the argument is, of course, a non sequitur. The ancient world had far lower levels of literacy, far less bureaucracy, far fewer documents about anything and, therefore, many millions of ancient people were born, lived and died without a single scrap of papyrus or parchment noting anything about them.

Even if they were noted in some way, the gulf of time between us and them means we have only a microscopic fraction of the far fewer documents that existed. Proponents of this form of the argument consistently overstate how many such records existed (e.g. “the Romans are pretty well known for keeping good records at the time”) but more importantly they also vastly overstate how many records survive to us. So one of the Guardian comments above notes that we “know what rank [and] file troops [ate], did or wrote home about while stationed on Hadrian’s Wall” and seems to think this means we have this level of detailed information for all places and all periods of the Roman Era, not realising that they are referring to a single chance find of wooden tablets from Vindolanda which are remarkable precisely because they are exceptional – we do not have this kind of material and therefore this kind of detail for most other places and periods of Roman history. Another commenter declares confidently that “we can find meticulous records off [sic] all kinds of criminals and trials” from the Roman era, when, in fact, we most definitely cannot. We have no such surviving “meticulous” records – what few references we have are fragmentary and their survival is totally accidental. Contrary to what this kind of comment seems to assume, there is no archive somewhere with the records of the trials held by Pontius Pilatus between AD 26-36 neatly stacked where a researcher could notice no mention of one “J. Christ of Nazareth”. These naïve Mythicists do not seem to realise exactly how scanty our surviving sources are even for highly prominent events and famous people, let alone for the minor doings of a Jewish peasant preacher.

Take, for example, the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. This was a major catastrophe, resulting in the total destruction of two entire provincial Italian cities – Pompeii and Herculaneum – with a total population of up to 20,000 people and causing the death of many thousands of those inhabitants. Its impact would have been massive, with tens of thousands of refugees flooding surrounding areas and the local region devastated for years to come. Yet not only do we have no contemporary references to the destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum, we actually have no direct references to the cities by name at all.

Our ancient references to the eruption of Vesuvius consist of:

(i) Two detailed descriptions by Pliny the Younger in letters to Cornelius Tacitus – Letters VI.16 and VI.20.

(ii) Two passing references to the volcano and its eruption in Valerius Flaccus’ Argonautica, III.209 and IV.507, written circa 90 AD.

(iii) One longer mention of the disaster in Martial’s Epigrams, IV.44, witten in the late 80s or early 90s AD:

“Observe Vesuvius. Not long ago it was covered with the grapevine’s green shade, and a famous grape wet, nay drowned the vats here. Bacchus loved the shoulders of this mountain more than the hills of Nysa [his birthplace], satyrs used to join their dances here. Here was a haunt of Venus, more pleasant than Lacedaemon to her, here was a place where Hercules left his name. It all lies buried by flames and mournful ash. Even the gods regret that their powers extended to this. “

The mention of “… a place where Hercules left his name” seems to be an rather oblique reference to Herculaneum and the closest thing we have to a mention of the two destroyed cities.

(iv) One reference to the disaster by Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews XX.141, that says that the grandson of Herod Agrippa and his wife died in the disaster:

” … that young man (Agrippa), with his wife, perished at the conflagration of the mountain Vesuvius, in the days of Titus Caesar … “

He says he will detail this later in his work, but unfortunately he does not actually do so.

(v) Suetonius mentions the disaster in passing in his short biography of the emperor Titus:

“There were some dreadful disasters during his reign, such as the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in Campania, a fire at Rome which continued three days and as many nights, and a plague the like of which had hardly ever been known before.” (Titus, VIII.3)

All of these references mention the eruption but none of them make any explicit mention of Pompeii, Herculaneum or any towns being destroyed. The closest any of them come to this is the part in Pliny’s first letter where he says “this lovely stretch of coast was thickly populated”. Beyond that there is only one general reference to towns being buried (in Tacitus) and no direct mention of Pompeii or Herculaneum by name at all. Of course, this does not mean that no such references were made. It is almost certain that there were thousands of accounts, letters, diaries, official records, imperial orders and so on that did so. But the key point is that none of these survive.

Another illustrative example can be found in our earliest references to the Carthaginian general Hannibal. As one of the greatest military commanders in the ancient world and the general who came close to defeating the Roman Republic in the Second Punic War, Hannibal (247- c. 182 BC) was justly famous in his own time and has remained so ever since. His career was also fairly long, beginning at around the age of 18 in 229 BC and spanning about 40 years until at least 190 BC. Yet, despite all this, we have precisely zero references to him in any literary source dating to his lifetime. Of course, as with the destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum, there would have been plenty of such references. And in the case of Hannibal we can be absolutely certain of this, given that we have citations of them and even quotes from them in later accounts of his career. But none of these works actually survive in their own right; as with Jesus, all of our surviving references to him date to decades after his death. The only surviving reference that actually dates to his time is a fragmentary inscription – an epitaph of the Roman consul and general Quintus Fabius Maximus that mentions that “he besieged and recaptured Tarentum and the strong-hold of Hannibal”. This is the only contemporary reference to Hannibal of any kind (* see the note below). So if someone as vastly famous and renowned as Hannibal is mentioned in no surviving contemporary literary sources at all and is only attested in one solitary fragment of an inscription, does it make any kind of sense to base an argument on the lack of any such contemporary references to Jesus? Clearly it does not. The scanty and highly fragmentary nature of our surviving sources on anything or anyone is such that this argument simply makes no sense at all.

Who “should” have mentioned Jesus?

Other slightly less naïve Mythicists at least try to construct their argument from silence coherently; not just by imagining that we have a vast number of complete sources and records that do not mention Jesus, but by noting sources we do have which they claim “should” mention him but do not. In many cases this claim is completely ludicrous. Most of the list compiled by the aerospace engineer Michael Paulkovich mentioned above, for example, is padded by pretty much anyone who wrote anything in the period around the time of Jesus, which makes his claim that his 126 writers somehow “should” have mentioned Jesus rather ridiculous. To begin with, Paulkovich claims writers that “should” have mentioned Jesus, despite the fact we do not actually have any writings by these people at all – the emperor Titus, for example. How Paulkovich could assess the lack of  mentions of Jesus in the completely non-existent writings of Titus I have no idea. And Titus is not an isolated example: no less than 47 of the writers Paulkovich lists have no surviving writings at all.

Only slightly less silly than this are writers who feature on the list despite having died before Jesus was born. So Paulkovich lists a “Lysimachus”, without noting which of several writers of that name he is referring to. Not that it matters, given that they all died in the BCs and so, unless they invented time machines, could not really have mentioned Jesus given that he had yet to be born. Then we have people like Silius Italicus and Gaius Valerius Flaccus, who were at least born in the ADs but who wrote works that focused on events long before Jesus’ time. So Silius Italicus wrote a poem about the Second Punic War, and so set centuries before Jesus’ time, while Valerius Flaccus’ Argonautica (referred to above because it allues to the eruption of Vesuvius) was about Jason and the Argonauts and so, similarly, had no reason to mention Jesus. Equally ridiculous are the claims that Soranus, who wrote on gynaecology, Frontinus, who wrote a book on aqueducts, or Decimus Valerius Asicatus, whose only known writing is a letter about a stolen pig, all “should” have mentioned Jesus. Most of Paulkovich’s list is so patently stupid that I find myself wondering if he wrote it as a satirical parody of just how bad this kind of argument can be.

He does get to some people who at least plausibly could have mentioned Jesus, but that does not mean that they should have done so. Here we find a few of the same figures we see in David Fitzgerald’s book noted above: Seneca, Gallio, Justus of Tiberias, Nicolaus of Damascus and Philo of Alexandria. These people lived in the right part of the first century, a couple of them were actually Jewish and most of them wrote works that at least mentioned contemporary figures rather than books on gynaecology or letters about pigs. Unfortunately there is still no reason to conclude they “should” have mentioned Jesus. Taking the figures on Fitzgerald’s list in turn:

Seneca? – Lucius Annaeus Seneca or Seneca the Younger (c. 4 BC – AD 65) was a prominent Stoic philosopher who wrote philosophy and tragic plays, and so is a rather better potential prospect as someone who “should” have mentioned Jesus. But Fitzgerald’s arguments to that effect are extremely weak. Firstly, he says Seneca was famous for his writings on ethics yet “he has nothing to say about arguably the biggest ethical shakeup of his time” (Fitzgerald, Nailed, p. 34). Fitzgerald does not bother to explain what “ethical shakeup” he is referring to, but we would have to assume it somehow refers to the existence of Jesus. Exactly why Seneca, writing in far off Rome, would see the existence and brief career of a Jewish preacher as some kind of massive “ethical shakeup” is left unexplained.

Similarly weak is his argument that because Seneca’s cosmological treatise Questiones Naturales makes no mention of the alleged natural phenomena claimed to mark key points in Jesus’ career according to the later gospel accounts (the so-called Star of Bethlehem, the earthquake reported in gMatt’s resurrection narrative and the darkness that was supposed to have marked his death on the cross), somehow this means Jesus did not exist. This may be a reasonable argument that these reported phenomena did not occur, but that does not, therefore, necessarily mean Jesus did not exist. Here, as in many other places, Fitzgerald confuses “the existence of a historical Jesus” with “the existence of the Jesus of conservative orthodox Christian belief”.

But Fitzgerald’s strangest argument is the one about which he is most bombastic:

“[I]n another book, On Superstition, Seneca lambasts every known religion, including Judaism. But, strangely, he makes no mention whatsoever about Christianity, which was supposedly spreading like wildfire across the empire.” (p. 34)

Here Fitzgerald gives breezy assurances about the content of another work which no longer exists. On Superstition survives in just a few sentences quoted by Augustine in his City of God, written four centuries later. So how on earth can Fitzgerald claim that it covers “every known religion” but leaves out Christianity? Given the fact we do not have the work in question, we have no idea what religions it did or did not cover. That aside, Seneca famously took his own life on order of Nero in 65 AD, and this was at a time when Christianity was not “spreading like wildfire”, but was actually a tiny and insignificant sect, especially in Rome and the western half of the Roman Empire (see “Review: Bart D. Ehrman – The Triumph of Christianity” for a longer discussion on how small and unimportant Christianity was in this early period). Finally, even if Seneca did have any awareness at all of Christianity in the 60s AD, which is unlikely, he would have no reason to consider it to be anything other than what it was at that stage: a small sect of Judaism. All this makes his lack of mention of it entirely explicable. Fitzgerald notes that Augustine made excuses for Seneca’s lack of notice of Christianity, and on this at least he is correct. It is also unremarkable that a fifth century Christian would overestimate how prominent, noticeable and significant Christianity was in the mid first century and so try to explain the omission. Augustine has an excuse for not understanding Seneca’s cultural and historical context. Fitzgerald, however, does not.

Gallio? – Fitzgerald’s argument here is even more confused. He claims that Lucius Junius Gallio Annaeanus somehow “should” have mentioned Jesus. But, although Gallio was Seneca’s brother and studied rhetoric under his adoptive father and namesake, we have no works of his at all. So what is Fitzgerald talking about here? In a rather tangled line of argument, he notes that Gallio appears in Acts 18:12-17 as the Roman judge of Paul, who he acquits. Fitzgerald finds it significant that Gallio did not mention “this amazing Jesus character” to his brother and concludes this means Jesus did not exist. He does not bother to consider alternatives, such as (i) Jesus existed but was not so “amazing” as Fitzgerald keeps assuming he has to have been if he existed, (ii) Jesus existed but a learned Roman official did not regard people like him as very interesting or important, (iii) Jesus existed and Gallio did mention him to his brother but Seneca did not regard people like him as very interesting or important or even (iv) the whole Gallio-Paul trial scene is a piece of fiction reported or even created by the writer of Acts to emphasise Paul’s credibility. Fitzgerald skips over all these quite plausible alternatives and leaps gymnastically straight to the conclusion Jesus did not exist.

Justus of Tiberias? – Fitzgerald is on marginally firmer ground with this example, but his argument still does not make sense. Justus of Tiberias was a Jewish aristocrat from Galilee who wrote a (now lost) account of the Jewish War and a history of the rulers of Israel from Moses down to the time of Agrippa II. As Fitzgerald notes, in the ninth century Photios of Constantinople complained in his Bibliotheca (see “The Lost Books of Photios’ Bibliotheca”) that Justus “makes not the least mention of the appearance of Christ, or what things happened to him or the wonderful works that he did”. Therefore, Fitzgerald concludes, Justus must have neglected to mention Jesus because he did not exist. But, again, while a devout Christian like Photios may have assumed Justus “should” have mentioned Jesus, we have no valid reason to do so. This is because Justus’ work no longer survives. As a result, we can make no assessment of how interested he was in wandering peasant preachers and prophets. If Justus’ work did survive and was full of references to other such figures – Theudas, for example, or the Egyptian Prophet, or John the Baptist – but did not mention Jesus, then Fitzgerald would have a solid argument. But given that we have no idea how many other such figures Justus mentioned, if any at all, we simply cannot say if his lack of a mention of Jesus is in any way significant.

Nicolaus of Damascus? – That Nicolaus of Damascus, a Greek scholar who was a friend of Herod the Great and tutor to the children of Mark Anthony and Cleopatra, did not mention the adult Jesus is hardly surprising given that he was born around 64 BC and so would have died well before a historical Jesus was more than a child. But Fitzgerald presses him into service by claiming that “if the nativity story in Matthew really happened, it is somewhat incredible that none of it was mentioned by Nicolaus” (p. 36), noting that Nicolaus should have witnessed the Wise Men causing Herod “and all Jerusalem” concern and recorded the massacre of the innocents etc. But this is another of Fitzgerald’s weird non sequiturs. Nicolaus’ silence on these alleged events may very well cast some considerable doubt on those particular episodes in one particular gospel, but that does not mean Jesus therefore did not exist. Even many Christians do not accept the Infancy Narratives in gMatt and gLuke, but non-historical stories get told about historical people. This example simply does not support Fitzgerald’s conclusion.

Philo of Alexandria? – If there is a writer who generally gets brought up in this form of the Mythicist argument from silence it is Philo of Alexandria, so it is no surprise that Fitzgerald places emphasis on the supposed significance of his silence about Jesus. Philo was a Jew who lived in the right period (c. 20 BC – c. 50 AD) and who left an extensive corpus of writings, many of which are still extant. Fitzgerald notes, correctly that this theological writer produced many “philosophical treatises on Judaism”, but assures us that Philo also wrote “commentaries on contemporary politics and events of note affecting the Jews” (p. 37) This claim is not actually wrong, but as even a brief survey of Philo’s surviving works shows it does not give an accurate picture of the content of Philo’s work. Of the 43 or so works included in Charles Duke Yonge’s standard edition of Philo’s collected works, just two – Against Flaccus and the Embassy to Gaius – are anything other than theological or philosophical treatises. These two works do mention a few relevant figures from his time – Herod Agrippa, for example, or Pontius Pilate – but they have a fairly narrow focus and so there is a vast number of people who we know existed in Philo’s time who do not get mentioned by him. These two non-philosophical/theological works have a particular subject focus, so it is hardly surprising that they only mention a few historical figures who are relevant to the rather specific political points Philo is trying to make. This means that any claim that if Philo did not mention a figure of his time in these two particular works, so they therefore did not exist is utterly ridiculous. Nowhere in either of these works do we find a reference to the 19 or so high priests of the Temple in Jerusalem who held that office in his lifetime, but no-one would pretend this somehow casts some doubt on their existence – it is just that there is no context in either of these two works in which we would expect to see them mentioned. Similarly, he makes no mention of the nine figures in his time who we could characterise as Jewish preachers, prophets or Messianic claimants, which means any argument that he “should” have mentioned Jesus when he made no mention of any other figure like him is equally absurd. Yet this is the claim Fitzgerald and many other Mythicists make.

Fitzgerald presses on to assure us that Philo “wrote a great deal on other Jewish sects of the time, such as the Essenes and the Theraputae, but nothing on Jesus, or on Christianity either” (p. 37). Again, anyone who has actually read Philo knows this is nonsense. He did not write on “other Jewish sects of the time, such as the Essenes and the Theraputae”, as though these are just two examples of many – they are the only such sects he mentions. Nowhere does he mention any other Jewish sects, including major ones such as the Pharisees and the Sadducees, both of which were far more prominent and numerous than the Essenes and the Theraputae. Fitzgerald misrepresents his source, yet again, by pretending Philo gave some comprehensive or even extensive discussion of Jewish sects when he actually just mentions two in passing.

Fitzgerald also makes characteristically extravagant claims about how Philo should have mentioned Jesus because “he had strong connections to Jerusalem” and claims “he didn’t just spend time in Jerusalem – his family was intimately connected with the royal house of Judea” (p. 37). Leaving aside the fact that we have evidence for just one brief pilgrimage visit to Jerusalem by Philo (see On Providence II.64), even the gospels depict Jesus’ career as taking place in the backwater rural areas of Galilee and only have him going to Jerusalem briefly in the days before his execution. So the idea that Philo was somehow a regular visitor there and so should, by some remarkable coincidence, have been there on the particular Passover week in which Jesus was there before he died is highly fanciful stuff. For all Fitzgerald’s bombastic claims, the idea that Philo somehow “should” have mentioned Jesus collapses on multiple fronts.

Fitzgerald’s arguments do not get any better when he turns from contemporary figures who he claims “should” have mentioned Jesus to some slightly later writers who he thinks should not be silent about him. Here we find an odd collection of mainly second and third century writers, but it is hard to see why any of them “should” have mentioned Jesus, given their total lack of interest in anything to do with Judaism, let alone the obscure founder of a tiny offshoot Jewish sect. Indeed, Fitzgerald loses track of his own argument with several of these, drifting from noting that they did not mention Jesus to their lack of mention of “Christianity”. This may tell us something of the tiny size and relative obscurity of Christianity in this period (which is already clear from other evidence), but that tells us precisely nothing about the existence or otherwise of its founder.

So Fitzgerald’s grand pronouncements essentially boil down to … nothing at all. He completely fails the test for a valid and convincing argument from silence, in that none of his writers can be shown that they “should” have mentioned Jesus. It is worth, therefore, going back and looking again at the bold assertion with which Fitzgerald begins his arguments on this point. Here it is again:

“There were plenty writers, both Roman and Jewish, who had great interest in and much to say about (Jesus’) region and its happenings …. We still have many of their writings today: volumes and volumes from scores of writers detailing humdrum events and lesser exploits of much more mundane figures in Roman Palestine, including several failed Messiahs.” (Fitzgerald, p. 22)

As we have just seen, this is abject nonsense. There are, in fact, remarkably few writers with much interest in Jesus’ region and its happenings, and the claim we have “scores of writers detailing humdrum events and lesser exploits of much more mundane figures in Roman Palestine” is total and complete garbage. As is the claim that these “scores of writers” included mentions of “several failed Messiahs” in the early first century. We have barely any such references and pretty much all of them come from just one writer – Josephus – who DID mention Jesus at least once and perhaps twice. When I brought this to Fitzgerald’s attention in my critical review of his book back in 2011, I got this sneering but remarkably feeble response:

“Incidentally, perhaps this is a good time to mention the real reason I didn’t list them all out: Nailed was distilled down from a manuscript that was originally not 250 pages, but nearly a whopping 700 pages. So in fact, there’s a lot of information that I don’t mention, and many hard choices I had to make about what to include and what to leave out in a book that’s intended to be a reader-friendly intro to the subject. ” (“Nailed: Completely Brilliant or a Tragic Waste of Trees? YOU be the Judge…“)

But as I noted in my detailed reply to his response, if the problem was merely a lack of room in his final manuscript, why did Fitzgerald not demolish my criticism by listing these supposed many writers who detailed the various other failed Messiahs but neglected to mention Jesus? Here he responds that he simply did not have room to do this in his book, but when he has the chance to do so in reply to me he … does not. Why? Because he is talking garbage. These “scores of writers” detailing “several failed Messiahs” simply do not exist. I will leave it to you, gentle reader, to decide if this makes Fitzgerald woefully and hilariously incompetent or simply deliberately deceptive.

How Famous was Jesus Anyway?

It is interesting how many of these failed attempts at an argument from silence to show the non-existence of Jesus are predicated on the spectacular miracles depicted in the gospels being historically true. As we have seen with several of Fizgerald’s weakest arguments, this means that unless someone does not simply accept a historical Jewish preacher at the origin point and core of the Jesus traditions but also argues for a “maximalist” Jesus of Faith, complete with water walking, levitation, water into wine and a resurrection or three, these arguments lose all their force. But other attempts at this kind of argument simply assume that Jesus was “a big deal” or “widely famous” and so concludes that he “should“, based on this Sunday School conception of Jesus, have been mentioned in his time by … well, someone. Of course, it is very hard to get a firm handle on any but the broadest details of Jesus’ life and only a handful of elements from the later stories are deemed highly likely to be historical, so it is difficult to gauge exactly how “famous” he was. But even a face value reading of the gospels shows the assumption that he “must” have been noticed is on shaky ground.

The earliest gospel, gMark, illustrates this rather neatly. Here is a work that is making great claims for Jesus and concludes triumphantly with the realisation (by a Roman) that he was God’s anointed one. Yet when, early in the narrative, the gospel writer wants to assure his readers that Jesus was widely famed, he says:

“The people were all so amazed that they asked each other, ‘What is this? A new teaching—and with authority! He even gives orders to impure spirits and they obey him.’ News about him spread quickly over the whole region of Galilee. (Mark 1:27-28)

Later, in Mark 6:14 the writer tells us that “Jesus’ name had become well known”, but he gives this as an explanation for why Herod Antipas, the tetrarch of Galilee, had come to hear of him. So the earliest gospel largely depicts Jesus’ “fame” as something of a local affair in the rather tiny region of Galilee – a territory you could stroll across in a day – one slightly dubious and likely exaggerated reference in Mark 3:8 to his renown spreading to people in Judea, Idumea, the coastal cities and the Transjordan region being the exception here. Even then he depicts Jesus preaching in small towns and rural villages, and never shows him entering any of the cities of Galilee or any major urban centre at all until he journeys south to Jerusalem for Passover and is killed. So his “fame” is largely restricted to a very small area of roughly 150 square kilometres and one that was considered a backwater even by other Jews, let alone by Roman or Greek historians in cities far away from this utterly inconsequential corner of the Empire.

The writer of the later gospel of gMatt seems to have noticed this, so he boosts the brief Mark 3:8 reference to wider fame considerably in his version of it:

“Jesus traveled throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every disease and every sickness among the people. News about him spread throughout all Syria. …. Large crowds followed him from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea, and from beyond the Jordan.” (Matt 4:23-25)

This expands Jesus’ supposed sphere of influence substantially to “all Syria”, though there is nothing anywhere else in gMatt or any of the other gospels to support the claim his fame spread through the whole Roman province of Syria, which extended north as far as modern Turkey. Again, this seems to be a deliberate expansion of the more modest claims in gMark, which are likely exaggerated but are at least more plausible. So even if this Marcan claim were true, it is hard to see why this very unfamous level of “fame” would attract much attention from writers of the time.

Then we have the problem of guessing exactly how long Jesus’ preaching “career” was. The traditional answer is that he preached for three years, but this is based entirely on the fact that the latest gospel, gJohn, contradicts the three earlier gospels by depicting three separate Passover journeys to Jerusalem, while they depict only one. If we do not accept that this is historical, then the events in the earlier gospels can actually be compressed into only a few months, or even a few weeks. gMark in particular seems to depict a fairly rapid sequence of events, and both gMark and gMatt often link episodes with variants of words like εὐθέως (“immediately”), giving a strong impression of these events happening in fairly quick succession. If indeed his “career” was a couple of years or even much less, the window for any “contemporary” attestation is extremely narrow. Recall that above we saw that Hannibal is barely directly attested at all in his lifetime, yet his far more prominent career spanned the Mediterranean world and lasted over 40 years.

Finally, we have good evidence of other early first century Jewish preachers, prophets and perhaps Messianic claimants who, by the accounts given in Josephus, were much more prominent and famous than even the Jesus depicted in the gospels, yet who were not mentioned by anyone at all until Josephus wrote at the end of the first century – decades later. Around 44 AD Theudas reportedly had a following of “a great part of the people” and led them to the Jordan with the promise that he would miraculously divide the waters. His following was apparently large enough that the procurator Cuspius Fadus had to dispatch a cohort of cavalry to disperse it. How many contemporary mentions do we have of these events? Zero. Then there is the Egyptian Prophet, who is said to have led “30,000 men” out of the wilderness to the Mount of Olives with the promise that they would see the walls of Jerusalem miraculously fall down. All they actually saw were the swords and lances of the several cohorts of both auxiliary infantry and cavalry that the Roman procurator Antonius Felix sent out to kill them, but how many contemporary references do we have to these large scale disturbances? Absolutely none at all.

So the idea that Jesus somehow “should” have been famous enough and that his “career” “should “have been long and noticeable enough to pique the interest of or even come to the attention of writers of his time becomes completely unconvincing. Even the gospels, which are clearly striving to depict him as highly significant, only show him as a local preacher who, when the time came to suppress him, was arrested by a body of Temple guards in a minor scuffle. The idea that some aristocratic writer in Rome, Corinth or even Damascus would have heard of him, let alone felt moved to write about him is deeply unlikely.

So both the simpler naïve form of this argument and the more detailed attempts by people like Fitzgerald fail dismally. Those who find this argument most convincing vastly overestimate the amount of surviving source material that exists and fail to understand that most people in the ancient world are only known by much later references, often in passing. Those Mythicists who actually try to show that certain writers “should” have mentioned Jesus consistently mishandle (or actively and, possibly, deliberately misrepresent) the material in question and fail to make a coherent and convincing case as a result. It is perhaps significant that this is the by far the most commonly seen argument against the existence of Jesus, yet it is also one of the very worst such arguments. The fact that it looks so convincing to those with little understanding of ancient history and yet it so easily dismissed by anyone with a solid grasp of the period and how it is studied means it is, in a way, a symbol for Mythicism generally.

(* Note: Whenever I use the example of Hannibal when talking about the scarcity of surviving contemporary references to anyone in the ancient world, as I have done above, there seem to be many who misunderstand the argument. So here, for their benefit, are some relevant points of emphasis:

1. To be absolutely clear once more, I am not saying that there never were contemporary mentions of Hannibal. As I say above, we know there definitely were, we have references to them and even quotes from a couple of them preserved in later works. The point is that none of these works survive and we only know of them via later works that are not contemporary.
2. Nor am I saying that the evidence for Hannibal is not as good as that for Jesus or even that they are comparable in any way. They are not. As we would expect, we have vastly more and entirely better evidence for one of the ancient world’s most famous men (Hannibal) than we have for a Jewish peasant preacher. The analogy is solely with the amount of surviving literary mentions, which is the same for both: we have none.
3. Yes, I am aware that a papyrus fragment of  Sosylus’ The Deeds of Hannibal does survive and that this work was a contemporary account of Hannibal’s campaigns. But the fragment contains only a few lines of this work and it does not actually refer to Hannibal himself. So my point stands.
4. Likewise, I am aware that we have coins probably issued by Hannibal and at least one piece of statuary depicting him that probably date to his lifetime. Unfortunately, as likely as it is that these artefacts are associated with Hannibal, they are only reasonably surmised to be so and do not mention him in any inscription or attribution.
5. Finally, yes I am also aware of the epitaph of the Etruscan warrior Felsnas Larth which claims he fought with (or, perhaps, against) Hannibal in his Italian campaign. But, leaving aside the fact that this could be a tall tale (Felsnas Larth also claimed to be 106 years old after all), the inscription is dated to around 130 BC, so well after Hannibal’s death in c. 183-181 BC.

So that leaves us with no surviving contemporary literary references to Hannibal at all and just one clear reference to him in the fragmentary inscription dedicated to Quintus Fabius Maximus. As I say above, given his fame, the geographical range of his career and the fact that he fought in one war or another for up to 40 years, this paucity speaks volumes about how scanty our sources are for pretty much everyone in this period.)