New Atheist blogger and biologist, PZ Myers is an honest guy. He admits he finds the issue of the historicity of Jesus baffling and knows this is largely because he has no training in history. As a result, he declares himself to be “agnostic” about the existence of Jesus, but what does “Jesus agnosticism” actually mean? Not all “Jesus agnostics” are taking Myers’ modest and circumspect approach and some just seem to be trying to avoid Mythicism’s critical flaws.         

The Good

A couple of weeks ago Myers, as a non-historian, did something very sensible. Given his interest in the question of the existence of a historical Jesus and his own lack of training in history, he asked a historian about how we can assess something like the historicity of Jesus. So he posted a video of his conversation with Eddie Marcus, who did a fairly sound job of explaining how the historical method works, how it is similar to (as well as different from) the scientific method and how and why scholars use the historical method to conclude that a historical Jesus most likely existed.

It is admirable that Myers was, as a non-historian, open to listening to someone trained in the historical method and to seek to actually understand how it applies to Jesus as a likely historical figure. Unlike other analogous non-historian New Atheists of his ilk – e.g. Jerry Coyne – he is humble enough to realise that this question is well out of his field of expertise and to respect the fact that almost all of those who have studied it accept that a historical Jesus most likely existed and try to understand why. This is greatly to his credit.

Unfortunately, many of his blog followers did not display the same sensible humility and the comments on Myers video quickly descended into a welter of Mythicist babble. One brave free thinker, “weylguy”, sneered “I stopped watching the video around the 3:00 mark, when the ‘historian’ claimed that the New Testament is “wonderful evidence.'” If “weylguy” had bothered to listen a few seconds more, he would have heard Marcus explain that the gospels are great evidence for what the communities of believers they were written for believed about Jesus, not they they were necessarily evidence about the historical figure of Jesus. But people like “weylguy” are typical of those who have an irrational, emotional commitment to Jesus Mythicism and so only listen to counter arguments to find a reason to dismiss them, however idiotic. He was also not the only one to try to dismiss Marcus on the grounds that he was not a specialist in first century history, despite the fact Marcus readily noted this at the beginning of his conversation. He was talking mainly about the topic under discussion – the way the historical method works – and as someone with a degree in history from Cambridge, he is more than qualified to explain something as basic as that. That said, judging from his comments, he also has a sufficient grasp of the mainstream, non-Christian views of the New Testament texts and the historicity of Jesus to give a decent assessment of those topics – certainly solid enough to satisfy any reasonable person, as opposed to sneering online Mythicists and mealy-mouthed nitpickers.

I joined the discussion briefly, until a couple of the more tedious usual suspects showed up and it clearly became a waste of my time. Myers himself said very little, though he has since articulated his own thoughts in a second post and they are an interesting insight into what a reasonable and open-minded non-specialist thinks on this subject:

I’m agnostic on the subject of the historicity of Jesus, in that I can be whipsawed back and forth depending on who I listened to last. What I was interested in was a much more general topic. What are the criteria a professional historian would use to assess the status of a named figure from the past, when lacking any direct documentation from that person’s life? How do you separate legend from human being? There’s no denying that there is a remarkable mass of unbelievable legend wrapped around this Jesus guy, but if you peel away the myths bit by bit, will there be any vestige of a person left? Or, alternatively, there is not enough solid information to make a distinction, but is the most parsimonious, reasonable explanation is that there was a man, around whom the myths accreted?

(“Still baffled over the historicity of Jesus stuff“)

These are fair questions and worth exploring. When he says he is “agnostic” on the question, I assume he is using the word in its colloquial sense of “on the fence, not committed one way or the other” or just “reserving judgement”. This is because no-one can actually “know” if Jesus existed or not, given that historical analysis of pre-modern evidence simply cannot arrive at definitive answers and can only make structured, evidence-based but subjective assessments of what is most likely. So when Myers goes on to declare “[a]s I said at the beginning of the video, I DON’T KNOW”, he is not alone. No-one “knows”, though some are better equipped with both the training and background knowledge to make an informed assessment of likelihood. Unlike many of the commenters on his posts, Myers is sensible enough to realise that he does not have that equipment and so wise enough to know it would be best to reserve judgement as a result.

He goes on to explain why he finds two arguments against the likely historicity of Jesus uncompelling. As he says, the fact that the later stories about Jesus contain supernatural and therefore obviously unhistorical episodes and elements does not necessarily mean the stories are wholesale fictions and no Jesus existed. As he says:

I think George Washington probably did lie now and then, and that some claim he never told a lie, which is unlikely, does not imply that Washington didn’t exist.

Similarly, and in more close analogy to the Jesus stories, ancient texts are full of supernatural claims about people we are fairly certain existed. Augustus was claimed to have a miraculous conception, Caesar was said to have ascended into heaven and Vespasian was reported to have cured the lame and blind – these are just the kind of things said and widely believed about great men and women in the pre-modern world. The fact that they could be said and believed about historical figures shows they are not good indicators of whether a person such stories were told about did or did not exist: they were told about both historical and mythical figures. This is why a bumbling and confused article on this question by the philosopher Stephen Law simply shows that, like biologists, philosophers really should leave the analysis of ancient history to historians (see “Evidence, Miracles and the Existence of Jesus”, Faith and Philosophy, 2011, Volume 28, Issue 2, April 2011, pp.129-151 – a piece of woefully wrongheaded analysis that I may have to address in more detail in a future article here).

Myers goes on to dismiss the persistent but invalid claim that we “should” have contemporary accounts of Jesus if he existed. Unlike many online Mythicists, he understands that the fragmentary nature of ancient sources on anything or anyone makes this claim ridiculous – as he says “we’re lucky that we even have third person accounts from decades after his death of this hypothetical individual”. I have discussed the problems with this weak Mythicist argument in detail elsewhere – see “Jesus Mythicism 3 – ‘No Contemporary References to Jesus'”.

The Bad

So far so good. But then Myers demonstrates that he really does still have a lot still to learn about historical analysis by repeating two of the weaker lines of argument against the consensus position on the historicity of Jesus. First, he dismisses the significance of that scholarly consensus on these grounds:

Here’s one from the historical Jesus side that I also don’t find persuasive: that it is the consensus of historians that he existed. Unfortunately, there is a strong alternative explanation for that, in that most of these historians are imbedded in a culture that insists as a matter of dogma that Jesus was real. This is a deep bias. You can tell me that most historians agree, but then I have to ask, what percentage of those historians are Christian?

Leaving aside the fact that when people note the consensus of scholars they are not actually making an argument, just noting a pertinent fact, this is a standard Mythicist line. The claim is that the consensus is only because the scholars are either Christians or somehow so hopelessly in thrall to Christian biases that they simply cannot entertain the idea that Jesus did not exist. Now, obviously in New Testament Studies there are inevitably going to be a large number of Christians and these Christian scholars, liberal or conservative, are most likely going to be highly inclined to accept that a historical Jesus existed. But even if we completely ignore the Christians and only focus on the non-Christians in the field, we find the consensus remains. If we look at relevant non-Christian scholars, both current and recent, we find people like Maurice Casey, Zeba Crook, James Crossley, Bart Ehrman, Paula Fredriksen, Robert Funk, Jeffrey Gibson, Michael Goulder, Amy Jill Levine, Gerd Ludemann, Jack Miles, Christina Petterson, Alan Segal and Geza Vermes. None of these people accept or accepted Mythicism.

And to pretend that these scholars are simply too unimaginative or too timid to examine and accept the idea that there was no Jesus at all is completely ridiculous. These are some of the leading proponents of conceptions about Jesus and the origins of Christianity that are so much at odds with orthodox Christian ideas that conservative Christian apologists write whole books warning their faithful to beware of their supposedly wild and radical theories. Darrell L. Bock’s Dethroning Jesus (2010) and  J. Ed Komoszewski and M. James Sawyer’s Reinventing Jesus (2006) are just two in a sub-genre of evangelical apologetics that tries to put mainstream, non-Christian academic interpretations of Jesus in the same category as Mythicism and The Da Vinci Code to discredit them as dangerously radical and unscholarly. So if these leading non-Christian scholars are so shackled to the Christian idea of a historical Jesus because of the vast influence on them of Christian culture, it is very strange that this highly Christian influence is so narrowly focused and selective. Why is it only on the question of Jesus’ existence that this supposedly pervasive Christian orthodoxy has such influence on these non-Christian scholars, but not any other ideas? How is it that this supposed Christian control only works on the historicity of Jesus, but somehow fails completely on topics such as the rejection of Jesus as a Jewish apocalypticist, or the promotion of the Farrer Thesis over the Two Source Hypothesis or conservative views on the dates and authorship of the gospels or any of the dozens of other issues on which the scholarship is sharply divided between non-Christians and orthodox Christian scholars? Why can and do these scholars present Jesus as a Jewish preacher, a charismatic hasid or a Cynic-style sage – all ideas substantially at odds with Christian orthodoxy – yet baulk at the idea that he did not exist? How is a conception of Jesus as being nothing like the Jesus of faith because he was one or a combination of the things just listed significantly different to one who is nothing like the Jesus of faith because he did not exist? It makes no sense that this supposedly powerful cultural bias would only affect non-Christian scholars on historicity and not across a much wider range of disputed topics.

This idea makes even less sense when we look at Jewish scholars and find, again, that the consensus on the historicity of Jesus holds among them as well. Given that modern Judaism has it origins, like Christianity, in the first century AD, this is a period which is the subject of intense historical focus by modern Jewish scholars. If there is a group of scholars which is not only unlikely to deeply influenced by Christian biases but actually likely to react against them for cultural and historical reasons, it would be Jewish scholars of the Second Temple Period. If Mythicism had any genuine persuasive weight, we should find it widely or even just significantly accepted by these learned specialists in the very period and religious culture out of which Christianity arose. Yet I know of zero Jewish scholars of this period who accept Mythicism. None. Amy Jill and Marc Zvi Brettler’s The Jewish Annotated New Testament (Oxford, 2017) lists no less than 50 editors and contributors: all Jewish, all prominent scholars and some of them among the leading figures in the field of Second Temple and Post-Revolt Jewish Studies of recent years. Not one of them is a Mythicist. Far from being influenced by Christian biases and ideas, it is the work of Jewish scholars over the last 70 years that has had a profound and quite revolutionary effect on New Testament Studies, with even the more conservative Christian scholars having to strive to accommodate the often uncomfortable but unavoidable fact that, properly examined, the NT material and the Jesus it describes fits very neatly with our increasing understanding of Jewish beliefs in this period.

So Myers does not seem to understand the field well enough to grasp why this argument is nonsense. The consensus is not because of some imaginary Christian control of the field. On the contrary, most of the last century of NT Studies has been a rearguard action by more conservative Christian scholars against an increasing and strengthening conception of Jesus as a Jewish man of his time and other views of early Christianity which do not fit Christian orthodoxy at all. In that context, if Mythicism actually had some real argumentative power it would have been embraced by at least a sizeable number of non-Christian scholars. It simply has not. This is not because of any non-existent overwhelming Christian dominance on the issue, but simply because it is a bad idea that has to be propped up by ad hoc arguments and contrived suppositions. Other non-Christian ideas about the origins of Christianity have gone from strength to strength in this period, with conservative Christian scholars constantly battling against that tide. Mythicism, on the other hand, has failed dismally.

Myers makes the odd claim that “the atheist historians are split” on the issue. Again, he does not seem to be well-versed enough on the views of actual non-Christian scholars, otherwise he would know they are not “split” at all. The consensus among them is as solid as it is among scholars generally. Despite some typical hysteria on the subject by people like the ubiquitous Dr. Richard Carrier PhD (who is an Ivy League graduate with a doctorate, in case you were unaware), there is no more of a “split” among scholars who are non-Christians than there is some “split” among scientists on evolution, as claimed in tellingly similar shrill tones by Creationists. When Bart Ehrman made a passing comment in a guest lecture that there are “a couple of scholars who’ve argued [Jesus] didn’t exist”, Carrier waxed greatly wrathful and poured forth several thousand words of rebuttal which triumphantly concluded the actual number was … eight. Just eight. And that was after padding this number with at least four or five who are not actually Mythicists but simply think the thesis should be given closer attention. Given the thousands of non-Christian scholars in relevant fields, this is an uttterly pathetic total and clearly not evidence of some kind of “split” on the issue. Mythicism is as much on the far fringes of scholarship as it has always been and for the same reason – it is just not very convincing to qualified non-Christian scholars with good grasp of the relevant material.

Myers’ second argument against the consensus position is not much better than his first:

Another one that induces a mild cringe is the parsimony argument — let’s apply Occam’s Razor! Then the simplest hypothesis is that there was one man who got the whole religion rolling. I can sort of agree, except we might differ on who that man was. Was it a Jesus? Or was it that wandering evangelist Paul? Or was it the mystery man who wrote the first of the gospels?

The only thing inducing a mild cringe here is Myers’ misunderstanding of how the Principle of Parsimony is applied in the analysis of history. No-one says that Jesus most likely existed because “the simplest hypothesis is that there was one man who got the whole religion rolling”. That is not necessarily even the simplest hypothesis. The way parsimony works here is, when confronted by a range of possible explanations of why our source evidence is the way it is, a historian usually accepts the one that best accounts for the most evidence with the least number of suppositions and ad hoc arguments. This is not some iron scientific law, but as an interpretative tool, it is a handy (if inevitably subjective) guide for analysis.

To illustrate this, let us look at the two alternatives to a single historical Jesus as the founder of the sect that became Christianity that Myers suggests. “Was it Paul?”, he asks. Well, no, because that does not fit the evidence at all. Paul himself makes it clear that the Jesus Sect existed before he joined it, so clearly he cannot be its founder or point of origin. In Galatians 1 he defends himself against the claim that he was some kind of subordinate apostle whose more radical ideas the Galatians could ignore. In a defence that is not entirely consistent or very convincing, Paul denies that he got his teaching from others in Jerusalem who he calls “those who were already apostles before me” (Galatians 1:17). So clearly the sect existed before he joined it. Similarly, he refers in several places to how he persecuted the Jesus Sect before joining it himself. He says of himself that “I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God” (1 Corinthians 15:9), he says he had previously been “violently persecuting the church of God and … trying to destroy it” (Galatians 1:13) and he talks about how his zeal as a devout Jew had previously made him “a persecutor of the church” (Philippians 3:6). None of these references makes any sense if Paul was somehow the point of origin of the sect he is referring to here. There are obscure Mythicist variants, mainly of the self-published amateur variety, which try to argue that the ἐκκλησία (assembly, church) Paul refers to here was not the Jesus Sect but some other Jewish group, but this makes no sense in context and is based on exactly the kind of contrived supposition that falls to Occam’s Razor.

So what about the other idea Myers suggests – that Christianity was founded by “the mystery man who wrote the first of the gospels”? This does not work either. To begin with, only a couple of scholars argue that the Gospel of Mark predates the seven epistles that all scholars agree were written by Paul. The latter seem on internal evidence to date to the 50s AD. Most scholars date gMark to sometime soon after 70 AD, but even the few who argue for an earlier date do not tend to go earlier than the mid-60s AD. Two exceptions to this are the late Maurice Casey and James Crossley, who both interpret references to the defiling of the Temple in Mark 13 to be to the threat by Caligula to raise a statue to himself there in 41 AD and not to the Romans’ desecration and then destruction of the Temple in 70 AD, though most scholars find this unconvincing. But there is still good evidence that the writer of gMark was drawing on earlier traditions, not creating the stories himself. Indeed, Maurice Casey is the one who has made a strong case that the author of gMark used earlier written sources in Aramaic, given that there are several puzzling elements in that gospel that make sense if the author had misunderstood key words in Aramaic when using an earlier Aramaic source and translating parts of it into Greek (see Casey Jesus of Nazareth: An Independent Historian’s Account of his Life and Teaching, Clark, 2010). Then there is the fact that most scholars agree there are parts of gMatt and gLuke which are independent of gMark and possibly predate it and a substantial number also see gJohn as independent of all three of the earlier gospels. So if Myers’ reference to “the mystery man who wrote the first of the gospels” refers to the writer of gMark, the idea that the whole story of Jesus began with him does not stand up to close scrutiny on several fronts and certainly does not account for the evidence we have in any parsimonious way.

When scholars note that the origin of Christianity as a sect focused on a historical Jewish preacher is more parsimonious than alternatives, they are saying it fits the evidence we have better than the kinds of alternatives Myers suggests and also does not require the kinds of fundamental suppositions and contrived ad hoc arguments that all forms of Mythicism depend upon. As I noted in my comments on Myers original post on the ontology of an ancient figure’s historicity, all of our early sources that refer to the origins of Christianity attribute it to this historical figure Jesus. Obviously the Jewish and Roman sources differ from the Christian ones in what they say or imply about him and the Christian sources also differ from each other on that as well. But all of them make an earthly, historical Jesus the point of origin for the sect. This does not in itself mean this therefore is what necessarily happened, but it does mean there is a very strong prima facie case that it is. And it means that any Mythicist alternative faces a steep uphill battle if it wants to present a credible and convincing alternative.

The way all of the variants of Mythicism try to do this is to posit that there was an earlier form of Christianity that did not have its origin with an historical Jesus and believed in a purely mythic, allegorical or celestial Jesus and then this belief gave rise to “historicised” stories about him as an earthly, historical figure, despite him having never existed. The problem with this is that we have no overt text or reference to any such earlier form of Christianity. None. Mythicists try hard to read this idea into some texts and references we do have – arguing for example that Paul believed in a purely celestial Jesus or claiming the Ascension of Isaiah never refers to Jesus coming to earth (despite the fact it actually does). But these readings assume the existence of this non-historical Jesus proto-Christianity and are too uncertain to be taken as actual evidence it existed. The problem is that the whole of Mythicism, in all of its forms, is based on a fundamental supposition – that a non-historical Jesus form of early Christianity existed – which has no sound evidential foundation. And Occam’s Razor makes short work of this kind of idea.

This is how the Principle of Parsimony applies to the question. It is not merely that, as Myers seems to think, the idea of a single person as the point of origin is “simple” therefore it is most likely. It is that the sources all say that there was a historical preacher as the point of origin of the sect and all of the alternative explanations for how this could be is based on a weak foundational supposition which can, in turn, only be sustained by contorted readings of the texts which are also propped up by still more suppositions. When Mythicism gets to the point where Carrier is forced to sustain his reading of Paul as believing in a purely non-human, wholly celestial Jesus by claiming the reference to Jesus as a descendant of King David in Romans 1:3 actually refers to some supposed belief in a “cosmic sperm bank” in the sky in which God kept some of David’s actual semen and used it to “manufacture” the heavenly Jesus – an utterly bizarre idea found nowhere in any text or anywhere outside Carrier’s highly fertile imagination – Occam’s Razor becomes a ripping chainsaw. But Mythicism has to go to these ridiculous and contorted lengths to sustain itself once we get down to the details in the sources, because otherwise it collapses like a house of cards. It simply does not work as a parsimonious reading of the evidence, which is why it mainly appeals to immature online apostates who not only do not have a good grasp of the evidence but also simply do not care about history – they just want a big rhetorical stick with which to hit Christianity.

“Jesus Agnosticism”?

As already noted, when Myers says he is “agnostic on the subject of the historicity of Jesus”, he seems to be primarily saying he is reserving judgement or, at most, is in two minds on the subject. He notes candidly that he “can be whipsawed back and forth depending on who I listened to last”. This is a reasonably common situation for someone who does not know enough about a subject to be able to genuinely assess it in an informed way and settle on an informed and considered opinion. I can think of several topics on, say, economics or sociology where I can read an argument one side of an issue and find it persuasive and then read an argument for the opposite idea and find it equally convincing. Given that I never experience this on subjects I have studied carefully and have good knowledge of, I usually interpret this reaction as a sign that I need to read a lot more before I can come to a personal opinion on that issue.

This seems to be where Myers is on the historicity of Jesus, and it would be good if more atheists were similarly circumspect. I regularly come across people who are strident champions of Mythicism who, when I explore how much reading they have done on the source material and its context and on the scholarship around the historical Jesus, are simply parroting Mythicist talking points because they find them emotionally appealing. Last year one of these people assured me in an online discussion that he had examined the issue carefully from both sides and decided that Mythicism was the best position. I asked him what scholars he had read to arrive at this opinion and he replied “Richard Carrier, Robert Price, David Fitzgerald and ‘Acharya S'”. I pointed out that these were all Mythicists and two of them were not scholars at all and then asked what mainstream critical scholars who were not Mythicists he had read in this supposedly balanced and objective analysis. He dodged the question several times because, clearly, the answer was “none”.

So Myers’ reservation of judgement is a very sensible alternative to jumping to an uninformed opinion or – worse – a supposedly “objective” opinion formed by reading the fringe theorists from just one side (and here, again, we find Myers’ fellow biologist New Atheist blogger Jerry Coyne, who plumps wholeheartedly for Mythicism on the basis of no wide reading at all).

But there are others who claim to be “Jesus agnostics” who do not seem to fall into the same sensibly circumspect category as Myers. In his desperate wrangling of a mere eight qualified Mythicist scholars (well, kind of) noted above, Dr Richard Carrier (PhD), the Ivy League doctorate holder and publisher of a peer reviewed book (in case you were not aware), included Dr Raphael Lataster, who recently graduated from the University of Sydney with a doctorate in Religious Studies. Lataster assures us in several of his mainly self-published works that he is not actually a Mythicist but is, in fact, a “Jesus agnostic”. But his so-called “agnosticism” is very different to Myers’ cautious circumspection.

Lataster is, like many prominent Mythicists and Historical Jesus sceptics, a former fundamentalist Christian. As recently as 2006 the very same Raphael Lataster was not only a “non-denominational Christian”, but also circulated a free e-book arguing that the New Testament had originally been written in Aramaic. It seems even then the erstwhile Christian Lataster had a penchant for fringe ideas argued at length and with immense self-assurance. Now that Lataster is an atheist, he has carefully scrubbed all references to his former ideas from the books and articles sections of his blog and is somewhat sensitive when reminded that he once argued for Christian apologism with the same vehemence and cocky confidence he now uses for his newfound scepticism. Youthful enthusiasm can be awkward.

But Lataster has indeed embraced atheism and putting aside his former qualification in Pharmacy, done a Masters Degree in Religious Studies and then a Doctorate in the same field, writing a thesis entitled “God’s Intellectual Battles: New Atheists, New Theologians, Philosophical Arguments and Public Engagement” (2017) on the arguments for the existence of God by apologists like William Lane Craig and Richard Swinburne. His Masters thesis formed the basis for his self-published book, There Was No Jesus, There Is No God (2013) and he has since self-published Jesus Did Not Exist: A Debate Among Atheists (2015). This last book was written “with assistance from independent historian Richard Carrier”, includes a foreword by Carrier and has been favourably reviewed by Carrier’s friend and acolyte David Fitzgerald, who confidently declares it “doesn’t just inform and invigorate the debate – arguably, it settles it.”

Given the rather categorical statements in his titles (“Jesus did not exist” and “there was no Jesus” do not leave much wriggle room), it is curious that Lataster claims to be a “Jesus agnostic”. But he explains what he means in an introductory section of his second book:

I am not a mythicist per se. I do not assert that Jesus did not exist. I am a historical Jesus agnostic. That is, I am unconvinced by the case for the historical Jesus, and find several reasons to be doubtful. To compare these terms to those often used when discussing God’s existence, the ‘historicist’ is the equivalent of the ‘theist’ and the ‘mythicist’ is the equivalent of the ‘strong atheist’. The oft-forgotten ‘Historical Jesus agnostic’ is the equivalent of, well, the ‘God agnostic’

That may seem neat, but on closer inspection things get somewhat less clear. Lataster goes on to group “the ardent mythicists and the less certain ‘agnostics’ under the broader term “ahistoricists”. But for someone who is apparently a “less certain agnostic”, Lataster comes across as … well, strangely certain.

Those who do not want to read a 442 page book to get a grasp of Lataster’s arguments can instead read a more succinct summary of his position in his article “The Fourth Quest: A Critical Analysis of the Recent Literature on Jesus’ (a)Historicity” (Literature & Aesthetics 24, 1, June 2014). Incidentally, Literature & Aesthetics is an open source online journal published by the University of Sydney, whose editorial team consists of, Lataster’s thesis supervisor, Carole Cusack, one Alexandra Guzman and … Lataster himself. I suppose that is one way to get your stuff published.

As the title of his paper suggests, he sets out to undertake a “critical analysis” of those who have recently tackled the question of Jesus’ historicity. His analysis focuses on four case studies: two “historicists”, Bart Ehrman and Maurice Casey, one so-called “agnostic”, namely himself, and one “mythicist”, the inevitable Richard Carrier. While this sounds a noble and objective endeavour, it does not take long to see where Lataster’s sympathies lie.

To begin with, the “defences of [Jesus’] historicity” he analyses are nothing like Carrier’s book or even his own in their intentions, style or method. Ehrman’s Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth (2012) is one of his works written to be accessible to a popular audience. Like all his popular works, Ehrman assumes little to no background knowledge on the part of his reader and presents a general overview of why almost all scholars find Mythicism unconvincing. It is not and was never intended to be a fully detailed, deeply scholarly defence of the historicity of Jesus, let alone a comprehensive debunking of all Mythicist arguments. In fact, it was originally written as an e-book and only later did Ehrman’s publishers decide to produce it in a print format. It is fairly clear from comments by Ehrman during its writing that he did not consider Mythicism worthy of much more than this kind of general treatment for a lay audience of interested but uncommitted bystanders.

Casey’s Jesus: Evidence and Argument or Mythicist Myths? (2014) is also not meant as some comprehensive defence of Jesus’ historicity and is, even more than Ehrman’s, a rather irritated swipe at Mythicism as a fringe, substantially amateur and amateurish and largely online phenomenon by a scholar who clearly holds the whole thing in distinctly low regard. Casey was never someone to worry much about offending people and this book, his last, was written not long before his death in May 2014. It certainly reads like a slightly gleeful project by an old scholar who knew that he would soon be well beyond the reach of criticism by his outraged targets. This means that it is even less intended to be a sober and objective analysis and is clearly something of an indulgence. Ehrman is gentlemanly, even if it is clear he does not consider Mythicism to be even close to good scholarship. Casey is openly and delightedly scornful, particularly of the pomposity of many online amateurs; though he was kind enough to give me some praise, noting “once in a while a blog turns up written by someone previously unknown, making a number of important points” and calling my critical review of Mythicist David Fitzgerald’s self-published book Nailed “a fine and incisive review” (Casey, p. 26).

Lataster contrasts these two popular overview responses to Mythicism to Carrier’s On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt (2014) and his own Master’s thesis, which  formed the basis for his There Was No Jesus, There Is No God (2013). Like most fringe theorists, Carrier and Lataster are striving mightily to make their ideas as respectable as possible. Lataster’s book is more aimed at a general audience than Carrier’s and has a rather more informal style (often irritatingly so), but he also works to make it as scholarly as he can, with full footnotes and other apparatus. He even puts the word “scholarly” in his ponderous subtitle – “A Scholarly Examination of the Scientific, Historical, and Philosophical Evidence and Arguments for Monotheism” – just in case anyone was unclear. Carrier’s work, of course, was meant to be Mythicism’s great new opus and was supposed to land in the field of Historical Jesus Studies like a mighty bombshell. It turned out to be a fizzing damp squib, but Carrier certainly put great effort into giving his book all the right scholarly trappings and academic equipment; complete with a 42 page bibliography and the standard three indices for scriptural references, authors and subjects.

This means Lataster is hardly comparing apples to apples in his “critical analysis” and while his conclusion that Ehrman and Casey’s books “seemed polemical, were occasionally vulgar, and often resorted to cavilling” may have at least a small degree of truth (especially with regard to Casey), it is hardly surprising that their popular overviews are going to be more overtly polemical than Lataster’s or Carrier’s more formal efforts.

That aside, the “criticism” element of Lataster’s “critical analysis” is distinctly lopsided. Beginning with Ehrman’s popular book, Lataster seems obsessed with the idea that Ehrman’s argument depends on “hypothetical sources”, referring repeatedly to this as some kind of flaw in Ehrman’s argument on pp. 4, 5, 6 (twice) and 7 (three times). This is in reference to Ehrman’s acceptance of the majority position on the inter-relationships between gMark, gMatt and gLuke: the Two Source Hypothesis, which posits, on the basis of careful analysis, that the writers of gMatt and gLuke used gMark and at least one other, now lost common source or sources – called Q – when composing their gospels. He also summarises the reasons that the material unique to gMatt and gLuke – called M and L respectively – is likely to be at least in part derived from still other lost sources, possibly written or maybe oral. All this is standard, basic stuff, and while Ehrman notes that not all scholars agree with the Two Source Hypothesis (p. 79), it is by far the most widely accepted position on the synoptic gospels’ relationships.

Strangely, Lataster places repeated emphasis on the idea that these sources may not have existed at all, noting “the existence of such hypothetical (i.e. currently not – if ever – existing) sources is disputed”. This is true, but the dissent is largely because conservative Christian scholars also dislike the idea of these lost sources for their own ideological and theological reasons – thus the minority position that tries to dispense with Q etc. That aside, these “hypothetical” sources are not something conjured out of thin air, and are based on careful analysis of overlapping elements in the gospels in question. This is a perfectly sound methodology used by textual analysts all the time and so-called “hypothetical sources” are accepted in historical analysis as a matter of course. To take just one example, the key work of the late medieval fencing master Sigmund Ringeck does not survive, but it can be reconstructed via later glosses on it. In fact, nine separate but inter-related works can be used to posit no less than three lost works which are, to use Lataster’s favourite word “hypothetical”.

But it seems Lataster’s primary problem with these “hypothetical sources” lies in the fact that because they are not accessible, their “reliability” cannot be assessed, arguing “Ehrman does not give reasons for why these sources should be trusted”. This seems to misunderstand Ehrman’s point. Noting the likely existence of lost sources that predate gLuke and gMatt and possibly gMark, as well as possible other earlier sources behind gJohn as well, Ehrman argues:

We cannot think of the early Christian Gospels as going back to a solitary source that ‘invented’ the idea that there was a man Jesus. The view that Jesus existed is found in multiple independent sources that must have been circulating throughout various regions of the Roman Empire in the decades before the Gospels that survive were produced. 

(Ehrman, p. 82)

But Lataster is having none of this:

These alleged sources could be works of fiction (midrashic parables perhaps). Religions stemming from obvious fictions are not unheard of.
None of this seems to interest this Biblical historian, perhaps due to the sheer number of non-existent sources.

(Lataster, p. 6)

Well, yes. As Ehrman notes, in addition to gMark there is the Q material, the M material and the L material – all three of which could in turn include multiple earlier sources. Then there is evidence of perhaps two passion sources and at least two sayings sources. Luke 1:1-4 refers his reader to the fact that “many have undertaken to set down an orderly account of the events that have been fulfilled among us”, and the writer would hardly have used the word “many” (πολλοὶ) if at least some of the earlier sources scholars posit were not already known to his audience. He states that his intention is to “write an orderly account for you …. so that you may know the truth concerning the things about which you have been instructed”. The whole premise of this statement is that there were “many” other sources about Jesus already in circulation and the authors wanted to, at least in part, reorganise and combine them.

So Ehrman’s argument that there were these “many” sources that pre-date any of the surviving gospels because they emerged independently from an earlier period of purely oral traditions about Jesus makes solid sense – Ehrman explores this in more detail in his more recent book Jesus Before the Gospels: How the Earliest Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior (2016). Of course, it is not therefore definite that these multiple early sources mean there was a human being as the various traditions’ origin point, but that is far more likely than Lataster’s rather vague hand flapping about possible “works of fiction”. That weak “maybe” is undercut by the fact that by the time we get to our extant gospels their writers seem to be struggling to get some elements of the stories they have inherited to fit their conceptions of who and what Jesus was; a sign they are shoehorning historical elements about a human into evolving theological ideas about him and finding some parts of their sources awkward to deal with.

Lataster concludes his critique of Ehrman by declaring:

Nowhere in Ehrman’s case, already suspect due to his reliance on non-extant sources, was the reliability of the existing sources substantially scrutinised.

(Lataster, p. 9)

Again, this is wrongheaded. Ehrman is not required to demonstrate any “reliability” on any issue other than one – that there was a Jesus. And he does make that case by noting there were multiple independent sources and these most likely emerged from a period of oral traditions about Jesus, as well as his argument about the reference to Jesus’ brother James in Galatians 1:19 (see my article “Jesus Mythicism 2: ‘James the Brother of the Lord'”). Lataster also uses strangely loaded language about Ehrman, constantly saying Ehrman “admits” things with the implication that these elements somehow undercut his argument. Ehrman certainly acknowledges things that pretty much all critical scholars accept, such as the fact that there are no contemporary references to Jesus or that the gospels are clearly biased. By painting these as “admissions”, Lataster tries to imply that by noting these fairly unremarkable things Ehrman is conceding weaknesses in his own case and even claims that by doing so his position “could be mistaken as a case for Jesus agnosticism” (p. 4), though why Ehrman should hold that position because of these things is not explained.

Lataster’s analysis of Casey’s book spends some time on its distinctly curmudgeonly tone, with much prissiness about “ad hominems” and “vulgarity” – these people dislike it when others do not take them as seriously as they take themselves. And, again, Lataster complains of the reference to “hypothetical sources”; this time Casey’s arguments for likely lost Aramaic source material lying behind parts of gMark. Not everyone finds Casey convincing on this (I do, as it happens), but the point Lataster makes is, again, about “reliability”:

Casey places great importance on hypothetical sources, and partly argues for them on the basis of mistakes caused by the poor translating skills of the Gospel authors. From this, an oddity of historicist argumentation is illuminated: sources that do not exist are claimed to be reliable, while the sources that scholars actually have access to are acknowledged as being filled with errors.

(Lataster, p. 12)

This is a strange argument. What Casey actually does is note that several oddities in gMark can be explained if the writer misunderstood some key Aramaic words or phrases in a now lost source or sources and so mistranslated them. But somehow Lataster manages to leap acrobatically from that to claims that these posited lost sources are “reliable”. Again, the argument derived from these multiple sources makes no claim to any “reliability” of the sources on any point but one: they imply multiple independent traditions best explained by various oral accounts about a single human being.

Lataster then turns to his own work, though thankfully he is modest enough to note that he is unable to review his own work and so just provides a summary. It essentially boils down to some reasons to at least conceive that a historical Jesus may not have existed. Most are valid, though few are as compelling as he seems to think. This is unremarkable stuff – only the most conservative Christian apologists dismiss the very idea of the non-existence of Jesus as wholly invalid. There is, of course, a large gulf between merely “valid” and actually “likely” and it is that very gap that historical analysis strives to bridge, by making an assessment of which “valid” idea is the argument to the best explanation and so the most likely. Interestingly, he notes a couple of generally favourable reviews of his There Was No Jesus, There Is No God, including one by Carole Cusack, his supervisor, in Literature & Aesthetics, the e-journal edited by … Lataster and Cusack, which is all extremely cosy.

But when he turns to Carrier, the tone of his article transforms completely. Indeed, Lataster must have worn out a Thesaurus of superlatives when penning this section:

Exhaustive ….  has the potential to genuinely shake up the research field ….  painstakingly outlines his approach to the sources and his method ….  effectively opens with meticulous explanations of the hypotheses ….  Carrier … masterfully outlines crucial “elements” of background knowledge supporting this position that are so forceful that the sceptically-inclined may already become persuaded …  In methodical fashion, Carrier then examines the residual evidence …. 

(Lataster, pp. 23-24 ff)

And so it goes on. And on. And on. So gushing is his praise of Carrier and so seemingly impressed is he by his arguments that the contrast between this section and the ones on Ehrman and Casey raise an obvious question – why the hell is Lataster an “agnostic”? He seems pretty much convinced, and even states “Carrier concludes that ‘He did not exist’ [and] though I have no great desire to deny some form of historical Jesus, I am inclined to agree” (p. 25). As already noted, his “agnosticism” boils down to not much more than some reasons it could be that no historical Jesus existed and his endorsement of Carrier’s argument is so ringing – almost gushing, in fact – that it is hard to see why he does not simply say he is a Mythicist and be done with it.

The answer seems to lie in a rather muddled conception of certainty in historical analysis. As already noted in relation to Myers’ rather different form of “agnosticism” on the question, historical analysis of pre-modern evidence simply cannot arrive at definitive answers and can only make structured, evidence-based but subjective assessments of what is most likely. Carrier has done that and decided it is most likely Jesus did not exist. I and, more importantly, most of the expert scholars have also done it and decided he most likely did exist. Why Lataster does not seem able to bring himself to make this kind of assessment, which is fundamental to all historical analysis, is a mystery. Perhaps his former fundamentalist background has something to do with it. Who knows.

With some others who adopt this “Jesus agnosticism” position, however, it feels it is more of a slippery rhetorical gambit than something genuine. There certainly are many who have drunk deeply from the Doherty-Carrier Kool Aid and argue vigorously for the baroque clusters of suppositions, supposed interpolations and conspiracy theories required to sustain Mythicism; complete with supposed ur-Christianities that vanish without trace, unjustified trimmings of received texts and bizarre conjectures about  a Pauline belief in a “cosmic sperm bank” in the sky filled with ancient Israelite semen. There are others, however, who constantly boost and bolster many elements of Mythicism, but when backed into a corner over the silly castles in the air that it requires for an explanation of how Christianity arose without a historical Jesus, scuttle and hide behind this “Jesus agnosticism” position and declare loftily that they “are not a Mythicist” and so do not have to support all of the Mythicists’ contrived fantasies. So they get the best of both worlds – they can play the arch, chin-stroking contrarian without having to stump up anything in the way of an alternative hypothesis. Some have been playing this slick little game for years.

I prefer PZ Myers’ approach. Either do your homework thoroughly, understand the material, its context and how it can be interpreted and then take your position either way. Or admit, as Myers does, that you do not know enough to make a call and wisely leave the discussion to others. Anything else is inadequate at best and pathetically weaselly at worst.

Addendum

PZ Myers has written a short response to my comments and criticisms above, and it is good-natured and reasonable stuff – see “Uh-oh. I get the Tim O’Neill treatment”.  He begins “I’m not going to disagree with his major points”, but unfortunately he goes on to show he is still not grasping how the Principle of Parsimony works in historical analysis.

First, he notes that the “structured, evidence-based but subjective assessments of what is most likely” that make up historical analysis are also essentially what evolutionary biologists like him are doing. I am certainly no biologist, but it does seem to me that there is a strong analogy between how a historian works and how an evolutionary biologist, a palaeontologist or, in many cases, a geologist proceeds – all are interpreting potentially ambiguous evidence from the past after all.

So far so good. But then he objects to my summary of why it is more parsimonious to accept a historical Jesus over any form of Mythicism, given that the latter is riddled with suppositions, by veering into an analogy with evolutionary biology which really does not work:

When we try to identify the last common ancestor of all tetrapods, for instance, we don’t have any doubt that such a thing existed, but the “thing” is not a single individual (it ain’t Tiktaalik!), but a population, or a group of populations, or even a few loosely interbreeding species, and we’re averse to holding up a fossil and declaring, “here is the mother of all four-legged vertebrates!”, because we know it’s not true.

So I look at the Middle East of a few thousand years ago (or even today), and I see a fermenting chaos that is throwing up preachers and prophets all over the place, and to point to one guy and say he’s the one seems to avoid the bigger question of what was going on in that particular environment. Wouldn’t it be better to acknowledge the cross-fertilization and interbreeding of ideas that had to have been going on? This Jesus fellow is just one focus, and given how little we know about him, not even a particularly interesting focus.

This is not actually analogous to what the evidence indicates in the case of the origins of Christianity. Yes, there were “preachers and prophets all over the place”, and the fact that the “apocalyptic preacher Jesus” of the earliest sources seems to fit what we know about them very well and that these elements get downplayed, adjusted and removed until we get the “divine Saviour Jesus” of the later sources indicates that he was one of these “preachers and prophets”. But there are elements in the source material that do indicate memories of an individual.

Paul’s letters are written approximately 20 years after Jesus’ time. That is the distance between now and the events of 1998. That is certainly enough time for legends to grow up around someone, especially in a sect of devout Jews in a world that saw the supernatural as completely natural and normal. But to pretend it is enough time to forget whether someone had been one person or several is clearly absurd. Writing to the Jesus Sect community in Corinth, Paul makes reference to Peter and James and Jesus’ other brothers and followers. And in his letter to the community in Galatia he mentions having met Peter, Jesus’ brother James and his other disciple John at some point in the mid-30s AD. He is referring to people who knew Jesus personally, including to Jesus’ siblings. This is nothing like the analogy Myers makes – this is clear evidence of a known individual made by someone who was writing at the same distance in time as we are from the Kosovo War, the Backstreet Boys and There’s Something about Mary.

Myers then says:

Writing that Christianity was produced by a committee, or the complicated interplay of a gang of scholars living in one little town, isn’t as compelling a story as saying it was this one enlightened individual.

Leaving aside the fact that I do not think the likely apocalyptic teaching of the historical Jesus was particularly “enlightened”, the problem is not that these strange alternatives he mentions are not “compelling”, but rather that there is simply no evidence at all they are what happened. What “committee”? Which “gang of scholars”? What “little town”? Again, these weird alternatives are pure supposition and Occam’s Razor makes short work of all of them, especially given the evidence there was an individual noted earlier.

Oddly, after all of the above, Myers then says:

But all right, I can accept that historians have reached a practical consensus based on available evidence that there was a guy named Jesus who triggered a major religious movement 2000 years ago, and that denying his existence is a pointless exercise in pedantry that is often misused by lazy denialists. 

Which would be fine, except then we get this:

If the time machine goes back, and the time travelers flounder about, unable to identify which of the multitude of preachers is “the one”, that similarly is not going to change the mind of anyone about the truth of Christianity. It’s a kind of peculiarly bad pattern of argument that doesn’t resolve anything that matters at all.

But given that we most likely could identify “which of the multitude of preachers is ‘the one'” – the most parsimonious read of the evidence indicates he was the one from Nazareth, the friend of Cephas-Peter and the brother of James, who was crucified by Pontius Pilatus – the only “bad pattern of argument” here is that of Myers. Again, because he does not know the evidence well enough, he keeps resorting to ways to distance himself from the likelihood of a single historical Jesus that are not parsimonious.

His new comments seem a lot like a reaction I often see from people inclined toward Mythicism once they start to realise it is flawed. I often have these people declare that it is “most likely there was no one historical Jesus, but rather he was an amalgam of many preachers from the time”. Now this is certainly possible, but “most likely”? For many years now I have asked these people what evidence they have which indicates that this mere possibility is somehow “most likely” and ask them to show this is “most likely” given the references by Paul to people who knew and were related to Jesus noted above. And every single time I am met with … silence.

This “multiple preachers”/”amalgam” Jesus idea is not actually a coherent assessment of the evidence. It is in fact simply a psychological gambit, aimed at putting some more conceptual distance between the realisation that Mythicism is a problematic cluster of suppositions and the, to some, uncomfortable realisation that there most likely was a historical Jesus. I find it is resorted to mainly by people whose grasp of how different that historical Jesus was to the Jesus of Christianity is rudimentary to non-existent and so do not understand that accepting a likely historical Jesus is nothing remotely close to accepting the existence of the divine figure called “Jesus Christ”. This is why there is a real need for easily accessible online material on what actual non-Christian scholars agree about that historical preacher, Yeshua bar Yosef of Nazaret, so many atheists can get over their association of “historical Jesus” with the “Jesus Christ” of their local holy rollin’  preacher man or Catholic bishop.

(For a detailed critique of the “Amalgam Jesus” gambit, see “Jesus Mythicism 4: Jesus as an Amalgam of Many Figures”).

Just last week I was contacted by someone who thanked me for the small contribution I had made to helping people understand this difference. He noted that he had been a devout Christian in part because when he looked online for alternative explanations for the origins of Christianity he mainly found New Atheists peddling Mythicism. When he examined Mythicism, saw how academically marginal it was, how it was presented by fringe scholars and nobodies and how implausible it seemed on close inspection, he felt satisfied that a version of the traditional Christian story of Jesus made more sense.

But since he came across my stuff and then did some more reading of the work of non-Christian scholars I and others refer to, he found a far more scholarly and much more convincing alternative thesis – one that was not propped up by suppositions and fantasies. As a result, he is now well on the way to becoming an unbeliever and wrote to thank me for helping him to that point.

So Myers’ conclusion that this stuff is “irrelevant” and “is not going to change the mind of anyone about the truth of Christianity” is dead wrong. Personally,  I am not very interested in actively deconverting Christians, though I always help any who are genuinely interested in exploring this stuff. But I have long maintained that Mythicism is a dead end. It is a self-indulgent conceptual rabbit hole and it really is time more atheists realised that and actually bothered to educate themselves in the mainstream non-Christian scholarship on how Christianity began, because Mythicism is just giving fundies a free pass.

P.S. I would suggest you avoid reading the comments from the Mythicist true believers on Myers’ articles – most of them are so dumb they will make you lose the will to live.