My fourth appearance on the Non Sequitur Show was by request and I strove to explain why Jesus Mythicism is not parsimonious and why the majority of scholars conclude a historical Jesus most likely existed. We ran out of time before I could get through all I wanted to present, but judging from the irrational reactions of the show’s resident Mythicists, it would not have mattered what I said anyway. Indeed, online Mythicism seems to be rapidly becoming like a fanatical cult.

What a Question! How to Answer?

I have to admit that I was hesitant about accepting Steve and Kyle’s invitation for this show. Having seen their audience’s reaction when I touched on the historicity of Jesus the first time I appeared on the Non Sequitur Show, I knew just trying to cram any kind of coherent critique of Mythicism into one and a half hours would be near impossible, let alone going over the reasons a historical Jesus most likely existed as well. I toyed with the idea with avoiding Mythicism altogether and just tackling the question as “how did Christianity begin”, but given that I knew there were die hard Mythicist believers in their audience, I decided that Mythicism had to be addressed somehow.

So in the end I took the tack of trying to explain that parsimony was the key to historical analysis, showing in detail how Mythicist arguments are always less parsimonious than their alternatives and then giving some idea of the context for the historical Jesus and how that indicates he was a Jewish preacher of his time; most likely an apocalyptic prophet. This was pretty ambitious I have to admit and in the end it proved too much so, since I barely got to the historical context of Jesus when I ran out of time.

Evidence that Demands a … Definition

The result was, inevitably, a lop-sided presentation that focused mainly on the problems with Mythicism. Now, I strongly suspect that even if I had been able to complete what I wanted to present, the Mythicist true believers would not have been persuaded, though it does seem from the live chat reaction that some of the “undecided” were only just starting to get an inkling of who and what non-Christian scholars see the historical Jesus as when we had to call a halt. But since I ended up mainly critiquing Mythicism, a lot of the reaction was that I had not made the case for a historical Jesus. Well, I had – but it seems the argument that a historical Jesus is more parsimonious than the often ridiculously contrived and supposition-laden arguments of the Mythicists was a bit subtle for some. What they wanted was “evidence”. From the live chat and comments:

“Tim is clearly smart and well read. However, he didn’t present convincing evidence for the existence of Jesus”

“I expected him to at least try and show some evidence for historicity.”

“What evidence do you have to support your position?”

Again, my central argument was that if all the source material (Christian , Jewish and pagan) says Christianity had its origin in this man Jesus, this gives us a strong prima facie case that this is indeed what happened. As I noted, this does not in itself necessitate a historical Jesus therefore did exist, but it does mean that any alternative explanation of how these stories of an earthly, historical Jesus arose needs to be far more parsimonious than the fairly simple idea that there … was an earthly historical Jesus. And the problem is that, far from being more parsimonious than this idea, Mythicism is a crazed tangle of special pleading, weak excuses for lacking evidence, contrived readings, suppositions piled on suppositions and patently motivated reasoning, often of the most absurd kind.

This is why I took the time to hold up two Mythicist arguments to detailed scrutiny and show why most informed critics find them flawed, contrived and, frankly, ridiculous. Of course, the fact that I could barely touch on the material that indicates there was likely a historical Jesus before we ran out of time did not help make the parsimony of the alternative to Mythicism crystal clear, but for many the cry for “evidence” seems to have been little more than a dogmatic mantra anyway:

“We don’t have a shred of historical evidence that Jesus existed”

“There is no evidence of a historical Jesus—full stop.”

“Wanna know what counts as “evidence” for historical figures? Stuff they wrote. Plato’s Republic is evidence that Plato existed.”

Not all of the audience were repeating this stuff by any means, but enough were for one of the hosts, Steve McRae, to respond to the claims I was not presenting “evidence” with an exasperated “He HAS!”

A large part of the issue here is that the word “evidence” gets misused and misunderstood by many in this debate the way the word “theory” gets misused by those who accept Creationism. This seems to be because in colloquial usage, “evidence” is often used as a synonym for “proof” or at least “information that clearly indicates something is true or occurred”. It is certainly used in that latter sense in the sciences, which also seems to be a source of many people’s confusion when they hear it used in historical discussions like this one.

In historical analysis, however, “evidence” means “any material or source of information pertinent to the question”. So a historian goes through a structured heuristic to establish what sources of information are likely to help analyse the point in issue and then uses them to determine the argument to the best explanation for how that information came to be. The “evidence” therefore is not “proof” and is not even necessarily anything particularly indicative one way or the other. It is simply the raw material for analysis.

This naive confusion by many as to what the word “evidence” means leads to some reacting to any reference to “the evidence” in relation to the historicity of Jesus by a knee-jerk scream that “there is none”. And it leads to some others being confused by the fact that none of the material being analysed represents some kind of slam dunk or rock solid conclusion. Because few who approach this subject without historical training understand that questions of ancient history worth analysis rarely involve hard and fast “proof”, all this talk of parsimony and things being “most likely” just sounds wishy-washy and unconvincing. Yet again, the fact that many atheists come from science backgrounds means that the way a humanities discipline like history works is mysterious and more than a little puzzling.

That aside, it is also clear from some of the comments that the bar of what would be accepted as “evidence” was being deliberately raised to a level where a historical Jesus would simply never meet it. This, rather than simple naivete, seems to be the major motivation behind demands for “contemporary references to Jesus” or the one above about “stuff they wrote”. I have already tackled the “contemporary references” demand in detail (see “Jesus Mythicism 3: ‘No Contemporary References to Jesus'”), but the demands for writings by Jesus himself is rather like claims we should have inscriptions to him or even, bizarrely, “examples of his carpentry work”. At best, these silly demands just show how little many people understand about the kind of evidence we can expect for the bulk of ancient figures. As with the “contemporary references” argument, the yardstick by which we measure how much or what kind of evidence we can expect for someone in the ancient world is what we have for analogous figures. For Jesus, this means what we have for other early first century Jewish preachers, prophets and Messianic claimants. Which means we actually can not expect to have any contemporary references to him, let alone any surviving writings, coin portraits or statues, let alone a nice china cabinet he knocked together for Mrs. Cohen with “J. Christ, Main Street, Nazareth” written in pencil on the back.

So most of these calls for evidence are simply confused and many of them are made in bad faith anyway. And for others, any inclusion of Biblical texts in the analysis of evidence at all causes a kind of weird emotional aneurysm.

“You Can’t Use the Bible to Prove the Bible!”

If I could give an award for the dumbest comment that I tend to get in these discussions it would have to go to “you can’t use the Bible to prove the Bible!” This is an argument that makes sense in another context, but makes no sense at all in this one. Yet, right on cue, we got it and versions of it in the comments:

“Is this guy using the Bible to prove the Bible?”

“First century mystics writing down nonsense isn’t “evidence” of anything”

“Bible isn’t evidence Tim!”

“What we have are anonymous texts written by mystics NOT HISTORIANS!!!!!!!!!”

“Plutarch’s book about Isis and Osiris proves they existed LOL”

The argument that “you can’t use the Bible to prove the Bible” has its origin as a legitimate response to a very specific argument used by fundamentalist Christians to defend Biblical literalism, claiming that because 1Timothy 3:16 says that “all scripture is inspired by God” this means the Bible is all true. In that context, noting that using a Biblical text to “prove” the Bible is divinely inspired can be argued to be circular reasoning. Using that argument to dismiss any reference to Biblical texts in relation to the question of the historicity of Jesus, however, makes no sense.

To begin with, arguing that a historical Jesus most likely existed is not “proving the Bible”. A historical Jesus as the point of origin for the later Biblical stories about “Jesus Christ” does not get much beyond establishing a base line for the examination of those later claims, and does not even get close to “proving” them.

Secondly, those who use this weird argument (which is actually little more than a reflex catch-cry) still seem to have an oddly Christian conception of “the Bible” as a single coherent work, rather than as a collection of disparate ancient texts by various authors in a variety of genres written over a centuries-wide range of time. Historians who use Biblical texts (and non-canonical, apocryphal and Patristic Christian texts) in relation to the question of the historicity of Jesus are not treating them theologically, let alone as part of any single “book”. They are using them the way any historian uses ancient texts – by examining them critically and sceptically. As with any ancient text or source, a critical scholar asks key questions about these texts. Who wrote them? When? What might their sources have been? Who were they written for? Why? In what context? What was the author’s objective? What biases do they seem to have had? Historians and textual scholars treat all sources this way and do not take any of them at naive face value. This critical and forensic examination of texts is a fundamental part of what scholars of any question relating to the ancient world do. For many, it is pretty much all they do.

So the idea that these ancient texts have to be automatically ruled as inadmissible evidence simply because, centuries later, they became part of the canon of the Bible is boneheaded. To claim that, somehow, the very texts that give us the earliest references to and stories about Jesus cannot be used to examine how those stories arose is absolutely absurd – they are obviously the key pieces of evidence as to the origins of those stories. By establishing how they inter-relate with each other, examining how the parallel stories they tell about Jesus evolve and change and working out why, we can extrapolate backward and come to conclusions about where these stories came from. These texts are solid evidence of something very important – what their writers and intended audiences believed about Jesus. Given that they are written over almost a century, starting in the 50s AD and extending into the early second century, they also give us a series of snapshots in time, indicating how these beliefs about him evolved. To claim we somehow “cannot” use  this information critically to work out the origins of these beliefs is totally ridiculous. Many of those who make this claim simply do not understand how critical analysis of these texts is done. And others just want to exclude this material because they do not like the conclusions most critical scholars draw from them. Strangely, they do not seem to have a problem with their favourite Mythicist writers use the same texts, but that seems to be because they draw conclusions that the true believers like. Emotion drives many of these people, not reason.

“That’s Not (True) Mythicism!”

One point that got some of the more hysterical and the less attentive viewers agitated was my observation that many people find Mythicism appealing because it gives them the biggest stick with which to hit Christianity. Anyone who spends any time interacting with Mythicism true believers knows what I am referring to here. It is fairly clear that for many of these people, the primary motivation – consciously or otherwise – is finding a way to debunk Christianity. This is why we see people raising the bar of what they will accept as evidence to absurd heights. I regularly point out that if we consistently applied the standards of evidence I often see demanded for the historical Jesus in these debates, this would result in about 90% of ancient figures being ruled as “mythical”. And this observation is usually met with shrugs. They do not actually care about the methods and standard of historical standards or about history generally – they just want Jesus to not exist and Christianity to be as wrong as possible.

Of course, this observation that many Mythicist true believers are driven mainly by emotion was met with … well, emotion:

“That’s not what Mythicism is Tim.”

“It’s hard to take you seriously when you start out with a complete lie.”

“Wrong!”

“Mythicism is not emotionally based.”

Some later tried to claim I had said that all Mythicists were motivated purely by the desire to debunk Christianity, ignoring the fact that I repeatedly stressed words like “many”, “often” and “some” and even went on to repeat and stress that I actually was not attributing this motivation to every Mythicist. At 21.36 I explicitly point out “this is obviously not every Mythicist“. Then at 22.14 I strongly emphasise that “I am not saying these are the only reasons people accept Mythicism”. I also made it clear I was talking about people who accept Mythicism, and not (necessarily) the main proponents of the Mythicist thesis. I could not have been more clear, but the reaction just proved my point. Emotionally-invested people tend to hear what they think they hear. As the hosts noted and several observers commented later, the slightly crazed reaction of some of the true believers to this point and pretty much everything else I said proved their emotional motivations better than anything I could say.

“He’s Just Bashing Carrier!”

Definitely the weirdest reaction came when I took the time to go into a couple of Mythicist arguments to show how contrived and unparsimonious they have to be to keep the whole thesis from collapsing. I could have chosen any number of arguments from any number of Mythicists. Given the varieties of Mythicims embraced by most atheists, it would not have been very useful to use the incoherent New Age ramblings of “Acharya S” or one of the kooky pseudo historical conspiracy theories of Joseph Atwill or Francesco Carotta. No Mythicist theory is particularly good, but – unlike the ones just mentioned – some at least try to play by the rules of scholarly analysis.

So it made far more sense to use a version of the “Celestial Jesus” form of Mythicism championed by Earl Doherty, Robert M. Price and, of course, Dr. Richard Carrier PhD. This is, after all, about as scholarly as Mythicism is ever going to get and it is the form of Mythicism I usually get parroted at me by online true believers.

Given that in the short time available I could not tackle the whole of or even much of this thesis, I had to select a couple of arguments that illustrated why those who know the material and its background do not find this theory convincing. Most of the time when I discuss this topic I can guarantee that someone will invoke Carrier within minutes and I cannot count the number of times I have been informed that “you need to read Carrier’s book” (though it is always amusing how often, when I show I have read his book, the person I am talking to reveals they actually … have not). And, again, the first time I appeared on Steve and Kyle’s show the live chat and the comments section were abuzz with people insisting that Carrier was the very man to refute my naughtiness, that he was the gold standard of Mythicist argument, that he was an Ivy League graduate with a peer reviewed book, a towering academic colossus bestriding the world of scholarship etc.

So it is indeed curious that when I went to the effort of taking apart Carrier’s hilariously bad argument about how Paul is refering to a “cosmic sperm bank” in the sky in Romans 1:3 suddenly this great enthusiasm for Carrier as the mighty standard bearer of Mythicism … collapsed.

Suddenly, my choice of Carrier as my example was declared unrepresentative and we were told that debunking Carrier was somehow missing the point:

“The issue I have is that Tim’s entire time was all talking about Carrier as if Carrier were the only person he could have rebutted”

“I was VERY disappointed that no actual argument was put forward… Just “Carrier is wrong” over and over for an hour…”

Of course, we saw something similar when Bart Ehrman took the time to debate Robert M. Price on this topic in October 2016. Despite great anticipation by Mythicists, the debate was easily won by Ehrman, as even the Mythicist true believers had to admit. But then, of course, the complaint was that it was Price who was not representative of Mythicism and that it was Carrier who was the real doughty champion of the cause. It seems no matter which Mythicist you defeat, it is apparently the wrong one.

Even stranger was the sour insistence by some that all I did was “attack Carrier”. Again, the hosts objected strongly to this claim; even going to lengths to state outright that I had kept solely to attacking Carrier’s arguments. As I pointed out later off-air, if anyone bothers to note what I say about Carrier as a person on the show, it is all actually quite complimentary: I say he is a smart guy, well trained, with good knowledge of most of the sources, good linguistic facility etc. Keep in mind that I am talking about the same Richard Carrier who consistently calls me a “liar” and says I am “an asscrank …. a hack …. a tinfoil hatter …. stupid …. a crypto-Christian, posing as an atheist …. a pseudo-atheist shill for Christian triumphalism [and] delusionally insane”, so I should not have to note that I was actually being pretty restrained. But this was because I do not care about all that childish stuff he indulges in – I care about the arguments. His arguments are bad and they are demonstrative of how bad Mythicism is as a thesis. And that is the point. 

But when people cannot respond to that with reason, they have to resort to emotion. Some of the stuff in the live chat was astoundingly stupid (I mention Paul and angels – a commenter says “so this guy believes angels are real?!”) But much of it shows that, for many, Mythicism is a substitute set of faith-based beliefs, propped up by apologist style parroted arguments and invocations of books they have not read and texts they have never even seen. For these people it is fundamentalism in another form and their cultish devotion to it is, for rationalists, simply weird.