PZ Myers and the Mythicists

PZ Myers and the Mythicists

Atheist activist and blogger PZ Myers has been on a journey regarding the likely existence of a historical Jesus and has been pretty honest about its stages. After a period of finding Jesus Mythicism at least compelling, if not wholly convincing, he has passed through a fairly thoughtful period of “Jesus agnosticism”, but now appears to accept the consensus position of almost all critical scholars: a historical Jesus most likely existed. This has not gone down well with some of his fan base, but it seems to be something of a trend among many of the less dogmatic type of atheist activistthere appears to be an increasing understanding of why Mythicism is a fringe thesis among informed scholars. Jesus Mythicism, it seems, is losing its lustre.

Amalgam Jesus?

Like many anti-theistic polemicists, biology professor and atheist blogger PZ Myers has had an ambivalent attitude to the issue of the existence of a historical Jesus. As an atheist, he obviously does not accept the Christian claims about Jesus as God or even as some kind of exalted being. But he has long readily admitted to being unsure about whether there actually was any such person at all and was, at one stage, at least inclined toward Jesus Mythicism: the position that there was no such person and that the figure is wholly mythological. He was originally fairly friendly with several prominent Mythicism advocates, including Robert Price, David Fitzgerald and Richard Carrier. But he does not seem to have ever been completely convinced. In 2018 he responded to my detailed criticisms of some of Sam Harris’ blundering forays into history (see “Sam Harris’ Horrible Histories”) by observing that history is a specialised field of study and so needs to be approached with care by non-historians:

Tim O’Neill is making an important point. Most of us have expertise in something, but we should be careful about assuming our knowledge of one thing means we have knowledge of all things.

(“History is hard”, August 20, 2018)

Wise words. And ones many of his fellow science-oriented anti-theists (e.g. “Aron Ra”, Harris, Richard Dawkins, Jerry Coyne) would do well to heed. Myers took his own advice and invited historian Eddie Marcus to give a primer on how historians work out whether a figure is likely historical or not in a video conversation (“The ontology of historical figues”, September 5, 2018), but the comments on that post became flooded with contributions by some of Mythicism’s usual suspects, leaping to the defence of their fringe theory. Thinking about the historiographic issues regarding the existence of an obscure ancient figure further, Myers admitted he was still perplexed by the issue of methodology:

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?

(“Still baffled over the historicity of Jesus stuff”, September 7, 2018)

In that piece he decided that a kind of agnosticism was the best position to take, given that we cannot “know” or “demonstrate” that a historical Jesus existed. Unfortunately, this misunderstands how the discipline of history works and how it differs from many of the sciences. We cannot actually “know” or “demonstrate” many or even most things in history, so it makes little sense to take no position on them, as this would make the whole study of the past effectively impossible (see “How History is Done” for an introduction to the Historical Method). So I used his comments on this as the starting point on an article on the problems with so-called “Jesus agnosticism”, to which he responded with some further thoughts – “Uh oh I get the Tim O’Neill treatment” (September 30, 2018).

So Myers and I have been in something of an indirect dialogue on this subject for some time, though he has not really explored the subject on his blog in the intervening four years. It would seem, however, that he has maintained his reasonable and open-minded approach to the question of Jesus’ historicity and come to the conclusion that the scholarly consensus is right: a historical Jesus most likely did exist and is the origin point for the later stories of “Jesus Christ”. In a Christmas 2022 blog post and video, Myers lays out why he has come to this decision:

Myers makes some shrewd points here. While Mythicism is a weak thesis on its own merits, it is not completely invalid to note that it seems to attract some … very odd individuals. As one of the people that arch-priest of Mythicism, Richard Carrier, spitefully sued for $2 million the allegations of Carrier’s sexual misconduct, Myers is probably more justified than most in making this point. Carrier’s ludicrous and clearly vexatious suit was hurled out of court, but not before it cost his targets considerable sums in legal fees and took a toll on them for years. His bad theories aside, he is an unpleasant individual by any measure. His fellow Mythicist and knee-jerk contrarian, Robert Price, has found himself increasingly marginalised thanks to going all-in on the MAGA end of the US Republican political agenda, with several public expressions of fairly racist views. To these and the other examples Myers gives can be added several more in which prominent Mythicists have shown themselves to be more than a little obnoxious and weirdly aggressive in their interactions with critics. Another Mythicist, Raphael Lataster, once tried to attack me via my employer at the time, the University of Sydney, claiming public comments made about him on a blog constituted a breach of the University’s Code of Conduct and calling for my official censure. The University’s Office of General Counsel did not take this very seriously and the general consensus was that Lataster was a strange loon, but it is yet another example of what Myers is talking about here. As he puts it:

[I]t suggests a deep problem in their theory, that it mainly seems to attract fringe scholars, pseudo-intellectual bible worshippers, wanna-be nazis, and misogynists and conspiracy theorists. I don’t like these people, making my opinion of their ideas suspect, but also…why do such unpleasant, unsavory characters gravitate towards Jesus Mythicism?

There is some merit to this observation. It does not seem to be a coincidence that the kind of person who habitually goes against the grain of popular opinion, presents themselves as the lofty truth-teller who exposes all the experts as fools and likes to provoke strong reactions from others often associate themselves with fringe theories like this one.

Myers makes another observation that I have noted in the past before. The people attracted to Mythicism seem to have a strangely binary way of thinking, whereby things are either black or white, with little to no nuance. So if any of the Jesus stories are not historical (e.g the miracles or the resurrection) then all of them must be completely rejected. I discuss this false dichotomy elsewhere (see “Jesus Mythicism 8: Jesus, History and Miracles“), and it represents a historiographical naïveté, given that history is all about nuance and degrees of likelihood. Again, Mythicism seems to attract people who can only think in absolutes and even those who think historical analysis can be reduced to a kind of calculus: here, again, we find Richard Carrier and his wrongheaded misapplications of Bayesian Probability.

So Mythicism increasingly struck Myers as a theory motivated by poor thinking and accepted by some strange people with an axe to grind. However you stacked it up, it did not seem the most parsimonious explanation. That there simply was a man at the origin point of the later stories simply fitted the evidence better than the convoluted Mythicist alternatives: this kind of preacher was common in the period and the idea that one ran afoul of the Roman authorities, got crucified and then his followers had to find a way to deal with that makes perfect sense. As Myers says:

That sounds likely to me, a non-historian. It also fits with the anthropology of religious cults, which have arisen many times before and since. Look at Mormonism, for instance: would it make sense to argue that their prophet, Joseph Smith, didn’t exist, and was an invention by Brigham Young and the Mormon Elders? Was Scientology handed down directly by an alien named Xenu, or did it involve one guy, L. Ron Hubbard, making up a story? Was Lutheranism a conspiracy by a cabal of anti-Catholic fanatics, or did Martin Luther actually exist?

How many religions have coalesced out of the ether in the absence of a charismatic human catalyst?

It seems to me that the mythicists are the ones insisting that Christianity is unique and special and had to have originated by an exceptional process. I don’t buy it.

So Myers has considered the theory, listened to both sides, thought about the motivations involved and made his assessment: a historical Jesus most likely existed. Good for him.

What is interesting is how his statement on this has been received. The comments on his video are generally pretty mild, supportive and largely in agreement with his conclusion. This channel has mainly been active in the last four years or so. But the comments on his blog are far less enthusiastic and have attracted some of the usual rota of tired and flawed Mythicist arguments. His blog has been going since 2005 and seems to attract a different and more militant atheist compared to his video channel.

So right on cue. we get the standard cookie cutter Mythicist claims. For example:

A lot of figures at that time are remarked in contemporary records. Their deeds and familly are recorded while they were alive. Jesus? Nope.

(dandare)

While it is true that some ancient figures were recorded in this way, an overwhelming majority were not. And the correct way to determine if we should expect contemporary attestation for someone like Jesus is to compare what we have for him with what we have for analogous figures: other early first century Jewish preachers, prophets and Messianic claimants. And we we do that we find … none of them are attested by contemporary references. So this line of reasoning fails – see Jesus Mythicism 3: “No Contemporary References to Jesus” for further critique of this kind of historiographically naïve argument. Another example:

My problem with Jesus historicity is kinda like trying to restore an old boat full of dry-rot. As you rip out the rotted wood, there’s more rot underneath that, and so on and so on. At what point can you just declare there’s no longer a boat there?

(moarscienceplz)

There are various points at which a historian can draw conclusions about the likely outlines of the original boat. When they get to strata that do not actually fit well with what appear to be clear later accretions, for example. Then they can draw a reasonable conclusion that this is likely to be historical material. As I argue in my video on this subject, elements like Jesus being born in the wrong town, getting forgiven for his sins by his supposed subordinate John the Baptist or getting executed when the Messiah was meant to triumph all clearly pose awkward problems for the gospel writers. Yet these elements are in the story anyway and the gospel authors have to find ways around them or rework them. Why are they there? It seems to be because … they happened.

Then we get claims that there is no evidence outside the Bible for a historical Jesus:

I’m intrigued by the “evidence outside the bible” for anything except a recognition that christianity was developing and its central ideas. But there is no evidence for those central ideas.

(nomdeplume)

Except there actually is such evidence. Tacitus gives a bald and fairly hostile summary of who, what, when and where about Jesus in Annals XV.44 and there is no good indication that he is simply repeating Christian claims. Putting aside the disputed passage about Jesus in Antiquities XVIII.63-4 (and that could well still be partially authentic), almost all Josephus scholars accept that he mentions both Jesus and his brother James at Antiquities XX.200, and the Mythicist arguments against that strong consensus are weak and unconvincing.

Then we get an argument based on faulty assumptions and errors of both interpretation and fact:

The mythicists theory has the advantage of explaining facts that are otherwise difficult to explain. In particular, one would expect the earliest Christian writings to be full of quotes of the teachings and the biographical details of their founder if that was rabbi Jesus. …. These include Paul’s authentic letters, Hebrews, and First Clement. Yet these writings contain very little, if anything, that can be construed as teaching from the rabbi or biographical information on the rabbi. Instead these writings appeal to the Old Testament and to apostolic visions as the source of their teaching.

(Bernie)

This argument is riddled with mistaken claims. The nature of the earliest writings are not better explained by Mythicism at all. In a period in which the stories of Jesus were not yet standardised in written form, it makes perfect sense that the main literature we have are communications between the centres of the Jesus sect on matters of theology. The genre here – letters that assume basic shared knowledge – means that, in fact, we would not expect biography. This is for the same reason it would be strange for me to give a biography of my late father when I mention him in an email to my brothers: they already know who I am talking about, so they already have that context. This comment also repeats the false Mythicist claim that Paul says he only gets his information about Jesus from visions, where he actually says nothing of the sort and speaks about getting details of Jesus life indirectly, via others.

It would take me a very long time to go through all the comments Myers’ post has attracted – over 200 of them so far – and show the flaws in the various defences of Mythicism made there. Suffice it to say there is nothing much there we have not seen a thousand times before and that I have not tackled in some way in my ongoing series of article on the problems with Mythicism. So I suppose it was gratifying to see History for Atheists get some acknowledgement in a couple of comments:

I’ve found the History for Atheists blog really useful in cutting through the pseudohistory peddled by a lot of new atheists.

I dabbled with mythicism but I got increasingly suspicious of the scientism promulgated by many of the prominent new atheists promoting mythicism, and their disdain for social sciences and the humanities (all the while nitpicking the humanities in order to bolster their position). Ultimately, I don’t think it really matters if a historical Jesus existed but the way mythicism captured the movement was really informative for me.

(sara00)

Another poster responded:

PZ has been featured on History for Atheists before, first as a voice of the atheist community who sadly believes in Mythicism, then more positively as an example of someone who has listened to reason and moved away to a more “agnostic” state regarding mythicism. For my part I am happy that he has now arrived at “Mythicism is wrong”, being a former student of history myself (and someone who prefers theories based on facts, not on wishful thinking).

I guess Tim played an important part on bringing about this change – sadly, he is not mentioned in the video. His blog is both well-written and well researched, he engages with critics in his comments (although his tolerance for bullshit is low) and can only be recommended for atheists who prefer facts over fiction. Which, sadly, are not all of them.

(Chabneruk)

I could not have put it better myself. So while the comments there have plenty of bad Mythicist apologism, they are among a number of signs that the message is, gradually, getting through. Mythicism is a bad conclusion in search of supporting arguments and a historical Jesus is simply more scholarly, more parsimonious and more rational. It is good to see PZ Myers has come to that conclusion.

90 thoughts on “PZ Myers and the Mythicists

  1. Thank goodness. I was ready to throw shoes at my screen when I got some Richard Carrier recommendations on YouTube and actually watched some of his speeches. Seemed to me, he didn’t just come to bad conclusions, but also often misrepresented sources. Apparently, so long as you say a source says something it doesn’t, you can come to your bad conclusion with perfect justification and logic …

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  2. A great read. Feel free to say this question is too off topic but… I find your analysis of the kind of cranky people attracted to Jesus mythicism very interesting. This is partly because I have mixed feelings on this issue myself. On the one hand I completely accept the point you have made that academia rewards original thought, so consensus usually forms only when the counter-arguments are threadbare or ridiculous. On the other, I think all human beings and perhaps intellectuals especially are prone to groupthink, intellectual trends and bandwagons, and to using their intelligence as much to summarily dismiss contrary opinions as to investigate them fairly. If you think small minorities holding a view are usually cranks but also that majorities are usually way too dismissive of alternative views, what do you do? Investigate every issue on its merits?

    On issues like nutrition, for example, I have struggled with this question for years. I can easily believe the kind of scientists who say nothing matters for weight loss except “calories in, calories out” are missing something important and clinging desperately to a crumbling view, and I can also easily believe those who deny it are cranks. And I don’t know where to start in evaluating their claims on their merits.

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    1. On the one hand I completely accept the point you have made that academia rewards original thought, so consensus usually forms only when the counter-arguments are threadbare or ridiculous. On the other, I think all human beings and perhaps intellectuals especially are prone to groupthink, intellectual trends and bandwagons, and to using their intelligence as much to summarily dismiss contrary opinions as to investigate them fairly.

      Your second point is true, but it’s the first principle that actually drives academic careers. In fact, the two principles actually work in a useful tension. Young scholars have to come up with something new to get noticed and build a career. But they also have to convince others that their new idea is valid and at least feasible, or no-one will bother with it. So these two tendencies keep new perspectives and ideas flowing while also (usually) preventing scholars indulging in completely fanciful and contrived stuff.

      If you think small minorities holding a view are usually cranks but also that majorities are usually way too dismissive of alternative views, what do you do? Investigate every issue on its merits?

      Yes.

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    2. What I do when I’m too lazy to evaluate claims on their merits is looking up credentials. What is the correct interpretation of quantummechanics? I lack the knowledge and understanding to say anything sensible about this beyond the most basic stuff. However it’s quite easy to look up that most experts either support Copenhagen or Many Worlds. So my bet is: one of these two.
      Now look up the credentials of Jesusmythicists. There are perhaps a handful with relevant ones: Carrier in the first place; if we stretch “relevant” Doherty and Price. ToN has linked to an article by Luke Barnes on Carrier’s usage of Bayes’ Theorem. There is another one, hard to refind. A non-mathematician using math, criticized by actual mathematicians, to support a view – is not credible. Etc.
      That’s how I do it.

  3. The issue with so many mythers ( but not all of them )is they seem to think they are some sort of genius for coming to their views and therefore look down at others for not coming to their ” profound revelation”. They consider non mythers and Christians as worthy of contempt at best and in need of castigation from mythers , who are their betters. They despise anyone who argues against mytherism as they feel such people are dupes, ” evil Christian apologists” or sell outs who cannot remove the last vestige of Christian belief from their mind. They have white hot rage toward any historicist which manages to out debate them ( not hard to do once you know your stuff on this issue).

    All and all this produces an egotistical ass who enjoys belittling people and despite their vaunted claims of reason are almost impossible to reason with. I am glad to see PZ has overcome this mindset and sees it for what it is.

  4. Wow, 250 comments and counting! In case anyone gets that far down: I am NOT the Steve Watson of comment #121. I haven’t followed Pharyngula regularly for several years now, and it’s nice to see PZ taking the right position. I was unfamiliar with Dr. Sara, who puts in a good defence.

    I’ll make one point here: the guy, early on, claiming that non-existence of Jesus is the null hypothesis? As I’ve said on here before: any theory of Jesus has to explain the existence of the Christian cult by c.100 CE. Surely the null hypothesis should be that there was such a person. It might turn out to be wrong, but the replacement should be more parsimonious and/or harmonize better with the textual evidence. Saying “people make shit up”, while true, isn’t an alternative theory, it’s at most a gesture in the vague direction of a possible alternative theory — you need a story about why, when and who. Mythicism seems to be the most popular attempt to provide one, but fails (at least) the parsimony test.

    The main lesson of that thread is that way too many atheists are emotionally attached to the non-existence of Jesus, to the point that they either don’t even think seriously about the issues, or uncritically latch on to Mythicism.

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  5. So I followed the link above to Luke Barnes’ discussion of Carrier’s use of probability. Googling lead me to some more examples, and I checked again some of the references in OHJ.

    I am astonished at the level of crank mathematics Carrier is pushing. The things he is saying *sound* mathematical but are virtually gibberish. I’m reminded of sovereign citizen loonies that string together a bunch of legal vocabulary into nonsense.

    What’s more, the mistakes that he makes are the exact kinds of mistakes that are made when people first begin learning probability theory. It’s not a sign of low intelligence, but they are very common places where our natural intuition isn’t quite correct and are thus usually brought up very early in an introduction to probability course.

    Carrier’s two biggest mistakes (and again, these are mistakes many people make when first learning probability) are that he treats an average as if it gives all needed information about a distribution and he fails to account for dependence. As best as I can tell, others have pointed this out to him but he doesn’t seem to comprehend it. Reading more of Barnes’ post, I believe Carrier has deluded himself into thinking he is some kind of expert on this topic. I have full confidence that he has never had any kind of education on this topic. Even an introductory course would have covered these mistakes and highlighted why they are fallacious. What’s worse is reading even more of Barnes’ points is that Carrier seems to believe he can even create his own new mathematics from his own foundations. I’m left bewildered as to why he even feels the need to do such a thing if he wants to use Bayes’ Theorem. It would be like trying to reinvent geometry all by yourself to use Pythagoras’ theorem, or algebra in order to use the quadratic formula.

    Thanks for that link up there. I knew his math was bad when I first saw it but never realized quite how bad it is. That link sent me down the rabbithole. This is full blown crank territory. I don’t know how anyone can take this man seriously, even setting aside his strange historical arguments. While it doesn’t automatically invalidate his strange interpretations of Paul, it does suggest that he has a tendency to talk like an expert on something way outside his domain of knowledge. I certainly don’t see any scholars that hold to a historical Jesus going off the deep end and inventing their own pseudo math.

    Mathematics is not the focus of this blog, but as an expert and professional in this area I will vouch that Richard Carrier is way outside of his depth. Nearly every single statement he makes is wrong, misleading, and even reflect that he has almost certainly never had any kind of serious education on this topic. He would do well to drop his pseudo math and stick to topics he at least has some level of education in.

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  6. Believing fringe theories about Jesus is mostly pretty harmless I guess, but I do have to grit my teeth when evolution, vaccination, and global warming come up, and that same community starts screaming about how everyone should believe the experts. In general, most of them would probably not admit to only respecting experts in the STEM fields, but their biases are totally obvious to everyone except themselves.

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    1. No, it isn’t harmless. JM stimulates a way of thinking that, as soon it becomes prominent, harms society. What matters is not the topic to which this pseudoskepticism is applied to but its popularity. And JM is way too popular among atheists. In the USA right wing nuttery might be correlated to conservative christianity, in The Netherlands it consists for a great part of unbelievers. For the sake of: left wing nuts aren’t any better – I say this as a radical leftist.
      Once you reject professional methodology in one field of research it becomes easy to do it in any other field too.

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  7. I used to read Pharyngula back when Myers posted on evolutionary biology – he is a great explainer and I’m sure an excellent teacher – but dropped when he pretty much abandoned that. Nice to see the residual respect I retained for him has some basis. He did strike me as a guy who is prone to wonder ‘But am I right?’ – the indispensible question.

  8. “so it makes little sense to take no position on them”
    To PZ’s credit (and I’m not a fan, actually I stopped reading him a while ago), he probably merely says “I don’t know and understand enough to take a position”. Like I don’t take a position on the question which interpretation of quantum mechanics is the correct one.
    It’s a bit funny that PZ largely went through the same process as me. It’s 10-15 years ago now that I met the idea (via a website called Jesuspolice). was enthusiastic about it, read through Kenneth Humphrey’s website and concluded that he is a loon. Then I found Earl Doherty’s website and noticed that he used theology to back his “theory”. That’s very odd for an atheist imo. After that I began to notice the similarities with creationism and that sealed the deal for me. Long story short: ToN’s blog removed the last remnants of the influence JM had on me.

    1. No, it doesn’t. Poor Carrier has been desperately trying to claim that Mythicism is gaining ground for years now and consistently failing. There he comes up with a feeble list of 29 scholars. The Society for Biblical Literature alone has over 8,000 members and there are thousands more Jewish scholars and historians in relevant fields. Even just as a fraction of the SBL alone, Carrier’s sad list represents 0.3%. Pretty pathetic. Carrier also pads out his list with six scholars who are dead. Then he pads it further with various scholars who he admits are “historicists” but have expressed some level of sympathy, however vague, with looking at Mythicism. Which leaves his list with a grand total of non-dead, actual Mythicists at … four. Just four. And none of them hold any academic position at any accredited university. So yes, almost all scholars accept Jesus most likely existed. As I said. Carrier’s sad list confirms this.

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      1. Carrier tries to enlist Zeba Crook on his side? A few years ago CFI Ottawa hosted a public discussion/debate between the two of them, with Crook taking the historicist side. Crook saying that it is plausible to doubt the historicity of Jesus may be no more than the kind of general hedging about historical confidence that even Tim does here — it hardly adds up to “taking Mythicism seriously”, and it’s sleight of hand for Carrier to try to sneak it in to support his headline.

        That whole list reads like those lists of scientists who accept creationism/ID or doubt evolution — they’re padded out with figures of marginal relevance, and often misrepresent the views of those they cite. And creationists have been predicting the Imminent Demise of Evolution since the ink was barely dry on the first edition of _On the Origin of Species_.

        Mythicism really is increasingly the atheist equivalent of creationism, isn’t it? A re-writing of history for the sake of ideological convenience.

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        1. Jesus Mythicism is a fringe thesis (rejected by academia, because it fails the historical method).
          And the behaviour and actions of promoters of these fringe ideas are always shared, and that includes falsely listing authorities who “accept” or “support” their ideas on the flimsiest of basis.
          Holocaust deniers, anti-vaccination advocates have resorted to this and the promoters just about every one of those crackpot conspiracy theories also always resort to this.

          But one other typical fringe promotion thing that Richard Carrier does (and one of the first things I personally chuckled at him over) is the sudden invention of his very own method of analysis to support his thesis. Carrier’s is his “Bayesian analysis”; in which he does this hackneyed application of Bayes’ theorem of probability to assess a probability of Jesus existing (and conveniently nothing else beyond). All very attractive to many of these “new atheists” with the reverence they hold for “STEM subjects”, within which Mathematics can be grouped as a “science”, over the humanities subjects (which many regard with a strange disdain).
          Of course what is really behind Carrier’s “Bayesian analysis” is that Jesus Mythicism fails the historical method that makes history… …history. And which thus makes his application-of ultimately invalid as history. But beyond that; as he has no verified statistical records to make use of as a basis for baseline probabilities, his analysis ultimately depends upon him pulling baseline probabilities essentially from where the sun doesn’t shine. And of course there is no consideration for margins of error (which would be close to 100% given that this is for events that occurred about 2000 years ago), let alone of confidence intervals, hypothesis testing etc. I have to ponder if Carrier has actually ever studied statistics before in his life. But I also have to wonder at the character flaws of anyone who has any education in statistics and yet who doesn’t immediately spot these enormous flaws in Carrier’s “method” and/or still takes him seriously, let alone maintains a pantomime of reverence for him.

          And in reality; Carrier’s “Bayesian analysis” is essentially no different to this dingbat and deceptively named alternative “creation science” that is inherently un-scientific that the Creationists such as Michael Behe conjured up (due to the fact that “creation science” badly fails the scientific method). And it’s also a usual behaviour/action pattern for promoters of any fringe & rejected theory.

    1. Another pathetic list that just confirms what I said. Like Carrier, Godfrey pads out his list with “agnostics” (pretty much anyone who has ever given the slightest credence to the possibility Jesus didn’t exist – by that measure I myself should be on that stupid list!), various dead people (Detering, Avalos, Ellegård etc.) and then a whole swag of non-scholars, including total crackpots like Atwill, Freke, Gandy and Murdock. Once again, if you boil Godfrey’s even more stupid list down to actual scholars with relevant qualifications (if no academic postings) who aren’t dead you get … four. The same four that we find on Carrier’s almost as stupid list. So, again, my statement that “almost all scholars” accept a historical Jesus most likely existed stands.

      Is this the best you can do? This is feeble.

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      1. No, I can do better.

        https:/www.richardcarrier.info/archives/23000

        A Primer on Successful vs. Bogus Methodology: Tim O’Neill Edition 2-17-23

        If you have responded to this in some manner that I am not aware of then I apologize. Please direct me. Do not see any responses from you on this forum as of 2/27/23. Perhaps you were unaware of it. Look forward to your response.

        1. No, I can do better.

          With a better list of scholars? Doesn’t seem like it. So you’ve just changed the subject.

          If you have responded to this in some manner that I am not aware of then I apologize. Please direct me.

          Okay. I try not to buy into Carrier’s nasty pscychodrama, which is aimed mainly at his followers on his blog anyway. But yes, I responded to the only point that he makes that has any substance in a pinned comment on the Reason to Dount video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfDhOqkcTOQ I also go over why Carrier’s arguments re Gal 4:4 don’t work on a more recent interview I did on Jacob Berman’s History Valley channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16bLztnVJvw

          Carrier loves to scream in triumph over any mistake an opponent makes, but the rest of his hysterical nonsense about me being a “liar” etc. is just pathetic. I owned the error I made about the ways ginomai can be interpreted as soon as I realised my error. But this actually makes little difference to the substance of my argument.

        2. The first rule of doing history isn’t mathematics. It’s read the historical sources carefully and make sure you understand them, both linguistically and according to what is known of the historical culture of the time, and then evaluate them to come to the most likely conclusion abut what happened.

          I have found numerous falsehoods in Richard Carrier’s comments and conclusions about his historical sources. These may be genuine misinterpretations, or they may be outright lies about the sources (perhaps thinking none of his own disciples will bother to check).

          So no matter how Could Richard Carrier’s maths may or may not be, he fails at History 101 when it comes to his sources.

          There is a common-law legal principle that states: Falus in uno, falsus in omnibus. That basically means, anyone found to be telling just one falsehood in their testimony cannot be trusted and is unreliable for the whole of their testimony.

          So it means, anyone who wishes to know whether or not Carrier is telling the truth about his sources and conclusions has to go and do all his work with all his sources again.

          That is not good history. It is bad history.

          Then there’s professionalism. Trash-talking your peers in the profession as Richard Carrier does means you are … well … unprofessional. You look like a douche. You also look like an amateur douche.

          You also look overly defensive, as if you know that the peers who critique your work are actually on the right track.

          So in methodology and in professional behaviour, Richard Carrier acts as a fail.

          1. PS: Sorry about the typos in that. Radically changing over my mental health medications with three weeks in hospital and my brain is NOT where it should be.

      2. [including total crackpots like Atwill, Freke, Gandy …]

        Ahhhh, thank you I read a piece he wrote, I think it was for American Atheists, and it was horrible, but that could be just me, so it’s great to hear that someone else agrees!

  9. Lataster’s site contact page has the tag line, combating tyranny and promoting free thought education. The tyranny of sanity?

    1. A few years ago Lataster was a strident fundamentalist Christian who wrote long, pseudo scholarly spiels about how the Gospel of Matthew was not only written by Matthew himself but was originally written in Aramaic. He has always been a shouty contrarian, he’s just found a new fringe view to shout about.

  10. I am an atheist that rejects mythicism but I find it hard to explain how people could have made up the miracles and the resurrection story and what motive they had in doing so. Jesus’ followers should normally have dispersed after his crucifixion and not gone on to preach his message around the world. What is your take on this?

    1. I find it hard to explain how people could have made up the miracles and the resurrection story and what motive they had in doing so.

      You do? Ancient literature is full of miracle stories. So you conclude this means (a) these stories were invented for various cultural, religious or literary reasons or (b) they actually happened? I don’t know about you, but I’d say (a) is more likely. Wouldn’t you? If so, you can then apply this to the miracle stories in the gospels. As I note in my article on the Jesus miracle stories, most of his miracles are simply faith healings and exorcisms. Those don’t require any actual supernatural events, just belief. Then once his reputation as a “wonder worker” got established, of course he would attract other miracle stories – we see this today with alleged “miracle workers” who do very simple faith healings and some sleight of hand tricks and then have amazing stories about them teleporting or levitating told about them. We also see the number of miracles reported in the later gospels decline, but the nature of them increase: we get less faith healings and more spectacular miracles instead. All this indicates stories that grew in the telling over time. Finally, some of the miracles so clearly echo Old Testament miracles or have such obvious theological implications that they don’t seem to be meant to be taken literally as something Jesus really did, but as rhetorical devices telling the audience who and what he was (the Messiah, a Saviour etc.) So no, the miracle stories are not hard to explain at all. Other preachers and prophets in this period also had miraculous powers attributed to them, so this is exactly what we’d expect for someone like Jesus.

      The resurrection story is also easy to explain. Modern sociological studies show that when a devoted group that has given up a lot to dedicate themselves to an expected outcome (the end of the world, UFOs coming to take them to the stars etc.) and this doesn’t happen, they don’t just say “Oh, okay – we were wrong. Let’s go home”. They find a new way to reinterpret the original expectation to accommodate its failure to eventuate. We see this all the time in apocalyptic sects, such as the Seventh Day Adventists, the Jehovah’s Witnesses and many others. In the case of the Jesus Sect they appear to have gone to Jerusalem expecting an apocalyptic triumph. Instead, Jesus was executed. So they had to reframe their expectation as simply delayed and still to come (something we see in those modern sects all the time) and decided he had, in some sense, “risen from the dead” in a pre-figurement of the general resurrection that was coming in the final apocalyptic coming of the Kingdom of God, which they still thought was coming very soon. I go into the details of this development here.

      Jesus’ followers should normally have dispersed after his crucifixion and not gone on to preach his message around the world.

      That’s a Christian apologist argument and it’s simply not correct – this is not what is “normal” at all in these circumstances. See above. We even have a parallel situation from Jesus’ time with John the Baptist. He is executed, but his followers continue after his death, preach in Greece and later dispute with Christians, claiming it was John who was the Messiah. So that argument is demonstrable nonsense on several fronts.

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      1. Thanks Tim, your reply was thorough and really helpful. I think you would agree with me that a significant motive in the formation of Christianity was deliberate lying and deliberate confabulation by conscious charlatans. In orthodox Christian countries where rank superstition is even more promiment than other cultural milieaus there are many reports of quite a few modern day saints who perform spectacular miracles during and after their death. See for example the case of Greek elders Paisios or Pophyrios of Kavsokalivia. These people died in the 90s and yet there are already many eyewitness reports of their supposed miracles. The fact that you have many apparently sane people that appear in front of a camera and tell you of completely spectacular (not simply mundane tricks) miracles and supernatural phenomena that they swear they personally witnessed means that you have many conscious myth-makers and charlatans who deliberately spread false stories around charismatic figures out of a need of attention, monetary gain or to strenghten belief in a sect.

        1. I think you would agree with me that a significant motive in the formation of Christianity was deliberate lying and deliberate confabulation by conscious charlatans.

          I’m not sure I would agree with that, actually. Yes, there are plenty of charlatans in the history of religions. But they are vastly outnumbered by sincere people who genuinely believe things that are completely wrong. Vastly. I doubt liars and charlatans had anything much to do with the origins of Christianity. Though they definitely came into play later.

      2. Except that only some Jews believed in any sort of resurrection, and that was only at the final judgement of Yahweh. There would have been no expectation by the disciples, and it seems more probable, given their Jewish beliefs, that they would have concluded he was not the messiah given his awful death. It’s not as if they didnt show any doubts when they were with him for 3 years. It makes little sense they would make up some story of him being physically resurrected from the dead, to the extent they were prepared to suffer and die for that belief. Your theory also doesnt explain Paul, who by all accounts was quite glad Jesus had been executed and no doubt thought that was an end to the matter.

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        1. only some Jews believed in any sort of resurrection, and that was only at the final judgement of Yahweh.

          So? The earliest traditions show us that Jesus, his first followers and their immediate successors were all among those Jews who believed in the coming general resurrection and made it a key part of their message. Jesus is depicted as debating those who didn’t accept this idea and Paul does the same at length in 1Cor 15. Jesus is depicting raising people from the dead and then holding this up as a sign of the coming general resurrection. Paul holds up Jesus’ resurrection as the “first fruits” of the coming general rising. So it’s perfectly clear that they not only expected this coming resurrection, they also believed in precursors to it. And then said this is exactly what Jesus’ rising was.

          There would have been no expectation by the disciples, and it seems more probable, given their Jewish beliefs

          Wrong. Completely wrong. See above.

          It makes little sense they would make up some story of him being physically resurrected from the dead, to the extent they were prepared to suffer and die for that belief.

          Strawman argument. (i) Who said they “made up a story”? (ii) There are strong indicators that the earliest forms of this belief were not about him being “physically resurrected” at all, but were visions and encounters where they met someone and “only realised it was Jesus later” etc. These more ephemeral experiences only evolved into a belief about a physical revivification of a corpse much later.

          Your theory also doesnt explain Paul, who by all accounts was quite glad Jesus had been executed and no doubt thought that was an end to the matter.

          How does it not explain Paul? We have plenty of examples of people who convert from one extreme and adopt its polar opposite. One of Muhammad’s most determined opponents converted to Islam and became its most fervent defender. The early Nazis used to spend more effort trying to recruit Communists to the Nazi Party because, as radicals who liked extreme views, they made better Nazis than moderates. The most fundamentalist (and annoying) atheists used to be fundamentalist (and annoying) Christians. This happens all the time.

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          1. Paul writes about the resurrection about 20 years or so after the event. Many commentators believe he was referring to a creedal statement from a significant period before that – Jesus was crucified, buried then raised. All physical, not ‘ephemeral’. Off the top of my head there are 2 recorded instances where some of his followers did not immediately recognise him – Mary in the garden and the 2 on the Emmaus road. Mary recognised Jesus it seems after a few seconds or minutes, and then tried to cling onto him. Pretty sure you cant do that with a ‘ghost’. I accept the Emmaus incident is harder to explain. But there’s no indication when he appeared to others that they didnt recognise him at the time. So Im not sure where these ‘strong indicators’ are.

            ‘Paul holds up Jesus’ resurrection as the “first fruits” of the coming general rising.’ – yes but only after the fact.

          2. I’m not very interested in an argument with a believer about the alleged Resurrection of Jesus. You believe? Good for you – go believe.
            But in response to your weak arguments above:

            Many commentators believe he was referring to a creedal statement from a significant period before that – Jesus was crucified, buried then raised. All physical, not ‘ephemeral’.

            Paul himself includes his vision of Jesus among the ones he lists in 1Cor 15:3-8. So no, you don’t get to conclude what he refers to is “all physical”. You’re projecting later stories back on to his early and much more ambiguous account.

            Off the top of my head there are 2 recorded instances where some of his followers did not immediately recognise him

            Which is two too many for your claims to make sense. Why the hell would they not “recognise” him? Where do these stories come from? They are another indicator that the earliest “Resurrection” encounters were far more ambiguous, ephemeral and visionary than the later accounts would like you to believe. Then there is also the reference in the longer ending of gMark that says he “after this [i.e. an appearance to Mary Magdalene] he appeared in another form to two of [the disciples], as they were walking into the country.” (Mark 16:12). This is clearly part of an attempt by the gospel continuer to reconcile gMark with the other gospels, but the claim he appeared “in another form” to these two disciples is telling, and more evidence of traditions about these appearances that are far from straightforward.

            Pretty sure you cant do that with a ‘ghost’.

            No. But who said these “didn’t recognise him” encounters were with a ghost? People are clearly seeing visions and having encounters with people that they identify as being, in some way, experiences of Jesus. These things are common in people who have experienced a traumatic loss. For months after my father died I kept catching glimpses of him in crowds. It was my mind playing tricks, but I know people who have experienced the same thing and interpreted it in far more esoteric and mystical ways.

            ‘Paul holds up Jesus’ resurrection as the “first fruits” of the coming general rising.’ – yes but only after the fact.

            Yes. And? This is just one element in the evidence that shows that the idea of precursor resurrections as signs of the coming general resurrection was very much around at the time among the earliest Jesus Sect, both before and after Jesus’ death. So your claim the idea he rose couldn’t have developed out of this kind of thinking is wrong.

            But, again, this is not a forum for apologetics. Take it elsewhere.

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        2. I do find debates over historical belief in the reality of Jesus’s resurrection interesting. But only because I always have questions along the line of: How do you square belief in a (genuinely resurrected) Christian Jesus Christ with the genuine existence of stuff like cot death, paedophilia and slavery?

          1. It may be interesting, but it’s off topic for the article above. Any further comments on it here will go into the trash.

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    2. Look up cognitive dissonance. Also: when was the last time you managed to convince a racist merely by using arguments and evidence? Actually it would be stunning if followers would “not [have] gone on to preach his message”. That would mean that humans 2000 years ago were much more rational and less emotional than we modern ones.

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  11. Interesting stuff! This Myers seems like a rather reasonable person.

    I have not seen you discuss mythicism here for a while, will there be more in the future?

    1. My Mythicism articles get less traction than the ones on other subjects. But yes, there will probably be a couple more articles on my ongoing Mythicism series.

  12. Thank you for posting your thoughts on this. If I get time, I will comment on the Tacitus and Josephus passages separately. However, I would like to test the “standard theory” that you seem to advocate – that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet who gave rise to the myth that he was the son of God through some sort of hallucination on the part of his followers. I find that this theory naïve and lacking insight into how religions actually evolve. The normal pattern for a new religion is that a shaman/prophet has a spiritual experience of a ”visitor from heaven” who passes on revelations that form the basis of the new religion. The shaman convinces his or her followers that these revelations are true and some of those followers may then have spiritual experiences themselves. In my book, The Rock and the Tower, I call this “the shaman paradigm” and develop the idea that Christianity most likely followed this pattern.
    The problem with the standard theory is that the role of Jesus is overloaded; he is both the prophet and the subject of the religion. Perhaps this could occur after several hundred years of development but it is there in the earliest sources from the very beginning. I do not see how you can get from a real-life vagabond apocalyptic prophet to the heavenly ruler of the universe within the lifetime of the people who knew him. We must therefore consider that Jesus is the visitor from heaven who has appeared spiritually to a prophet/shaman who is the real founder of Christianity.
    The standard theory cannot account for anything we actually observe about Christianity in the first century or so. The early Christians would have to abandon everything that Jesus actually taught for an opposed set of beliefs which no Jewish preacher could have held. If Jesus had been an apocalyptic prophet, then his movement should have been law-observant. And yet freedom from the law is a Christian belief that is present no more than a few decades after Jesus and probably earlier. I cannot think of any other example where a religion has so thoroughly disregarded the teachings of its founder within living memory.
    Most significantly, the Jesus of the standard theory could not have taught his own crucifixion and resurrection. Yet these are at the heart of the Christian religious experience. Christianity certainly works as a religion, but the standard theory cannot explain why it works. The dying and resurrected god/king is a powerful myth that goes back thousands of years at least. It makes far more sense that the crucifixion and resurrection were hard-coded into Christianity from the beginning rather than something that emerged from some strange coincidences.
    I could go on and on. Would we expect a Jewish preacher to have started a movement that gave rise to Gnosticism? Well no. Or the belief that Yahweh was an evil lower spiritual being, as Marcion and some gnostics believed? Certainly not. Or the very un-Jewish belief that Jesus mother was a virgin who had been impregnated by God? Not at all. And then there is the author of 1 John whose church has just split in two because of a controversy of whether Jesus had come to earth spiritually or in the flesh. Is there any Jewish prophet in history who was believed to have existed on earth spiritually? No. So why should anyone believe that about Jesus?
    The standard theory fails every single test. Scholars get around this in two ways. Mostly they do not test the theory but take it as granted. If they do notice the discrepancies, they apply additional “it just so happened” assumptions. It just so happened that the cult of Mary emerged. It just so happened that gentiles dispensed with the law (ignoring what they would have been taught) and somehow took over the church. A false theory can explain any set of data by adding enough of these “it just so happened” assumptions. But a good theory should explain everything as emerging in a natural manner from the initial conditions.

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    1. If I get time, I will comment on the Tacitus and Josephus passages separately.

      No, I don’t think you will.

      I would like to test the “standard theory” that you seem to advocate – that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet who gave rise to the myth that he was the son of God through some sort of hallucination on the part of his followers. I find that this theory naïve and lacking insight into how religions actually evolve.

      You find a standard critical position on Jesus that has been around for about 150 years and is held by some of the leading scholars in the field “naïve”? Okay. This better be good.

      The normal pattern for a new religion is that a shaman/prophet has a spiritual experience of a ”visitor from heaven” who passes on revelations that form the basis of the new religion. The shaman convinces his or her followers that these revelations are true and some of those followers may then have spiritual experiences themselves. In my book, The Rock and the Tower, I call this “the shaman paradigm” and develop the idea that Christianity most likely followed this pattern.

      No, that is not the “normal pattern for a new religion”. It’s a possible pattern, certainly, but not the “normal” one. And you’re also making a fundamental error in working from the idea that the Jesus Sect was a “new religion” anyway. It was a sect of Second Temple Judaism and remained that for almost a century after it arose. So your thesis is based on a false assumption to begin with.

      The rest of your claims above are riddled with similar erroneous assumptions and misunderstandings of the material and its context. I think you should go peddle your silly self-published books elsewhere. Goodbye.

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    2. What I think funny is your “follow the evidence” – and no single assertion of yours is backed by any. You don’t even try.

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  13. I wonder whether part of the popularity of Jesus Mythicism is people who are particularly infuriated by certain types of Christian apologism that beg the question by assuming that the Gospels are literally true – eg CS Lewis’s notorious “trilemma” (either Jesus was the literal Son of God, or he was a lunatic, or he was a conman) which leaves out the possibility that Jesus’s claims to be the Son of God are exaggerated in the Bible. Although Lewis’s main target with that one was wishy-washy individuals who claimed to be Christian in the sense of following Jesus as a moral philosopher without accepting theism.

    1. @Phil E

      I’m often frustrated by the apologetic gymnastics, but I don’t see this as a reason to crank up Carrier’s foolishness. These are more likely former Christians carrying over the same intellectual habits to their new found cause.

    2. What PhilE writes I have thought as well for a while. Unfortunately JM is quite popular among Dutch atheists too. Given statistics I suspect many of Dutch JMs never were christians. The explanation probably is something like tribalism – christians are opponents and everything they say must be wrong.

  14. I am an Occam’s Razor atheist, but I have never taken the Christ Myth seriously. My reason is the careers of two holy men who allegedly performed miracles in modern times: The Baal Shem Tov in Poland and Ukraine in the 18th century was a Jewish holy man and founder of Hasidic Judaism, and Simon Kimbangu in the Belgian Congo in 1921 founded a Christian sect that exists to this day as the Kimbanguist Church. The Baal Shem Tov allegedly glowed in the dark and turned invisible to avoid being seen by his enemy, and Simon Kimbangu supposedly healed the sick, turned flying bullets to water, and stalled a train until he could say good-bye to his followers. Since both of these men flourished in modern times, sensible people doubt their alleged miracles but nobody doubts that these religious leaders really existed; in fact, personal belongings of the Baal Shem Tov still exist, and King Leopold of Belgium ordered that Kimbangu should be imprisoned. There is likewise no reasonable doubt that Jesus bar Joseph from Nazareth likewise certainly existed?

  15. Another one of “Bernie’s” whoppers in the above quotation is his placement of first Clement alongside Paul as an allegedly very early source. First Clement was written when Paul’s work was already in circulation. Carrier is pushing an early dating of that epistle (and Hebrews) as a part of his particular agenda, and his fan is parroting him in those comments.

  16. “It does not seem to be a coincidence that the kind of person who habitually goes against the grain of popular opinion, presents themselves as the lofty truth-teller who exposes all the experts as fools and likes to provoke strong reactions from others often associate themselves with fringe theories like this one.”

    I’m a Christian who has a particular interest in the erroneous KJV- Only movement, and it’s quite striking how that statement pretty much sums up most of its promoters.

    1. Let me know when Humnphreys comes up with an argument for Mythicism that hasn’t been answered or debunked a thousand time before. He also used to have his books published by a press that publishes Holocaust Denial authors and actual Nazis, which should tell you something about how credible his stuff is. He has a ” history degree in the classics”? From where? And his website should win an award for “Ugliest and Most Confusing Site of 1996”.

      1. He has a ” history degree in the classics”? From where?

        Kenneth Humphreys is a British scholar and activist for atheism who lives in the south of England. He studied for five years at university, graduating with a master’s degree in history and social sciences
        Education and career

        Why?

        Why is a hardcore atheist drawn with such passion and commitment to Jesus studies? Humphreys’ answer is unequivocal:

        “Jesus is a myth, a syncretic creation from antiquity.

        After achieving a distinction in a Higher National Certificate course, Humphreys studied for five years at university, graduating with a Bachelor’s degree (BA Hons) and a Master’s degree (MA) from the University of Essex in history and social sciences, followed by pedagogic certification from the University of Leicester.

        https://www.jesusneverexisted.com/author.html

        Nazareth did not exist in the 1st century AD – the area was a burial ground of rock-cut tombs.

        The 12 disciples are as fictitious as their master, invented to legitimise the claims of the early churches.

        Ken presents the Top Ten reasons why Jesus is a Myth -A Talk with Jacob Berman of History Valley

      2. I’m not sure the attractiveness or otherwise of a website should be attacked in a discussion like this.

        More at issue is the content of the website. Including the way his qualifications are mentioned and represented. This content is indeed somewhat strange.

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        1. I’ll note his site is a hideous piece of crap as well as full of nonsense if I choose, thanks. It’s an indication of his amateurishness and his chaotic thinking.

          1. Well, now, I didn’t say you couldn’t choose. Of course you can. This is your site, and short of anything illegal, you can do and say precisely what you choose.

            I simply said that I – me personally – wasn’t sure the appearance of Kenneth Humphreys’s site should be attacked.

            Your point as you worded it sounded petty as well as trivial. And I felt therefore that it was unlikely to win over anyone perhaps sitting on the fence or the far side, whom you might be trying to convince of your views. Respect always works better than knocking.

            However, you also get to moderate all our comments and you are free not to publish them. So you could have not published my comment if it touched a nerve. So you don’t need to get snarky with me for expressing my own opinion almost as freely as you express yours.

            All of that said, had you noted the first time, when knocking the appearance of Kenneth Humphreys’s site, what you now note – “It’s an indication of his amateurishness and his chaotic thinking” – I would not have commented what I commented. That statement makes more of a decently logical point in what I (me myself) would always prefer to be a respectful discussion.

            I shall finish with a couple of quotes.

            The first is from Tim Minchin’s monologue on “Confirmation Bias” in his show BACK: “If you tell someone they’re a fascist [or idiot or whatever] and publicly shame them on the internet for what they believe, you’ve lost’em. You have prioritised your need to express your outrage – and, if we’re honest, more often than not, signal your virtue – over the possibility that you could utilise your educational privilege to reach across …”

            So what is your real agenda, Mr O’Neill? To signal your virtue and claim naysayers are idiots or merchants of “crap” while preaching to the converted? Or actually to convince people to consider or study atheism with honesty?

            The second quote for me to leave you with is from – of all people – Johnny Depp: “You cannot be right all the time. You should try being wrong sometimes. You might learn something.”

            Best,
            Catherine.

            * BA, University of Sydney, 2002
            * Research MA in History and English, University of Sydney, 2003
            * PhD in History, University of Sydney, 2007 (with a specialisation in Renaissance Italy)

          2. A bizarre response. No, you didn’t “touch a nerve”. You gave a needlessly prim appraisal of me notiong the ugliness and disorganisation of his site, so I made things more clear for you. I’m not sure who I’m meant to be persuading or convincing here (Humphreys? You?), but if anyone here needs any kind of persuasion that Humphreys is a crackpot and an idiot, they’re very much in the wrong place. I also have no idea how the Depp quote applies here. I am actually pretty quick to admit any mistakes I make and I make a point of doing so publicly. Though what mistake I’ve made here is totally unclear. I also have no idea what your list of credentials have to do with … anything.

            But yes, I can choose what comments get posted here. And I can assure you if you try giving me any more of these strange little lectures, they will go straight to the trash.

        2. Crap websites that were embarrassing in the early ’90s are one of squares on a standard crackpot bingo card. In this day and age they speak of an unwillingness to learn from others and a high degree of egocentricity.

    2. Kenneth Humphreys is useful. He nicely demonstrates that jesusmythicism is just another conspiracy theory, sucking things out of his big fat thumb and presenting it as “evidence”. That way he convinced me that jm is crap.
      You can play a nice little game: find as many things Humphreys has in common with Ken Ham (of AiG fame) as you can.

    3. As someone who has a PhD in History, I’m genuinely asking, what does “a history degree in the classics” mean?

      Don’t you get either a degree in History or a degree in Classics? Or even a degree in Ancient History?

      The phrase “the classics” implies classic or classical literature only, and studying that really isn’t sufficient substance for a history degree, I think.

      Ancient History can encompass study of the classics and classical era (ancient Greece and Rome). Classics can encompass studying some history of the same era.

      But what the deuce is “a history degree in the classics”?

  17. Just a quick question, I’m not really expecting to get a definite answer from anyone…
    …but I’m wondering if anyone knows if that “mythicist Milwaukee” crowd with their MythCon events are still around? From the impression I got; their annual conventions were becoming increasingly debaculous. And like all of these atheism advocacy groups; there seemed to be cracks & splinters forming under the surface. We’re they financially wiped out by the pandemic? Or are they still operating and planning to bring back these conventions?

    One thing I can say; is that they were a major promoter of both Dr. Robert Price & Dr. Richard Carrier, along with the real amateurs like Fitzgerald. And they gave Jesus mythicism in general a lot of publicity. So without them; Carrier and mythicism will have lost a lot, in the case of Carrier I expect much in monetary income (given how he would “headline” their conferences). I suspect that they were a major financial and organisational force in the promotion of theories of Jesus mythicism.

    I also have to wonder if Dr. Price would be welcome back to MythCon given the recent revelations of his connections to very dubious people on the political far right.

    1. The question made me curious too. Apparently, they are now called. Mythinformed Milwaukee.
      I had only heard of them for the price Ehrman debate.
      I see they have a LinkedIn page. I didn’t known they initially formed after seeing zeitgeist. Pee Yew!

      [given the recent revelations of his connections to very dubious people on the political far right.]
      Who? And “,linked” in what way? I saw Derek Lambert’s dismissal of him but don’t recall any dubious links mentioned.

    2. Given some of the people MythCon has featured in the past (like Wossname who calls himself Sargon of Akkad), I’m not sure they’d object to someone with far-right connections.

        1. He’s a fat, ignorant, uneducated, unemployable, lazy, unhygienic, entitled perennial moaner from dead end Swindon England. Who managed to make something of a living back in 2015-16 by making whinging videos on YouTube enjoyed by reactionary and naive people in North America and adolescents in the UK.

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  18. I am glad I found your blog. The mythicist position held great appeal for me some years ago and it was only the desire (of which I am not proud) to see the then-unaccused alleged sexual predator, Richard Carrier, mop the floor with a self-righteous fundie in a locally-held debate that made me put the whole mythicist affectaion in thr rearview mirror. It turned out that Carrier’s opponent was neither self-righteous, nor even a believer in Christian theology. Rather, he was a wry, humorous New Testament scholar from a local university, Zeba Crook. The floor was indeed wiped, but it was Carrier who picked up the dirt. His ignorance of the manuscripts and literary traditions (and, if i recall correctly of Ancient Greek) of early Christian communities was staggering in comparison to Dr. crook’s knowledge of these things, and the latter’s easy fluency in communicating what is known and how the evolution of the mythic Jesus was completly in line with the evolution of mythic traditions in the literary forms of those cultures from historical foundations. Of course, Carrier’s ignorance of the subject was not remotely the equal of my own, so I can’t recall the details of his trouncing, but it involved sophisticated textual analysis of Greek sources and their relationship to contemporary writings of the time. All this to say, I look forward to looking at the articles on this site to make my ignorance slightly less woeful.

    1. I’m glad you liked the event, Andrew. I’m a member of CFI Ottawa, and one of the organizers. For those who care, here’s a link to the video: https://centreforinquiry.ca/jesus-of-nazareth-man-or-myth/. I honestly don’t recall anything of the contents now; possibly I was too busy guarding the cash box and generally worrying about something going wrong to pay attention. I sort of regret not finding an excuse to take Crook’s course during my time at Carleton.
      My wife and I billeted Carrier on that occasion. At one point in the weekend, I took Carrier over to Early Doherty’s house (Carrier counts Doherty as one of his inspirations, but they’d never met).

      1. ….and I just watched most of the video. Crook clearly won the points about Philo and the euhemerization of gods; all Carrier could do was reiterate what he’d already said as if the rebuttals didn’t exist. He also relies heavily on his claim that gMark is a “missionary allegory”, but never actually supports it, and Crook seems to think he pulled it out of his ass (though he says it more politely).

      2. Thanks for the link Steve. Haven’t finished it yet, but didn’t even know about this one.

        [My wife and I billeted Carrier on that occasion. At one point in the weekend, I took Carrier over to Early Doherty’s house]

        So, Is Doherty still in the game? Hopefully, all of you then proceeded to Tim’s.

  19. Similarities Between Mythicism and Creationism
    For all many New Atheists accept the one and ridicule the other, they’re actually rather similar:
    – Both theories are nonsense disconnected from reality, for a start.
    – Because both theories are nonsense disconnected from reality, they have to bolster themselves with weird, over-literal or just wrong readings of the things they’re critiquing. Think of Carrier’s claims that Paul believed in a cosmic sperm bank or that Matthew’s resurrection narrative features space aliens with death rays, or creationist social media posts about evolution saying goo turned into the zoo and turned into you.
    – To bolster their claims, they will brag to the hills about every PhD scholar they have. Please ignore that the overwhelming majority of academics in their relevant field would disagree with them.
    – They consistently avoid interactions with actual scholarship. To my knowledge, Carrier has never seriously engaged with Christian Jesus scholars (N.T. Wright, Richard Bauckham, etc.), let alone with wider Jesus scholarship. And the closest Ken Ham has ever come to interaction with a real scientist is debating Bill Nye.
    – Despite avoiding interaction with scholarship, they complain about being ignored by academia. Well, surprise, most academics have better uses for their time than responding to claims that Paul believed in a celestial sperm bank or that Noah’s flood deposited the geologic column.
    – When pressed to answer why they have virtually no scholarly support, they respond that the academy is full of “apologists” (mythicism) or “secularists” (creationism). Go tell Maurice Casey, Bart Ehrman and Geza Vermes that they are apologists, or Simon Conway Morris, Francis Collins and Ken Miller that they are secularists.
    – If their followers started thinking for themselves, they’d soon leave. So make an industry of peddling off-the-shelf answers for your followers to parrot uncritically. Think Carrier’s CHRESTUS app or the “Answers Magazine”.
    – Biggest similarity – in the end, these theories are impervious to evidence, because neither side wants to actually study history/science. They want a magic bullet in a perceived culture war between atheism and Christianity.

    1. [Despite avoiding interaction with scholarship, they complain about being ignored by academia.]

      Here’s the funny part. They haven’t been ignored by academia. Apart from the interaction of a number of scholars, Ehrman etc, Carrier for example, was invited to discuss his book at a regional meeting of the society for Biblical literature.
      Simon Joseph’s recap is no longer up. Carrier went and his book was discussed. As a matter of fact you can buy OHJ from the SBL’s book store. How’s that for being ignored?
      But wait, there’s more. R. Joseph Hoffman organized a seminar to deal with this question. The Jesus Project modeled on the Jesus seminar was, iirc, fully funded for 5 years and included the likes of Carrier, Price, Zindler etc. Hoffmann, the chair, ended up calling it off. I’ll quote Hoffmann, himself,

      “The first sign of possible trouble came when I was asked by one such “myther” whether we might not start a “Jesus Myth” section of the project devoted exclusively to those who were committed to the thesis that Jesus never existed. I am not sure what “committed to a thesis” entails, but it does not imply the sort of skepticism that the myth theory itself invites.”

      In other words, when they’re taken seriously, they have no interest in constructive engagement, but prefer to go off to their own never never land.

      1. Since you’re clearly more familiar with Christ Mythicism than I am (pretty much everything I know about it is from this blog), I have a question for you or whoever sees and answers this comment first – how do mythicists respond to the existence of vast numbers of non-Christian New Testament scholars who accept a historical Jesus?
        In the case of creationists confronted with the large number of evolutionary biologists who are Christian (or otherwise religious), they insist that Christian evolutionary biologists are faithless compromisers selling their principles to get ahead in a field run by secularists. Do mythicists respond similarly?

        1. Their response to anyone noting that the consensus is held by non-Christian scholars too is usually fairly weak. They usually claim a number of things. First, that these scholars only hold this consensus because they have never really questioned Jesus’ existence in the first place or examined Mythicist arguments. This may be the case for some, but most have enough of a grasp of the history of the question in New Testament studies to be aware of the reason Mythicism was rejected a century ago. They also often claim these scholars work in a field dominated by Christians and so can’t rock the boat because they would be ostracised, or even kicked out of their universities. This is absurd. These scholars hold all kinds of ideas about Jesus that are completely contrary to orthodox Christian beliefs and yet remain, in many cases, leading experts in their fields. They are certainly in no danger of ostracism, let alone unemployment. And the idea that top tier secular universities act like fundamentalist Bible colleges and sack academics for holding “heretical” views is pure fantasy.

          The fact is that most scholars reject Mythicism because it doesn’t take much thought to see why it’s a flawed hypothesis if you have sufficient knowledge of the material and how analysis of it works. This is why most scholars can dismiss it fairly easily.

          1. “This is absurd.”
            I suspect that at least in The Netherlands it’s also dead wrong. Granted, there are few Dutch historians of Antiquity, but I bet most are not christians. None of them is a myther and none of them would have to fear for his career if he were. At the other hand we’ve had a protestant preacher, Van der Kaaij, who embraced jesusmythicism. While he was heavily criticized his church (PKN) did not fire him.

          2. So, again, like creationism. Their response to “why do so many scientists accept evolution” is usually to blame methodological naturalism and to say that scientists just aren’t critical of evolution. Or to say that anyone who questions evolution will be expelled from “the academy”. This one is probably less ridiculous than the parallel mythicist argument, but it’s still rubbish – Michael Behe still has his academic position and YEC geologist Andrew Snelling still gets work (albeit with a hell of a lot of cognitive dissonance and/or dishonesty: https://www.noanswersingenesis.org.au/realsnelling.htm).
            Also, in your experience, does mostly harmless per se* mythicism accompany dangerous pseudohistory (Holocaust denial, tankie-ism, the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, that kind of thing) the way that mostly harmless per se* creationism accompanies dangerous pseudoscience (thinking mostly of climate change denialism)? I wouldn’t be surprised.
            * While they’re not damaging in and of themselves, the misunderstanding of how history and science work and the distrust of authorities they promote is dangerous. All I’m saying is that Christ mythicism or creationism in isolation from any other views and attitudes doesn’t hurt people

          3. It depends on the form of Mythicism. The New Ager-style version peddled by the late Dorothy Murdock/’Acharya S” tended to attract people who uncritically accepted a lot of other pseudo history and associated woo. The Doherty-Carrier thesis that many atheists have adopted tends to be popular with people less inclined toward crackpot stuff. Unless it’s anti-Christian in tone or its conclusions and then they are happy to adopt it – e.g. Rene Salm’s “Nazareth never existed” nonsense.

  20. To add to what Tim said. My experience is that they simply ignore the point about non Christian scholars and insist that it doesn’t matter for the reasons he specified. It amounts to insinuating something.
    On a similar note, I happen to be a fan of Dale Allision (who wouldn’t be, right?) And yet people try to make something out of the idea that he believes he saw God, as if his work doesn’t matter. This is just the cheap tactics mythicists use.
    I can discard his personal experience, whatever it was and still find his stuff well worth reading. It isn’t an all or nothing proposition.

  21. So, here’s a bit on a recent discussion I had with a mythicist. The guy was insistent that Jesus was the product of pesher and that a suffering Messiah was a “common” trope in Second Temple Judaism. When I pointed out that if it was common, they wouldn’t have had an uphill battle claiming Jesus was just such a Messiah, he accused me of having a sophistic definition of common, apparently common can also mean rare or non existent. All the papers he cited, Tabor, Holmén, Obrien did not agree with him. In fact, Holmén’s paper contradicted his claim about dying messiahs in Judaism.
    So, yeah, the creationist mythicist analogy holds up for me.

    1. Thinking about it, the better analogy is probably anti-Stratfordianism (the “someone else wrote Shakespeare” conspiracy theory): an outworking of 19th century academic trends (whether it be monomyth origins and dying-and-rising-god theories or, in C. S. Lewis’ words, “the kind of criticism where every old book was made by six anonymous authors well provided with scissors and paste”) that was rejected in the early 20th century and has not had a drop of academic respect for quite some time and looks set to stay that way, plus the conspiracy theories it inevitably includes to explain why academia reject it. I mostly chose creationism because I’m VERY familiar with it (an enthusiastic young-earth creationist until I was fourteen and clung to it until I was seventeen whose read a lot of the debunking. )

  22. So, having read this blog, it certainly seems like the ratio of “actual evidence for mythicism” versus “contrivances required to get mythicism off the ground” skews heavily towards the latter. From this blog, it seems like there are only four real arguments for mythicism:
    – “There are no contemporary attestations to Jesus [or any other equivalent figures].”
    – “How can anyone [without a viciously binary understanding of historical reliability] believe a book that contains miracles?”
    – “Jesus is [actually not] very similar to pagan figures [first-century Palestinian Jews would be horrified at patterning their religion off of].”
    – “[I think] Paul believed in a purely celestial Jesus because he didn’t make any references to Jesus’ life [that I noticed].”
    Tim, is that it? Because it seems that way to me.

      1. Also, I have a question for you – how is the Jesus Seminar viewed by non-Christian historical Jesus scholars? Of course it’s viewed unfavourably by orthodox Christian scholars, but my impression is that most non-Christians view it as an attempt to construct a Jesus who reflects modern liberal Christianity. Is that an accurate assessment?

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