AS275: Did Jesus Exist? With Tim O'Neill

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:29 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Atheistically Speaking. This is episode 275 and I am your host, Thomas Smith. Alright, well I need to sort of address the elephant in the RSS feed here. The most recent episode was certainly a departure from the norm. I said it then, I'll say it again, I don't regret doing it, it was something I think was necessary. I am absolutely stunned by the response. I'm torn, though, because I don't really want to dwell on it at all. I kind of want to just move on. I want to get on to bigger and better topics, things that I think are more worthy of our attention, but at the same time, it's kind of hard for me to see the hundreds, literally just hundreds of comments and emails and Patreon comments and all that, and not want to address them.

0:01:20 Thomas: So that kind of hurts because as much as I just don't think it's something we should dwell on, there's some themes I do want to address in these comments and I'm not sure where. So I haven't decided yet. Feel free if you want to chime in with an opinion. If I should just forget about it, move on. Or if it would be worth doing another commentary on it. Since we reached a Patreon goal of starting a blog, maybe I could do a blog post on it. I don't know. So feel free to chime in with that if you want. But needless to say, thank you so much for your support. Some people had criticism for me and I appreciate it. I think it was very constructive criticism. I appreciate that. But for the most part, I was amazed at, frankly, how one-sided the response was.

0:02:08 Thomas: I was not really prepared for that. I figured it would be more or less a two-sided thing. It really was not. I mean, it all came down on the same side that Andrew and I were, to be perfectly honest. You can check the website. I think there's over 100 comments on there.

0:02:26 Thomas: Not 100%, but something like, I don't know, 96% of them or pretty much one way. But anyway. I just want to say thank you for the support. Thank you for all the new pledges. I'll be thanking you individually on Thursday's episode. And with that said, let's move on to something I think is quite interesting, a great use of perhaps the new audience attention that this podcast may have. We'll see if it carries over. And that is the topic of mythicism, whether or not Jesus actually existed. Now, a lot of you may know that this is something that a lot of atheists subscribe to, that the idea that there was no historical Jesus. And I've got a guest here, second-time guest. You can go back and check out his original episodes if you're a new listener.

0:03:11 Thomas: A different topic, but they were great, very fascinating. I've gotta guest who contends that Jesus absolutely did exist, or at least it's very reasonable for us to assume he existed. And it's unreasonable to take the position that he didn't, especially if we're not historians. So very Very interesting topic, interesting guest, and let's get right over to it.

0:03:46 Thomas: Joining me right now for the second time, Tim O'Neill. How you doing, Tim?

0:03:51 Tim: I'm very well thanks mate.

0:03:52 Thomas: Thanks for coming on, especially, you know, so early over there. It is really hard to schedule between the United States and Australia. It isn't it is an unbelievable time difference. Like I...

0:04:03 Tim: It's almost as though we're on the other side of the world or something.

0:04:04 Thomas: Yeah. Something Like that. Yeah. I think it's just a conspiracy. I think you guys are actually closer. You just want to be different with your clocks. No, I'm just kidding. But It's always surprising, but thank you for accommodating and coming on such an early hour your time, great hour for me. I feel selfish. I feel it's perfect right in the middle of the afternoon. So you're back for the second time, and Tim, by the way, is from historyforatheist.blogspot.com, is your blog, and I have to say last episode really well received. Not everybody necessarily agreed, but got a lot of comments, a lot positive comments, and a lot to listen. So I'm really, really, really glad to have you back. We're going to cover even more interesting territory. And by the way, I don't know if you saw this, but lots of people were requesting this very episode, you covering your views on Jesus mythicism. So I'm really glad to give the people what they want. And we're going to tackle that today.

0:04:15 Tim: That's it.

0:05:02 Tim: Okay, well, it's a big topic, so apologies in advance. I'm going to be making some fairly broad statements, and there are quite a few areas of this topic that would require hours really to go into in some detail, but we'll see what we can do in a fairly reasonably short period. No,

0:05:18 Thomas: Yeah. Actually, we should also say just for new listeners, maybe who didn't hear the first one, can you 30 second version of your, you know, your background? I don't think you're not technically a historian, right? So we don't want to mislead people.

0:05:33 Tim: That's true. Technically, no. My postgraduate degree is in medieval literature, but you can't study period of literature without studying the background history. But I've been studying history, I suppose, as an interest for all of my life and in some scholarly depth for about the last sort of 35 years. So I think you could call me an amateur historian. You can call me a historian in the broader sense of the word, but I'm not a professional historian.

0:06:05 Thomas: Sure.

0:06:06 Tim: Some people sometimes try, and people who don't like what I say try to dismiss me on those grounds. And I think if I were coming out with radical ideas that were my own theories, then that would be fair enough. But really all I'm doing is telling people what the mainstream scholarship on these questions says. So if they want to disagree with me and they want to disparage my qualifications, that's fine, I've got a phalanx of actual scholars behind me on these topics. Whereas could

0:06:35 Thomas: Yeah, that's fair enough. Yeah. Totally makes sense. And I think that's, that may be a theme of today's show, which is, yeah, which has kind of what to do as a non-historian because, you know, I don't know that that line, if there's a real fine line there, maybe there is depending on who you're talking to, But I can, I can tell you I'm firmly on the other side of the line. I'm firmly on the not a historian side. And so I think it's interesting. I actually saw, not sure if you're familiar with Justin Schieber, but he wrote a little bit, I think maybe just in Facebook form some months back, because there was a bit of a debate brewing just in the podcast world over mythicism and all that.

And he echoed the sentiment of, if you are not an expert, you need to be wary of holding to fringe views in a field. It's something you got to be careful full of. And I took that to heart. It makes sense. Like, and I do think that, I'm not sure, I'm still agnostic on this. I, you know, I don't know for sure one way or the other if Jesus, the person, existed. But I do think it's, you, it may be prudent to be cautious when,

0:06:52 Tim: Be sure

0:07:41 Thomas: You Know, latching on to a radical view in a field that you're not a specialist in. So, right.

0:07:47 Tim: Yeah, We've got to agree with that wholeheartedly, and what I often say to people, and this is not just on this particular fringe idea, the idea that Jesus, there was no historical Jesus, but on a lot, but if you've got on one side a very large consensus of scholars from all sorts of backgrounds who might disagree on other things but agree on something fundamental, and on the other hand you've got a very small number of largely amateurs, or at least very, very fringe figures on the edges of scholarship who just happen to have a bit of an ideological bias and who disagree with that consensus, your alarm bells should begin to ring. Now, that doesn't mean that that the consensus is always right, and consensus does actually count for something when it comes to history, and I might get back to that point, but it doesn't mean it's always right, but but what it does mean is that usually, often, but I even go so far as to say almost always, when you've got that situation, it's usually the the small number of people with the ideological bias that tend to to be wrong.

0:08:42 Thomas: Right.

0:08:55 Tim: And a classic

0:08:55 Thomas: Well, let me push you on that, actually, because I remember my only dealings with Jesus mythicism, besides reading a few articles here and there, is I did see talks by Richard Carrier and David Fitzgerald. And one thing that they talked about, I apologize if this is not exactly how you wanted to launch into this, but they did say that the problem is that everybody who studies this kind of thing has an ideological bent the other way. Like, they're all, you know, in seminaries or they're people who are already Christians and they're historians, and that's why there's the overwhelming consensus. What would you say to a claim like that?

0:08:56 Tim: Sure Yep. Yeah.

0:09:34 Tim: And and The fringe theorists always say that, right? The fringe, so you look at Holocaust deniers, they say exactly the same thing. You know, they say that there's this great big conspiracy that's keeping everyone in believing that there was a Holocaust when actually we're the brave, brave few who just happen to be anti-Semites and neo-Nazis who are showing the light of truth on what actually happened. And no, I'm not saying that Richard Carrier and Doe Fitzgerald are Nazis, or that they're like Nazis. I'm just saying they're using the same tactic.

0:10:04 Thomas: Yeah, I was going to say, would you put it to that level or are you just using that as an example?

0:10:06 Tim: Yeah. No, I just saying it's a tactic that fringe theorists always use to explain why they're in the vast minority. But that claim by Carrier and Fitzgerald is wrong. Even if we completely dismiss all of the Christians, and obviously, if they're Christians, they're going to believe that there was a historical Jesus. So even if we put them completely to one side, there's still an enormous number of scholars working in the fields of both of New Testament studies, but also in the historical fields and other related areas, Jewish, early Jewish studies, scholars, for example, who also accept that, overwhelmingly accept that there is a historical God. Jesus, so we've got Jewish scholars, we've got non-Christian scholars, we got, we've got atheist scholars, we're going to agnostic scholars, we go people like, but and we've got people like Geza Vermes, and we got people like, you know, the late Morris Casey, we got people like Joseph Hoffman, we got people like Paula Fredriksen, just be a bit, this, this huge numbers of them.

0:10:12 Thomas: Okay, right.

0:11:07 Thomas: Name

0:11:07 Tim: So so let's put it together, let's, let's forget about the Christians, even if we, even if we completely ignore the Christians, the overwhelming consensus of non-Christian and Christian scholars, is that there was a historical Jesus. So that argument just doesn't work.

0:11:07 Thomas: Dropping, yeah.

0:11:21 Thomas: And one thing we should mention is you, just in case people, again, didn't hear the first episode, you are an atheist. You're not, yeah, you're not here as a Christian trying to tell us about Jesus, yeah?

0:11:26 Tim: And that's – sorry, yes. Despite the rumors you may read on the internet, Tim O'Neill is not actually a paid Vatican operative or a closet Christian. No, I'm an atheist. I've been an atheist my entire adult life. And this is the thing, I don't have a dog in the fight as far as Jesus existing. If someone were to present me with a plausible argument that indicated to me that it's more likely that historical Jesus didn't exist, I'd have no problem with that at all, I don't care, you know, Jesus

0:11:48 Thomas: Right. Yeah, that's a good point. Now that I think about it, it's like, I mean, it is interesting. Thing. I'm a fan of, if it turned out that he, you know, there's good evidence that he didn't exist or just not at all enough evidence, I would want to know. But when it comes to somebody like Muhammad, I don't, I've don't remember hearing about a bunch of theories of him not actually existing or whatever. And that does nothing to, you increase the plausibility of the religion. You know, it's, it, it fine that someone exists. It's just, there is a bunch of bullshit stories about them and it's not like you have to accept those. So interesting. All All right. All that being said, what do you say? Maybe we, we launch into it.

0:12:14 Tim: Exactly, exactly that's right well let's maybe, I'll just use the expression historical Jesus, so maybe we could clarify which Jesus we're are talking about. Because sometimes when I start talking about this or when I'm discussing this online with people, people get very confused, particularly people who come from fundamentalist Christian backgrounds for whom the word Jesus means Jesus Christ. So the theological figure that is the central figure of Christianity, the second person of the Trinity who apparently allegedly was incarnated in human form, died on the crossroads from the dead and all that stuff, stuff, right? So we are not talking about the existence of Jesus Christ, nor are we talking about existence of the Jesus of the Gospels, from whom that theological figure was extracted, right.

So we've got these various Jesuses in the four Gospels, he's a bit different in each one. And we're not talking the Jesuses of the Gospel, so the person who allegedly walked on water and raised people from the dead and fed 5,000 people and all that stuff, We're not talking about him either. We're talking about a Jewish preacher from the early 1st century AD who his followers seemed to think was the Jewish Messiah, not God, but the Jewish messiah, and who seemed to thing that in some sense had risen from the dead after he was unexpectedly crucified. That's who we're talking about. So he almost certainly was called Yeshua ben Yosef. He was almost certainly called Yeshua. Yeshua, and

0:12:43 Thomas: Hmm. Oh, absolutely. Hmm.

0:14:05 Tim: Jesus is simply the anglicized version of the Latinized version of the Greek version of that name.

0:14:12 Tim: So sometimes just to differentiate between Jesus Christ and the Jesus of the Gospels, who are very closely connected, and the historical Jesus, I sometimes refer to him as Yeshua, but it's probably easier just to refer to him as the historical Jesus. Throughout this conversation, I'll probably just say Jesus, but I just want to clarify up front that we're talking about a Jewish preacher. Because a lot of people say, well, look at this story in the gospel that contradicts this story, therefore Jesus didn't exist. And that doesn't follow at all. There can still be a historical Yeshua and later stories about him probably would contradict each other. The fact that there are contradictions in the Bible, the fact that, that there were bits in the bible that are obviously miraculous and therefore didn't happen. And the fact that there are historical anomalies in the Bible that indicate that – in the Gospels that indicate that those stories are probably bullshit doesn't mean that there wasn't a human person as the point of origin. So we're really talking about Yeshua, the historical Jesus, a Jewish preacher who existed in the early 1st century AD.

0:14:29 Thomas: Right.

0:15:16 Thomas: Let me

0:15:17 Tim: That's a talk.

0:15:17 Thomas: Ask you a clarifying thing. Sorry to cut in. I when you say what specific Jesus you're talking about, you are talking about it. I mean, they all are pointing to one guy, right? Like, it's not as though there could be, or let me ask you, could there be multiple people that some of these stories that we know are fictitious because they're fantastical and involve miracles and all that, could they be referring to multiple different people? Or is it just that we're talking about the person, the man, Jesus, that all these stories likely refer back to rather than a particular version of him as described in one of the Gospels?

0:15:19 Tim: Sure. That's right.

0:15:56 Tim: Okay.

0:15:56 Thomas: Did that make sense?

0:15:57 Tim: Yeah, it did. Actually, it's a good point because that argument gets made a lot. A lot of people say, well, maybe there was someone called Jesus. There might have been a lot of people called Jesus, it was a common name. It doesn't mean that there was one person at the point of origin. And people often say, I think Jesus was an amalgam of a number of people and they all kind of came together into this figure. Whenever I come across that argument, I always say, okay, you believe that based on what? And I've yet to get a coherent answer. And the reason I ask that is that it's a valid possibility, but the way we work in history is you look at the possibilities and then you line up which ones explain the most evidence in the most parsimonious way.

0:16:41 Thomas: Right.

0:16:41 Tim: And I've yet to come across anyone to actually make a coherent case for multiple Jesuses, an amalgam of various people who all came together. Now, it could have happened, but there's nothing in the evidence that I can see and certainly no scholar that I know of argues for that. So it may have happened, but it's not actually a terribly – it's a plausible possible idea, but It's not a terribly coherent idea because it doesn't seem to be supported by the evidence.

0:16:59 Thomas: Okay.

0:17:08 Thomas: So just to, let me put it this way, just to make sure we're at a good starting point. The secular history version, like if we were in a completely secular setting, some sort of class, whatever it would be, that version of history, the consensus is that there was a historical person, And that one person is who all these stories are likely referring to, even if they're embellished or made up partially or whatever. And that would be the basic historical consensus. Is that right?

0:17:43 Tim: Yeah, absolutely. The consensus position is that there was a guy, his name was probably Yeshua. He almost certainly came from Nazareth, and there's some reasons why we would think that. And despite what some people have tried to claim, yes, Nazareth did exist in this period. There isn't an archaeologist on the planet that doesn't think that.

0:17:44 Thomas: Okay.

0:18:03 Thomas: Uh-oh, I haven't even heard that claim.

0:18:04 Tim: Oh, yeah, yeah. There's a whole branch of Jesus mythicists who say that Nazareth didn't exist. There's this guy called René Salm who was a piano teacher. So, of course, he knows all about archaeology. He has written a whole book on the subject. Don't get me started. But, Yeah. It's generally accepted that there was a guy who was probably from Nazareth.

He was almost certainly an early 1st century Jewish apocalyptic preacher, he was preaching a message that was well known at the time, that God was going to intervene in history and sweep away the Romans and sweep aside all the wicked people and make everything nice for the poor, that he was teaching to, he was a peasant himself, and this message got him crucified, and so he was wrong about the whole apocalypse thing, but then his followers reinterpreted that message, as usually happens with these kind of apocalyptic cults, to say, oh, yeah, yeah, that was meant to happen and he's gone off to heaven and he is coming back.

In fact, I've seen visions of him. He's risen from the dead and he has gone off to heaven and he comes back very soon. Christianity arose out of that.

0:18:18 Thomas: Uh oh. Right,

0:19:08 Tim: There you are. There it is in like two minutes.

0:19:08 Thomas: Right. Sure, sure. Sure. So I let's delve into it. I would ask, I suppose as a total lay person, I would ask, what is the historical evidence for the man Yeshua? And what does it look like relative to the evidence from other people of that time? You know, like, is it more or less? Is it corroborated? That kind of thing.

0:19:27 Tim: Sure. Yeah. Well, short answer to that is that we have very little but we have about as much as we would expect In fact, we have slightly more than we have for other analogous figures. But before I elaborate on that, can we just go back to that word you just used? You just used the word evidence. And this is a word that gets misused quite often in discussions about and debates about whether or not a historical Jesus existed. I have people who say to me, there is no evidence that there was a historical Jesus. And this a little bit like creationists saying evolution is just a theory. Theory, right? So the word evidence gets misused. When people say there's no evidence, what they mean is there's not proof. But historians don't use the word, evidence, in that way. Evidence is not proof, evidence are simply relevant fragments of, they might be written sources, they might pieces of archaeological data, but relevant fragments, of information that that might indicate what possibly happened.

0:19:49 Thomas: Right.

0:20:36 Tim: So historians don't deal in proof. Historians deal in making an argument to the best explanations. They look at the evidence the way a detective, for example, at a crime scene, looks at the events left behind. The past leaves behind a trail, if we're lucky, a trail of evidence. And if we wanna work out what happened in the past, we have to piece together the evidence and try and come up with a story that explains that evidence in the most plausible way. So right, so when you say what evidence is there for, uh, for Jesus, well, there is evidence. There are references to a historical guy. Now some of them are obviously from very, very biased sources. The gospels obviously are incredibly biased sources, and there's a whole range of problems with using the gospals, taking the gospers at face value, which no historian does. But but taking the gospels at face failure, when it says, you know, he went from this town to this town and then he said this.

0:21:30 Tim: Well, how the hell do we know that? These Gospels are written decades later. You know, the earliest Gospel was written probably after the 70 AD. So that's years, 40 years after Jesus is supposed to have been around. So, and was someone taping him when he was talking? You know when you read any ancient source and it says, and then the general got up and made this speech, ancient historians, scholars of ancient history know that it's the historian who's writing that No one was standing next to the General Julius Agricola at a battle in Scotland, taking down notes on a wax tablet saying, sorry, could you speak a little bit more slowly, please? I didn't quite catch that last word.

0:22:10 Thomas: Yeah, I made that joke when I was it's probably already been made, but when I was reading through the Bible and is giving the Ten Commandments, I'm sure it must have been like, oh, slow down. I'm chiseling these as fast as I can.

0:22:25 Tim: So of course the Gospels can't be taken at face value. And that realization for a lot of people who – particularly people who have come from fundamentalist backgrounds, people who come from biblical literalist backgrounds – the realization that, of course, that the Gospels can't be sort of read like documentary journalism suddenly makes them think, oh, maybe there's nothing in there that is historical. And that's why mythicism actually seems to appeal a lot to those sorts of people. But even though the Gospels can't be taken at face value, we can use them, so a historian can use them, with great care. But then again, a historian uses any ancient source with great care. So you think about, when reading a Gospel source or any ancient source, you think, about who wrote it?

0:22:25 Thomas: Oh,

0:23:11 Tim: Who do we think wrote it, because they're usually anonymous sources? When was it written? What would their sources of information be? Now we can't get definitive answers to most of those questions, but we can make some well-educated guesses about them. What the gospel does tell you is what the person who wrote that gospel believed about Jesus. And the interesting thing about the gospels is because we've got one written about 70 AD, two written sometime between 80 and 90, around maybe 80, 90s AD, and another one written maybe anything up to 120 AD, is we have four snapshots in time over several decades of what people believed about Jesus. We can see those beliefs evolving and we can also see – we can make some comparisons and see what maybe those beliefs evolved out of.

0:23:58 Tim: So what evidence do we have for Jesus? There's actually stuff in the Gospels, nuggets of stuff that do indicate that there was a historical Jesus. And those nuggets are quite often bits in the gospels that the gospel writers are having real trouble with. Now, if you think about it, if they invented a Jesus, I don't think too many Jesus mythicists actually say they invented him wholesale, but if they were to say, just make it all up, then what they would do, if They Wanted to Invent a Jesus who was meant to be the Messiah, he would fit the whole Messiah expectation for us. He would fit it perfectly. But what you find in the Gospels is they're having a lot of trouble shoehorning Jesus into the whole messiah stuff.

0:24:32 Thomas: That's a great point. Yeah. Right. Yeah, they got to get them over to the other town where they, you know, where they're having a census. They got to, yeah.

0:24:44 Tim: So, Exactly, so he's born in Nazareth, he's from Nazareth, but the Messiah is meant to be born in Bethlehem, so they make up these elaborate stories, two stories, both contradictory, as we, as we discussed last time, That That have him, what's the object of the story, the object of the stories, to have him born in bethel him why? Because it was clearly a problem that he was from Nazaroth.

0:24:56 Thomas: Right, right. Yeah?

0:25:05 Tim: He was from the wrong town, so that's why I say almost certainly from Nazareth, that element sticks out like a sore thumb. And it sticks out because it's probably historical. You can say the same thing about the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist. If you compare that story, because it is one of the few stories that is in all four Gospels, which is interesting.

0:25:24 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:25:24 Tim: But if you compare the way each of the Gospel writers, I could go into some detail on this, but if you compared the way the Gospel writer deal with that, they are dealing with a problem because the problem is baptism implied that the person being baptized was inferior to The person doing baptizing, Right, now if Jesus was the Messiah, why the hell is he being baptized by this guy? He's meant to be his subordinate. So each of the Gospels comes up with a different way to deal with that, and and and why are they dealing with it?

They're probably dealing with, I would argue, and many other scholars argue, they're dealing with because it happened, and because it was a key, not just an element in the story of Jesus, it was an important element because it was obviously something significant to Jesus. It seems to have been the turning point. It seems to have been where he suddenly decided he had some kind of mission. And then the same thing happens with the crucifixion. The Messiah wasn't meant to be killed.

He sure as hell wasn't meant to be crucified, because for the Greeks, for the Gentiles, for the non-Jews, crucifixion was the death of a slave or a rebel, and it was the most despised form of death, the most humiliating form of death you could possibly have.

0:25:39 Thomas: Right, right, right. Yeah.

0:26:33 Tim: And for Jews, it said in Deuteronomy, anyone hung up on the tree is accursed before God. So it was actually someone who was crucified was rejected by God. They had a massive theological and cultural problem to try and say this guy, crucified man, was actually this amazing figure, this savior figure. And they go to enormous lengths to try and explain that. After 2,000 years of indoctrination into Christianity, you know, culturally, we look at crucifixion and we just think, oh, yeah, Jesus is crucified. Yeah, fair enough. We don't see it from the point of view of the people who they were writing the Gospels for.

0:26:56 Thomas: Yeah, I've seen the pictures. He was crucified. But let me ask you this, and maybe it's something I should know, actually, from reading the Bible, but what was the Jewish, I hope this is something you can answer, but what Was the Jewish prophecy of what the, coming, the Savior or whatever, whatever, that Jesus is alleged to be, believed to be by Christians, but not by Jews? What was he supposed to have done where dying was, you know, obviously not the plan? What, what was he supposed to do?

0:27:37 Tim: Yeah, yeah. It wasn't on the agenda. He was meant to restore the ancient kingdom of Israel. First of all, there was no single idea of what the Messiah was supposed to do. And secondly, we have to be very careful in assuming that everyone in Second Temple Judaism, so everyone in the Judaism of the early first century, expected a Messiah at all. It doesn't seem to have been as widespread as we're often led to believe. So the idea that all Jews in that period were expecting a Messiah, or an idea that Jews in the period had one idea about what that Messiah was going to be, both those ideas seem to be wrong.

0:27:44 Thomas: Yeah. Okay.

0:28:19 Thomas: Okay, fair

0:28:20 Tim: So the idea that all Jews were expecting a kingly Messiah who was going to be a descendant of David, who was gonna rise up and lead an army and destroy the Romans, and Jesus wasn't that because he was a man of peace and so on, that's kind of the Sunday school version of what was going on. It's actually much more complicated than that. They were expecting, there were branches of Judaism that were expecting three Messiahs, a prophet Messiah, a priestly Messiah, and then the kingly messiah. There were some that were expecting a prophet and priest. There were Some that were Expecting a King and Priest. Jesus is sometimes depicted as both. He's often referred to, particularly by Paul, he's often Referred to as being a priestly figure. And the whole prophet Messiah bit, well, that gets shuffled off to John the Baptist.

0:28:20 Thomas: Enough.

0:29:08 Tim: So they kind of, again, they're shoehorning, I would argue, they're shoehorning historical people into these expectations interpretations and then sometimes not always fitting. But just to get back to your original question, your original question was how much evidence would we expect? Okay, now this is an argument that is quite often used and a lot of people consider it to be a bit of a slam dunk. They say there's no contemporary reference to Jesus at all, which is absolutely true. There should be contemporary references to Jesus, therefore Jesus didn't exist. And I often come across that argument, uh, in, by, by atheists, in, in general discussions about Jesus, and, you know, letters to the editor and so on, just saying no contemporary references to Jesus, therefore Jesus didn't exist. It sounds like a good argument, it's a terrible argument.

0:29:56 Tim: No one who's actually studied ancient history would regard that as anything other than a bit of a joke, and the reason for that is that the keys of that argument, that's an argument from from silence, right? And you can make a legitimate argument from silence in history. But the key to an argument from silence is the linchpin of it, is that middle bit. There should be. So simply noting a silence isn't enough. And the reason simply noting a silence is enough is that, particularly pre-modern history, ancient medieval history, our sources are incredibly sparse. They're very patchy. They're highly fragmentary. And quite often there are whole stretches of sometimes anything up to a century where we don't have any at all. So to sort of say, here's a silence, therefore this didn't happen, that doesn't really work. What you have to do is you have prove or have to show that there should be a reference to the person or event that you're making the argument about. And here's where that argument falls apart.

0:30:07 Thomas: Yeah.

0:30:53 Tim: Because people say, well, we've got all these references to other ancient figures. Look at Julius Caesar. We've got letters about him. We've go books written by him. We've got inscriptions dedicated to him. We even got a statue that was found recently that was carved in his lifetime. Julius Caesar definitely existed, right? But we don't have that for Jesus. Now, that's a stupid argument as well because you're comparing apples to watermelons. Julius Caesar was ruler of the entire world.

0:31:10 Thomas: Yeah, right.

0:31:22 Tim: He's one of the most famous people in the ancient world. So, of course, we've got more bloody evidence of Julius Caesar.

0:31:25 Thomas: I mean, one could say there's... there's,

0:31:27 Tim: That's stupid.

0:31:27 Thomas: Yeah, one could say there's, what, hundreds of thousands of people who didn't exist? Like, virtually no one existed by that argument, I guess.

0:31:33 Tim: Exactly. So that's the problem. So what you do is if you want to assess whether the argument from silence on this particular case makes sense, you've got to compare apples to apples. So what we do is we look at other early first century Jewish figures similar to Jesus. We look at Other Early First Century Jewish Preachers, Prophets, Messianic Claimants, and there's about a dozen or so of them. So there are people like Theudas and Throngas. There are people Like Hillel and Gamaliel. We've got people like John the Baptist, the Samaritan prophet, the Egyptian prophet. These are all people that were people like Jesus. They were preachers, prophets. They claimed to be the Messiah. Other people claimed to me the Messiah, they were talking about similar things to Jesus, about the coming of a kingdom of God and so on, we think.

0:32:25 Tim: And if we look at the evidence for those people, we find that none of it is contemporary, right? None of it. So all of it is decades after. In fact, most of it is in Josephus. There's most of those people are known in from, from one reference in one paragraph in Jesephus, and that's it. And

0:32:43 Thomas: Now, Josephus is a name that comes up a lot in this. Can you briefly explain who Josephus is?

0:32:48 Tim: Okay, uh, Flavius Josephus, his name was actually uh Yosef um ben Matityahu, uh, and he was a, he was a Jewish aristocrat, uh, he was born probably not long after Jesus died. He He was born sometime in the early 30s AD and he was of a priestly family, born into an aristocratic priestly family in Jerusalem and was a politician who got caught up in the Jewish revolt against the Romans, which kicked off in 66 AD, and was the military governor of Galilee for a very brief period until the Romans decided they were going to crush the revolt, which they did in their usual very effective manner by killing lots of people.

0:33:35 Thomas: Yeah.

0:33:35 Tim: And he saw which way the wind was blowing and actually switched sides, went over to the Roman side and got very lucky. He proclaimed that the Roman general who was leading the fight back against the Jews, Vespasian, he proclaimed that he was going to rise to the highest possible office. And not long after that, the Emperor Nero was overthrown and Vespasian kind of won the tussle that happened in 69 AD and became the Emperor Vespasian. So that was good for Josephus. It meant Josephus had to get the hell out of Palestine because he was now a turncoat and a traitor and he ended up dying in Rome working as a historian with a number of other expatriate Jewish exiles at the court of Vespasian and then at the court of his son Titus.

0:34:28 Thomas: Huh.

0:34:29 Tim: Now he pops up all the time in this conversation because he's our major source for anything that was happening in this period. And of course there are two very interesting passages in which he mentions guess who. So that's why he comes up in this. We might get back to that. That um, but, but just on, the back to the point about what evidence would we expect, um, so so we wouldn't expect contemporaneous references to Jesus because we don't have them for any other person of of similar type in the same period. We also don't have them for most people in the ancient world, and you just made that point. You know, if we, if we applied that, that uh, standard generally, then about 90 of the ancient world would be mythical, which doesn't make any sense. So I think when people use that argument, they don't understand exactly how patchy and how fragmentary our sources are. And the example I like to use to really bring that home to them is, if we applied that standard across the board, then Hannibal wouldn't exist.

0:34:45 Thomas: Yeah. Right. Sure.

0:35:35 Tim: Now, I think everyone's heard of Hannibal, even if they only know about Hannibal and elephants. But Hannibal was a Carthaginian general in the second century BC, brought the Republic of Rome just before the empire rose to its knees in a series – in a long war and rampaged through Italy, defeated Romans left, right and center throughout Italy, almost completely destroyed Rome and was one of the most famous generals, one ofthe most famous people in the ancient world. Guess how many contemporary references we have to Hannibal?

0:36:12 Thomas: Just Silence of the Lambs.

0:36:14 Tim: Zero.

0:36:15 Thomas: Oh, okay.

0:36:17 Tim: Different Hannibal.

0:36:18 Thomas: Interesting. So, why is that, though? I mean, I was going to actually ask you, and I think it ties into this, and I apologize if it's a sort of a diversion from what we're talking about, but why do you suppose that the Gospels were so far after Jesus? Like, why didn't they just, I mean I'm sure there's some good historical reason, but why didn'T somebody just 40 years earlier think, maybe I should write something down, or 30 years, maybe let 10 years go by, maybe let 12 years go, but 40 to 70 to 120 years or whatever whatever the max might be. Why, why do you think that is?

0:36:51 Tim: Okay, two reasons. First of all, they may have. But when you think about it, Christianity at that – well, what we call Christianity, it was sort of the Jesus sect. It was a Jewish sect. It was very, very small. All. It was a few people in Jerusalem, a few people in Antioch, and a few other places, and starting to spread out in the 40s, spread out into the Jewish diaspora in the eastern Mediterranean. It was very few people, and basically it all happened by word of mouth, which is the reason the stories in the Gospels have clearly grown in the telling in that 40-year period. So they're already They're already starting to develop – Bart Ehrman's most recent book on Jesus before the Gospels actually gets into this in some detail. But they're already started to grow in the telling. But there really wasn't a lot of need to write this stuff down because everyone kind of knew the story.

It's only as that first generation of people who had actually known Jesus started to die, which would have started to happen around about the time the Gspels actually start to be – we think start to being written. That it became important to really start to write these stories down.

0:36:56 Thomas: Okay. Right.

0:38:06 Tim: There's also some evidence that there was an earlier stratum of written material that existed before.

0:38:14 Thomas: The gospel's referenced and used possibly. Is that what you mean?

0:38:17 Tim: But that's right. If you read the Gospel of Luke, the very first chapter of the Gospel says many people have written down accounts of the life of Jesus. So many people, he definitely, that person that wrote the Gospel of Luke. It wasn't Luke. But that person definitely used the Gospel of Mark as one of his sources, but he used other sources as well. And we can see that because there's overlap between stuff in the Gospel Luke and the stuff in the Gospel Matthew. That's called the Q material. Now whether that was one source or a whole lot of sources or some oral tradition and written sources, we don't know.

But there's definitely overlap. So that's separate to the Gospel of Mark there's also stuff in the Gospel of Mark which seems to it doesn't make a lot of sense in Greek but seems to derive from a written source in Aramaic and it's quite complicated how we know that but it seems to be that Mark was using an earlier source so the writer of Mark was using an earlier source and he was translating it from Aramaic into Greek and was making a few mistakes so there's evidence of that in the text of Mark so yeah Yeah, they didn't. They seem to have written some of it down. But on the whole, the main reason is that the stories were being told orally. The

0:38:18 Thomas: Okay, hmm, hmm. Yeah.

0:39:33 Tim: Other reason isthat the earliest Jesus sect seemed to think that the end of the world was coming very, very soon.

0:39:38 Thomas: Oh, yeah. Like, why, I don't want to go to the trouble of writing all this down. It's gonna be, yeah, it's

0:39:41 Tim: So, yeah, what's the point? What's the poin? I mean, they seriously...

0:39:43 Thomas: A good point, because Jesus Jesus thought that, right?

0:39:45 Tim: Yeah, that's right. And Paul thought it as well. Paul's always going on about, you know, come, come Lord Jesus. He's thinking it's happening any day now. The guy who wrote Mark, if you look at the bit where Jesus does does what they call the little apocalypse and he's sitting outside the temple in Jerusalem just just before he gets crucified and he says look this stuff is going to happen very soon and this is effectively the the writer of the Gospel of Mark saying to his audience, any day now guys, it's going to happen any day now, you know, this generation will not pass away before the kingdom comes. So if you think the end of the world is going happen, I mean end of world is is our way of putting it, but if you, the apocalypse is going to happen and God will reassert himself in history, and the world will be renewed and the unrighteous will be swept away and sent to hell. If you think that's going to happen very soon, what's the point of writing these stories down?

0:39:46 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:40:35 Thomas: You know,

0:40:35 Tim: Just tell them.

0:40:35 Thomas: I never thought of that. That makes a ton of sense, actually. Plus, I wonder also, it's not as though, correct me if I'm wrong, it is not as though Christianity was born the instant Jesus was crucified. So maybe it took a little while for these things to gain significance. Maybe a handful of people here or there might have preached or talked or written about this sort of new Christology, but maybe it it took a long time for it to be mainstream enough to where people cared to preserve those writings or to leave writings. Is that something like what could have happened as well?

0:40:38 Tim: Yeah.

0:41:07 Tim: Yeah, I think that, I that's fair to say. We're drifting from the topic a little bit though.

0:41:09 Thomas: Sure, sure. Sorry. That was very interesting though. So I appreciate you answering that. But I have to ask you, so that explanation makes sense. That explanation as to why there aren't any contemporary sources to me makes sense now. Why in the case of Hannibal Lecter? No. In the case of Hannibal. Why did it happen in that case? I'm curious.

0:41:14 Tim: No problem.

0:41:29 Tim: Ah, well, there actually were, we, this is where it's different. We actually, we actually know that there were contemporary references to him, and in fact we know the names of some of the historians who wrote about him during his lifetime. At least one of them was actually a soldier or a general in his army. So the difference there is because he's much more famous, we actually know that there were contemporary references. When I say we have no contemporary references, none of them survive. So we only know about those sources from later writers, so from Polybius who used them as his sources.

But we don't actually have any of those. We've got a fragment of one, which is about a paragraph, and it doesn't mention Hannibal himself, but it seems to be from a work that was about his campaigns. That's all we've got. So when I say we don't have any contemporary references to Hannibal, I'm not saying that there never were any. I'm saying that because our historical record is so patchy and so many sources are lost about everyone, that sources actually surviving is the difficult bit. So for all we know, there were like dozens of people writing about Jesus. Probably not, actually, but there may have been. It's

0:41:57 Thomas: Survived, okay.

0:42:24 Thomas: Okay. Yeah,

0:42:45 Tim: Just none of them survived.

0:42:45 Thomas: For like the local newspaper, but just nobody. It wasn't important.

0:42:48 Tim: Someone wrote a letter saying, this guy just got crucified. What an idiot. I mean, we don't know. We don't know. That thing could have happened. So this is why this argument from silence, there are no references to Jesus in contemporary sources, therefore he didn't exist. This is why it's so stupid. And even people like Richard Carrier say just don't use that argument. It's a terrible argument.

0:42:50 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah yeah.

0:43:35 Thomas: So there you have it for part one with Tim O'Neill. Part two, even more jam-packed, actually it's even a little bit longer. And we get even further deep into it. Tim has an incredible ability, in my opinion, to remember all this stuff, to rattle it off, to make these arguments coherently. I'm really glad I had him on. I think you'll really enjoy part 2. Now, new patrons at patreon.com/atheists, you'll get episode 2, you get part 2 of this series early, and as well, Tim also did a bit of bonus content. I think it was maybe 20, might have even been 30 minutes of bonus questions that I launched at him, and that was really fun too. So, plenty of bonus contents over on patreon.com/atheist, including this early part two, but if not, that's okay, I understand not everyone can be a supporter in that way, totally cool. Part two will be out Thursday and look forward to it all. Alright, thank you so much for listening, and I'll see you then.