AS276: Jesus Mythicism, with Tim O'Neill, Part 2

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 276 and I am your host Thomas Smith. All right, here we are for part two with Tim O'Neill. I would like to point out that Tim has already been really great answering questions, getting in a little bit of back and forth with some listeners on the website atheisticallyspeaking.com. Check out the post there, and you may be able to get a question answered by Tim. I know a lot of you are coming from the mythicist perspective, so this is a chance to kind of go back and forth. Hit him with your best shot, maybe he'll answer. But of course, I'd recommend you hear part two first, and we're going to get to that. Here we go.

0:01:21 Thomas: Let me read from this article I found that I wanted to try to be able to put you somewhat to the test on these claims. So this has five reasons. We may not go through all of them, but five reasons to suspect Jesus never existed.

One of these paragraphs, and I can link this article in the show notes, one of them has a quote from Bart Ehrman himself, and I would like you to, if you don't mind, react to what you think this quote means and why it doesn't support the point in your view. It says, "What sorts of things do pagan authors from the time of Jesus have to say about him? Nothing.

As odd as it may seem, there is no mention of Jesus at all by any of his pagan contemporaries. No birth records, trial transcripts, no death certificates. There are no expressions of interest, no heated slanders, no passing references, nothing. In fact, if we broaden our field of concern to the years after his death, even if we include the entire first century of the common era, there's not so much as a solitary reference to Jesus in any non-Christian, non-Jewish source of any kind. I should stress that we do have a large number of documents from the time, the writings of poets, philosophers, historians, scientists, and government, government officials, for example, not to mention in the large collection of surviving inscriptions on stone and private letters and legal documents on papyrus. In none of this vast array of surviving writings is Jesus' name ever so much as mentioned." Bart Ehrman is not a mythicist, so there's

0:02:44 Tim: Yes.

0:02:45 Thomas: Got to be something going on here. How would you respond to that?

0:02:46 Tim: Yes, there is something going on here. It's called quote mining, um, and it's, it's a classic tactic used by fringe theorists. Creationists love doing it, you know, creationists loves sort of quoting people like Stephen J Gould, uh, out of context and saying, look, here is Stephen J Gould saying that, that the fossil record is, is, uh, is, is against evolution, uh, this is a bit like that. Yeah, of course Bart Ehrman isn't saying that Jesus didn't exist. Bart Ehrman wrote a book saying exactly the opposite and arguing against the idea that he didn't exist. This is a quote taken out of context from a quite excellent book by Bart Eherman called Jesus, Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium, which came out in 2001. And it's a book that I can't recommend more highly.

0:03:34 Tim: I think if anyone is actually interested in who the historical Jesus almost certainly was and how we can know and how he then evolved into the Jesus Christ of Christianity, then I think that book would probably be the best place to start. And it's a book that I recommend very, very highly to anyone if they say, where do I begin? Start with that one. It's quite a short book and he writes extremely well and it's very, Very accessible. But if you look at that in context, that quote is where he's sort of saying, well, lots of people would assume that there's lots of evidence for Jesus, but actually there isn't, right? So really what he's doing is he's – in context there, he's working against the common conception of Jesus as being this definite historical figure.

0:04:23 Tim: Why would you even sort of question anything about him? It's in the gospel, so we can know all about Jesus. And in context, he's saying, well, actually, there are reasons why we shouldn't read the Gospels at face value. We've just been talking about those. And then he says, actually there's very little we can know about Jesus. It's very difficult to get a handle on who he was. And he's one of the reasons. We don't have any references to him in the first century by pagan authors at all. But as he goes on to say in his book on whether or not Jesus existed, and his answer to that question is yes, he points out, yeah, sure, there aren't any references to Jesus in these writings of poets, philosophers, historians, scientists, and government officials, but we wouldn't expect there to be.

0:05:12 Tim: Because if you look at, again, look at how often those writings refer to other early first century Jewish preachers, prophets, prophets and messianic claimants, the answer is they don't refer to any of them either. So this is why the argument, well, he should have been mentioned by these other writers, that falls apart as well. There's a thing called the Remsburg list. A guy called John Remsberg put it together in the early 20th century where he actually lists pretty much every writer from the first century AD and says none of these people mention Jesus, therefore Jesus didn't exist. Well, it's kind of stupid. I mean, some of those writers are writing about pig farming. Why the hell would they mention Jesus? It's a silly argument. So, yeah, it

0:05:56 Thomas: Well, that brings to mind, how far back does this mythicism thing thing go? I mean, does it go back as far as essentially Christianity? Or when did it start gaining more popularity? Because that's interesting. Early 20th century, you said?

0:06:10 Tim: Doesn't go back very far at all. And that's Actually quite a key point. First, people that had a kind of a glimmer of a possibility that perhaps there was no Jesus at all, probably in about the 18th century, and that was when people were starting to apply the kind of critical analysis that scholars have been implying for a few hundred years before that to ancient Roman and Greek writers. They thought, hey, let's try this on the Bible. And so at that point, people were beginning to come up with all sorts of radical reinterpretations of the Bible and obviously the idea that there was no Jesus at all was one idea that popped up. It didn't really gain any traction though until the 19th century, where there were some German New Testament scholars that kind of pushed it.

0:06:11 Thomas: Oh, okay.

0:07:00 Tim: Late 19th century, early 20th century it was really given a reasonably good look at by scholars at that point and it was rejected. And then it kind of died. I mean there's always been someone popping up at some point with a theory about Jesus not existing. Probably the lowest point was about the 1960s. There didn't seem to be a whole lot of people in the West who made that argument, though in the Soviet Union it was still a very popular idea. And it didn't revive in its current form until the 1990s, and it really does seem to me an internet phenomenon. I remember in the 1980s when I first started reading about the historical Jesus studies, was a footnote.

0:07:45 Tim: It was like, oh yeah, once upon a time people kind of toyed with this idea, but it's pretty much crap. Whereas suddenly in the 90s, I started seeing it popping up on news groups, on Newsnet, usually on the same sorts of news groups that talked about UFOs and Bigfoot. Then it started popping up in the news. It started popping on atheist discussion boards, and then it really started to take off with, I suppose, the new atheist movement. It's really gained legs, but only gained legs amongst non-scholars. I mean you can count the number of scholars who actually accept the Jesus myth thesis on the fingers of one hand, and that's if you've been really generous about the meaning of the word "scholar."

0:08:28 Thomas: Well, you don't mince words. Would you say that while, of course, it's clear that your position is that Jesus likely existed, or at least it's reasonable to believe Jesus existed. Would you say, though, that Christians overstate the case for Jesus?

0:08:44 Tim: Oh hell yes. And really they don't sort of help people like me very much because they say, oh, there are - I haven't got it to hand, but they say there's a list of, I think it's about like 16 ancient writers that refer to Jesus. And they rattle them off. Often, you know, there's Luke and there's Pliny and there is Thallus and there are all these others, and most of those writers don't talk about Jesus as a historical person, they talk about Jesus as the figure of Christianity. Well, that doesn't help you.

0:09:15 Tim: The only ancient historians who actually refer to Jesus as historical person are Josephus, Tacitus and maybe Pliny the Younger, that one is a bit of a stretch. They're the only ones. Everyone else is just talking about Christianity and saying they worship this guy, Christ, or they worshiped this God, Christ. But Pliny does say they worship him as though he were a God, which indicates that, as far as he was concerned, that the God they're worshiping is a man. And Tacitus says quite clearly, oh, there was a guy, you know, the Christians, they were founded by this guy Christus, which is a Latinized version of Christos, which means Messiah. And he was executed, he gives us the when, where, how and who.

0:08:45 Thomas: Okay. Yeah. Yeah,

0:10:03 Tim: He was executed in Judea by Pontius Pilate during the reign of Tiberius and he's quite clearly talking about a historical person. He tells us when it happened, he tells us where it happened and he is absolutely clear that he's talking about a person. Some people try to dismiss Tacitus and say oh he just refers to Christians. No he doesn't, he refers to Christians and their founder and he tells his when, where and how in some detail and anchors it quite quite clearly, in a time and a place. Josephus, I don't know, should we talk about Josephus now? We keep skirting around him.

0:10:13 Thomas: Huh. Wow.

0:10:35 Thomas: I know. I thought you did. You explained a ton about his history, actually.

0:10:40 Tim: Oh, his background, but not his references to Jesus.

0:10:41 Thomas: Oh, oh, okay. Yeah go ahead.

0:10:43 Tim: Okay, well, there are two. And a lot of people, when you mention that Josephus mentions Jesus, a lot of atheists who don't know the subject very well say, nonsense, scholars agree that the Josephus reference to Jesus is a forgery, and they just dismiss it out of hand. And some go further and say it's a forgery, it was added in the 4th century, it was added by Eusebius, so they get quite definite. They say that that passage in Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews is a forgery, end of story, which sounds pretty good, except it's wrong. First thing is there are two references to Jesus in Antiquities of the Jews. One is in Book 18, where there's actually kind of a little story about Jesus, who he was and how he got crucified and so on.

0:11:32 Tim: And the other is a passing reference in Book 20, where Josephus is actually telling another story. He's talking about how the high priest got deposed, but he said he was deposed because of an extrajudicial, illegal execution of some people, one of whom was a guy called James, who was brother of that Jesus who was called Messiah. So the first one, the longer one, is problematic because at least parts of it are forgeries. And this is why people try to dismiss the whole thing. And they say, oh yeah, that was written by Christians. But there are certainly bits in the book 20 reference, which is usually referred to as the Testimonium Flavianum or just the Testemonium. So there are bits in The Testimonian that Josephus almost certainly did not write. So he says, well, there was this man, a wise man called Jesus, if it be lawful to call him a man, for he was the Messiah. So he just comes out and says he was a Messiah.

0:12:30 Tim: Well, Josephus was a devout Jew. He didn't believe Jesus was a messiah. He wasn't a Christian.

0:12:29 Thomas: Yeah yeah it doesn't make a lot of sense. Yeah that

0:12:35 Tim: So that bit's definitely not written by Josephus. The bit about if it'd be lawful to call Him a man that's probably not written by him either. And then he goes on to say he was handed over by the leading people of our people, the leading Jews, to Pontius Pilate and was crucified. And then it says, but his followers continued to this day because on the third day they saw him again, like he rose again. And so as a result, the Christians are still around to this date. The bit about him rising from the dead, so them seeing him again on the first day, that's clearly Christian. So the question then becomes, is it just those bits that are additions? Interpretations and did Josephus write an original reference to Jesus and the Christians came along and added those bits?

0:13:22 Tim: Or is the whole thing an interpolation? So is the whole thing a forgery that was inserted wholesale? The consensus of Josephan scholars, most of whom are Jews, by the way, so they don't really care too much about whether or not Jesus existed. The consensus of Josephan scholars is the former, is that there was an original reference to Jesus there by Josephus, and that it was added to by Christian scribes. There are complicated reasons as to why that is the consensus view.

But if you read various people online saying, dismissing Josephus and saying, not a reference to Jesus, the whole thing's a forgery, that isn't the consensus review of Josephan scholars. There are some who do argue that, but fewer now than at any time in the past. The reason that it's generally accepted that there was an original reference to Jesus is that while some of the language in this passage as it stands, what we call the textus receptus, or the received text, while some of it is clearly Christian and not used anywhere else by Josephus. So the word Christos, for example, Messiah, anointed one, Messiah.

Josephus doesn't use that anywhere else in any of his works. So that's not a Josephan word. So we can be pretty certain that, in some sense at least, that part of the passage is suspect. But there are other parts in that passage where the language is Josephan. So I'll give you a couple of examples. At one point in the passage, he says, at the beginning, he calls Jesus a wise man. He says he was a wise men. Man. We don't find any Christians writing in the first four centuries of Christianity that refer to Jesus as a wise man.

0:15:11 Tim: They refer to him for obvious reasons as the son of God, as the Messiah, as the Lord, as God, the second person of the Trinity, all this other stuff, but they don't say that he was a wise men. Whereas Josephus does use exactly that expression a couple of other times. He uses it about Daniel, the Old Testament prophet, and he uses it about Solomon, the Old Testament king, both of whom were renowned for their wisdom. So that seems to be something that Josephus would say and doesn't seem to be someone who would say something that a Christian would say about someone like Jesus.

0:15:41 Thomas: Seems reasonable. Understandable, yeah.

0:15:44 Tim: There's another example where he talks about how Jesus apparently did, it's often translated as wondrous deeds or wondrous works or miraculous works. The Greek actually, in Josephus, the Greek actually says that he was a doer of paradoxical deeds, paradoxa, which means deeds which are difficult to interpret, which are hard to reconcile with what normally happens. Now, that makes sense as a description for a miracle, but it's got a slightly skeptical sort of a spin to it. It's not something that someone who definitely believed Jesus did miracles would say, and it isn't something that is ever used. It isn't a phrase that is ever used by any early Christians in the first four centuries of Christianity about Jesus' miracles.

0:16:34 Tim: Mainly because it actually is a little bit sceptical, but it is used by Josephus in two other places about other miracle workers, the prophet Elisha, for example. So there are elements in the passage which don't feel linguistically, stylistically like what what a Christian would say, but do actually connect with what we know about the way in which Josephus wrote about this stuff. So that's reason number one. Reason number two is quite interesting, though. Back in the 1970s, a Jewish scholar called Shlomo Pines found an Arabic manuscript, which was an Arabic translation of a Greek historical work by a Greek Christian called Agapius, and it had a paraphrase of the Testimonium, a parapherase of this passage.

0:17:25 Tim: And lo and behold, this paraphrase actually differed from the received text, and it differed on exactly the points that historians had already worked out were probably Christian interpolations. So instead of it saying he was the Messiah, it said he was called the Messiah. Now, it would be very weird. It also doesn't say that they saw him rise from the dead. It said it was reported that they saw him arise from the dead. So it would be very weird for a Christian writer like Agapius, or his source - the textual history here is quite complicated, I won't bore you With the details.

But it would be very weird for a Christian writer to look at the received text that had already been doctored and see "he was the Messiah" and then change that to "he was called the Messiah," I see that "they saw him on the third day" and changed that too: "it was reported," right? So this seems to be an echo of an earlier version before it was doctored. And there's two further textual variants, one in a guy called Michael the Syrian. It was a Syriac text, again a summary of the Testimonium, again differs from the received text. And a third one in Latin by Jerome, who basically does a paraphrase again, and again he uses "called the Messiah" rather than "he was the Messiah."

0:18:02 Thomas: Sure.

0:18:48 Tim: And if you think back to what I was saying before about the second reference to Jesus and Josephus in Book 20, how does he describe Jesus? He says this was James, the brother of that Jesus who was called the Messiah. So it seems to be that the original text gave a summary of the life of Jesus and didn't say he was the Messiah, just said that he was called that because he was. People called him the Messiah. People Said that it was the anointed one. And they also didn't saying that he rose from the dead, just said it was reported, because it was - people were going around saying that Jesus had risen from the death in Josephus' time.

And what the Christian scribes did is rather than interpolate an entire passage, they just tweaked it a bit, but it's interesting the bits they tweaked - the two things they changed most substantially was a claim that he was the Messiah and a claim that he rose from the dead, and those are the two things the Jews in later centuries after Josephus's time disputed about Jesus, and so tweaking those things they can then turn to those Jews and say, "Ah, look, here's a Jew saying he was a Messiah, saying he rose from the dead, you know, stick that

0:19:11 Thomas: Yeah. Huh.

0:19:56 Tim: Up your bum," so it actually makes much more sense that the first Josephan reference in, uh, in Book 18 was - there was originally a story there about a wise man who who was who was executed, and it's in a in a sequence of stories about Pontius Pilate, so it mentions Pontius Pilate, and it is also in a sequence of stories about calamities that afflicted the Jews, and a wise man who got killed because of course the bad Jewish leaders and the asshole who was the Roman ruler had him crucified. That's a calamity. So it actually does fit in quite well. It's sometimes argued that it doesn't, but it does. Then we've got the second reference, which, as I said, is in passing, and it's actually talking about the deposition of the high priest.

0:20:43 Tim: So the high priester, Anan ben Hanan, or known in the text as Ananus, he he was the the high priest in Jerusalem, the Roman procurator died in office and the new procurator was on his way out to Judea from Rome, so Hanan was kind of acting without any oversight, took advantage of that, had some people executed including James the brother of Jesus, and some other people - other Jews - objected to that, and so King Herod had him removed. This is the story that Josephus is telling. James is an incidental detail. So he just sort of says, "Yeah, one of them was this guy, James, who was brother of that Jesus who was called Messiah," right? Linking It back to the earlier reference.

Now, it's much, much harder for Jesus' mythicist to get rid of this one because there is some debate about the Book 18 reference because it's obviously been doctored. So even if we put the Book 18 reference to one side, the Book 20 reference is pretty clear. And there's about maybe two scholars at the moment who would argue that somehow it's not genuine. One of those is, not surprisingly, Richard Carrier, who makes a, I would argue, a terrible case. He has written a peer-reviewed paper on it. He seems to think it's wonderful. But I've recently written a critique of it where I point out that it just doesn't fit with the way in which Josephus introduced people to his text.

0:21:27 Thomas: Okay.

0:22:14 Tim: The way they usually argue it is when Hanan gets deposed, he gets replaced by a new high priest, and the new high priester's name is Jesus. Now, obviously, this is not the Jesus. This is another Jesus. This is Jesus ben Damnias. And what they say is, oh, yeah, the James who got killed, who was the brother of this Jesus, the Jesus he was the father of is actually the one who later on becomes high priest. Now, for very complicated textual reasons, it would take me a long time to explain that just doesn't work. That's not the way that Josephus introduced people in the text.

0:22:49 Thomas: Well. Maybe we Can point people to - could we, would we be able to point people to the paper, and then to your critique that you, you posted? Yeah? Maybe that, because, uh, interesting, I - it sounds, you You've answered the question of in my mind of what historians do all day, because this sounds like a lot of work. There's a - there's all you got to look, look at every aspect of the text and think, oh, how, what would Josephus have said? And what, you know, compared to all these other, this analysis of the words he's used in other parts, it's really, really complex.

0:22:49 Tim: Yeah, sure. It's complicated.

0:23:20 Tim: Yeah,

0:23:20 Thomas: And it's, and it's

0:23:20 Tim: That's how it works. That's how he goes. And this is the thing. A lot of people who look at this stuff and go, well, all that evidence for Jesus, it all sounds pretty subjective and you can interpret it different ways. All I say to them is, yeah, welcome to history, mate. That's that's how it works.

0:23:21 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, cool. Cause I don't, you wouldn't say, it seems to me that you wouldn'T say it's impossible that Jesus didn't exist. You're just right. I mean, it's just, it sounds like with most historical claims, based on how you're framing it, you kind of have to go with the likelihood, you know? There's, There's all kinds of ways you could craft a story to where the facts would still fit. But I think the key was what you said early on was, you know, what's the most parsimonious? You know, What makes the most sense? So I suppose, would you say it's possible that he didn't exist? It's just not the most likely scenario. Would that be fair?

0:23:36 Tim: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly, yeah. Yeah, exactly. But but the the problem is that a lot of things are merely possible and and there's there are whole shelves of books in the in the kind of the esoteric and and fringe theory section of the bookshop of of people, you know, crackpot theorists who have come up with an idea that was merely possible, gone off looking for evidence that might support that crackpot idea, and lo and lo and behold, if they look hard enough, they usually find it. Present that evidence. Don't critique it.

Don't look at the alternatives and don't make an assessment as to whether this mere possibility is actually likely. And so you get books like Holy Blood, Holy Grail, and you get looks like the whatever conspiracy. If you get these books that say the amazing true story that unlocks the secret of incredible amazingness about history, and it's written by, you know, like a guy who is an accountant in Surrey, it's almost certainly crap. But it's actually very easy. I've done it myself. It's actually really easy to come up with an idea just for fun. It's easy to go up with and idea and go, okay, this is possible. Let me now go and see if I can find some evidence that seems to lead to that. And if I then don't subject that to the kind of rational rational and highly critical analysis that historians do subject their ideas to, I can create a beautiful story. And usually if you do that, the best thing to do would be to write a novel and then you could be like Dan Brown because that's

0:24:11 Thomas: Yeah. Sure. Oh, yeah? Yeah.

0:25:40 Tim: Effectively what...

0:25:40 Thomas: I was just going to say. So what you're telling me is Dan Brown is, is not a historian or not a, oh

0:25:44 Tim: Dan Brown actually ripped, he's not even terribly original, he actually ripped that off from some guys who wrote a non-fiction book called Holy Blood, Holy Grail that I just referred to. But yeah, Yeah, that's exactly right. Historians don't prove things. Historian look at the various things that are possible, line up all the evidence, and then make a judgment call on which of them is most likely. It's a subjective judgment call. But here's where consensus, I mentioned this before, here's were consensus actually is important in history. It is important in history in a way that it isn't important, for example, in the sciences. In the sciences you can have a consensus, for example, that the continents don't move, that there's no way the continents could move. And there

0:25:53 Thomas: Man. Yeah, sure.

0:26:27 Tim: Was that consensus.

0:26:28 Thomas: Well, they're, they'RE far too big. So yeah.

0:26:29 Tim: Exactly. And look, no one's ever seen them moving. So there was a consensus back in the early 20th century until someone came along and challenged that consensus and everyone said that he was wrong. He was right. And we've since worked out that he wasn't right. So the consensus in science doesn't really count for much. In the humanities, though, particularly in history, a consensus does count for something. It doesn't mean that it's always right. But what you're trying to do as a historian is you're to make your case for that argument to the best explanation, the most parsimonious argument, the best parsimonius explanation of the evidence that you've put on the table. And if you can convince your peers, who are a hostile audience, and believe me, I work in in academia, I know how hostile they are. If you can convince your peers and that position becomes the consensus position, that actually means something.

0:26:32 Thomas: Yeah. Right. Yeah. Right.

0:27:23 Tim: It doesn't mean they're right necessarily, automatically, but it means they probably are. Now, this is why we have to be very, very careful in history when you've got a consensus opinion from a whole lot of people who are across a whole range of different opinions and beliefs and backgrounds and ideologies and. And then you've got these other guys over here going, no, no, no, everyone else is wrong and I, a self-published blogger, or I, an unemployed person on an atheist lecture tour, am right and everyone else was wrong. Warning bells should begin to ring there, folks. Pretty loud.

0:27:56 Thomas: Let me ask you this, a broader question to kind of frame it. I, we have all these examples and you just brought one up of when the scientific consensus has changed. How often has historical consensus, historian consensus, changed on something of a major historical point? Does that happen often?

0:28:13 Tim: Yeah, it's usually When new evidence turns up. So I gave you an example before. I mean, things were pretty 50-50 on the whole question of the Testimonium in Josephus until those other pieces of evidence came up and once people looked at the Agapian paraphrase and then put it together with the the the Syriac paraphrase and then noticed that there was a a similar echo in in Jerome's paraphrases then then the consensus really swung behind the idea that that there was partial authenticity in the in the Book 18 reference so that that's an example, um, sometimes. Sometimes consensus can change with fashion or someone starts looking at things in a slightly different way. But it does happen. It does.

0:29:01 Thomas: There's no big bombshell examples or anything where it drastically changed how we looked at history that you can think of?

0:29:08 Tim: I'll probably think of one when we get offline. I think nothing's springing to mind.

0:29:11 Thomas: Fair enough. Enough. Well, while we're at this, I was just looking at points two and three of this article, and I bet you you could probably deal with them pretty quickly, so let me just read a couple sentences. And you've already talked about this a little bit. Number two was, the earliest New Testament writers seem ignorant of the details of Jesus's life, which become more crystallized in later texts. And then number three, which I think is related, well, actually three and four, so maybe I'll do all of those. Three and four, even the New Testament stories don't claim to be firsthand accounts. And then four is the gospels are only accounts of a historical Jesus contradict each other. So I think those are similar enough that you could probably deal with them in one go. What do you think?

0:29:48 Tim: Okay. Okay. Let me start with three. Even the New Testament stories don't claim to be firsthand accounts. Virtually no ancient sources are firsthand accounts, Um, that, that it's incredibly rare for us to have, uh, an ancient source that says I was there and I saw it happen. Um, almost all of our ancient sources are second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth hand account. So if you look at, for example, Alexander the Great, um, I don't know if you remember the Oliver Stone, not terribly good Oliver Stone movie a few years ago about Alexander. Alexander.

0:30:05 Thomas: No,

0:30:26 Tim: Okay, okay, you didn't miss much. But that whole story of Alexander's campaigns and so on largely comes from one source, not completely, but largely from one source, a guy called Arian. Arian was writing 600 years after Alexander died.

0:30:26 Thomas: I didn't see it.

0:30:44 Thomas: Wow.

0:30:45 Tim: So is that a first-hand account? No. Look, it was obviously, again, a bit like Hannibal, Arian Arian was drawing on first-hand accounts, which are now lost. And that's the reason why we use Arian and not some of the guys that he was drawing on. But it's not a first-handed account. So to say the Gospels aren't first-stand accounts, therefore we can dismiss them, well, that's stupid. And again, that is raising the bar. It's a bit like the argument from silence. It's raising thebar for Jesus so high in order to exclude Jesus that you'd exclude most of the ancient world in the process, which is clearly irrational and illogical and stupid. Stupid. So yeah, they don't claim to be first-hand accounts, big deal. And you'd only want to use them as first- hand accounts if you're a fundamentalist Christian anyway.

0:31:31 Tim: Historians just shrug and go, yeah, sure they're not first-handed accounts, let's use them with that in mind. That's how we use any ancient source. The fourth one, the only accounts, the gospels are only accounts of a historical Jesus contradict each other. Yeah, fine. Again, ancient sources tend to contradict each other on all sorts of stuff. One of my areas of specialty in ancient history is the study of the ancient Germanic tribes. And there was a major battle in 9 AD called the Battle of the Teutoburgerwald, where an uprising of Germanic tribes wiped out three Roman legions, which was a major disaster for for the Roman military.

Now, as you can imagine, we've got several accounts of of that battle, not as many as we'd like, and they're not as detailed as we like, but they contradict each other all over the place. One, two of them say the battle lasted for a day, another one says it lasted for three days. You know, two of those say that the the general Varus killed, it was killed early in the battle, another one said he fell on his sword at the end. Who the hell knows? So so for for ancient sources to be contradicting each other, that that's not at all surprising, and it's actually, again, again, something that historians just take into account. Okay,

0:32:44 Tim: Well, what do those contradictions tell us?

0:32:44 Thomas: Well, again, Again, yeah, I would say that I really, personally, I'm pretty convinced by your argument a while ago that they would have invented a better Jesus. Like, especially Now that we're talking about accounts that contradict each other. And if we're going on the argument, like the assumption, oh, the reason they contradict each other is because they're just making it up. If we go with that, like you said before, I mean, they really could have made up a better Jesus. You would expect one gospel would be like the perfect messiah gospel, it would be like he was born here, he did this, you know, all the exact stuff and then maybe another would get some slightly different details or something but

0:32:49 Tim: Oh, yeah. Yep. Yeah. Exactly right. And what we do find, though, is that they get a better and better Jesus as they go on. So this is why Christians really love the Gospel of John. Because the Gospelof John, apart from being a much nicer story, it smooths out a lot of the lumpy details. That's because they had quite a few decades to kind of get the story sort of less difficult. Whereas Mark, the earliest gospel, is full of all sorts of weird stuff that Christians have trouble with today. So you've got Jesus saying things like, you know, saying to his disciples, go out to all the towns of Israel and preach that the coming apocalypse is going to happen, that the incoming kingship of God is goingto happen. Happen. And if they don't accept your message, move on to the next town because I tell you that the kingdom will come before you get around all those towns. That's clearly wrong. That didn't happen.

0:33:28 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Right.

0:34:25 Tim: Same with, you know, this generation standing here will not die before they see the kingdom come. Again, that didn't happen. But what you find is that that stuff gets smoothed out in the later Gospels. And then by the time you get to John, it disappears altogether.

0:34:37 Thomas: So Then you would agree with number two then, where it said the earliest New Testament writers seem ignorant and then they become more crystallized. You just would, I guess I suppose you would disagree with the the implications of it.

0:34:47 Tim: I disagree with the first part of it, the earliest New Testament writers seem ignorant of the details of Jesus life. Now the the argument, you know, because it goes on to say Paul seems unaware of any virgin birth, there's no wise man, no star in the east, no miracles, and refers to this thing called the Silence of Paul. Um, the problem with that is first of all it's not true. We actually do have stuff in Paul that is clearly referring to a historical Jesus. So in Paul he says that Jesus was born as a human, born of a human mother, and born a Jew. That's in Galatians 4.4. He says that he had a human nature and that he was a human descendant of King David. That is in Romans 1.3. He refers to teachings that Jesus made in his ministry about divorce in 1 Corinthians 7.10, on preachers in 1 Corinthians 9.14, and on the coming apocalypse in 1 Thessalonians 4-15.

0:34:52 Thomas: Okay.

0:35:39 Tim: He mentions that he was executed by earthly rulers in 1st Corinthians 2.8, and then he says that that he died and was buried, 1 Corinthians 15 to 3 to 4. And finally, he says that he had an earthly physical brother called James in Galatians 1.19, who Paul had met. So it's really hard to say Paul didn't believe in a historical Jesus. But the mythicists have to argue that Paul didn'T believe in a historic Jesus. And people like Richard Carrier and Earl Doherty go to vast lengths, spill gallons of ink, trying to make those references I just talked about there go away. And some of the lengths they go to are hilarious. I mean, he talks about Jesus, Paul talks about Jesus in Romans 1.3, talks about Jesus being a descendant of King David.

0:36:25 Tim: Richard Carrier's argument on that is just hilarious. He's talking about a sperm bank in the heavens, and somehow David's human sperm is stored up in the heaven and Jesus is created out of this sperm. It's like, dude, seriously? I mean, actually, when I got to that bit in Carrier's book, I just laughed out loud. It was just so terrible. I'm sorry. I did just mention –

0:36:48 Thomas: Well, I haven't read that. I, I, it seemed, that sounds a little straw man-y to me, but I, you know, I hadn't read it, so I can't say for sure, but that, that sounds pretty ridiculous. So,

0:36:54 Tim: It Is ridiculous, but I'm paraphrasing a very complicated argument, and I'd have to drill down into the Greek and into the use of the words in an Old Testament passage that Carrier refers to to try and bolster that argument. He doesn't just make it up, up he goes back to a a passage and I think it's Second Samuel and says, oh this is a reference to a belief that that uh that there was going to be kind of an eternal um eternal uh line of of of David's descendants and and it's all to do with sperm in the heavens, um, it does sound a little straw manny because I'm paraphrasing about like 15 pages Of argument into a couple of minutes, trust me, it's a crap argument.

So the first thing, the idea that Paul seems unaware of a historical Jesus at all is simply wrong. And it's very difficult to look at things where it says, you know, he was born of a woman, which is actually a Greek translation of a Hebrew and Aramaic phrase, which we find in several places in the Old Testament and a couple of places in and the Dead Sea Scrolls, and this phrase, born of a woman, is a kind of a, it's an expression of, well, I'm only human.

So if someone says, why did you eat all that chocolate? An ancient Jew would say, well I'm but one born of a woman. I'm not a human. So it's an emphasis on humanity, and Paul uses that very expression in its Greek form in one of these references to Jesus, and he, that's in Romans 1 through as well.

0:37:32 Thomas: Well, yeah.

0:38:28 Tim: So he says, you know, he was born of a woman, born a Jew, born under the law. It's really hard to read that and interpret it in any way other than he's referring to a human being. So the idea that Paul was unaware of Jesus as a historical person at all is untenable. The idea that he doesn't mention things like the virgin birth or any miracles and doesn't go into a lot of detail about his life, that's actually not that inexplicable. Because if we look at what Paul was doing in these letters, he wasn't telling the story of Jesus. He was writing to communities that he'd established to answer questions, to settle disputes, or to sometimes to kind of give them a bit of a telling off.

0:39:16 Tim: And so it's incidental. So if we we look at this type of text elsewhere in Christian history, texts like, say, 1 Clement or 2 Clement, which were definitely written in the 2nd century, so definitely written in a period where people believed in a historical Jesus, not a mythical Jesus. They don't mention anything about Jesus' miracles or his birth or his hometown or virgin birth or wise men or miracles or any of that stuff. So this is just the nature of the type of texts that Paul is writing. So that one doesn't have a whole lot of weight. When we do get to the point, as you were talking about before, where people actually decided, hey, we better tell the story and we better write it down, then sure, we find all of that stuff.

0:40:03 Tim: And we find that in the meantime, between 30 AD and about 70 AD, the story has grown, as we've discussed before, oh

0:40:11 Thomas: But you're saying, yeah, so that's why I said, it sounds like you, you agree with that claim, although you,you know, you say you don't agree with the first part about Paul not having historical details about Jesus. But, but overall, all, the idea that the story gets more ironed out later on is, in your mind, not proof that it's fake or that there's no historical person, just that, I mean, we obviously know that a lot of the story is false, regardless of whether there was a real Jesus or not. Could be 90% for all we know, could be whatever.

0:40:41 Tim: Absolutely. Absolutely, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

0:40:45 Thomas: So the ideathat these exaggerations would become more polished over time time isn't necessarily evidence that there was no guy in the first place. So, well, I would say we are, we are running out of time. So do you want to try to start to, well we could tackle number five if you want, maybe you could make some, some closing thoughts about it. What do you think?

0:40:55 Tim: Well, but Number five is basically it says modern scholars who claim to have uncovered the real historical Jesus depict widely different persons, um, I can, I can tackle that pretty quickly, uh. If you sit down with academics on on any subject, particularly in the humanities, and ask them to and compare what they say on that subject, you'll find wild differences. Sit down with with six academics uh who study Shakespeare and ask them who Shakespeare was and what he was doing with his plays, and you will get six completely different interpretations of Shakespeare. You'll get a feminist Shakespeare, you'll get a post-colonial Shakespeare, you'll get traditionalist Shakespeare.

You'll get Shakespeare as a woman, you'll get you name it, you'll get, you'll get a wild variety of interpretations. Well I'll say to you is welcome to academia, academia, um, but actually this exaggerates the difference, so it says, you know, uh, the interpretations include a cynic philosopher, a charismatic, charismatic hasid, a liberal pharisee, a conservative rabbi, a Zealot revolutionary, a non-violent pacifist, and so on. Yeah, absolutely, you'll find all of those things, they overlap, so The idea, the idea that you could be, if you were a charismatic hasid, you know, a miracle worker, you couldn't also be a cynical style philosopher, and he couldn't also be a liberal Pharisee and to some extent a revolutionary, that just doesn't make sense. So they all overlap. All we're talking about here is usually a difference in emphasis. There are some interpretations such as those by people like John Dominic Crossan and the so-called Jesus Seminar that say that he was definitely just a social reformer.

There are others that say that he was definitely a zealot, and there are a large number that say that he wasn't an apocalyptic preacher, but on the whole, they tend to overlap. You could do a Venn diagram, and there'd be a hell of a lot of crossover in the Venn.

0:41:15 Thomas: Okay. Yeah.

0:42:55 Tim: So that one I think we can dismiss pretty happily. I suppose if we are running out of time, one last point, too... I was

0:43:01 Thomas: Well, let me, hold on. Let me ask you about that first. How does that affect the consensus argument you made earlier? I mean, a minute ago, you know, there's consensus on Jesus. Now there's not?

0:43:03 Tim: Sure. Yeah, okay. Good point. Yeah, good point. The consensus is on the fact that he existed. Who he was and what he did and how much of the Gospels we can take as historical and how much we can't, and how he fitted it into his context. Pretty much every scholar has got their own spin on that, but That's just The nature of the game. Sure.

0:43:16 Thomas: Okay.

0:43:32 Thomas: So, because we're able to fashion so many compatible stories, it sounds like while there's consistency, you knows, consensus that Jesus existed, maybe different historians have their kind of pet stories that, you now, fit the pattern in their minds a little better or allow them to write a book about it or whatever it is.

0:43:51 Tim: But Yes. Sure. But Again, welcome to ancient history. You can say that about pretty much, I mean, pick up three books on Julius Caesar and you'll get three interpretations as to who, who, or what Julius Caesar was, you know, a harsh conservative or a radical, a charismatic megalomaniac or a very measured and intelligent guy. I mean, this is just – that's just history. And so to expect anything other than that for Jesus is ridiculous. I think the other point is, you know, it's a bit rich for mythicists to be making – this is an argument made by David Fitzgerald, who I hold in fairly faint regard. Guard, but it's a bit rich for mythicists to be making this argument when actually, if you look at the various Jesus myth theories, you can say exactly the same thing. I mean, which Jesus myth theory is it? The one where Jesus is a an idealized allegorical Jewish messiah who got historicized? Is it one of, with, of Carrier, with a celestial Jesus who lives in the sublunar heaven with a sperm bank?

0:43:54 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah,

0:44:56 Tim: Is it the Dorothy Murdoch Acharya S. Jesus is an amalgam of ancient Greek and Egyptian gods? Which one? So you can make exactly the same argument.

0:45:08 Thomas: That's a good point. Yeah hmm.

0:45:09 Tim: So it's not a terribly good argument, that one.

0:45:12 Thomas: Okay, well, you were getting to closing thoughts. Why don't you go ahead with that?

0:45:15 Tim: Well, I suppose just one final point, And I think this is fairly important because it gets back to what we were saying before about the way in which historians work and the way in which history is analysed. So what historians do is they try and come up with, as you put it, the most parsimonious explanation. And the thing about the principle of parsimony is that you're looking for an explanation that accounts for the most amount of evidence with the least number of suppositions. And the reason I, as I said, don't have a dog in the fire, but the reason why I go for the consensus position that there was a historical Jesus is that it does that. The idea of a historical Jesus actually accounts for all the evidence, as far as I can see, and does so without having to go off on tangents of, well, maybe if this, then maybe that, and if this then perhaps that.

0:45:17 Thomas: Sure. Right,

0:46:05 Tim: Whereas the Jesus myth hypothesis always has to be grounded in a foundation of supposition. So take Carrier and Doherty's idea that there was a celestial Jesus and he got historicized and so there was never actually a historical Jesus and all these stories about a historical Jesus are just historicized versions of a story that was originally about a celestial mythic Jesus. That theory, and various others like it, all require that there was an early form of Christianity that didn't believe in a historical Jesus and only believed purely in a celestial Jesus. The problem is there's no evidence for that. There must have been, according to Doherty and Carrier, there must have this proto-Christianity that believed in purely in the celestial Jesus, okay, where's that in the historical record?

0:46:59 Tim: Good. They try to claim, this is why they try and make those bits I just mentioned from Paul go away. They're trying to claim it's in Paul. Well, that doesn't work. Doherty tries to claim all sorts of early Christians were actually mythic Christians and not historical Christians, and that doesn't either. That would take a while to go into. But the problem is, if there was an early form of Christianity that actually claimed there was no historical Jesus, we should find references. This gets back to an argument from silence. Here we should find references to that proto-Christianity. Two places. First of all, we should found references to it in the extensive literature we have in early Christianity about what they called heresies, because we've got the books by the form of Christianity that won.

0:47:50 Tim: They were writing storming and condemnations of these other forms of Christianity that they regarded to be heretical, and of course those other forms of Christianity were doing the same thing, but we haven't got their books, but They were talking about Christians that believed that Jesus was simply a man. They talked about people who believed that Jesus was simply a Jewish messiah and not some kind of god. They talked about Jesus who was so much of a God that he didn't have a physical form at all, and he was just, it was just an illusion. They talk about various types of other forms of Christianity which they condemn and say these people are wrong and evil and wicked and heretical. Nowhere, nowhere in that extensive literature is even so much of a whisper about a form of Christianity that said Jesus didn't exist on earth at all. Now where? Why not? Now when I put that to mythicists, they say, they resort to conspiracy theory. They say, oh, that was all destroyed.

0:48:03 Thomas: Yeah.

0:48:50 Tim: Really? So why? Why didn't they destroy all the references to all these other forms of Christianity as well? Actually, what they tended to do is they tended, even with early heresies that didn't exist anymore, they still condemned them because they were worried that they might pop up again. So nowhere in that literature do we find any reference to the proto-Christianity that actually would have had, if Carrier and Doherty were right, a genuine claim to being the original form, but they don't condemn it. That doesn't make sense. The second place we should expect potentially to find references to this proto-Christianity is in the works of people who were pagans and Jews who were condemning Christianity and arguing against it. We don't actually have those works, but we do have the responses to them written by Christians.

0:49:40 Tim: And what they do is they quite often quote some of these critics, people like Trypho, who was a Jew, or people like Celsus, who was a pagan. They quote these guys' works and then they answer them. Nowhere in any of that anti-Christian polemic do we find any reference to, hey, what about these guys over here who say that your Jesus didn't even exist? What about these guys over here say Jesus didn't actually walk the earth at all?

It would have been a pretty good killer argument in the hands of a critic of Christianity, yet we don't find it anywhere in that material, and we've got quite a few of those works as well, so we can make a good argument for silence from silence, that effectively what Doherty and Carrier are talking about with this proto-Christianity, it's fantasy. They have to make it up though, because otherwise their theory collapses, and these are some of the reasons.

I mean, obviously, I've been skating pretty, pretty rapidly over, from very, you probably understand pretty complex material. People who know the material are probably listening to what I'm saying, saying, but, but I fully accept that. And I understand the counter arguments and I understand the counters to those counters. And we could be here all day. All I'd say to anyone is don't read Jesus mythicist stuff and go just because this emotionally appeals to me. I like the idea that Jesus didn't exist. It's a big stick that I can use to hit Christianity. Be

0:51:00 Tim: Very careful, right? Be careful of confirmation bias, read the other side and read the critiques of of Jesus' mythicism, even if some of that critique is written by Christians. But there's good stuff. There's good staff out there written by non-Christians as well. It's an extremely fringe idea for a good reason. It's very unconvincing stuff to people who actually know the material.

0:51:00 Thomas: Well, There you go. Yeah, I mean, I for one would be happy to have a mythicist on the show to respond. It could be interesting and actually actually, the conference I'm going to be at will feature Price and Ehrman debating. I'm pretty sure they're debating Jesus's existence. I don't know if you've heard of that. Have you heard about that or that debate?

0:51:43 Tim: Yeah, yeah, I'm a bit puzzled that Ehrman is doing that. I just don't think that debates shed a lot of light on these subjects. And back in the days when I used to sort of debate creationists, I kind of gave up on that because generally speaking what happened is people would walk away having had their ideas sort of massaged for an hour. I really don't think this sort of topic lends – it doesn't even lend itself to the conversation that we've just had, which has gone for about an hour and a half, and I've barely touched the surface of most of the arguments. Yeah, it'll be interesting to see. I mean, yeah,

0:52:24 Thomas: Well, I mean, but unfortunately, that's kind of the position that non-historians are in. I am certainly not going to have time to go through all these sources and go and do all all that. So, I'm looking forward to it. And yeah, debate as a form of discourse certainly has its flaws, but I'm Looking forward to It. But, well,

0:52:34 Tim: Look, it will be interesting. And if you've got a mythicist on and they could go, I can assure you, they could goes through absolutely everything I said and I can tell you now what their counterarguments would be. The problem is it's all longer.

0:52:55 Thomas: That'll be another hour and a half, though. Yeah.

0:52:59 Tim: So this is the thing. All I'd say is this is why I go back to the point about consensus. There's a reason there's a consensus amongst the people who really do know this stuff in depth. There's an reason.

0:53:07 Thomas: Yeah, okay. Well, we'll cut it off there. I was wondering if, similar to last time, you wouldn't mind doing a minute or two of bonus content. I got some more questions I could could ask you. Would that be okay?

0:53:19 Tim: I could talk about this for hours. I can do more than a minute or two, yeah?

0:53:21 Thomas: Well, I've got a few questions based on my reading of the Bible over on my other podcast, Thomas and the Bible. So I'm going to ask you those over on the bonus content. But in the meantime, thanks so much, Tim O'Neill. Once again, the blog, if you'd like to find more from Tim, is historyforatheist.blogspot.com. Thank you so much for coming on. You're a wealth of information I could barely keep up. It is a challenge every time because I'm I'm so not history-minded, but I do my best to kind of keep up with where you're going. But thanks for providing an hour and a half of solid, dense content.

0:53:56 Tim: No problem. Thanks for having me on, Tom.

0:53:58 Thomas: All All right, I need to sincerely thank you all for your overwhelming support this last week. Really, it means a ton to me. I'm going to try to thank all my new patrons. I, seriously, it was hard to know where to go back to because it was so many. I just, I'm blown away. Seriously, thank you so much. So, thank you to Bloodbeard godslayer, Joshua Moldenhauer, capitalthree, Cognitive Dissonance Podcast, Jay (I gave at the office), I don't know what that means, Alison Herrold, Søren Kongstad, John Bowness, Andrew N., Mark Wainwright, Glenda D Kenyon, Eric Ripley, Eric Lindenberger, Good Bad or Bad Bad. I actually like that name. OldManLogan, Claire Wilson, Mike Rote, Robert Brown, Thadius Loar, Daniel McCarthy, Michael Schrader, Jesse Selbert, Jeremy A. Christian, Rich, Rachel Shields, The Writer's Beard, Kam, Patrick Greer, Matthew Degear, Tyler Ensor, Sally Clay.

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0:56:09 Thomas: Renee, Mike G, Xavier Garza, Garrett, DARWIN H MESADIEU, Robert Carter, Michael Chronister, Robert Lisiewski, ahman, some of these names, I'm so sorry, Caleb R. English, Dan Helman, Andrew G., robert schepis, Randall Nelson-Peterman, Jesus Fucking Christ, that was actually a name, that wasn't just me, Scott Bilas, Albertsonian, we're getting close, Seismozombie, Tony Livernois, my cat chimed in there. Marcus Rademacher, David C Bruce, and Frost11tbh, to be honest. TBH, I don't know what that means. Wow, okay, that was way too many. I can't believe that many of you saw fit to support the show. It's seriously such an honor to have that support, and I can't wait to run with it.

0:57:00 Thomas: I want to do bigger and better things with this show. I'm going to be able to go full-time pretty soon. I have a bunch of stuff I got to get in a row. It's a big step, you know, like figuring out, you know, benefits, paying off a bunch of stuff, that sort of thing. But I think I'm going to be able to do it. And your support will allow me to take the show to places that it hasn't yet been. And I'm really excited for that. So thank you. One more big giant thank you on that. And And new patrons, don't forget to check out the bonus content with Tim, as well as you've probably heard this episode early, and that's out, that should be out soon, and I will see you guys next week for another great week of Atheistically Speaking.