AS285: Dr. Robert Price on Jesus Mythicism, Part 1

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 285, and I'm your host, Thomas Smith. All right, very excited for this week's episodes. I recorded with Dr. Robert Price.

A lot of you asked for him, actually, to represent the other side of the Jesus mythicist sort of viewpoint, I guess, since we had Tim O'Neill to represent the consensus historian view, now we've got, Robert Price likes to go by Bob, Bob Price, on to talk about the other side, I'm really excited, I love doing this on the show, I like getting both viewpoints, so, So, I'm giving you guys a warning that I've already given, I'm very, very bad at history, it's not my strong suit, I did my best to ask the right questions, but I'm certain if anyone out there is more of a historian, Now, when it comes to physics or something, I could do it for math or whatever, it might be philosophy, I can do a little better, try to punch a little bit above my weight, but when it it comes to history, I did my best, but I am no expert. I tried to ask what questions I could. I think I did okay, but that'll be up to you to judge.

But it's really just key to get the views out there and be able to let you as a listener have both sides represented and decide for yourselves. I may give some commentary afterward, or I may wait until after Myth Information 3. I know I've already told you about it, but there's no more time left. You gotta go. Google Myth Information, and you'll find the conference, I'm gonna be there this week, and so is Dr. Robert Price, who you're about to hear, he's debating Bart Ehrman, it's gonna be amazing,

0:02:07 Thomas: So that was really cool to get him on the show the week of that, and that way, we'll all also be able to watch the debate, get, get both views again, and kind of see what I feel about this whole mythicist thing, I know I've made it no secret that I am very much, think that the, the consensus view is the safe one for me to take as a non-historian, but who knows? Maybe I'll change my mind on that. I'm definitely capable of doing so. But without further ado, let's get to my interview with Dr. Robert Price on whether or not Jesus was a real guy.

0:02:48 Thomas: Joining me right now is Dr. Robert Price. Bob, how are you doing?

0:02:52 Bob: Oh, doing great. How about you?

0:02:54 Thomas: I'm doing fine. Thank you so much for joining me. I'm really happy to have you on the show. Lots of people, actually, lots of listeners have requested you by name, I believe. You need to get Dr. Price on the the show. And I'm really happy too, because I've done sort of the standard historical maybe view, I guess if that's fair to say, the consensus view on Jesus. And I'm really excited to talk to you about the view, sort of, before we get into that, though, why don't you, if you don't mind, for listeners who might not be familiar with you, do you mind giving a little bit of biographical information for us, how you got started in this and all that good stuff?

0:03:03 Bob: Well, Back when I was in high school, I guess, I began to get interested in the whole business of apologetics and defending the faith. I remember in our youth group, we saw some film or slide presentation or something where someone was using the blackboard and putting down the evidence that how early the gospels were and that they were written by eyewitnesses, and therefore it's more likely than not that Jesus rose from the dead and so on. Well, I had never really even thought about that.

I just thought, well, of course it's true. That's what they told me at church and so forth. And I thought, gee, if you could really pretty much prove it's truth, that would come in very handy in witnessing and evangelism and such and I began to read books like, uh, Oh, F.F. Bruce's The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable, and John Warwick Montgomery's, uh, History and Christianity, and eventually Josh McDowell's Evidence That Demands a Verdict, and and so on, and so there are loads of those. And I just devoured all of them. And I felt like, OK, I've got my weapons here for debating unbelievers, trying to convince them that they ought to accept Christ as their savior and so on. And yet before too long, maybe it was when I was a freshman in college and I was involved with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and so on, I

0:05:07 Bob: Began to realize that once you went into the territory of probability and arguments, Even though I had thought the arguments buttressed what I believed on the basis of faith, it became less and less possible to do that because now it mattered to me whether or not there was good evidence for it. And so I had to constantly reevaluate. Now, is this a good argument for the resurrection of Jesus and the authority of the Bible? Well, yeah, I think so. But on the other hand, and that really almost destroys faith. And you can still have beliefs, but the very type of argument you're dealing with is against that. It says that you that faith is not really adequate. You can have a kind of a double truth theory and like William Lane Craig does and say, well, the evidence seems to point that way.

0:05:28 Thomas: Yeah.

0:06:15 Bob: And luckily, it confirms my faith. But that bothered me more and more until that's

0:06:20 Thomas: Yeah, interesting. I've heard William Lane Craig talk like, well, these are arguments for, well not really for me, like I, you know, he speaks like, "Well, I have my faith and I have my other reasons. But here's some arguments just in case," you know, that helps somebody or something. But it's interesting that you weren't able to keep both those things in your mind at once that kind of created like a cognitive dissonance for you,

0:06:41 Bob: Right. Right. Yeah. You can't wear the two hats at the same time. And I figured, well, once I was thinking about it in terms of what's probably true, the door opened for me, theoretically, to one day conclude, gee, it's probably not true. And sure enough, that's what eventually happened as I looked into evidence and questions that these apologists had not raised. And I thought, boy, I've only heard half or less of the story. And so I went on into studying all the guys they said I needn't study Tillich, Bultmann and so forth. And eventually I came to more of, I guess, an existentialist position that I thought Christianity had great value and I still sort of rooted for it, but that I figured there's just no way to know if there were ever any miracles or if any supernatural exists.

0:06:45 Thomas: Yeah.

0:07:43 Bob: Exists. And eventually, though it took some years, I finally decided, you know, I can't really say I'm a Christian as much as I have a soft spot in my heart for it. And I decided to enter the lists with a book first called Beyond Born Again, explaining why I no longer bought the whole thing. And then I got invited to do debates. And I've always tried to say, look, I am not trying to deprive anybody of their faith. I don't really care what anybody believes. It's none of my business, unless, of course, they're a jihadist or something. But I do feel like if people are publicly promoting bogus New Testament scholarship, well, I know something about that. And I would like to try to correct the situation, and that's kind of the standpoint I still take about it.

0:07:54 Thomas: Yeah.

0:08:39 Thomas: Interesting. So you were all through this, you were a minister, right? Former minister?

0:08:44 Bob: Yeah, though, I had departed from evangelicalism, oh, some 12 or 13 years before this. When I was a church pastor, it was a pretty theologically liberal church. In fact, decades before it had been the first pastorate of Harry Emerson Fosdick, a great liberal theologian and preacher. And then, however, about five years into my pastorate, I began to be, well, I was reading a lot of Jacques Derrida and Don Cupid and was much influenced by deconstruction. And I realized there's just no real reason that I can see to believe in idealistic metaphysics that is like Platonism, that there are spiritual realities somehow that are invisible and more real than material ones. And so I don't pretend to know what's going on in the universe, but it just came to seem unconvincing to me.

0:08:52 Thomas: Oh, okay.

0:09:45 Bob: And I realized, well, I guess I am an unbeliever, though a sympathetic one. I tried not to become the village atheist. I

0:09:51 Thomas: Sure. Do you feel now? I mean, have you gone further toward being more actively atheist, or are you still kind of in that position of, you know, you don't begrudge anyone their beliefs, but you have your views on it.

0:10:08 Bob: Still maintain that. And it's easy to to do, because it's increasingly painfully clear to me that atheism in general is, they can't separate it from left-wing politics, and I don't buy that. And in fact, I think that commitment to such a notion is itself a kind of fact-proof, naive faith. And I wish that political atheists would exercise the same skepticism in politics that they do in religion and so I find it harder and harder to identify with the atheist movement and oh

0:10:52 Thomas: So it's not hard for you to not really be a part of the atheist movement in that case because of politics. Well, I don't really want to open that can of worms if we can help it, but yeah.

0:10:57 Bob: Yeah yeah oh no, no, me neither, I hate that, yeah.

0:11:04 Thomas: Okay. Well fair enough. So let's about Jesus, should we? Should we go into maybe, I suppose it has to be sort of a positive case for why why we ought not to take for granted that there is a historical person named Jesus, right?

0:11:05 Bob: Yeah that's what I think and and like I don't hold it as a belief, like a dogma, that Jesus didn't exist, because again, all historical judgments by their very nature are tentative and provisional. So to me, the way I would put it is that the burden of proof rests with those who say that there was a historical Jesus. It's quite possible there was some sort of Jesus back then, but the evidence seems to me just so inadequate and not really really historical evidence at all. Once you look at the kind of works the Gospels really are and so forth, I think we're dealing with myth, legend, and rewrites of the Old Testament, much as the Book of Mormon rewrites the Old and New Testaments. So I just don't think there's any solid core of evidence. Maybe there was a historical Jesus who's been completely eclipsed by what I call the stained glass curtain but

0:11:34 Thomas: Well,

0:12:20 Bob: Um, there's no way any longer to make it look likely. Well

0:12:27 Thomas: I suppose we should dive deeper. Unfortunately, as I've said many times, this is my worst, history is my worse subject. I'm terrible at it. I have no concept of it. I will do my best to see if I can ask the right questions here, because I'm finding myself kind somewhat convinced by the historical case, and it convinced at least that there's not great reason to actively suspect Jesus didn't exist. And I think the key is having to do with what you said. Like, pretty much all historical figures are kind of provisional, but there's so little evidence for many of them that we kind of take for granted. Why do you think that Jesus is more likely a myth than, say, any other historical figures that we might not have very much evidence for.

0:13:13 Bob: Uh, for one thing, Jesus and virtually everything, well, let me just step back and say one often hears the case set forth by uh George A. Wells and uh uh Earl Doherty and others that um is a great disparity between the Gospels and the Epistles in these letters, which they assume are decades earlier than the Gospels. I'm not so sure of that, but at least in the Epistle, Paul's, 1 Peter, and so forth, that we don't really have much that would indicate they're talking about a figure of recent history. The couple of places where it sort of sounds like that are very likely interpolations into the text, and though it was not mythicists that first suggested this, it was on other grounds non-mythicist scholars suggested that this or that was probably a later interpolation.

So, but on the whole, they would say that the Jesus of the Epistles appears to be a celestial figure who was put to death by the fallen angels, the archons, the demons up in space, as we would call it, the upper heavens, and that very much like Gnosticism, and that later on, for institutional reasons, people began to historicize Jesus because they felt it gave them an edge to claim their teaching had come from a recent public figure and was not just the result of private revelations and visions such as the Gnostics claim. And

0:15:01 Bob: So they began to... Well,

0:15:00 Thomas: Let me get this just to make sure I'm following. So, you're saying the epistles portray this. You're saying, because I actually just got done reading the entire Bible and I don't have the greatest memory in the world for it, but I don't really remember that. Did I Did I misunderstand you?

0:15:18 Bob: For instance, in 1 Corinthians, geez, I think it's chapter 2, it says that was put to death by the archons, the rulers of this age, who had they known they were doing, wouldn't have done it because they sealed their own doom by doing it. There's no reference to Pontius Pilate or the Sanhedrin or the Roman Empire or any political or historical setting, which would have been pretty easy to do because you see it in the Gospels. In Colossians, it says that he was put to death by the principalities and powers. Well, that's technical language in apocalyptic Judaism and Gnosticism for these fallen angels who run the world, which is why it's so corrupt and so forth.

0:16:06 Bob: And again, no political references. And now, of course, it could be that the writers just took all that for granted. But as Jacob Neusner would say, no evidence is no evidence. You cannot simply assume that they already had in mind all that stuff that we now read in the Gospels. In 1 Peter and in Romans chapter 12, I think, it tells readers, now you behave well because the Romans only punish the wicked. If you're righteous, you've got nothing to worry about. Wait a minute. And could somebody who said that believe that Jesus Christ was unjustly executed by Rome?

0:16:53 Bob: It seems very odd. And so all you've got really in the epistles is this idea that some preexistent heavenly being allowed himself to be done to death and by the evil archons, and that he rose and sits at the right hand of God and will come again. There's nothing about Jesus as an itinerant teacher. There's nothing about Jesus ever doing miracles, anything, nothing about a virgin birth and so on. Can you just assume they believe these things anyway? I mean, it's possible, but that's a classic fundamentalist style harmonization. And so most of the mythicists have said, you see, the epistles come from an earlier time.

0:17:45 Bob: No teachings of Jesus are quoted. There's a couple of places in 1 Corinthians 7 where people sometimes say, this I say by the word of the Lord, no divorce and so on. But that, I think, more likely means that he had a revelation such as he talks about out in 1 Corinthians, a word of knowledge, a word of wisdom, and so on. So I think that is a good point. But even if you switch over and look at the Gospels, it's equally mythical because virtually everything said concerning Jesus, the whole narrative conforms to the mythic hero archetype, a set of episodes and mythemes, many of which you find in the same order, whether you're talking about Gilgamesh, Hercules, Oedipus, the Buddha, Muhammad, et cetera.

0:18:39 Bob: And it's an ideal type. Not every case has every element, but there are a lot of them that recur. And these would include an annunciation of the birth, then a miraculous conception or birth of some kind, a child prodigy story where the savior, prophet, whatever, whatever, outwits all of his elders and already knows everything. Eventually some initiation rite like Jesus Zoroaster goes into a holy river for an immersion and comes out and sees the angel Vohumana who calls him to his ministry. And immediately Ahriman, the Zoroastrian devil, shows up and tempts him to stray from the mission, but he won't do it. I mean, it's the same thing with Abraham, the same thing with the Buddha and Mara's temptations. These things weren't borrowed.

0:19:29 Thomas: So do you think they literally had access to these stories or is it more of a, it's in the zeitgeist?

0:19:33 Bob: Oh, no, they needn't have, though it wouldn't be improbable because Buddhist missionaries had been in the West, in Syria, in Egypt for at least a century before Christianity supposedly started. But it needn't have been borrowed. It's just what Martin de Belius called the law of of biographical analogy with certain figures. You're going to have their significance commemorated in a certain series of myths. And eventually the hero is a proclaimed king, literally or figuratively, like on Palm Sunday. And there's other things I'm leaving out. But then the people turn against him and he's put to death, usually on top of a hill.

0:20:20 Bob: Then there's some, some confusion about where the body is, and he may appear, uh, posthumously to his disciples, as Romulus did, Apollonius of Tyana. And so on

0:20:30 Thomas: I was going to ask. So there's other, you're saying there's other examples that follow these, not every single element, but follow this story for the most part.

0:20:31 Bob: Yeah none is exactly like all the others but you have many of the, well

0:20:40 Thomas: Could you talk about maybe one of them in detail just to give us an idea?

0:20:44 Bob: Apollonia's of Tyanna, who was a neo-Pythagorean and philosopher and is depicted in a long work by Philostratus written in the 200s. He has the god Proteus appear in a vision to the woman who will give birth to Apollonius and saying, you're going to give birth with an incarnate god. And she said, which one? He says, me, the shape-shifting god. So sure enough, she's miraculously pregnant. She has the, the kid. And he has already, as a youth, is working in an Asclepius healing shrine and is able to cure things that Asclepis cannot. He becomes an itinerant teacher, preacher, exorcist, and healer. He eventually, and he performs all manner of miracles.

0:21:33 Bob: And then eventually he is arrested by the goon squad of the Emperor Domitian, is tried before him, and is about to be executed when he disappears from the courtroom and teleports across the Mediterranean in the presence of his disciples who have given him up for dead. And he says, no, almost exactly like Luke 24, he says, take hold of me and see that I do not pass through your, your hands. I'm not a ghost sent up from Persephone's realm. And then after that, he ascends into heaven and his disciples are talking and theorizing in their community. And one guy says, I don't know about the rest of you, but I've been praying to Apollonius and I've gotten no answer.

0:22:23 Bob: I just believe he's dead. And then what happens? Apollonius appears out of heaven to him to show him that he's really alive after all, and it's just like doubting Thomas in John chapter 20. That's pretty darn close, but none of the specific texts, the stories, the sayings are enough alike, the ones in the New Testament, to imply either was copying from the other. It's It's just the same sort of thing again and again, the mythic hero archetype. And the problem is now Apollonius may well have existed and been completely mythologized. So these parallels by themselves wouldn't tell the tale, except that with Apollonius and various others, Caesar Augustus, Cyrus of Persia, so on and so on.

They are knitted so inextricably into the history of their time uh that uh there's no way you can just say well he's a myth like there's No Way Caesar Augustus was made up because you know he's involved in the Roman government and various battles and all that stuff but with Jesus there is no real connection to the timeline even the stories that seem to associate him with known figures like Herod the Great, Herod Antipas, Pontius Pilate, and Caiaphas, these stories are all extremely unlikely to be historical. And this is what scholars who never thought of mythicism have said for generations. It's not like they're axe grinding, well, we got to get rid of those episodes some way.

0:24:05 Bob: They're all grossly implausible based on what we know about those figures. Well, okay, maybe there was a Jesus, but this is no evidence for it. If there were some kind of neutral, secular, if you want to say that, biographical data, that'd be one thing, but there just isn't. It's a guy that's always doing miracles, casting out demons, walking on water, and so on. I don't think that's any kind of historical evidence. Now, well,

0:24:34 Thomas: Can I just clear up quickly like a technical thing argument-wise? Often I've got, and actually this happened with some commenters too on the, when I did the more, guess, typical historical view episodes. Can we clear up exactly what it means to be a mythicist? You've sort of alluded to it a little bit, but just so we're totally on the same page. Say, because I've heard you say, I just heard you saying now, like maybe there was a guy named Jesus, but, you know, so that doesn't disqualify mythicism. For you. It's not enough to say maybe there was a guy, it's that there has to have been a guy named Jesus and he has to Have what like been a preacher or been like, what is the minimum amount we'd have to know for Jesus for the mythicist view to be wrong? I'm just wondering.

0:25:19 Bob: Actually, my answer to that always is if we had some contemporary reference to him, however unspectacular, for instance, we've got hundreds of old papyrus letters from that period found in Egypt where the climate being so dry allowed the stuff to survive. And there are letters home from traveling businessmen and so on. If in one such letter you had some guy writing to his wife and saying, well, when I was in Judea, I happened to hear the famous Nazarene Jesus, a wise man. To me, that would sink mythicism right there. That would imply. I, yeah.

0:26:06 Thomas: Okay, so it's so there has to be. So you're just saying there has To be some level of confirmation that what doesn't come come from the Gospels, or is that all you're looking for? I mean, is that probable? I mean how famous was Jesus at the time, do you think? Or would he have been, I guess, since you're alleging he didn't exist? Is that probable? If we're going with the historical view that he was, you know, I'm sure he would have been somewhat noteworthy, but wouldn't he have been notewworthy enough to guarantee that we would find some of these letters? Or are you to putting the burden of proof the other way.

0:26:18 Bob: And, That's right, well, Just suppose he was a teacher, uh, just a well-known rabbi that attracted crowds. Suppose somebody had happened to hear him preach, that's not unlikely, uh, and recorded that, oh yes, he's a wise man, he taught good things, that if it was not just a hey, Jesus, but Jesus the Nazarene. I mean, so, you know, it's supposed to be the guy in the Gospels. That'd be enough, and maybe one day they will find it. But the irony is when you do what most critical New Testament scholars do and say, well, okay, he didn't walk on water. He didn't change water into wine. He didn't curse the fig tree, and it withered up immediately. He didn't multiply loaves and fish. No, all right, that's legend. No virgin birth, of course, but he was a wandering healer and teacher. And so, OK, there's the core of it.

Well, these guys were a dime a dozen, as we read in Lucian of Samosata in the second century, says that that Syria is swarming with these guys saying, I am the son of God and those who believe in me will be saved from the coming cataclysm.

0:27:07 Thomas: Yeah.

0:27:57 Bob: And there's loads of them. It's just like today, there's loads of alleged healers. I wouldn't expect there ever to be an American history textbook chapter on Oral Roberts. And in the same way, would such a Jesus have been notable enough to be taken note of? Okay, maybe not, but then you've got to ask, well, if he wasn't that big a deal, how was he the fountainhead of Christianity? If you reduce him to such a degree, you got a lot of explaining to do. Why did he get mythologized all of a sudden? Whereas if he was a figure like the Buddha, who I doubt was a historical figure, or Mithras or Dionysus, and people thought they They existed in history too, though we know they didn't.

0:28:50 Bob: Why is it implausible to say that they were gradually evolving mythical figures? Because there's certainly no evidence of a historical Jesus as there is a historical Augustus again. And so it just seems to me you've got, you shave all of the miraculous spectacular stuff off what's left to begin Christianity. Whereas if it was myth all the way back, well, that happens. I mean, there was no historical Mithras. There was no hysterical Krishna and so forth. Nobody thinks that. And yet they're the founders, quote unquote, of ancient religions and so on. And it just seems to me that what scholars are doing is what the ancient Greeks called euhemerism.

0:29:39 Bob: They couldn't believe there had never been a historical Hercules. And so Herodotus says, okay, there must have been. All right, he didn't kill the Hydra, but he must have been a great, strong warrior. And they looked at references to different kings in different Hercules stories. And Herodotus says, well, according to this one, he would have lived in so-and-so period. But according to this one, it'd be a different one. I don't know. And he gave up. Plutarch thought Osiris was an ancient king of Egypt, but it's pretty obvious. He's just trying to distill a historical figure from the myth. And it seems to me we're dealing with the same sort of thing with Jesus. Obviously, we don't know. But it seems, to me, just very unlikely that there was such a figure.

0:30:27 Thomas: Yeah, it sounds like there's a lot of burden of truth shifting going on, and you look at it from one perspective, there's not enough evidence to say he wasn't a historical figure. But if you look at it form the opposite perspective, there's no enough evidence for sure he was a historical figure. So is that the issue here? Is it just a question of which direction you think we should be looking at it from?

0:30:49 Bob: Well, yeah. And how do you determine whether it's heads or tails? And to me, uh, the fact that you've got, like, that virtually, as far as I know, really completely the gospel and epistle evidence does not seem to be sober historical reporting, uh, that, uh,

0:30:50 Thomas: Right.

0:31:09 Thomas: Well, let me ask you, I was particularly convinced. The argument that I would say convinced me the most was the fact that why wouldn't they have just made, I'm sure you've heard it, obviously, well-versed in all this, but why wouldn'T they have made a better savior? Like, why wouldnT they have made a more consistent story? Why all the nonsense of getting to be born one place and then the census to get him to be another place, and if they truly were just making it up, why didn't they make it up better? Why does he not fulfill the Jewish prophecy better?

0:31:37 Bob: Well, Because there were no messianic prophecies in the sense that Christians claim Jesus fulfilled. The whole notion of the Messiah was almost an anachronism for that period. What do you mean? Was he the priestly Messiah expected among the Dead Sea Scrolls people? Was he the Davidic king? Was he primordial man of the Gnostics and going way back into Zoroastrianism and Hinduism? Was he some cosmic savior? What do you even mean by Messiah? There was a big conference some years ago now at Princeton, and a huge volume came out of it devoted to what did they think about a Messiah? And it seems pretty clear that there were different views. So would people be saying Jesus is the Messiah? It's almost like people arguing in first century Palestine, do you suppose Jesus is the second person of the Trinity? Nobody would have been thinking that way.

0:32:28 Thomas: Sure, yeah, that's fair, but at the same time, the idea is that he's being made up specifically, what, by the people writing the Gospels? I mean, why?

0:32:59 Bob: I don't think that's the case. In fact, I think that's ridiculous. Ridiculous. Some people argue that, but that seems to me utterly implausible. Joseph Atwill is is one who argues that way, and it seems to be, as you say, the Gospels would never read as they do if that were the case, the fact that they have all sorts of contradictions. It's just like in the Pentateuch with Moses, there are stories from all over the place that arose independently, and and collectors of these things are kind of scotch taping them together and sometimes trying to harmonize them. But like the Bethlehem versus Nazareth thing, Matthew and Luke both had heard that the son of David was supposed to be born in Bethlehem, but everybody called Jesus the Nazarene.

0:33:03 Thomas: Okay. Well,

0:33:52 Bob: So where was he born? And they come up with harmonizations, but completely opposite ones. For Luke, Mary and Joseph lived in Nazareth, and Jesus happened to be born while they were off in Bethlehem for this taxation census, and then they go back home to Nazareth. Hence, born in Bethlehem, lived in Nazareth. Matthew has it just the opposite. Mary and Joseph live in Bethlehem, where Jesus is born, and then they skip the country to go to Egypt, and then some years later come back to Palestine, but in fear of Herod and Archelaus, they go to Nazareth, where they've never lived before. Which is it? You can't harmonize them, but the evangelists are somewhat winging it to try to cobble together something from the bits and pieces they've heard. But there was no systematic attempt to invent Jesus like some sort of a hoax, like a bunch of TV writers working on the next episode of Seinfeld. That's grossly unhistoric.

0:34:58 Thomas: Sure. No, no. And I don't think that's what I'm really saying. But you are sort of, even in that description, you're alleging that they're reconciling details kind of however they want. So it seems to me that they would have been free to just go ahead and write that he was, you know, from Bethlehem all along or get rid of it. You know, if there's no guy to pin it to, is your argument that they were pinning it to something that was already invented by that time, rather than somebody somebody that could be referred to as Jesus of Nazareth?

0:35:32 Bob: We have the myths continue to evolve, and one thing that just somehow gets ignored all the time is when people say, well, there wouldn't have been sufficient time to create a Jesus myth. Yeah, sufficient from when? When? According to the mythicist idea, it could have been, and I think it was, developing for centuries out of the myths of the dying and rising gods like Osiris, Tammuz, and so on and so on, well known to the people of Israel because they're mentioned in the Old Testament that people were already mourning for the death of Tammu's, Ezekiel mentions that, and so on. It's no, it's not difficult to see how these old myths, I mean, even Jehovah apparently was believed to be a dying and rising God, like Marduk, his counterpart in Babylon. And it just, so there's the floor drops out of it. You no longer have to, like it to say that there was or was not time for it to develop implies that you think, yeah, a committee got together and and made him up more or less at the time he was supposed to have lived.

0:35:47 Thomas: Well, yeah, if he didn't exist, then it doesn't really matter, right? When, yeah.

0:36:44 Bob: But that's just a fiction. That's just completely arbitrary. If there was no historical Jesus, there's no way to tell how far back the developing myth began. And I think it goes way back.

0:36:56 Thomas: Well, but then, but dann if that's true, okay, if that'S true, though, doesn't it seem coincidental that all these books came out around the same time? I mean, there were a few different authors of the Gospels, right? And then you've got the epistles that are kind of referring, it doesn't seem odd that they all kind of started referring to this guy who recently died around the same time. If what you're saying is true, and it could have happened to, you know, virtually any time because he's totally made up, why so neatly packed together, I guess?

0:37:10 Bob: Not so neatly. In fact, there are Jewish and Jewish Christian traditions that in the Talmud, in Epiphanius of Salamis, in the Christian bishop in the fourth century, there are various estimates as to when Jesus lived. Did he live 100 BCE, or was he born a bit later, but not the New Testament time? When did he die? Irenaeus thought Jesus was 50 years years old when he died during the reign of Claudius, and it just seems to me nobody remembered a definitive century the guy lived in? Who put him to death?

0:38:11 Bob: There's like the Gospel of Peter that says it was Herod Antipas, and of course the canonical Gospels say it was Pontius Pilate, and then Mark knows both traditions, I mean Luke does, and tries to harmonize him by having the trial before Herod Antipas end with Jesus' acquittal, and yet he sends him back to Pilate, who condemns him, though Pilate already washed his hands of it, figuratively. What's he doing? Well, he's just scotch-taping together contradictory traditions.

0:39:07 Thomas: All right, that's all for part one. Of course part two will be available early to patrons at patreon.com slash atheist You can go find that very soon. Maybe even now But if you're unable to be a patron, no big deal. No hard feelings. You'll have the show on Thursday like normal. Still plenty to come in part two, there's those Josephus references we get to talk about, those are always a big thing, and And plenty more. I really appreciate Dr. Price coming on the show and accepting my very non-expert questions and being a good sport about that. It was really fun to record with him. All right. Well, I guess that's all I have for you for today. I'll see you at part two, whether or not it'll be immediately for those patrons or on Thursday.

0:39:53 Thomas: Either way, I hope to see some of you on Friday at the Myth Information Conference in Milwaukee, I'm really excited. I hope you'll be there and I'll see you then.