AS286: Dr. Robert Price on Jesus Mythicism, 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 286, and I'm your host, Thomas Smith. All right, here we go with part two with Dr. Robert Price. Very excited for this one, and I will just get right into it and see you afterward.

0:00:58 Bob: So it's not like there was—that people were just free to write any old thing.

0:01:03 Thomas: But how, well, I Guess, but then it seems all really coincidental to me that we've got I get the idea that the basic story of this hero mythology could have evolved, sure. Definitely possible. I'm not saying it's impossible or anything, but it does seem weird that they're reconciling all these facts that all of a sudden were very crystallized right around the first century. I that the gospel writers aren't just making it up from whole cloth.

It sounds like you're admitting, or you're not admitting rather, but you're saying they're not making it up whole cloth because that's obviously not true because they're trying to reconcile all these things. But it sounds like rather than them reconciling actual details about a person, which seems to me like a compelling reason for the, I mean, that seems to be just a natural reason why, 50 years later, 60 years later 70 years later whenever the given gospel was written seems to make sense that maybe some details would be fuzzy, especially back then with, you bad record keeping and, just you loose oral tradition. But it seems weirder to me to suspect that there would be this fake guy who evolved over time. He is a kind of a hero story. But then right around that time, there are all these crystallized sort of bits of knowledge about his biography that had to be reconciled. Does that make sense as a question? It just seems a little little coincidental to

0:01:04 Bob: Yes, but there's a good answer to it that Arthur Dreffs gave decades ago. As I mentioned before, the historicizing of Jesus looks like a move to provide a historical founder to give the emerging small-c Catholic church the copyright. Right. You Gnostics, you're a bunch of kooks. Everybody has visions. They contradict. No, we got our teaching from the bishops who got theirs, from the apostles who got their right from the horse's mouth, our founder Jesus. In fact, the debate appears in, oh, I think it was Pseudo-Clementine's fourth century work with second century sources, verses where Simon Magus, who was obviously supposed to be Paul in this story, is debating with Peter.

0:02:30 Thomas: Me. Okay.

0:03:20 Bob: And Peter says, "You claim to have been called by Jesus as an apostle in a vision? I mean, you never even met him. If he really called you, wouldn't you agree with us? Because we knew the guy." I mean, that's, Irenaeus argues in a similar way, it looks as if the historicization came at a certain point to win this argument, and that's the point at which they begin to fill in an earthly life of Jesus by appropriating stories that are strikingly parallel to Pythagoras, Apollonius of Tyana, and others, and who knows who they were originally told about. Many of the sayings of Jesus are found almost word for word among the Cynic and Stoic philosophers and the rabbis and so on.

0:04:13 Bob: So I think the whole Q source, Q1, the first level, was originally a Cynic document that didn't have Jesus' name on it. So it seems to me that the crystallization point is the institutional move to provide a historical founder to buttress their claims to authority, which is certainly how they used it. There's no question about that. And so they filled in the gaps as best they could. When the epistles were written, apparently that had not yet happened. And, uh, so, uh, it makes an awful lot of sense to me. Why would you suddenly have this stuff appear, uh, after the epistles, and, and, uh, yet at the same time, well, some big development happened, namely a historicization of a Jesus that was already believed in as a celestial god, right?

0:05:07 Thomas: Yeah, that's interesting. I certainly would love to reread the epistles with that in mind. To go back to that point you made earlier, I mean, I had just kind of taken it like you said, where these references to these little names, like what it was, the archons, is that what you said? Stuff like that. I had just taken that to mean Pontius Pilate and whoever. I definitely hadn't thought about it from that angle. I'd be interested to go back and read maybe with this in mind and see what I think. So I suppose that's a plausible conclusion. I do kind of still resist it, and I feel like it's a little more complicated than they're just having been a guy around that time and then all this crystallizes. One thing I want to ask you, so you say they sort of set this to paper and started creating this figure at this, this given time to solidify, I, what, their authority is, I think, what you said. Do I have you right there?

0:05:25 Bob: Yes.

0:06:05 Bob: Institutional authority, hey,

0:06:06 Thomas: Right. But they were persecuted.

0:06:07 Bob: This is just my view, I

0:06:08 Thomas: So, how does that conform with it, do you think? I mean, does that make sense?

0:06:12 Bob: Must have missed something. Well, how does what makes sense? They

0:06:15 Thomas: Well, it sounds like you're saying they did this to get this institutional authority. But really, they did THIS and were just horribly persecuted for it and killed and all that stuff. Sure, it somehow ended up working out in the end. And we look at it from that angle, like, oh, eventually Christianity took over. But it just as easily could have not. And it seems, what do you, how do you account for that motive-wise? It sounds like a suicide mission to me to try to do this. What do you think about their motives there?

0:06:19 Bob: Yes. Well, It's unclear when, uh, the persecution started. Uh, some people, like Candida Moss in her book The Myth of Persecution, says she observes, looking at the evidence for the third century empire-wide persecutions under Decius and Diocletian, that these things apparently have been way overblown. The persecution under Nero, it happened around 60, but that's only supposed to be a persecution within that city. We don't really know to the extent to which Jews persecuted Christians, because most of that comes from the Book of Acts, which is a second century historical novel, really.

0:07:31 Bob: And so the evidence for that is not very good, though there must have been some local persecutions. Now, why were they? Well, it has, well, interestingly in Acts, again, if you can trust it, it says that it was the Sanhedrin opposed Christianity because it gave aid and comfort to the Pharisaic doctrine of resurrection, which the Sadducees who were the real authorities, didn't believe in, and that they were giving Paul trouble because he was buttressing the argument of their rivals. It wasn't so much Jesus himself as exhibit A for our view. Romans persecuted what Christians they did simply because the Christians would not offer a pinch of incense in sacrifice to the Roman emperor, which everybody else did without a second thought, it was just like the Pledge of Allegiance.

0:08:27 Bob: But these, the Christians said, I can't do that. That implies I'm offering it to the godlike nature of Caesar. I don't believe in such a thing. So they didn't care a whole lot what the Christians did believe, because they had similar religions, like Mithraism was the official religion of the Roman Empire for a long time. And there were various religions that, you know, they didn't insist you be a Roman worshiper or the Olympian gods, but they did insist that you pledged allegiance to Caesar, which at some times these Christians would not do. So a lot of it really, it's impossible to say they objected to specific Christian doctrines or teachings even. It was just that they were considered subversives because they wouldn't salute the flag.

0:09:19 Thomas: Well, what about the whole render unto Caesar? What is Caesar's part? That wasn't, but I thought that was an attempt. Yeah.

0:09:23 Bob: You know, that's interesting. Was a long long history of radical Jews who were sick of foreign domination of Israel for hundreds of years, and the Zealots and others, the Sicarii, who assassinated Roman compromisers and so forth. So there were people that said, I mean, there'd been a revolution under Judas of Galilee in 6 CE over this. A, we don't have any other king but Jehovah. We're not going to pay taxes to Rome. That would be like the incense to Caesar. Most Jews didn't think that was a big deal, even though they collected the Roman taxes at the Jerusalem temple.

0:10:11 Bob: So Jesus is asked, asked, which view do you support? Is it lawful for us as Jews to pay taxes to Caesar or not? And apparently they're trying to back him into a corner because depending on who's in the audience, if he said, the zealots are right, we shouldn't pay taxes for that bum. Okay, they rat out Jesus and he gets crucified, which of course he does eventually anyway in the story. But if he says, uh oh no no what the heck who cares uh the the the others the zealots will say this guy's a quizling. So what does Jesus say to get out of it, if I understand the logic of it, uh, when he says render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's and unto God that which his God's, he's referring to the temple um, um, set up again, because Jews were, they didn't have any problem with using Roman Roman coins in everyday commerce, like the denarius.

0:11:08 Bob: They had Caesar's image on it, like we have presidents. And okay, it's an idol according to Jewish law, but what are you going to do? It's no big deal. But if you came to the temple to buy sacrificial animals, you couldn't use this kind of money to do it in the house of God, which is why they had the famous tables of the money changers in the temple. Uh, it was like an exchange. Uh, we'll take your your pagan Roman coins, but to pay for the animals, the sheep, etc, you gotta have um Jewish or Phoenician minted coins that don't have people's images on them. Now you can buy it with that and go ahead and have it sacrificed. Well, the logic of Jesus' statement is since God cannot receive Caesar's coins, they cannot be rendered to him, paid to him.

0:12:00 Bob: Then there shouldn't be any problem given the stinking pagan coins back to Caesar, which I think is a, whoever came up with it, it's a brilliant solution to a problem, but it has nothing to do with him being a sucking up to to the Romans or opposing them. He's saying, look, it's a moot point. You don't seem to realize the implications of your own rules with the not being able to use Roman money in the temple.

0:12:27 Thomas: But this is all made up, right? So, you're saying it was written and made up this story because Jesus isn't real. This didn't happen under your view. So this was made up for that purpose?

0:12:38 Bob: Oh yeah, in fact, for a long, long time, New Testament critics have done what's called form criticism, where you look at each saying and story and ask yourself, what does this seem to be trying to prove? Because there's really none of it that's-

0:12:52 Thomas: Right. And you know what? As I said that, I realized even non-mythicists might say that story was made up for a specific purpose. So that's not an exception, right, because there's going to be a lot of Jesus stories in the gospel that were made up anyway, of course. So maybe now now that I think about it, that's not, yeah.

0:12:54 Bob: Oh yeah and especially when you see either contradictions like did, is Jesus supposed to have endorsed or forbidden fasting? Well, they're like four different views attributed to Jesus on that issue. What did he say, was he a multiple personality, or or have different people decided to father their views onto Jesus so they can win the argument? I mean, you still have this happen in Appalachian churches where the people are illiterate and they have Bible debates making up the Bible verses. They don't know what's in there, but if they say, well, the Bible says it, then it's the same sort of thing that happened. Or in Islam, all the thousands of Hadith, the traditions of the prophet, what he did and said, all of them are trying to establish a legal precedent for this or that practice. Critical scholars realize none of this stuff is authentic. In fact, many of the Hadith transmitters eventually admitted they had made it up, and it was all right since it was for a pious purpose.

0:13:49 Thomas: Hmm. Okay.

0:14:09 Bob: Well,

0:14:09 Thomas: But I think where I got confused, and let me know where I have this wrong, is it sounded like I was asking, okay, so I was asking why would they have made this up in an effort to crystallize authority and to sort of maintain you institutional authority, but in actuality, all they were was persecuted. And it sounded like your, your answer was sort of they weren't really persecuted for being Christian so much as these certain things like not paying taxes or and so that's why I asked about the render unto Caesar passage. But I don't, did that answer the question? Because even if this was being made up, it still would have meant that they were paying taxes because of this passage or this story, right? So why, so why were they they being persecuted in light of that?

0:14:55 Bob: The thing about the persecution, as far as we know from what the ancient sources tell us, it was that they refused to offer the pinch of incense in the sacrificial fire to the genius, the divine spirit of the reigning Caesar, because they believed he was a god on earth. And Christians wouldn't do it. Jews had an arrangement that, well, we can't do that, so we won't do that, but tell you what, we will have daily prayers and sacrifices to our God on Caesar's behalf. And in fact, in 70 AD or CE, when that stopped, because the zealots took over and killed the priests, that's when Rome uh went to war with him.

That was the great um uh subversion, the great uh uh rebellion in in news, uh, to begin with. So Christians didn't have that because once they were distinct and distinct from Judaism, which took a while, uh, they were perceived as a new suspicious religion. Like, what's the matter with you guys, aren't the old ones good enough? Like, uh, the religion of uh of Bacchus was ruthlessly persecuted in Rome, though it was old, but the Romans weren't familiar with it. And so they had a hell of a time. If you had an old long established religion and you were loyal to Rome, well, we don't care what you believe. But Christianity was a new religion and wouldn't uh pledge allegiance. That seems to be the main reason, I, I

0:16:27 Bob: Mean, what did they care if you wanted to add Jesus to the pantheon of gods? In fact, some Romans did that.

0:16:34 Thomas: But then what did they gain by making this up, by becoming Christians, essentially making up this Christian, not, I get it, not they didn't make up the whole Jesus thing, but writing all these gospels at this time, like you said, in an effort to achieve some sort of dominance of some kind, what do you think was going on in their minds then? It clearly didn't work for them, at least. It might have worked for later Christians, but not for the the people at the time because of the persecution and because of the...

0:17:00 Bob: Why do you say that? Well, that's really a completely different issue, isn't it? I don't see how, when I say they're trying to secure their own authority among Christian groups, to say, you Gnostics, you don't know what the hell you're talking about. We got it right from the historical Jesus. So when was that? Well, pretty recently. And, of course, there are plenty of martyrdom sayings attributed to Jesus eventually, and they're anachronistic for the picture of Jesus you find in the Gospels where he's a popular itinerant teacher. Was persecution on the horizon according to the story itself? No, that's a later phenomenon, but they have to give authority to their pronouncements on it by attributing them to Jesus.

0:17:50 Bob: And there are various things. In the Gospel of Thomas, they ask Jesus if circumcision is worth going through. That is impossible in the time when Jesus supposedly lived in a Jewish framework. It only makes sense as you find it in the epistle to the Romans, which is written to Romans, Christians, converts from Rome, among whom were some Hellenized Jews. That's where the issue, should we go ahead and circumcise? That's Where That Comes to the Fore. That's its natural home. But Paul wasn't good enough. Somebody had to have Jesus address it. So he does, and it's an absurd anachronism, and there's a lot of stuff like that, like when Jesus says, whoever wants to be my disciple, let him take up his cross and follow me. Wait a second, surely that presupposes that the reader knows the story of Jesus' crucifixion. Nobody in that scene would have, it hasn't happened, yet what's he talking about?

0:18:52 Thomas: Right. Well, so much of it is written like that, though. I mean, a lot of the Gospels are just written with that you already know the story. But that's also compatible with a historical Jesus, don't you think?

0:18:54 Bob: Yeah, That's Right, and that's a big Yes, but my point is the gospel traditions are almost nothing but that kind of thing. And especially with the miracle stories, if you say, well, that's just been blown up from what? Instead of healing somebody, did Jesus say to Jairus, gee, I hear your daughter's dead. That's too bad. Anybody ready for lunch? I mean, what's the nucleus that would have caused anybody to remember it and magnify it? Magnify what? I like to say, I'm a big comic book fan, I like that the mainstream non-mythicists are saying, you know what, there was a historical Superman, but he was just Clark Kent. Well, if that's the case, who would remember him? How would this person ever have been magnified as Superman? And that's a same thing with, oh, Jesus was a first century Martin Luther King or Gandhi or something. Well, then, you know, we might have heard of him. But how would he have become this miracle working Superman? It just seems to me he must have been this mythic hero all the way back.

0:19:13 Thomas: Okay.

0:19:30 Thomas: Well, I get the argument. It's a good metaphor or analogy, rather, and I like it. I would say the difference is, and maybe why the analogy might break down a little bit, is with a Clark Kent, we're just talking about a normal guy. There's not really a lot of room to make up stuff about a normal guy and have that be connected to these insane superpowers. Whereas back in the day, I would think, I mean, there were people who did sort of magic tricks and did sort of healing tricks or did, and there were people who, certainly the things Jesus could have said if he is the person that we kind of think he might have been historically, or for the sake of argument, he could have said things that might have led people to kind of believe he was, he might've had a philosophy or sort of a fresh kind of set of ideas that might've led people to assign all these miracle stories to him.

0:21:13 Thomas: Over time, it's a little bit different than just picking a random guy and then just going straight to huge miracles. Do you see what I'm saying?

0:21:19 Bob: It still seems to me to be a huge gap. Why would you say a guy who said love your enemies, why would that lead you to say, you know, he changed water into wine and walked on the surface of the sea? What? What does that have to do with it? It's like saying a guy that knows logic must be from the planet Vulcan.

0:21:31 Thomas: Well, if he said, love your enemies, and he had, sure, sure. I mean, it's a good point. I would say that if he did enough things and he said enough things that made people think, well, this is a holy kind of guy. I mean people think the Pope is a super holy guy. You know, I get there's a lot of other stuff going on there. But if you think someone's super holy, oh, or how about Mother Teresa, for example. Example, eventually, given time, I feel like that can morph to like, well, he also did such and such thing that, yeah, it turned out to be, that was miraculous. And then, and the details can warp over 50 or 60 years to where you're signing these miracle stories to them. But I don't know, that's just how I look at it. But, I think you make an interesting point there, for sure.

0:22:18 Bob: You're already in that argument, assuming that this evidence is fictional. So why think, I mean, it's like Occam's razor, especially since most of these stories look so much like stories of Elijah, Elisha, and Moses and others in the Old Testament, like the multiplying food. What's more likely, that some guy did this or that somebody made up the story out of whole cloth or that they simply changed the name in a scriptural story that everybody already knew? I mean, it seems like a pointlessly far-fetched explanation.

0:22:56 Thomas: How about we talk about Josephus? We haven't, that seems to be a pretty famous part of it. It sounds like some people allege he had, what, up to like two references to Jesus? And then I'm sure you'll dispute those, I'm guessing.

0:22:59 Bob: Oh, yeah, that's fascinating.

0:23:09 Bob: I'm afraid so. In fact, recent scholarship on it, a couple of great articles. One shows that, take the Pilate references in it that are important. At the instigation of the chief men among us, Pontius Pilate had him crucified and so on. Well, somebody looked at the other three or four adjacent Pilate stories and showed how the grammatical and sentence structure is common in the others, but not in this one. And that all of of the things said are kind of insubordinate clauses and are after the fact, well, he had done this, he has done that, and that it's not, it doesn't look like it's written by the same guy.

0:23:58 Bob: Then another interesting thing says, another interesting paper showed that, probably Eusebius, who's the first ever to quote or mention this passage, probably made it up, which is what I've thought for a long time because all the it appears in a particular polemical treatise where he's making points about Christ and as the son of God and so on and all of the things said allegedly by Josephus fit in perfectly with the points Eusebius is trying to make in this treatise. Like, it makes no sense for Josephus to have said "about this time there appeared a man, if you can even call him a man." Well, it takes an awful lot of sense in Eusebius' context, because he's a Christian and he's trying to explain the incarnation.

0:24:50 Bob: And one thing after another, it matches up with the agenda of the particular treatise it's in, whereas it doesn't fit the context at all, even violates it in the work in the Jewish war by Antiquities of the Jews, where it supposedly appears. So Origen didn't have this in his copy of Josephus, and he lived a couple of hundred years, at least a hundred years before Eusebius. And so it just, everything militates against this. Now, some scholars say, well, you know, if, okay, a Jew couldn't have written this overtly Christian text. He was the Messiah and so forth. So let's cut out the stuff that would show it couldn't Have been written.

0:25:37 Thomas: Yeah, I was going to say, I think that's what Tim O'Neill I had on said, that some lines were clearly inserted, but not the core of it or something like that.

0:25:46 Bob: Yeah, That's just nonsense. I've been familiar with that argument for decades. It's an old one by now. But what what they're doing is to try to say that, well, this is not good evidence for us that we'd like to say Jesus was mentioned by a non-Christian source. This debunks it. Now, if we could just cut out that stuff that shows it's bad evidence, then it would look like good evidence. But it doesn't make any sense because among the things they cut out is the phrase, "He was the Christ." But then at the end of it they leave in "the tribe of Christians named after him has not gone extinct to this day." He hasn't mentioned Christ on this theory, he's mentioned Jesus.

Why doesn't he call them Jesuits or something? So it just doesn't make sense. It's it's obviously - and it appears to be based on Luke 24 - it's just everything points to the whole thing being a spurious interpolation by by Eusebius. I mean, the burden, they really have a burden of proof to try to - it's almost like defenders to the Shroud of Turin, come off it. It's been radiocarbon dated. It's the same sort of thing, give it up. The other reference is much shorter. And in this one, Richard Carrier has argued to my satisfaction that again, in context, this can't be referring to the Christian Jesus and James the Just, his brother, which is the way everybody's always said it.

0:27:21 Bob: It has to do with a different pair of brothers, Jesus or Yeshua, whatever, and James, the sons of Damnius. The thing was that they were in one, see, James was Jacob, the son of Dammius was in line to be high priest, but the house of Annas didn't like it, so they had him killed by a mob. And once the the Romans were told this they removed him from office and the the office passed to his brother Jesus son of Damnius well in the part they quote they say James the brother of Jesus called Christ well remember Christos was also a word as it is in the Greek translation of Daniel for priest and that's the whole point of the passage so I don't think that even means to refer refer to Jesus. It wasn't an interpolation. It's just not about the New Testament characters.

0:28:17 Thomas: So the first one you're saying totally fabricated or are inserted later or something like that by Christians. And the second one, think it doesn't actually refer to Jesus. Do I have that summary right?

0:28:23 Bob: Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Or James the Christian figure.

0:28:29 Thomas: Okay. Oh, right, because it says the brother. Is that what it says? The brother of Jesus?

0:28:35 Bob: And these Two guys whom we know from elsewhere in Josephus were in the priestly line. And when one was killed by his enemies, the other one took his place. Hence, he says James, the brother of Jesus, because he's the guy that's going to take over by the end of the story.

0:28:55 Thomas: Hmm. Okay. Let's see. What else can we cover? I mean, I suppose that dealt with Josephus since I don't have the historical knowledge to to ask any follow-ups on that. But is that all there is to it for Josephus then? It's just those two claims and then those are how you would typically rebut those claims?

0:28:55 Bob: Yeah.

0:29:13 Bob: He, he mentions John the Baptist at one point, and it's interesting that his account of his death at the hands of Herod Antipas doesn't exactly match what Mark says in the Gospels. Some people have suggested it's an interpolation, I wouldn't be surprised, but there's no similar cases with these others. You can easily say there was a John the Baptist, even if you don't, that is, he needn't have been a mythical figure, much less is made of him, uh, you don't have the same problems as you do with with a historical Jesus.

0:29:48 Thomas: Interesting, yeah, to compare those two. So you would say you would think that John the Baptist was a real person, but because there's not as much writing on it? Or is there equal evidence or is there or more evidence for John the Baptist.

0:30:03 Bob: Well, There's so little evidence that is even near contemporary, it's pretty much just uh um Josephus. There's a a lot of John the Baptist material, but it's in later Mandean documents where they have whole books devoted to John the Baptists, and he becomes an incarnate angel who is a savior and he gets mythologized the same way. So it's like with the Buddha, you wonder if it's the tail wagging the the dog, which is the real one, the myth or a brief mention in a historian. So I think it's quite likely there was a John the Baptist, but that's still a bit of an open question, much like Muhammad.

0:30:49 Bob: There's a good case to be made that Muhammad may have been a fictional character, but certainly not an open and shut case. I'd say The The Idea

0:30:57 Thomas: Oh, I was going to say, so what is your belief on that? Are you just kind of agnostic about it?

0:30:59 Bob: Uh So far, like one of the arguments that really surprised me when I heard it a few years ago, somebody pointed out that um the earliest references to the name Muhammad, which kind of sounds like a title, it means the illustrious one, just like the Buddha means the enlightened one, and so forth, the Christ, the anointed one. The earliest reference to it in in Arabic is a reference on coins, interestingly, by early Arab kings to Jesus, that he was the illustrious one. And so this one scholar says he thinks that he Was made into a different character to provide a kind of Arab Muslim counterpart to Jesus, just as the Quran is explicitly, even in the Quran, said to be a scripture for the Arabs who hitherto didn't even have the Bible translated into Arabic.

0:32:01 Bob: So I think there's a strong case there, though it's not open and shut. It's very suggestive, but I don't think you, though I would say that the idea of the Hadith and all the material that went into Ibn Ishaq's life of Muhammad, written about a hundred years after he supposedly lived, all of that is spurious, as as uh modern studies of the Hadith have shown, so that even if there was a Muhammad, we know virtually nothing about him, whereas we do know all kinds of stories and sayings were were made up by people who admitted it, uh, so it's a tough thing, I mean, it's very likely that there was no historical Buddha, that there was no Lao Tzu, it was certainly there was no Mithras or Krishna, and so it shouldn't surprise anybody there was now Moses, that's, he was originally a sun god, and it shouldn't seem outlandish, except that in our culture we've all been raised believing that Jesus was as historical as Abe Lincoln, was he may not have been.

0:33:09 Thomas: How do you account for the consensus being against you in this case?

0:33:14 Bob: It's the Christian culture, a huge number of Jesus scholars are Christians of a conservative or a liberal type. I'm a fellow of the Jesus Seminar, and even though many, though not all of them, want to radically redefine Christianity for the new millennium, that was a slogan they used, it's clear that they need a historical Jesus to mouth their views. For them, Jesus was a progressive in the modern sense. It's just an outrageous example of what Albert Schweitzer pointed out so long ago, that that uh that the historical Jesus thing appeals to theological liberals, and today that's almost the same thing as political liberals, uh, which I say not to denounce them, but more and more it's it's uh They're redefining uh uh Christianity as liberal politics, and uh they they need a Jesus to say things like that. And it sounds, Jesus suddenly becomes a kind of a feminist and teaches vegetarianism and he's anti-colonialist.

0:34:22 Thomas: You know, even Coming from a different, it's funny, again, I don't want to get too much into, do, but even coming from a different place than you politically, I actually, that does kind of annoy me quite a bit that liberal Christians make Jesus out to be kind of whatever they need him to be for whatever liberal argument they're making. I've long been annoyed at that, so I can kind of agree with you there.

0:34:42 Bob: And they're just doing what Christians have always done. It legitimates their claims because if they just argue that, well, Hillary Clinton said it or Obama said it, they know the pew potatoes, the common church attenders are not going to be be persuaded by that. But if you say, well, you know, Jesus was a radical, and like John Dominic Crossan and others argue, Richard Horsley, then hopefully, from their standpoint, the pew potatoes, the sheep will get in line. They're doing exactly what Arthur Dreff said the early church did when they historicized Jesus to begin with, to use him as a ventriloquist dummy me to say, yeah, our divine founder said this and the guys that trained us heard him say it. So this is it.

0:35:28 Bob: Don't believe those Gnostic weirdos over there. Things don't change much.

0:35:33 Thomas: But what about, though, to go back to the consensus question, I think a counter-argument has been there's plenty of Jewish scholars who would have no particular reason to who say Jesus is real, but who still do, right?

0:35:34 Bob: Oh yeah.

0:35:47 Bob: Well, yes, there is because they know mythicism. Now I'm not saying they're scheming about this, but it's a question of can you dare to think outside of the box? I don't mean to pretend to believe leave things you don't believe. But a lot of the work, the things said about Jesus by Jews and liberal Christians today is in favor of ecumenism, which is a good thing. I mean, they're trying to wipe out the horrible Christian anti-Semitism. But in order to do it, you have both sides interested in saying, you know, Jesus was really more of a Jewish innovator than a a Christian. And we Christians need to follow in those footsteps. And so if you said there was no history, in fact, I've had this said to me, I was disinvited to give a talk by a Presbyterian bigwig once he realized I thought there might not have been a historical Jesus because this was Jewish-Christian dialogue.

0:36:48 Bob: And he knew that would not fit in, that you couldn't say to Jews that Jesus didn't exist, not to these Jews, because they wanted a Jewish historical Jesus to be able to use as a bridge to Christians in ecumenism, which of course I like, but I think it's phony axe grinding history. I don't think anybody is pretending, but you can see how certain options look very attractive. Or Jesus as a right winger, a John Bircher. There've been plenty of people that said that, or Jesus says they're racist. They're lunatics that say that. And so they need a Jesus who said this, because if I say it, who cares? But if Jesus said it, you got to believe it. And, uh, so I don't think people can see beyond that.

0:37:35 Thomas: And you think Jewish scholars are kind of falling into the same pattern.

0:37:39 Bob: Oh yeah. Yeah. And though there are certainly good stuff being written by him, like Hugh Schoenfield was a great Jewish New New Testament scholar, David Flusser, Robert Eisenman. And I've learned a lot from their works. It doesn't matter to me, you know, Jewish, Buddhist, whatever. You know, I don't really care. But it does seem to me that there is a reason for both groups to want there to be a historical Jesus and they would suffer without one.

0:37:40 Thomas: Hmm. Mm-hmm.

0:38:13 Thomas: Interesting. Well, let me ask you this. How do you feel? So let's build the suspense for Myth Information 3 a little because since we're both going to be there. How do you feel about that debate? Are you excited about it?

0:38:23 Bob: Yeah, I, uh, I have read some of Bart's books and I'm reading more because I'm writing a book about his work called Bart Ehrman Interpreted, and, uh, I uh really disagree with him on the the mythicist topic and I think he doesn't really come to grips with some of the evidence. And I think his position is undermined by certain blind spots, but I have great respect for him. I love his writing and I love the way he does what I try to do, to communicate New Testament scholarship in plain spoken terms and with a dose of humor. I'm a lot like him in that way. So I've never actually met him.I've just had email correspondence with them, so I'm really, uh, looking forward to to meeting him. Oh.

0:38:31 Thomas: Great.

0:39:13 Thomas: So it sounds like you respect him a lot as a scholar, just you disagree on the mythicism question, but there's probably a lot you agree on.

0:39:16 Bob: Yeah. Yeah. Though, ultimately, Who cares, right? I mean, I have nothing invested in it. I don't care if I'm the only weirdo who does believe in it. It doesn't matter to me, okay?

0:39:28 Thomas: Well, it should be a really interesting debate. I'm excited to watch it. Well, yeah, I can't think of any other questions that I have. Have. If you're satisfied with arguments the as you've laid them out and you don't think we need to add any addendums or anything, then we can go ahead and call it a show. What do you think?

0:39:43 Bob: Yeah, I sure appreciate your having me on. I'm

0:39:46 Thomas: Oh, I appreciate you coming on so much. And actually, I will say I wanted to avoid it for this particular recording, because I really wanted to focus on mythicism. But I wouldn't mind to have you back another time to talk politics. I know it's kind of a, or maybe maybe not politics per se, but what your view of kind of the political connections, the sort of atheist liberal dogma that you outlined. I wouldn't mind hearing your thoughts on that. I just didn't want to kind of go down that rabbit hole today.

0:40:12 Bob: Sure, sure.

0:40:13 Thomas: But if you were willing.

0:40:13 Bob: Yeah. I'm Kind of tired of getting a firestorm of denunciations from, uh, broad-minded, tolerant, intolerant people, but I don't mind standing up for what I think either. So that's, bravo.

0:40:24 Thomas: Well, that's excellent. I like to hear all sides on the show. So, all right. Thank you so much, Dr. Price, for coming on. I really enjoyed that.

0:40:32 Bob: Oh, me too. Thank you.

0:40:48 Thomas: All right, that's it for part two with Dr. Price again. Thanks so much to Dr. Price for coming on. Really appreciate that. Now I should note, historian Tim O'Neill, who represented the consensus view, has already been messaging me a bit saying he's eager to address some of these things, but also he said he's gonna try to tune in to the debate. I think there's a live broadcast of the debate that, wow, Wow, as of now, if you're listening to this on time, it will be tomorrow.

This is normally out on Thursday. The debate is on the Friday, the 21st. So, this won't be the end of this particular topic. We'll have more to say on it, and ultimately I can give you my thoughts eventually, but I'm, you know, I don't know how much my thoughts matter that much in this instance, because I'm not the expert, and I'm not very good at history, so I still lean toward Jesus having been a historical person myself, but I'll see how the debate affects that, and I hope to see some of you guys there very, very soon, likely, if you're listening to this again on time. Time now to thank my new patrons. Thank you so much Matthew Kennedy, Dave, Emily, Shaun Barber, and Frost11tbh. Thanks for becoming patrons. I very much appreciate it. And, of course, I want to thank all my all-time greats.

Since it's Thursday's show, that's what I gotta do. I want to thank Hunter Ash, Sakashite Fukasumi, Jesse, Inciting Incident Podcast, Along Blackcock, Kaylee Reiser, Jonathan Moyet, Jay Aldenwalt, Ian Rosano, Pretheist, Roger Metcalf, Robert Schepis, Sammy, Adrian Borschoff, Blackhawks, Aerosign Sharks, Steve Sigmund, Peter Skelton, Brian Gareford, Dale, Matt Garrett, and that's it.

0:42:36 Thomas: Thank you guys for being my top patrons over at patreon.com slash atheist. I hope you enjoyed this part too early. With that said, have a great weekend. I hope to see you, some of you listeners, at Myth Information 3. If not, no big deal, and I will talk to you on Monday.