Aside from all the textual references to Jesus confirming that he existed (especially from Paul, who met people that knew Jesus in real life), there's also just the sheer implausibility of Christianity coming to exist at all if there was no Jesus. If Jesus did exist, it's pretty easy to see how the religion got started, but mythicists have to believe an ad-hoc explanation, and any such explanation will fit with the historical data quite poorly. Either a massive cult just suddenly sprung up out of nowhere, worshipping a guy who never existed but who they claimed was from the recent past, at a time when many of them were still alive, or the Christians originally didn't believe Jesus was a real person, despite all of the textual evidence that very early Christians did, and they somehow switched over to 100% uniform belief in historicity in just a few generations, with no one ever commenting on this change (not even to try to argue that it never happened) and even secular sources being fooled into thinking that they had always believed in a flesh-and-blood Jesus, and that this Jesus was a real person.
From skimming the historicity of Muhammad wikipedia page it looks like his existence and relation to the Islamic faith is much more in question, but I haven't seriously looked into either case.
Really? I don't know as much about early Muslim history, but I would expect everything I said here to apply to Muhammad as well, perhaps to an even greater extent.
Great post! I agree with the facts presented, but I also want to raise a philosophical point about personal identity.
Suppose I write a biography of you. It’s a thorough description of your life, and it gets everything correct, including all the minute details. Then suppose I make some edits to it – I change your middle name, or your favorite TV show – such that now there are a few details that are incorrect. Ok, you might say, it’s still a biography of you, just with some minor errors. But then suppose I keep doing this – not only altering facts about you that are more and more fundamental to your identity – but also embellishing things and inserting new stories about your life that are entirely made up. So there is a gradual transition of this book from “accurate biography” to “mostly accurate but with some errors” to “loosely based on your life” to “fictional story about someone else that is entirely unrecognizable to you”. At what point in this transition does the character in the book cease to be *you*? It depends on how many facts are changed and how fundamental they are to your identity, but ultimately it’s an arbitrary distinction.
I think many historical figures lie somewhere on this spectrum. There’s often some delta between historical figures as they actually existed and the conception of them in the public consciousness. For example, there’s a lot of folklore surrounding the Founding Fathers that isn’t true. George Washington didn’t have wooden teeth, and he didn’t chop down a cherry tree as a child. But nobody thinks these stories are fundamental to his identity, so we say that Washington was a real person who existed.
But on the other end of the spectrum, consider Santa Claus. Although we recognize that he isn’t real, there is an actual historical figure who he is based on – Saint Nicholas of Myra. Now clearly, Nicholas didn’t live at the North Pole with elves or fly on a sleigh with reindeer. If Nicholas were to hear a description of Santa Claus, he would of course reject the notion that it’s him. Perhaps the only thing they have in common is their penchant for gift-giving. In this case, the folklore has evolved so extensively that it is more accurate to say that Santa Claus isn’t real, even if there technically is a real person who we can tie him to.
I view Jesus as being somewhere between Washington and Santa Claus on this spectrum, though closer to Washington. You make a compelling case that *someone* named Jesus really existed as a historical figure. But is he the same Jesus as the character from the Bible? No doubt the two can be linked - there are historical facts about the real person that the Bible gets right – his name, where he was born, that he got crucified, etc. But on the other hand, if the individual who really existed wasn’t born of a virgin, didn’t perform miracles, didn’t rise from the dead, etc…then I don’t know, that seems like a lot of (pretty important and fundamental) aspects of someone’s identity/biography to get wrong! I don’t think there’s an objective fact of the matter, but personally I would just phrase it as “Jesus was based on a real person”.
My understanding is that mythicists flat out deny there was a real person named Jesus Christ who was born in Bethlehem and executed by the Romans. If you agree that there was, you aren't a mythicist.
Thank god someone else with sense. I've been making this argument for years haha. I think the best way to state it is: "the biblical Jesus is a fictional character based on a real person". I don't understand how any other framing ends up making more sense.
I don't think this is a mythicist perspective, but at the same time any other arguments about the historical Jesus (and remember, the real person wasn't actually named Jesus) that miss this point end up going very wrong in my opinion.
Mythicism is to atheism as young earth creationism is to Christianity. You can see this because they (a) have no scholarly support to speak of and (b) have instead fast-talking proponents who employ deceptive debate tactics.
History furnishes many examples of charismatic individuals who indisputably existed who founded successful religions with millions of followers: Muhammad, Joseph Smith, L Ron Hubbard, and others.
Why would anyone assume this is improbable in the case of Christianity?
> This view is rejected by ~100% of serious scholars; Bart Ehrman notes “There is not a single mythicist who teaches New Testament or Early Christianity or even Classics at any accredited institution of higher learning in the Western world.”
This is correct. Evidence strongly suggests that Jesus, the man, existed. However, it’s vital to note that Bart Ehrman considers himself to be an “agnostic atheist” due to the inconsistencies and contradictions contained within Christian doctrine and the lack of any divine evidence. Ehrman doesn’t believe Jesus was divine. https://ehrmanblog.org/on-being-an-agnostic-or-atheist/
Everyone who’s interested in the history of Christianity should read Bart Ehrman or watch his lectures on Jesus. They’re excellent, and he knows as much historically about Jesus as anyone I’ve come across.
Yes, it's disheartening to see so many of my fellow atheists embracing fringe views. Bible-believing Christians say, "Don't listen to what the historians say about Jesus, they're biased!" And a bunch of atheists say the same thing. "Don't listen to the experts! They're biased!" Well, for sure in both cases _someone_ is biased. This is not the case of an innocent misunderstanding.
Of course you’re completely right. A weaker source which I think also provides evidence is Josephus’s Testimonium Flavanium. It has much more clearly been subjected to Christian interpolation, but the original is probably the earliest textual description of Jesus’s role in Christianity from a non-Christian source.
"Despite this, mythicism is taken seriously by quite a number of people on the internet. Turns out that the consensus on atheist Reddit is not always in accordance with the scholarly consensus, which is a development that I find shocking!"
> If Christians were adding an extra sentence, it would be quite odd for them to describe Jesus as having been crucified, rather than something grander, like that he was God incarnate
Disagreed with this on face. If a Christain was going to interpolate this guy, adding the Crucifixion, which is a central event in the faith, seems quite reasonable. Adding grand proclamations of God to this guy’s works would have been a dramatically more obvious addition that would not have had any chance of being taken seriously.
> Adding grand proclamations of God to this guy’s works would have been a dramatically more obvious addition that would not have had any chance of being taken seriously.
That's kind of what we see with the interpolations we know about, though? They didn't interpolate these things to trick sceptics a thousand years later, their audience was fellow Christians in a majority Christian society. In Josephus's book "Testimonium Flavianum" there is a passage about Jesus that pretty much everybody believes is an interpolation and...well, subtle it ain't.
"And there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if indeed it is necessary to call him a man, for he was a doer of paradoxical works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure, and many Jews on the one hand and also many of the Greeks on the other he drew to himself. He was the Messiah.
"And when, on the accusation of some of the principal men among us, Pilate had condemned him to a cross, those who had first loved him did not cease to do so. For he appeared to them on the third day, living again, the divine prophets having related both these things and countless other marvels about him. And even till now the tribe of Christians, so named from this man, has not gone extinct."
To the lack of professors advocating mythicism, I would point out that this is a field that is massively corrupted both by its history and current incentives. For most of the history of western universities, these were very christian institutions, which existed in significant part to train clergy. Nobody could be employed by such an institution who denied the divinity, much less the existence of christ. Even in a modern context, what sorts of institutions are actually going to employ new testemant scholars? The University of Delaware, where I did my undergrad, employs exactly 0. You may occasionally find one, such as Ehrman, at a secular university, but not often. They are employed by seminaries, divinity schools, religious institutions. These are still places where you can't be a mythicist, because people are paying you to train them to be clergy. Even Ehrman, who teaches undergrads at a secular institution, has to publish in peer reviewed publications. Who is doing that peer review? All those people at the religious institutions. So it is pretty obvious that the professors in these fields would deny mythicism whatever the state of the evidence was, and thus we should infer nothing at all from their views on the topic.
> The basic case against mythicism about Jesus is rather similar to the basic case against mythicism about, say, Thales or Pythagoras: a bunch of people wrote about them existing. Normally, people do not write in detail about people who don’t exist.
What? Since when? Of course they do! There is a whole genre of books and various other media called "fiction". Even in the ancient world, people spent a great deal of time writing about various titans, gods, and other supernatural entities that I assume you agree did not exist. And of course people are mistaken about second-hand facts all the time, presumably even more so in the ancient world where facts were much harder to verify and norms for verifying facts and reviewing publications did not exist. So I start from the position that any character in an ancient manuscript may not have existed, unless there is serious evidence to the contrary. The burden of proof is on the person claiming Jesus was real, not on the mythicist. So lets look at that evidence.
With regard to Tacitus, of course it is hearsay! According to wikipedia, he was born in 56 CE. Jesus's execution is traditionally dated to the 30s CE. Tacitus can't have been there to see it for himself. He likely never spoke to anyone who was. It may be that he heard the claim about Jesus having been crucified from non-christians, but it was definitely hearsay. I'll happily grant that there were christians in late 1st century Rome, and that non-christians often uncritically accepted their claim that this Jesus guy existed and was crucified, but that is weak evidence that it actually happened. Lots of people believe untrue things all the time, especially when people around them believe those things and there is no refutation readily at hand.
As to whether Tacitus even wrote the passage in question, again I see this as questionable. Ehrman has written quite a bit on interpolations in the bible, he seems to think that additions were quite common in manuscripts that were hand copied over the centuries. When the copying was done by christian monks, the stuff those monks believed is particularly suspicious. And it seems quite plausible to me that a monk messing with a manuscript written by a pagan would choose to write the non-supernatural thing that he believed rather than the supernatural one. So maybe the passage is original, maybe it isn't, but the frequency of changes like this to ancient texts certainly weakens Tacitus' usefulness as evidence for a historical Jesus.
Josephus is maybe a little better as evidence for a historical Jesus, but only a little. Here are some other possibilities you don't seem to consider. Firstly, James might have been real, but have been lying or speaking metaphorically when he claimed to be the brother of Jesus. There are lots of religious leaders blatantly lying today, I would expect to also find some in ancient Jerusalem. There are also lots of christians who speak of "brothers and sisters in christ", and even christian monks who address each other as "brother" despite being biologically unrelated. James might have been doing either of these things. It is also possible that that passage is an interpolation which appeared first in Origen. Later monks who has read Origen then copied Josephus, noticed that the passage was missing, thought it was missing by mistake, and added it in, mistakenly thinking they were adding it back in. And the copies of Josephus that we have today are the ones, or descendants of the ones, that those monks made. It can be an interpolation in both sources without the two additions being independent.
As for Paul, he seems the weakest of the bunch. He was writing decades after the fact. He was a christian trying to spread his faith. And he doesn't even claim to have met Jesus precrucifiction. Even if he believed a historical Jesus existed, that is very weak evidence that one actually did.
At the end of the day, we have nothing that Jesus wrote. We have nothing plausibly written by anyone who even claimed to have met Jesus. We have no text, and no historical event, which is better explained by a historical Jesus existing in the early 1st century than by a movement of christians existing in the late 1st century. So nothing here should move us off the default presumption that any character in an ancient document may have been entirely fictitious.
//To the lack of professors advocating mythicism, I would point out that this is a field that is massively corrupted both by its history and current incentives.//
There are various considerations that are extremely inconvenient to Christians which most new testament scholars accept. For instance, there's a broad consensus that the Gospels weren't written by the people they're attributed to. There are many secular new testament historians at various institutions. None of them accept mythicism. The question is why.
//What? Since when? Of course they do! There is a whole genre of books and various other media called "fiction".//
But Tacitus, Josephus, and Paul weren't writing fiction. They wrote about Jesus as if he was a real person. Two of them were credible historians. The last one knew the early Christian community.
//With regard to Tacitus, of course it is hearsay! According to wikipedia, he was born in 56 CE. Jesus's execution is traditionally dated to the 30s CE. Tacitus can't have been there to see it for himself.//
Tacitus got his information about Jesus from talking to people. The question is, of course, which people he talked to. It seems that he was not primarily consulting the Christians as he didn't trust them. So he was likely consulting other people who knew Jesus. In addition, it's very hard to believe that people would be claiming that Jesus had lived *20 years ago* when he had never existed. You couldn't get people to believe that there was a literal earthly figure just a few decades past. This is why the mythicists like Carrier say Paul believed Jesus was an angel, and only Mark at his later date adopted the historicist position. While it's theoretically possible that the early Christians would all pretend some guy existed just a few years ago, there's no reason to think that and literally no historical precedent.
//As to whether Tacitus even wrote the passage in question, again I see this as questionable. Ehrman has written quite a bit on interpolations in the bible, he seems to think that additions were quite common in manuscripts that were hand copied over the centuries.//
Ehrman, for the record, doesn't think the Tacitus passage is an interpolation. No serious new testament scholar does. Interpolations weren't that rare, but they rarely added totally new information. IN later years no one doubted Jesus's existence, so an interpolator had no reason to randomly insert that into a passage from Tacitus, and if they were going to do that, they'd have a more dramatic description than the extremely mild one provided by Tacitus.
//Firstly, James might have been real, but have been lying or speaking metaphorically when he claimed to be the brother of Jesus. There are lots of religious leaders blatantly lying today, I would expect to also find some in ancient Jerusalem. There are also lots of christians who speak of "brothers and sisters in christ", and even christian monks who address each other as "brother" despite being biologically unrelated.//
I addressed the second interpretation in the article--James is distinguished from other brothers of Christ, and there's no reason Josephus would have referred to James as the brother of Christ if all Christians said that. It's true James could have, in theory, called himself the brother of Christ in a way that was unique, but why would anyone else have followed him. The early Christians new James--they knew his family. Why would they, as well as Tacitus and Josephus, have agreed his brother was Christ?
//As for Paul, he seems the weakest of the bunch. He was writing decades after the fact.//
No he wasn't. He was writing about 15-20 years after the crucifixion of Jesus. His statements in various places, e.g. the creed in first Corinthians, are likely early creeds that date back to just a few years after Jesus's death--even Carrier grants this which is why he tries to say that Paul didn't believe in a literal Jesus. It's hard to believe that the Christians would universally believe in and describe the presence of a guy names Jesus just a few years prior when no such person had existed. By far the simpler hypothesis is just that there was such a person and tails about him grew more dramatic over time. There are lots of examples of this.
//At the end of the day, we have nothing that Jesus wrote. We have nothing plausibly written by anyone who even claimed to have met Jesus.//
Also true of Hannibal and Alexander the Great. Most people didn't write anything and most things written about most people came lalter.
//We have no text, and no historical event, which is better explained by a historical Jesus existing in the early 1st century than by a movement of christians existing in the late 1st century.//
Well I obviously dispute that. Tacitus, Josephus, and Paul providing extremely ordinary descriptions of the life of Jesus is not likely if he'd never existed. There are no other examples of a religious movement claiming a guy existed just a few years prior and being someone's brother and then this being believed by the serious historians of the day.
//So nothing here should move us off the default presumption that any character in an ancient document may have been entirely fictitious.//
"May have been" isn't the right way to phrase things. Sure he may have been fictitious--it's possible though unlikely. But certainly we shouldn't start by presuming those people written about in ancient documents were probably fictitious--most of them won't, especially if sober historians were writing about them just a few decades later.
It's first worth pointing out that I think you are trying to defend a position that is different from what mythicists supposedly purport, and that this conflation is very common in the internet atheist community. The claim "there exists some non-negligible possibility that Jesus was an entirely invented figure" is a vastly weaker claim than "Jesus was an entirely invented figure". Proving the first still leaves you with the reality that the most likely situation is a historical Jesus, but because the motivation is to find the maximally anti-Christian position, it is conflated as being identical to the second position.
>There is a whole genre of books and various other media called "fiction".
This is hardly even worth responding to, because it's clearly irrelevant. The sources we are discussing are not fictions. Fictions are self-consciously non-truthful, because they are stories. Fiction is extremely ancient, and even going back to the very beginning of written works we can easily distinguish between intentional fictions and things that purport to record truth.
>So I start from the position that any character in an ancient manuscript may not have existed, unless there is serious evidence to the contrary
This is a genuinely absurd position that only makes sense if you are back-filling it into your belief system because you *want* to believe Jesus is a mythic figure. Hellenistic titans, deities, etc. are very rarely (if ever) described in a way that straightforwardly implies they are regular flesh and blood humans. There are a handful of figures in ancient history that blend the lines between myth and flesh, but even then, the consensus position among scholars is typically that these are historical figures who are then mythicized.
Take Gilgamesh. The evidence of his existence is not really much better than Jesus. There are a handful of inscriptions implying his existence, but none of these are direct first-person accounts by a person who has met him, and none of them are written by him (as with most ancient figures, we should not be surprised by this, as literacy was not widespread). Of course, it's always possible the Sumerians were just making him up even then If we really hold to this idea that we must have ironclad evidence a figure is real or else they were made up, then we must reject the idea that Gilgamesh was a historical figure. However, scholars of ancient Mesopotamia (who are *not* subject to the various pressures you describe in your post) broadly accept his historicity. And the reason for this is obvious: people, writing fiction, typically write in the fictional mode. People, writing records, typically write in the historical mode. It is almost always easy to distinguish these, even going very far back in time -- we can tell that Homer is not attempting to write a serious historical account, unlike later Greek writers who are very clearly and self-consciously trying to write historical records. The records in the historical mode are not reliable, they often contain legends or lies, but nevertheless we rely on them to construct our pictures of basic facts because *they are not fiction* and the idea that they would be entirely invented out of whole cloth and be about figures who never even existed makes one wonder why a trained, literate individual would waste their precious time and resources recording it in the first place.
And this brings us to the strongest argument for historicism that no one has a really good answer to. For the mythicist case to be true, there must have been some cult that formed among a group of people, the apostles, who we know existed because they are attested to. These people must have decided among themselves that there was some celestial being named Jesus, who was not a real person, but whom they would worship as the prophesied Jewish messiah, despite the fact that the Jewish messiah is clearly indicated to be a person who will actually exist in the real world. Their motivations for doing this instead of just following one of the various apocalyptic Jewish preachers that were roving around the wilderness at the time (e.g. John the Baptist himself) are unclear. Maybe for fun. However, before they are even all dead, it seems that their entire cult has decided to instead believe that this entirely made-up figure was actually flesh and blood. Absolutely no remnants of the original belief structure survive, to the point that Paul, who spends a fair amount of time rejecting various ideas he thinks are bad, doesn't even bother to mention this, so there couldn't have even still been a large fragment of "Jesus is non-real" believers. Instead of a real man becoming later divinified, which was an extremely common practice in the country that this entire drama is unfolding in and which we have countless examples of throughout human history, a divine figure was humanized and back-filled into history -- something that seems to directly reduce their divine status and run contrary to the platonic impulses of Christianity's most prominent early boosters, who were all educated and Hellenized.
What is the balance of probabilities between this scenario and the other one (where there is a real figure with charismatic authority who claims to be the fulfillment of a widespread and well-known prophesy, is executed, and is then divinified by his followers?)
You're right that I am not arguing that Jesus definitely did not exist. Like many things about ancient history, I consider it unknown and likely unknowable due to sparsity of evidence. If I had to put a number on it, I'd say 70% that a historical Jesus did exist. Bentham's Bulldog's thesis was " I’m going to explain why mythicism is not taken seriously by anyone serious and why it’s almost certainly false." So he seems pretty clearly to have drawn up the lines in a way that places Jesus-agnostics like me in the same camp as people who are certain there was no historical Jesus. My uncertainty definitely contradicts his position. Whether you want to call me a "mythicist" is up to you.
My reference to the genre of fiction was mostly to point out the absurdity of Bentham's Bulldog's claim that nobody writes in detail about non-existent people. Otherwise I agree it is mostly irrelevant. Though I don't think other cultures, present or past, always conceptualize fiction v nonfiction the way we do. I don't think the ancients thought they were doing fiction when they wrote about the gods, I think they thought they were doing history.
I know basically nothing about Gilgamesh, or what the historical evidence for him is, or what scholars think about it. If it is as you say, that is concerning. All we have for Jesus is a handful of documents written decades after his purported death, usually in different countries and different languages from where he purportedly lived and what he purportedly spoke, and none by anyone who claims to have actually met him. If we had a similar level of evidence about someone who purportedly lived in the 20th century we would of course question his existence. If scholars studying the ancient world are applying different standards of evidence, that is a bit concerning. It seems to me that the absurd position is the one that applies different standards of evidence based on what century we are looking at, not the one that applies the same standard.
How exactly do we know that the apostles existed? We have gospels conventionally attributed to four of them, but those gospels do not actually claim that authorship, and they were written in Greek, not the Aramaic that was spoken in Jerusalem at the time. Seems substantially weaker than the evidence for Jesus.
It might be that there was a celestial being cult in the early first century that made a collective decision to change to teaching that Jesus was a historical man, but it is certainly not a "must". Beliefs about Jesus may have evolved from beliefs about other supernatural figures available in the meme pool at the time. There may have been a small Jesus cult going back several centuries BCE. Or the belief might have popped up in the mid 1st century without any historical basis beyond the broad fact that Romans often executed people by crucifiction in Jerusalem. Since we have no relevant records from that time period, it is impossible to know. What we do know is that belief systems can crop up and change remarkably quickly on historical timescales without it being clear what the path was. We all know the stories of the cargo cults in the pacific that sprung up around a character named "John Frum" who would supposedly return with cargo. That happened within a couple of decades of ww2. If the war department's personnel records had been lost in a fire, and we applied your epistemeic standards, we'd have to conclude that John Frum was a historical person too. I heard recently that Mormons are actually massively divided on the question of whether humans become gods in the afterlife, and that most Mormons themselves do not even know that this divide exists - they all think that the answer they believe is also the one believed by other Mormons. This, again, is a recent historical change of belief, one that is difficult to trace even in the modern world. We shouldn't be any more surprised about beliefs quickly sprouting up and changing in the ancient world than we are in the modern.
>that applies different standards of evidence based on what century we are looking at, not the one that applies the same standard.
We should apply different standards of evidence to a recent era of mass communication versus an ancient era/location of limited literacy. Someone existing in modern America with no direct records is extraordinary, and strong evidence against their existence. Someone existing in ancient Judea with no direct records is just the default.
I did not say we shouldn't take the availability of records into account. A person can have a similar level of evidence today. Lets say I hear stories about a guy in Brazil who was born of a virgin, performed miracles, was executed and rose from the dead, etc. Lets say he died around 2000, so before ordinary people were walking around with cameras to record and share photos or videos. I find several online accounts of his life presented as being by uneducated fisherman who were his closest followers. I notice word plays in those accounts that make sense in English, but not in Portuguese - rather odd from uneducated Brazilian fishermen, or any Brazilian actually. Now, the Brazilian government may or may not have records of this guy, and Brazilian news sources may or may not have reported on some of the events in his life, but I don't speak Portuguese, so I have no way of checking. (Lets forget for the moment that google translate and LLMs exist. I'm sure we are all old enough to remember a world where they did not). Should I take it as beyond question that this guy existed, even if I doubt his miracles? Of course not. That would be ridiculous. I can't prove this guy didn't exist, but I should definitely consider it an open question. Applying the same epistemic standards regardless of what century we are looking at means taking the same attitude to Jesus and any number of other ancient figures. The quality of evidence from that time period is much weaker than the evidence generally available today, both because fewer records were created and because many of the ones that were have been lost. So there will be a lot more characters whose historicity we cannot be confident about.
>Even in a modern context, what sorts of institutions are actually going to employ new testemant scholars? The University of Delaware, where I did my undergrad, employs exactly 0. You may occasionally find one, such as Ehrman, at a secular university, but not often
That seems to be untrue. 15 minutes of Googling and I was able to find out that Oxford University has 18 professors of New Testament, Cambridge has 14, Harvard has 4, Yale has 9, and Duke has 4. And that was limiting myself to only counting faculty that were specifically labelled as being New Testament scholars.
I checked and you're right, Delaware does not have any New Testament scholars because it does not have a religious studies department at all. You can minor in religious studies, but it's attached to the philosophy department. That doesn't seem particularly typical: the University of Oregon has a religious studies department, University of Virginia does, University of Pennsylvania does, etc.
Harvard, Yale, and Duke all have divinity schools, which I assume is where most if not all of these people are employed. So those are not secular institutions. Those are institutions that make their money training clergy. I don't know the British system as well, but Oxford and Cambridge certainly date to the era when universities were religious institutions. Do they still train clergy? Is that how these people make their money?
Maybe here's the more fundamental question. For what X is it the case that x% of a field's livelihood depends on P implies that the field cannot entertain not P? I'm pretty confident that x < 50.
What do think X is higher then, if it’s lower than 50? Is it higher than 10? 5? 1? Is there a value of X where you would believe that some of the scholars of a field could entertain not P?
I don’t think X exists. Even if an academic field relied on belief in P for 100% of its livelihood, if not P had a decent probability of being true *someone* in the field would believe not P. You can find academics who believe all kinds of heterodox opinions: there are biologists who espouse intelligent design (Micheal Behe was a biochemist, remember) there are economists who are communists, there are geologists who are neo-catastrophists, and there are a great many professors at seminaries and divinity schools who are atheists. What do professors care for the livelihood of the field once they have tenure? Is it really the case that all biblical scholars, whether Christian, atheist, or agnostic, are willfully blind against the evidence without exception?
In any other field, a person whose livelihood depended on a thing would not be trusted to make objective decisions about the thing. We even have a phrase, "conflict of interest" to describe such a scenario. It seems extremely improbable to me that professors would somehow be an exception.
I also don't believe for a second that there is a respectable atheist or agnostic anywhere who would accept employment at a divinity school. A person who did such a thing would be demonstrating at best such an extreme degree of confusion that they could not be trusted.
Good summary of the arguments. I agree with your conclusion, but, out of fairness to the mysticists, you should have mentioned that there is a second passage in Josephus mentioning Jesus that *is* very likely an interpolation. Hence the interpolation explanation is not completely ad-hoc.
It's very likely at least partially an interpolation. But most scholars think there was a historical core underneath it. So in my view that makes the case for mythicism weaker not stronger.
Agreed that Jesus mythicism is likely false. However, I also don't think that it's necessarily wrong to go against expert consensus on a specific issue; after all, when it comes to hereditarianism (average racial and ethnic differences on IQ, criminality, et cetera), many experts are very possibly wrong. I also think that just because someone seriously errs in regards to one specific question does not mean that they can't make valid arguments in regards to another specific question.
> after all, when it comes to hereditarianism (average racial and ethnic differences on IQ, criminality, et cetera), many experts are very possibly wrong.
The difference is that if you go look at expert sources (e.g. Google Scholar), you'll find researchers go back and forth on what % of racial differences in IQ are attributable to environment versus heredity, and there is not some 100% consensus that it's 0. It's very very easy to search for "hereditarian hypothesis" and find arguments going one way and the other, marshaling evidence, people doing studies, etc. The taboo on talking about it is political and external.
Cremieux nuked his credibility with me recently by making nonsense claims about how jus soli isn't part of the American constitution. You can be a race-IQ sperg and I can believe you're an earnest truth-seeker, but if you say nonsense like that I'll just think you're racist (in the "I hate non-whites" sense) and that nothing you say on that subject can be trusted to correlate to evidence and reality.
>This is especially likely because later Christians found it embarrassing that Jesus had brothers and tried to downplay this fact;
That may be the case, but those same early Christians didn’t have to be evade anything in order to assert the Perpetual Virginity as well as the fact that Christ had a brother. The Protoevangelium of James is from the 100s, and says James was the half-brother of Christ, from Joseph’s first marriage.
Aside from all the textual references to Jesus confirming that he existed (especially from Paul, who met people that knew Jesus in real life), there's also just the sheer implausibility of Christianity coming to exist at all if there was no Jesus. If Jesus did exist, it's pretty easy to see how the religion got started, but mythicists have to believe an ad-hoc explanation, and any such explanation will fit with the historical data quite poorly. Either a massive cult just suddenly sprung up out of nowhere, worshipping a guy who never existed but who they claimed was from the recent past, at a time when many of them were still alive, or the Christians originally didn't believe Jesus was a real person, despite all of the textual evidence that very early Christians did, and they somehow switched over to 100% uniform belief in historicity in just a few generations, with no one ever commenting on this change (not even to try to argue that it never happened) and even secular sources being fooled into thinking that they had always believed in a flesh-and-blood Jesus, and that this Jesus was a real person.
From skimming the historicity of Muhammad wikipedia page it looks like his existence and relation to the Islamic faith is much more in question, but I haven't seriously looked into either case.
Really? I don't know as much about early Muslim history, but I would expect everything I said here to apply to Muhammad as well, perhaps to an even greater extent.
Great post! I agree with the facts presented, but I also want to raise a philosophical point about personal identity.
Suppose I write a biography of you. It’s a thorough description of your life, and it gets everything correct, including all the minute details. Then suppose I make some edits to it – I change your middle name, or your favorite TV show – such that now there are a few details that are incorrect. Ok, you might say, it’s still a biography of you, just with some minor errors. But then suppose I keep doing this – not only altering facts about you that are more and more fundamental to your identity – but also embellishing things and inserting new stories about your life that are entirely made up. So there is a gradual transition of this book from “accurate biography” to “mostly accurate but with some errors” to “loosely based on your life” to “fictional story about someone else that is entirely unrecognizable to you”. At what point in this transition does the character in the book cease to be *you*? It depends on how many facts are changed and how fundamental they are to your identity, but ultimately it’s an arbitrary distinction.
I think many historical figures lie somewhere on this spectrum. There’s often some delta between historical figures as they actually existed and the conception of them in the public consciousness. For example, there’s a lot of folklore surrounding the Founding Fathers that isn’t true. George Washington didn’t have wooden teeth, and he didn’t chop down a cherry tree as a child. But nobody thinks these stories are fundamental to his identity, so we say that Washington was a real person who existed.
But on the other end of the spectrum, consider Santa Claus. Although we recognize that he isn’t real, there is an actual historical figure who he is based on – Saint Nicholas of Myra. Now clearly, Nicholas didn’t live at the North Pole with elves or fly on a sleigh with reindeer. If Nicholas were to hear a description of Santa Claus, he would of course reject the notion that it’s him. Perhaps the only thing they have in common is their penchant for gift-giving. In this case, the folklore has evolved so extensively that it is more accurate to say that Santa Claus isn’t real, even if there technically is a real person who we can tie him to.
I view Jesus as being somewhere between Washington and Santa Claus on this spectrum, though closer to Washington. You make a compelling case that *someone* named Jesus really existed as a historical figure. But is he the same Jesus as the character from the Bible? No doubt the two can be linked - there are historical facts about the real person that the Bible gets right – his name, where he was born, that he got crucified, etc. But on the other hand, if the individual who really existed wasn’t born of a virgin, didn’t perform miracles, didn’t rise from the dead, etc…then I don’t know, that seems like a lot of (pretty important and fundamental) aspects of someone’s identity/biography to get wrong! I don’t think there’s an objective fact of the matter, but personally I would just phrase it as “Jesus was based on a real person”.
My understanding is that mythicists flat out deny there was a real person named Jesus Christ who was born in Bethlehem and executed by the Romans. If you agree that there was, you aren't a mythicist.
Christ is not a name in the sense we use the word today, it's more of a title. It's possible that noone called him the Christ while he was alive.
Also regarding the post above: I think it's quite likely that the Bible gets Jesus' place of birth wrong but I agree with the rest.
Yep, agreed! Didn't intend to come across as identifying as a mythicist or defending their views.
Thank god someone else with sense. I've been making this argument for years haha. I think the best way to state it is: "the biblical Jesus is a fictional character based on a real person". I don't understand how any other framing ends up making more sense.
I don't think this is a mythicist perspective, but at the same time any other arguments about the historical Jesus (and remember, the real person wasn't actually named Jesus) that miss this point end up going very wrong in my opinion.
Mythicism is to atheism as young earth creationism is to Christianity. You can see this because they (a) have no scholarly support to speak of and (b) have instead fast-talking proponents who employ deceptive debate tactics.
History furnishes many examples of charismatic individuals who indisputably existed who founded successful religions with millions of followers: Muhammad, Joseph Smith, L Ron Hubbard, and others.
Why would anyone assume this is improbable in the case of Christianity?
> This view is rejected by ~100% of serious scholars; Bart Ehrman notes “There is not a single mythicist who teaches New Testament or Early Christianity or even Classics at any accredited institution of higher learning in the Western world.”
This is correct. Evidence strongly suggests that Jesus, the man, existed. However, it’s vital to note that Bart Ehrman considers himself to be an “agnostic atheist” due to the inconsistencies and contradictions contained within Christian doctrine and the lack of any divine evidence. Ehrman doesn’t believe Jesus was divine. https://ehrmanblog.org/on-being-an-agnostic-or-atheist/
Everyone who’s interested in the history of Christianity should read Bart Ehrman or watch his lectures on Jesus. They’re excellent, and he knows as much historically about Jesus as anyone I’ve come across.
Yes, it's disheartening to see so many of my fellow atheists embracing fringe views. Bible-believing Christians say, "Don't listen to what the historians say about Jesus, they're biased!" And a bunch of atheists say the same thing. "Don't listen to the experts! They're biased!" Well, for sure in both cases _someone_ is biased. This is not the case of an innocent misunderstanding.
This is one of those topics that fits nicely into the “Conspiracy theorists aren’t idiotic, they’re bad at epistemology” point you made a while ago
Wait until you hear people deny the existence of the carpenter Josh Chris, who was born in Bethlehem, lived in Egypt, and retired at 30.
Who would have built all the stuff if he wasn’t real?!?
Of course you’re completely right. A weaker source which I think also provides evidence is Josephus’s Testimonium Flavanium. It has much more clearly been subjected to Christian interpolation, but the original is probably the earliest textual description of Jesus’s role in Christianity from a non-Christian source.
Yeah I think that's plausible but haven't really read much into it.
Ehrman's "did Jesus exist" (yes) is a great book length treatment of this post subject.
"Despite this, mythicism is taken seriously by quite a number of people on the internet. Turns out that the consensus on atheist Reddit is not always in accordance with the scholarly consensus, which is a development that I find shocking!"
I'll assume this is sarcasm
Indeed!
Good post!
> If Christians were adding an extra sentence, it would be quite odd for them to describe Jesus as having been crucified, rather than something grander, like that he was God incarnate
Disagreed with this on face. If a Christain was going to interpolate this guy, adding the Crucifixion, which is a central event in the faith, seems quite reasonable. Adding grand proclamations of God to this guy’s works would have been a dramatically more obvious addition that would not have had any chance of being taken seriously.
> Adding grand proclamations of God to this guy’s works would have been a dramatically more obvious addition that would not have had any chance of being taken seriously.
That's kind of what we see with the interpolations we know about, though? They didn't interpolate these things to trick sceptics a thousand years later, their audience was fellow Christians in a majority Christian society. In Josephus's book "Testimonium Flavianum" there is a passage about Jesus that pretty much everybody believes is an interpolation and...well, subtle it ain't.
"And there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if indeed it is necessary to call him a man, for he was a doer of paradoxical works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure, and many Jews on the one hand and also many of the Greeks on the other he drew to himself. He was the Messiah.
"And when, on the accusation of some of the principal men among us, Pilate had condemned him to a cross, those who had first loved him did not cease to do so. For he appeared to them on the third day, living again, the divine prophets having related both these things and countless other marvels about him. And even till now the tribe of Christians, so named from this man, has not gone extinct."
The interpolations we’re most sure about are the least subtle ones? Imagine that…
OK, lets go through this point by point.
To the lack of professors advocating mythicism, I would point out that this is a field that is massively corrupted both by its history and current incentives. For most of the history of western universities, these were very christian institutions, which existed in significant part to train clergy. Nobody could be employed by such an institution who denied the divinity, much less the existence of christ. Even in a modern context, what sorts of institutions are actually going to employ new testemant scholars? The University of Delaware, where I did my undergrad, employs exactly 0. You may occasionally find one, such as Ehrman, at a secular university, but not often. They are employed by seminaries, divinity schools, religious institutions. These are still places where you can't be a mythicist, because people are paying you to train them to be clergy. Even Ehrman, who teaches undergrads at a secular institution, has to publish in peer reviewed publications. Who is doing that peer review? All those people at the religious institutions. So it is pretty obvious that the professors in these fields would deny mythicism whatever the state of the evidence was, and thus we should infer nothing at all from their views on the topic.
> The basic case against mythicism about Jesus is rather similar to the basic case against mythicism about, say, Thales or Pythagoras: a bunch of people wrote about them existing. Normally, people do not write in detail about people who don’t exist.
What? Since when? Of course they do! There is a whole genre of books and various other media called "fiction". Even in the ancient world, people spent a great deal of time writing about various titans, gods, and other supernatural entities that I assume you agree did not exist. And of course people are mistaken about second-hand facts all the time, presumably even more so in the ancient world where facts were much harder to verify and norms for verifying facts and reviewing publications did not exist. So I start from the position that any character in an ancient manuscript may not have existed, unless there is serious evidence to the contrary. The burden of proof is on the person claiming Jesus was real, not on the mythicist. So lets look at that evidence.
With regard to Tacitus, of course it is hearsay! According to wikipedia, he was born in 56 CE. Jesus's execution is traditionally dated to the 30s CE. Tacitus can't have been there to see it for himself. He likely never spoke to anyone who was. It may be that he heard the claim about Jesus having been crucified from non-christians, but it was definitely hearsay. I'll happily grant that there were christians in late 1st century Rome, and that non-christians often uncritically accepted their claim that this Jesus guy existed and was crucified, but that is weak evidence that it actually happened. Lots of people believe untrue things all the time, especially when people around them believe those things and there is no refutation readily at hand.
As to whether Tacitus even wrote the passage in question, again I see this as questionable. Ehrman has written quite a bit on interpolations in the bible, he seems to think that additions were quite common in manuscripts that were hand copied over the centuries. When the copying was done by christian monks, the stuff those monks believed is particularly suspicious. And it seems quite plausible to me that a monk messing with a manuscript written by a pagan would choose to write the non-supernatural thing that he believed rather than the supernatural one. So maybe the passage is original, maybe it isn't, but the frequency of changes like this to ancient texts certainly weakens Tacitus' usefulness as evidence for a historical Jesus.
Josephus is maybe a little better as evidence for a historical Jesus, but only a little. Here are some other possibilities you don't seem to consider. Firstly, James might have been real, but have been lying or speaking metaphorically when he claimed to be the brother of Jesus. There are lots of religious leaders blatantly lying today, I would expect to also find some in ancient Jerusalem. There are also lots of christians who speak of "brothers and sisters in christ", and even christian monks who address each other as "brother" despite being biologically unrelated. James might have been doing either of these things. It is also possible that that passage is an interpolation which appeared first in Origen. Later monks who has read Origen then copied Josephus, noticed that the passage was missing, thought it was missing by mistake, and added it in, mistakenly thinking they were adding it back in. And the copies of Josephus that we have today are the ones, or descendants of the ones, that those monks made. It can be an interpolation in both sources without the two additions being independent.
As for Paul, he seems the weakest of the bunch. He was writing decades after the fact. He was a christian trying to spread his faith. And he doesn't even claim to have met Jesus precrucifiction. Even if he believed a historical Jesus existed, that is very weak evidence that one actually did.
At the end of the day, we have nothing that Jesus wrote. We have nothing plausibly written by anyone who even claimed to have met Jesus. We have no text, and no historical event, which is better explained by a historical Jesus existing in the early 1st century than by a movement of christians existing in the late 1st century. So nothing here should move us off the default presumption that any character in an ancient document may have been entirely fictitious.
//To the lack of professors advocating mythicism, I would point out that this is a field that is massively corrupted both by its history and current incentives.//
There are various considerations that are extremely inconvenient to Christians which most new testament scholars accept. For instance, there's a broad consensus that the Gospels weren't written by the people they're attributed to. There are many secular new testament historians at various institutions. None of them accept mythicism. The question is why.
//What? Since when? Of course they do! There is a whole genre of books and various other media called "fiction".//
But Tacitus, Josephus, and Paul weren't writing fiction. They wrote about Jesus as if he was a real person. Two of them were credible historians. The last one knew the early Christian community.
//With regard to Tacitus, of course it is hearsay! According to wikipedia, he was born in 56 CE. Jesus's execution is traditionally dated to the 30s CE. Tacitus can't have been there to see it for himself.//
Tacitus got his information about Jesus from talking to people. The question is, of course, which people he talked to. It seems that he was not primarily consulting the Christians as he didn't trust them. So he was likely consulting other people who knew Jesus. In addition, it's very hard to believe that people would be claiming that Jesus had lived *20 years ago* when he had never existed. You couldn't get people to believe that there was a literal earthly figure just a few decades past. This is why the mythicists like Carrier say Paul believed Jesus was an angel, and only Mark at his later date adopted the historicist position. While it's theoretically possible that the early Christians would all pretend some guy existed just a few years ago, there's no reason to think that and literally no historical precedent.
//As to whether Tacitus even wrote the passage in question, again I see this as questionable. Ehrman has written quite a bit on interpolations in the bible, he seems to think that additions were quite common in manuscripts that were hand copied over the centuries.//
Ehrman, for the record, doesn't think the Tacitus passage is an interpolation. No serious new testament scholar does. Interpolations weren't that rare, but they rarely added totally new information. IN later years no one doubted Jesus's existence, so an interpolator had no reason to randomly insert that into a passage from Tacitus, and if they were going to do that, they'd have a more dramatic description than the extremely mild one provided by Tacitus.
//Firstly, James might have been real, but have been lying or speaking metaphorically when he claimed to be the brother of Jesus. There are lots of religious leaders blatantly lying today, I would expect to also find some in ancient Jerusalem. There are also lots of christians who speak of "brothers and sisters in christ", and even christian monks who address each other as "brother" despite being biologically unrelated.//
I addressed the second interpretation in the article--James is distinguished from other brothers of Christ, and there's no reason Josephus would have referred to James as the brother of Christ if all Christians said that. It's true James could have, in theory, called himself the brother of Christ in a way that was unique, but why would anyone else have followed him. The early Christians new James--they knew his family. Why would they, as well as Tacitus and Josephus, have agreed his brother was Christ?
//As for Paul, he seems the weakest of the bunch. He was writing decades after the fact.//
No he wasn't. He was writing about 15-20 years after the crucifixion of Jesus. His statements in various places, e.g. the creed in first Corinthians, are likely early creeds that date back to just a few years after Jesus's death--even Carrier grants this which is why he tries to say that Paul didn't believe in a literal Jesus. It's hard to believe that the Christians would universally believe in and describe the presence of a guy names Jesus just a few years prior when no such person had existed. By far the simpler hypothesis is just that there was such a person and tails about him grew more dramatic over time. There are lots of examples of this.
//At the end of the day, we have nothing that Jesus wrote. We have nothing plausibly written by anyone who even claimed to have met Jesus.//
Also true of Hannibal and Alexander the Great. Most people didn't write anything and most things written about most people came lalter.
//We have no text, and no historical event, which is better explained by a historical Jesus existing in the early 1st century than by a movement of christians existing in the late 1st century.//
Well I obviously dispute that. Tacitus, Josephus, and Paul providing extremely ordinary descriptions of the life of Jesus is not likely if he'd never existed. There are no other examples of a religious movement claiming a guy existed just a few years prior and being someone's brother and then this being believed by the serious historians of the day.
//So nothing here should move us off the default presumption that any character in an ancient document may have been entirely fictitious.//
"May have been" isn't the right way to phrase things. Sure he may have been fictitious--it's possible though unlikely. But certainly we shouldn't start by presuming those people written about in ancient documents were probably fictitious--most of them won't, especially if sober historians were writing about them just a few decades later.
It's first worth pointing out that I think you are trying to defend a position that is different from what mythicists supposedly purport, and that this conflation is very common in the internet atheist community. The claim "there exists some non-negligible possibility that Jesus was an entirely invented figure" is a vastly weaker claim than "Jesus was an entirely invented figure". Proving the first still leaves you with the reality that the most likely situation is a historical Jesus, but because the motivation is to find the maximally anti-Christian position, it is conflated as being identical to the second position.
>There is a whole genre of books and various other media called "fiction".
This is hardly even worth responding to, because it's clearly irrelevant. The sources we are discussing are not fictions. Fictions are self-consciously non-truthful, because they are stories. Fiction is extremely ancient, and even going back to the very beginning of written works we can easily distinguish between intentional fictions and things that purport to record truth.
>So I start from the position that any character in an ancient manuscript may not have existed, unless there is serious evidence to the contrary
This is a genuinely absurd position that only makes sense if you are back-filling it into your belief system because you *want* to believe Jesus is a mythic figure. Hellenistic titans, deities, etc. are very rarely (if ever) described in a way that straightforwardly implies they are regular flesh and blood humans. There are a handful of figures in ancient history that blend the lines between myth and flesh, but even then, the consensus position among scholars is typically that these are historical figures who are then mythicized.
Take Gilgamesh. The evidence of his existence is not really much better than Jesus. There are a handful of inscriptions implying his existence, but none of these are direct first-person accounts by a person who has met him, and none of them are written by him (as with most ancient figures, we should not be surprised by this, as literacy was not widespread). Of course, it's always possible the Sumerians were just making him up even then If we really hold to this idea that we must have ironclad evidence a figure is real or else they were made up, then we must reject the idea that Gilgamesh was a historical figure. However, scholars of ancient Mesopotamia (who are *not* subject to the various pressures you describe in your post) broadly accept his historicity. And the reason for this is obvious: people, writing fiction, typically write in the fictional mode. People, writing records, typically write in the historical mode. It is almost always easy to distinguish these, even going very far back in time -- we can tell that Homer is not attempting to write a serious historical account, unlike later Greek writers who are very clearly and self-consciously trying to write historical records. The records in the historical mode are not reliable, they often contain legends or lies, but nevertheless we rely on them to construct our pictures of basic facts because *they are not fiction* and the idea that they would be entirely invented out of whole cloth and be about figures who never even existed makes one wonder why a trained, literate individual would waste their precious time and resources recording it in the first place.
And this brings us to the strongest argument for historicism that no one has a really good answer to. For the mythicist case to be true, there must have been some cult that formed among a group of people, the apostles, who we know existed because they are attested to. These people must have decided among themselves that there was some celestial being named Jesus, who was not a real person, but whom they would worship as the prophesied Jewish messiah, despite the fact that the Jewish messiah is clearly indicated to be a person who will actually exist in the real world. Their motivations for doing this instead of just following one of the various apocalyptic Jewish preachers that were roving around the wilderness at the time (e.g. John the Baptist himself) are unclear. Maybe for fun. However, before they are even all dead, it seems that their entire cult has decided to instead believe that this entirely made-up figure was actually flesh and blood. Absolutely no remnants of the original belief structure survive, to the point that Paul, who spends a fair amount of time rejecting various ideas he thinks are bad, doesn't even bother to mention this, so there couldn't have even still been a large fragment of "Jesus is non-real" believers. Instead of a real man becoming later divinified, which was an extremely common practice in the country that this entire drama is unfolding in and which we have countless examples of throughout human history, a divine figure was humanized and back-filled into history -- something that seems to directly reduce their divine status and run contrary to the platonic impulses of Christianity's most prominent early boosters, who were all educated and Hellenized.
What is the balance of probabilities between this scenario and the other one (where there is a real figure with charismatic authority who claims to be the fulfillment of a widespread and well-known prophesy, is executed, and is then divinified by his followers?)
You're right that I am not arguing that Jesus definitely did not exist. Like many things about ancient history, I consider it unknown and likely unknowable due to sparsity of evidence. If I had to put a number on it, I'd say 70% that a historical Jesus did exist. Bentham's Bulldog's thesis was " I’m going to explain why mythicism is not taken seriously by anyone serious and why it’s almost certainly false." So he seems pretty clearly to have drawn up the lines in a way that places Jesus-agnostics like me in the same camp as people who are certain there was no historical Jesus. My uncertainty definitely contradicts his position. Whether you want to call me a "mythicist" is up to you.
My reference to the genre of fiction was mostly to point out the absurdity of Bentham's Bulldog's claim that nobody writes in detail about non-existent people. Otherwise I agree it is mostly irrelevant. Though I don't think other cultures, present or past, always conceptualize fiction v nonfiction the way we do. I don't think the ancients thought they were doing fiction when they wrote about the gods, I think they thought they were doing history.
I know basically nothing about Gilgamesh, or what the historical evidence for him is, or what scholars think about it. If it is as you say, that is concerning. All we have for Jesus is a handful of documents written decades after his purported death, usually in different countries and different languages from where he purportedly lived and what he purportedly spoke, and none by anyone who claims to have actually met him. If we had a similar level of evidence about someone who purportedly lived in the 20th century we would of course question his existence. If scholars studying the ancient world are applying different standards of evidence, that is a bit concerning. It seems to me that the absurd position is the one that applies different standards of evidence based on what century we are looking at, not the one that applies the same standard.
How exactly do we know that the apostles existed? We have gospels conventionally attributed to four of them, but those gospels do not actually claim that authorship, and they were written in Greek, not the Aramaic that was spoken in Jerusalem at the time. Seems substantially weaker than the evidence for Jesus.
It might be that there was a celestial being cult in the early first century that made a collective decision to change to teaching that Jesus was a historical man, but it is certainly not a "must". Beliefs about Jesus may have evolved from beliefs about other supernatural figures available in the meme pool at the time. There may have been a small Jesus cult going back several centuries BCE. Or the belief might have popped up in the mid 1st century without any historical basis beyond the broad fact that Romans often executed people by crucifiction in Jerusalem. Since we have no relevant records from that time period, it is impossible to know. What we do know is that belief systems can crop up and change remarkably quickly on historical timescales without it being clear what the path was. We all know the stories of the cargo cults in the pacific that sprung up around a character named "John Frum" who would supposedly return with cargo. That happened within a couple of decades of ww2. If the war department's personnel records had been lost in a fire, and we applied your epistemeic standards, we'd have to conclude that John Frum was a historical person too. I heard recently that Mormons are actually massively divided on the question of whether humans become gods in the afterlife, and that most Mormons themselves do not even know that this divide exists - they all think that the answer they believe is also the one believed by other Mormons. This, again, is a recent historical change of belief, one that is difficult to trace even in the modern world. We shouldn't be any more surprised about beliefs quickly sprouting up and changing in the ancient world than we are in the modern.
>that applies different standards of evidence based on what century we are looking at, not the one that applies the same standard.
We should apply different standards of evidence to a recent era of mass communication versus an ancient era/location of limited literacy. Someone existing in modern America with no direct records is extraordinary, and strong evidence against their existence. Someone existing in ancient Judea with no direct records is just the default.
I did not say we shouldn't take the availability of records into account. A person can have a similar level of evidence today. Lets say I hear stories about a guy in Brazil who was born of a virgin, performed miracles, was executed and rose from the dead, etc. Lets say he died around 2000, so before ordinary people were walking around with cameras to record and share photos or videos. I find several online accounts of his life presented as being by uneducated fisherman who were his closest followers. I notice word plays in those accounts that make sense in English, but not in Portuguese - rather odd from uneducated Brazilian fishermen, or any Brazilian actually. Now, the Brazilian government may or may not have records of this guy, and Brazilian news sources may or may not have reported on some of the events in his life, but I don't speak Portuguese, so I have no way of checking. (Lets forget for the moment that google translate and LLMs exist. I'm sure we are all old enough to remember a world where they did not). Should I take it as beyond question that this guy existed, even if I doubt his miracles? Of course not. That would be ridiculous. I can't prove this guy didn't exist, but I should definitely consider it an open question. Applying the same epistemic standards regardless of what century we are looking at means taking the same attitude to Jesus and any number of other ancient figures. The quality of evidence from that time period is much weaker than the evidence generally available today, both because fewer records were created and because many of the ones that were have been lost. So there will be a lot more characters whose historicity we cannot be confident about.
>Even in a modern context, what sorts of institutions are actually going to employ new testemant scholars? The University of Delaware, where I did my undergrad, employs exactly 0. You may occasionally find one, such as Ehrman, at a secular university, but not often
That seems to be untrue. 15 minutes of Googling and I was able to find out that Oxford University has 18 professors of New Testament, Cambridge has 14, Harvard has 4, Yale has 9, and Duke has 4. And that was limiting myself to only counting faculty that were specifically labelled as being New Testament scholars.
I checked and you're right, Delaware does not have any New Testament scholars because it does not have a religious studies department at all. You can minor in religious studies, but it's attached to the philosophy department. That doesn't seem particularly typical: the University of Oregon has a religious studies department, University of Virginia does, University of Pennsylvania does, etc.
Harvard, Yale, and Duke all have divinity schools, which I assume is where most if not all of these people are employed. So those are not secular institutions. Those are institutions that make their money training clergy. I don't know the British system as well, but Oxford and Cambridge certainly date to the era when universities were religious institutions. Do they still train clergy? Is that how these people make their money?
Maybe here's the more fundamental question. For what X is it the case that x% of a field's livelihood depends on P implies that the field cannot entertain not P? I'm pretty confident that x < 50.
What do think X is higher then, if it’s lower than 50? Is it higher than 10? 5? 1? Is there a value of X where you would believe that some of the scholars of a field could entertain not P?
X is definitely greater than 1, probably greater than 10. I'm curious what you think X is.
I don’t think X exists. Even if an academic field relied on belief in P for 100% of its livelihood, if not P had a decent probability of being true *someone* in the field would believe not P. You can find academics who believe all kinds of heterodox opinions: there are biologists who espouse intelligent design (Micheal Behe was a biochemist, remember) there are economists who are communists, there are geologists who are neo-catastrophists, and there are a great many professors at seminaries and divinity schools who are atheists. What do professors care for the livelihood of the field once they have tenure? Is it really the case that all biblical scholars, whether Christian, atheist, or agnostic, are willfully blind against the evidence without exception?
It seems extremely improbable.
In any other field, a person whose livelihood depended on a thing would not be trusted to make objective decisions about the thing. We even have a phrase, "conflict of interest" to describe such a scenario. It seems extremely improbable to me that professors would somehow be an exception.
I also don't believe for a second that there is a respectable atheist or agnostic anywhere who would accept employment at a divinity school. A person who did such a thing would be demonstrating at best such an extreme degree of confusion that they could not be trusted.
Good summary of the arguments. I agree with your conclusion, but, out of fairness to the mysticists, you should have mentioned that there is a second passage in Josephus mentioning Jesus that *is* very likely an interpolation. Hence the interpolation explanation is not completely ad-hoc.
It's very likely at least partially an interpolation. But most scholars think there was a historical core underneath it. So in my view that makes the case for mythicism weaker not stronger.
Agreed that Jesus mythicism is likely false. However, I also don't think that it's necessarily wrong to go against expert consensus on a specific issue; after all, when it comes to hereditarianism (average racial and ethnic differences on IQ, criminality, et cetera), many experts are very possibly wrong. I also think that just because someone seriously errs in regards to one specific question does not mean that they can't make valid arguments in regards to another specific question.
> after all, when it comes to hereditarianism (average racial and ethnic differences on IQ, criminality, et cetera), many experts are very possibly wrong.
The difference is that if you go look at expert sources (e.g. Google Scholar), you'll find researchers go back and forth on what % of racial differences in IQ are attributable to environment versus heredity, and there is not some 100% consensus that it's 0. It's very very easy to search for "hereditarian hypothesis" and find arguments going one way and the other, marshaling evidence, people doing studies, etc. The taboo on talking about it is political and external.
I would advise you to read @Cremieux’s various writings about this topic, if you could.
Cremieux nuked his credibility with me recently by making nonsense claims about how jus soli isn't part of the American constitution. You can be a race-IQ sperg and I can believe you're an earnest truth-seeker, but if you say nonsense like that I'll just think you're racist (in the "I hate non-whites" sense) and that nothing you say on that subject can be trusted to correlate to evidence and reality.
Where exactly did he say that about jus soli?
This thread: https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1882183485521305601
Thanks; that said, even a broken clock is right twice a day! :)
>This is especially likely because later Christians found it embarrassing that Jesus had brothers and tried to downplay this fact;
That may be the case, but those same early Christians didn’t have to be evade anything in order to assert the Perpetual Virginity as well as the fact that Christ had a brother. The Protoevangelium of James is from the 100s, and says James was the half-brother of Christ, from Joseph’s first marriage.