I am herein combining some statements on some aspects of Tim O’Neill’s “An Atheist Historian Examines the Evidence for Jesus,” part 1 and part 2. We will see where he went right and, in my part 2, where he went wrong.
He notes, “The numbers of professional scholars, out of the many thousands in this and related fields, who don’t accept this consensus” that “it is most likely that a historical preacher, on whom the Christian figure ‘Jesus Christ’ is based, did exist” can “be counted on the fingers of one hand.”
Those within the “fingers of one hand” hold to the utterly radical notion that “there was no historical Jesus at all and that ‘Jesus Christ’ developed out of some purely mythic ideas about a non-historical, non-existent figure.” There is a reason that no one within a decade of Jesus’ time could have even imagined that “there was no historical Jesus” nor anyone within 500 year, no not one within one millennia nor a millennia and a half but it took virtually a full two millennia for someone to hit upon such an outlandish, illogical and a-historical assertion.
Tim O’Neill notes that such a view “has had a checkered history…but has usually been a marginal idea at best. Its heyday was in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century” and, I will add, has exploded with the advent of the internet whereby any less than half baked notion can go viral. Thus, “it fell out of favor as the twentieth century progressed and was barely held by any scholars at all by the 1960s.”
Neo-Jesus Mythists, “are almost never scholars, many of them have a very poor grasp of the evidence, and almost all have clear ideological objectives.” This is clearly evidenced within my articles on the historical Jesus and especially the article about which Gary Habermas, PhD (Distinguished Research Professor & Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary) said, “I have hung on to it since you sent it, & plan to keep doing so”: Historical Jesus – Two Centuries Worth of Citations.
As you can hear from the utter beat-down within the video above there is good reason for Tim O’Neill affirming that “Many of the arguments for a Mythic Jesus that some laypeople think sound highly convincing are exactly the same ones that scholars consider laughably weak, even though they sound plausible to those without a sound background in the study of the First Century.”
He notes that “our sources for anyone in the ancient world are scarce and rarely are they contemporaneous—they are usually written decades or even centuries after the fact.” He specifies the example of one of the most “prominent, influential, significant and famous” personages of old: the Carthaginian general Hannibal (247 BC-183 BC). Now, “how many contemporary mentions of Hannibal do we have? Zero. We have none.”
It is noted that “Some ‘Jesus Mythicists’ have tried to argue that certain ancient writers should have mentioned Jesus and did not” and that in “1909 the American ‘freethinker’ John Remsberg came up with a list of 42 ancient writers that he claimed ‘should’ have mentioned Jesus and concluded their silence showed that Jesus ever existed.” Well, in 2014 AD Michael Paulkovich came up with a list of 126 ancient writers that he claimed “should” have mentioned Jesus and you know the rest. Well, I my Two Centuries Worth of Citations article, I chronicled 237 texts that reference Jesus dating to between 70 AD to 280 AD.
As was the case with Paulkovich so it was the case with Remsberg in that “list has been widely criticised for being contrived and fanciful” for examples poets, military historians, those who wrote about medicine are listed even though there is no reason to expect that they would reference Jesus at all.
A good point is made regarding Philo Judaeus aka Philo of Alexandria since he did write on theology, was contemporaneous to Jesus, referenced Judea and Pontius Pilate but: he made no mention of Jesus nor, by the way, “any of the other Jewish preachers, prophets, faith healers, and Messianic claimants of the time, of which there were many.”
One person who seems that he “should” have mentioned Jesus was Flavius Josephus and in fact, he does so in Antiquities of the Jews XVIII.3.4 and XX.9.1. Yet, one of these mentions is controversial as I covered in Flavius Josephus, the Historical Jesus and Pseudo-Skepticism Outdated By Four Decades and about which Tim O’Neill notes that “the majority of modern scholars” argue that “there is solid evidence to believe that Josephus did make a mention of Jesus here and that it was added to by Christians to help bolster their arguments against Jewish opponents.” Note that Josephus’ report that Jesus was called Messiah appears to be original (as it is merely reporting that which people believed) since Origen (mid-third century AD) quotes Josephus’ key passage thrice and includes the phrase, “Jesus who was called the Messiah” each time: Contra Celsum I.4 and II:13 and Commentarium in evangelium Matthaei X.17.
Another view O’Neill reviews is the claim that “The earliest Christian traditions make no mention of a historical Jesus and clearly worshipped a purely heavenly, mythic-style being. There are no references to an earthly Jesus in any of the earliest New Testament texts, the letters of Paul.” This is precisely the view of, for example, Raphael Lataster again which I have provided plenty of evidence to the contrary, see here.
In turn, Lataster was merely parroting the celestial Jesus myth of Earl Doherty’s books “The Jesus Puzzle” (2005 AD) and “Jesus: Neither God nor Man” (2009 AD). This permutation of the myth is “not something accepted by historians of ancient thought but actually a hypothesis developed entirely by Doherty himself.” In fact, as Atheist Biblical scholar Jeffrey Gibson put it, “the plausibility of D[oherty]’s hypothesis depends on not having good knowledge of ancient philosophy, specifically Middle Platonism. Indeed, it becomes less and less plausible the more one knows of ancient philosophy and, especially, Middle Platonism.”
In short, there is not a single historical (or theological) trace of any such a view or sects having ever existed, “Despite” as Tim O’Neill puts it, this supposedly, “being the original form of Christianity and despite surviving, according to Doherty, well into the second century.” This is merely more waking up one morning 2,000 years after the fact and saying, “Oh hey, I know, I will just invent something!”
There are also those who attempt to correlate various Pagan figures to Jesus claiming that He is just a fictional amalgam. One popular source for such is the New Ager Acharya S’ “The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold” (1999 AD). She based her tall tale on “late nineteenth and early twentieth century theosophist claims…many of these ‘parallels’ are highly strained, with any miraculous conception or birth story becoming a ‘virgin birth’ or anything to do with a death or a tree becoming a ‘crucifixion’ (even if virginity or a cross is not involved in either).” I have made various similar observations on such claims including that, for example, such personages will call a triad or three gods a “Trinity” when there is no such logical or theological correlation between three gods and one God in three persons.
The symbolic Jesus view was popularized R.G. Price in his “Jesus: A Very Jewish Myth” (2007 AD). This view utterly contradicts the view of Paganism as a source for a Jesus myth and affirms early Christianity’s Jewish roots. Yet, it then weaves a tale of an idealized messianic view being personified as “Jesus.”
A cousin to the Jesus as Pagan amalgam view is the Jesus as human amalgam view which baselessly claims that Jesus is a combination of various historical personages’ characteristics. One such proponent is computer programmer Joseph Atwill who wrote “Caesar’s Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus,” 2005 AD, see J.P. Holding’s review here. In short, Tim O’Neill notes that “No scholar takes these theories…seriously.”
Tim O’Neill asks “why do the overwhelming majority of non-Christian scholars also accept that Jesus existed?” Part of the answer for me is the point above about how no one even imagined that He did not until circa two millennia after His time. Another reason is that none of the imagined explanations hold any scholarly weight.
Yet, every few years someone either invents a new tall tale or simply repackages an old one that has already been discredited. These are then discredited and a few years later someone either invents a new tall tale or simply repackages an old one that has already been discredited and on it goes—on and on and on and on.
I find that when I encounter someone who actually claims that Jesus never even existed at all and counter argue, they immediately give up their claim and fall back onto one of the pseudo-scholarly tall tales—at least the ones that admit He existed.
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