In this episode Trent reveals three bad ways to answer mythicism, or the view that Jesus never existed.
Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Hey everyone, welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast. I’m your host, Catholic answer’s apologist and speaker, Trent Horn. Today I’m going to talk about three bad ways to combat Jesus mythicism. So mythicism is the view that Jesus never existed. He was a fictional character, a mythic character, and that Christianity was not based in any way on an actual Jesus of Nazareth who walked the Earth.
Trent Horn:
Now I will say that Jesus mythicism is not uncommon among certain atheist communities online, but it’s practically nonexistent among scholars. Bart Ehrman is an agnostic New Testament scholar. He used to be Christian. He left the faith. He’s one of the world’s leading experts on New Testament documents. Even as an agnostic, Ehrman tells us on page four of his 2012 book, Did Jesus Exist, that it is the opinion of virtually every expert on the planet that Jesus did exist. There are only a handful, I probably can count them on one hand, of people with relevant PhDs who believe that Jesus never existed. To my knowledge, none of them teach at major universities or seminaries or anything like that. You’ve probably come across people online who said that Jesus didn’t exist. They’re a mythicist. The story of Jesus was copied from pagan mythology. You may have come across mythicism and attempted to engage it.
Trent Horn:
On previous episodes of the podcast I’ve done rebuttals to zeitgeist, for example, which is the classic documentary that has that whole, Jesus was a ripoff of pagan gods like Horus and Mithra. If you want my complete take down of those kinds of arguments, definitely check out that at video. But what I want to talk about today are the bad arguments, because we should always combat error with the best arguments or at least good arguments, but it is a mistake if we combat it with bad arguments, because sometimes people can show, especially if you think it’s a good argument, it could shake somebody’s faith if they don’t realize their actually using a weak argument. It can lead people into error. It can make the other side think, oh, these people, they got no good arguments to their position, when actually we most certainly do. So let’s jump right into that then and talk about these three different arguments that I hear when Christians attempt to defend that Jesus exist.
Trent Horn:
Number one, I’ve heard this one a lot, is the claim that there is more historical evidence for the existence of Jesus of Nazareth than there is for Julius Caesar. Right off the bat I’m skeptical of a claim like that because John Meyer, who is a moderate scholar. Many things I disagree with him on, but he wrote an excellent four volume series called Jesus, a marginal Jew. That was a great description for who Jesus was. When Jesus was crucified, he was a marginal Jew. He was the leader of a tiny sect of people, 12 when he was crucified, well 11. He was a leader of that group and they were a tiny marginalized group within Judaism, in a backwater province of the Roman empire very far away from Rome, from the center of the empire.
Trent Horn:
Christianity didn’t rise to prominence within Rome for many decades after Jesus’ life. For a while, Christianity was seen as a sect of Judaism and part of a Jewish disagreement. For example, the Roman writer Suetonius tells us that Jews in Rome were expelled by emperor Claudius because of an instigator named Crestus. We don’t know exactly who that refers to. Crestus was a common name so it could just be a reference to a Jew or someone named Crestus, leading a mob and the Jews were arguing and writing amongst each other, or Crestus could be a reference to Christ or Christus, that Jews and Christians were fighting with each other in Rome and then the emperor just expelled all of them from the city. All the Jews and Christians were considered Jews, many Christians thought of themselves as Jews. They still went and worshiped at the synagogue for example, even though on the Lord’s day on Sunday, they gathered together to receive the Eucharist, but many of them were still attending synagogues and temples until they were kicked out from there.
Trent Horn:
I’m just skeptical that you have Julius Caesar, the Roman emperor, that somehow we would have more evidence for Jesus, even though Jesus was a much more marginal figure in his lifetime than Caesar was. I think this is just not a good comparison. We don’t need to compare Jesus to Julius Caesar, because we believe in many other individuals who existed in the time of Jesus who were not leaders of the entire empire. You don’t need to compare that. Even many atheists who denied Jesus existed believe John the Baptist existed. Josephus writes about him. We’ll talk about Josephus in a bit. Rabbi Gamaliel, Rabbis Hillel, Shammai, [inaudible 00:05:31]. That’s just in the time of Jesus himself.
Trent Horn:
We can look at other historical episodes. William Wallace, who is the portrayed in the movie, Braveheart, the Scottish freedom William Wallace. The first, the first written biography we have of Wallace was 150 years later written by a blind minstrel, I think his name was blind Harry. A brief mention in the Scotichronicon, but nobody seriously doubts that William Wallace existed. There’s doubts about aspects of his life.
Trent Horn:
With Jesus, a much stricter test is put over or stricter framework if you will. Just putting it out there saying, you should believe Jesus existed because we have more evidence for Jesus than for Julius Caesar. That is just not a good argument and frankly, it’s just not true. I’ll link in the description here to an answer on Quora. Not all these answers are great at quora.com, but I trust this one because it comes from Tim O’Neill. Tim O’Neill, spelt here with two Ls at the end. I have a friend Tim O’Neil who it’s one L at the end. The point that this O’Neill is making. He’s an atheist who rebuts and argues against Jesus mythicism. He’s saying that it’s equally wrong to say there is the same amount of evidence for Julius Caesar as for Jesus. We have more evidence for Caesar. We have coins minted during the time of his reign, inscriptions dedicated to him. We don’t have of that for Jesus. We have his own autobiography. We have the actual writings of Julius Caesar himself. We don’t have that for Jesus.
Trent Horn:
Now we still have very good sources for Jesus. You just don’t need to compare that to Julius Caesar because you’re raising the bar high. We would expect to have a lot of sources for the emperor of Rome and we wouldn’t expect to have as many for a rabbi that was leading a marginal group of Jews that only rose to prominence within the Roman empire decades after his crucifixion for the faith to be able to spread via churches and the proclamation of the gospel.
Trent Horn:
The point is that O’Neil in his article here, his answer. He traces this claim back to FF Bruce in 1960. FF Bruce is a conservative Evangelical scholar, very good biblical scholar. In there, Bruce was comparing the manuscript evidence for Julius Caesar versus the manuscript evidence for Jesus. Here I might say, we have better manuscript evidence for Jesus in that we have more copies of works that describe Jesus in ancient manuscripts than we do for Caesar. I did a whole episode about this on the podcast as well, called how the Bible beats every ancient book. You’ll definitely want to go and definitely go check that out. This is what Bruce says. “For Caesars Gallic war there are several extent manuscripts, but only 9 or 10 are good and the oldest is some 900 years later than Caesar’s day, whereas we have the thousands of New Testament manuscripts, dozens within the first few centuries of Jesus’ life.” We don’t have to wait 900 years to get the first copy of a gospel for example.
Trent Horn:
Then O’Neill goes on to say, “Bruce here is making an argument for the textual integrity of the New Testament books. In the hands of later Christian apologists, most notoriously Josh McDowell, this argument became muddled into something to do with not the integrity of the text, but the historical reliability of the contents and the events described, which makes no sense at all. This in turn got garbled still further by repetition until it somehow turned into. There is more evidence for Jesus’s existence than there is for Julius Caesars, which is complete garbage. By using stupid garbled arguments like this ignorant fundamentalist, Christians play directly into the hands of the Jesus never existed anti theist fringe, who are almost as incompetent and ignorant of history, but not so much so that they can’t see this claim about Jesus and Caesar is total crap.”
Trent Horn:
So we can make a lot of other comparisons to show we have better evidence for Jesus than other well attested historical figures. We just don’t have to choose as grand a figure as somebody like Julius Caesar for example.
Trent Horn:
Here’s the next one. Some people will say, well of course we know Jesus existed because Pontius Pilate wrote a letter to Emperor Tiberius talking about the crucifixion of Jesus. I’ve heard people actually mention this to me saying, “Why don’t you talk about the letter Pontius Pilate wrote to Emperor Tiberius?” I never understood where they got this idea because we don’t have any of Pontius Pilate writings, none. We don’t have any of Pilates writings whatsoever. We had nothing. We really had nothing in a non-Jewish Roman history talking about Pilate. We have nothing until Tacitus writing The Annals of Rome in the second century AD. He wrote about Christus being crucified under the procurator Pontius Pilate.
Trent Horn:
Now we did discover in the 1960s a headstone with an inscription related to Pilot. We haven’t found anything like a report. We have no reports or any writings from Pontius Pilate. In my investigation, I found that I think this claim comes from the Church Fathers. Tertullian, Justin Martyr claiming that Pilate had written a report of this. They’re telling people, there is a report of the crucifixion, go and check it in the archives. It may be possible but I just don’t think it’s going to be very persuasive to atheistic critics because we have found no such report at all. I just don’t think they’re going to take the Church Father’s word on that.
Trent Horn:
Definitely don’t try to share with them the apocryphal letter itself. This has been dated to the Renaissance period. This is the purported letter from Pilate, but it’s a Renaissance forgery. “Upon Jesus Christ, whose case I had dearly set forth to thee in my last, at length by the will of the people of bitter punishment has been inflicted. Myself being in a sort of unwilling and rather afraid. I did not, according to my strength, resist that innocent blood free from the whole charge brought against it but unjustly through the malignity of men should be sole and suffer, yet as the scriptures signify to their own destruction. Farewell.” I wouldn’t really expect Pontius Pilate to speak of the Bible, the Hebrew Bible as the scriptures. Don’t cite this. Where it comes from, it probably comes from a Latin text, I think has been dated to the year 16th century, like 1571, though there’s other things called the Acts of Pilate that go back more in a more apocryphal way in church history. But this isn’t one of them.
Trent Horn:
There are other kinds of forgeries at this time in church history. 15th, 16th century. Another famous one from the Renaissance period, this is from Italy in the 15th century, the Letter of Lentulus. It claims to be from a Roman official and claims to be a description of what Jesus looked like. “He is a man of medium size. He has a venerable aspect. His hair is the color of a ripe hazelnut. Straight down to the ears but below the ears, wavy and curled with blueish and bright reflection flowing over his shoulders. Parted in two at the top of his head. Mouth and nose are faultless. His brow is smooth and very cheerful.” It’s an imaginative description and there are others that go back in church history as well amongst certain fathers, Eastern traditions. Be wary of stuff, put on your thinking caps. Look for the evidence behind it, not just I want it to be true, but is there good evidence behind it showing that it is true?
Trent Horn:
Don’t make the comparison to Julius Caesar. We have just as good evidence for Jesus as many other minor figures in ancient history and other figures in history that were not recorded nearly as well. Don’t bring up the Pontius Pilate letter because we don’t have the actual letter itself. There are forgeries of it. I don’t think many atheists will be impressed by the Church Fathers referencing a report.
Trent Horn:
Finally, don’t rely solely on Josephus. Don’t say, “Well look, Josephus said Jesus existed.” You can make that argument. I have made of that argument about the Jewish historian Josephus referencing Jesus, but you got to know the whole picture involved. First, you need to know that parts of Josephus’ testimony, he writes about Jesus in two places. Book 18 and book 20 of the Antiquities of the Jews. Book 20 is I think the stronger reference because it’s a very brief reference about James being martyred when there was not a Roman Proctor, he was martyred by the San Hedron. He was executed by the San Hedron I should say. We would interpret his martyrdom. He’s executed by the San Hedron and it says this James was the brother of Jesus who was called Christ. It’s a very simple thing. I think there’s good evidence that that’s authentic. The longer one is the [inaudible 00:14:16]. I might do a whole episode on the non-Christian references to Jesus maybe at some point. Just know parts of this are interpolated. I’ll read it.
Trent Horn:
“About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man. If indeed one ought to call him a man, for he was one who performed surprising deeds and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly. He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks. He was the Christ and went upon the accusation of the principle men among us. Pilate had condemned him to a cross. Those who had first come to love him did not cease. He appeared to them spending a third day, restored the life for the prophets of God. If we’re told these things and a thousand other marvels about him and the tribe of the Christians so-called after him has still to this day not disappeared.”
Trent Horn:
Right off the bat, when I said interpolation, I meant that a later Christian author added things he felt Josephus left out. Like he was the Christ. He was restored to life on the third day. Josephus never converted or became Christian. I read one Catholic essay claiming he did, but there weren’t very good arguments for that. If you just put Josephus out there and you don’t know parts of it are forged, you might have egg on your face if you don’t know that. Now you can be prepared, like I would you’re right. Some of this is forged, but I don’t think all of it is. I think there’s good evidence for that because there’s other things in here. When you read this paragraph, it sounds like there’s two different voices. A really Christian voice and a Jewish voice and they’re in conflict, which would show the forgeries added to something Josephus originally wrote. That he originally wrote “about this time their live Jesus a wise man.” Now it’s interesting. Christians don’t call Jesus a man. That’s why the interpolator, the forger wrote “If indeed, why not to call him a man?”
Trent Horn:
If he was just writing straight out a forgery, just skip that part. Just say, at this time they live Jesus. For he was one who performs surprising deeds or startling is another word. Like it’s not necessarily a positive thing. He won over many Jews, many of the Greeks. He was the Christ, that’s interpolated, and went upon the accusation of the principle men among us. Pilate had condemned him to a cross. Those would first come to love him did not cease. I think that’s genuine. I’ve also gone through and looked at the passages here and done a word search of the language and it matches other things that Josephus writes. When you look at the rest of the antiquities, it’s very similar to his language whereas the forger is not.
Trent Horn:
Then the whole thing, third day, prophets of God, that’s forged, no doubt. The last part ” And the tribe of the Christians so called after him has still to this day, not disappeared.” Christians did not refer themselves as a tribe. They called themselves the way of the church, but they didn’t consider themselves just another tribe in Judaism. They weren’t one of the 12 tribes. They were unique. They were the Jews who were following the Messiah. This sounds more like an outsider’s view on Christians as just being another sect of Judaism, following a failed Messiah or being the remnants of a failed Messiah but they did not give up on him. Unlike other people whose messiahs that they follow, like the [inaudible 00:17:22], the Egyptian. These other Messiah claimants at the time of Jesus were shortly thereafter, their followers gave up on them after they were exiled or killed.
Trent Horn:
I think it’s fine to talk about Josephus’ reference to Jesus, but just know the arguments against it and be able to answer them. I think I’ve given you guys some bad arguments he shouldn’t use. What are the good arguments?
Trent Horn:
I would say first, the fact that this is the consensus of scholars, that the burden of proof is on a mythicist to show why the consensus of religious and non-religious scholars is wrong. They have the burden of proof, not us. Number two, one argument I like that I haven’t seen pursued a lot in literature, maybe I’ll pursue it, is an argument from silence.
Trent Horn:
The first people to seriously argue that Jesus did not exist at all. We don’t see that until the 17th or 18th centuries. The mythicist theory says the first Christians believed Jesus was like a cosmic being and then later Christians allegorize that and then mistakenly believed that Jesus actually had earthly existence. The first Christians didn’t. But if that’s true, then why didn’t the disciples of the first Christians, those mythicists, why didn’t they fight the heretical historicist later in church history? Why didn’t they go and do that? We would expect then the people who believe Jesus existed, where heretics to the mythicists, the mythicists would be heretics to the historicist who believe there was real Jesus. We don’t see any record of any conflict between them, which makes it the case that even though there were heretics in the early church there, [inaudible 00:18:57] believe Jesus existed, but he didn’t have a human body. They all agreed that there was a Jesus.
Trent Horn:
Finally, I would say that Paul is our early witness. Galatians chapter one, is clear. He knew Peter. He knew the apostles. He knew James, the brother of the Lord. Though Jesus never existed, who is this brother? This relative could be cousin, kin, stepbrother. If Jesus didn’t exist, even mythicists will say this is a big argument against their position, that Paul speaks about Jesus having the Eucharist at dining or dinner with others. He’s recounting the last supper tradition he’s received. Talks about being born of a woman, born under the law. I think that Paul is one of our best arguments against the mythicist view because he’s so early. Then you could talk about the historical reliability of the gospels themselves and how the gospels don’t seem like allegories that are meant to look like history, but have a secret mythicist message behind them. I talk about that a lot in my debate with Richard Carrier several years ago. Also, check out my book, Counterfeit Christ. I talk a lot about mythicism in that book.
Trent Horn:
I hope this is helpful for you all. I’ll leave links to resources I talked about in description here below. Thank you guys and I hope you have a very blessed day.
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