Audio only:
Joe Heschmeyer examines mythicist arguments to answer the question: Was Jesus a Myth?
Transcription:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery; I’m Joe Heschmeyer. So Christians often present what’s called thema, that Jesus speaks in such a way that he declares himself to be God, which leaves us with three possibilities, sometimes shorthanded to Lord, liar or lunatic. Either he’s totally out of his mind delusional or he’s knowingly lying about being God or he actually is God. Now, some atheists will object to that or non-believers more broadly and say, I reject that whole tri. I don’t think Jesus existed or said the things. He’s as described as saying this is what sometimes called Jesus mythicism, and I want to answer two versions of that argument today. One version says literally there is no such person as Jesus of Nazareth. The other version says, yeah, sure there may have been a Jesus of Nazareth, but he didn’t do all the things ascribed to him and the things ascribed to him are based not on the life of Jesus, but on Roman mythology and well Greco-Roman mythology that sin being brought into Christianity.
Now, if you’ve never heard those objections before, then I encourage you to buckle up, tune in and see kind of how we should respond to those because there are good answers to those, but I think a lot of Christians are so ignorant of Greco-Roman mythology that it’s easy to kind of fall for these false objections. The stronger, the more extreme of the two is the first one that Jesus literally never existed. The most famous proponent of this even kind of cautiously was Richard Dawkins in his book, the God Delusion, he doesn’t endorse it, but he kind of throws it out there. He says, it is even possible to mount a serious though not widely supported historical case that Jesus never lived at all as has been done by among others, professor Ga Wells of the University of London in a number of books, including did Jesus exist.
Now, you’ll notice he doesn’t exactly come out and say this is true, but he does claim that a serious case can be made historically and then he quotes a professor. Now, if you know nothing else, you might imagine this is a history professor or someone with a relevant kind of degree in a relevant field. Who’s teaching on that kind of subject? None of that’s true. JO Wells is George Wells who is a German professor, and it’s true early on like in the 1970s, he did make the argument that Jesus didn’t exist, but even Wells realized that argument didn’t hold water, and so by the end of his life he admitted that there was a Jesus of Nazareth and he retracted his earlier skeptical views. So the one guy who’s being cited as scholarly support by Dawkins reneged on that he retract, he doesn’t think the thing Dawkins ascribed him as saying and didn’t think it at the time Dawkins was ascribing that view to him. Now, John Lenox pressed him on this, his colleague at Oxford. I think Lenox is a mathematician, so neither of them are classicists or historians or theologians or anything like that, but Linux actually asked the people in the relevant fields and realized nobody believed the thing that Dawkins was claiming, and so he pressed him on it and surprisingly kind of got dawkins to admit that he was wrong about the whole Jesus didn’t exist thing.
CLIP:
You say that it’s under scholarly dispute among historians that Jesus actually existed. Now I checked with the ancient historians that is not so and it disturbed me. History is not natural science, but what I don’t understand is this why you would write something like that.
I don’t think it’s a very important question whether Jesus existed. There are some historians, most historians think he did, some, they
Certainly do. I couldn’t find
An ancient historian that didn’t. Well, there are one or two when you look at history and let’s leave aside maybe I alluded to the possibility that some historian think Jesus never exists. I take that back. Jesus existed.
Joe:
So you’ll notice Lyx presses him and Dawkins backs down. He says, oh, there are one or two. He can’t name them. He doesn’t cite to them, and then eventually it’s just like, yeah, Jesus existed. Now when he’s not being pressed by someone who knows the relevant area, he’ll still vaguely refer to some unknown scholars out there who side with this view that Jesus didn’t exist. But he’s careful not to give us any clues as to who they are or what they’ve written or whether they still hold that view. Do you think he was a real person?
CLIP:
Most of the scholars I’ve talked to say he probably was. The evidence is not great of course, but I I don’t think it’s that big a deal actually because he, I mean a wondering preacher called Yes you are or harsh you are. Would it not be surprising? I mean it’s a common name and there are plenty of wandering preachers. What would be very surprising would be if he raised rather from the dead and walked on water and turned water into wine and that of course didn’t, did not happen.
Joe:
So you’ll notice Dawkins is still kind of heming and hawing. Oh, most scholars think he existed like leaving open that maybe there’s some scholars who agree that Jesus didn’t exist. He doesn’t really cite them to the best I can tell. The closest you’re going to find to any kind of scholarly support is Richard Carrier who does not work in academia but has a PhD in his defense and carrier has some pretty wild views on Jesus’s alleged non-existence. He’s easily the most famous sist because he’s extremely online and he says things like whether there was a historical Jesus or not, the earliest Christians believed he was an extra terrestrial who descended from outer space and then ascended into the stars to communicate with them beyond the grave. That’s an outrageously inaccurate view of the New Testament account. But he goes on to say once we accept this, the proposal that Jesus never even existed becomes more intelligible and more coherent with the surviving evidence.
Well, yeah, I agree. If the view is Jesus is et, then I can see why Jesus didn’t exist would be a stronger view than that, but only because you have a ludicrously false kind of depiction of Christianity to defend this. He says these Christians, and he’s referring to people like St. Paul who he quotes earlier, these Christians literally said that Jesus was an extraterrestrial who descended from the stars and they returned that while on earth he merely wore a mortal human body like in an environment suit. He eventually discarded. No, that’s just not at all. Whatever you think about Jesus’s existence or non-existence, the idea of the Christian message is Jesus wasn’t fully human, he just wore a human suit and then discarded it. If you’ve watched my recent videos on gnosticism, you’ll know this was the very point that Christians were fighting the gnostics about gnostics viewed the body as merely a cage or a prison that you would eventually be liberated from and discarded.
The Christians defending the empty tomb are defending Jesus’s bodily resurrection, that he doesn’t just discard his body. He’s not et from outer space. He’s God come into the world and God isn’t just living among. That’s not every part of that is inaccurate or blatantly false. So that’s carrier. But besides him, you’re more likely to find these kind of claims just in pop culture, whether it’s on Facebook or on television. So for instance, Stephen Fry, who is smart in other areas, it was on the game show Qi, explaining this very fictitious view that Jesus is just a retelling of the story of myths, and you often find this around Christmas time, but you’ll hear variations of this claim.
CLIP:
There are amazing things claimed about Mires, and I’ll read you some of them. He was a savior sent to earth to live as immortal through whom it was possible for sinners to be reborn into immortal life. He died for our sins but came back to life the following Sunday. He was born of a virgin on December the 25th in a manger or perhaps a cave attended by shepherds and became known as the light of the world. He had 12 disciples with whom he shared a last meal before dying. His devotees symbolically consumed the flesh and blood of him because RAs was the sun God. He was worshiped on Sundays. Is he a tribute band? He’s often depicted with a halo around his head and MIAs gave each other gifts. On December the 25th, the leader of the religion was called a papa and HQ was on Vatican Hill in Rome.
Joe:
Now, almost everything you just heard there is blatantly and demonstrably untrue and it should ring some alarm bells. If you know anything about Roman mythology, there’s no soteriology where someone needs to die for your sense. That’s just not how their whole religion works. Nevertheless, you’ll find things like this Facebook meme where it says, mires was born of a virgin on December 25th. He was considered a great traveling teacher and master. He had 12 disciples and he performed miracles. He was buried in a tomb after three days, he rose again. His resurrection was celebrated every year during his principal festival held on what would become Easter. So you’ve got the Christmas version, you’ve got the Easter version of myths. They’re both fictional, they’re both invented by people who opposed Christianity or you’ll find a version of this was Horace allegedly. He was also born of a virgin on December 25th, and I could point you to any number of Christians who would say None of this is true. I can point you to any number of scholars who would say this is untrue. I’m going to point you to someone I’ve spoken well of recently twice in a row. Now, Bart Airman, he’s an agnostic with atheist tendencies, but even he recognizes this is just ridiculous falsehood. So here’s airman just tearing this theory apart.
CLIP:
It is a modern myth that there were lots of accounts of people being born of virgins and on December 25th and that they were crucified and that they were buried and raised from the dead. It’s actually a modern myth. Those myths was not born on December 25th. His mother was not a virgin. Osiris is not raised from the dead. People say that, but people who say that don’t know the ancient sources, the ancient sources, in fact don’t bear that out
Joe:
Hilariously, a lot of this actually comes from what was originally an anti-Catholic polemic from Alexander his lips, the two babylons, which was allegedly about how all those depictions of Mary holding her child, Jesus, that must be Isis and Osirus or that must be Nimrod and his wife or anytime there’s a woman with child, this must be a goddess. You couldn’t just have a woman holding a baby. Obviously if a woman’s holding a baby, that must be paganism. And it’s that level of logic where it’s like, why in the world would you jump to paganism from this very Christian, very biblical idea that Jesus has a mother named Mary? And so this was extreme kind of fringe Protestant anti Catholicism that then gets adopted by people who reject Christianity and seemingly unaware that they’re just repeating these 19th century falsehoods that no scholar takes seriously. And I’m going to go back to Airman because he pushes atheists on this by saying they’re just regurgitating these embarrassing falsehoods.
CLIP:
I know in the crowds you all run around with, it’s commonly thought that Jesus did not exist. Let me tell you, once you get outside of your conclave, there’s nobody who, I mean this is not even an issue for scholars of antiquity. It is not an issue for scholars. There is no scholar in any college or university in the western world who teaches classics, ancient history, new Testament, early Christianity, any related field who doubts that Jesus existed
Joe:
And that includes carrier, by the way, as I say, he has a PhD, but I looked at his CV and the closest he’s got is lecturer, but if you read it says independent, which basically just means he’s like doing this. He’s going on YouTube channels, he’s talking to people or he’s working for atheist groups like Partners for Secular activism and CFI, the booth goes center for Inquiry Institute, and he only did that for like two years. None of that is academic positions. None of this is him being in a position where he’s in academia doing anything kind of peer reviewed proving his kind of work. The nearest he has is a little more than 20 years ago he worked as a librarian’s assistant. That’s it. He’s not an academic in this field, working in academia. And I mentioned this because he constantly puts the PhD after his name and speaks of himself as a classist.
And people who don’t understand academia can imagine that he has a degree of authority that he just does not have. He’s a smart guy on the internet with a crazy view. There are a lot of people like that on the internet. And if you say that, it’s like, oh, okay, well now to take it with more of a grain of salt, I mean you could find plenty of people who’ve gone to school but still have weird views on relevant issues like religion or history that just know that that’s what you’re getting. Now, I realize that doesn’t automatically disprove it, and Airman acknowledges that too, but he makes the case that if you’re going to say the entire field is wrong, you’d better come equipped with evidence, you’d better have some strong evidence to support you. I’m going to go back to Airman one last time because I like what he says here.
CLIP:
If you want to go where the evidence goes, I think that atheists have done themselves a disservice by jumping on the bandwagon of Mythicism because frankly it makes you look foolish to the outside world if that’s what you’re going to believe. You just look foolish.
Joe:
So I applaud Airman and I applaud those people who were literally applauding airman, that there are atheists out there who realize this is silly, this is an extreme kind of fringe view, but because there are enough people who are atheists who believe this kind of thing, it’s worth just calling out like, oh yeah, none of that is true. Now how do we know it’s not true? How can we disprove this? Well, remember Richard Carrier, who I mentioned before is the most famous proponent of this. He actually in a 2016 blog post on his own blog, he responds to a question that he says he gets a lot. And the question goes like this, I keep hearing Christian apologists insisting the Corinthian creed, first Corinthians 15, three to eight can be reliably dated to the thirties ad just years or even months after Jesus died. Can you direct me to a solid reputation of that claim?
And the answer is no, he can’t because there is no refutation of that claim other than a logically fallacious one because the evidence for the creed dating back to the very origins of Christianity is amply strong and there is no reasonable basis for claiming otherwise. So we’re going to get into what the Corinthian creed is in a second here. But notice he’s saying there’s no reason to reject the idea that what we’re about to hear in one Corinthians 15 dates to the earliest months or earliest years after the death of Jesus. And he says in particular that Paul doesn’t appear to have written this, it has a non Pauline style, particularly in the first three lines. He’s got textual criticism of some of the later parts. I’m only going to focus on the first three lines that he grants the authenticity of without an asterisk.
And he says, this is what distinguishes Christianity from any other sect of Judaism. It’s the only thing Peter fuss and the other pillars, James and John could have been preaching before Paul joined the religion and Paul joins the religion sometime before the year 37. So we’re not looking at some late myth from like 100 or 200 or something like this. We’re looking within the first months or a couple of years after Jesus dies that the early Christians are preaching the following creed, one Corinthians 15 verse three, for I delivered to you as of first importance, what I also received, that’s Paul introducing this and what is it that he received when he came in around 37, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures and that he appeared to pha then to the 12.
So notice a couple things. Number one, they don’t say Jesus was an alien who discarded his space suit and went back to heaven. No, he is buried bodily and he rises seemingly bodily. It’s all right there. And this is a very clear view that Jesus is not a myth. So the people who would be in a position to know the people who were alive at the time in the very months or years after this happened, say, yeah, Jesus existed. How do you get to Peter, James, John, these other people before Paul? I understand people who say St. Paul didn’t know Jesus, and so maybe he was tricked about the whole thing. Maybe he had a delusional experience on the road to Damascus, and so he thought he saw the risen Christ. It was just a hallucination. I understand all of that. That’s not what we’re talking about.
We’re talking about the 12 apostles because when Paul comes into the religion, there already is a religion. It already has a creed, this Corinthian creed and one Corinthians 15, and that creed clearly says Jesus lived, died and rose again. That doesn’t sound like a myth. Now you could say the apostles are lying. That’s a different question. But to say that this was a myth that Jesus never existed is just bizarre. I mean at most we’re talking maybe three years back. So imagine someone who said, oh, no, COVID didn’t happen. Covid didn’t exist. That wasn’t even a thing that’s further back than Jesus’ death and resurrection was from the Corinthian creed in Paul’s conversion. So you can see why you can’t just build up a myth. You can make up a story about, oh, there is a terrible plague in the 19th century, and most people wouldn’t know better, or you could say this, Paul bunion or somebody existed in the 19th century.
That’s far enough back. You can make up a myth. It’s very hard to make up a myth about someone you say was publicly executed and then rose again and appeared to hundreds of people just a few months or years after it allegedly happened. So it doesn’t work as a myth. It doesn’t even really work as a lie, but that’s carrier’s view. The other that we can, and notice carrier has to acknowledge the Corinthian creed is authentic because you just can’t deny it on historical grounds. But the other place to turn is to the Roman historian and TAUs born in the mid first century. So he’s born around the year 50 or so, I believe, maybe 56, and he’s a young boy in the year 64 when there’s the great fire of Rome and later as an adult, he’s writing the history of Rome and he talks about it how after this happens, people thought Nero, the emperor at the time had caused the fire himself so that he could expand his own properties.
And so Nero to deflect criticism, fastened guilt, and started torturing a class hated for their abominations called Christians by the populace. Now notice here Tacitus is not a Christian. He’s not sympathetic to Christianity, but he’s describing how when he was a boy in the sixties, there were a group of Christians who were tortured and killed by the emperor Nero, and he goes on to say that Christus from whom the name had its origin suffered the extreme penalty, obviously crucifixion during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our pro curers punch his Pilate. So he’s who’s not even a Christian, is acknowledging that Jesus of Nazareth, this Christus historically existed. He’s not endorsing Christianity. He doesn’t believe the whole thing. He calls it a most mischievous superstition and talks about how it’s spread from Judea to Rome or all things hideous and shameful eventually arrive.
This is classic Roman kind of lamenting the city that they grew up in, but he goes on to describe how the Christian suffered these really barbaric forms of martyrdom. They were covered with the skins of beasts. They were torn apart by dogs. They were nailed the crosses. They were doomed to the flames and burnt, and they were used as human torches. The point there is the Christians in the early sixties were in a position to know whether the whole thing had just been a fun story they were talking about or a real event. And if it’s just a fun story, no one’s going to be like, I’m such a big fan of the Marvel universe that I want to literally become a human torch. No, that is not a thing that’s happening. No one is saying, I’m going to be martyred because I really like this story.
I really like this myth. No, the Christians, we have to just grant that the Christians in the early sixties being martyred for this clearly think this is real and worth s taking their entire life and their salvation on, and we have to grant, they’re so early on that there are eyewitnesses who are still alive. This is 30 years, this is as far back as the mid nineties are to us. And so if you know a bunch of people heard your story, mistook it for real, and then are getting violently murdered, wouldn’t you be like, Hey guys, guys, guys, that’s not a literal thing. That’s just like a fun story we tell around the campfire, so it doesn’t work, right? The whole mythic theory in this form that Jesus never existed, it was just mythology, just doesn’t make sense of why the Corinthian creed exists or why the early Christians are being martyred.
And I’m misusing this example in Rome because it’s a very well established one, but there are plenty of martyrdom accounts from even before this of people being martyred in places like Jerusalem, and so they knew becoming Christians, they would die. It doesn’t make sense to do that for a fun story. It does make sense to do that for the Messiah who you believe is the one who holds the keys to heaven in hell. So which one did they believe? It’s very clear from both what they said and how they behaved. So that’s the first theory that Jesus never existed. The second theory is that there was some kind of rabbi named Jesus, but he was transformed into a Greek demigod. And unlike the first theory, this one actually has some scholarly support, namely a figure named Dennis McDonald. And Dennis McDonald has written many, many books related to this subject, including books like the Ric Epics and the Gospel of Mark or the book Luke and Virgil, where he claims Luke is trying to copy Virgil, who’s trying to copy Homer.
And there’s a lot, he’s many, many other books. He’s got a lot there. And at the very broadest level, he’s saying one thing that I think most people will grant is true Homer and the Homeric kind of poems. Iliad and Odyssey are an important part of Greek education. And so someone learning Greek would know the basic stories of Homer, and more broadly just Homer has a massive influence on Greek literature and Greek writing and rhetoric and everything else. We could sort of say the same thing in English with a figure like Shakespeare, but it would be a mistake to say, well, Shakespeare is so influential that therefore we must know that twilight is just a retelling of Romeo and Juliet that doesn’t follow at all. And so the problem is McDonald goes from saying, Homer’s very influential on Greek literature and writing true to making these much wilder claims.
So I’m going to focus on one of his books, mythologizing Jesus from Jewish teacher to epic hero in which he makes the following claims. First, the indebtedness of Mark and Luke to the Homeric epics does not call into question Jesus’s existence. The evangelist simply injected him with narrative steroids to let him compete with the mythological heroes of Greeks and Romans. So that’s the first kind of idea that okay, the real Jesus was not that impressive, and so to make him seem more impressive, his followers made him more like the Greco-Roman heroes that they would’ve known from their pagan neighbors. Second, he says the mark and evangelist, meaning whoever wrote the gospel of Mark, we classically called Mark, as we shall see, created most of his characters and episodes without the help of antecedent traditions or sources. So he’s just saying, mark makes up most of the gospel.
Now that should create a question. Why would he, if he’s going to go to the trouble of telling the story of Jesus, why not actually tell some of the things Jesus really did do, but no, he makes up the stories instead and they’re not based on any tradition or sources. Instead, he imitated the Homeric epics that centuries earlier had come to define Greek cultural identity and retain this unrivaled status for at least to millennium. So rather than asking people who knew Jesus, what was Jesus like? Instead, according to McDonald’s view, mark just kind of picks up Homer and is like, oh yeah, those are fun stories. I’m going to put Jesus’s name on here instead. And then Luke reads, mark as historical fiction, McDonald says rightly that the gospel is not even meant to be. This is not meant to be true, and Luke then expands its imitations to include even more Homeric episodes.
Thus to read the Gospels as historically reliable witnesses to the life of Jesus obscures the author’s intention to demonstrate to their first readers that Jesus was the ultimate superhero superior to gods and heroes in the book such as Iliad and the Odyssey as well as Jewish scriptures. Now, it’s true in again, one very broad sense that in proclaiming the gospel, the evangelism, that Jesus is son of God and the true king. There’s obviously a rival claim being made to the Roman claim that Caesar is son of God and the king. There’s no question that there’s an intentional kind of contrast there, but to say therefore this was all just made up out of pure cloth doesn’t follow at all, and significantly we don’t get evidence that Luke is just seeing, oh, this is all historical fiction. I’m going to build upon this fiction again. We already saw that they think Jesus really existed. Whether you think he did or not, he clearly did. They clearly do. And Luke begins his gospel by telling us he’s trying to write history. He says, in as much as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things which have been accomplished among us just as they were delivered to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word. So he’s appealing to eyewitnesses and ministers of the word, who by the way we know existed, we know there were people going around claiming that they’d seen Jesus.
Eight seemed good to me. Also, having followed all things closely from time past to write an orderly account for you most excellent Theophilus, that you may know the truth concerning the things of which you have been informed. So Luke is saying, I’m writing history. Sure, history in the first century follows different conventions and norms and styles than it might in the 21st century. That’s fine to say what did history look like to a first century author? But that’s not what McDonald is trying to do here. McDonald is reinterpreting all of this, not his history, but his conscious historical fiction that Mark and then Luke are just making stuff up and they’re making stuff up based on mythology. Now, because McDonald has so many books, it’s hard to show you all of the areas he’s wrong, but I want to highlight one particular episode that he does on the Myth Vision podcast.
He’s actually sitting down with Richard Carrier who has the first view of Mythicism that Jesus literally doesn’t exist and he and Carrier are presenting and well, as the title of the episode says, inescapable evidence, the gospels used Homer to create their narrative. So this is supposedly among the strongest evidence. Now, I realize McDonald probably didn’t write that himself. Usually if you’re being interviewed, you don’t get to choose the title of the podcast episode, and I’ve had times where I wouldn’t have chosen the title that they gave it, so I get that. Nevertheless, McDonald does sound like he’s saying this really is irrefutable evidence that he’s about to prevent. So let’s hear him make that claim and then hear what the evidence that is. So rebuttable actually is,
CLIP:
I think there really can’t be any doubt that this text is mimetic of Homer. That doesn’t mean that it justifies all the emesis that I propose, but in this case, I think it’s inescapable.
Joe:
So he’s claiming he’s got evidence that there can’t be any doubt about that is inescapable evidence. What is that evidence? What is this alleged parallel between Homer and the gospel of Mark that so strong? You literally can’t even argue it.
CLIP:
The woman who anoints Jesus for his burial in Mark surely imitates the famous Homeric nitra or washing by Ucle O’ nurse who recognized the scar on his thigh while washing his feet in Odyssey 19. Okay,
Joe:
So if you remember in the Odyssey by Homer, Homer is in his own house with his wife Penelope, but he’s in disguise as a poor beggar and his former nurse when he was a small boy, she’s now an old woman, washes him and recognizes a scar that he had from an earlier wound, and then she realizes who it is, and we’re supposed to read that and read the following words from Mark and be like, oh, this is obviously mimetic. This is the same story being retold in a Christian way. Think about all the themes you just heard me describe and see if you hear literally any of those themes. In Mark chapter 14, beginning in verse three, while he, Jesus was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper. As he set a table, a woman came with an alabaster jar of ointment of pure Bernard, very costly, and she broke the jar and poured it over his head.
But there were some who said to themselves, indignant, why was the ointment thus wasted for this ointment might’ve been sold for more than 300 denari and given to the poor, and they approached her, but Jesus said, let her alone. Why do you trouble her? She has done a beautiful thing to me, for you always have the poor with you, and whenever you will, you can do good to them, but you will not always have me. She has done what she could. She has anointed my body beforehand for burying. That’s an important one. We’re going to get back to that. And truly I say to you, wherever the gospel is preached in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her. Okay, so think about the details in Mark. Odysseus is in disguise. Jesus is not in disguise. Odysseus is in his own house.
Jesus is not in his own house. Odysseus is having his feet wash. There is no washing of feet. In Mark’s version, there’s a recognition because of a wound. There’s nothing like that in Mark’s version. Meanwhile, Mark’s version, there’s the anointing with oil. Now, you do have an anointing later in book 19, but not in the passage that we’re focusing on here. So that’s not really a match. Additionally, this woman is rebuked because the anointing oil could have been used for the poor that’s not present in Book 19. And Jesus talked about how she’s anointing him for his burial. That’s not present at all in any way, shape or form in Odyssey Book 19. So what do these passages have in common at all we’re supposed to believe. This is obviously a retelling of this passage in Book 19 in the Odyssey, and at first glance, there’s literally nothing in common.
Well, in his book, mythologizing Jesus, Dennis McDonald quotes Bruce Louden’s book, Homer’s Odyssey in the Near East to try to paint the picture of how there’s a connection. He says, in both myths, a female follower anoints the king shortly before events reach a crisis in the gospels. It’s not a prophet who anoints them as one might find in the Jewish Bible, but as you’re a CLIA in Odysseus, a woman Now that on the surface we should flag, the reason it’s not a prophetic anointing is because Jesus isn’t being anointed as pre prophet king here. Rather as Jesus says, she’s anointing his body for burial, and that was something women did. This is also why you see women at the tomb on Easter morning because the care for these bodies was often a female task. So it’s actually not surprising or striking or out of place in a Jewish context for a woman rather than a man to be anointing a body for burial because that was historically a woman’s role.
Strikingly, I mentioned McDonald, this is all a quotation from Bruce Loudon and I went and found Bruce Loudon’s book, and there’s hilariously this footnote that McDonald cuts out because Loudon says in his footnote, McDonald pursues tenuous parallels between Ulee as bathing and anointing of Odysseus. In three episodes in Mark, literally the book he’s citing to about how these are so connected mentions in a footnote how he’s pursuing these weak, tenuous parallels. That’s what tenuous means. These are weak connections. This is not a strong case, and yet we’re to believe this is this strong rebuttable case. Now, I think McDonald can persuade a lot of people because there’s a few things that he does, and I’m not saying he necessarily does them intentionally, but he does them in such a way that you can miss some really important details. So I want to get to that, but first I want to point out, I’ve alluded to it already, but there’s one really famous part of Book 19 in this washing of Odysseus, which is that she recognizes him by his scar. So McDonald acknowledges this.
CLIP:
Ulay has recognition generated many literary imitations, especially in Greek tragedy, where one character recognizes another by a distinctive token, which is the second criterion in this case. Examples appear in Osis Koori ide. Esophagal uses Electra in Achilles, TAES Lupa andron, long Daphne and Chloe and Helio’s Ethiopia. All novels interesting are all religious novels. That’s right where both, there’s both tragedies and religious novels where the hero identified himself by unquote a scar on his knee and that he got a hunting ab bore and the testament of Abraham even. So here we have an example of an imitation in Jewish literature presents a superb example of imitation of Odyssey 19 by a Jewish author.
So yeah, and proof
Of concept,
I give those parallels in other books.
Joe:
So even if you want to say every time somebody recognizes somebody else from a scar that this is imitating Homer, and I think that’s already really stretching the limits of ESIS and parallelism. There are plenty of times you just recognize someone by distinctive features. There’s a whole field in criminology where they look at the danger of misidentifying suspects because the person you grabbed had a scar and the person that assaulted you had a scar and you don’t notice it’s a different scar. That’s the whole nature of identifying features. Nevertheless, for our purposes, let’s just focus on the fact that there is none of that here in the anointing of Jesus. It isn’t like she’s anointing Jesus and is like, hold on a second. I noticed you’ve got this scar. You must be Jesus. No, everyone knows this. Jesus. There’s no identification of scars. The thing that is like the most distinctive feature in this passage in book 19 is not present here. So why then do people fall for McDonald’s theory? I would suggest he’s doing a couple things to watch out for. The first is he’s not just showing you the text, so watch what he does. Here
CLIP:
I’m reading from this the synopsis that I have of the gospels, a mimetic synopsis, which includes parallels to classical Greek poetry and to the Bible, the Sep as well.
Joe:
Okay, so he’s reading from not the original text, he’s reading from a synopsis he has made, and you can find this in his books in chart form. And when you take a look at it, you’ll notice some really strange things. You, for instance, on one side of the page, he’s looking at all of book 19 of the Odyssey, and on the other side of the page he’s looking at Mark 13, one to four and Mark 13, 28 to 37, and Mark 14, one to 11 to try to find parallels. Now, if that doesn’t mean anything to you, let me explain why it should matter. In the passage between Mark 13 verse one where he begins, and Mark 14 verse 11, where he ends, my Bible has it broken down into nine different sections. You have destruction of the temple, foretold, persecution, foretold, deci, sacrilege, the coming of the son of man, the lesson of the fig tree, the necessity of watchfulness, and then the plot to kill Jesus.
And then eighth, the anointing at Bethany, the thing that’s allegedly the parallel here and the ninth Judas agreeing to betray Jesus. So you may notice there’s a lot there. There’s eschatological teaching, there’s kind of parabolic sort of teaching. There are events happening after those teachings where Jesus goes into Bethany, then there’s a plot to kill him, and then you have the anointing, and then you have Judas agreeing to betray Jesus, and he’s lumping all of those different things together and saying, all of this has parallels to book 19. But when you cast a net that broadly, of course you’re going to find some common words and phrases and themes because you’re looking really at nine different events or nine different stories. Similarly, on book 19, he casts an extremely broad net as well. He doesn’t just look at the washing or anointing of Odysseus, rather, he looks at all of book 19, and that’s 604 lines long.
It’s nearly 7,000 words in English in the, what is it? Klein translation, I believe. This is how the table of contents breaks down the themes. Now, again, you might have a different table of contents that breaks things down slightly differently. The point I’m making here is there’s a bunch of different stories being told and so to say, well, this one story has this one element with this other story. If you get 20 stories over here and 20 stories over there, you might find 20 different connections. And someone who’s not realizing you’re drawing from 20 different events might think, wow, that must be a retelling. How could there be that many connections? Well, because you’ve cast this extremely broad net, right? So in book 19 verses one to 52 or lines one to 52, Odysseus and Telemachus hide the weapons. 53 to 99, Penelope prepares to question the stranger.
That’s Odysseus in disguise, 100 to 1 63, Penelope and Odysseus Converse 1 64 to two 19, Odysseus tells a false tale. He’s lying to his wife about who he is, two 20 to 3 0 7, Odysseus prophesize his own return, 3 0 8 to 360 Penelope’s offers hospitality. So notice for 360 lines we’ve not yet gotten to Ucle and the anointing in washing that then happens 360 1 to 4 75, UCLE recognizes Odysseus. That’s when she’s washing him. And then 4 76 to 5 0 7 Odysseus tells her to conceal his identity. Then 5 0 8 to 5 53, we’ve got Penelope Stream 5 54 to 6 0 4. Penelope proposes a challenge for the suitors. That’s a lot, right? 604 lines of text, and you’ve got nine different stories, and you’ve just got to find a few things in common between them. Once you’ve set the bar that low, of course you can find some thematic similarities. And the thematic similarities he’s finding are in many cases kind of silly.
So for instance, the first one, Telemachus was amazed at the great light that’s shown on the walls of his house, and that allegedly is a parallel to when one of Jesus’s disciples was amazed at the great buildings in the Jerusalem temple. I don’t think anyone seeing that on its own would be like, oh, obviously the anointing in Mark 14 must be a retelling of Odysseus being washed by his former nurse in book 19, because earlier in both Mark and earlier in book 19, two people were amazed at something unrelated things, but they were both amazed by something. And then after that, the second parallel, Odysseus went to Penelope and sat, and then Jesus went to the Mount of Olives and sat actually even a little misleading because Penelope actually sits first. So yeah, I mean these are extremely forced kind of parallels. My point though is in his book, he highlights several alleged parallels between these two passages, but the first, quite a few, let’s see the first 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, I think the first 10 or 11 are not even from the passage he’s allegedly looking at.
They’re just from earlier parts of Mark’s gospel in earlier parts of book 19, when you’re quoting Mark 13 and quoting the early parts of Book 19 of the Odyssey to say, look at these connections. You’ve gone astray from the alleged connection you’re drawing. The alleged connection is that when Penelope has ucle wash Odysseus, this is just like when a woman anoints Jesus in the gospel of Mark. So if you narrow it down to just those things, you have these alleged similarities after giving his prophecies to Penelope, Odysseus disguised as a beggar sat by himself. And then the parallel is after giving these prophecies to four disciples, Jesus sat at a table in the humble home of a leper, okay? What we don’t actually know as a humble home, we also should notice that there’s nothing like sitting at a humble home of a leper in the Greek version.
So literally the only thing in common there is two people are sitting. That’s the striking connection. How could you miss? Jesus is sitting. Therefore, that must be a retelling of Homer. Okay, what’s the next one? Ucle comes under the bottle of, excuse me, a bowl of water and washes his feet. Later, she anointed him generously with oil that later is doing a lot of work because it’s not in the section we’re looking at, but if you’re going to make an anointing to anointing parallel, Jesus is anointed and not washed. Odysseus is washed and not yet anointed. It’s that kind of thing where it’s like these are these strange kind of forced connections.
Next Odysseus, when Ucle recognizes him, she drops his leg into the brass vessel spilling the water, and that’s supposedly an obvious parallel to when the unnamed woman in the gospel of Mark breaks the jar on purpose to release the oil. Again. All that you have in common here if you break this down is two people sat down, two people had something done, either washing or anointing, not even the same thing. And in one case, water was spilled accidentally, and another case the oil is spilled on purpose. Then there’s one that he just says. He says, UCLE alone recognizes her king, true. And then this woman in Mark’s gospel alone recognizes that Jesus soon would die. That doesn’t actually appear in the text. He’s reading that in there to create that parallel. And then the last parallel that’s in here before he moves on to later events that aren’t in the passage that he’s supposed to be comparing is that Milo, one of the servants in the household of Odysseus and Penelope had objected to Penelope’s generosity to a poor beggar.
And the parallel is that people were objecting to the expensive anointed oil since that money could have gone to the poor. So again, those aren’t actually the same at all. And one, the woman is disdainful of Ossis because she thinks he’s poor and he’s actually not the other one. They’re saying, oh, this money could have been used for the poor. Those aren’t really a reversal or a parallel, but you can ignore another really glaring detail. Now, here’s why I mentioned that he’s using this chart, and so you don’t actually know where that’s appearing. And so it sounds like, I mean, the way that he has presented this, you would think this is sequential through book 19. So you’d expect this bit about meto to be right after or at the end of the anointing or washing scene, and it’s not. Listen very carefully to how he introduces it.
CLIP:
There are characters in Odyssey 19 who are not happy about the reception of Oeu, the beggar and somebody washing his feet, and there’s a slave woman named Lan, a slave, a female slave. She earlier complained about Penelope’s generosity to ois the bagger.
Joe:
Now, this alleged connection is just literally a falsehood because he’s claiming that she’s upset about the fact that they’ve welcomed Odysseus and are washing his feet. That is not true. The washing of the feet is introduced around line three 15. The incident with Milan though, who’s upset not about the washing of Odysseus’s feet, but the idea that there’s a beggar in the house that they’re being kind to, that happens way back in line 65, but if you look at his chart, it looks like it’s the next thing that happens sequentially, and it’s like, oh, wow. Maybe there is a connection here. But no, he’s just presenting these things in his own translation, by the way, which often makes the language sound more similar than it really is. He’s presenting these things in his own chronology, in his own language and saying, look at all these parallels, but when you actually open it up, those parallels don’t really exist.
Or if they do, they’re just at this superficial kind of level that you can find parallels between almost any two events. I’ll close with this example. Was JFKA Mimetic retelling of Abraham Lincoln? More specifically was the assassination of JFK, just a 20th century retelling of the story of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. And I mentioned this because I remember as a kid hearing about all these alleged connections, and some of them are true, and some of them are fake that are really just coincidences, not evidence of a memetic retelling. But Wikipedia, it turns out, has a whole article highlighting what are the real connections between the two and i’s going to run through them and point out that there’s a stronger case be made that JFK didn’t exist. He’s just a mythological retelling of Abraham Lincoln than there is a case that Jesus is a mythological retelling of Homer or of Oeu.
So here are the statements, or here are the true statements about Kennedy and Lincoln. Number one. Both of them were elected to Congress in 46. Lincoln was elected in 1846, Ken in 1946. Both were elected to the presidency in 60 Lincoln, 1860. Ken in 1960, both have seven letter long last names. Both were famously connected with civil rights. It’d be hard to find two people more connected with civil rights who were President Lincoln liberating the slaves, and then Kennedy signing this Civil Rights Act in 1964, fifth while in their thirties married women in their twenties, sixth. Both of them were shot on a Friday seventh. They were shot in the head eighth. Both of them when they died were replaced by their vice president who happened to be Johnson. In both cases, both of them had a security agent named William, who within 48 hours of attaining the age of 75 years, five months died.
Lincoln’s bodyguard, William and Kidney Secret Service agent William Greer, both of them were succeeded by Southerners. Andrew Johnson’s, Tennessee, Lyndon Johnson’s from Texas, both of their successors had been born in oh eight, Andrew Johnson in 1808, Lyndon Johnson in 1908. Both of their successors had six letter first names in addition to having the same last name. Both of the assassins are known by three names, although they acknowledge that’s pretty common. Both of their full names John W. Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald are both 15 letters. Both the assassins committed the crime wall in a place where they were regularly employed. Booth worked at Fort Theater, Oswald worked at the Texas School Depository, and then finally, the mother of Ulysses S Grant who succeeded. Andrew Johnson as president 1869 was named Hannah Simpson. Grant, the mother of Richard M. Nixon, who succeeded Lyndon Johnson as president in 1969 was named Hannah Millhouse Nixon. How could you deny these parallels?
Right? Obviously this is a mimetic retelling, and I think the same person hears that and is like, yeah, I understand how probability works. There’s going to be a certain number of things that are just coincidental. If you get a group of a couple dozen people, the odds that two of them have the same birthday, it’s pretty high. I don’t remember the exact number, but it’s much lower than you would imagine before. It’s more likely than not that two people share a birthday. And so the fact is, ordinary people just often don’t understand how probability works. And so a lot of what you’re seeing, I think in McDonald’s work is he takes these things that only sound improbable if you kind of follow his charts in his rewritten versions of the accounts, and don’t look closely at what’s happening. If you do look at it, you’re like, two people were amazed, two people sat down.
This is vaguer. Then the Kennedy Lincoln thing, and we can safely discard the Kennedy Lincoln thing is obviously not evidence of a real mimetic parallel. So I mentioned that obviously McDonald has other things. Like I said, he’s written many books on this. He has many charts, but when you delve into them, I find over and over it’s this. He’ll do a few things that are red flags. He’ll look at one event in Greek mythology or in Homer specifically, and then claim three different New Testament accounts or retellings of that, even though those three accounts are really unrelated. So Aphrodite, for instance, seduces a guy in the woods while pretending she’s not a goddess and is actually a goddess, and he points to that and he’s like, obviously this is the same story being retold in the enunciation of the birth of John the Baptist. It’s just like there’s nothing in common there.
Nothing happens in the woods. There’s no seduction. There’s in the case of John the Baptist, an old man, an old woman supernaturally give birth to a child, but still through sexual union, husband and wife, there’s none of the things that are real red flag. Obviously, this is what the story is about. Those things aren’t present there. Instead, he takes these random details and is like, look at how that random detail is kind of the same as that other random detail. If you squint just right, and I would just suggest if you’re going to buy into either of these forms of synthesism, you would do well to go and read a primary source. If you actually think that Jesus is a retelling of Mires or Horace or of Odysseus, pick up ancient Greek literature and pick up a Bible and don’t just read other people telling you those things or listen to other people telling you those things on tv.
Try to read it for yourself and see, well, is any of that true? Can I find any evidence MIRIs was born on December 25th? Do I see any of these alleged parallels that are, and I think once you do that, you’ll realize that the overwhelming majority of these mythic cases completely fall apart, and the ones that don’t, you can usually safely say those look like incidental coincidences. All of that’s to say the historical evidence does not point to Jesus being a myth. The historical evidence points that they’re having historically been if Jesus of Nazareth, who was known to many people who publicly was executed and who hundreds of people claimed rose from the dead. You may not like where that history points, but that history points to the truth of Christianity. For Shameless Popery; I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.