Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.

Happy Memorial Day, everyone. Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers apologist, Trent Horn. Originally, I was going to take Memorial Day off because, well, it’s a holiday, and number two, I also wanted some time to prep because I have a dialogue next week with Tony Annett, he is a Catholic economist, on the issue of climate change, what should Catholics believe about climate change and how should we respond to this? And Tony and I will be offering two different perspectives on that issue. So I’m very excited about that. But I thought, you know what? There is something I could share with you all today that I think would be very helpful. Recently, I had a dialogue with John, the Godless Engineer, on the question of the non-Christian sources for Jesus, so these ancient first century documents, and the alleged silence in these sources, sources that people you’ll hear atheists say, “Well, why didn’t all of these ancient historians write about Jesus during his own lifetime or during the first century?”

So I’ve heard that argument a lot, I wanted to talk with John about it. I’ve shared this with my patrons already and they seem to really like it. So I thought I would share it with you all. At first, I was concerned because John and I actually didn’t disagree as much as I thought we would disagree. So there isn’t a lot of clash in this dialogue. However, I think it’s a good example of understanding another person’s perspective. And I hope it can serve as a good model to show how we can dialogue with people. Because some people will say, “Oh, so John is a Godless Engineer, he doesn’t think Jesus existed.” He thinks Jesus is a myth. But he isn’t actually as much in favor of this argument, so we had a dialogue back and forth about it. And some people will tell me that, “You’ll just ridicule people who hold views.”

And this is a very extreme view, hardly anybody in academia holds it, maybe four people. And some people just ridicule it, just mock it, “Why would you dialogue with these people?” Well, I believe in dialogue. I believe in taking other people’s views seriously and charitably. So even though we didn’t have as much clash in this dialogue as I would’ve hoped, I’m sharing this with you all today because I hope that it can serve as a good model to show how to have these kinds of cordial engagements. And I think John and I will hopefully have another dialogue soon on an issue where we have very firm disagreement, like on whether St. Paul believed Jesus really existed, or whether he was a cosmic myth figure. So without further ado, here’s John’s video. And by the way, if you want more on this particular argument, the alleged, the non-Christian silence about Jesus in the first century, why didn’t these ancient sources write about Jesus, I have a whole video on that subject. I’ll link to it in the description below if you guys want to check that out.

So here’s my dialogue with John, the Godless Engineer. Joining me today is John, the Godless Engineer. He hosts a YouTube channel. He discusses atheism. He also advocates for mythicism, which is the view that Jesus did not exist. So we’re going to be chatting a little bit about that today here on the podcast. Before we do that though, definitely be sure to this video and subscribe to our channel so you don’t miss all of our great content. So John and I, we previously discussed the historical accuracy of the Gospel of Luke. I’ll link to that video below for you guys to go and check out. Gosh, we did that well a year or two ago. Feels like forever.

Yeah, I know. It has been a while.

Yeah. Well, it’s nice to have you back and yeah, let’s just talk about this. So you would identify as a mythicist. Could you explain to everyone what you mean by that and what your position is?

Right. So I guess, a more specific way to characterize my position is the minimal mythicist position, and that’s just that Jesus probably didn’t exist. I think that the evidence is pretty bad and vague, the evidence that we do have. So I think that while I lean towards Jesus probably didn’t exist, I think the most defensible thing is just pure agnosticism on the topic, at the very least. So in my own own position, I think Jesus probably didn’t exist, but that comes from arguments to the best explanation and arguments from evidence. And of course using Bayesian reasoning, trying to weigh the evidence that we do have against the background evidence behind Christianity.

Sure. And we’re not going to get into the entire case for mythicism today. The reason I wanted to chat with you, I was watching one of your videos maybe like a month ago, and you were dialoguing with someone, I forget who, but you were talking a little bit about the absence of testimony about Jesus in ancient non-Christian sources. So non-Christian sources written, let’s say, within the first 100 years of the crucifixion, for example, so saying that that counts as evidence against Jesus’s existence. And so people have called this the argument from ancient silence, for example. And I just wanted to focus on that particular argument because you’re talking about Bayes reasoning. And what you would do is you’d have all this data set in front of you and things would tip the scale one way or another based on likelihoods and things like that.

And this would be one of those data sets, this apparent absence of testimony about Jesus in the ancient non-Christian sources. And so from my perspective is, I don’t find this to be a very compelling argument at all. I think there are other mythicist arguments that are stronger. I don’t even think this really factors into the data set at all. But maybe you can give us your thoughts about ancient non-Christian sources, their testimony about Jesus, and what conclusion you draw from that.

Well, so I’m not exactly sure which discussion you saw, but if I said that the silence from non-Christian sources is positive evidence in favor of mythicism, then I must have just misspoke, or maybe just heat of the moment thing. Because I don’t think that silence from non-Christian sources is positive evidence that Jesus didn’t exist, I think that it just simply doesn’t help the historicist case because then that’s just evidence that you don’t have. So I’ve been thinking about your question since you asked me to come on, and the way that I see it is, at the question, let’s start out at a 50/50 chance, because Jesus, either he did exist or he didn’t exist, and then we have to weigh the evidence. If you don’t have non-Christian sources, then that doesn’t help either side.

And so it’s a little detrimental to the historicist case because you would expect to at least find some references out there if Jesus had existed. Because we have authors, in the first historians in the first century, that recorded similar people at the time, similar events that supposedly happened. And so you should expect to find some non-Christian references to Jesus, but we don’t. Now, that doesn’t mean that I think that Jesus didn’t exist, that just means that I don’t think that there’s any outside corroboration for the figure of Jesus.

Well, it sounds like you’re straddling two positions a little bit because what I would say is, I would agree with you that the absence of mention of Jesus in non-Christian sources. And what I’m going back to here is there are a lot of mythicist you go back to, I think it’s 1909, there was an atheist named John Remsburg. And he made a list of 40 or 50 ancient authors who wrote within the first 100 years that Jesus was crucified. And he considered that extremely suspicious, he considered that evidence Jesus did not exist, because if Jesus did exist, surely, one of these people would’ve written about him. And so you have this list of all these ancient authors and we can talk about that. But I would agree that if these ancient authors don’t mention Jesus, that doesn’t tell us anything one way or another. I personally would not expect them to write about Jesus.

And there’s a lot of silence even in the other major sources, like Josephus or Tacitus, many large events that they don’t record. So help me understand where you’re coming from. Because it seemed like you said you wouldn’t expect it one way or another, but I thought I heard you just say that if Jesus existed, we would expect at least one of them to mention something. So do you think that it wouldn’t matter one way or another or we would’ve expected some of these sources to talk about him?

Well, I don’t think that I said that it wouldn’t matter one way or another. As far as that 50/50 split goes, I thought that I had said that it doesn’t help either case. Not that mythicism doesn’t expect it just the same as the historicist position doesn’t expect it, or something like that. That’s not what I meant. I just meant that it doesn’t help either case. So you can’t use it as positive evidence for either case.

Okay. Well, help me out here. That sounds like the same thing. So a Christian… I mean, that makes sense, right? A Christian wouldn’t say this, “Silence shows Jesus did exist.” I don’t know anybody who would make that argument. And then you’re also saying a mythicist can’t really use that silence to say Jesus did not exist.

Right. Because it’s not positive evidence. It is an element of data in our background knowledge that factors into either just our general knowledge of the surrounding evidence in the first century. So I think that it definitely contributes to, I guess, maybe our starting position or maybe the amount of evidence that we have for Jesus. But as far as positive evidence for either position, I don’t consider it to be positive evidence for either position. Because Jesus could have walked around and existed in the past and done some of the things that he said to have done but these non-Christian sources just didn’t record him, or we’ve lost the sections that would’ve recorded Jesus doing whatever he did, because we definitely have evidence of surgical editing and also the ancient… it’s not ancient historians, but the maintainers of these documents, they would selectively maintain documents, let some documents fade off into obscurity, and eventually, we lose them completely.

So I think that while the silence from non-Christian sources isn’t positive evidence for mythicism, but I just also think that it’s not positive. It just doesn’t help the historic disposition because that’s just evidence that you could have had but you don’t.

Okay. Well, this is so funny, actually. I think that we agree far more than I thought that we might disagree, which is fine because you’ll hear people say this online, “Well, there’s no corroborating evidence for Jesus.” They’ll say that, “You can’t believe Jesus existed unless you have non-biblical sources.” But would your position be that if the biblical sources said things differently, you would say that this is enough? If Paul were emphatic that Jesus had been executed by the Romans, for example, would you say that would be enough to believe that Jesus existed?

I think that if Paul was a lot less ambiguous in his statements regarding several things about Jesus, that it would definitely point more towards historicity than it does, in my view, mythicism.

Okay. So even if everyone agreed, yeah, Paul is talking about an individual who lived on the Earth like he did, you would still say that it would just point towards historicity, there would still be a lot of evidence pointing towards mythicism?

Well, it’s not so much that there’s evidence pointing towards mythicism as how strong the evidence is for the historicist point. So I think that the verses in Paul work for both historicity and mythicism, because you can come up with parsimonious explanations on both ideas. So for me, the real discussion takes place in Paul, but I feel like the verses in Paul are too ambiguous to make a determination one way or another. But I will say that in Richard Carrier’s On the Historicity of Jesus, he does count a few of Paul’s verses as positive evidence for historicity, it’s just that they’re not strong pieces of evidence. So that doesn’t really tip the scale enough to lean away from mythicism.

Okay. Well, I don’t want to veer too much into Paul and the New Testament, I just wanted to talk about the non-Christian sources. And I think we actually do have a lot of agreement on that. But would you disagree, because the way I feel like there are Christian caricatures of mythicism, there are these bad Christian arguments and these bad atheist arguments. I’ll give you an example. A bad Christian argument is saying there’s more evidence for Jesus than for Julius Caesar. That’s just a patently bad argument to make. There was clearly more historical evidence for a Roman emperor than for Jesus who was a marginalized Jewish wonder worker and preacher in a backwater province in Galilee. So I think that’s a bad Christian argument.

But I think a bad atheist argument is this statement, “You can’t prove the Bible by citing the Bible.” Which on the one hand, yeah, if you say the Bible is the word of God because it says so, that’s a bad argument. But it seems like that that argument makes it seem like you can’t even use the Bible as a historical source to say that any kind of historical data happened. To me, that just seems like a bad assumption right off the bat. I don’t know what you would think of that.

Well, I definitely think that in this particular context of proving whether or not Jesus was a historical figure, I think it is a bad argument on the atheist side to say, “Well, you can’t prove the Bible with the Bible.” I think that that might be able to work for some of the more miracle claims, just because the Bible’s the only place where the miracle claims come up. And also, I think the miracle nature of them, which I know that we’re not getting into that, but I think the miracle nature of them requires a bit more substantial evidence to establish that as a historical fact. So in those instances, I think that you would need something else other than the Bible.

But for just the historicity of Jesus, for me, personally, I think that documents contained in the Bible are the only references that we actually have in antiquity about Jesus. So it really comes down to what can we establish as independent, what can we establish as actually historical? And I think that that’s really where the discussion is had. But I do want to point out that your bad Christian argument is actually not only Christian like atheists and Christians, it’s a bipartisan bad argument, the first one, because Dr. Bart Ehrman, he actually makes that same argument for Jesus’ historicity too, and several people that I’ve encountered on the atheist side also-

A historicist argument, I guess is what I should have said. Because we have to remember that the mythicist position is not identical to atheism. I think there are many atheists online who are embracing this, but there are many atheists… well, I’d say, most in the academic world, like Bart Ehrman, professors, and others who don’t subscribe to this view. Yeah.

There have been some Christians that have subscribed to the mythicism view as well.

Oh, wow. Who would you count in that bracket?

I can only name one name off the top of my head, and that’s Thomas Brodie, I believe.

Yeah, I guess it’s hard. I guess I’d be wondering what his theology is, if it’s like to be a Christian who thinks Jesus… unless you think Jesus literally was just cosmic figure who existed, but only in a cosmic way, maybe I’ll have to talk to him about his view. Let’s talk then, let’s do a little bit more on the non-Christian sources, because there’s really two kinds of non-Christian sources here. So one would be the list of the pagan writers who don’t say anything at all, and everybody agrees they don’t say anything, like Pliny the Younger, Seneca the Younger, there’s a whole list, like 40 or 50 of them. But my view is that for many of them, they either didn’t write history, they were more interested in other subjects, or they could have even written about Jesus and a lot of ancient literature has been lost, but it just probably wasn’t a subject that interested them, including there’s other miracle workers, things like that that weren’t recorded.

Then there’s other sources though, where people dispute that there’s a record about Jesus. I think the two biggest ones would probably be Tacitus and Josephus. We don’t have to get into a big discussion about them, because this is a dispute about whether do they really mention Jesus or not. Because Tacitus talks about how… I guess I could just bring it up here and then we can chat and I can see your view on that. Let’s bring up Tacitus Annals Book 15:44-

Well, I could tell you I share the same view that Robert Van Voorst does on Tacitus.

Well, let me read the passage for everyone and then you can give people your view. Because he basically talks about Nero being blamed for the fire at Rome. He says, “Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hand of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their center and become popular.”

And so people who are mythicist have different views on this part of the Annals Book 15, section 44 of the Annals, what Tacitus says here. You say your view is similar to Robert Van Voorst… and I’d recommend his book, by the way, if anyone wants a really solid treatment of… he has a book called Jesus Outside of the New Testament, and it’s a great survey of the non-biblical sources and what they say about Jesus. I think I remember Van Voorst, but why don’t you go ahead and say your thoughts on that.

Right. So at the very end of the section on Tacitus and Van Voorst’s book, he agrees with R.T. France that there’s no way that we can establish independence from the Christian community. And so because of that, we can’t really say that it’s a historical reference to anything. Because I think that however Tacitus got this information, he most likely got it from a Christian source, either through Pliny the Younger or from just the general Christian community at the time. Considering at what time that he was writing this, which was early second century, the Christian beliefs were not exactly widespread, but they were known at least by the Christian community themselves.

And Pliny the Younger, in the next province over from Tacitus, who Tacitus regularly communicated with, he was interrogating Christians about their beliefs and their faiths. And so that’s a possible source that Tacitus got his information from. I will say that there has been forensic evidence that has shown that the Christus is actually Chrestus. It was changed by scribe at some point in its history. So originally, it was Chrestus and Christians, but I know that the argument there is just that that was a common misspelling at the time.

Right. Yeah. Because I think that this would count in favor of Jesus existing, at least as what we would expect, but we need to figure out where Tacitus got the information. He could have gotten it from other Christians. There is a possibility he looked at Imperial archives or other Roman sources. I think that the word that he uses for crucified is different than the Greek word that Christians often use. It meant more something like impale, which would be different than what a Christian source might give. But I agree with you, to me, the strongest evidence for Jesus’s existence is going to be the New Testament documents, I do think this has some corroboration.

But I wanted to know your view on this because some other mythicist will claim the entire passage is an interpolation or that it’s interpolated, it’s forged, that he gets Pilate’s title wrong by calling him a procurator. And I think that those arguments aren’t very good, Pilate was either known as a prefect in some sources and a procurator in others, Josephus uses the titles interchangeably. I think the arguments for interpolation are fairly weak. So it seems like you don’t endorse the interpolation view, maybe a minor editing, but you just think, since we don’t know the source, it’s not as helpful?

Well, I guess, when I was speaking a second ago, I was speaking more as it exists, how is it evidentially for the case. I think that I actually hold the opposite opinion of you because I think that the interpolation arguments is actually pretty strong for-

Oh, you were just making a best case scenario?

Right. Yeah, because I didn’t want to get into the minutiae of discussing the possible interpolation. Because ultimately, as far as the evidence goes, it doesn’t really matter if it’s interpolated or not, to me, because of the fact that we can’t establish independence, we can’t say there’s no direct evidence that he was getting this information from Roman records of Jesus’ crucifixion, or the events surrounding Jesus’ issues in Judea. We don’t have any solid evidence to differentiate that source from just the Christian community in the second century. And so for me, that’s the big sticking point. I think that if we could make a solid case for Tacitus getting this information independently of the Christian community, I think that I would probably agree with you that it would be evidence of some kind of Roman record or existing entasis, this time, that of Jesus. But as it stands right now, we just don’t have the evidence that we would need in order to solidly lean on one or the other.