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 Luk... Read more on Catholic.com