Hegel??

"After decades of trying and utterly failing to see what could possibly be worthwhile in Hegel's philosophy, I believe I've had a breakthrough."

That's the first paragraph of an essay I posted here on December 11, 2023. 4 months later, it seems more and more likely that what I understood was a YouTube which purported to be about Hegel. Does that video actually have anything to do with Hegel? I don't know. I don't have any Earthly. I can't even. 

 

What we have here, now as before, is failure to communicate. We're back to where we were before last December. I am not getting the message from Hegel's texts. 

Unless I am. Unless Schopenhauer was right about Hegel's philosophy: that it was pseudo-intellectual gibberish successfully passing itself off as philosophy. But I can't be sure about that anymore. 

It's not that I am afraid to assail the reputation of a celebrated thinker and purported genius. Every word Susan Sontag published or said on a broadcast was pseudo-intellectual garbage, delivered with that smug grin William Gaddis warned us about. Spengler is, im Grunde genommen, pretty silly, and hugely overrated. But at least much more entertaining than Sontag.

It's not that I can't follow philosophers in general. With those up to and including Hegel's most celebrated immediate forerunner Kant, and also with those following him, although I must often read very slowly and repeat certain passages, I don't get this feeling I get with Hegel. Not with Kant himself, not with Heidegger, not with Adorno. Not with the world's most famous Hegelian, Marx. 

Well, as Kierkegaard said -- Kierkegaard, who has often delighted me, often made me shake my head chidingly, but never puzzled me: enten -- eller. Either Hegel has fooled a great number of very smart people, who regard him as a great genius, but not me, or Schopenhauer, or Kierkegaard -- or all of those people have significantly smarter than all three of us, at least in this regard.

I can easily admit it when a single person is clearly more intelligent than I  -- okay, not easily, but I can admit it. When an entire group is outdoing me, it's disturbing. 

It sort of reminds me of the historical Jesus question. I've studied it pretty thoroughly. Most of the people who have studied it pretty thoroughly say that it's pretty obvious that a person named Jesus preached in Galilee and Jerusalem in the 20's, 30's or 40's AD, that he said many of the things in the text we today call the Sermon on the Mount, and that he was crucified on Pilate's orders. 

Well, it's still not obvious at all to me. That light bulb above my head, which is supposed to go on when I see how the evidence all adds up to Jesus having really lived and preached and been crucified by Pilate -- that light bulb is not on, it has not begun to flicker. The Biblical scholars go over the evidence, and to me, they're making the case that it's possible Jesus existed, the case that it's conceivable -- and then they say, so you see, it's really certain that he existed! And I shout wearily: No! I don't see!

I also don't see how I'm not keeping up with what those Biblical scholars are saying. Let's take the example of another famous controversy: were the writers of the New Testament wrong when they said that a virgin birth was prophesied by Isaiah? Yes. They were wrong. Bart Ehrman explained this to me in less than half a minute. To make a short story even shorter: read the entire chapter of Isaiah 7, and as Ehrman said: shame on all of us supposedly brilliant people for not already having read the entire chapter. It's not long. The Hebrew word can mean "virgin," or simply "young women," somewhat like the English term "maiden." Reading Isaiah 7, the entire short chapter, makes it clear that the Greek New Testament authors were mistaking in translating the word as "virgin" instead of simply "young woman."

I had zero trouble keeping up with that. But understanding what is so great about Hegel...

Continuing Education on YouTube

Stefan Milo is a British archaeologist who lives with his family in Murrka and has a great YouTube channel called, wittily enough, Stefan Milo: 

Well. There was supposed to be a link to Stefan's YouTube channel here. But we seem to be having even more technical difficulties. I repeat: it's on YouTube, it's called Stefan Milo and it's great.

I don't know what sort of archaeologist Milo is. He's very self-deprecating about his intellect and his academic accomplishments -- too much so, I would guess. He regularly talks to world-leading archaeologists on his channel, and he seems to keep up them pretty well. He has a degree in Archaeology from the University of Sheffield, but I don't know whether it's a Doctorate or some lesser degree.

I don't know whether he's published a lot of peer-reviewed papers. He's published a children's book about archaeology; he talks about that book a lot on his channel. 

I do feel that I've learned a lot about archaeology from Milo's channel after a few weeks of binge-watching his videos. That is in large part because I find his videos pleasant to watch: he has an engaging personality and his videos have good production values. 

For just a little while I said to myself: since Milo didn't make a career in academia, now he has to be an academic and a performer as well. And then suddenly it struck me: all teachers are performers. Some are good performers, some aren't. Milo is one of the ones who are more effective because they're more engaging and likeable.

I don't know why it took me until I was 62 years old to grasp this, but it's been grasped. Of course teachers who fascinate their students are more effective than those who repel them. And some teachers started showing slides decades ago, if not centuries, and some of them have been very good with the visual aids, and that doesn't hurt a bit when it comes to actual task of education.

Milo makes a great contrast here to Bart Ehrman, probably the world's most famous living academic authority on the subject of Jesus and early Christianity. Ehrman can be seen as having at least three separate careers: as an author of academic books, which contain footnotes and multilingual bibliographies and are peer-reviewed; an author of popular books, which eschew the footnotes and bibliographies, are aimed at the "general public," and sell several times as much as the academic books, routinely making bestseller lists; and also as a teacher who stands in front of students and talks.

Nowadays, of course, teaching is done not only in classrooms, but also in front of cameras, in the making of various kinds of videos. I've watched quite a few of Ehrman's videos lately, and... and I like his academic books very much.  So do many academics. And his popular books must have hundreds of thousands of ardent fans among the "general public" by now. If not actually millions.

Ehrman also appears on many YouTube channels, some seem to be run in part by him, and he's a guest on many others, and the videos get millions and millions and millions of views.

Would they get so many views without the books? I really have to wonder. There are probably some people who find Ehrman to be the epitome of charisma, because when there are millions and millions and millions of views, there will be every conceivable opinion. 

I watch the videos for Ehrman's knowledge. I have to put up with a lot of teeth-grittingly annoying behavior in order to get to that knowledge. One channel which Ehrman seems to at least partly control, is actually hosted by a British woman, and every video starts with her asking "Bart" about the latest in his private life, and why?! "Bart" never says anything edifying or remotely interesting in these intros, and I've taken to skipping ahead to where they're actually talking about Jeebus.

What a huge contrast to Stefan Milo's video, where the occasional glimpses of his wife and baby girl are actually charming, and sometimes even tied in relevantly to to the archaeological content.

Ehrman has said many times that his students in North Carolina are from North Carolina, and therefore are often fundamentalists, and therefore are often quite astonished by what he has to teach them. He's said this many times just that I've seen. How many times has he insulted his students in pretty much the identical way in his entire life?! It boggles the boggles. Why not try some new material for a change, and tell the world about the most surprisingly clever things he's heard from his students lately? 

And his laugh. Ehrman's laugh just sets my teeth on edge. it literally sounds like "Hyuck hyuck hyuck!"

Anyhow. Stefan Milo's videos on YouTube, and Bart Ehrman's academic books, the ones with the footnotes and bibliographies, are what I recommend. 

Also, since I'm sure some of you are wondering now that I've mentioned Ehrman: no, I am still not convinced that Jesus existed. I agree with Ehrman that most of the most prominent living mythicists, Price and Carrier and Freke and Gandy and Fitzgerald et al, are bozos as well as unpleasant people, I agree with him that Atlantis was not real and that the Egyptians and Mayas built all of those amazing buildings all by themselves, with no extra-terrestrial help whatsoever. I will almost always side with the academic consensus in the sciences and humanities. "Academic cover-up" strikes me as an oxymoron. I agree with Ehrman that there is no reason to doubt that Socrates and Caesar and Alexander the Great and Pilate and Herod Antipater and John the Baptist and Saul/Paul of Taurus were real people, and I trust Ehrman's opinion about which of the Pauline epistles were written by Paul and which of the Platonic dialogues were written by Plato, and about many, many other things. 

But I still haven't had that  "AHA!"-moment where it suddenly makes sense what Ehrman and almost all other academics say about Jesus: that he certainly existed. I'm also not certain that he never existed, the way I am with, for example, King Arthur. When it comes to Jesus' existence, I'm on the fence, where I've been for at least 30 years.

King Arthur and Jesus

 King Arthur never existed. I'm not sure whether Jesus existed. 

And of course, I'm talking about a completely non-supernatural Jesus, who was crucified by Pontius Pilate around 30 AD. Supernatural details were added to the story later. They were either added to the biography of a real person, or the entire biography is fiction.

Academics overwhelmingly say Jesus existed. This is the only case where I go against an overwhelming academic consensus. I still can't figure out why the academics are convinced.

I believe John the Baptist existed. I believe Pontius Pilate existed. I believe Saint Paul existed. But the evidence for Jesus seems very thin, to me. The story of Jesus could be based on John the Baptist. Paul could have made Jesus up because he thought the story would be good for people.

Or something else.  Or he might really have existed.

King Arthur is a slam-dunk case: never existed. 

 

Merlin might have existed. The earliest writing about a King named Arthur comes from Geoffrey of Monmouth, who wrote a terrific book (in Latin) in the 1130's called de gestis Britonum (The History of the Kings of Britain). Fantastic book of fiction, great story, zero reason to regard it as actual history.

What Geoffrey thought he was writing is very hard to tell. He said his book was a translation of a book in Welsh. But there's no trace of that book except Geoffrey mentioning it.

I see several possibilities:

1) Geoffrey never intended anyone to regard his book as non-fiction. The Welsh book was just one more fictional detail.

2) Geoffrey wrote what he regarded as a mixture of history and legends. In this case, the Welsh book could have been 2a) real, or 2b) made up by Geoffrey.

3) Geoffrey could have been completely sincere, and the Welsh book could have been real, and Geoffrey could have done no more or less than translate it into Latin.

If Geoffrey never intended de gestis Britonum to be regarded as non-fiction, Boy, did that go wrong: it took about 500 years until the main stream of academia began to have doubts about Geoffrey's book, and large parts of the general public are still, today, having trouble sorting this out.

It's possible that that Welsh book really existed, but if so, it's very strange and extremely unusual that we can find no trace of it except for Geoffrey's mention. Still, it's possible that that Welsh book, and/or some other written description of a Dark Age Welsh King named Arthur, may turn up. 

But if and when they are found, they, like all other tales of King Arthur, will be legends. There may have been a soldier named Arthur in 5th or 6th century Wales. There may have been more than one. One of them, or more than one, may have been what could reasonably have been called a general. 

 

But enough light has been thrown upon the Dark Ages that we can say, with great confidence, that there never was a King Arthur. 

 

Many of the stories are still magnificent, though. That hasn't changed at all.

 

Non-Discussions About Early Christianity

A friend of mine posted a link on Facebook to a story about the Gospel of Jesus' Wife,

and it happened again: another one of those exchanges which you can hardly call a "discussion," because many of the participants weren't listening to each other at all, just asserting their competing erroneous versions of the history of Christianity. The usual suspects were there: the assertion that Jesus was a rabbi (perhaps true, perhaps not) and that all rabbis 2000 years ago were married -- not true. In fact, there were entire Jewish sects who were celibate, such as the Essenes, who are well-known today primarily because of their similarities to Christians. A lot of people in these non-discussions really seem to think that Christians invented religious celibacy. Can they say "Vestal Virgins"? The Vestal Virgins was the priestesses in one of the oldest and most revered religious cults in ancient Rome, a cult hundreds of years older than Christianity, and just one example of religions older than Christianity who have a revered place for celibacy.

I've only been hearing the claim that all ancient rabbis were married for a couple of years -- can it be that the claim is no older than that? Where did it come from? Perhaps from discussions of the Gospel of Jesus' Wife? People who wished this little scrap of forgery to be an authentic description of Jesus, perhaps they adopted the belief that all ancient rabbis were married because it bolsters their belief that Jesus was married, which they believe because they wish it to be true?

The assertion that the Bible as we know it was a creation of the Council of Nicea. This time, the Council of Nicea was described as a gathering of Jewish clergy under a pagan Emperor, and that the Bible as we know it was created there.

I can't remember hearing somebody claim, before this, that the participants of the Council of Nicea were Jewish. The Council took place in AD 325, and the division between Christian and Jew was already long-established and very hostile by then. And Constantine was at least partly Christian at the time. And the Bible was neither written, in whole nor in part, at the Council, nor was it even discussed whether this or that biblical book was to be regarded as canonical or heretical. The main thing the Council of Nicea accomplished was to adopt the Nicene Creed, which was favorable for the Christians who eventually came to be called Orthodox and Catholic, and was another nail in the coffin of the Christian movement known as Arianism, which has nothing more than a coincidental similarity in spelling to do with Aryans, who, before the Nazis, were no more and no less than Iranians. I couldn't tell you whether "Aryan" or "Iranian" is closer to the pronunciation of the corresponding word in Persian, which is also called Farsi, which is the language of Iran.

So anyway, after making just a couple of comments in this discussion on Facebook, I realized that nobody in that discussion -- or at most very few of them -- was the slightest bit interested in being corrected about anything. One of the exceptions is my friend, the one who posted the link which started the whole non-discussion. My friend doesn't always assume he's right. You can talk to him. That's one of the reasons he's my friend. Others, however, in this discussion and in countless other discussions about Christianity...

So what do you do, what do you do, when a whole bunch of people are wrong, objectively wrong about concrete, demonstrable facts, and they want to stay that way?

That's not a rhetorical question. If anyone has any suggestions, I'd be very grateful to hear them.

In my case, instead of continuing to comment there, I came here and wrote this post.

Jerome's Vulgate is a beautiful piece of writing. That has nothing to do with the rest of this post.

Turning and Turning in the Widening Gibberish

The late Professor GA Wells, at the beginning of his paper "The Historicity of Jesus," published in 1986 in the collection Jesus in History and Myth (ed by Hoffmann and Larue), notes that the question of whether or not Jesus existed was hotly debated early in the 20th century, and that those who were less than certain that Jesus existed -- a position now referred to as "mythicism" -- made mistakes in 3 major areas: 1) They over-emphasized similarities between the biography of Jesus and those of pagan gods; 2) they were overly ready to disregard as interpolations any passages in primary materials which were inconvenient to their arguments; and 3) they often badly erred in dating those primary texts. Besides these 3 classes of errors, the tone of the debate was regrettably polemical and lacking in the sober detachment necessary for productive scholarly inquiry of any sort. Because the mythicists argued their case badly, Biblical scholars concluded that it was certain that Jesus had existed.

And it's all happening again in the early 21st century: people who have doubts about Jesus' historicity are making the same kinds of mistakes, and the tone of the debate is usually deplorable, and Biblical scholars -- although, now just as 100 years ago, their tone often isn't any more dignified or productive than anyone else's -- are pointing to the mythicists' poor performance as proving that Jesus actually did exist.

I find it flabbergasting that so many people, including so many highly-trained experts, are (for at least the 2nd time around now) taking the fact that one side of a question is being ineptly arguing as proving the other side. If detectives investigating a crime listen to a raving fool who has one theory of the crime, do they conclude, because the man is a raving fool, that the case has been solved, and that the solution is the opposite of whatever the raving fool said? I certainly hope not. I would hope they would, instead, take a position such as that the statement of the raving fool, by itself, proved little or nothing about the case one way or the other, and continue to investigate.

Except that, carrying the analogy back from police work to New Testament studies, I still maintain that serious investigation of the question by the experts must begin before it can continue. Although the experts maintain that the issue has been thoroughly investigated, I still can't see where that investigation is, or when it was, let alone whatever it is which makes them all so convinced that the investigation is complete.

If you google bollinger paulkovich you will find many references, in news articles, blogs, discussions and what have you, to the particularly, spectacularly inept mythicist Michael Paulkovich, and to 2 of my blog posts about his ineptitude, the Open Letter, my first reaction to hearing that Paulkovich had claimed to have studied the work of 126 ancient authors looking for mentions of Jesus, and 126 Writers, written the next day when I had found the list of those 126 people. Most of these mentions refer to me as "atheist blogger Steven Bollinger," which is an accurate description: I am an atheist and I am a blogger. Occasionally some of these people -- including Paulkovich himself -- refer to me as a Christian, assuming, apparently, that only a Christian could have any criticism of any expressing any doubts that Jesus existed. Quite often, I'm referred to as supporting the historicist position, the position that Jesus certainly existed, which is also erroneous: I'm a mythicist, I'm far from convinced that Jesus existed.

But why should that mean that I think that everything said by everyone else who isn't convinced that Jesus existed is pure flawless genius?

Obviously it means nothing of the sort, unless you're a moron, or not paying attention, or both.

There are a lot of people out there spending a lot of time debating whether or not Jesus existed who are either morons, or not paying a lot of attention to the things they're spending so much time debating, or both. Even those references to me as "atheist blogger Steven Bollinger," although accurate, imply that it's amazing that any atheist would go to the trouble of criticizing a mythicist.

And look, I myself deplore harsh polemical tone, only to indulge in it just a few short paragraphs later. Except that I am not taking that tone in the conventional manner, which would be to use it only against those on the other side of the mythicist/historicist divide -- no, I'm potentially prepared to sneer at almost anyone who says anything at all about Jesus, whether skeptical or credulous. (The late Professor Wells still gets a pass -- for now. And it must be pointed out that he converted from mythicist to historicist, although his historicism remained so minimal that many of his readers and fans never noticed it.) It seems that most of the people debating Jesus's existence are not detached at all: they want the side they're arguing to turn out to be correct. Not so much with actually confronting the evidence with open minds, as if they were -- you know: scholars or something. I would feel great satisfaction if the question were ever definitively resolved one way or the other: I would feel great schadenfreude, directed at either one side, or the other.

My Glorious Career As a Brilliant Provocateur

I have a vivid imagination. Some would say, if they knew its full proportions, an over-active imagination. I have a healthy self-confidence in the quality of my writing. For example, when I write about receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature, although I usually attempt to do so in a humourous way, I'm not joking. I imagine it all the time, and I imagine my blog blowing up -- almost constantly. (For the benefit of readers my age and older and/or with a native language other then English who may possibly be unfamiliar with the idiom: "to blow up" means "to very suddenly become extremely popular." I'm not talking about stuff literally splodin'.) I have a lot of healthy self-confidence: time after time, I finish a blog post and think to myself: This one will be a big hit.

And time after time that post is not a hit at all, but I keep my chin up and keep plugging away.

But so far, the single most clicked-on post in my 8 years of blogging is at best a medium-sized hit. Although it has several times more pageviews than anything else on this blog, I'm careful not to call it my most-read blog post, because it's clear than many of those who've commented on it, positively as well as negatively, haven't read it very carefully at all. Maybe my average post isn't any more carefully-read, on average, than my one medium-sized-or-smaller hit, maybe my average post is much more carefully-read. It's just that in the case of the hit, I know for sure that many haven't read it carefully because there are so many comments on it, on this blog and elsewhere, which completely miss its main points, such as that I am an atheist and am not sure whether or not Jesus existed.

Some time after I noticed this widespread incautious readership, I also noticed how often I myself will just read a headline or the first paragraph of something before I move on. So I see that it wouldn't be right for me to complain too much about people treating my work the same way. However, I have tried to refrain from expressing overly-emphatic opinions about written works, whether short articles or multi-volume studies, which I know only from reading a part of them.

Anyway, yesterday I wrote a post about the Volksbühne Berlin and its upcoming change in leadership, and naturally I hope that it will be the one which finally makes me a huge glorious superstar -- it, or this one, or the one linked above could get a big second wind, or another post I wrote days or years ago could blow up. As if I care how I become a huge success -- and it's gotten some reaction, both positive and negative, somewhere else on the Internet, not here on the blog itself.

And the negative reaction -- disappointingly, so far there has been only one negative reaction -- referred to Americans blabbing away without a clue. And this is interesting in more than one way. I can't really tell whether the person making the comment has read the entire blog post. If not, it would be an ironic although hardly unusual example of someone accusing a writer of not having a clue based on work they hadn't read. If the entire post was read, however -- it's not particularly long -- then, well -- I mean, I did make it particularly clear in the post, I think, that I was viewing the controversy over the Volksbühne from a long way away, and that I knew that I actually knew very little about it. But my critic did not merely blame me for speaking up without a clue, but blamed Americans for doing so and inferred that I was a typical American and that we -- Americans -- generally stink. Which, unconsciously or not, ironically or deliberately, would seem to reinforce my point about the opposition to the change in leadership of the Volksbühne having a element of xenophobia about it.

Yesterday's blog post about the Volksbühne is not particularly substantial, I freely admit that here, just as I admitted it there. However, I can see how it's possible that it could become quite widely clicked-upon -- I'm fastidiously avoiding saying "widely-read" -- because, like my medium-sized hit about Paulkovich, it deals with a topic about which people have strong opinions. And so, like my medium-sized hit, it could conceivably serve as a place for people to gather and verbally abuse each other. The wily fame-seeking provokateur writes on subjects about which people are already provoked. Yesterday's post was actually less about the Volksbühne than about some people's extremely-passionate reactions against the incoming new leader of the company, so passionate that, even without knowing many of the details or the players involved, it is difficult for me to believe that these reactions make sense.

In essence, many of my essays are about me. Many essays, from the time that Montaigne invented the genre, have been primarily about their authors. Some may see this as arrogance, I see it as honesty. The only subject one can describe with full authority is oneself. It can actually be modesty: I was going to write about Julius Caesar, but I eventually had to face the fact that I'm not competent to write an article about Julius Caesar which would be of any use to any expert; and so instead I'm writing an essay about my failure to rise to the level of a scholar of the subject of Caesar. The self is also guaranteed to be a unique subject for every author.

"Finding Jesus: Faith, Fact, Forgery" On CNN

The episodes of CNN's series (and it is hardly alone among TV shows about ancient history in being like this) "Finding Jesus: Faith, Fact, Forgery" ought to begin the way they finish:

NARRATOR: The (fill in the blank: piece of wood, bone fragment, etc), thought to (fill in the blank: have come from the True Cross, be the remains of the Apostle [fill in apostle's name], etc), has/have been proven by Carbon-14 testing to come from (fill in actual time 200 to 1500 years later than the 1st century), and so is/are inauthentic, and does/do not bring us any closer to the historical Jesus.

CNN might object: "If we did that, many viewers would change the channel and miss the next 59 minutes and 45 seconds of our 1-hour show!"

To which I would respond, "Well they might! Especially if they had already seen 1 or 2 episodes of the series, in which 80 to 95% or so of the first 59 minutes and 45 seconds are repetition, fluff and theological babble, only very mildly mitigated by the odd intelligent remark not edited out or the occasional glimpse of a lovely artwork! Have you thought about how many of those viewers you've already lost doing it your way? Here's a bold new approach for you: you want viewers to hang around for an hour? Fill up the whole hour with actual content!"

Obviously, CNN is not taking my advice these days.

But imagine: a show about Jesus' place in history where they told you what they know about this episode's artifacts right away, first thing, but was so interesting and filled with still further information -- and more of the art: I've seen a tremendous lot of really beautiful art in shows in this genre, but I haven't seen one yet which wouldn't have benefited from still more -- that the actual general public would watch breathlessly all the way to the end.

Drop the "historical re-enactments," the sequences in which actors are portraying Jesus and his contemporaries, like a hot rock. What will you put in their place? I refer you to the above-mentioned beautiful art. (It wouldn't kill you to occasionally mention, if you happen to know, when and/or where and/or by whom the painting or sculpture or altar or church or temple was made.) You can also show manuscripts: hopefully, a large part of the evidence of what you're telling your viewers comes from primary sources. You can show maps, old and also freshly-made. You've already flown academics in to Jerusalem or Rome or wherever -- give them more time to show the viewer around. Get out of their way, use this rich resource in a more appreciative way. If you're doing it remotely close to right you won't have to repeat one frame of film to fill up an entire hour.

That's right, CNN: I just said you're not doing it remotely close to right. Well, there it is. What's that you say? You're asking if I think I could do better? I can't produce an entire documentary right now. But if you hired me as a consultant on your next project of this type: yes, I don't think that could help but result in a drastic improvement. And/or: you could simply stop hiring Simcha Jacobovici. That alone would result in a tremendous improvement. You're welcome!

Intellectual Laziness: The Sad Case Of Michael Paulkovich And Myself

The two first posts I wrote concerning Michael Paulkovich's claim to have studied 126 ancient historians, looking for evidence of Jesus' existence, which I posted here back in September 2014, continue to be the two most-discussed, most-viewed, most-linked things I have written. They both continue to generate pageviews on my blog. And that's great. I was about to describe them as "most-read" along with "most-discussed" and "most-linked" and so forth, but the thing is, I don't know how carefully-read those posts have been. And not reading written works or just skimming them, and then acting as if you familiar with their contents, is the theme of this post.

First, there's Paulkovich: he claims to have studied 126 ancient historians, looking for evidence of Jesus' existence, but he hasn't: he has listed 126 names. But of those 126 people, few are actually historians. There are writers of fiction, physicians, lyric poets, people who died before Jesus was born, 4 writers who actually do mention Jesus, and more than 40 of whose writing nothing has survived, so much for Paulkovich's claim of having studied it. That's a particularly spectacular case of intellectual laziness, as is Free Inquiry's having published Paulkovich's piece and their continuing to defend it to this day.

Then there are the many people, other than the editors of Free Inquiry, who have taken Paulkovich's word when he says that he has studied historical texts written by these 126 people. And those who take his word when he describes himself as an historian and Biblical scholar. All of those people who assume that Paulkovich's assertions are sound, who haven't gone to the trouble of checking them. And sweet Lord Vushnu, you don't have to check Paulkovich's list of 126 names very extensively before you start to notice that something is wrong. (If Paulkovich is an historian, I'm a freakin' unicorn.)

Among the people who have described Paulkovich as having done devastating damage to the case for Jesus' historicity is Jerry Coyne, one of the world's most highly-respected biologists, but when it comes to his rep as an authority on ancient history, not so highly-respected anymore, along with fellow big-time, no foolin' biologists like Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers. Besides being some of the world's leading biologists, Coyne, Dawkins and Myers are also New Atheists, which among other things means they don't know much about ancient history and seem determined to stay that way. They would never accept any statement about biology whatsoever, made by anyone whatsoever, by an unknown or a Nobel Prize-winning biologist, as uncritically as Coyne accepted Paulkovich's claims about ancient historians.

Coyne may now know better about Paulkovich, someone may have been able in the meantime to explain to him what's up there, but if so, I haven't heard about it yet.

Besides Coyne, many others have assumed that Paulkovich knows what he's talking about when it comes to ancient historians. I hope that not many of them are also academics, but I have no idea how many of them may be.

All of the above has been perfectly clear to me all along.

So. Then comes me, with my blog posts concerning that list of 126 names, and a lot of people have praised those two posts of mine and linked them and so forth.

But how many of the people who have been so enthusiastic about my blog posts have checked my work? I'm complaining because people have uncritically accepted what Paulkovich says, but how many people who accept what I say about Paulkovich are just as uncritical?

Before we even get to the question of whether readers have checked my facts, it's been clear all along that many people have commented on my posts without having read them carefully at all: for instance, because they describe me as convinced that Jesus existed and/or a believing monotheist, although I state in those posts that I am an atheist and that I'm not sure whether or not Jesus existed. These are mostly people who defend Paulkovich, and apparently assume that pious Christian belief is the only reason anyone could have for having any problem with him.

Those are obvious cases. But today it suddenly hit me that most of the people who take my side against Paulkovich probably haven't checked my work any more thoroughly than those who take Paulkovich's side have checked his. If they had checked my work at all, then they would've given an indication of it in their comments underneath those countless online articles and blog posts. They would've given an indication by saying: Bollinger is right, person X -- fill in the blank: has no writing which survives, or, wrote only fiction, or wrote only about medicine, or actuallly does mention Jesus, etc.

And a few people have made such comments, and I've had some very rewarding online discussions with them. But for the most part it's people saying: look here, Paulkovich has made a great case that Jesus never existed, against people saying, look here, Bollinger has made a compelling case that Paulkovich doesn't know what he's talking about.

And all sides are choosing their authority -- Paulkovich, or me, or someone else -- for no sounder reason than because that authority is saying what they want to believe is true.

It just dawned on me very recently how rare it has been, in this entire controversy over Jesus' historicity, for someone to actually go to any trouble at all of actually digging into the source texts and doing a little research for themselves. Hearing arguments about who wrote this or that text, and when, and whether or not it may have been altered, by mistake or on purpose. Actually attempting to figure out how reliable this or that modern or ancient authority might be. Weighing the non-literary evidence. Considering opposing points of view while attempting to keep an open mind. And then reaching their own conclusions rather than just accepting someone else's, and actually basing those conclusions on ancient evidence rather than contemporary politics.

Well, it's a shame when people don't do all of that, because that's the fun stuff in the study of ancient history.

G A Wells Is No Longer A Mythicist

Since this post has to do in large part with clarity and its lack, let me begin by explaining once again how I define historicism and mythicism, and by warning my readers that others may not always define these terms exactly the same way I do.

Historicism is summed up in the last 3 words of Bart Ehrman's book Did Jesus Exist, which would have made a much better, much less-misleading title for the book: "Jesus certainly existed."

Mythicism contains every other possible viewpoint on the matter: if you're convinced that Jesus never existed, you're a mythicist. if you're not sure whether he existed or not, like me and many of the most prominent mythicists, you're a mythicist.

In the 1970's and 1980's G A Wells was a mythicist, someone who said that it wasn't certain that the stories of Jesus were based on a real person.

In the 1990's he changed from a mythicist to an historicist, convinced that these stories began with an actual 1st-century Galilean preacher.

Many people have not noticed Wells' change from mythicism to historicism and continue to refer to him as a mythicist. Up until this post, I mistakenly referred to him as a mythicist, not having noticed his change. mea culpa. Last week, in the comments to my post 126 Writers Who, According To Michael Paulkovich, Should Have Mentioned Jesus If Jesus Existed, the irascible Tim O'Neill said to me that Wells has switched from mythicism to historicism, that he has become convinced that the hypothesized Q document, drawn upon by the authors of the Gospels of Luke and Matthew, was based upon the life and teachings of a real person. I quoted a passage from Wells' 2004 book Can We Trust the New Testament? which, to me, seem to indicate that Wells had still been a mythicist when he wrote it.

O'Neill said, of the very same passage, that it demonstrated that

Wells abandoned the Mythicist position and admitted that the evidence is best explained by a historical figure.

That's right: I read a passage by Wells, and to me it seemed to say that he was a mythicist; O'Neill saw the very same passage and said it confirmed what he was saying: that Wells was now an historicist.

I decided that I had better read some more material by Wells before responding to Tim. So I read his book Cutting Jesus Down to Size, published in 2009, and sure enough, Wells not only said that he now believed that the Q document was based on an actual person. He also said:

"This is the position I have argued in my books of 1996, 1999, and 2004, although the titles of the first two of theses -- The Jesus Legend and The Jesus Myth -- may have mislead potential readers into supposing that I still denied the historicity of the Gospel Jesus." (Cutting Jesus Down to size, p 15)

Well, I had been, in fact, mislead. But I was hardly the only one: besides "potential readers," whoever wrote the book-jack blurb of The Jesus Legend, which begins: "Did Jesus actually exist as a historical personage[...]", as well as Wells' colleague R Joseph Hoffmann, who wrote the book's Foreword, which begins: "It is no longer possible to dismiss the thesis that Jesus of Nazareth never existed as the 'marginal indiscretion of lay amateurs,' (to paraphrase a sentence once imposed on Matthew Arnold’s biblical criticism by his theological critics). The direction of biblical criticism since Albert Schweitzer's day has circled back with dizzying regularity to the implied question of Jesus's existence but has sought without success to answer it." -- were either misled, or themselves seriously misleading, concerning Wells' place on the mythicist-to-historicist spectrum, or so it seems to me, harrumph harrumph.

In Cutting Jesus Down to Size, Wells repeatedly complains about both historicists and mythicists having misunderstood his position, and it would be hard, I should think, to read this most recent book of his and still be unclear on the matter. On p 327 Wells, complaining about P R Eddy and G A Boyd still thinking he's a mythicist, says that he belongs in their category 2: people who believe "that Jesus did exist but, as Bultmann argued, 'the reports we have of him are so unreliable and saturated with legend...that we can confidently ascertain very little historical information about him.'"

I apologize for my part in spreading the misconception that Wells has remained a mythicist, and I hope this clears that up.

And in case anyone was wondering: although Wells is no longer a mythicist, and hasn't been for 2 decades, I still am. It still seems to me that the default position of academia regarding Jesus is to assume that he existed, and to take any fairly reasonable hypothesis about how this may have been the case as evidence that it was the case. It still seems to me that there is much special pleading and begging the question going on here. I still have not experienced anything remotely resembling an "Aha! it DOES make sense, what they're saying when they insist Jesus existed!"-moment.

Not even close. Not any closer when Wells says so than when anybody else says it.

So: Wells was the last mythicist known to me whom I felt was doing solid work, except that he wasn't doing what I thought since the 80's. Now it turns out he's just one more historicist doing solid work, and I disagree with him on this one issue. I am isolated and embarrassed here. This exhaustion I'm feeling right now: is this anything like what Hoffmann has referred to as "Jesus fatigue"? (No, probably not.) In any event, I don't really feel like throwing myself wholeheartedly and full-time into Jesus Studies, to straighten this all out once and for all if no-one else will.

For now I think I'd rather spend some time boning up on my Livy. Unlike Q, his missing 106.95 books are much more than merely hypothesized. They did exist, and some part of them may well exist still.

An Ironic Incident And An Attempt To Do Better

I'm not convinced that Jesus existed. I think maybe he did, or maybe that someone (leading candidate: St Paul) made him up, or had a dream about him and concluded he was real; or maybe that the nonfictional John the Baptist gradually morphed, in the minds of several people, into a mythical character, Jesus. The overwhelming majority of academics who specialize in the New Testament and related fields insist that Jesus existed. The problem I have with them is that they seem unwilling even to discuss the possibility that he never existed. Several times on this blog, I've characterized the response of many of them toward people who aren't convinced that Jesus existed as, "We're right, you're wrong, shut up!" And I've complained that this sort of response does not amount to an argument. I've complained about the unwillingness to discuss the matter.

This morning, it suddenly occurred to me that "I'm right, you're wrong, shut up!" is exactly what I said to someone in my previous post on this blog, in which I responded to someone who'd said that there are 5h-century Viking maps of Canada.

That's ironic. And I shouldn't do exactly the same thing I complain about other people doing. So, does that mean that I'm going to explain in this post in painstaking detail why I'm so sure that the assertion that there are 5th-century Viking maps of Canada is mistaken? No, not right now, because that would require some effort. Hard work made me quit. But I'll provide some references to the work of some other people. For example, there is this book, also linked in yesterday's post:



Does this embarrassing ironic incident make Jesus' existence seem more likely to me? Also no. Does it give me more sympathy for the academics who are convinced Jesus did exist, and respond to us who aren't convinced by saying, "We're right, you're wrong, shut up!" ? Yes.

I'll try not to repeat yesterday's behavior. I'll try to improve upon it with this:

Am I aware of any plausible evidence of Europeans sailing to the Western Hemisphere as early as the 5th century AD? No. (That's how I should participate in debates: not by saying, "You're wrong! Get out!" but by saying: "I am unaware of any plausible evidence which supports what you're saying." That's not merely nicer: it's also much more precise. It is open for the possibility that there may be evidence of which I am unaware. Such openness is the way to be.)

Now, when we come to the 6th century, I am aware of some things: namely, St Brendan and some other Irish monks sailed west from Ireland, and as far as I can see, no one knows with anything approaching certainty how far west they journeyed. Samuel Eliot Morison's book The European Discovery of America: the Northern Voyages, AD 500-1600 is an excellent introduction to the subject, and has superb bibliographies following each chapter, with a heavy emphasis on the primary sources. Morison is completely convinced that the Vinland Map is a fake.



Morison also wrote an excellent book about the southern voyages, ie, Columbus and those who followed him.

Jesus' Stand On Homosexuality

A popular talking point among gay-friendly Christians arguing that traditional Christian homophobia is un-Christian -- if, that is, they are reality-based enough to admit that traditionally, Christianity has been homophobic -- is:

"Jesus never said a word about homosexuality."

Maybe not. But if he didn't, living and teaching as he did (assuming he existed, which I don't) in a cultural tradition which was decidedly homophobic, the logical conclusion would be that he went along with this homophobic tendency.

Even more logical would be for Christians to decide for themselves that homosexuality is okay, no matter what Jesus said or would have said about it. But of course, insisting that it doesn't matter what Jesus would do is entirely too logical for Christians.

Gay-friendly Christians ARE making up their own minds about homosexuality -- so far, so good. But they still have this completely irrational need to believe that they have Jesus' approval and that they are following Jesus' example. Nevermind that there is no evidence whatsoever that Jesus made any pronouncements which differed with the culture he came from on the subject of homosexuality.

But of course, theology and logic have been oil and water for a least a couple thousand years now. Evidence schmevidence, if there's no evidence we'll make up whatever we need. Of course, it's possible that Jesus was gay-friendly, and that this was edited out of the Gospels by those who may also have edited away that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, or in a gay relationship with one of his male disciples, or that he was married to Mary Magdalene and in a gay relationship with one of his male disciples. There are a few words' worth of evidence that Mary Magdalene's role in the group around Jesus may have been minimized in the New Testament. There's less evidence that Jesus was gay-friendly, and/or gay.

The thing is that there is so very little evidence about Jesus, period, which means that there has always been a great deal of room in which the imaginations of Christians could roam. It's possible that Jesus was gay-friendly, or homophobic, married or single, or that he never existed. It's certain that Christians have made whole libraries' worth of different versions of Jesus to suit what various ones of them have wanted to believe about him, out of the slender volume of dubious, self-contradicting evidence.

Once More About Mythicism

It seems to be in the news again, at least in the small-pond news of New Testament scholars and we mythicists who aggravate them so much, so I'll take the opportunity to state my position at present.

Typically, academic Biblical scholars describe mythicists as amateurs and nuts. Unfortunately, they're right, with some rare exceptions such as G A Wells, and -- of course -- myself. But just because a lot of people argue a position ineptly does not mean that the position itself is unsound.

Those writing the news and quoted in the news -- and not just the journalists who are not Biblical scholars, but sometimes the academic scholars as well -- often repeat the erroneous view that mythicists are convinced that Jesus did not exist. But mythicists such as Robert Price, Richard Carrier, G A Wells and myself are not convinced that Jesus did not exist: we are all just none of us convinced that he did exist. [PS, 9 January 2018: Actually, G A Wells (22 May 1926–23 January 2017) ceased to be a mythicist some time before 2000; but the difference between himself and a mythicist remained so small that almost no-one noticed it.] And we all agree that the academic mainstream of Biblical scholarship is much too opposed to debating the matter. They, the academic Biblical scholars, are the pros. They're the ones with the advanced training. They are the people ideally qualified to investigate whether or not Jesus existed. And they're simply not investigating it. Four centuries ago, almost everyone assumed that Abraham was an historical figure, and that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible. Today, we don't assume that either Abraham or Moses is historical, and before the discovery of the Tel Dan stele there were some doubts about David as well, and their remains quite a bit of controversy over whether David's kingdom was anywhere near as large as described in the Bible. And all of that is due to the efforts of these very same Biblical scholars, the very same ones who are not subjecting the question of Jesus' historical existence to the same kind of scrutiny.

Typically, the academic Biblical scholars aren't nuts. But many of them are religious believers, and many more are somewhat reluctant to upset religious believers, and this may have something or everything to do with why they aren't asking (in spite of the title of that book by Bart Ehrman), Did Jesus exist? but rather continuing to routinely assume that he did, and go from there.

We mythicists don't all agree about much else other than that Jesus' historical existence has not been firmly established. What follows is my own position. Other mythicists disagree with some or all of it, so don't assume that I'm speaking for anyone else but myself. For their positions, read their books and their blogs.

With one possible exception, there are no known mentions of Jesus written earlier than Paul's letters and at least 3 of the 4 Gospels. That one possible exception is the Gospel of Thomas. Assuming that those who date Thomas to the 30's are wrong -- a very safe assumption in my opinion -- the earliest mentions of Jesus are from Paul, who by his own admission only saw Jesus "in a vision," whatever that means: in a dream, or a daydream, or an hallucination, or does it simply mean that Paul made Jesus up?

In my opinion, the only significant evidence we have at this time about whether or not Jesus existed is the New Testament. All that Tacitus, Suetonius, Josephus have to tell us is about the existence of Christians, which is not the same as the existence of Jesus. The good news is that we just keep on finding more and more ancient texts. Mostly in Egypt near the Nile, but also some as far east as Mesopotamia. So, more evidence may turn up at any time. But in the meantime, it seems to me, only the New Testament can help us figure out whether or not Jesus existed. And I honestly don't see how it alone can answer the question conclusively one way or the other.

The problem with the New Testament as history, obviously, is that so much of it is legend. But we can't conclude from that that it's entirely legend and that Jesus is a fictional character. I like to compare the New Testament to the Nibelungenlied. Both contain a high percentage of legend. In the case of the Nibelungenlied we have a great deal of historical material about the same time and place, and because of that other historical material, we know, for example, that Etzel in the Nibelungenlied is an historical person: he's Attila the Hun. If we didn't have as much of that other historical material, we would have to rely much more heavily on the Nibelungenlied in trying to understand the history of 5th- and 6th- century central Europe. Because of the lack of other historical material, we have to rely very heavily on the New Testament when trying to understand the history of 1st-century-AD Judea and Galilee, because it comprises a very great portion of all the written evidence we have, and when it comes to the life of Jesus, it comprises almost all of the significant evidence we have.

Another comparison I find helpful is to compare Jesus to Achilles. In my opinion, there's about as much reason to assume that one existed as the other. This, of course, will cause academic Biblical scholars to point at me and laugh and laugh, because they think it's so obvious that Jesus existed. But it still isn't obvious to me, and they shouldn't laugh so much, because their job is to explain stuff to people like me, and as yet none of them has begun to convince me that it's obvious and certain that Jesus existed.

I'm not so upset about it. I'm a 54-year-old autistic man who wasn't correctly diagnosed until the age of 45, so I'm quite used to being laughed at for all sorts of reasons. And laughter is a physically healthy thing. Who am I to begrudge it them?

But they haven't convinced me, and that's their job. To convince me, or to admit that the matter is not yet settled. When it comes to Jesus, the academic Biblical scholars -- with a few exceptions -- are not doing their jobs.

New Chronology And Mythicism

Recently I came across the New Chronology of Anatoly Fomenko and others. I had heard of this stuff before -- claims that conventional chronologies of ancient and Medieval history were drastically mistaken, and that most of what we think of as ancient history actually happened after AD 1000 -- but this is the first time I've taken a closer look at it.

I haven't yet (knowingly) discussed historical topics with proponents of this New Chronology, but for some reason I can vividly imagine how I would react to them, and it's strikingly similar to the way that Biblical scholars react to mythicists, people, including me, who think that it's possible that Jesus is a legendary character and was never an historical figure.

I've complained many times on this blog about the way that Biblical scholars react to mythicists: they dismiss us contemptuously.

I would have difficulty reacting to someone talking to me and advancing Fomenko's ideas about history in any way other than contemptuously dismissing them. Some propositions are simply beyond the pale: that God or Santa Claus exists, that Muslims in general are pro-rape, or, as Fomenko asserts, that Suleiman the Magnificent (16th century AD) is the actual Biblical Solomon (10th century BC) and built the Hagia Sophia (in Instanbul, built by the Emperor Justinian in the 6th century AD, originally a church, for a long time a mosque and now a museum), which is the actual Biblical Temple of Solomon.

Or, as Fomenko asserts, that Aeneas found Rome in Italy in the 14th century AD. Or that the events described in the Old Testament occurred from the 14th to 16th centuries AD in Europe and Byzantium, centuries later than the events of the New Testament, which occurred in AD 1152-1185. Or that the histories of ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome as we know them today were invented during the Renaissance by scholars who based these histories for the most part on documents which they themselves forged.

I would have a very difficult time remaining polite if someone were to confront me with assertions like these. Very much the way that Biblical scholars often seem to find it difficult to remain polite when one of us mentions that he's not convinced that Jesus existed. If I replied at all to Fomenko or one of his fans (who include former chess world champion Garry Kasparov), I would say that the amount of things someone needs to be ignorant of in order to accept such cockamamie nonsense is staggeringly huge. The number of people who would have had to have been in on the conspiracy of historical falsification is ridiculously huge. The amount of science which would have to be completely faulty in order for the New Chronology to hold up would be huge and would include things like carbon-14 dating. Millions or billions of artifacts would have to have been mis-dated by hundreds or thousands of years by people dating them for a living, using many methods, of which carbon-14 dating is just one. These mistakes would have to have been committed by people presenting their finding publicly for peer review for several centuries now.

Biblical scholars sometimes compare us mythicists (just to be perfectly clear: I'm not at all sure whether Jesus existed or not. I could absolutely eventually be convinced that he did or that he did not) to people who believe in nutty stuff like this New Chronology.

And in some case, mythicists actually are as crazy and ignorant as that.

But I'm not. But why should you believe me? Well, as far as I'm concerned you don't have to take anybody's word for anything. More research is needed -- everywhere, all the time, about everything. By all means, research everything further. I'm completely for that. Research me if you feel the need to, by all means. Read Fomenko if you want to, if you're not yet convinced that he is, in fact, crazier and more ignorant than I am. Think for yourselves. Please. If you come to the conclusion that Fomenko is right and that academic historians are wrong and/or lying for some reason, well, okay then. But in that case be prepared for the fact that I'll probably consider you to be a little slow.

Yes, I'm saying that I consider Garry Kasparov to be a little slow -- when it comes to history. The only place I've seen geniuses who were smart about everything is in fictional characters in TV shows and movies. In real life I've never encountered anyone with no serious weak points mentally. Kasparov is a genius at chess and a bit slow in the study of history. I'm good at language acquisition and quite bad at sarcasm detection. I'm sure I have other mental weak spots of which I'm unaware, because one reason why people have these weak spots is because they're unaware of them, and remain stubbornly unaware of them somehow even when other people repeatedly point them out, and I see no reason to assume I'm unique in this department.

Does It Matter If Jesus Existed?

Of course it matters. If it didn't matter to so many people we wouldn't discuss it so much.

The question is: how important is it? Many people, historicists and mythicists alike, Christians and atheists and others, seem to think that nothing could be more important: if it were ever proven that Jesus never existed, they seem to think, it would remake our world, from the ground up, in a flash.

These people who believe that the proof of Jesus' non-existence would be cataclysmic don't seem to me to have thought it through very far.

Let's look at the case of evolution. Since well before Charles Darwin's time, it has been plain that the nature and origin of life on Earth do not correspond at all to Biblical accounts. And yet, this has not led to an overthrow of Judaism and Christianity: on the contrary, fundamentalists still do not believe in evolution, and scientifically-literate practicing Jews and Christians have had remarkably little trouble in convincing themselves that the Bible never said what it clearly says, and that believers never took it as literally as they clearly all did until a few hundred years ago.

It's much harder to prove the absence of an historical person 2000 years ago than to prove his or her historical reality. Then again, never have so many people been so obsessed with one possibly-historical person as there are with Jesus. The amount of attention paid to him isn't comparable to that paid to anyone else. The usual standards of difficulty of proof or disproof may eventually be swamped by this tidal wave of attention. So let us say for the sake of argument that some day soon it will somehow be conclusively proven, as conclusively as it's been proven that Piltdown Man was a hoax, that Jesus of Nazareth was invented whole by Paul of Tarsus or created in hindsight out of unclear memories of John the Baptist or what have you, that the person himself is shown to be as legendary as his miracles and resurrection. What will happen?

Why should we believe that people will suddenly behave differently than they have in the past? The fundamentalists don't believe that evolution happens just because some biologists have explained that it does. Why on Earth would they be more receptive to historians showing that Jesus didn't exist?

And as for the moderate and the politically-progressive, academically-up-to-speed believers: they have quite calmly kept their beliefs in the face of evolutionary theory by maintaining that the stories in Genesis of the Creation and the Flood are metaphors, or camp-fire stories handed down from generation to generation and never taken all that seriously until all of a suddenly in 19th-century America the Biblical literalsts somehow very suddenly got it all wrong. Why should we expect a smaller amount of faith-saving mental acrobatics if and when Jesus is proven never to have existed? They will tell themselves and each other that Jesus was understood to be just a story all along -- or whatever else they have to tell themselves in order to be able to continue to believe whatever it is that they want to believe.

Although the progressive believers for the most part, and very, very nearly 100% of the academic Biblical scholars and Christian theologians, still firmly maintain that Jesus existed, even the ones who say that all the stories of miracles are legendary (and often have varying absurd positions about no-one ever having really believed those stories anyway -- until the 19th century in the US when millions of fundamentalists somehow managed to pull firm literalist beliefs out of their butts all at once), even the ones who don't believe in God -- although these latter ones have been much more reluctant to call themselves what they are -- atheists -- since Richard Dawkins started to behave like a jackass and put all this stink on the term "atheist" -- although even these Christians, or "2/3 Christians," as Nietzsche called them, still say that they are quite certain that Jesus existed, and tend to rather impolitely mock all doubts -- even they seem to be starting to hedge their bets a little, as more and more of the stories of the early Christians are proven to be legends, and are beginning to say that it doesn't MATTER whether Jesus existed or not, that what matters is the allegorical worth of the stories about him.

In short, although they still firmly maintain that there is no doubt that Jesus existed, they are already laying the ideological groundwork for the case that they may be proven wrong, by emphasizing more and more that "it doesn't matter" if he existed: what matters is the symbolic worth -- whatever that worth might be; it tends to vary quite a bit from progressive theologian to progressive theologian -- of the legendary stories about him. Christians suddenly switched from believing the stories in the Bible literally to maintaining that no-one ever believed them literally. If they could do that, why would it be at all difficult to suddenly switch from saying that it's certain that Jesus existed to saying everyone understood all along that he was a fictional character in those parables known as the Gospels, and that only those pesky fundamentalists, since just very recently, had ever believed in anything like "Gospel truth."

Monday: "Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia and at peace with Eastasia." Tuesday: "Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia and at peace with Eurasia." And only an occasional Winston Smith among the progressive faithful has any qualms or doubts that all is well. That sniveling creep and snitch George Orwell may have fooled millions of readers into thinking that his novels were realistic depictions of Communist regimes, but the Soviet Union actually never was much like that. The parallels between 1984 and Christianity, on the other hand, are many and striking, although, astonishingly, apparently quite unintentional on Orwell's part.

Many naive New Atheists seem to believe that if can be proven that Jesus never existed, superstition will shatter and crash to the ground and a Golden Age of Reason will begin, their descriptions of which sound very much like their families' descriptions of the Millennium. The New Atheist apple has often landed not nearly as far from the fundamentalist tree as it thinks.

I tend to agree, upon reflection, with those who say that it would make little change in the world, at least not right away. I just wish they wouldn't constantly interrupt discussions of Jesus' historicity to say that they don't care about it, because I do care -- not for the sake of huge sudden changes in the world which I don't see coming. I personally am interested in the question of the historical Jesus the same way that I would be interested in any other historical question. I'm interested in history, in trying to determine what happened at such and such a time in such and such a place, for its own sake, in somewhat the same way that theoretical mathematicians enjoy their equations and formulae for their own sake. I just find it interesting to attempt to learn what happened. And if possible to improve the historical record, to make it more accurate and/or more detailed. Some people like detective novels, some like comic books, some like quilts, some like boats. I like old manuscripts and inscriptions and mosaics and other ancient artifacts, and they happen to be what may possibly eventually clarify the historical Jesus question.

Writing From Jesus' Time And Place? What Writing Would That Be, Exactly?

It seems that some people have a distorted notion about the amount of ancient writing which has survived down to our time. They sometimes seem to think that the amount of written material from ancient Jerusalem is comparable to that of a big city today. They seem to imagine historians poring through the stacks of Jerusalem newspapers and police records from April and May, AD 33, and the diaries of Romans and Greeks vacationing in the city...

Newspapers didn't begin to appear until the 17th century, and whatever written records may have been kept by the Roman authorities in 1st-century Jerusalem are gone. We have a handful of such written records of ancient legal proceedings from anywhere in the Roman Empire, mostly from a few sites near the Nile in Egypt. After the actions of the authorities were carried out, the writing involved was thrown away. It seems it didn't occur to people back then to preserve such things. And when papyrus was thrown away, for the most part it rotted away very quickly. Those few sites near the Nile are very dry, which is good for preserving papyrus, and so we have found all sort of written documents in garbage dumps, above all the garbage dumps of the Egyptian town Oxyrhynchus. The Dead Sea Scrolls and some other ancient papyri have survived because they were stored in jars.

Most of the ancient Latin writing we have today was written in or fairly near the city of Rome, which was the cultural center of the Empire at the time. But very much even of the writing of the most highly-renowned ancient Roman writers has disappeared over the millennia. The ancient Romans considered Livy their best historian; only about 1/4 of his work has survived. The 2nd-most revered historian in ancient Rome was Tacitus, and 1/2 or more of his work has vanished. And Livy and Tacitus aren't unusual in this regard. This is how much ancient writing has vanished. We have only a fraction of many of the most highly-regarded writers. For many others, we have even less: a sentence or two, or just a mention in someone else's writing, or they've been forgotten altogether. Many of the most highly-regarded ancient writers.

The situation is similar in the case of Athens and the other major cities of ancient Greece. And peoples such as the Jews were much less favored by the Romans than were the Greeks, with the result that more of their culture, including their writing, has disappeared. And the Jews were much better favored than many other ancient peoples, who we only know by their names, or who have been forgotten altogether.

Most ancient Romans didn't know or care much about Judea and Galilee, and in the 1st century, indifference turned to hostility. There are a few lines here and there in ancient Latin and Greek in recognition of the crushing of the Jewish revolt from AD 66-70, and otherwise little mention of the place, except for the work of the authors of the New Testament and a couple of other Jewish writers, Josephus and Philo. And Philo was writing from far away in Alexandria. Without them, the modern world would have completely forgotten about Pontius Pilate until the 20th century, when a stone with a few words about him was excavated in Israel in the 20th century. (And without the New Testament and Josephus and Philo, would anyone today have any idea to whom the stone referred? I'm not asking rhetorically, I don't know the answer.) I keep mentioning the Pilate Stone on this blog because, from the point of view of most Romans of the time, Pilate would have been one of the most important people in Judea or Galilee. And, again, because there is so very little writing which survives from that time and place.

Other than the Pilate Stone and some of the Dead Sea Scrolls, I don't know of ANY writing we have today made in Judea or Galilee during Jesus' lifetime. I would imagine that there are a few more Roman inscriptions, but I don't happen to know. (Words carved into stone are called inscriptions by historians of the ancient Mediterranean world.) There probably was a lot of writing of various kinds in the Temple in Jerusalem which the Romans destroyed in AD 70. Maybe some more writing will turn up eventually, but for the time being these people who say things like, "We go through all the writings of his contemporaries and there's no mention if him" are talking through their hats: there are no big piles of records to go through. For Jesus' time and place, there are the New Testament and Josephus, and that's pretty much it. Add to that a couple of lines in the works of Tacitus and Suetonius and the younger Pliny, and some of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Pilate Stone, and whatever parts of the other papyri found since the late 19th century can be said to have an historical, and not merely an imaginative connection to 1st-century Judea and Galilee. (Remember, most of those papyri have been found in Egypt, near the Nile. Ancient papyrus in most places tends to have rotted away.)

You Can't Talk To Some People -- Or At least You Shouldn't

When you've become convinced that someone isn't listening, and that talking to them would be a waste of your time, what remains? Talking about them.

There are two people here who, I'm convinced, wouldn't listen to me if I tried to get through to them. The first quotes one of the more far-fetched passages in the Bible and seems to have no doubt that it's 100% true -- because it's in the Bible.

The second, who seems to have the opposite problem, replies to the first:

"Why is it that not one independent historical source ever mentions any of these things happening? Possibly because they didn't happen, and once again the wholly babble is a lie? Hmmm."

Oh, it makes me angry, how stupid this "the Bible is a lie" talking point is! All the more stupid because the people parroting it think of themselves as the voice of reason, as rationality incarnate. A collection of over 60 texts, with dozens of authors, is not "an" anything, it is more than one thing. It shows you how these two idiots are the flip side of one another, this all-or-nothing approach to the Bible. To the one it's absolutely all true, to the other it's absolutely all "a lie."

Who talks that way about a book by one author, let alone a compilation of works by many different authors?

In this case, the Bible verses quoted as Gospel truth are actually from one of the Gospels and have to do with one of the less-believable details of the Biblical account of Jesus' life, and the New Atheist was dutifully responding with the party line: "No historical sources mention Jesus."

So why is this, hmm? Could it be that Jesus never existed?

Yes, hmm? it could be that Jesus never existed. But one of the long list of things which these smug hmm? -ers don't want to hear is that very few non-New-Testament sources say anything at all about Judea and Galilee between 6 BC and AD 40, and one of those sources, Josephus, does mention Jesus, and not just in the discredited Testamonium Flavianum that they're always talking about because it's been discredited, but in a second passage as well.

They don't want to hear it. They don't want to have an intelligent conversation about 1st-century Judea and Galilee, they wouldn't recognize such a conversation if it slapped them in the face.

The Anti-Paulkovich: Ken Ammi's List Of 237 Texts Which DO Mention Jesus

Ken wrote a comment on my post examining Paulkovich's list of 126 people who allegedly didn't mention Jesus, and included a link to his blog post listing 237 texts, a list he seems to have published in 2010. (WHY are my posts on Paulkovich suddenly getting a surge of readership more than a year after I posted them? Did Paulkovich get the Presidential Medal of Freedom or something?) Ammi's list is less silly than Paulkovich's -- but of course that's setting the bar very low.

Paulkovich listed the names of some ancient people and claimed to have read their written work and found it very suspicious that none of them mentioned Jesus. All that Paulkovich's list proves is that he is a charlatan and a buffoon: more than 40 of the people on his list left no written work which Paulkovich could have studied. 4 actually do mention Jesus and/or Christians. Most of the rest are not historians, and perhaps a handful would have had some reason to mention anything which happened in Judea or Galilee in the time when Jesus is said to have lived. None of them were there during that time.

Now that's what I call a low bar. But it looks to me as if Ammi has cleared it easily.

Paulkovich automatically discounted all Christian writers. Ammi's list includes mostly Christian writers. Paulkovich counted up 126 people. Ammi lists 237 texts. Those texts are written by somewhat less than 237 people. For example Tertullian wrote 35 of them. Clement of Alexandria wrote 14. Hippolytus of Rome wrote 11.

Ammi counts the Gospel of Marcion as 6 texts instead of 1. That's rather strange. Still, it looks as if he's listed 230 or so texts written up until around AD 250 which do mention Jesus. That's a far, far more scholarly feat than Paulkovich's.

Still, I don't think that Ammi has proven anything about the historical Jesus. A legendary Jesus can account for the New Testament, and the New Testament can account for the rest of the items on Ammi's list. In Ammi's comment he writes: "Furthermore, the number refers to the texts and not to each manuscript behind each text. Counting each manuscript would also take us well beyond the 237 total." That's true. And it would have been even more spurious, just as Ammi's presentation of 237 texts is already somewhat spurious in counting texts rather than authors, counting Tertullian 35 times instead of once, for example, and in listing each and every text produced before AD 250 which mentions Jesus without asking of each one whether it tells us anything about Jesus which we didn't already know from the New Testament -- if, that is, the New Testament describes a man named Jesus and not a mythical creature.

To be clear: I think that texts later than the New Testament can possibly tell us something about the historical Jesus. Possibly. But I think that the burden of proof is upon him declaring that Marcion, for example, or the Epistle of Barnabas, gives us historical information about Jesus, and not just about the author and possibly also about the Christians with whom the author was acquainted. We don't count up all of the early written references to Achilles and claim that each one strengthens the case for Achilles' historicity, nor should we.

The Last Temptation Of The Mythicist

Or at least the latest temptation for this mythicist, to stop being a mythicist and say, "Okay, there was an historical Jesus, they're just debating his background and characteristics and what he actually did or didn't say and do."

"They" in this case would be a lot of academics, almost every single one of whom expresses no doubt about Jesus' existence. R Joseph Hoffmann, author of this fine blog as well as several fine books, has not yet, to my knowledge, become a strict historicist and said that it is certain that Jesus existed, but he expresses much less doubt about it than he did decades ago. And he's unusual among academics in expressing any doubt at all. Price expresses doubt, but unfortunately Price is a dingbat who seems a century or so behind current research. And Carrier, yeah, well, applying Bayes' Theorem to Jesus' existence is ridiculous, period. Besides these two, the academics make their cases on the basis of primary texts. They're familiar with the relevant manuscripts. They keep up with the relevant journals. Of course they do: their papers fill the relevant journals.

"They" include Barbara and Kurt Aland, Johannes Karavidopoulos, Carlo M Martini and Bruce Metzger, the editors of a critical edition of the Greek New Testament, known as the Nestle-Aland (Eberhard Nestle published the 1st edition of this version of the New Testament in 1898; they're up to the 28th revised version now.) for which they examined thousands of Greek and Latin manuscripts, plus some Greek and Latin (printed) editions, plus Syriac and Coptic editions to a great degree, and Armenian, Georgian, Gothic, Ethiopic and Old Church Slavonic editions to a lesser degree, and if you're new to this sort of thing, all that fine print at the bottom of every page of the Greek text gives the sources for every word of the text, as well as the major variations -- the most significant differences in some manuscripts and editions from what is in their text. Those abbreviations are the ones they give in the introduction to the most important of those manuscripts and to all of those editions. Usually, in an edition of an ancient text, there's plenty of room at the front of the book to list all of the sources from which the edition was made. Since there are so many sources in this case, only a couple of hundred of the most important of the manuscripts are listed in the introduction. There's a complete list at the back of the book, which mentions where each manuscript was used. There's also a list of the minor variations between editions at the back. Two lists, actually: one list of minor variations in manuscripts and one of minor variations in editions.

Iss a Ding.

You got all that? No? Well, what I'm saying is that critical editions like this are the shiznit: if you're serious about knowing what the experts currently know about what is in the New Testament and how it got there, you learn Greek and you get the latest Nestle-Aland, and in those latest scholarly journals you will find things like praise or criticism of the Nestle-Aland, plus research which will influence things like future editions of the Greek New Testament and the Vulgate and the Hebrew Old Testament and the Septuagint and the Georgian and Armenian translations of the Bible, and so on and on and on and on. If you want to keep up with the big kids in this field your Greek and Hebrew better be very, very good, and you should be good in Latin and Syriac, too, and it certainly wouldn't hurt to be very good at Coptic, and to be at least -- at least -- a little bit familiar with Ethiopic and Georgian and Gothic and Old Church Slavonic, and...

Not to mention those modern journals, which contain papers in English and German and French and Italian and Spanish and other modern languages.

These are the leading historicists. The leading mythicists, on the other hand, base their work on...

*sigh*

...well, usually on somewhat less than that.

And that's why I'm sometimes tempted to say, "Okay, I'm convinced that Jesus existed."

Except that the experts haven't convinced me that they've really allowed the question into their minds. That's just one except, but it's a huge one. As huge as except's get.

Wrong Monkey Broken Record Time: The experts need to investigate whether or not Jesus existed.

The experts who are fluent in 4 or more of those ancient languages, and somewhat familiar with between 4 and WOW more. Plus a bunch of modern languages. Who are all keeping up with and criticizing each other's work. I'm not an expert. But I'm close enough to expertise to tell who the experts are. It's those genius hardworking dedicated polyglots who unfortunately keep telling the rest of us to move along, nothing to see here. Who aren't doing one entirely crucial part of their jobs.