Did Jesus Exist? by Bart Ehrman

Hi Percy,I have to ask; how much information do you think we ought to have?If Jesus was a real person he was, during his life, an obscure religious mystic, born of a no-account family in a cultural backwater. Most of his followers would have been illiterate and the Gospels never mention him producing writings of his own. He died young. It's not like we have a wealth of exacting records from that time and place. What is it exactly that you think we ought to see if he were real?To be clear, I assume we're talking about a realistic Jesus here, not one who walked on water and got into fights with fruit trees. The idea of Jesus as an apocalyptic preacher who left an outsized legacy doesn't seem at all implausible to me.Mutate and Survive

Hi Theo, I find that a bit of an odd comment. Low bar? The bar is set at... reality.Neither of us believes in magic or divinities. No reputable historian incorporates miracles into their interpretation of the past. In talking about a historical Jesus, in the framework set by normal historical practice, we are necessarily talking about a non-divine, non-magical Jesus. That's just where the bar is set, whether we like it or not.Of course we could talk about whether the magical Jesus of popular Christian imagination was real or not, but I think we both know that's a waste of time. I'm not proposing we have that silly conversation. That's off the table as far as I'm concerned. Certainly if we were academics publishing papers on history it would be off the table. As rhetoric I agree with that. It's true in a sense and I'm pretty sure I've said it myself before. The distinction between a plausible historical Jesus and the mythic Jesus is a useful one. I would quibble a bit over the phrasing though.Even before his death, people said that Julius Caesar was divine, the descendant of Ares and Aphrodite (talk about being a nepo baby). This is obviously made up, just a bit of myth making. They're still talking about the same guy though. They're talking bollocks about him but that doesn't mean they're not talking about Julius Caesar, the real guy. They are talking about the historical Julius, they're just saying things about him that aren't true. Similarly, even when the claims about him are clearly fiction, the Gospels are, possibly, talking about a real historical person called Jesus. They're just saying a lot of things about him that aren't true.I find it more plausible that the Gospels are heavily fictionalised accounts of a real person than that they are complete fiction.Mutate and Survive

Hi AZPaul, Well quite. If "many holy people who had died" really did jump out of their graves and go wandering around Jerusalem to the considerable surprise of "many people", I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that somebody might have thought that worth mentioning somewhere. The obvious reason we have no record of such incredible events is because they never happened. I agree. The myth isn't true. But that doesn't mean that it wasn't based upon a real man, nor does it mean that there aren't elements of historical truth in the Gospel accounts. Likely they are a mix of;a) Broadly true accounts of real events and/or the real teachings of the actual historical Jesus.
b) Heavily fictionalised or distorted versions of real events/teachings. These might resemble reality quite closely or be wildly errant, or anywhere in between.
c) Fan fiction, based on no real event and/or which does not represent or actually contradicts Jesus' original teachings.How much is there of each and which bit is which? That question is kind of above my pay grade, although I do suspect that there's quite a bit more of the latter two categories than the first.Mutate and Survive
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And yet we have the Gospels. Dodgy evidence they may be, but they are evidence. There are reasons to think that there is some truth in them, not least the fact that Jesus makes for such a terrible candidate for the Messiah. Jews of the 1st Century were not expecting their Messiah to kick up a bit of ineffectual fuss and then get ignominiously executed. They were expecting an ass kicker who was going to smite their enemies and win back their lands. The spiritual savior of the Gospels was kind of a hard sell. If an author were to invent a Messiah out of whole cloth it seems implausible that he would have invented this one. I think that might be over-egging it. Certainly Paul's influence is great. I think it likely though that the proto-Christian church existed before him and that James and Paul were both leaders of that church before Paul. I think Paul was probably sincere. I think he really had a vision, which he genuinely believed was of a divine Jesus and it changed his life, not necessarily for the better. I don't see a strong motivation for him to devote his life to this if he wasn't sincere. Also he mentions meeting James the brother of Jesus and Peter, so if he's making it all up, that's at least three people he made up out of whole cloth, two of them ostensibly still alive at time of writing. He's also necessarily making up the church in Jerusalem and the Christians he supposedly persecuted before his conversion. These seem like big lies, easily exposed even in the ancient world. No, I think he's telling the truth, as he sees it. Does any fact of history really matter? It depends what you mean by "matter" and what your priorities are I suppose.If by that you are alluding to whether it matters with regard to whether or not we should become Christians though, I agree; it doesn't matter. I don't reject Christianity simply because I don't trust its historical claims. I reject the supernatural altogether. Absolute proof of the existence of a historical Jesus would do nothing to win me over.Overall, I also think there's a disconnect here. You say there is no evidence. Even if that were true, that would surely seem to justify a position of neutrality, a mythicism-agnosticism if you will. But instead you seem to be coming down on the side of mythicism. I think that's an over-correction. You have to understand that scholars in the field, including non-Christian ones, tend to view Jesus Mythicism as a bit of a joke. Many if not most of its major proponents are a bit flaky. I think that concluding that Jesus was not real simply because there is little evidence is a bit odd, given that we all agree that a historically plausible Jesus would not have left much evidence.Mutate and Survive

Wow Theo. I'm just gobsmacked by how far you've missed the point I was making here. I was not comparing the strength of the evidence for the historical existence of Julius Caesar to the strength of the evidence for a historical Jesus. I'm not doing that because that would be completely stupid.I was using Caesar as an illustrative example only. The point I was trying to make is that just because a story about a particular person isn't true doesn't mean that the story isn't about that person. It's just a story about that person that happens not to be true.Let's try another example, just to be as clear as possible.Taylor Swift is a real person. Crazy little online right wing weirdos have concocted a bizarre story about how the Superbowl has been fixed so that Taylor Swift can help Joe Biden win the election... or something. It's honestly quite hard to parse what they think is happening. Whatever it is though, it's 100% horseshit. The story isn't true. That doesn't mean that it's not a story about Taylor Swift though. It is a story about Taylor Swift, just a stupid false one.Again, to be clear, this is not an attempt to examine the strength of the evidence for the existence of Taylor Swift. It's just an illustrative example.If Jesus was a real person then even the most fanciful stories about him are stories about the real Jesus at some level. They're just bullshit stories. Just because a story isn't real doesn't mean the person in the story isn't real. I have literally zero idea how you think that comment follows from what I said in any way.What I'm saying here is that in discussing a historical Jesus we should be discussing the version that is plausible, or at least possible, a non-magical Jesus. I'm saying that we should discount the magic Jesus; that blatantly isn't real.The bar is set here because that is where the bar would be set for any and all sane historical analysis of this or any claim. I essentially describing a form of methodological naturalism. I don't see what possible problem you could have with that. I think you've perhaps got the wrong end of the stick. Or a mythic story was built around a real man with influence from other mythic stories, poetry, philosophy, etc. Seems pretty reasonable to me. If that were the case, why not make up a Jesus who actually fulfilled the prophecies? Why piss around trying to trace Jesus' lineage to David, even though it plainly isn't the case, when you could just make someone up who actually fitted that prophecy? Jesus is a poor fit for the Messiah. Given the luxury, why not create a Messiah who more closely resembled expectations?Mutate and Survive

Hi Tanypteryx, No, none whatsoever. Why would there be? What physical evidence would a man who was famously unkeen on material possessions leave? I'm suggesting that he would leave no physical evidence at all. Indeed if someone were to announce an archaeological discovery of physical evidence for Jesus' existence, I would assume that it was just another pious fraud. There's no what! WTF! Please tell me that this entire post was just a wind up, please.I saw someone protest that we don't have Jesus' DNA once. No foolin'. Citation needed.You can't seriously think that our records of 1st Century Judea are so perfect that they mention everyone can you? Jesus is only supposed to have preached for about three years or less. I don't know how much impact you think a person like that would have had on the historical record. I'm really hoping that Jesus is real right now so that he can have mercy on my poor goddamned soul. Yeah, that's exactly my point. I'm not saying that Paul's vision was a bona fide supernatural vision from God. I'm saying it was a psychologically induced event that the superstitious Paul took to be a divine revelation. That provides him with a compelling motivation to preach the message of Christ, as he saw it.Mutate and Survive

Evidence for the existence of Jesus as I made clear.People are fond of saying that there is "no evidence", That is simply false. People saying this are seemingly pretending that the Pauline Epistles, the Gospels and the rest of the NT don't exist. They are certainly not the most reliable evidence, to put it mildly, but to pretend that they don't exist is asinine. Same for the References to Jesus by Josephus and Tacitus. They exist. They are evidence. You are not compelled to take them at their word, but the claim of zero evidence is false. Of course, but I'm not suggesting we give the job to candle2 or something. Modern historians and textual critics hold to a higher standard than those who torture the Bible for their own weird purposes. There are also agnostic, atheist and Jewish scholars, with no axe to grind, who are not under the same pressure for the text to conform to some presupposition. It would not be fair to compare someone like Bart Ehrman to a fundamentalist apologist. Not what I'm talking about. It's easy to kill your fictional character off at the end, and that would indeed be convenient for a fraudster. But that's not what I meant.I'm talking about places where the Gospel authors tie themselves in knots trying to make problems go away, when need not have created the problem in the first place were they simply writing fiction. Take the narratives of Jesus' birth for example. The early Christians had a problem. They had come to think of Jesus as Messiah, but he didn't fit the bill in a number of ways. One of those was Micah 5:2, which was taken as prophecy.

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But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel, whose origins are from of old, from ancient times.

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So the Messiah was supposed to come from Bethlehem, whereas Jesus was from Nazareth. Worse, he had probably gone by "Jesus of Nazareth", a common way of identifying individuals in a world where few people had surnames. There was no hiding it, certainly not from the people of Galilee, where Jesus was known and where his followers would have been based. This was a problem and the solution was to invent the story of the census, the journey to Bethlehem and everything that goes with it. The problems with this story are well known, it contains much that is spurious or ahistorical, censuses did not and could not work that way, etc. The versions presented in Luke and Matthew are highly contradictory. I think we can all agree that the story is made up and indeed that is the majority opinion of scholars. Why go to all this trouble? If one was creating a wholly fictional Messiah, why not simply have him born in Bethlehem? Why bother with the story at all? The most parsimonious answer is that Jesus was real and he was inconveniently from Nazareth. People knew this. He was "Jesus of Nazareth". Jews of the time would have made this objection, just as in the Gospel of John;

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41 Others said, “He is the Messiah.”

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Still others asked, “How can the Messiah come from Galilee? 42 Does not Scripture say that the Messiah will come from David’s descendants and from Bethlehem, the town where David lived?

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To get around this, the idea was planted that he was born in Bethlehem. It's quite clever really. Even if most people who had heard of Jesus knew he was brought up in Nazareth, very few people outside of sleepy little Nazareth would be in a position to deny that he might have been born elsewhere. If the whole thing is a fabrication, why even include an insignificant detail like Nazareth at all? It was an obscure little place that hardly anyone had heard of and no-one cared about. Why not just cut it from the narrative altogether? The most parsimonious explanation and in my view the most likely, is that Jesus did indeed come from Nazareth. It was a known fact and the early Christians couldn't make it go away, so they had to create a workaround. Ah! Thank you. That should of course read "James and Peter were both leaders of that church before Paul".I also forgot that Paul claims to have met John the Apostle as well in a later visit to Jerusalem and he alludes to Jesus' other siblings. Are all these people made up? Is everyone Paul mentions made up? This seems unlikely. These are letters to other Churches after all. He is writing to people who would be in a position to know if none of these people or proto-churches didn't exist. But I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about a plausible historical Jesus and you know that. Why insist upon responding to a claim I'm not making? It's obtuse, it's unnecessarily confusing and in my opinion it's just sloppy rhetoric . Your doing the same thing as Theodoric, addressing only the lunatic claims of Christians and ignoring the far more plausible claim that I am making. This matters because a bad habit of Jesus Mythicists is a sort of bait and switch. They claim to address a plausible Jesus but then switch to arguments that only matter for the magical Jesus. It's infuriating. Saying "Jesus didn't exist" when you're really talking about the magic Jesus is just confusing and contrary. It has no place in any sensible conversation about a plausible historical Jesus. It's a waste of time; we're all already agreed that no-one walked on water. People who are not onboard with that aren't engaged in any recognisable kind of scholarship. I don't care what Christians believe; I'm not interested in that conversation.I don't understand why you insist upon framing it like this. I know that you don't believe in magic. You know that I don't believe in magic. I just don't get it.Mutate and Survive

I'm not sure what you mean by necessary. Christianity has to have come from somewhere and having it's origins in a real person is a highly parsimonious explanation. Well I wouldn't like to put a figure on it, even loosely. Certainly I would not encourage amateurs and laymen to uncritically view the Gospels as reliable history, far from it. Historians though, textual critics and other scholars of antiquity approach their sources with far greater caution and detailed analysis than laymen. "What you call "finagling over the 5%" is what such people do!I also think that the question of whether one of the most influential individuals of all time existed or not is a bigger deal than just part of that "5%". My problem with this is that lots of evidence from antiquity is "dodgy". It's patchy, fragmentary, only known form much later manuscripts and littered with bias and superstition. Historians are used to this and largely take it in their stride. Laymen tend to be shocked when you say something like "there are no contemporaneous sources", but in reality, that's far from unusual. Yes, extremely challenging. That's why textual critics get paid those big, big bucks! Seriously though, it's a very challenging field, requiring a greater familiarity with the texts than a lowly internet malcontent such as myself will ever possess. As I said above, a lot of this is above my pay grade. Well Paul doesn't mention the Nativity. I would agree that if Jesus was wholly concocted, then it must have been before any of the Gospels were written, if that's what you're getting at. I also think that if it was all concocted, then it must have been before Paul's Epistles as well. His various claims don't make sense unless there was some sort of pre-existing Christian movement. I think that's pretty good description of what I'm suggesting. I'm further suggesting that the Nativity story is an example of this. They had a theological problem and came up with a solution. Luke and Matthew (whoever they were) give differing version of the story, but I don't think either of them invented it. They both might have got it from Q or Luke from Matthew, or somewhere else, but to me this seems like a good example of exactly the kind of evolution of ideas that you describe. Okay, cool. I still think it's a funny way of putting it. I mean, we don't hear anyone asking "Was there a George Washington who chopped down the cherry tree?". That would be weird phrasing. Semantics I guess. It doesn't. I don't think any question about distant history really matters much. Did king Arthur exist? Or Robin Hood? Probably not. Does it matter? Not in the least. Where was Alexander the Great buried? It would be nice to know, but not knowing won't keep me up at night. It's interesting though and I find this topic interesting. To be fair, it clearly matters a great deal to Christians, but it doesn't matter to me in the same way. The existence or non-existence of Jesus was never a foundation of my atheism in the first place. The idea started in the Nineteenth Century but gradually fell out of favour. It has had a renaissance of sorts in the internet age, but there are almost no professionals who take it seriously today.Mutate and Survive

I think there's a few problems with this. Well yes, history is usually written after it happens. That's how time works. It would be nice if it had been written closer to the events, but it wasn't. That doesn't make it worthless and I don't think that a gap of 80 years is particularly exceptional for an ancient source. So for starters, you haven't provided a source for this. Also, I did a bit of digging and found the term to be in use before Tacitus' time and after. Notably Suetonius uses it and he was writing at about the same time. Also, is this supposed to be a problem just for this passage? Because Tacitus uses the word "procurator" multiple times in Annals, in English translation at least. Is this supposed to be a substantial enough objection to throw out the whole of Tacitus? Given that he is one of our most valuable sources on 1st Century Rome I think that's a bit of an overreaction. These aren't "records". The Annals aren't part of some official record or something, they are histories, so I don't really know what you mean by that. Tacitus most certainly used official records as sources, but that doesn't mean that he had to follow their naming conventions. I also just don't buy this generally. If early Christians commonly referred to Jesus as "Christ" or "Christus" or "Chrestus", then I see no reason why Tacitus would not have done the same. Tacitus may not even have known the given name of this "Christ". It is clear from the context that he is using "Christ" to show the derivation of the term "Christian", which makes sense. You cite no backing for this claim. Overall, I am sceptical. What do you mean he accepts it? He's not accepting anything, just reporting events. Far from being accepting, it is clear from the passage that Tacitus despises Christians and Christianity;

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Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judæa, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular. Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty; then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind.

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Tacitus, Annals 15:44, bolding mine

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That doesn't come across as accepting to me. That comes across as extremely hostile. He clearly regards Christians as dangerous wackaloons, which... yeah that checks out. Clearly this is a man who knows Christianity well! This is the worst argument you bring. The reason no-one cited Tacitus is because no-one had access to Tacitus. We're damn lucky we have as much of Tacitus as we do. He wrote around thirty books of which we have about half. Annals 11-16 survived through a single manuscript. We think of Tacitus as a big deal, but that's presentism; he was not well known in the latter part of the first millennium. The Wikipedia article on Tacitean Studies reads;

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His popularity waned with time: his unfavorable portrayals of the early emperors could not have earned him favor with Rome's increasingly autocratic rulers, and his obvious contempt for Judaism and Christianity (both troublesome foreign cults in the eyes of a 1st-century Roman aristocrat) made him unpopular among the early Church Fathers.[5] The 3rd-century writer Tertullian, for example, blames him (incorrectly—see history of anti-Semitism) for originating the story that the Jews worshipped a donkey's head in the Holy of Holies and calls him "ille mendaciorum loquacissimus", 'the most loquacious of liars'.

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Doesn't sound like a source that Christians would be queuing up to read and cite. The article continues;

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By the 5th century only a few authors seem aware of him

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and;

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After Jordanes, Tacitus disappeared from literature for the better part of two centuries, and only four certain references appear until 1360.

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and;

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It was not until Giovanni Boccaccio brought the manuscript of the Annals 11-16 and the Histories out of Monte Cassino to Florence, in the 1360s or 1370s, that Tacitus began to regain some of his old literary importance.

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So the reason Christians didn't quote Tacitus is simply because they didn't have it. You cannot make an argument from silence in such circumstances, it's nonsensical. If you can name a single non-mythicist scholar who regards this passage as an interpolation, I would be very surprised. But there are no "Christian stories" in there. There's nothing beyond Christ being executed. There's no resurrection, no miracles, nothing that would suggest a Christian input. Not that Tacitus would have taken such stories seriously, but he might have enjoyed mocking them. They're not there though. Indeed, he makes no attempt to describe the beliefs or practices of Christians beyond dismissive scorn. I don't think these accounts came to Tacitus directly from Christians.In general, I'm not convinced by anything here that the Tacitus passage is fraudulent or particularly problematic. I can see how it's extremely inconvenient for mythicists though.Mutate and Survive

Hi Taq,I think that's a sensible approach.I think there is rhetorical value in granting the existence of a historical Jesus whether you believe it or not, at least in conversation with Christians. If you suggest that Jesus was wholly fictional they're going to get defensive. They're going to tell you, correctly, that most scholars regard mythicism as bunk, they're going to think you're an idiot and they're going to stop listening. It is perhaps more productive to grant the existence of Jesus and focus on critiquing the more outlandish elements of the story.Mutate and Survive

We seem to be broadly on the same page. I agree, Christianity is based pretty much entirely on the mythic Jesus. Any real Jesus is practically a ghost. Sadly Christians are the last people who want to hear about him. I think it is completely fair to say that there is consensus on the historicity of Jesus amongst scholars. No. If I were the betting type I would probably bet on Peter being the first person to become convinced of Jesus' resurrection, and if not him then James or someone else form Jesus' inner circle. Again, that's not how I would put it, but... semantics.Mutate and Survive

Hi Phat, I didn't say it was. As I said to Percy, it's not emotionally or philosophically important to me. It is important to Christians though; no Christ, no Christianity, obviously.I think that whether or not Jesus existed is a valid question, I think that it is in principle an important question for Christianity to address. It's just that the answer is "Yes, he probably existed" which is probably a relief for Christians, but not the knockout punch that others were perhaps hoping for.I can see why some atheists find mythicism appealing. It promises to sweep Christianity away in one fell swoop. I just don't think it fulfills that promise. I think it's a bad argument against Christianity and I don't see why anyone would bother with bad arguments against Christianity when we have so many good arguments against Christianity.Mutate and Survive

Yes, that is the case. The same. A historical Jesus, just a rather more modest one than many of their Christian colleagues. The same amongst Jewish scholars. I find that telling. These people have no skin in the game after all. To reiterate, the number of professional scholars who take mythicism seriously can be counted on one hand - if you take a very generous definition of "scholar". Both of those are good examples of problematic elements though, the Criterion of Embarrassment applies. John the Baptist anointing the actual Messiah makes little sense. That makes me more inclined to believe it might have happened. And the crucifixion is especially problematic for early Christians (especially those who still considered themselves Jews). Crucifixion was a shameful death. The Romans intended it as the ultimate humiliation, not just death, but a horrifying and shameful death. Jews of the time would also have seen being nailed up as a shameful death, an outsider's death. This was not what anyone had expected from a Messiah. This would have ben a hard sell and I don't see why anyone would come up with it except out of great need. I think that immediately after his death, Jesus' followers found themselves in a similar position to the Millerites after the Great Disappointment and like the Millerites, they immediately set about explaining to each other how they had never really been wrong after all. They found ways of getting around all of the contradictory evidence that was piling up and believed what they wanted to believe; that Jesus was the Messiah and that everything was going to according to plan actually. To me, that sounds like human nature. Oh absolutely. Religiously inspired bias is clearly at play here. There's more at play than mere bias though, as the existence of non-Christian scholars who dismiss mythicism attests. This is what make people like Ehrman so valuable. Sure. If you could get a clear look at the real Jesus I suspect he would seem rather an unremarkable figure in most ways. A well intentioned kook, ranting about an apocalypse that still hasn't come two millennia later. Yes. Is that so hard to believe? He was unreliable about events he witnessed only in a "vision". He was reliable about actual events from his own life. He was unreliable about supernatural things that never really happened and reliable about real actual events involving no fanciful elements. That seems sound to me.Mutate and Survive

That sounds dangerously close to creationist conspiracy theories about scientists being unable to speak candidly about evolution. The idea that there non-Christian scholars are trapped in some sort of cognitive bias is far fetched. They are arguably the ones who we might reasonably expect to be more biased toward mythicism and yet they're not. I think that a fair characterisation. I don't know what you expect from such a culturally loaded field of study. Inevitably the existence of Christian faith and any resulting bias are going to affect the scholarship. That's just how it is. It's also worth mentioning that not all Christian scholars are insistent upon every supernatural aspect of the mythic Christ. Moderate Christians do exist and it's my understanding that a number of ostensibly Christian scholars hold beliefs about the accuracy of the Gospels that would make someone like Ken Ham denounce them as fake Christians.Also I will point out again that insofar as there are two extremes at play, the extreme anti-Christian position - mythicsim - falls outside of academia. The extreme within academia is a mundane historical Jesus. That's what I would call "lampshading".I don't think the scenario you outline is innately implausible. The thing that's truly implausible is the idea of Jesus the Messiah needing to be baptised by a lesser figure like John. This oddity falls away however if we picture the scenario where a mundane Jesus gets baptised. Of course he would want to be baptised by John the Baptist. John was already a well known figure and, as you say, having John's imprimatur would have helped Jesus' evangelism. They were operating in the same area. We have independent evidence of John's historicity. It hangs together. I don't think that argument is following the same logic. It's not a criterion of embarrassment. I think you are underplaying the extent to which crucifixion was an embarrassment. Take a look at this Roman Graffito; The caption reads "Alexamenos worships his god". It's from Rome, dating form the 1st to 3rd Centuries, probably the early 3rd. This is the kind of mockery that early proto-Christians were inviting. It would have been viewed no more charitably by most Jews. I don't see why they would invite such scorn without reason.A model built around a historical Jesus actually being crucified however explains this rather well. In the face of the catastrophic failure of their beliefs, Jesus' followers had to come up with a workaround and the resurrection was their solution. I'm not suggesting they concocted it cynically; I think that someone had an experience which they took for a vision or revelation of a risen Christ. This caught on, allowing the veneration of Jesus to continue beyond his death and become the veneration of Christ.This is a higly parsimonious explanation for the crucifixion, the resurrection, the presence of many of the objectionable elements and perhaps most importantly, the reason why Christianity exists at all. There was no pre-existing tradition of a resurrected Messiah, let alone a suffering martyr. The crucifixion of a real Jesus explains the origin of both of these novel ideas. I don't think that putting it the other way around as you do leaves any explanatory power. Certainly it is especially glaring that a full mythicist hypothesis leaves us with absolutely no idea where Christianity came from in the first place. This is a major failing, a failure to address the null hypothesis. Mythicists typically make little attempt to address this question. If not a real Jesus, where does any of this come form? We are left to wonder. No, absolutely not. In the real world most people are right about some things and wrong about others, that's almost universal. It is certainly the case with historical sources from antiquity. I don't think there's any substantial source from that far back that doesn't contain some mixture of truth, honest error, bias, outright lies, plausible and implausible.The same might be said of scholars themselves, but you are being extremely uncharitable in equating the deeply held and oft inflexible faith positions of fundamentalists at one end of the spectrum with the vastly more tentative academic positions held by scholars operating as professional historians or textual critics. I think you're being a little uncharitable toward the more moderate Christian scholars too. There are Christian scholars who are candid about not being able to make an evidence based case for the resurrection. If you insist; it's not hard to believe. In fact it is completely normal for people to be right about some things and wrong about others. The same is true of historical documents, to the point where we might even start to become suspicious if a source were too perfect. We were talking about the resurrection, or at least I was. Paul claims to be a witness to the resurrected Jesus, but only in a vision. That leaves him a poor quality witness to that event, as his account is wholly supernatural in nature. It seems to have convinced him (a superstitious man from the 1st Century) but I obviously don't find it convincing.His accounts of mundane natters are obviously more plausible. Well yes. I think that's both obvious and inescapable.Once the supernatural elements have been cast aside we are left with a mixture of less-plausible and more-plausible material. There are ways of sifting through that. Ahistorical elements for instance cast doubt. A higher degree of concordance between independent sources is more convincing. There are arguments from embarrassment. There are linguistic arguments - some passages from the NT seem to make more sense in Aramaic. Honestly, I'm not really qualified to lay out every tool historians and critics have at their disposal, but they are all aware of the problem you raise and they have their ways of addressing it. Just the same as every other historian in every other area of study. That is the job. That's what they do. they call this "Tuesday".Mutate and Survive

Name them.Mutate and Survive