I recently had an Atheist tell me that since the written records of Jesus’ life come to us from decades after His death then they are “very late.” Note two things: 1) expecting a largely oral culture to behave in our modern manner is illegitimate (perhaps “chronological snobbery” as C.S. Lewis put it) and 2) decades after an event is the historical equivalent of us witnessing something and tweeting about it one minute later. The fact is that decades later is a news flash and that which we know about ancient personages comes to us from centuries if not millennia after the fact.
Stephen Hawking has noted that Jesus’ virgin birth is “A fairy story for people afraid of the dark?” This just in, he has not dared state any such thing about anything within the Qur’an—shocking, I know.
Professor of Mathematics and Linguistics at Dartmouth College Lindsay Whaley noted the presuppositional bias involved in this issue, “If there is nothing beyond the material stuff of this world, then the concept of ‘resurrection’ is ludicrous.”1
Regarding the written records and the (common sense) manner in which different people recount events he notes, “One common problem, particularly in the blogosphere, is to interpret conflicting written testimony to mean that an episode did not take place.”
Also, “Another common mistake – made by internet amateurs and scholars alike – is to over-interpret historical silence.” Michael Paulkovich is a perfect example of this as he claims that to have perused 126 texts from circa Jesus’ time which fail to mention him (the group of texts include poetry, books on medicine, etc.) and so he claims no meek messiah but a fable of the Christ. This just in, he has not dared state any such thing about Muhammad—shocking, I know.
Of course, I have chronicled over two hundred references to Jesus, see Two Centuries Worth of Citations.
It is also important to note that Jesus locus of ministry, Jerusalem, was destroyed in 70 AD. Granted, whether other records which mention Him were destroyed is an argument from silence in either direction yet, it is a noteworthy fact.
Whaley points, out:
…no Roman historical writing from the mid-first century has been preserved. We know that it was being written because some of it is quoted in later sources, but we just don’t have access to it…
Romans considered Christianity to be a superstition, an unlawful cult. In general, Roman historians didn’t have much interest in curiosities occurring around the Empire. They tended to write about the lives of the emperors, the battles being fought, natural disasters, or political intrigues.
Macquarie University Honorary Fellow of the Department of Ancient History, John Dickson teaches a unit called “Historical Jesus to Written Gospels” for Sydney University’s Department of Jewish Studies. One of his students was Raphael Lataster and so Dickson basically uses him as a target rich punching bad whereby to demonstrate the various errors in pop-Jesus mythicism “research.”2
Dickson notes, “You can almost set your clock by it. Another article appears arguing Jesus never lived – so Christmas must be upon us.” He relates a bit of fake news as Raphael Lataster had a piece published in The Conversation which was picked up by The Washington Post. This just in, he has not dared state any such thing about Muhammad—shocking, I know.
Dickson notes:
As his former lecturer, I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that Raphael’s 1000 words on Jesus would not receive a pass mark in any history class I can imagine, even if it were meant to be a mere “personal reflection” on contemporary Jesus scholarship….his numerous misrepresentations of scholarship would leave a marker little choice but to fail him.
One historically new view of Jesus is that He never even existed. Of course, this is an utterly radical view and it is not surprising that no one even imagined making such a claim a year after Jesus died not a decades later no, not a century nor millennia but it took virtually a full two millennia before someone invented a new way to excuse their rebellion against Jesus. Well, a side niche group of such deniers claim that Jesus is just a character which is an amalgam of various earlier myths. This is convenient because it is based on mere assertion and they can play fast and loose with the mythology and pick and choose whichever bits they wish so as to formulate their very own neo-mythology.
Dickson notes, “Lataster has offered an academic contrivance, as he seeks to give respectability to what is known as ‘mythicism.’” Playing off of a Latasterism, he writes:
Romulus and Remus, the mythical founders of Rome, were somewhat historicised over the course of about 300 years. But somehow this is meant to have happened to Jesus in the space of 10-20 years: from celestial deity to crucified Palestinian peasant in half a generation!…
But anyone who dips into the thousands of secular monographs and journal articles on the historical Jesus will quickly discover that mythicists are regarded by 99.9% of the scholarly community as complete “outliers,” the fringe of the fringe.
As to the methodology, Dickson notes:
…when mainstream scholars attempt to call their bluff, the mythicists…cry “Conspiracy!”…Lataster’s arguments amount to an unfortunate disregard toward mainstream scholarship and highlight a worrying trend in new atheist literature generally: the tendency to pontificate on topics well outside one’s area of expertise. And when challenged by those who belong to the relevant field, these evangelists of unbelief…cry foul.
Thus, “with a wave of his hand he dismisses the apparently ‘atrocious methods’ of historians of Jesus. It is as if he thinks he wins the game by declaring all its rules stupid and inventing his own path.”
He also wrote, “no student – let alone an aspiring scholar – could get away with suggesting that Christians ‘ought not to get involved’ in the study of the historical Jesus. This is intellectual bigotry and has no place in academia, or journalism.” This was within the context of the fact that Lataster had the chutzpah to claim that as Richard Carrier approvingly puts it, “the debate over the historicity of Jesus” should be conducted “by focusing only on what atheist and agnostic experts are saying…really we should only be looking at the debate among atheists”—see, Richard Carrier on Raphael Lataster’s Jesus Did Not Exist – A Debate among Atheists.
There is also the specific claim by Lataster that “the letters of Paul ‘overwhelmingly support the ‘celestial Jesus’ theory’ is an indefensible exaggeration” yet, “Paul’s evidence for the historical figure of Jesus is widely regarded as particularly early and significant.”
I have shown in explicit detail that this is accurate, Raphael Lataster on no historical but a celestial Jesus in Paul’s writings. I even had a Facebook discussion with Raphael Lataster on historical Jesus and wouldn’t-cha know it? Just when it was getting good—or, bad for Lataster—that Facebook page was locked and all comments deleted (little did they know that every day I was copying and pasting the comments into a Word doc for safe keeping).
John Dickson also notes, “Raphael Lataster reveals that his real interest is in sceptical apologetics rather than ancient history when he opines, ‘There are no existing eyewitness or contemporary accounts of Jesus. All we have are later descriptions of Jesus’ life events by non-eyewitnesses.’” Just as an FYI: “later descriptions of” whomever’s “life events by non-eyewitnesses” is called doing history.
He further points out:
…virtually everything we know from ancient history comes to us from sources that are neither “contemporary” with events, nor written by eyewitnesses…This is typical of ancient history, and it poses no dilemma to the contemporary scholar…to suggest that the Gospels are somehow dodgy because they are not contemporaneous accounts of Jesus indicates a basic unfamiliarity with the discipline of history.
And unfamiliarity with the discipline of history premised upon the bias of Atheism—which is an anti-Christian support group—is perfectly descriptive of the pop-“research” occurring today within the realm of what is supposed to be serious historical Jesus studies.
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