One might feel for Secular Humanist magazine. They appear desperate for writers. How else to explain the fact that they publish Michael Paulkovich, an engineer who appears to have no innate (never mind cultivated) talent for historical thinking, on the alleged weakness of the evidence for Jesus? And apparently they're too poor to hire editors who recognize weak pseudo-history when they see it.
Here's Paulkovich's "argument," followed by a point-by-point rebuttal. Instead of believing nine impossible things before breakfast, I thought I'd breakfast on this impossibly bad argument instead, after someone brought it up at National Review to dispute Easter.
"I have always been a staunch Bible skeptic but not a Christ-mythicist. I maintained that Jesus probably existed but had fantastic stories foisted upon the memory of his earthly yet iconoclastic life."
He and Richard Carrier were, it seems, enlightened to the Gnostic "truth" about the most famous man in history at about the same time.
"After exhaustive research for my first book, I began to perceive both the light and darkness from history."
What a sentence! The pomposity of this line should let us know what we're in for. After "exhaustive" research (we'll see otherwise below), you "began" to perceive that both bad and good things happen? Or that a particular hidden pattern of good and evil can be traced by the Illuminati?
"I discovered that many prominent Christian fathers believed with all pious sincerity that their savior never came to Earth or that if he did, he was a Star-Trekian character who beamed down pre-haloed and full-grown, sans transvaginal egress. And I discovered other startling bombshells."
Sounds Carrier-esque, all right.
"An exercise that struck me as meritorious, even today singular, involved reviving research into Jesus-era writers who should have recorded Christ tales but did not. John Remsburg enumerated forty-one “silent” historians in The Christ (1909). To this end, I spent many hours bivouacked in university libraries, the Library of Congress, and on the Internet. I terminated that foray upon tripling Remsburg’s count: in my book, I offer 126 writers who should have but did not write about Jesus (see the box on p. 57). Perhaps the most bewildering “silent one” is the super-Savior himself. Jesus is a phantom of a wisp of a personage who never wrote anything. So, add one more: 127."
We begin to see that Paulkovich has no natural talent for history. The confusions already are enormous:
(1) Who is to decide who "should" have written about Jesus. Based on what criteria?
(2) Why "should" Jesus have written an autobiography? The biographies his disciples wrote have proven worldwide Number One best-sellers, to put it mildly. That worked well enough.
(3) Confucius didn't write an autobiography, either. Yet his Analects, like the gospels an account of the life, acts, and teachings of the Master by early disciples, is one of the foundations of Chinese tradition. Analects is not, as I show in How Jesus Fulfills the Chinese Culture, anything so well-attested as the gospels, but it is the best evidence for Confucius' life we have, and satisfies most historians as such.
(4) How does Paulkovich know Jesus "never wrote anything?" Or any of these other alleged writers? As every historian knows, the vast majority of ancient writings are lost, even by the most famous philosophers, dramatists, and historians.
(5) Still less writings about folk preachers in backwaters of the Roman Empire whose followers were persecuted for centuries.
"Perhaps none of these writers is more fascinating than Apollonius Tyanus (sic), saintly first-century adventurer and noble paladin. Apollonius was a magic-man of divine birth who cured the sick and blind, cleansed entire cities of plague, foretold the future, and fed the masses. He was worshiped as a god and as a son of a god. Despite such nonsense claims, Apollonius was a real man recorded by reliable sources."
I know "LOL" is a cliche. But I really did laugh out loud when I read this paragraph.
(6) To give Paulkovich "credit," here he is at least echoing ridiculous arguments made by many real scholars, for instance, Bart Ehrman. I refute them thoroughly in Jesus is No Myth.
(7) Apollonius actually left no writings behind, anyway. So why should he have written about Jesus?
(8) The main account of Apollonius' life, The Life of Apollonius of Tyana, was not in fact written by a "reliable source," but by a Saturday Night Live comedian before his time. It is filled with amusingly absurd dialogue, pepper-farming monkeys, ridge dragons, and fawns that attack Indian cities with cloaking devices around them.
(9) It was commissioned by an enemy of the church, for reasons of her own.
(10) The stories it tells cover the known (and unknown) globe at the time, but are fabulous tall tales, with little more to recommend them than, say, The Alexandrian Romance.
(11) Apollonius is sort of said to have cleansed the city of Ephesus of the plague -- by instructing its inhabitants to stone a beggar to death. Jesus, let us note, stopped a stoning, he never instigated one. Apollonius wasn't really all that "noble." Most of the rest of what Paulkovich says is derivative and sketchy.
(12) It is telling that that IS the best skeptics can come up with. The one valuable take-away here is that Paulkovich can find no better parallel to the life of Jesus -- as, I show, is true of real NT scholars on the same mission. (I won't say from God.) Apollonius is frequently cited by genuine skeptical historians as well as fake ones, because they can't come up with any better parallels to the life of Jesus. To a starving man, three day old crow meat will do.
"Because Jesus ostensibly performed miracles of global expanse (such as in Matthew 27), his words going “unto the ends of the whole world” (Rom. 10), one would expect virtually every literate person to have recorded those events. A Jesus contemporary such as Apollonius would have done so, as well as those who wrote of Apollonius."
(13) A classic non sequitur, which shows again that Paulkovich has little concept of how history works.
In fact, Matthew 27 records events which are said to have occurred not around the globe, but in Jerusalem. Suppose there were a small earthquake in Jerusalem that day. How was some writer in Spain or Greece supposed to know about that? Why should he believe any reports that come to him about veils rent or even the dead raised? Why should he bother filling expensive papyrus pages or codexes with such remote accounts? Who would have copied it? And then have preserved it all those centuries, against the ravages of time, unlike more famous works which were lost?
The idea that "every literate person" would have recorded such rumors, and then those records would have been preserved, is ridiculous. What is amazing is how much we do have about the life of one particular penny-less 1st Century Jewish carpenter, as again I show in Jesus is No Myth, and of what extraordinary, unparalleled quality.
"Such is not the case. In Philostratus’s third-century chronicle Vita Apollonii, there is no hint of Jesus. Nor does Jesus appear in the works of other Apollonius epistolarians and scriveners: Emperor Titus, Cassius Dio, Maximus, Moeragenes, Lucian, Soterichus Oasites, Euphrates, Marcus Aurelius, or Damis of Hierapolis. It seems that none of these first- to third-century writers ever heard of Jesus, his miracles and alleged worldwide fame be damned."
(14) More bosh. Note that against Paulkovich begins with Philostratus' Apollonius, showing how bad his evidence is. Damis was his main supposed source, though he was obviously just his sock-puppet, a convenient device from a city that didn't even exist in that time. Lucian is most famous for a proto-science fiction work about floating islands and countries in the stomachs of giant whales. (Not very good sci-fi, in my opinion. But neither was Kepler's story of a travel to the moon, so one must give him credit for trying, I suppose.)
And is there "no hint of Jesus" in Lucian? One wouldn't be surprised: Christianity was still a tiny movement in the late 2nd Century. (See Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity.) But actually Lucian did mention him. In all his "exhaustive" (or is that "exhausting?") time in libraries, apparently Paulkovich never came across the following passage from The Death of Peregrine:
"The Christians, you know, worship a man to this day,--the distinguished personage who introduced their novel rites, and was crucified on that account."
So dead wrong on that.
But Paulkovich prefers to harp on old and silly parallels:
"Another bewildering author is Philo of Alexandria. He spent his first-century life in the Levant and even traversed Jesus-land. Philo chronicled contemporaries of Jesus—Bassus, Pilate, Tiberius, Sejanus, Caligula—yet knew nothing of the storied prophet and rabble-rouser enveloped in glory and astral marvels."
No one who has dipped into Philo's long commentaries on the Old Testament will expect him to mention Jesus. He barely writes of the contemporary city of Jerusalem! His writings are almost entirely theological and philosophical, though his work also took him occasionally into politics, the context in which he mentions Pilate, the ruler of the country, in a letter.
So if an American Muslim writer mentions Donald Trump, it follows that if he doesn't also mention Mark Driscoll, the latter did not exist? Such silliness.
"Historian Flavius Josephus published his Jewish Wars circa 95 CE. He had lived in Japhia, one mile from Nazareth—yet Josephus seems unaware of both Nazareth and Jesus. (I devoted a chapter to the interpolations in Josephus’s works that make him appear to write of Jesus when he did not.)"
I shall pass on reading that chapter. The consensus among historians is that Josephus did, in fact, write about Jesus, not once but probably twice. But engineers who tangle their feet in the weeds at every step should be believed before historians about history!
"The Bible venerates the artist formerly known as Saul of Tarsus, but he was a man essentially oblivious to his savior. Paul was unaware of the virgin mother and ignorant of Jesus’s nativity, parentage, life events, ministry, miracles, apostles, betrayal, trial, and harrowing passion. Paul didn’t know where or when Jesus lived and considered the crucifixion metaphorical (Gal. 2:19–20). Unlike what is claimed in the Gospels, Paul never indicated that Jesus had come to Earth. And the “five hundred witnesses” claim (1 Cor. 15) is a forgery."
No, that passage is not a forgery, though it needs to be, for the Carrier-Paulkovich thesis.
And no, from the fact that in his writings to the young church, Paul emphasized moral and theological themes, it is completely invalid to deduce that he "was unaware" of the details of Jesus' life. He wrote and spoke often of Jesus' death and resurrection, so that latter part is just false. But ancient writers, and even some modern writers, liked to focus on specific topics. Writing a book does not imply one knows or cares about nothing outside of that book. Luke barely mentions the historical Jesus in Acts, but fills his gospel with Jesus' life. I don't think one could find mention of Alexander the Great in Arrian's account of his Stoic teacher Epictetus, or of Epictetus in his biography of Alexander. Paul's close friend Luke wrote an excellent biography of Jesus, and Paul visited Jesus' disciples. He no doubt knew the facts well. And he does mention the death and resurrection of Jesus numerous times -- also Jesus' brothers, another piece of evidence which Carrier feels the need to try to debunk.
"Qumran, hidey-hole for the Dead Sea Scrolls, lies twelve miles from Bethlehem. The scroll writers, coeval and abutting the holiest of hamlets one jaunty jog eastward, never heard of Jesus. Christianity still had that new-cult smell in the second century, but Christian presbyter Marcion of Pontus in 144 CE denied any virgin birth or childhood for Christ. Jesus’s infant circumcision (Luke 2:21) was thus a lie, as well as the crucifixion! Marcion claimed that Luke was corrupted; Christ self-spawned in omnipresence, esprit sans corps."
What do you know! Orthodox Christianity had critics, 110 years after the resurrection! This is like saying, "Some people criticized communism in the 20th Century, so Karl Marx must be an imaginary figure."
As for Qumran, here's a list of Dead Sea Scrolls. Where in this list would one expect biographies of contemporary Jewish preachers?
List of the Dead Sea Scrolls - Wikipedia
"I read the works of second-century Christian father Athenagoras and never encountered the word Jesus—Athenagoras was unacquainted with the name of his savior! This floored me. Had I missed something? No; Athenagoras was another pious early Christian who was unaware of Jesus."
Here Paulkovich moves from mere stupidity, to out-and-out lying.
It is true that in Athenagoras' open letter to the emperor and others, he does not use the name "Jesus." It is true that he is mainly arguing for theism and the goodness of Christian teaching, not offering a detailed account of Jesus' life. But it is also true that he quotes Jesus' words as given in the synoptic gospels, several times. And he refers, in terms clearly borrowing from John, to the Son of God:
"We acknowledge also a Son of God. Nor let anyone think it ridiculous that God should have a Son. For though the poets, in their fictions, represent the gods as no better than men, our mode of thinking is not the same as theirs, concerning either God the Father or the Son. But the Son of God is the Logos of the Father in idea and in operation; for after the pattern of Him and by Him were all things made, the Father and the Son being one. And, the Son being in the Father and the Father in the Son, in oneness and power of spirit, the understanding and reason (νοῦς καὶ λόγος) of the Father is the Son of God."
And, from the Synoptics, we get several quotes like this:
"But we are so far from practising promiscuous intercourse, that it is not lawful among us to indulge even a lustful look. For,
says He, he that looks on a woman to lust after her, has committed adultery already in his heart.
But Athenagoras uses the word "he" instead of "Jesus," so it doesn't count, and the man had never heard of Jesus!
Even if Paulkovich can make himself believe that, it is gross dishonesty not to mention the fact that his source is caught quoting words ascribed to Jesus in the gospels directly. One should never trust a writer who plays such games: he is a scoundrel.
"The original Mark ended at 16:8, with later forgers adding the fanciful resurrection tale. John 21 also describes post-death Jesus tales, another forgery. Millions should have heard of the crucifixion with its astral enchantments: zombie armies and meteorological marvels (Matt. 27) recorded not by any historian but only in the dubitable scriptures scribbled decades later by superstitious folks. The Jesus saga is further deflated by Nazareth, a town without piety and in fact having no settlement until after the war of 70 CE—suspiciously, just around the time the Gospels were concocted."
Even an engineer with an amateur knack for history should be able to do better than this.
"Zombie armies?" There is no mention of such armies in Matthew 27, in fact.
"Decades later?" But Jesus died young, and his disciples would have been younger. Many would have been alive in the 70s.
While it would be incautious to write so dogmatically in response as this amateur does about Nazareth, we can at least say that his opinion about when the city was founded is disputed by better-informed writers. His suspicions count for nothing.
"When I consider those 126 writers, all of whom should have heard of Jesus but did not—and Paul and Marcion and Athenagoras and Matthew with a tetralogy of opposing Christs, the silence from Qumran and Nazareth and Bethlehem, conflicting Bible stories, and so many other mysteries and omissions—I must conclude that Christ is a mythical character. Jesus of Nazareth was nothing more than an urban (or desert) legend, likely an agglomeration of several evangelic and deluded rabbis who might have existed."
An absurd argument, with nonsensical premises and invalid arguments to connect those premises to a ridiculous conclusion. (Which furthermore, simply ignores the contrary evidence, which I describe in Jesus is No Myth.)
"I also include in my book similarities of Jesus to earlier God-sons such as Sandan and Mithra and Horus and Attis, too striking to disregard. The Oxford Classical Dictionary and Catholic Encyclopedia, as well as many others, corroborate."
As if we didn't have enough to make us laugh, already. These arguments have already gone far beyond refuting, to the land of satire.
Sorry, I gave in and had breakfast before finishing this, finding P's argument thin gruel, indeed.
"Thus, today I side with Remsburg—and with Frank Zindler, John M. Allegro, Godfrey Higgins, Robert M. Price, Salomon Reinach, Samuel Lublinski, Charles-François Dupuis, Allard Pierson, Rudolf Steck, Arthur Drews, Prosper Alfaric, Georges Ory, Tom Harpur, Michael Martin, John Mackinnon Robertson, Alvar Ellegård, David Fitzgerald, Richard Carrier, René Salm, Timothy Freke, Peter Gandy, Barbara Walker, Michael Martin, D.M. Murdock, Thomas Brodie, Earl Doherty, Thomas L. Thompson, Bruno Bauer, and others—heretics and iconoclasts and freethinking dunces all, it would seem."
I'm tempted to add another "LOL."
Dunces? I wouldn't call Price, Carrier, Bauer, or Martin that. But flakes? Crack-pots? Yes, absolutely. Martin is a philosopher, and can be given some leeway, since history wasn't his gig. But true, Freke and Gandy, Doherty, Fitzgerald, Murdock, are not the sharpest blades on the shelf. Perhaps even some of them are better historians than this chap, though.
"If all the evidence and nonevidence including 126 (127?) silent writers cannot convince, I’ll wager that we will uncover much more. Yet this is but a tiny tip of the mythical-Jesus iceberg: nothing adds up for the fable of the Christ."
That's a metaphor to get one's head around. "The mythical Jesus iceberg" on which "nothing adds up?" He gave a line or two of decent alliteration earlier: one hoped he might end on a rhetorical high note, considering how he has bungled history.
Before we get to his list, let me reprise, or at least prise, some salient facts:
1. Paulkovich has claimed or implied that four people did not mention Jesus, who plainly and clearly did, one of whom repeatedly quoted Jesus' words from the gospels.
2. His "all stars" of those who "should" have mentioned Jesus can hardly be bested for lameness, as witnesses against Jesus: Jesus himself, the extended Saturday Night Live gag Life of Apollonius of Tyana, Philo the theologian, and St. Paul.
3. He has, thus far, breathed not a word of the extensive evidence for the historicity of the gospels that I describe in Jesus is No Myth, and other scholars like Craig Blomberg, NT Wright, and Ben Witherington have delved into in such depth.
4. He clearly has no concept of how extraordinarily rare it is to find as much and as rich textual evidence for anyone in the 1st Century, as we have for Jesus of Nazareth -- let alone for an itinerate preacher in a remote Roman province. I challenge anyone to find anything remotely resembling the gospels, never mind other early works which speak of Jesus. The closest analogy that I have found, as mentioned above, is the Analects of Confucius. But that is only one book, and it is far poorer in the kind of historical evidences found and described in the gospels.
5. Paulkovich's comments breath of Amateur Hour at the Karaoke Bar. We do not, then, need to go through his long, vain list in detail. Paulkovich has given his best arguments, and they are pathetic. These other cases are, one can fairly assume, are even weaker and, hopefully, half as amusing as Apollonius of Tyana, though that is a tall order.
Several of these people actually do mention Jesus, against all odds. Look up some of the others. Arguing that Jesus didn't live because the writings we have from these people don't all mention him, would be like claiming that Mark Driscoll is a fictional character, because he's not cited by name in your World Lit textbook or the Farmer's Almanac. The non sequitur is strong with this one.
Paulkovich has fired his best missiles, and they circled round and hit him in the rear. And he hasn't even glanced at what's incoming from the other sideat least not in this article. If he takes a shot at my Jesus is No Myth: Fingerprints of God on the Gospels, I hope he does better than than Carrier did.
Poor Secular Humanist. I'm half-tempted to contribute an article or two myself, to help them make their anti-Christian case, so refuting them will be more fun.
The Silent Historians
- Aelius Theon
- Albinus
- Alcinous
- Ammonius of Athens
- Alexander of Aegae
- Antipater of Thessalonica
- Antonius Polemo
- Apollonius Dyscolus
- Apollonius of Tyana
- Appian
- Archigenes
- Aretaeus
- Arrian
- Asclepiades of Prusa
- Asconius
- Aspasius
- Atilicinus
- Attalus
- Bassus of Corinth
- C. Cassius Longinus
- Calvisius Taurus of Berytus
- Cassius Dio
- Chaeremon of Alexandria
- Claudius Agathemerus
- Claudius Ptolemaeus
- Cleopatra the physician
- Cluvius Rufus
- Cn. Cornelius Lentulus Gaetulicus
- Cornelius Celsus
- Columella
- Cornutus
- D. Haterius Agrippa
- D. Valerius Asiaticus
- Damis
- Demetrius
- Demonax
- Demosthenes Philalethes
- Dion of Prusa
- Domitius Afer
- Epictetus
- Er
otianus - Euphrates of Tyre
- Fabius Rusticus
- Favorinus Flaccus
- Florus
- Fronto
- Gellius
- Gordius of Tyana
- Gnaeus Domitius
- Halicarnassensis Dionysius II
- Heron of Alexandria
- Josephus
- Justus of Tiberias
- Juvenal
- Lesbonax of Mytilene
- Lucanus
- Lucian
- Lysimachus
- M. Antonius Pallas
- M. Vinicius
- Macro
- Mam. Aemilius Scaurus
- Marcellus Sidetes
- Martial
- Maximus Tyrius
- Moderatus of Gades
- Musonius
- Nicarchus
- Nicomachus Gerasenus
- Onasandros
- P. Clodius Thrasea
- Paetus Palaemon
- Pamphila
- Pausanias
- Pedacus Dioscorides
- Persius/Perseus
- Petronius
- Phaedrus
- Philippus of Thessalonica
- Philo of Alexandria
- Phlegon of Tralles
- Pliny the Elder
- Pliny the Younger
- Plotinus
- Plutarch
- Pompeius Saturninus
- Pomponius Mela
- Pomponius Secundus
- Potamon of Mytilene
- Ptolemy of Mauretania
- Q. Curtius Rufus
- Quintilian
- Rubellius Plautus
- Rufus the Ephesian
- Saleius Bassus
- Scopelian the Sophist
- Scribonius
- Seneca the Elder
- Seneca the Younger
- Sex. Afranius Burrus
- Sex. Julius Frontinus
- Servilius Damocrates
- Silius Italicus
- Soranus
- Soterides of Epidaurus
- Sotion
- Statius the Elder
- Statius the Younger
- Suetonius
- Sulpicia
- T. Aristo
- T. Statilius Crito
- Tacitus
- Thallus
- Theon of Smyrna
- Thrasyllus of Mendes
- Ti. Claudius Pasion
- Ti. Julius Alexander
- Tiberius
- Valerius Flaccus
- Valerius Maximus
- Vardanes I
- Velleius Paterculus
- Verginius Flavus
- Vindex
