Jesus Mythicism is Creationism for Atheists
Picking the low-hanging fruit
Your adolescent “skepticism” dismays the Lord Jesus.
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“Any view that has to be defended with outright lies is almost certainly false.” — Richard Carrier, mythicist extraordinaire
For the blissfully unaware, mythicism is the view that Jesus of Nazareth did not exist as a historical figure. Despite its complete and total lack of scholarly support,1 it continues to shamble about in the darker, danker cervices of the internet, with most of its adherents concentrated in the so-called “counter-apologetics” community.
In this post, I want to note a number of interesting similarities between mythicism and other pseudo-scholarly hypotheses, such as creationism and climate change denial. In particular, I will argue that mythicism exhibits the following three features: (1) a reliance on faulty factual claims; (2) vitriolic attacks on mainstream scholarship; and (3) a dishonest inflation of credentials. Let’s look at the evidence.
Exhibit A: Faulty Factual Claims
The cornerstone of any pseudo-scholarly movement is a heaping pile of falsehoods. These will typically be repeated loudly and often, with little-to-no attention paid to the counter-arguments of actual scholars.
Examples abound. For instance, so-called “intelligent design” theorists will often claim that various biological mechanisms are “irreducibly complex,” and that they could not have evolved via natural selection. They repeat these claims in spite of the many refutations on offer in the scholarly literature. In a similar way, climate change deniers will often claim that the models used to track temperature change are unreliable, which is flatly false.
Lo and behold, we see exactly the same thing when it comes to Jesus mythicism. For instance, mythicists will commonly claim that Philo of Alexandria attests to a pre-Christian celestial figure named Jesus, who was then taken as the inspiration for Jesus of Nazareth.2 But this is complete nonsense, based on elementary misreadings of the relevant Greek texts.3 There is not a single Philo scholar who accepts this claim.
Similarly, mythicists frequently insist that Paul depicts Jesus as a purely heavenly being, rather than as a historical figure. But this is obviously false: Paul says that Jesus was a descendent of David (Romans 1:3), born a Jew (Romans 9:4-5) to a Jewish mother (Galatians 4:4), and that he had human brothers (1 Cor. 9:5), one of whom was named James (Galatians 1:19).4 He also tells us that Jesus was crucified and buried (1 Cor. 15:3-5) by earthly authorities (1 Cor. 2:8), some of whom were Jewish (1 Thess. 2:14-16). In order to get around these passages, mythicists are forced to resort to inane misreadings, baseless claims of interpolation, and other highly dubious workarounds,5 none of which has gained an iota of acceptance among mainstream scholars.6
One final example. Many mythicists will insist that Jesus’ hometown of Nazareth never really existed, and hence that Jesus himself cannot have existed either. The problem with this argument (aside from its patent logical invalidity) is that we know Nazareth existed, because we’ve dug it up. This is not a disputed topic amongst archeologists, and attempts to show otherwise “exhibit a misunderstanding of even the basics of the archaeological process, from stratigraphy, through artefact dating, to conventional publication procedures and the critical use of analogy” (Dark 2020, 6).7
At this point, mythicism is a smoldering heap of ash. Its core claims are bunk, founded on dubious arguments that no competent scholar would (or does) accept. So how do mythicists respond? Well…
Exhibit B: “Everybody who says I’m wrong is a liar/shill/fraud.”
It is typical of pseudo-scholars to respond to criticism by alleging that all who oppose their (ahem) novel views are part of some grand conspiracy, hell-bent on suppressing the truth. The motives for these supposed conspiracy are typically rather murky, though they often involve some vague hand-waving about money and power.
An obvious example of this involves the flat-earth “community,” which commonly claims that its opponents are part of a globalist (get it?) scheme (typically involving NASA) to prevent the common people from realizing that Earth is actually shaped like a trapezoid (or something like that). The globalists are supposedly pursuing this agenda because somethingsomethingkneelbeforezod, and they must be stopped so that we can somethingsomethingwakeupsheeple.
While mythicists are typically a bit less apocalyptic in their conspiratorial theorizing, they nevertheless exhibit a strikingly similar tendency to claim that actual experts on the relevant topics are entirely untrustworthy. For example, Richard Carrier has claimed that a proper assessment of mythicism must involve “excluding from consideration nearly all historians of Jesus.” He also advises his readers to “Never trust anyone in this field. Never trust the consensus in this field” (unless of course one has “double-checked its validity by some dependable means,” such as by reading Richard Carrier’s blog posts).
This is far from exhaustive; there are literally dozens of examples of Carrier claiming that his opponents are dishonest shills. As Tim O’Neill puts it:
Jesus Mythicism apologist Dr Richard Carrier (PhD) has a bizarre obsession with proving his many critics are “liars”. Do a word search on his blog for “liar”, lies”, “lying” etc. and scores of his blog posts come up in the results – I stopped counting when I got to over 50 of them in which he accuses critics and opponents of being “liars” or “lying”. […] It is worth pausing to consider that for a moment, because the arrogance of this is quite staggering. It is not merely that he disagrees with our positions. Nor are we simply wrong. Or even just incompetent. Or even stupid. No, he says we are actively lying when we disagree with him – as though the only way to assail his mighty ideas is by telling untruths, since the wonder of his scholarship is so patently manifest that it is only by lying that we can disagree with it.
Just like with the flat-earthers, we are never given any remotely-persuasive motive for this supposedly-rampant mendacity; it’s just to be taken as obvious that any scholarship which might happen to support some traditional Christian claim is to be treated as suspect. It’s like the online atheist equivalent of your weird uncle whose credence in any given proposition goes down as soon as he learns that the government recently confirmed it.
Note that this is just one mythicist; there are many more where he came from, many of whom exhibit the same tendency to accuse any and all “historicists” (their term for non-mythicists, otherwise known as “employed historians”) of being in on some grand plot to uphold the Christian religion’s (nonexistent) hold on contemporary culture. This despite the fact that the most prominent refutations of modern mythicism (i.e. those of Bart Ehrman and Maurice Casey) have been authored by agnostics. Go figure.
Exhibit C: Lies, Damned Lies, and Credentials
A final point involves the habit of pseudo-scholars to exaggerate their own credibility and credentials. A well-known example is Patrick Moore, a climate-change denier who is most famous for claiming that weed-killer is safe to drink (and then refusing an offer to taste some for himself). Once upon a time, Moore was president of Greenpeace Canada and director of Greenpeace International, a fact which he has relentlessly exploited in order to lend credibility to his nonsense. This despite the fact that his role as a former climate activist does not actually give him any particular expertise on any of the relevant issues.
In a similar way, mythicists have tended to venture in where their credentials do not warrant. One example is G.A. Wells, a professor of German at Birkbeck, University of London, who seemed to be under the impression that his expertise in die deutsche Sprache gave him standing to speak on ancient Palestinian history.
Even those who do have semi-relevant credentials are often unable to resist the temptation to exaggeration. The most clear example is (drum roll please) Richard Carrier, who not only takes every possible opportunity to remind people that he does, in fact, have a doctorate,8 but also engages in overt sliminess concerning his quasi-peer-reviewed book On the Historicity of Jesus (e.g. repeatedly falsely claiming that it was published by a university press, which it wasn’t), for which he himself appears to have personally chosen the reviewers.9
Conclusion
We’ve seen that mythicists exhibit three of the primary traits associated with cranks of all kinds: consistent wrongness, enormous vitriol, and habitual dishonesty. I would recommend taking this into account before giving any credence to mythicist claims.
Bart Ehrman notes that “there is not a single mythicist who teaches New Testament or Early Christianity or even Classics at any accredited institution of higher learning in the Western world. And it is no wonder why. These views are so extreme and so unconvincing to 99.99 percent of the real experts that anyone holding them is as likely to get a teaching job in an established department of religion as a six-day creationist is likely to land on in a bona fide department of biology.” For further discussion, see Ehrman (2012), Casey (2014), Gullotta (2017), Gathercole (2018), Litwa (2019), and Hansen (2022).
This claim has been peddled most vociferously by Richard Carrier, a “world-renowned author and speaker” (not to mention paragon of humility) who is widely beloved amongst the sort of people who devote hours of their precious life to watching Christopher Hitchens clip compilations.
In his article on mythicism, Simon Gathercole (2018) offers no fewer than seven counterarguments to Carrier’s claim of a pre-Christian Jesus in Zechariah and Philo. More recently, Christopher Hansen argues that the claim “is not convincing and would require far more substantial evidence to be considered a better alternative to historicist conceptions of early Christianity’s development” (2022, 17).
The Catholic and Orthodox traditions, in order to reconcile these passages with the doctrine of Mary’s perpetual virginity, have generally argued that the “brothers of the Lord” were either more distant relatives of Jesus, or else children of Joseph from a prior marriage (each are possible, though the latter is more plausible grammatically). In any case, the point is the same: Paul directly attests to Jesus having had human relatives, at least one of whom (i.e. James) Paul knew personally.
For a scholarly resource on this matter, see Gathercole (2018). For a more popular-level (though still highly informative) treatment, see Tim O’Neill’s excellent Jesus mythicism series on the History for Atheists blog. For a refutation of the claim that 1 Cor. 2:8 refers to Jesus being crucified by evil spirits, see Allison (2010, 396–398).
The sole possible exception here pertains to 1 Thess. 2:14-16, which is sometimes regarded (not only by fringe mythicists) as an interpolation. However, this is the less probable opinion, and the consensus of scholarship has largely shifted against it; for discussion, see Jensen (2019). In any case, the other cited passages are all entirely undisputed (except by the mythicists themselves).
For a useful (and hilarious) popular-level summary of this particular topic, see Tim O’Neill’s discussion on the History for Atheists blog.
Though the actual relevance of Carrier’s doctorate is questionable, since his area of research was ancient Roman science, not early Christianity. His work on ancient Roman science has been rather tepidly reviewed by scholars.
Jesus mythicists are some of the most annoying people you can find on the internet. I have noticed that they tend to like crank ideas in general. Rational Wiki is filled with them.