NPL Allen’s The Jesus Fallacy is a marvelous book that has the most serious (as well as one of the most seriously negative) assessments of the Josephan evidence I have ever seen in print.
This is no surprise as the book’s content overlaps with material from his previous Josephus Interrupted published through Cambridge. For just seven bucks, the kindle edition of Jesus Fallacy is a steal.
He demonstrates strongly that three passages in Josephus (two on Jesus, one on John the Baptist) are interpolations beyond reasonable doubt. His careful and wide-ranging study and neutrality on the issue has resulted in a case that is deadly convincing. The Josephan sections alone make the book a must-have.
His section on Tacitus is overall good, especially his noting that it isn’t referred to for a few hundred years after it was written (even by Tertullian who knew and quoted Tacitus). However, he recycles the argument from G.A. Wells that Pilate was “never a procurator, he was a prefect,” though there is a reasonable case he was both, and therefore the passage is not mistaken on this point.
Regarding Tacitus, is it (a) the entire passage that is a forgery or (b) just a single line mentioning Pilate, a position some hold? However, Allen doesn’t discuss or even seem interested in which of these possibilities is true, or make any sustained argument for either horn of the dilemma.
He concludes the book with agnosticism about the historical Jesus. It’s a reasonable opinion and one that I am glad to see in the field. However, there are some arguments for mythicism he doesn’t seem to consider. Most notably that Paul’s letters, Hebrews, Revelation and 1 Clement cite only visions and scripture for information about Jesus, and never relate anything that could not be attributed one of the two. It is only later documents from about a century or more after the fact (Luke, John, 2 Peter) that explicitly connect themselves to eyewitnesses. This matters, because without eyewitnesses having ordinary day-in/day-out experiences of Jesus, we have no evidence of any experience other than fleeting visions (as people had of the mythical god Apollo). Lacking crucial evidence of eyewitnesses, there isn’t sufficient evidence of an historical Jesus even in documents that should contain it.
At nearly 950 pages, Allen’s work is not light reading but nonetheless the book is best treated as an encyclopedia of ancient extrabiblical evidence for Jesus, and might be best utilized that way instead of a read from start to finish. Recommended.
