I wanted to take the time to review some interactions James has had with others online about the Christ myth theory before working our way to his latest. Of course, I’ve had my exchanges with McGrath in the past. This post will mainly center on exchanges he has had with others. Some of the following exchange (which took place four years ago on this video) was abridged, but without alteration of meaning as anyone who cares to check can see.
James: If you mean that there is much evidence that the early Christians fabricated a completely fictional Jesus not based on a historical person, then I am at a loss to know what evidence you have in mind. Care to elaborate?
RealityRevolutions290:
1> There is no actual evidence Jesus existed, there are only ambiguous claims, or just claims that aren’t actually evidence.
2> We know the OT talked about a messiah coming to be a savior to God’s people.
3> We know that the OT talked about how the Jews (God’s people) were going to rule the world.
4> We know that the Romans crushed them effortlessly and their temple.
5> We know that the Jews and the non-Jewish converts of Paul based their beliefs on scripture as a divine source of wisdom, knowledge and prophecy.
6> We know that the Jews (and Paul’s non-Jewish followers) still turned to their scriptures even after the fall of their temple.
7> The Gospel of Mark was written as a symbolic allegory and was written to symbolize that God destroyed the temple and gave up on the Jews because of the Jews sinning. The entire Gospel of Mark is allegorical and symbolic in multiple ways.
-Symbolic names
-Jesus is allegorical to God
-Allegorical things (like the fig tree)
8> Mark is just allegorically paralleling the letters of Paul, in the same order. Paul however is ONLY talking about Jesus based on scripture and nothing else.
9> Paul did believe Jesus was historical, but only historical the way he thought Moses, Noah and Satan were historical. Based on scripture and nothing else.
10> Mark is paralled by the OT and the other gospels copy Mark and each other and parallel additional things in the OT.
11> Jesus is just a figure based on scripture that was prophecized and then said to have existed (based on that scripture) and then people made up things. (Comparable, overlapping arguments are also given on my and Joel Pearson’s article Twelve Counterpoints).
James: Okay, it is clear that you have no idea what my job situation is, what I believe, what consequences I would or would not face for anything I do, how honest I can be, nor (perhaps more importantly) have you read what I have written that addresses points you assert, nor have you read historical scholarship that would make you aware that Jesus is a poor fit to Jewish prophecy about the Messiah and other things relevant to this discussion.
If you are as content as conservative Christians are to remain part of your faith community without critically examining its beliefs, merely engaging in the kinds of online apologetics that manage to keep most diehard believers on board despite their inadequacy, then we’re not going to make progress. I would much rather you start reading mainstream scholarship on this subject than continue this fruitless comment thread in which you repeat tired and unconvincing points that I have addressed countless times before, and presume your own rightness regardless of facts and evidence. (NOTE: This is James’ complete, unabridged response to the 11 points painstakingly laid out by RealityRevolutions290. As McGrath claimed, prior to authoring these comments, that he read Earl Doherty’s Jesus Neither God Nor Man as well as Richard Carrier’s On the Historicity of Jesus, it is inexcusable for him to ask what evidence there is for mythicism).
RealityRevolutions290:
I elaborated, and rather than address those points you just attacked me and claimed you answered them multiple times and so did everyone else and it’s my fault for not knowing why those points are flawed.
Again though, this is my WHOLE POINT is this this is what you do EVERY TIME. It’s always deflection and personal attacks and not actually talking about mythicist arguments without insults and fallacies attached.
As we will see, James does do this every dang time. Here is an exchange from a post from Reddit’s Academic Biblical:
Where do the Christ mythicists believe Christianity began?
James: If there were a fully formed scholarly proposal, such things would be addressed. Mythicism is like all denialisms happy to offer arguments with no proposal of what the plausible alternative might be.
See my articles in Bible and Interpretation for more on this (as well as many years of blog posts).
EstablishmentLow2312 responded:
Instead of a historical Jesus, the earliest Christian movement began as a revelatory cult within Second Temple Judaism, centered on a heavenly figure revealed through visions, scripture, and mystical exegesis not through remembered biography.
This “Christ figure” was believed to have undergone death and resurrection in a celestial realm, possibly modeled on scriptural patterns (Isaiah’s Suffering Servant, the Wisdom traditions, or Enochic literature).
– Groups like the Essenes and Hekhalot mystics already speculated about heavenly mediators.
As the movement spread into Greek-speaking Jewish and Gentile circles, mythic traditions were narrativized converted into biography to make the cosmic drama more accessible:
• Early epistles (e.g. Pauline letters) show no biographical Jesus, only a revealed, celestial Christ.
• Later writings (e.g. the Gospels) “anchor” this figure in recent history, giving him disciples, a hometown, and a timeline.
• This process mirrors other mythic-to-historical developments (e.g. Romulus, Osiris, or Asclepius).
The mythicist position isn’t automatically absurd it just requires, as you noted, a plausible developmental model showing how that mythic-to-historical transformation happened socially and textually.
James:
Indeed, few things are automatically absurd. The pertinent question is only which theory is a better fit to the evidence.
[Note: This ‘response’ is what’s absurd! McGrath began with no more than an assertion that mythicism had “no proposal of what the plausible alternative might be” and when confronted that this was false, attempts to act as if his only point being blown apart is no big deal, and then tries to move the goalpost away to another argument: that mythicism is a bad fit for the data. Recall the prior discussion in which it was argued to McGrath that mythicism was in fact a better fit for the data, he offered no response to the points given. Nor did he even attempt rebuttal of the evidential arguments made in EstablishmentLow2312’s comment.]
Now, James McGrath is at it again. This time he is reviewing Richard’s latest book, The Obsolete Paradigm of a Historical Jesus (see my recent review also).
“Carrier constantly assumes what he needs to prove (such as the purportedly purely mythological character of the Gospels and Acts)”
122 pages of Carrier’s OHJ is devoted to this topic! But just check Michael Turton’s commentary on the Gospel of Mark, see the evidence of Chiastic Structures used in its composition (which Carrier also covers in his book). If you’re a smart bat you realize that chiastic structures and how much content they cover in the gospel means that either all of the content is fabricated or the vast majority of it is. Moreover, Turton’s excursus “What is the Historical Yield of Mark’s Gospel?” is a nifty summary of why the strong majority, if not all of it, must be fiction. Carrier’s blog “All the Fantastical Things in the Gospel of Mark” (covering over 100 improbable or impossible things in the gospel) is another window for viewing just how much these documents are loaded with fiction. Taken together, all these things completely crush any attempt to view the gospels as histories with a bit of legendary trim. The baptism of Jesus Christ, once said to be one of the few facts all scholars agreed was historical in the gospels, has collapsed under scrutiny, as Chris Hansen, Rivka Nir, and others have documented. Mythicists and secular historicists only reliably disagree on the historicity of a single event in the gospels: the crucifixion.
Obsolete Paradigm (p.44-49) contains an extended defense (and citation of numerous contemporary scholars) of the view that Paul received his knowledge of the Eucharist (1 Cor. 11) from a vision or revelatory experience. Realizing this, it means Mark transformed Paul’s vision into a pseudohistorical terrestrial narrative. This is a microcosm of the Christ myth theory: that Mark transformed a deity experienced only in visions into a deity interacting with others in a pseudohistorical terrestrial narrative. Does Mcgrath, based on his review, believe all this is ‘germane’ to the book’s ’central emphasis’?
McGrath defends the guild’s absence of a proper response by linking to the Gullotta review (which McGrath himself had a hand in, feeding arguments to Gullotta behind the scenes for a ‘critical’ review that failed spectacularly), and McGrath’s own crappy Bible and Interpretation pieces about Carrier. But the things you see there don’t work out any better for him than the online exchanges quoted above.
McGrath seems not to realize that both his and other biblical scholar’s spectacular and repeated failures to answer the case for mythicism now function as a way for us to know that mythicism is true: because if there was a great refutation of mythicism we can be sure these people would have it, and would tell us what it is. If there is not a great refutation of mythicism, the fact that historical Jesus apologists always and only flounder like McGrath does is exactly what we’d expect.
