Yesterday a diary called "Scholars Acknowledge No Evidence Jesus Existed", spent the day on the rec list, which was surprising and rather embarrassing for a "reality-based" site. The diary was primarily based on a poorly constructed Raw Story article by someone named Valerie Tarico, who, as best I can tell has no real credentials for writing in this area.
The gist of the argument boils down to whether the material about Jesus in the New Testament and other early Christian sources are best described as "mytholigized history" or "historicized myth." The former loosely describes the the understanding of almost all scholars who study early Christian history and its context, except for fundamentalists who insist the material is straight history. The claim that the New Testament is historicized myth is relatively new and held by a very small number of people. Tarico's "growing number" amounts to 3-4, most of whom are marginally credentialed. These few "mythicists" are analogous to the tiny number of climate-change denying climatologists and anti-evolution cellular biologists. They get a lot of attention and sell a lot of books because they take a .1% position in their fields and make claims a lot of people wish were true.
Jump
Tarico's primary source is the the most serious of the small group (though there is little competition), Richard Carrier, who has published On the Historicity of Jesus. Tarico's first claim is
No first century secular evidence whatsoever exists to support the actuality of Yeshua ben Yosef.
Surprisingly, she cites Bart Ehrman here, who has debunked mythicism in his recent book,
Did Jesus Exist?. Of course Ehrman would say things that seem to support her statement because it is basically true, but it proves nothing. It is argument from silence in its purest form. Aside from the term "secular" being a modern word that is difficult to apply to the first century, the majority of writings from that period are not extant, and writers outside of the early church would have had had very little reason to mention Jesus.
Tarico's second claim is
The earliest New Testament writers seem ignorant of the details of Jesus’ life, which become more crystallized in later texts.
She is primarily talking about the apostle Paul here and she has no idea whether the statement is true, nor does anybody else. In the small number of writings that survive from the 50's and 60's (about six of Paul's letters) he makes very little reference to the human life of Jesus. The jump from that to a claim that he and others were ignorant of the details is beyond ridiculous. Even if we granted the claim, though, it would still prove nothing. I'm sure Paul was ignorant of many events that had happened in the first century. In making this point, Tarico states the odd claim that
Paul seems unaware of any virgin birth
This is where she seems to know her claims are nonsense. What kind of language is "seems unaware?" Why doesn't she say the truth instead, that in a handful of letters he didn't mention it. More significantly, the virgin birth is one of the primary examples of a mythologized element in Jesus' life, but she uses it as an example of a historical detail, so she has mangled her own argument.
Claims 3 and 4 are
Even the New Testament stories don’t claim to be first-hand accounts.
and
The gospels, our only accounts of a historical Jesus, contradict each other.
These are undeniably true, but Tarico does not even bother to explain what they have to do the claim that Jesus never existed at all. The gospels are not first-hand, but some claim or imply access to eye-witnesses. They obviously disagree on details, but that is a a whole different matter than claiming they all made the whole thing up from nothing. I'm glad that two conflicting claims about something I did in the past can't make me disappear from history.
Her last claim is more of the same.
Modern scholars who claim to have uncovered the real historical Jesus depict wildly different persons.
It is another true premise that has nothing to do with her conclusion. Modern historians reconstruct radically different versions of the American Civil War and its causes. Who would conclude from this that it didn't happen?
The diaries own strange claim is that
Ehrman is feeling pressure on this topic like all the scholars
Where does the diarist think this pressure is coming from? Ehrman teaches at a state university, and has already famously moved away from his former Christian faith. Nobody can pressure him to say anything. This argument is not about defending the faith or "apologetics." Those of us who think the New Testament is "mythologized history" are not defending anything. Our position is that much of the material accrued onto the basic life-story of Jesus over the next 60-70 years after he died as the church tried to figure out who he was and what to believe about him. The tools of history cannot evaluate claims about miracles or Jesus being divine, but they can establish with ample certainty that a person who became known as Jesus of Nazareth lived during the first half of the first century, gathered a small following, and was crucified by the Roman government. We have long faced attacks from fundamentalists who insist on the Bible being literal history, based on assumptions that deny history. Jesus mythcism is the same thing from the other side.
Tue Sep 02, 2014 at 5:26 AM PT: I was surprised and gratified to see this made the rec list after I went to bed. I keep seeing claims that there is "no evidence" for the existence of the historical Jesus. I am going to make this statement even though a few will do their level best to misunderstand it. By the end of the first century, there were at least four highly developed written accounts of Jesus' life. That is an enormous amount of evidence. This is not a religious claim. I am a proponent of the Farrer Hypothesis - the gospels were written in the order Mark-Matthew-Luke-John, and each subsequent writer had access to the previous writings and each had additional source-material. They added, subtracted, changed, and corrected. So, my claim is not that each of the gospels independently is a historically accurate account of Jesus' life, nor can they be combined into on, but their mere existence within 4-6 decades of his death is a massive quantity of evidence that he existed.