Reply to Bill Cooke on Christ Myth Theories

This was submitted as an article to Free Inquiry in response to Cooke's Aug/Sep 2024 Free Inquiry article. It was not chosen for publication. Instead Ron Lindsay, the Editor of Free Inquiry, asked my to write a general article on mythicism. 

by Don Wharton

I was disappointed with the Bill Cooke’s Free Inquiry article on his Five Challenges to Christ Myth Theorists. He seems to not understand what the mythicist theory means to those who advance it. There were several letters to the Editor in the Dec./Jan. Free Inquiry suggesting reasons to be skeptical of Cooke’s claims. While each of them confronted one or more of his claims, I semi-agree with Cooke in that none of those three were able to mount overwhelming evidence to debunk all of his claims. FI readers deserve that evidence in depth.

Cooke-Claim Number One

Why should we ignore the majority consensus of Jesus scholarship around the world and pay attention to a few mythicists operating, for the most part, outside the academy?

The “majority consensus” is not supported by peer reviewed research while the mythicist perspective has been confirmed in peer reviewed publications.^{1 2} Cooke claims there was a Yeshua ben Yosef killed by the Romans. I presume he knows that “ben” just means son of and Yeshua is both Joshua and Jesus depending on how it is translated. Yosef is a different English spelling of Joseph. Joseph did not exist as a father figure in Biblical literature until Mathew and Luke. This is after the dates for all valid epistles of Paul and the New Testament book of Mark. There are no Roman documents reflecting this name in the first century. This name and its imagined use in the early first century is just a created figment in the imaginations of Cooke and others.

Cooke-Claim Number Two

Belief in the mythical Jesus is restricted to a minority of American humanists and is not shared by most humanists anywhere else in the world.

The Episcopal Church could not be slandered as an anti-Christian organization. A poll³ they conducted showed that only 38% of those who are not religious believe in a historical Jesus. This means that 62% either explicitly reject a historical Jesus or report no such knowledge. Among those who are religious but not Christian 57% either reject Jesus as historical or report no such knowledge. Astonishingly only 84% of non-evangelical Christians now believe in a historical Jesus in this poll. Three percent of them now actively reject a historical Jesus. Twelve percent of non-evangelicals do not know and do not care. Their support of Christianity does not require a historical Jesus.

A trivial Google query would show a 31 October 2015 BBC report⁴ declaring, “Forty percent of people in England do not believe Jesus was a real person, a Church of England survey suggests.”

Cooke-Claim Number Three

The myth theory not only indulges in but relies on serious fallacies and flaws in logic.

Cooke claims that the majority of humanists who doubt the historical Jesus are being absolutist. He is just flat wrong. While 33% of those with no religion in the Episcopal poll cited above say that they do not believe in a historical Jesus almost none would preclude the possibility. In my experience in the Washington DC region there are no longer any humanists who believe in the historical Jesus at all. There may be some out there but I do not know them. Virtually all of them would also concede that there may be an historical Jesus. We just have no knowledge of him and no reason for belief. In this section of Cooke’s article he says, “It is a valid exercise to try and unravel the various layers in search of some reliable historical kernel of fact. But it is quite unjustified to suppose that absence of evidence is evidence of absence.” We do not do that. We just accept the absence of evidence as shared by Cooke to be adequate for our lack of belief. Cooke acknowledges that there is no evidence for a historical Jesus when he says that the many stories “smothered the original story.” Why then is the evidence advanced by Cooke not adequate for Cooke to find his own unbelief?

I do strenuously disagree with his claim that, “the simpler explanation is that stories about a man actually relate to a man.” Then do stories about a wizard named Harry Potter relate to an actual wizard named Harry Potter? The magic of Jesus stories became the popular wizard stories of their time. What is his metric for “simple” and how is just making things up not more simple?

Cooke-Claim Number Four

The myth theory adds nothing useful by way of response to what many theologians are actually saying now.

The details add enormously to our understandings. Classical theologians passionately avoid the wider nature of myth telling, evidence of fraudulent redactions, translation incompetence, and motivated reasoning to support their case.

Christianity in the Roman world was founded by St. Paul who was channeling messages from a celestial source decades after the hypothetical period of an earthly life for Jesus. See Galatians 1:12, “For I neither received it of man, neither was I taught [it,] but by the revelation of Jesus Christ.” Given this claim, these “revelations” were creative imagination or hallucinations by any modern standards. Paul cited a Jerusalem church but some Jerusalem leader might have been channeling a celestial spirit in a way that inspired Paul. Paul wanted the approval of Jerusalem and that would have been unlikely if they did not like his messages from outer space. We have no record of anything taught in Jerusalem prior to Paul’s epistles.

It was not until much after the epistles that dozens of gospels about a life of Jesus emerged to satisfy the demand for such stories. Wikipedia and many other sources can convey that this was a general genre of its time. The magnitude of the demand for this literature can be seen as adequate to explain their creation. Four of the gospels were chosen for the Bible but we cannot be certain that they were actually the first ones. Some think the Gospel of Thomas might have been first. The genre of dying and rising gods were endemic in the region before the Jesus stories emerged.⁵ A myth theory fully populated with surrounding myths show how the Jesus myths were just part of the flow of such myths through that time and region.

There is the obvious break between a possible Jesus in Jerusalem speaking Aramaic and the author of Mark who decades later was outside Jerusalem and wrote in a very literate Greek for a probable Roman, Syrian or Egyptian audience. Researchers suggesting a bridge Q document or other conveyance of information to the author of Mark are just assuming something that is not in evidence. A possible four or five fold oral chain of transmission is likewise a very suspect channel of conveyance. These are but a tiny fraction of the issues that should be examine to view this very complex mythic framework which “smothered” any possible “original story.”

See Richard Carrier’s essay Josephus on Jesus⁵ for powerful evidence that the most cited extra-Biblical evidence was inserted by Christians charged with maintaining (read copying) the Josephus document. He cites numerous peer reviewed papers supporting his position.

Cooke-Claim Number Five

By mirroring the literalism of the evangelicals, mythicist arguments are implicated, however unintentionally, in the same casual anti-Semitism.

The notion that we mirror some “literalism” is pure nonsense. We do not do that. We just lack belief in historicism when there is no reliable evidence. I would also challenge the Cooke claim in this section that, “The consequences of discovering the Jewishness of Jesus are far more fatal to Christian theology than whether he existed or not.” I think nearly all Christians presume Jesus comes from the Jewish tradition and was the fulfillment of Jewish prophecy. That is why the Old Testament is included in the Bible and why many passages from it are used in Christian sermons and teachings. It can be argued that Christianity would never have succeeded if it did not appropriate the respect of traditional Judaism. Cooke’s claim is certainly not true in our Washington, DC region humanist community. My guess is that the proportion of local humanists who are Jewish is likely to be at least five times greater than in the general population. They see no need to delete their Jewish identities when they join us as humanists. They just become secular Jews. Our near universal acceptance of mythicist arguments detracts not at all from our deep appreciation of what they bring to us. Obviously, we care not at all about the tangential “supersessionism” cited by Cooke. I think that bigots will be less educated and in general not have the slightest clue what this word even means. Seriously, why would any others care and by what reasoning would people become confuse by it to become bigots? Besides, if a major reason for antisemitism is that “the Jews killed Christ” then if Christ was not an historical person that reason is removed. This suggests that mythicism would reduce antisemitism. Deleting crazy notions deletes the crazy bigotries based on them.

Conclusion - Minimal historicism is equivalent to minimal mythicism. We are presuming that the mere logical possibility of a historical Jesus is adequate for some to be historicists. That same lack of strong proof and a complete inability to find anything reliable under the massive layers of obvious myth is also completely adequate for modern mythicism. It is just unscientific to reject the logical possibility of a historical Jesus. I did find some evidence that the crazy “excluded middle” advanced by Cooke was used by some in the last century. For proof that modern mythicists do not do that I refer everyone to Richard Carrier’s List of Historians Who Take Mythicism Seriously.⁶ He includes notes for each of the 44 well credentialed academics who support taking seriously the evidence that Jesus might be only a mythic invention. That is all mythicism means in the here and now. It remains true for some people on his list who still prefer historicism. Let us examine the evidence and create more mythicists.

1 Richard Carrier - On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt

‎ Sheffield Phoenix Press Ltd (June 3, 2014)

2 R. Lataster The Fourth Quest: A Critical Analysis of the Recent Literature on Jesus’ (a)Historicity

https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/index.php/LA/article/download/8328/8466

3 The Episcopal Church - Jesus in America.   [Note: This reference is no longer on the site]

https://www.episcopalchurch.org/jesus-in-america/

4 BBC - Jesus 'not a real person' many believe.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-34686993

5 Richard Carrier, Dying-and-Rising Gods: It’s Pagan Guys. Get Over It.

Includes gods Osiris, Dionysus, Zylmoxis, Inanna, Adonis, Romulus, Asclepius, Baal, and Hercules.

https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/13890

6 Richard Carrier - List of Historians Who Take Mythicism Seriously.

https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/21420

Don Wharton is on the Board of Directors of the Washington Area Secular Humanists and a prior Editor of WASHline, the newsletter for WASH.

Scopes at 100

The Rhea County, TN Courthouse where the trial took place.

By Mike Reid

August 26, 2025

This year, 2025, marks the centennial of the famous Scopes Monkey Trial. It took place in the small town of Dayton in Rhea County, Tennessee in July of 1925, and quickly became one of the most famous and controversial trials in U.S. history. Most people know it as a legal battle over the separation of church and state, as an academic conflict between modern science and Christian creationism, or as a monumental courtroom clash between two of the most famous attorneys in the country at the time. There is some truth to all three of these, but the whole truth is much more complex, and much of what most people believe about it today is myth. Over the decades following the trial, the story has become sensationalized, mythologized, and shaped to benefit different agendas.

The story surrounding the case of The State of Tennessee vs. John Thomas Scopes (1925) or the “Scopes Monkey Trial” as the contemporary press would dub it, did not begin with the persecution of a brave and enlightened young biology teacher who was simply trying to educate his students in modern biology as most people now believe. On the contrary, the whole affair was engineered by the then fledgling American Civil Liberties Union and a group of Dayton businessmen. The ACLU wanted a court case that they could use to challenge the recently enacted Butler Act, a Tennessee state statute that prohibited the teaching in Tennessee public schools of any scientific principle which denied the divine creation of humans as taught in the Bible. Any teacher who taught Darwinian evolution would be in violation of the Butler Act. The ACLU could then appeal a conviction up to the federal courts and hopefully get them to declare it and other such emerging laws unconstitutional. They just needed a Tennessee public school teacher to teach evolution, stand trial, and be convicted of violating the statute.

The Dayton businessmen wanted to bring some notoriety to their economically declining town that they hoped would give it a much needed economic shot in the arm. Upon learning of the ACLU’s interest, the businessmen recruited 24-year-old Rhea Central High School teacher John Scopes to voluntarily be prosecuted for violation of the statute. Scopes was not the school’s regular biology teacher. He was primarily their football coach, but he had served as a substitute teacher in a biology class for a few weeks in the past school year. It was not even clear that while teaching biology Scopes had ever actually taught evolution in a way that would violate the Butler Act. In fact, his lessons came straight out of the state approved textbook. To the ACLU attorneys and the businessmen who were manufacturing the case, that did not matter. The ACLU had their legal test case and the businessmen had their publicity stunt.

The case garnered enough press coverage to gain the notice of William Jennings Bryan, a famous orator, lawyer, politician, three-time presidential candidate, devout Christian, and vehement opponent of the Theory of Evolution. Bryan, who saw Darwinian evolution as a threat to Christian morality and the very fabric of American society, traveled to Dayton to aid in the prosecution of Scopes. To him, this was not merely a court case over a little-known state statute. It was part of a much larger struggle of Christianity against an amoral scientific theory that debased humanity and pushed God out of the classroom. It could even lead to (gasp!) atheism!

Upon learning of Bryan’s involvement in the case, Clarence Darrow who was arguably the most prominent defense lawyer in the country at the time and a critic of Bryan, offered to aid in Scopes’ defense. Darrow, an agnostic, saw the case as a battle of enlightened modern science against an outdated and repressive mythology. Against the wishes of the ACLU, Scopes accepted Darrow as one of his defense attorneys. Bryan and Darrow had known each other for years. In fact Darrow had supported Bryan in his first and unsuccessful presidential campaign, but by 1925 their relationship had soured.

With the involvement of Bryan and Darrow, The Scopes Monkey Trial became international news. Baltimore journalist H. L. Mencken, an ally of Darrow and one of the most widely read newspaper columnists of the era, travelled to Dayton to cover it. Once the trial began, clashing egos, legal theatrics and contentious exchanges between Darrow and the presiding judge, John Raulston, caused it to take on a farcical circus-like feel. Someone even brought a chimpanzee to the courthouse. Biting daily commentary by Mencken and continuous coverage by other reporters, including the 26-year old female reporter Nellie Kenyon of the Chattanooga News, fueled public interest. The trial became more of a gladiatorial contest between Bryan and Darrow than a serious legal matter. Think of Godzilla vs King Kong, but in a courtroom. Probably most bizarre of all, in desperation defense attorney Darrow asked to put prosecutor Bryon on the witness stand and examine him as an expert witness on the Bible. Surprisingly, Bryan agreed to it and Raulston allowed it.

Statue of Clarence Darrow on the courthouse lawn.

Statue of William Jennings Bryan on the courthouse lawn.

The ACLU quickly lost control of the defense and John Scopes became increasingly irrelevant to the affair that bore his name. Reporters and members of the public who were there to see a show filled the small Rhea County courtroom beyond its capacity. Judge Raulston, concerned that the floor of the building might not sustain the weight of so many people and also to escape the sweltering summer heat, moved the trial outside to the lawn in front of the building. After much acrimony, legal drama bordering on the absurd, and saturation press coverage, the jury convicted Scopes of a misdemeanor and the judge fined him $100. Scopes knew that he would never have to pay it. Perhaps as a gesture of magnanimity or to show that the whole thing had never really been about him, Bryan offered to pay Scope’s fine for him. 

At first it seemed that each of the protagonists in this drama got what they wanted. The ACLU had their court ruling to appeal. Dayton got an economic boost. Bryan, relishing his victory, believed that he had successfully defended Christianity in God’s country and defeated the heathenistic and morally debasing Theory of Evolution. A fundamentalist Christian college, Bryan College, was founded in Dayton a few years later and named in his honor. It’s still there. Darrow, although losing the case, felt that he had effectively made a fool of Bryan, which might have been his underlying if unspoken aim all along.

However, things did not ultimately turn out for them in the ways they intended. Unfortunately for the ACLU, the Tennessee Supreme Court later dismissed the case on a technicality, so they lost their opportunity to appeal. More unfortunately for Bryan, he died five days later. Unfortunately, for Dayton, the economic boost was less than hoped for and did not last. Darrow moved on to other cases. Scopes left town. The legal case faded away, but the controversy did not.

One hundred years on, the Scopes Trial remains a subject of intense scrutiny and controversy. The Rhea Heritage Preservation Foundation (RHPF), a local historical society, preserves the venue and history of this most famous event in their town’s history. Each July, they hold a commemoration of the trial and dramatize it in a play titled Destiny in Dayton. Local amateur actors perform the play in the courthouse where the trial took place. This is not the highly fictionalized 1955 play Inherit the Wind and its later film adaptations from which unfortunately most people know of the trial. Destiny in Dayton is much more historically accurate and most of the dialog is taken from the actual trial transcripts.

In July 2025, on the centennial of the trial, the RHPF held a commemoratory symposium titled “Evolving Conflict: Scopes at 100” in the Rhea County Courthouse where the trial was held. The building no longer functions as a courthouse. It now contains county and other offices, but thanks to preservation efforts the exterior of the building and the interior courtroom look much as they did at the time of the famous trial. There are now statues of Bryan and Darrow on the lawn in front of the building as well as some historical markers.

I attended the Evolving Conflict symposium in Dayton, which took place on July 18-19th. Upon arriving at the Rhea County Courthouse, I was disturbed to see a large banner sign reading “Read Your Bible” attached to the front of the building. This would be highly inappropriate for a public building. I later learned that it was a facsimile of a sign that hung there in 1925. The RHPF had placed it there to make the building look more as it did at the time. Furthermore, the original sign had been the subject of a heated exchange between Darrow and Bryan during the trial and was historically significant. Once I understood that it was a relevant historical prop and not just a cynical attempt at evangelism, I changed my mind about it.

The courthouse with the infamous "Read Your Bible" banner.

The symposium ran over two days and consisted of talks by scientists, historians, and yes, creationists. The talks focused primarily on the events leading up to the Scopes Trial, the historical context in which it occurred and its legacy. Speakers pointed out that up until the middle of the nineteenth century, few people saw religion and science to be in conflict. For them, natural philosophy as it was then called was just an extension of Christian theology. In fact, the term “science” did not come into common use until around that time. It was not until the publication of Charles Darwin’s famous On the Origin of Species in 1859 that the two realms or “magisteria” as the famous evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould would one day call them, diverged and most conflict between them arose. Furthermore, a revival of Protestant evangelism began in the latter decades of the century, particularly in the United States, and continued into the next.

One speaker, a local attorney who had argued cases in that courtroom during his long career, discussed the legal context of the Butler Act and some little-known details about the trial and its effect on the town. Another speaker discussed the historical and political impact of the trial on American society at large over the decades that followed. A biology professor who is a devout Christian, but fully accepts Darwinian evolution and the antiquity of the Earth, somewhat disparagingly talked about how fundamentalists have negatively responded to evolutionary theory over the following decades. Although I have no interest in reconciling science and religion and consider them to be inherently antithetical to each other, I found his talk quite engaging. A well regarded paleoanthropologist informed the audience about some of the fascinating recent findings in the field of human origins, one of my favorite subjects. 

The only speaker whom I had any real problem with was a creationist “scientist” who in the course of what would otherwise have been an historically interesting account of the development of creationist thought since the mid-nineteenth century, seemed to subtly jab at evolutionary theory. Without attacking evolutionary theory directly, he cited many examples where scientific consensus and our imagining of extinct creatures have repeatedly changed over time. I think this was just a gentle repackaging of that old creationist strategy of casting doubt on the validity of scientific principles by pointing out how scientists supposedly keep changing their minds and therefore must not really know what they are talking about. He seemed to not understand or more likely chose to disregard the iterative, self-correcting, and rigid evidence-based process of the scientific method. Yes, scientists constantly modify and often replace older ideas with new ones, but eventually as they gather more data and complete more analyses, understandings of nature converge on basic truths and stabilize. This can take years or even centuries, but it eventually happens. Our understanding of organic evolution has progressed greatly since Darwin’s time and we continue to learn more, but the fundamental tenets of his brilliant theory still hold today. Nearly every reputable natural scientist now accepts Darwinian evolution as a fundamental basis of modern biology.

During the week, the RHPF staged several performances of Destiny in Dayton. Watching the play performed in the very room where the historic events that it depicts transpired was the highlight of my time in Dayton.

I think that the Evolving Conflict symposium was a great success. Although I have long been fascinated by the Scopes Trial and have studied it, I always find more to learn. As an ardent evolutionist and atheist, I consider Biblical creationism to be harmful pseudoscience. Nevertheless, I gained a feel for how the other side thinks and operates. To paraphrase the ancient Chinese military theorist, General Sun Tzu: Know your enemy.

The courtroom where it all happened. The judge's bench is in the back.

Science and Biblical creationism have clashed in American courtrooms multiple times since the Scopes Trial, most notably in the cases of Epperson v. Arkansas in 1968, Edwards v. Aguillard in 1987, and Kitzmiller v. Dover in 2005. The Epperson case ultimately made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court which ruled that an Arkansas law similar to Tennessee’s Butler Act violated the Establishment Clause in the U.S. Constitution which mandates the separation of church and state. This federal ruling invalidated all such state laws. In the Edwards case, the Supreme Court ruled that a Louisiana law that required creationism to be taught alongside evolution in public schools also violated the Establishment Clause and was therefore unconstitutional. Finally, in the Kitzmiller case, creationists deceptively tried to slip their religious doctrine into Pennsylvania public schools under the guise of “Intelligent Design.” Fortunately, the judge saw through their ruse and in a scathing 139 page finding ruled against them. In all three of those cases, science won.

Although science has usually prevailed over creationism in American courts since the Scopes Trial, creationists have never accepted defeat. Undeterred by prior defeats, unconcerned with evidence, and driven by religious zeal, they continue to attack modern science in schools, museums, and other public forums. Sometimes their attacks are overt, such as with the ridiculous but glitzy Creation Museum and Ark Encounter monstrosity in Kentucky. Other times they are subtle, quiet, or indirect, such as persuading state school boards to insert disclaimers into biology textbooks.

A scientifically literate person today might feel dismayed that more than a century and a half after the publication of On the Origin of Species and a full century after Scopes we are still having arguments over science and religion, but such is the current reality. Creationism is the spawn of religious fundamentalism. And in my opinion, religious fundamentalism is the greatest threat to civilization today. For fundamentalists, advocating Biblical creationism is just one theater of battle in their multi-pronged war against enlightened modernity. In the United States, this takes the form of rising Christian nationalism. Bolstered by well-funded think tanks and political victories at all levels of government, they are attempting to impose upon this country a form of theocratic fascism that threatens not just science and freedom of thought, but reason itself. Not all Biblical creationists are Christian nationalists, but their agendas do overlap. Historians show us that the more we understand the past, the more we understand the present. The Scopes Trial speaks as loudly to us today as it did one hundred years ago.

 

Mike Reid is a secular activist and a former president of WASH

[An abbreviated version of this essay appeared in the September/October issue of WASHline.]