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.
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