Debunking Jesus?

The law of parsimony and Occam’s razor just kind of tear to shreds all of the very complex convoluted structures that you have to build upon other structures upon other structures in order to make it all work. And it seems an awful lot more convenient to just say, there was a dude, he died. Tradition started circulating about him coming back to life, and then it took off from there. Like, that is a far simpler solution to the problem. Hey, everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and combat the spread of misinformation about the Bible. How are things, Dan?

Oh, I’m doing better than you are, man. I’ve got a cold right now and. You have a cold?

Yes, I have one.

That is one to nothing. I win. It’s like golf. You want a lower score?

Yeah, lower score is better. So I was like, can I just have one this time? And at least I’ve. I’ve got that going for me.

Yeah. So, so sorry about that. Sorry that I’m making you record while you have a cold. I’m a very cruel, heartless taskmaster.

Taskmaster. Yeah, that’s the one. What do we. What do we got on the docket for today?

We got a couple of fun. A couple of fun things. We got a. Who’s that coming up at the end of the show? That’s going to be. We’re going to be talking about one Flavius Josephus already.

We’re going to hit Flavius town.

Yeah, we’re going to go to Flav. Flav. Flavius.

You said, who’s that? And immediately the new girl theme song jumped into my head.

I don’t know the new girl. I’m.

Yeah. Oh, gosh.

This cold has me a little disoriented, but.

Well, that’ll happen. And. But before that, we’re going to talk. I’m going to call it a History’s mysteries.

All right.

And we’re. We’re going. We’re going to dive into a commonly held out thing from. From the people on my side of the table, meaning a lot of atheists share this kind of thing. Around this time of year, it starts to crop up and. And we’re going to discuss the various saviors in the world and how completely and totally similar they all are and the many that.

That predate Jesus and were very obviously the inspiration for the fabrication of the story of Jesus.

Jesus was a big old rip off and we’re gonna prove it or not. So let’s just dive into that. Let’s do it with histories, mysteries. Okay. So a lot. Many people’s first exposure to this. My first exposure to this, I will say to this. This concept is. Came from the, the documentary made by… documentary. The, the self aggrandizement made by Bill Maher called Religulous.

Religulous. Right.

Pronounce?

Okay, yeah, whatever.

I, I don’t, I don’t know the original Greek or Hebrew, so I’m afraid I can’t do anything with that.

But yes, Religulous. Religulous. That was the one that, that where I first encountered these claims and I will admit believed them rather uncritically. Not.

So that’s like first the scene where he’s like, there’s the Jesus like actor or something and he’s confronting him about.

He’s at some sort of Christian themed amusement park and he, he.

I feel, I feel less bad about him confronting an actor. He’s at a Christian themed amusement park.

Yes, it was, it was that indeed. But. But yes, then he, he presents him with all of these, this whole, this long list of, of people of gods who predated Jesus and who had eerily similar biographies or, or stories about them. Yes, but he didn’t get that from nowhere. He didn’t make that up.

No, it was made up by somebody else.

Somebody else did that, right? Yeah, yeah, it was per. It was also perpetuated by a movie I watched in preparation or at least I watched the relevant part of. In preparation for this episode.

And now I’m mad that I said, hey, check this out.

You said, hey, check out Zeitgeist. And I was like, oh, okay, I’ll do that. And now I, now I have done that. That’s minutes of my life I can’t get back. But even, even the guy that made Zeitgeist did not make this up. But we, why don’t we start with the claim. Do you want me to sort of outline sort of what, what I, what I witnessed in Zeitgeist?

Well, let me, let me share where I first encountered this because this is. And then, and then. Yeah, I’ll have you outline the. Because I have not watched the movie and it’s been a year and a half since I watched. Right. That segment of the movie and I was glad to pawn that off on you for, for this go round. But I, I was exposed to, I am exposed to this most frequently like it still happens all the time from maybe little clips from a gentleman named Jordan Maxwell. I, I honestly don’t know his background, but he made a name for himself spreading a lot of conspiracy theories in like the 80s and, and into the 90s, particularly related to religion. And he was fond of confronting people and insisting that there were 16 major pre-Christian religions that all had a messiah with the exact same story as Jesus. And he would say it the exact same way, that they were a messiah that came to earth born in a manger with 12 disciples, died on a cross with a crown of thorns.

And. And the first time I saw that it, he was on some television show being interviewed by some. A woman who was clearly a Bible believer. She’s got a Bible there that she’s flipping through. And he’s like, did you not know this? This is history, ma’am. This is history. And making her feel rather awkward and uncomfortable and she like doesn’t know where to flip to in her Bible.

Right.

I. And, and literally none of that is true. And, and I have, I have had to point out that you cannot find any pre-Christian savior with any two of those features. And people have tried to prove like the, the first time I made a response to this, I posted it on YouTube. It wasn’t even a minute long. It was like a YouTube short. It was like 40 seconds long. And I was just like, there is absolutely no primary text from the ancient world that demonstrates anybody had any two of these features.

I feel like you just did a spoiler, but okay, fine, we’ll get there.

But I had more views on that. That little short than like on any five videos combined on my YouTube channel. It had almost had almost a million views on that thing. And then half as many comments from people telling me I was wrong and to go check out this book or that movie. And it’s like, I’m not asking for a book or a movie. I’m asking for a primary text. Yeah.

A source. Some source material.

So why don’t you go ahead and. And I, I don’t recall exactly what the claim in Zeitgeist is, but.

Well, okay, so it’s not quite as, as obviously stupid as. As your friend Jordan with. With the crown of thorns with all of them having the same thing. But yeah, it’s the same kind of idea, right? This idea that all of these gods prefigured the Jesus narrative. All of them were so. But in different, slightly different ways. So specifically mentioned were Horus. Now they, they launch into this in Zeitgeist talking about how the sun was God.

Right.

The. The pernicious thing about all of these things, about this kind of sort of conspiracy theorizing is that they will often have kernels of truth or have whole truths that they inject into things.

That are real, that then bolster up and support really bad claims that have no support.

So they start with the idea that, like, people worshiped the sun and, and, and what’s. There are little moments that you can. That you can kind of catch them out as, like, oh, they’ve. They’ve just pulled a rhetorical maneuver without explaining themselves or whatever. So they keep talking about the sun and then they’re talking about the sun is God. And then they talk and then they just throw out the phrase God’s Son. And I was like, you, you made a leap and you did not explain where that leap came from.

Anyway, they go to Horus. This is the Egyptian God Horus, claiming the claims are sun God of Egypt. Maybe that’s true. I haven’t looked into Horus at all close.

Horus was the sky God, but there was a conflated version of Horus and Ra, and that was Ra Horakhty. And that was the. A. A conflated sun God.

Ra was a sun God.

Right, right, right.

So Ra Horakhty is Horus’s kind of, you know, team up to be the sun God with Ra.

I feel like you’re supporting the theory now. Zeitgeist.

You’re.

You agree with Zeitgeist? I, I’m. I’m putting it in the books. Okay. They claim Horus, sun god of Egypt. They use the word savior, which I, They. They don’t explain why Horus is the savior of anything, but they make sure to throw that in there.

Right.

They claim that Horus was the. Was the nemesis of Set. Horus was the light and the day. Set was the dark and the night. Horus wins the fight every morning, the. The fight every evening. That’s a very stupid concept, but okay, fine. So the. Here are the claims about Horus.

Born on December 25th of a virgin star in the East. Don’t know what that means. Adored by Three Kings. Teacher at age 12. Baptized and started a ministry at 30. Baptized by Anup 12. Oh, I’ve been autocorrected. I’ve. I’ve apparently written 12 decibels, but I think it means disciples, probably.

And then known as the Lamb of God, the truth, the light. Crucified, resurrected three days after. I’m gonna guess that Some of those slash. All of those don’t apply to Horus. Or like, there’s a way that you can sort of. If you squint and look sideways and like, you’re. You happen to be upside down and looking through a mirror, maybe some of those things kind of apply. I don’t know. Do you know enough about Horus to be able to keep on that stuff?

Yeah, yeah. So for the most part, none of it’s accurate, but there are a couple of places and. And some of it’s just. Just totally made up. There’s absolutely nothing that supports it in any way, shape, or form whatsoever. But some of it has things like you said you could squint at it and maybe get that. Like, for instance, there is an inscription in a. In a tomb from 1500 BCE that shows Horus seated on a throne. And there are 12 anthropomorphic figures before Horus lined up. And each of them has a star. Yeah. 12 disciples. Right. Each of them has a star over their head. And these represent. And each star represents a. An hour of the night. So it’s the 12 hours of the nighttime. And so they’re basically just anthropomorphized celestial bodies that represent the 12 watches of the night or whatever. Not disciples, certainly not apostles.

I don’t know if you’ve seen Zeitgeist recently, but I believe you mean instead of watchers of the night, you mean the 12 zodiacal signs. I’m pretty sure that’s what you mean.

Well, in. In this inscription, there’s no relationship to the zodiac that comes.

How dare you, sir?

It comes from much later. Yeah, well, and this is one of the things that you have to do with these kinds of conspiracy theories is you have to chronologically collapse everything and things that are separated by a thousand years, you gotta just be like, man, same time. Yeah. You know, same time. And.

Or. Or you. Or. Or you just insist that everyone has to think, no, no, no, that part’s a metaphor, but this part’s literal. Oh, no, it’s not literal. That means it’s a metaphor. Oh, it’s not working in your mind. You’re not getting the figurativeness of it.

Yeah. And then there. There is a. In the temple of Amun at Luxor, there is a little triptych, a little series of scenes, and a bunch of text associated with the birth of Amenhotep III. So this. This king. And it’s. In this conspiracy theory, the three scenes are the annunciation, the conception, the birth and adoration of Horus. Of course, it’s not Horus, it’s this human king. And when you actually look at the text, the text is not describing an annunciation. It’s not a virgin birth. In fact, it is a graphically sexual conception. Like, literally, it’s talking about the, the human woman just marveling at the sexual prowess of the deity with whom she’s doing, you know, the gods know what.

And, well, actually, they describe it in graphic detail in the text, but. And then the, the queen is pregnant and showing. And these deities are using ankh symbols to. It’s kind of the, the, the ensoulment. They’re putting the divine soul of the king into the fetus and then the baby is born. So if you just entirely ignore the text that is explaining what these little vignettes are, and if you don’t know Egyptian and don’t care to look it up, of course you’re going to ignore it. And then you can just make up whatever you want about these things. And that’s what is done in a lot of the texts that try to promote this, this idea that all of these things predate Jesus. So, yeah, it’s again, entirely made up. And if you ignore the data, if you ignore what the scholarship all has for many years indicates, then you can just say, hey, if you squint at this enough, the lines blur and you can squish it into a shape that looks kind of like Jesus.

And so, so it’s like for every one thing that’s kind of based loosely on a factoid, there are three or four things that are just thrown in there and entirely made up. But like you said, as long as you include enough things that sound factual or maybe even are to some degree factual, you can also squeeze in some utter falsehoods and people aren’t going to notice, right?

Well, you say that, but let me just tell you about Attis of Phrygia, because if you don’t know anything, because Attis of Phrygia. Born of a virgin on December 25th. Crucified, resurrected after three days. There you go. Krishna, apparently. Yeah, Krishna was born of a virgin. Devaki star in the east. What does that mean? There’s. There’s always stars in the east. Performed miracles, resurrected. Boom. Dionysus, born of a virgin, December 25. Performed miracles, turned water into wine. King of kings, Alpha and Omega, resurrected. Mithra of Persia, born of a virgin, December 25th. 12 disciples, miracles, dead for three days, resurrected. I think it’s funny. And then, and what’s really funny is that like, he goes through all of those.

And then. And then is like. And there were more and just presents a list. And that, you know, of course does not want you to pause on that list.

Or look into it at all.

Bart Simpson is going to be one of them on there.

Well, I did look at. I, I mean, so I wrote down a bunch of them that I did pause. Horus of Egypt. I don’t know who Horus is, but Odin. I was like, okay, now we’re getting into Odin Zoroaster Salivahana of Bermuda, Baal, Indra of Tibet, Bali of Afghanistan. And then I was like interested in this one. So I just googled it and checked it out a little bit. Vithoba of the Telinganese. So I was like, I would like to know more about Vithoba of the Telinganese. And it turns out that literally everything about that is so wrong, it’s absurd.

Like nobody now calls it Vithoba. It’s, it’s actually generally what, what were the names it was there. Vit, Vithoba or Vital or Vitthala and was not Telinganese or Telinganese, which is the other one, that anyway, nothing about it, including just the, the, the identification of this God was correct.

Yeah. So interestingly, we know where all of these claims come from.

Because like we said, this movie did not make them up. And there are a couple of, a couple of texts that were published in the, at the end of the 20th century that popularized these things were responsible for probably the Zeitgeist movie picking them up. One of them was a book called the Jesus Mysteries. Was the original Jesus A Pagan God by Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy and I didn’t say a word. I didn’t say a word.

It’s just, it’s just like a little on the nose Freke family. Like, like if you’re, if your name is Freke, don’t go into the conspiracy business. Go into, go into like good science business. Good, good data business. Just, just go against the grain a little.

Freakonomics. Yeah. And then you had another book called the Christ Conspiracy, the Greatest Story Ever Sold that was published under the name Acharya S, which is the, the nom de plume of Dorothy Murdock who along with Jordan Maxwell and I think, I don’t know about Freke and Gandy, but I know that Dorothy Murdock and, and Jordan Maxwell have since passed away. But the. None of these people have any training or any academic background whatsoever and anything related to what they’re talking about. But they kind of popularize this. But it all comes from a 19th century book by a gentleman named Kersey Graves. And we really don’t know if, if Mr. Graves had any academic background either, but in 1875 he published a book and get ready because you know, pre 20th century book titles could carry on for a while.

The World’s Sixteen Crucified Saviors or Christianity Before Christ. Containing new startling and extraordinary revelations in religious history which disclose the oriental origin of all the doctrines, principles, precepts and miracles of the Christian New Testament and furnishing a key for unlocking many of its sacred mysteries, besides comprising the history of 16 heathen crucified gods. And this is where the, the main 16 gods are. Thulis of Egypt, Krishna of India, Crite of Chaldea, Attis of Phrygia, Tammuz of Syria, Hesus or Eros, Bali of Orissa, Indra of Tibet, Jao of Nepal, Buddha of India, Mithra of Persia, Alcestis of Euripides, Quetzalcoatl of Mexico, Vithoba of the Telinganese, Prometheus of Aeschylus of the Caucasus and Quirinus of Rome.

And then he actually lists dozens of others, which is where some of these.

Other folks particularly interested in Quetzalcoatl because.

Yeah, how did Quetzalcoatl get to the authors of the New Testament in the first century CE and how did it.

Get from like, clearly it all started in, you know, the regions around Egypt, you know, India, whatever, the Middle, you know, the Southeast, Southwest Asia and, and, and Northern Africa and stuff. How the hell did it get to Mexico? That seems, that seems pretty strong.

It seems like we might be squinting at all of this stuff and. Yeah, and you know, this is part of, you see this in the anthropology of the 19th century with folks like Frazer and Tylor and others, where what they’re doing is they’re trying to distill everything down to a single kind of like Ur-society. And, and they want to try to account for all the different societies of the world by suggesting they all share certain features. And so for instance, Tylor or no, Frazer, has the dying and rising gods motif. This idea that the societies of, of the world have these traditions about gods that die and rise in a cycle. And, and so everything gets classified into that. And this is also the time period that things like monotheism are also being used as these buckets. And it’s like, all right, you either go into the monotheism or the polytheism bucket.

Line up everybody. I’m going to decide which one you’re in. And, and it’s, it’s a way to just divide up the, the societies transhistorically, transnationally, to just try to show that we can reduce everything down to single theories. And so, you know, you’ve got this idea that, oh, all of these gods, they’re all the same template. It’s just somebody, somehow, this, this template was just making its way around the world and everybody was just like, oh, we’ll make our God just like this other God.

And the Egyptians dress him up as Horus and. Yeah, so, and so dress them up in different. It’s basically the same guy, but with different clothes on.

Yeah. And what’s, and what’s bizarre is with the idea of, of Jesus being based on one of these templates, there’s a lot in the, in the tradition of Jesus that is pretty idiosyncratic. And so you have to kind of generalize. Like you, you call them all messiahs. It’s like messiah is a Hebrew word that describes a specific anointed one. And it’s not like, oh, well, that person over there was a deity and they helped their people. That’s a messiah. You’re overgeneralizing quite a bit there by trying to use that title. But here’s something that Graves claims in one part of his book where he’s talking about how Jesus is all related to these deities. These have all received divine honors, have nearly all been worshiped as gods or sons of gods, were mostly incarnated as Christs, saviors, messiahs or mediators.

Not a few of them were reputedly born of virgins, some of them filling a character almost identical with that ascribed by the Christian Bible to Jesus Christ. Many of them, like him, are reported to have been crucified. And all of them taken together furnish a prototype and parallel for nearly every important incident and wonder-inciting miracle, doctrine and precept recorded in the New Testament of the Christian’s Savior. And there’s not, there’s absolutely zero documentation to support any of these claims anywhere in the book than that.

And, and therein lies a bit of a problem.

Therein lies the rub. Yes, they cannot find a text or iconography or anything that demonstrates any of these claims. I pointed out with a. With Horus, they’re like, well, maybe it’s this, you know, little series of drawings over there. Nope, the text says it has nothing to do with that. Oh, well, maybe it’s this drawing of Horus with 12 stars and standing in front of. Nope, has nothing to do with, with disciples. I have tried for years to get people to identify primary texts that support any of these claims. And, and the. The reason I do this is because I know there are none.

Right.

Because I have looked. I looked for a long time before I ever responded to any of these claims. No such texts exist.

And by texts, we’re not talking. We’re talking about like. Like something inscribed on a wall or like something like, chiseled into a stele or something like that.

Anything contemporary to the time that would bear any, shed any light on any of this?

Yeah. And this is where, like, when we get into Dionysus and stuff like that, people are like, oh, Dionysus tradition has this, that, and the other. And that’s, and that’s very Christian. It’s like, well, if you look at this, the things that are most similar to Jesus are things that pop up in the Dionysus tradition from after the time of Jesus. And that’s not to say that it influenced the Dionysus tradition. It’s just to say that’s not an inspiration for the Jesus tradition.

Right.

And there.

There’s an argument Jesus could have been an inspiration for some of the Dionysian tradition. That could, that’s possible.

It’s certainly possible.

But it’s also like, you know, if, for example, we take the example that was used in Zeitgeist, that Dionysus also turned water into wine. Don’t know if that was ever part of the actual Dionysus myth, but even if it was, wine was a big part of everybody’s life in both places.

It’s totally possible for the same miracle to have, for storytellers to have come up with the same idea in different parts of the world. That’s not that impossible. Coincidence does not prove anything.

Yeah. And there’s certainly, like, it wouldn’t shock me at all, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the Gospel of John is kind of, you know, riffing a little bit on Dionysus in relation to Jesus as the vine and the relation of Jesus to wine. That wouldn’t surprise me at all. But guess what? John is being written at the end of the first century CE. John is not inventing the Jesus tradition. The tradition is already in circulation. John is just adding some rhetorical flourish, like the turning water into wine. That’s one story from one chapter of one gospel, and that is not the Jesus tradition. But I’ve looked, and the two things I have found regarding Dionysus that come closest to turning water into wine: there’s a tradition about him, he likes the look of some nymph that comes and drinks at this stream every day, and he decides that he’s going to replace the water with wine.

And so it doesn’t say turned water into wine. It says he replaced the water of the stream with wine. So the nymph became drunk, so he was able to have his way with her. The other tradition is the notion that there was a tradition associated with a temple dedicated to Dionysus, where they would put empty vases in the temple, and then when they came back the next morning on the day of a certain festival, the vases would be filled with wine. So that’s boom. That’s the closest that proves it.

I don’t know what you’re talking about. Suddenly we’ve proven that Dionysus and Jesus are absolutely ripping each other off.

Both born on December 25th. And that’s the one that comes up the most, particularly like in a, what is it, the 14th of November right now. This comes out probably last week in November. Once we get into December, you’re going to have all this December 25th crap. And none of it is accurate. None of these deities was ever associated with December 25th in any way, shape, or form whatsoever. That’s another thing that, I mean, Jesus did.

Well, they have associated Jesus with that.

Touche. But that’s toward the beginning of the third century CE, right? Like the Jesus tradition is not only well underway, it is already deeply embedded in a lot of these societies by that time period.

We should talk about why December 25th was, is so integral or so important to this line of thinking.

Because what Zeitgeist at least is aiming at, what they are going toward, they end up arriving at, which is that the reason each of these things are significant is that all of this is just astrotheology.

And so they’re saying that, like, December 25th is when it was thought, is when the ancients thought the equinox, not the equinox, the, what’s the winter, summer?

Winter solstice.

Solstice. The winter solstice. So they thought that it was the 25th. It was the 21st, but they thought it was the 25th or whatever. And so, and that’s when the sun dies. And then three days later, the sun is reborn because the days start to get longer again. Oh, God.

And then they make the claim that, that the star in the east was Sirius, which is one of the brightest stars in the sky. And then that on December 25, Sirius aligns with Orion’s Belt, which were known as the Three Kings. I’ve never heard them referred to as the Three.

How does one star align with another? Are—

Well, they just, they form a line. That’s all. They just—

But they all, they all turn in and they don’t move in relation to each other.

No, no, planets do, but not the stars. But yes, they kind of form a vague line. That’s kind of true.

And. And around December 25th, they. The, that line, it could be said if you look at it in the east, to point to the vague area where the sun rises in the morning and therefore the three kings follow the star to the birth of the sun. Sun, spell it either way.

The S-U-N of God.

Yeah, yeah, blah, blah, blah. You know, and I did. It’s funny because I did reach out to a friend of mine who, who’s a, who’s an astronomer and, and just said, hey, will you just check this for me? And it was like, yeah, it’s basically kind of mostly true, but. But also like it’s true all of the time and not. And like, why, why does it matter? Like, it wouldn’t have been particularly useful at one, you know, the year one or whatever.

And, and there’s. You’ll frequently see included in those claims that the Southern Cross, the constellation known as the Southern Cross, is a part of it.

Right. Because that, how else. Because that explains his crucifixion died on a cross. Right.

Except the Southern Cross was not visible right in that part of the world 2000 years ago.

Right.

It was something that was. Because of the precession of the equinoxes. The, it was below the horizon for that part of the world for centuries. And so. Oh yeah, the, it’s, it’s some silliness. And the traditions like the three Wise Men. Matthew says nothing about three wise men. Matthew just says the magi, the—and you know, we did a show on the wise men.

Yeah, we did a whole thing about it. Go check last year.

These are later traditions that develop. So they’re not, they’re not picking up on these to develop. The, the account, the account later on becomes these traditions.

Right.

And yeah, the, and the, the, the winter solstice thing is silly because the solstice is the 22nd. Sometimes, you know, with a little bit of wiggle room. The 25th was actually the, the observed celebration of the solstice in the Roman Empire for a time.

It was not in ancient Egypt. And the notion that the sun stopped and, like, held still for three days and then started going, that’s nonsense. It is. You know, it has its lowest point, and then the next day it’s moving the other direction. It is not just holding still. It’s not like, all right, I gotta. I gotta rest for a minute, and then I’m gonna.

And the ancients who studied this had ways of figuring that out. They knew.

Yeah. And so the 25th is actually, as best we can tell, and, and there’s still debate about when this originates. But the identification of December 25 as the day of Jesus’s birth seems to come down to a calculation that was made based on the tradition regarding the date of his conception. So we, and we see this first in Hippolytus around 210 CE. This is the first time we have a good case to make that somebody’s actually arguing this. But the idea is March 25 was thought to be the date of Jesus’s death. That is, that was may have been the, the celebration of the Passover that aligns in the Gospel stories with Jesus’s crucifixion. In the ancient world, they had a tradition of aligning a big important figure or a divine figure’s death with the day of their birth.

And so this, this was just a tradition. It was like, we don’t know when he was born. We’re just going to line it up with when he died. And for whatever reason, when it came to the Jesus tradition, they lined it up with when he was thought to be conceived. This is the Annunciation. So. And still there are Christian traditions that celebrate the Annunciation on March 25th. So if Jesus was conceived on March 25th, and you just estimate that that gestation takes nine months. You count nine months from March 25th, you get December 25th.

And so the idea was, oh, that’s when Jesus died. That’s when Jesus was conceived. December 25th must have been when Jesus was born. And its proximity to the winter solstice, when the sun starts going the other direction, was not lost on them. The significance of that of celestial phenomena was not lost on them. They obviously thought that was… was significant, but it wasn’t the inspiration for it. It was just a cherry on top. And so that’s probably where the date December 25 comes from. It certainly does not have anything to do with, like, Sol Invictus, because the temple to Sol Invictus that was dedicated in Rome on December 25th was not dedicated until like 274, 273 or 274 or so. So a good 60 to 70 years after these calculations were first made. So, like, Mithra has nothing to do with December 25th. None of the other deities have anything to do with the 25th, Sol Invictus does.

But we have no evidence of it until decades after the initial calculation, which is based on, you know, this assumption that he must have died on the same day that he was conceived.

Well, all right, so there you have it, friends. If you are trying to dismantle Christianity, this is not the way to go.

I think there are easier ways to do that.

All right, there’s that. Let’s move on to our, to our next thing, which is a Who’s That? Now, the reason that I wanted to do this as our Who’s That is that this guy is conspicuously not mentioned in Zeitgeist. Now, Zeitgeist, the movie does certainly have a moment where it’s like, and why do no historians contemporary to the Jesus time discuss, mention Jesus? Here’s a list of all of these historians from that era. And none of them mentioned Jesus. And there was… and I looked at that list and I paused again and I read through them all and I went, wait a minute, we’re missing somebody. Why? Why? I mean, who were some of the…

Historians that were on that list?

I don’t remember the list. I don’t know. I don’t… I didn’t write them down or anything. What I did notice was just that the one guy that I know should have been on the list wasn’t. And that is one Flavius, Flavius, Flavius Josephus. Talk to me about Josephus. Who was he? Where did he come from? We’ve mentioned him before, but let’s just… let’s just sort of give a… give the broad strokes on Josephus.

So Josephus was likely born around 37 CE, so a handful of years after Jesus was probably crucified. Born to a priestly father and an aristocratic mother, he was pretty well off in this priestly family. Flavian family. But he was Jewish, right?

Born a Jewish family, correct?

Yes. So priestly as well. So, yeah, he was actually a leader of the resistance against the Roman siege. So when, when the Romans began to come into Judea and Galilee and everything, he was a general who helped the… the Jewish people defend against the Romans in… he was in the Galilee. In fact, when you go up to… there’s a… there’s a cliff overlooking the, the western half of the, the Sea of Galilee. If you go up there… a lot of tours will take you up there. Some… there are some caves on, near that cliffside that, that Josephus helped people hide out in when, when the Romans were coming, you know, and where they, they debated, “What have the Romans ever done for us?”

Consider that foreshadowing everybody, people hiding from the Romans rather than triumphantly fighting them.

Yeah. And, and then he, you know, ends up getting captured and decides that he’s basically going to use a, he reads a prophecy in Jewish literature to say that Vespasian was going to become emperor. So he’s, he’s caught and he’s kind of like, “Hey, guess what? I know you, you’re Vespasian, right? Hey, these, these scriptures or these, this literature prophesies that you’re going to become the emperor.” And Vespasian likes the cut of that jib, so takes him on as, as an enslaved person, a servant. And then Vespasian does become emperor.

You gotta love it when you, if you’re Josephus, that’s a good moment for you.

Yeah. So in 69 CE, Vespasian becomes Emperor and he grants Josephus his freedom. And at this, and this is when Josephus takes on the emperor’s family name of Flavius. And so Flavius Josephus identifies him as, as a kind of an honorary member of that family. And then he, he fully defects and he becomes a Roman citizen and decides he’s gonna write histories. So he writes a history called the Jewish War somewhere around 75 CE, and then writes Antiquities of the Jews or Judean Antiquities, and that’s later, that’s around 90, mid-90s CE.

But obviously he was seen as, as a, a traitor to an awful lot of Jewish folks, which is why his works were never. Weren’t really preserved within any Jewish streams of tradition. It was mainly Christians who preserved his works. But yeah, he wrote, he also wrote a handful of other stuffs. He wrote a life which is kind of a biography about himself. But yeah, he is, and he is our main historical source for virtually anything that happened in or around Judea or Galilee. In the early to mid or even late 1st century CE, because we have no other historians that are covering that region in that time period. The closest we get is Philo, who is a philosopher and to some degree a diplomat who has literature that he’s writing from just before the time that Josephus starts writing, where he talks about an embassy to Rome and talks about what’s going on in different parts of the Jewish world, but primarily focused on Alexandria in Egypt.

But Josephus was there. He was watching all of this go down. And so he is an eyewitness account to a lot of what went on in the late 60s CE in Jerusalem, in Judea, in Galilee. And so it was a wonderful source. And. And, yeah, our reconstruction of the. The siege of Jerusalem and the Romans destroying the temple and the things that happen after that, as well as most of the things that led up to that, including the different procurators like Pilate and others and the history of Herod the Great and his family. Pretty much everything we know either comes from Josephus or is extrapolated, inferred based on Josephus. So, yeah, if you want. If you want a historian who’s covering that time period, Josephus is all you have.

He’s the only. His only game in town.

Now you won’t expect a. A formerly Jewish, now Roman citizen defending the Jewish sort of tribe to be. To care all that much about Christian traditions. So mention of Jesus would be significant, it seems to me. It would. It seems like that would be a thing. And he. His. His book does it theoretically. And I’m gonna. We’ll get to why I say theoretically. Twice.

Twice. Yep.

The. The. There’s one mention of him and his brother.

Huh. So this is it. That’s not, that’s not.

Sorry, go.

That’s not the big one. But. But it’s in Judean Antiquities, Book 20, Chapter 9, where he refers to the execution, the unjust execution of James. And he identifies this James as the brother of Jesus who was called Christ. And the idea there being that, yeah, there was this dude, Jesus. People called him the Anointed One.

So he’s not endorsing that. That label, but just saying, by the way, because he mentions like 20 different people named Jesus or.

Okay, right, so Greek. So he’s got, he’s got to differentiate which one this is.

Yeah. And so he’s like, yeah, that one, the one they. They called the Anointed One. Those, those doofuses.

Now you say doofuses, but let’s go to book 18, chapter three. In which what is apparently known as the Testimonium Flavianum.

Is located.

So this is the other mention, and this one is. Is significantly expanded mention of Jesus. I’ll go ahead and read the Testimonium Flavianum as it has traditionally been preserved.

And it. And this is probably. This is going to be. Whose translation is this going to be? It’s probably Whiston’s translation, which is awful, but I’ll go ahead and read it. About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man. For he was one who performed surprising deeds and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly. He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks. He was the Christ. And when upon the accusation of the principal men among us, Pilate had condemned him to a cross, those who had first come to love him did not cease. He appeared to them, spending a third day restored to life. For the prophets of God had foretold these things and a thousand other marvels about him. And the tribe of Christians so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared.

Far cry from Jesus who was called Christ. Yes, that is. That is a very different feel and quite surprising coming from someone who did not follow Christianity himself. That would be. That would be a shocking thing to read from a non-Christian.

Yeah, yeah. It doesn’t make a ton of sense that this came from Josephus who elsewhere is just like, “you know, that guy.” So pretty much everybody agrees this is definitely not authentic, definitely not entirely authentic. It may be in part authentic. There may be a core, maybe something similar to what was mentioned in reference to James, but then it got, you know, elaborated on, it accreted a bunch of additional stuff, or it could just be entirely a Christian forgery. And the scholarly consensus these days, if you ask most scholars—and I’ve talked to Martin Goodman, who was my Jewish history professor at the University of Oxford. When it comes to the history of Judaism in the first century CE, he’s the game in town. And he agrees that there was probably a core to that tradition that just got added on to by Christians who were transmitting the text.

So the consensus view is that it originates in some authentic reference to Jesus on Josephus’s part that was then elaborated on and added to by later Christian transcribers of the text. Although there are those who want to make the case that it is entirely a forgery. And I know of some folks who have publications forthcoming that are trying to make an even stronger case for that now. So that could be changing. We’ll see. But right now most folks think that Josephus referenced Jesus, maybe referenced that Pilate crucified him, maybe didn’t. But whatever the case, the Testimonium Flavianum as it exists right now is definitely not original.

Why? Why? I mean, this may actually seem obvious to a lot of people, but what would you guess is the reason why someone would insert this into a history text?

This is a question that a lot of people have asked. Just because like the notion that Jesus wasn’t around or didn’t exist wasn’t really something that was taken seriously over a thousand years ago. So there, it seems like a silly reason to add this into there. However, at the same time, like I mentioned, Jewish folks are not transmitting Josephus’s text. It’s primarily Christians and primarily because Josephus not only provides a good history and background for the things that are in the New Testament, but provides a direct, a non-biblical, non-Christian witness to Jesus’s existence. Also references John the Baptist. So other things from the New Testament are in there as well. And so it just sounds like somebody saw an opportunity to enhance the praise that they saw somebody heaping on Jesus. Because if Josephus was like, yeah, this clown that thought he was the Messiah went and got himself crucified.

What a doofus. They might have been like, “ow.” And they might have been like, “I’m gonna just fix this a little bit so it doesn’t sound like Josephus is being such a jerk.”

That’s an interesting. I guess that’s true. That’s possible that Josephus was unflattering and someone decided, and since it was transmitted primarily by Christians, they could control the transmission of it. And they decided that was going to be not only flattering but a full-throated endorsement of his, of his, of his Christness.

Yeah. And one of the issues with this, one of the most frustrating parts about this is that we don’t have any Greek manuscripts from before I think the 11th century, I think is our earliest manuscript of Josephus. So these are things that were written in the first century between 75 and maybe 95 CE. And the closest we get in terms of Greek manuscripts is a thousand years later. We have some Latin manuscripts of portions of it that go back to like the 6th century, but none of them attest to the Testimonium, and we do have in like Syriac and Arabic manuscripts, we have slightly different versions of the Testimonium that are pared down a little bit, sound a little more like what it might have been like originally. But there are an awful lot of folks who will argue that those are later, that these are just different interpolations. So it got interpolated once and then other people expanded on it in different ways.

So unfortunately it’s not something that we can know for sure. But when it comes to trying to reconstruct the history of what’s going on here and the groups that were in play—the Sadducees and the Pharisees and the Essenes and the Zealots and the others—like, Josephus is our main source for all of that.

It’s such an interesting thing. I, I think, yeah. I mean, so a name that has come up a few times as I was researching both of these things, researching the, you know, the, the, the big claims, the, the 16 crucified saviors and then also Josephus, you start to find all of the same, a bunch of names of people who are, and you said this word earlier, mythicists.

Talk briefly about what the mythicist idea is and, and, and is there any, like, respectable support for it or, you know, what, what’s, what’s the, the state of mythicism within the, the current academia?

So there are, there are some scholars who, who would call themselves mythicists who have training that is tangentially relevant. I think the, the only scholar who’s actually got training related to the New Testament who would call themselves a mythicist is Robert Price, and I am trying to remember his first name. Robert Price, I think, is the only one who, who actually works within the study of Christianity. Richard Carrier is another who has a PhD, I believe in history, so primarily works in Greek and Roman sources, if I recall correctly.

He’s in ancient history.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Who is probably the most prolific and the most vociferous mythicist. But the idea is basically that there was never a historical Jesus and that what we have in the New Testament is a tradition that was fabricated, that was created based on some of these earlier deities, whether Dionysus or Mithra or Attis or Tammuz or Osiris or Horus or whatever. That everything that we have from Paul to The Gospels and everything else was just fabricated. And, and there are a bunch of different theories about how and why. So there’s no one single mythicist theory. It’s a collection of theories that is grounded on the same idea that there was no historical Jesus. And that is rejected by, apart from Robert Price and maybe one or two other scholars actually working in the study of the New Testament in early Christianity that is rejected by literally everybody else.

So it is in terms of popularity, it is about as unpopular as a theory can get among, among the actual subject matter experts on that particular topic. But and this is something that I’ve said, folks have said, well, there are, there are a bunch of scholars who, who would agree with the mythicist position and, and they’ll rattle off a bunch of scholars who have said things very similar to what I’ve said. And I would not in any way, shape or form whatsoever identify as a mythicist or say that, that my position is at all aligned with mythicism. And what I would say is that when it comes to the existence of a historical Jesus, we cannot know for sure. All that we can do, which is all that we can do with the overwhelming majority of scholarship related to interpretation, related to authorship, related to historicity, the best we can do is weigh probabilities and decide what makes the best sense of the available data. And right now I would say the, the overwhelming majority of scholars agree that it is more likely that a historical Jesus existed.

Now some people will say it’s a lot more likely. We’ll say, you know, we can be certain. I, I am probably just underneath that threshold. I think. I, I would say it is a lot more likely. I don’t think we can be certain, which means that I leave open the possibility, maybe even the plausibility that there was no historical Jesus. But I would, I would reject identification as a mythicist because I still think it is incredibly unlikely.

Well, I mean, it’s funny because even if you reject the, the obvious interpolation of, of the Testimonium Flavianum, whatever it is, the other part where, where Josephus mentions Jesus in passing as the brother of another guy who got killed. Like it’s thin, but it’s there.

You know what I mean? Like, that’s, that’s enough to just, to just say, like it’s would be, I think you’d be hard pressed to not at least understand that there was a dude who, like all, I mean, even if you reject so much of what the, you know, what the New Testament says about this guy? It seems really, really hard to say there was no guy. Yeah, you know what I mean?

One of the things it means is that you have to be able to account for all of the different rather idiosyncratic ways that the tradition has come together because this is one of the things that historical Jesus research tries to do.

And people are like, well, okay, where did the seed of David come from then if he was not born of a human? And he concocts this notion of a cosmic sperm bank where God preserved some of David’s semen so that this mythical non-human creation could be called the seed of David. And so like the, the law of parsimony and Occam’s razor just kind of tear to shreds all of the very complex convoluted kind of structures that you have to build upon other structures upon other structures in order to make it all work. And it seems an awful lot more convenient to just say there was a dude, he died, tradition started circulating about him coming back to life and then it took off from there. Like that is a far simpler solution to the problem.

All right, well, we’re going to leave it at that though. You and I are going to go on and have more fun discussion for our patrons over on patreon.com. Woohoo. If, if you dear friend, dear listener, dear viewer at home would like to join that conversation, you can do so by going over to patreon.com/dataoverdogma and, and then sign up. If you sign up at the $10 level or more, and you’re welcome to do as much as you want, you, you will, you’ll be able to get the after party. Otherwise, at the $5 a month level, you can get an early and ad-free version of every episode of the show. Thanks so much to all of you for tuning in. If you’d like to reach us, you can do so at contact at Data Over Dogma Pod dot com. We’ll see you again next week.

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Debunking Jesus?

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