Historical Jesus Beats Mythical Jesus

150 years ago, David Friedrich Strauss described 

the gospels as part history and part myth, a formulation

that has stuck ever since.

Sometimes people ask me why, as an atheist, I'm so sure that Jesus existed as a real guy. Here's why. Historians conclude that Jesus probably existed because that’s the best explanation for the evidence we have.  There is a ton of evidence that an apocalyptic sect popped up within Judaism in the first century AD, and historians hypothesize an actual Jewish faith healer and martyr as the inspiration for this sect. The Jesus-myth hypothesis, on the other hand, doesn't offer any alternative explanation for where this sect came from. In fact, it  doesn't even try. Finally, you can just look at the state of Jesus mythicism and tell that it’s not credible scholarship.

Who founded Jewish Christianity?
A thriving Jewish sect existed before Paul established Christianity for gentiles. Who started it? Where? Historians say it was Jesus in Galilee. Mythicists have no clear answer.

Why did early Christianity have no official leader, rules, or creeds?
Early Christians struggled to figure out who could be a Christian, what you had to believe, whose direction to follow, and even who Jesus had been. There was no church hierarchy or pope to specify which people and beliefs were legitimate. Historians say that Jesus’ execution left the sect without clear direction and leadership. Mythicists don’t explain why the people who invented the sect left these leadership issues up in the air.

How did certain leaders in the early church get identified as Jesus’ brother and apostles?
Paul meets with Jesus’ so-called brother James, and with two so-called apostles, Peter and John. Historians explain this by saying those people were Jesus’ brother and disciples. Mythicists have no clear answer.

Who is the preacher who composed the sayings attributed to Jesus?
The gospels include a lot of unremarkable teaching attributed to Jesus that really anybody could have said. The synoptic gospels, however, also include a body of original teachings that challenged the assumptions of 1st century Jews. We underestimate the power and originality of these sayings because 2000 years later they’re old hat, but at first they were so unusual that evangelists sometimes “tamed” them with a little editing. Who came up with these remarkable sayings? Turn the other cheek? God's reign is like dirty leaven? Who is behind this distinctive voice? Historians say it was Jesus who said these unusual things. Mythicists have no clear answer.

Why did the author of Mark create a new literary genre, the gospel?
Today we take gospels for granted, but the first gospel was unprecedented. According to historians, the author strung together elements from written and oral traditions to synthesize a narrative. While myths tend to be about great heroes of the distant past, this was the story of a hillbilly bastard exorcist who had died a loser’s death just a generation or two earlier. Historians say that this genre-creating work was inspired by Jesus. How do mythicists explain Mark?

Why don’t Jewish and pagan critics of Christianity question Jesus' existence?
Critics said he was a fool, magician, fraud, or bastard but not a fiction. Historians say that Jesus was a public figure, so even critics of Christianity acknowledged that he had lived and died. What is the mythicist explanation?

Hitchens asks, why are the gospels full of weird details?
That's right, Hitchens laid out "impressive" evidence for why he thought there may have been a historical Jesus, whom he characterized as a charismatic, deluded rabbi. Hitchens makes the point that the gospels have enough weird elements that they are evidently “not a whole-cloth fabrication”. If Jesus were merely an invention, why would the gospels say he was from Nazareth in Galilee and not the “right” city, Bethlehem in Judea? Early Christians had to invent two competing explanations for how Jesus could have been born in Bethlehem despite growing up in Nazareth. If he were just a myth, why bring in Nazareth at all? And why are the first witnesses to the resurrection just lowly women and not higher-status men? Again, not a detail that one would invent. Here is a link to a video clip of Hitchens making his case.

What are the telltale signs of a fringe idea?
Revolutionary ideas, such as natural selection, deny the scholarly consensus and offer something better. Fringe ideas merely deny the scholarly consensus. Creationist arguments are primarily criticisms of evidence for evolution, not a better explanation of the fossil record. Mythicist arguments are primarily criticisms of evidence for Jesus, not a better explanation for how Christianity started. Where is the biologist who uses creationism in their work? Where is the historian who uses Jesus mythicism to write a better history of Christian origins?

What are the telltale marks of group-identity bias?
If a fringe idea is largely confined to an identity group, it’s probably the product of group identity rather than evidence. The same is true if the idea is especially popular with the more outspoken members of that group and if it readily inspires emotional arguments. Young-earth creationism is like this, and so is Jesus mythicism.

More evidence
My arguments are holistic and brief. If you want to get down to brass tacks and assess evidence in detail, here’s a great article in which an atheist historian lays it all out for us. Again, Jesus mythicists will try to pick apart each piece of evidence, but they can’t propose a more plausible explanation for where Christianity came from.

The Big Picture: Jesus Mythicism and Atheism
Accepting the historical consensus on Jesus and rejecting mythicism would be a great way for the atheist community to show that we value scholarship and evidence over our own group-identity bias.

2015

The amniote clade split into countless smaller clades.

Clades in Grandmother Fish

Last week the printer shipped me two of the first finished copies of Grandmother Fish, which I raised money for last year on Kickstarter. There’s a lot I can say about Grandmother Fish: the 15 years I’ve been working on it; the help I got from science communicators, parents and children; how Karen’s art brought out the soft side of evolution; the difficulty of turning evolution into a story; or the power of kinesthetic learning. Today what’s on my mind is the concept of clades. In the old way of thinking, each living thing went into one or another categorical bucket, as in bird, reptile or mammal. In terms of clades, there are no buckets. Instead there are countless branch points, each leading on to more branch points. A clade is an ancestral population and all living things that ever descended from that population. Each time the evolutionary tree of life branches, both new branches are still part of the original clade, but each also represents a smaller clade of its own. Grandmother Fish shows children how living things are related, branch by branch. What excites me about this is that it demonstrates a new way of thinking about relatedness. In the old way of thinking, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals were all classes of vertebrate. In the new way of thinking, reptiles and birds are in one clade, with mammals in a sister clade. Those two clade combine in the amniote clade, with amphibians as their sister clade. Then the amniotes and amphibians combine in the tetrapod clade, and so on. Where 19th century scientists saw tetrapods as four classes, 21st century scientists see them as countless nested populations defined by sequential branching in the family tree. That’s one of the subtexts of Grandmother Fish, that we organize living things according to their lines of evolutionary descent.

Creationists can’t create a book to match Grandmother Fish. They have no cogent explanation for why animals resemble each other the way they do. The evolutionary family trees in Grandmother Fish show children how various sorts of animals are related to each other. Creationists can’t even generate a list of which animals are which kind. They say that each animal is in one and only one kind, and that these kinds have biological reality, but they can’t assign each animal to a kind. That’s because animals come in clades, not kinds. Relationships among animals are complex. Creationism reduces relationship down to a single factor: for any two animals, are they the same kind or not? Evolution posits a more complex and informative question: for any two animals, what was their most recent common ancestor, what was it like, when did it live, and where?  That’s what the five Grandmothers are in Grandmother Fish, they’re common ancestors found at major branch points in the history of our lineage.

The two-page phylogenetic tree in Grandmother Fish was a stretch goal, and I’m glad we added it to the book. Getting each branch point in the right sequence was a challenge, especially because genetic testing is rewriting the tree year by year. But the hard work means that these two pages include a large amount of scientific information, all distilled down to a simple, visually appealing diagram. It’s the sort of information that one can’t imagine without understanding the concept of common descent.