While there’s much debate about whether scientific evidence supports theism or atheism, conversations between Christians and atheists inevitably move to discussing historical evidence at some point. Traditionally, it has been Christians who have taken the conversation into the realm of history, arguing that the historical evidence supports Christianity, but recently more and more atheists are appealing to history to argue for atheism. In 2006, Dawkins wrote “It is even possible to mount a serious, though not widely supported, historical case that Jesus never existed at all” (The God Delusion, p97), and in 2007 Hitchens wrote about “the highly questionable existence of Jesus” (God is not Great, p114). While a number of new atheists quickly propagated these claims, they are not shared by historians. When John Dickson read them out to Macquarie University’s ancient history department, they began to laugh at them. To the historical scholarship, this argument is literally a joke.
Since then, Richard Carrier (blogger and writer on philosophical and historical topics) has been advocating that Jesus was a mythical character (who never actually existed) based on a number of similarities between the gospel and some ancient mythologies. His work has persuaded a large number of online atheist communities who now believe that they have history on their side in debates with Christians. However, there are a few problems. First of all, at the risk of mounting an argument ad hominem, you’ve got to be sceptical of a book written by an aspiring author who was paid $US 20,000 to write a book advocating the Christ myth theory at a time when he desperately needed the money. Of course this doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t listen to his arguments, but there’s a certain irony in that he is writing off the early Christian witnesses because of their ‘agenda’, as one who is (self confessed to be) financially motivated and heavily invested in metaphysical naturalism.
But secondly, and more importantly, these arguments have been shown to be outdated, spurious, and incredibly weak when the gospel is recognised in its Jewish context rather than artificially transplanted into a pagan mythological context. Rory Shiner sums up the point well: At the point of the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, Christianity puts its head on the chopping block of history. It is not like the stories of dying and rising gods of antiquity. Such stories come from outside of Judaism, in which Jesus was firmly embedded. And those dying and rising gods were indexed against the seasons, and fertility. They were about how things are. And they were precisely gods, not men. Their dying and rising happened in the dream-time, in pre-history. If you asked a pagan, “On what date did Osiris rise and at what time?” you would get you a puzzled face, saying: “You don’t really get myth, do you?” Jesus by contrast was crucified under Pontius Pilate, within the time of our history, and, it is alleged, rose to life in April, early in the morning, on a Sunday.
When confronted with the historical scholarship on this issue, Lawrence Krauss, a new atheist who highly prizes intellectual honesty and following empirical evidence, demonstrated that he practices what he preaches when he publically accepted that the connections (between the gospel and mythologies) are spurious in light of the evidence. This is a good start, but it’s not nearly far enough. There’s no debate on Jesus’ existence within the academy of ancient history, the debate is on Jesus’ claims and miracles. But even here, the fact that Jesus performed miracles was not debated by his opponents, it was the source of Jesus’ miracles that was contested (Matthew 9:32-34; 12:22-24; Mark 3:22; Luke 11:14-15). When atheists argue that Jesus didn’t do any miracles because there’s no such thing as miracles, they’re being rationalists, not empiricists. Unbelievers who often criticise believers for not substantiating their claims with hard evidence, are at this point closing their eyes to the historical evidence in order to argue for their unfalsifiable assumption that there’s no such thing as miracles. While they can certainly make an argument, it’s not one that’s based on evidence.
When atheists argue, or even suggest, that Jesus didn’t exist, they’re not being rationalists, they’re not being empiricists, they’re grasping at straws. Most of them have been led to believe that there’s an actual debate among historians as to whether Jesus was a historical figure, but no such debate exists. What’s more telling is the lengths that some will go to in order to maintain that Jesus may not have existed 2000 years ago. Most of these people have been burnt by churches or had bad experiences with Christians claiming the moral high ground, and we should be loving and sympathetic to their desire to be free from legalistic religion. But we shouldn’t let them hide behind an imagined debate, especially if they’re going to claim intellectual honesty and/or a desire to follow empirical evidence. Claiming that Jesus didn’t exist is the historical equivalent of claiming that there’s no evidence of micro-evolution (the fact that children are different from their parents), and that the theory of evolution that’s based on it was invented by atheists in order to gain control of the masses. It’s so far-fetched that you’ve got to wonder what happened to the person who suggests it, and graciously help them to work through their hostility.
