Scholarly consensus

The underlying fact is true, and it is worth knowing. Confessional institutions – evangelical seminaries, Bible colleges, some denominational universities – do require faculty to sign doctrinal statements, and those statements do constrain publishable conclusions. Dan McClellan, whom the site cites, makes this point regularly and correctly, and it is a real methodological problem when reading work from those institutions.

It is also irrelevant to this question, for a straightforward reason: the people who would be exposed by this argument are not the people who established the consensus.

The historicity of Jesus is affirmed by:

• Bart Ehrman – agnostic-atheist, spent his career at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a secular state university with no statement of faith, and wrote an entire book against mythicism (Did Jesus Exist?, HarperOne, 2012). He is also the scholar most responsible for popularising the textual corruption of the New Testament.
• Maurice Casey – non-believer, University of Nottingham, whose last book was a book-length attack on mythicism (Jesus: Evidence and Argument or Mythicist Myths?, T&T Clark, 2014).
• Géza Vermes – Jewish, Oxford; Paula Fredriksen – Jewish, Boston University and the Hebrew University; Amy-Jill Levine – Orthodox Jewish, Vanderbilt. No Jewish scholar has a confessional interest in a historical Jesus, and several have obvious professional reasons to be sceptical of Christian claims.
• Michael Grant – classicist and Cambridge fellow, no theological stake at all, who reviewed the question as a Roman historian (Jesus: An Historian's Review of the Gospels, 1977).

A statement-of-faith explanation has to account for why an atheist at a state university, a Jewish scholar at a secular university, and a Roman historian with no interest in Christianity all reach the same conclusion as the seminary professor. It cannot, because the mechanism it proposes does not apply to any of them.

The field's actual record creates a second problem. If its conclusions tracked what employers wanted, it ought to have protected church tradition generally. It did the opposite. The same discipline concluded that Moses did not write the Pentateuch, that Daniel is a second-century BCE composition, that the exodus did not happen as described, that Mark was written first and Matthew used him, that the Pastoral Epistles are pseudonymous, that 2 Peter is not by Peter☦, that Isaiah has multiple authors, and – as the source site itself relies on – that the Testimonium Flavianum has been tampered with by Christian hands.

Every one of those conclusions was fought by the churches, and every one of them won. That is not the behaviour of a bought field. It is the behaviour of a field that follows argument, which happens on this particular question to have landed somewhere mythicism dislikes.

The historicity conclusion does not rest on church tradition, and it does not rest on the passages this site spends most of its time on. Tacitus, Pliny, Suetonius, Mara bar Serapion and the Talmud are corroborating evidence in the standard treatments; the case does not stand or fall with them.

What it actually rests on:

Paul☦. The undisputed letters date to the 50s, within about twenty-five years of the crucifixion – earlier and better attested than the sources for most ancient figures. Paul reports meeting Jesus's brother James☦ and Peter in Jerusalem (Galatians 1:18–19, 2:9). He is a hostile-turned-insider witness writing to communities that included people who had known these men, and he is writing about a contemporary, not a legend from the distant past. Mythicism has to reinterpret "the brother of the Lord" as a title for ordinary believers, which produces its own difficulties in a letter that also distinguishes James from "the brothers of the Lord" as a group (1 Corinthians 9:5).

Multiple independent strands. Mark, the material Matthew and Luke share that is not from Mark, the material unique to each, and John's largely independent tradition. They disagree constantly – which is what makes their agreement on the basic frame (a Galilean teacher, baptised by John, executed under Pilate) evidentially interesting rather than a copying artefact.

Details no one would invent. A messiah from Nazareth, an insignificant village nowhere in prophecy; a messiah baptised by a rival preacher "for the forgiveness of sins"; a messiah executed by Rome as a criminal, which in first-century terms is a disqualification rather than a credential. Inventing a founder means inventing a good one. The early Christian sources spend enormous energy explaining away facts that would have been simpler to omit.

The silence of the opposition. This is the point that does the most work and gets the least attention. Christianity had informed, motivated, literate enemies within a century – Celsus around 175, later Porphyry, Hierocles, Julian. They knew the Christian texts well and attacked hard: Jesus was illegitimate, his mother a peasant who was thrown out for adultery, his miracles were Egyptian sorcery, his disciples were fishermen and tax collectors. Not one of them took the shortcut of saying he never existed. Celsus, who had the best access to Jewish counter-tradition, has his Jewish spokesman argue that Jesus was a bastard magician – which is a claim about a real person's parentage.

Neither example is a denial that Jesus existed. Both are the opposite.

Hierocles argued that Apollonius of Tyana was the better miracle-worker and had the better-qualified biographers, and that he was not therefore deified. That argument requires Jesus to have been a real miracle-working figure to compare against. You cannot rank two people's biographers and their respective wonders while holding that one of them is fictional.

Trypho, in Justin☦'s Dialogue with Trypho 8, says that "Christ — if he has indeed been born, and exists anywhere — is unknown, and does not even know himself, and has no power until Elijah comes to anoint him." Read in context, this is a standard Jewish argument about the messiah: the messiah, whoever he turns out to be, is currently unrecognised and unanointed. It is not a claim that a Galilean preacher named Jesus never lived – and Trypho elsewhere in the same dialogue argues about what Jesus did and what it meant, which presupposes he did something.

Trypho presents a more basic problem. He is a character in a Christian apologetic work, written by Justin, giving the objections Justin wants to answer. Using him as an independent ancient witness cuts against the site's own method everywhere else, where Christian sources are treated as unreliable by default.

"Not novel" is true. "A long tradition of scholarly doubt that persists" overstates it considerably.

Mythicism has a real intellectual history – Bruno Bauer in the nineteenth century, Arthur Drews and J. M. Robertson in the early twentieth, G. A. Wells later – and it was taken seriously enough to be argued over and, in the judgement of the field, answered. What it has not had at any point is a position inside the specialist consensus. Ehrman's summary is that among scholars holding a relevant doctorate and teaching in the field, the number of active mythicists is in the low single figures.

The serious current statement of the case is Richard Carrier's On the Historicity of Jesus (Sheffield Phoenix, 2014), which does have the merit of being peer-reviewed and published by an academic press – and it should be read by anyone who wants to argue this properly. It has also been reviewed at length in the specialist literature and found wanting: see Daniel Gullotta's 36-page assessment in the Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 15 (2017), 310–346, which works through Carrier's celestial-Jesus reading of Paul, his handling of "brother of the Lord," and his Bayesian arithmetic.

None of that makes mythicism false by counting heads. Consensus is not proof, and this site does not ask anyone to accept a conclusion because it is popular. But a consensus held across religious, secular and hostile scholarship, which survived a discipline that dismantled most of church tradition, is evidence. It has to be answered, not attributed to a payroll.

Correct, and unremarkable. Contemporary documentation is the exception in the ancient world, not the rule.

There is no contemporary account of Hannibal, of Boudica, of Arminius, or of Spartacus. The main sources for Alexander the Great – Arrian, Plutarch – write three to four centuries after his death, and the contemporary accounts they used are lost. For Pontius Pilate himself we have one inscription and two later writers. Roman Judaea produced very little writing that survives, literacy was low, papyrus rots in that climate, and the region was comprehensively destroyed in 70 CE.

The relevant comparison is not "do we have contemporary records of Jesus?" but "do we have contemporary records of anyone in his position?" – an itinerant preacher from a village of a few hundred people, executed as a minor provincial nuisance. The answer is that we would expect nothing at all, and what we have instead is a body of letters from within twenty-five years, written by someone who knew the man's brother.