In Reply to “Jesus Mythicism Is About to Go Mainstream”

“As a former graduate student in religious studies and writer of the classics, it is deeply regrettable that the scholarship of the academy does not reach further and that century-old myths no longer of any substantial prominence in academic study still hold public sway.”

Peter Clarke’s recent essay on Jesus mythicism is filled with many misleading perceptions about contemporary religious scholarship and the place and understanding of Jesus therein. While one can reflect on the statistics about the cultural declination of Christianity and the woeful misperception of the public at large on religious scholarship, few scholars adhere to the mythicist disposition, and no one in any historical-critical religious studies department reads such obscure and phantasmagoric material. Moreover, the continual association of Jesus with myth-figures and Late Antique religion furthers—often unknowingly—the anti-Semitic origin of these ideas seeking to divorce Jesus from his Jewish context.

The reliance on the arguments of Richard Carrier, for one, is problematic. Carrier is not a respected scholar in the field and his work is debunked by the bulk of historical-critical scholarship. This, however, does not alter Carrier’s presuppositional bias (no amount of evidence will) who hides under the veil of critical inquiry while pushing conspiracy. Richard Price, though he has academic pedigree, is not exactly on the usual New Testament reading list either at any historical-critical religious studies department. Academic pedigree does not necessarily entail respectability; we know many graduates of prestigious schools today whom we do not take seriously because we know they are peddling nonsense outside the mainstream despite their paperwork credentials. Additionally, David Fitzgerald is a great digital entrepreneur, like Carrier, but not a scholar. The works of all three do not stand up against the thousands of books and articles in historical-critical scholarship.

Furthermore, the comparisons of Jesus to dying-rising gods of the Near East are hardly similar at all upon a close inspection. Nearly all scholars know the similarities are only bare and the differences tremendous within their particularities; the claims of similarities are based on overarching universal archetypal claims without careful attention to specificity and particularity. I shall return to this point in a moment.