The authors do not tackle the resurrection

John Dickson is a historian, an actual practicing working credentialed historian, with a PhD in Ancient History from Macquarie University and a visiting scholar gig at Oxford, yet he wrote this absurdity.

A survey found that only 49% of Australians say “Jesus was a real person who actually lived.” You mean 51% don’t?! The horror!

But, frankly, this new survey is also bad news for historical literacy. This reported majority view is not shared by the overwhelming consensus of university historians specialising in the Roman and Jewish worlds of the first century. If Jesus is a “mythical or fictional character”, that news has not yet reached the standard compendiums of secular historical scholarship.

Take the famous single-volume Oxford Classical Dictionary. Every classicist has it on their bookshelf. It summarises scholarship on all things Greek and Roman in just over 1,700 pages. There is a multiple page entry on the origins of Christianity that begins with an assessment of what may be reliably known about Jesus of Nazareth. Readers will discover that no doubts at all are raised about the basic facts of Jesus’s life and death.

But Professor Dickson doesn’t tell us what he considers the basic facts.

Or take the much larger Cambridge Ancient History in 14 volumes. Volume 10 covers the “Augustan Period”, right about the time that Tiberius, Livia, Pliny the Elder, and — yes — Jesus all lived. It has a sizeable chapter on the birth of Christianity. The entry begins with a couple of pages outlining what is known of Jesus’ life and death, including his preaching of the kingdom of God, his fraternising with sinners, and so on. No doubts are raised about the authenticity of these core elements.

Cool; what’s hiding behind that “and so on”?

There was a time when I was quite interested in the historical Jesus question, and read a fair bit about it. If I remember correctly, secular historians consider it reasonable to think the biblical account starts from a real person, although some argue it’s all or almost all (as opposed to just mostly or half or whatever) myth. It’s textual stuff – what is this account based on, what are the sources, which came first, that kind of thing. Did Tacitus really talk about Jesus? Did Jesus walk to Sepphoris when the mood took him and thus get exposed to city life and Hellenistic culture? It’s interesting, and it’s not as cut and dried as Dickson makes it sound.

Just for one thing stories about god-men were a genre at the time, so the fact that there’s a collection of stories about this one god-man isn’t particularly remarkable. It’s a bit like stories about men who metamorphose into women…

Not wanting to labour the point, but we could also turn to the compendium of Jewish history, the Cambridge History of Judaism in four volumes. Volume 3 covers the “Early Roman Period”. Several different chapters refer to Jesus in passing as an interesting figure of Jewish history. One chapter — 60 pages in length — focuses entirely on Jesus and is written by two leading scholars, neither of whom has qualms dismissing bits of the New Testament when they think the evidence is against it. The chapter offers a first-rate account of what experts currently think about the historical Jesus. His teaching, fame as a healer, openness to sinners, selection of “the twelve” (apostles), prophetic actions (like cleansing the temple), clashes with elites, and, of course, and his death on a cross are all treated as beyond reasonable doubt. The authors do not tackle the resurrection (unsurprisingly), but they do acknowledge, as a matter of historical fact, that the first disciples of Jesus “were absolutely convinced that Jesus of Nazareth had been raised and was Lord and that numerous of them were certain that he had appeared to them.”

Yes, and? Lots of people are absolutely convinced of lots of things that they’re wrong about. The fact that some guys 2000 years ago were absolutely convinced that another guy “was Lord” really doesn’t tell us anything much.

H/t Gnu Atheism

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