Today I read
Trent Horn’s new book, Counterfeit
Christs: Finding the Real Jesus Among the Impostors (El Cajon, Calif.:
Catholic Answers, 2019). While, naturally, I take exception on his comments on LDS
Christology, including his repeating the
errant claim one finds creation ex nihilo
on the Shepherd of Hermas (p. 117), the book does a good job as refuting
things such as the “Gay Affirming” Jesus and also the “Mythical” Jesus. On pp.
46-7, he addresses a rather common objection raised by proponents of the “Mythical
Messiah” thesis:
[I]n their book the Jesus Mysteries, Timothy Freke and Peter Gandry list twenty-four
ancient authors who lived within 100 years of Jesus, and wonder why none of
them describe Jesus’ life or miracles. This style of argument actually goes
back to a 1909 list devised by the skeptic John Remsburg that includes:
Philo-Judaeus, Seneca, Pliny the Elder,
Juvenal, Martial, Persius, Plutarch, Justus of Tiberius, Apollonius,
Quintilian, Lucanus, Epictetus, Silius Italicus, Statius, Ptolemy, Hermogones,
Valerius Maximus, Arrian, Petronius, Dion Pruseus, Paterculus, Appian, Theon of
Smyrna, Phlegon, Pompon Mela, Quintius Curtius, Lucian, Pausanias, Valerius
Flaccus, Florus Lucius, Favorinus, Phaedrus, Damis, Aulus Gellius, Columella,
Dio Chrysostom, Lysias, Appion of Alexandria.
But these lists are flawed, because they
assume these authors (if they even knew who Jesus was) would have wanted to write about Jesus.
For starters, many of these authors didn’t
even write about history. Pausanias and Pompon Mela wrote Greek and Roman geographies.
Ptolemy and Pliny the Elder were scientists who recorded information about the
natural world. Theon of Smyrna, Favorinus, and Gellius wrote reflections on philosophy
(Theon’s only surviving work is entitled On
Mathematics useful for the Understanding of Plato). Other writers, such as
Hermogenes, Quintilian, Apollonius Dyscolus, and Dio Chrysostom focused on practical
subjects like speechmaking. And Columella limited his writing to the subject of
trees that existed within the Roman Empire!
Moreover, many of the authors who were historians did not usually write
about the time period in which Jesus lived. Statius, Flaccus, and Apollonius
the Sophist only wrote about ancient Greek subjects and Arrian is best known
for his chronicles about Alexander the Great—who lived 400 years before Christ.
Many of these authors didn’t even write about Christians, but that doesn’t prove there were not Christians in the
first and second century. (There were; we have their writing.)
But wouldn’t some of these authors have “taken
a break” from their normal subjects in order to write about someone who
performed incredible miracles like Jesus? Well, if they did hear these
accounts, they probably would have dismissed them as idle tales about a failed
messiah. Historian John Meier puts it well: “Jesus was a marginal Jew leading a
marginal movement in a marginal province of a vast Roman Empire. The wonder is
that any learned Jew or pagan would have known or referred to him at all in the
first or early second century” (A
Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, Vol. 1 [New York: Doubleday,
1991], 56).
The few non-biblical sources that do attest
to Jesus only mention him because of the surprising fact that his followers did
not abandon this “marginal Jew.”
