Friday, May 17, 2019

Trent Horn vs. the "Mythical Messiah" and Ancient Historians Not Mentioning Jesus


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.”

As an aside, Horn debated Richard Carrier a few years ago on the historicity of Jesus. The debate is available on Youtube: