A Skeptical Equivalent of "The Passion of the Christ" and Other Skeptical Myths

Today's Los Angeles Times has an article about a documentary that denies the historical existence of Jesus (Notice what sources the Times goes to in order to get a response to the documentary. I guess the Baptist janitor who cleans their offices was on vacation.):

The 39-year-old Angeleno has made an hourlong documentary titled "The God Who Wasn't There." In it, the former born-again Christian argues that the biblical Jesus never lived, but is a mythological figure like Paul Bunyan.

Initially released theatrically June 17, the documentary grew out of Flemming's research for a fictional thriller-in-progress titled, "The Beast." In that film, which he hopes to release next year, a teenage Christian discovers that the Jesus she fervently believes in never existed.

"My position is that's the most likely scenario," the filmmaker said.

Asked why he chose to question Jesus' existence instead of his divinity, Flemming said: "I think that the idea that an individual could be the son of a god is already so ridiculous it doesn't need to be debunked."

To promote the movie, Flemming places it squarely in the company of other headline-making exposes: " 'Bowling for Columbine' did it to the gun culture. 'Super Size Me' did it to fast food. Now 'The God Who Wasn't There' does it to religion…. Hold on to your faith. It's in for a bumpy ride."...

Chris Leland, a spokesman for the Focus on the Family Institute, an educational unit of the evangelical Christian organization, has seen the film and decries the scholarship that Flemming uses to argue against a historic Jesus....

Father Thomas Rausch, a Jesuit priest and professor of theology at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, has not seen the film. But, he said, "I don't know any serious scholar who questions the existence of Jesus."...

Historian Richard Carrier, the atheist author of "Sense and Goodness Without God," said he had been "agnostic" about the existence of Jesus until Flemming interviewed him for the film. Now, he said, "I think that more likely than not, Jesus did not exist."

Considering the absurdity of Carrier's arguments in the past and his willingness to take a ride in so many different skeptical boats, his advocacy of the position that Jesus didn't exist shouldn't surprise us much. But it is somewhat surprising, since the argument that Jesus didn't exist is so absurd that we would expect even somebody like Carrier to resist it. (For answers to Carrier's arguments, see Glenn Miller's site, J.P. Holding's, this article by David Wood, and this page at the same web site. For a defense of Josephus' having mentioned Jesus in his writings, see the article by Christopher Price here. Price addresses the objection mentioned in the L.A. Times article, regarding Origen's not mentioning the Josephus passage.)

If we go to the web site promoting the documentary the L.A. Times is referring to, we read (see here and here):

Your guide through the world of Christendom is former fundamentalist Brian Flemming, joined by such luminaries as Jesus Seminar fellow Robert M. Price, professor Richard Dawkins, author Sam Harris and historian Richard Carrier....

The DVD also includes special audio commentary tracks with Richard Dawkins (A Devil's Chaplain), Earl Doherty (The Jesus Puzzle) and The Raving Atheist (ravingatheist.com).

The Jesus Seminar and Richard Carrier aren't particularly credible historical sources. I suppose that men like Dawkins and Harris would be commenting on the existence of God, not the historical evidence for Jesus' existence. These people have some significant credentials and some knowledge of the subject matter, but their conclusions are so unsupported by the evidence and so often out of the mainstream of contemporary scholarship. You have to wonder how well Brian Flemming would be able to defend his beliefs under scrutiny. He may not be as ignorant as the ignorant Christians he's criticizing, but he ought to know that his characterizations don't reflect all Christians. And if Flemming can't refute the arguments of the more knowledgeable Christians, then criticizing the less knowledgeable ones doesn't accomplish much.

A lot could be written in response to the claims of Flemming and his sources, and a lot is written in response to them in the links I've provided above. But, as a general summary, the comments of Gary Habermas and Michael Licona illustrate why denying the historicity of Jesus is untenable. Their focus is on the resurrection of Jesus, but they address issues in the process that are applicable to Jesus' existence in general:

In fact, many critical scholars hold that Paul received it [the creed of 1 Corinthians 15] from the disciples Peter and James while visiting them in Jerusalem three years after his conversion [Galatians 1:18-19]. If so, Paul learned it within five years of Jesus' crucifixion and from the disciples themselves. At minimum, we have source material that dates within two decades of the alleged event of Jesus' resurrection and comes from a source that Paul thought was reliable. Dean John Rodgers of Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry comments, "This is the sort of data that historians of antiquity drool over."...

On the state of Resurrection studies today, I (Habermas) recently completed an overview of more than 1,400 sources on the resurrection of Jesus published since 1975. I studied and catalogued about 650 of these texts in English, German, and French. Some of the results of this study are certainly intriguing. For example, perhaps no fact is more widely recognized than that early Christian believers had real experiences that they thought were appearances of the risen Jesus. A critic may claim that what they saw were hallucinations or visions, but he does not deny that they actually experienced something....

roughly 75 percent of scholars on the subject accept the empty tomb as a historical fact....

Likewise, to claim that we cannot rationally believe Jesus rose because the New Testament authors were biased toward Jesus is to commit the genetic fallacy. Such an argument fails to address the data they provide. The prominent New Testament historian N.T. Wright comments, "It must be asserted most strongly that to discover that a particular writer has a 'bias' tells us nothing whatever about the value of the information he or she presents. It merely bids us be aware of the bias (and of our own, for that matter), and to assess the material according to as many sources as we can."...

New Testament scholar Craig Blomberg, who served as an editor for and contributor to a large scholarly work on the Gospels, provides four reasons why more was not written on Jesus in his time: "the humble beginnings of Christianity, the remote location of Palestine on the eastern frontiers of the Roman empire, the small percentage of the works of ancient Graeco-Roman historians which have survived, and the lack of attention paid by those which are extant to Jewish figures in general."...

What we have concerning Jesus actually is impressive....

let's take a look at Julius Caesar, one of Rome's most prominent figures....Only five sources report his military conquests....If Julius Caesar really made a profound impact on Roman society, why didn't more writers of antiquity mention his great military accomplishments? No one questions whether Julius did make a tremendous impact on the Roman Empire....

Tiberius Caesar was the Roman emperor at the time of Jesus' ministry and execution. Tiberius is mentioned by ten sources within 150 years of his death: Tacitus, Suetonius, Velleius Paterculus, Plutarch, Pliny the Elder, Strabo, Seneca, Valerius Maximus, Josephus, and Luke. Compare that to Jesus' forty-two total sources in the same length of time. That's more than four times the number of total sources who mention the Roman emperor during roughly the same period. If we only considered the number of secular non-Christian sources who mention Jesus and Tiberius within 150 years of their lives, we arrive at a tie of nine each....

miracle accounts in other religious writings are unanimously inferior in historical credibility to the New Testament reports of the appearances of the risen Jesus. They are not usually multiply attested, and the records are normally very late when compared to the time the miracle was supposed to have taken place. The first reports of these miraculous events were written long after the time when the alleged events took
place....

[quoting Craig Blomberg] "A careful reading of the patristic evidence suggests that indeed the vast majority of early Christians did believe that the type of information the Gospel writers communicated was historical fact, even as they recognized the more superficial parallels with the mythology of other worldviews"

(The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus [Grand Rapids, Michigan: Kregel Publications, 2004], pp. 52-53, 60, 70, 125, 127-128, 170, n. 27 on p. 327)