Here I continue with the Q&A I had years ago with evangelical New Testament scholar Ben Witherington, focused on my book Did Jesus Exist.   I think I can say with relative confidence that this is the ONE book of mine that evangelicals on the whole were (mainly) pleased with.  A nice change!  And why do they like it?  Because I argue there must have been a man Jesus.  OK, then! Doesn't seem like a lot to be grateful for, but I'll take what I can get. Ben's questions were more astute than that, dealing with some of the key issues at a scholarly level.  Here are two more of them, and my responses. Q. It appears that mythicists have not read Jonathan Z. Smith, and do not realize that there is no unambiguous evidence for the historical argument that ancients believed in dying and rising gods before the time of Jesus, and that therefore the story of Jesus is just a historicized version of that myth. Why do you think this theory of dying and rising [...]

This post continues my 10-part interview with Ben Witherington dealing with "mythicists," those who claim that there never actually *was* a man Jesus, but that he is a complete fabrication, a myth.  In Did Jesus Exist, I try to show why that is simply not true.  But if he did exist, and the Gospels say things about him that probably didn't happen, how do you separate the fact from the fiction?   Here Ben asks me questions related to that idea, and I give some responses. Q. Various mythicists have tried to argue that in fact there is only one source, namely Mark, that provides evidence that Jesus existed and presumably he made up the idea? Why is this not a fair representation of the evidence, and why do you think it is that various of them hardly even deal with the evidence from Paul? A. Most mythicists claim that Paul never mentions the historical Jesus or says anything about him, but that he only speaks of a “mythical Christ” who was not a real human [...]

I continue here with the conversation I had some years ago with evangelical New Testament scholar Ben Witherington, based on my book Did Jesus Exist.  In this post, we start getting into some of the key evidence we have for Jesus, not only to show that he actually existed (uh, yes he did...) but also to help us know what we can say about him, about what he really said and did.   Q (Witherington). In the middle portion of your book, you place a great deal of emphasis on what is usually called the criteria of multiple attestation to demonstrate that Jesus surely existed.   Would you explain briefly why historians place so much stock in this criteria, and why it is especially important when dealing with the question of the existence of Jesus. A.    Multiple attestation is one of the most important historical criteria for establishing what happened in the past – not just for historical Jesus research, but for any serious historical research.   If the sources to a historical person or event are [...]

I continue here with the re-post of an interview from years ago but of ongoing relevance, about how we can know what we know about Jesus.  The interview was with Ben Witherington, a conservative evangelical Christian New Testament scholar, who asked me to respond to a number of questions about my book Did Jesus Exist in light of criticism I received for it (not, for the most part, from committed Christians!). Some of Ben Witherington’s most popular books are The Jesus Quest, and The Problem with Evangelical Theology, among others. - Q. Sometimes you make a distinction between literary evidence and other sorts of written evidence (e.g. records of trials or tax records),  and you place especial stress on the former as a way of answering the question of whether or not Jesus existed.   Can you explain why you do this? A.   Yes, there is a clear distinction to be made between literary and documentary evidence.   The only reason I place special evidence on the former, when talking about the historical Jesus, is that [...]

Nine years ago, Ben Witherington, a conservative evangelical Christian New Testament scholar,  asked me to respond to a number of questions about my book Did Jesus Exist, especially in light of criticism I have received for it (not, for the most part, from committed Christians!).   I am reposting the interview, since it's on such an important topic. Ben's blog is widely read by conservative evangelicals, and he has agreed to post the questions and my answers without editing, to give his readers a sense of why I wrote the book, what I hoped to accomplish by it, and what I would like them to know about it.  He has graciously agreed to allow me to post my responses here on my blog, which, if I’m not mistaken, has a very different readership (although there is undoubtedly some overlap).   It’s a rather long set of questions and answers – over 10,000 words.   So I will post them in bits and pieces so as not to overwhelm anyone.  The Q’s are obviously his, the A’s mine. Some [...]

On this Easter Sunday I would like to explain what I think led to the belief that Jesus was raised from the dead.  A lot of readers over the years have not liked my answer (readers on wide ends of the spectrum):  I think some (a few) of the disciples had visions of Jesus.  That is, they saw him, or thought they saw him -- which for them would have been the same thing. I dealt with the matter in my book God's Problem, and responded to a question on the blog about it a long time ago.  Here it is.   QUESTION: I am reading How Jesus Became God and would like to comment on some of the content of Chapter 5. To that point in the book, it seems to me you have been very careful to avoid speculation, but it seems to me that the application of your usual standards may have lapsed somewhat in regard to the visions of Jesus after the crucifixion. Specifically, what evidence do we have, apart from [...]