I have little patience these days for people who bring up the same stale canards time and time again that I have already refuted; such is what we find now in Jacobsen's response to The Case for the Real Jesus. Since it is just the same old same old, I won't put my replies in narrative format unless we happen across something new - which I don't expect to.

This has to do with an interview with Dr. Craig Evans in Ch. 1.

Challenge 1: "Scholars are Uncovering a Radically Different Jesus in Ancient Documents Just as Credible as the Four Gospels"

Jacobsen: The first thing about this passage that strikes me as odd is that Evans claims that one really needs to understand Hebrew and Aramaic in order to fully understand Jesus. That seems to leave out the vast majority of the world's population, no?

The "vast majority of the world's population" does not need to "fully understand Jesus" in the sense that Evans is talking about - which is, to the extent of dealing in matters like historical criticism and alternate fraudulent Gospels like Judas and Thomas. There are popular-level works like Jenkins' Hidden Gospels which distill the data for the average person. Nothing is inaccessible in terms of issues like Jesus' message of salvation. Evans' point has to do with scholars who produce these distilled works (like Burton Mack) without knowing enough. Mack and his sort are not producing arguments about "salvation" and so their coming up with unusual portraits is beside the point of the accessibility of salvation. How this is "odd" even so is a matter of subjectivity and does not answer a single argument, but it appears that it is Jacobsen's radical unfamiliarity with the subject matter at hand that is causing his confusion.

Re: Strobel and his experts continually downplay the significance of those first 30 years, frequently suggesting that it is a tiny amount of time on a historical scale. Maybe so, but it's a huge amount of time when we are talking about what may amount to myth making - or, if short of that, for people to remember speeches and events. Oversimplified. The issue is not merely the making of myths, but how well they "stick" as history in the face of adverse conditions, as well as how well truth can be preserved with such functions as ancient orality. Apparently Jacobsen has refused to educate himself on these matters in the years since he has begun to be a critic of Strobel.

Re: The point I'm leading to is, there are NO known contemporary references to Jesus--meaning there are no known references to him that date during his lifetime. The point being what? This is not a required criteria for having reliable information about a person. Most of what Tacitus writes was written well after the people he relates the history of were dead. Yet I don't see historians throwing out his work to any extent because of this. Jacobsen: …the fact is that there is no contemporary reference to him, which means that, whoever this Jesus was, very little can be said about him. Which parts of the Gospels are real and which are fictional can, therefore, only be guessed at. One can only guess where Jacobsen digs up this criteria for what can be "guessed at" - he admits it is beyond my credentials to be able to assert with authority though he appeals to Gottschalk's Understanding History on the importance of using eyewitness testimony. Why is hard to say, since what he quotes doesn't say a thing about references having to be contemporary for us to have any hope of saying anything about someone. He seems to think there is some issue in Luke not being an eyewitness, bit Gottschalk says clearly that a historian can use eyewitness testimony, which is what Luke does say he does. So that means that Luke is "based on eyewitness testimony" as Jacobsen manages to admit.

The canards of Carrier about Luke's methods are uncritically repeated. See here.

It is hard to say why Jacobsen complains of Strobel and Evans not going on about Daniel when their subject is the New Testament Gospels and Jesus, as he admits, though he tries to strain an application: the idea of the NT being a divine new revelation from God isn't too likely if the first alleged revelation is notably fraudulent! When he is done complaining, he can answer this.

Jacobsen: And, on a related note, Evans could have also mentioned that writing style and themes can reveal fraudulent authorship claims, which is why we know that some of Paul's epistles were likely not authored by him at all. Oh really? Jacobsen can pick his poison when he's through sound biting - for example, on the Pastorals. Or he can use our index to check the other books.

On "bias" in the NT see Miller's item here.

Jacobsen complains of Evans just "asserting" that there were no alternate Christianities early on. He can do so precisely because there is no evidence; it is Jacobsen's job to provide evidence for the alternates, not Evans' job to do his arguing for him, and claiming "we do not know what happened" or pleading that there is not enough evidence or just saying of Gnostics, "their views had to come from somewhere" is not an argument but an admission that Jacobsen does not have an argument. It is up to Jacobsen's side to explain how a Gnostic Jesus could have arisen from history in Jewish first-century Palestine, and why anyone should take something like Judas and Thomas as a valid witness. Jacobsen repeatedly resorts to the "we don't know" approach as an argument, which tells us that he really has no arguments.

The usual canards about 1 Tim. 2:11-14 and 1 Cor. 14:34-35 - answered ages ago by Miller here.

I myself do not reject documents like The Gospel of Peter on the grounds of the absurdity of what they report - I reject them on the grounds that they are late and have no support as genuine testimonies of what happened. That said, Evans' point is probably more sophisticated than Jacobsen realizes; it is not just that what is reported is ridiculous, but gratuitous. "NBA angels" serve no purpose in their context.

Barker's canard about the apparent progression of the fantastical nature of the empty tomb story from the earliest Gospels on is uncritically repeated. See response here.

On Gospel dates, see here. Jacobsen is also not informed concerning the pool of "possible witnesses" which would include Jews from all over the Diaspora who came to visit Jerusalem at the same time the events recorded in the Gospels occurred - not just those killed in Jerusalem in 70. He also forgets that there were plenty of things Jesus did outside of Jerusalem.

There is no "bias" inherent in Evans idea that time was spent discussing beliefs. Indeed, far from being a "like us" assumption, it is a case where the ancients were more inclined to something than we are. Socially, it would not only be natural, but expected in a collectivist setting, that the Christian social ingroup would discuss their beliefs within a community setting and "network" with one another. On this also see Miller's item here. To say that Evans only "alleges" the existence of Christian community reflects a dismal ignorance of the collectivist setting of early Christianity. See the above link also on oral tradition and a corrective to Jacobsen's allegations about human memory's role.

Summation: Jacobsen has a long way to go with his studies before he is a credible critic of a scholar like Evans.