I found the end of Doherty’s rebuttal interesting where he reports that not even The Fourth R, which is a periodical published by the Westar Institute (from which comes the Jesus Seminar), is interested in discussing his hypothesis. The editor for the periodical wrote that the question pertaining to whether Jesus really existed is not a living discussion among scholars and added, “If someone wants to doubt the existence of Jesus, my experience is that no evidence or argument will change his mind.” In spite of the $5,000 offered as an incentive to open the discussion, the request was declined. This is quite a blow to Doherty and his colleagues. It is like a guy who wants to impress his new girlfriend by cooking for her. He prepares an elaborate dinner that seems delicious to him but smells and tastes so horrible to his girlfriend that she refuses to take a bite. In frustration, he puts a little of his food on the floor for the dog, who only sniffs it then walks away. -- Mike Licona

Earl Doherty's version of the Christ-myth thesis is a central support for the presentation of The God Who Wasn't There, so it seemed proper at this time to pick up Earl off the floor where we left him and re-evaluate the damage report. It may be recalled that we responded to Earl some years ago, and after reviewing that material, I have been struck in the main by just how little indeed Earl fought back, and how indeed devastated (to put it mildly) his case was by the retort here. Our reply on the matter of the reasons for the silence, and on the clear references to a human Jesus in the NT and in secular sources, by itself would have accomplished a devastation; and Earl's replies to the bulk of this amounted to vague appeals to "common sense" and a repeated harrumph. He was completely unable (or unwilling) to reply to such things as the detailed case showing why 1 Thess. 2:14-16 is not an interpolation. And as time passes, one gets the idea that this is because Doherty is far from being any sort of credible scholar as he claims to be, but is little more than a hack making his way through an extended bluff with the help of sometimes well-crafted doggerel and an ego to match.

Indeed, there is much to make one suspicious about Doherty. He claims to be degreed in classics and ancient history -- and I previously took for granted that this was the case. I am now suspicious of this claim. Doherty does not bother to tell us from what institution he got this degree, nor is he even clear on what level degree it is, though Internet scuttlebutt rates it as a Bachelorate. Ironically as well, by Doherty's own reckoning of the lack of details about Jesus in the epistles, one would be constrained to suppose that Doherty himself is mythical, for he tells us almost nothing about himself. His websites are registered to another person associated with a Canadian humanist organization. While recently (3/08) reviewing Doherty's material for my book on the Christ myth, I found myself thinking it all the less impressive than I remembered. (See more on this thread at TheologyWeb.)

The evidence leads to a disturbing conclusion that Earl Doherty -- if such a person even exists -- is a fraud with no credentials to speak of. If he seems to "win" debates, it is only because no one will take him seriously enough to read all of his nonsense, and so he can point to some other article of his where a critic "missed" a critical point and therefore allegedly failed. At the time of my own response, I answered nearly all of his material, and left no option for him to reply that way. Although he naturally offers the standard canard of the despairing that I'm too mean to reply to, it seems rather that he knows he's been exposed for what he really is.

At any rate, we turn our attention now to a reply Doherty wrote to Mike Licona's critique of The God Who Wasn't There (hereafter GWWT). Much of it is beyond our subjective coverage, though it is amusing at times to watch, eg, as Earl screeches like a wet hen (or like Acharya S) about Licona's critique of the film's production values (actually, a very legit target in any full review), as though he has just been told that his newly-hatched chicks are ugly. It is also amusing to see Earl dip fully into the well of hypocrisy and deceit, as he proceeds to perform the psychoanalysis game (last seen from G. A. Wells) of supposing his opponents, because they respond to his thesis, to be incensed, or disturbed, or anxious, or whatever the Emotion of the Week is for this round, while pontificating about the superiority of his own enlightened humanism (so enlightened that it resorts to the racist description of the ancient readers of the Bible as "nomadic goatherders") and of course pretending that his own production of a response does not prove him anxious, or disturbed, or what have you; as he furthermore dismisses (but does not answer) replies as "confessionally driven" even as he forgets that this very same fan that he has encrusted with excrement can be turned around and blown back on him with respect to his "religion" of humanism (and also claiming, hypocritcally, that it is "irrelevant" that Flemming seems "embittered" towards Christianity). Doherty truly excels in but one area, and that is in the use of manipulative rhetoric. It would be better if he had kept that as an addition to a truly scholastic ability rather than concentrating on the one rather than the other. It would also be better if he learned to see the blatant inconsistencies in his own rhetoric.

Let's get to the meat of the matter which concerns us, and that does not start until Part 2; and even here, there are times when little needs to be said, because we already had (even in that past time when Earl was turned to a crisp on the site) provided detailed refutations (or links to them) the claims Doherty has made. We continue to have no expectation that Doherty will engage with our material on the subject of Q, Marcan priority, and Gospel dates and authorship; on such as these, he is clearly able to do no more than rattle the chains of The Ghost of Consensus Present (even as he hypocritically insists that scholars should waste their time engaging his overwhelmingly counter-consensus position, and also hypocritcally points out that Licona did not address the matter of Q in detail, knowing full well that we have, and that he refuses to engage it; and even as he himself employs a badly non-consensus position of dating the Gospels VERY late!). He resorts to such laughable desperations as the suggestion that Luke's prologue was "a later addition" (! -- though of course, no textual-critical evidence exists to that effect, and Luke's prologue does fit a model of a biographical-historical introduction typical for the period; Earl is left to blatter about irrelevancies in context, such as that "the writer of the Prologue makes no mention of his own identity, or any personal link to important figures involved in Christianity's beginnings," never mind that the same could be said of other ancient biographies; for of course Doherty has no interest in placing the NT documents within their proper social-historical context, but rather assumes his own values as a modern Westerner upon them, and then complains when they don't meet his ridiculous, anachronistic expectations). Earl continues to show critical ignorance of such matters as the use of probabilities in literary production, as well as of the answers to such matters as Passover timing difference and the difference between the portrait of Jesus between John and the Synoptics. Answers to all of his points are readily available, and have been for many years; it is clear (especially from his marginal response to our detailed refutations) that Earl has no interest in reply, and is indeed incapable of one. Since Earl cannot even manage a detail-response to us on these matters, despite having had years, let him go and find our replies otherwise himself, if he has the nerve. Which he does not.

So in the end, is there anything in Earl's reply to Licona that we have not already addressed, years in the past (whether against Doherty, or against the position generally)? No. He does resort to rhetorical tricks after his kind, such as this:

Licona makes an appeal to our reliance on the histories of many famous figures in the ancient world having been written far longer after the lives of those figures than the Gospels were written after Jesus, even assuming a later dating than the traditional one. This is a common argument, but basically irrelevant. We have to examine each individual case on its own merits, as to the reliability of the writers, our knowledge about them and their circumstances, the nature of their writings. There is no comparison between sober-minded historians like Diodorus, Plutarch and Arrian writing on Alexander the Great and four unknown authors recounting a miracle-working man-god forecasting the end of the world who redact and contradict each other while writing on an otherwise unattested human figure—much less the Son of God—some three-quarters of a century after the 'fact'.

Earl simply pushes the philosophical buttons of gullible, uncritical Skeptical readers here; by first begging the question of what should be regarded as "sober-minded" reportage (he has already declared "miracle-working man-god" off limits); in other words, completely ignoring the critical issue, which is that it was his original view that lateness somehow equated with unreliability, so now he changes the subject to that of what sort of events are reported. Add to that a dash of hurled elephants (alleged unknown authorship [link above], alleged false prediction of the end of the world, alleged problems in harmonization; alleged lack of otherwise attestation) -- all of which have been refuted in detail on this site and others, and is addressed regularly in the scholarship, but which he refuses to engage, merely preferring his cheap rhetorical victories before a band of dazed fundy atheist admirers. He quotes from his Challenging the Verdict nonsense as well, even though that too has been answered here in detail. Doherty remains ignorant of the facts concerning the high Christology of ALL of the NT documents. Doherty continues to hypocrtically accuse others of "begging the question" even as one of the cores of his thesis remains begging the question of interpreting references to Jesus as a "man" and so on in terms of his Platonic netherland (even as Paul and the others remain eerily "silent" about Jesus' past in this netherworld, just as much proving that his thesis is no more informative).

While I will say that there are some arguments Licona used that I would not, it remains that Doherty's own replies are little more than things that have already been answered here, in detail. If Earl wants to rebut our detailed arguments on the authority and authenticity of the Pastoral letters, he is going to need to do more than stay on his rump in his easy chair and belch out such cheap psychology lessons as, "conservatives are very anxious to try to discredit the mainstream judgment that the Pastorals are second century forgeries written in Paul's name." So why can't I just rebut Doherty by saying that "Christ-mythers are very anxious to try to discredit the informed judgment that the Pastorals are authentic letters written at Paul's behest"? Is that an argument? It is not, and nor is anything Doherty has said. Doherty merely thinks that it is because he cannot imagine that he has wasted his life on a career pursuing a chimera...now how's that for some cheap psychology, eh?

Some comment is in order on Earl's treatment of alleged pagan savior deity parallels. We of course have a detailed series on this issue here; as for Earl, his commentary reminds me of his tap dance in reviewing Acharya S' Christ Conspiracy. On the one hand, he clearly doesn't want to stick his neck out dealing in such details as, "Did Mithra really die and rise after three days?" On the other hand, he wants to support the principle of Jesus as a myth generally. And so he is left with such patent, question-begging idiocies as this comment:

I wish I had a dollar for every time an apologist rattled off this claim that much in the mysteries postdates Christianity and this makes borrowing possible in the other direction. The only accurate aspect of it is that some of the existing evidence for what was contained in the mysteries comes from the second century, a little of it from later centuries, but this does not mean that such features necessarily began only at that later time.

It is amazing indeed how many breaks Earl wants to cut when it comes to this sort of data; but when it comes to the NT or evidence opposing him, suddenly it is all very late and there is no reason to think it came any earlier! Take this as an admission from Earl that the data, as it stands, doesn't give him what he wants, and so he is forced to make excuses like these to keep afloat; this, and collapsing descriptions down to themes that would make Darth Vader a copycat of Abraham Lincoln?

How easy is it to play this game? One of our readers put it this way:

Is Jesus Mehrunes Dagon? Imus Keptic, PhD.

I was playing a new game, "The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion" when I realised that I had stumbled upon another mythical figure Jesus was ripped off! How anyone else managed to miss it is beyond my comprehension. The following may contain information from the game that you might want to find out on your own, so if you plan on playing it, don't read this.

Jesus claims the world is his and plans on ruling it

Mehrunes Dagon claims the world is his and plans on ruling it

Jesus fights a dragon at the end of the Bible

Mehrunes Dagon fights a dragon at the end of Oblivion

Jesus's followers wore robes

Mehrunes Dagon's followers wear robes

Mehrunes Dagon has four arms

Jesus and the Father have four arms in total

Mehrunes Dagon's cult is called the Mythic Dawn

Jesus's tomb was found empty at dawn

Paul promises Jesus's followers eternal life in paradise

Mankar Camoran promises Mehrunes Dagon's followers eternal life in paradise

Mehrunes Dagon wants to destroy the world and rebuild it.

Jesus wants to destroy the world and rebuild it.

Jesus was dead for three days.

I finished Oblivion in thee days.

There you have it ladies and gentlemen, "Jesus" is actually a carbon copy of Mehrunes Dagon. Even the physical similarities are striking. Can you tell which one of these is Jesus?

Earl's games with Jesus and the likes of Attis and Adonis are nothing more than this. When needed, vast differences are ignored, terms are obfuscated in meaning, and parallels and ripped from unrelated contexts. (And yes -- we answered Price's claim in Deconstructing Jesus, the very quote Earl uses, as it happens). He calls such efforts a "dubious exercise" (as Licona uses one of Lincoln and Kennedy), based on the circular excuse that we know that eg, Lincoln and Kennedy are historical! And yet Earl misses the point (as he must, to keep his delusions alive) that the fact that the game can be played so easily with historical figures, destroys this aspect of his argument. By the same token, the fact that my fictional future historian, Phonias Futz, was able to make the same case for a mythical Jesus using a 1970s hymnal, speaks just as well to how easy it is to dehistoricize a historical person by playing with the evidence, using denial, obfuscation (excusing clear differences as "variants" on an overbroad, and therefore epistemically worthless, theme), redefinition (as is done with "resurrection" as is typical), and deceit where necessary. So likewise was it done to Lincoln (in jest) by Utley, who was able to use the same tactics to find Lincoln "mythical". It is also of no moment for Doherty to resolve to the distraction that:

A major factor becomes the nature of the data being paralleled. There is a great difference between the data in the JFK/Lincoln case and the data in the Jesus/savior gods case. Each of the features attributed to Jesus and the other deities we can identify as serving a purpose, and they all form part of a coherent whole within the framework of mythical expression.

Well, fine: Creation of a purpose is a simple exercise; the obvious "purpose" of a JFK/Lincoln parallel (as Futz deduced) was to prop up Lincoln as a wonderful President, as his supporters desired. It is a very simple matter to create out of whole cloth communities of persons with the motives you need for them to have. It is also easy to dismiss the claim that they are "random" for after all they are made to serve a purpose. The difference need not be theological; it can be political, or laudatory and biographical. This is why in the end Earl's only real answer is to beg the question by saying, "Well, yes, but we know that Kennedy was historical. Jesus wasn't." His method destroyed, all that remains is to whiningly restate the thesis.

The travesty continues with Earl rehashing the same (and here refuted, with little or no answer from him) tired canards about the secular references, much of which now amounts to "so and so says otherwise" and accusing modern scholars who differed of being stupid sheep who hopped on the bandwagon. Asking Earl to engage arguments in detail on these points is like asking Bubba to give up his pickup truck and drive a Volkswagen. Let the pitiableness of Earl's "scholarship" speak for itself in that he who claims to be correcting all on Josephus has never heard of Louis Feldman, and admits it! Let it speak further that he thinks that there "are good arguments for postulating an interpolation" in Tacitus (though he declines to actually take that tack).

That is really all that needs to be said; I do not accept the existence of Q (and do not expect Doherty to have the courage to engage any detailed arguments made to the contrary, as we have linked to above), and Doherty's "smoking popgun" affairs are that which we have addressed in detail previously, and which Doherty had (as we showed) no sufficent answer to. It is clear that Doherty employs little more than his usual question-begging counsels of despair when he tries to shift references such as that to Jesus' membership in Judah into the Platonic nether-world and claim it was merely derived from Scripture (though however it was derived, it remains a severely begged question to "Platonize" it). One thing I would note, for it reflects my work since first addressing Doherty: As a preterist, I have no need to defend the idea that the NT indicates a "return" for Jesus. I read his "coming" in terms of an enthronement in heaven, and so it does not matter to me if texts do not indicate a "return".

Far from being the Best Explanation, Doherty's Christ-myth thesis continually resorts to evasion, redefinition, and circular reasoning to survive. Likewise, far from being the Best Explainer, Doherty avoids (as much as possible) direct responses to detailed rebuttals of his argument. His explanations are devoid of connections to the relevant contexts (other than Platonism, and the correctness of that connection has been questioned by others as well) and resort time and time again fringe positions which are defended with no more than "he says so". I have to conclude that years ago, I gave Doherty far too much credit as a researcher.

In light of that Doherty's ideas have been recently popularized by TGWWT, it seemed judicious to examine comments made on Doherty's work by someone else that moviemaker interviewed, Richard Carrier. This review was written some years ago, which means it may not fully represent all that Carrier now accepts or believes. But we wish to address certain ideas within which will remain the same regardless, so after this paragraph Carrier's name will not appear in this essay.