One of the few Jesus Mythicist with any kind of relevant credentials is Raphael Lataster. He has had an article published in a journal titled, “Questioning the Plausibility of Jesus Ahistoricity Theories.”
I am not going to reply to everything that he says in the article but there are a couple of comments that I do want to make. I am going to break this up over a number of blog posts and I hope that you read them all.
One of Lataster’s critiques is:
Unfortunately, biblical scholars do not have access to primary sources, arguably rendering all of their conclusions about the historical Jesus as susceptible to doubt.
This might surprise some Christians in that they would consider the Gospels to be primary sources. Now the Gospels are primary sources for what the church believed about Jesus in the second half of the first century, but are they primary sources for the existence of Jesus?
It seems as if Lataster would like to see actual actual texts written during the life of Jesus as reasonable evidence for his existence. I would like to see that as well. But having a text from the lifetime of the figure is not a requirement for us to be reasonable confident of the existence of an ancient figure.
Now, a primary source is does not have to be written during the lifetime. A witness to the assassination of John F. Kennedy could write down their account after the events, including details about JFK’s life, and that would be a primary source.
Are the four canonical Gospels primary sources? If they were written by eyewitnesses, they could. Holding to traditional authorship for a moment, there is no evidence that Mark or Luke were eyewitnesses to the life of Jesus. They are reporting from what they have heard from others.
What about Matthew and John? If those Gospels were written by the apostles Matthew and John, they would be eyewitnesses and they would be primary sources. Many Christian apologists would hold to this view.
However, that view is only held by a mostly evangelical minority of scholars. We will be reminded that the Gospels are technically anonymous. I unpack what we mean by that here.
I would agree with Richard Bauckham that the Gospels contain eyewitness testimony. It is even possible that the final editors/authors of the Gospels were eyewitnesses but we cannot know for sure.
This may mean that we need to accept that the Gospels are secondary sources. But there are secondary sources of differing quality. For example, a police report after a crime is a secondary source, and yet it is given a high value by the court of law.
Historically, we do not require the kind of primary sources that Lataster calls for here to determine historicity. Even prominent figures in history rarely have that kind of historical evidence and yet we do not doubt that they existed.
Next time, I will look at what else Lataster has to say in his argument for the ahistory of Jesus.
