Creative to the Max: Outrageous Ideas for Youth Ministry Book

There is a recent phenomenon among the online atheist community which tries to argue that Jesus wasn't a historical person. Richard Carrier is the most well known advocate of this view today, but the idea seems to be growing. He wrote a book in 2014 titled "On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt." He argues that there is no independent (that is, outside of the New Testament) historical evidence confirming that Jesus existed. It seems that among the online atheist community, this view is getting some traction. This got me interested in wanting to explore the extra-NT evidence for Jesus more carefully. I knew about the Josephus quote and the fact that Tacitus mentions Christ, but I wanted to know if there was more ancient evidence, and also to examine the historical credibility of such evidence. That lead me to this book by Gary Habermas, although it was published in 1996, a couple of decades before this recent movement. I thought it might be a helpful resource to answer them since a similar position was argued earlier (1970s) by G.A. Wells. Habermas devotes a chapter to Wells and Michael Martin, an atheist who depended on Wells to deny the historicity of Jesus (ch. 2).

Habermas divides the book into three parts. Part 1 is "Contemporary Challenges to the Historicity of Jesus," which deals with things like the modern quest for the historical Jesus, the aforementioned ahistorical Jesus view of Wells and Martin, the Jesus seminar, etc. It includes a critique of the Humean a priori rejection of the miraculous. Part 2 is "Historical Data for the Life of Jesus," which is the heart of the book and the section that most interested me. Part 3 contains three appendices: an essay on historiography, an apologetic outline, and a selected bibliography for the non-Christian historical sources discussed in Part 2.

Looking now at Part 2, this section has four main chapters plus a summary and assessment. Chapter 7 is on the early Christian creeds imbedded in the NT (e.g., 1 Tim 3:16; Rom 1:3-4; and most important of all, 1 Cor 15:3-4). Chapter 8 is on archaeological sources: the Titulus Venetus (which supports the historicity of the census of Luke 2:1-5), Yohanan, a skeleton of a first century crucifixion victim, and the Shroud of Turin. Chapter 9 is the key chapter for me: the ancient non-Christian sources that refer to Jesus as a historical person (Tacitus, Suetonius, Josephus, Thallus, Pliny the Younger, the Emperor Trajan, the Emperor Hadrian, the Talmud, the Toledoth Jesu, Lucian, Mara Bar-Serapion, various Gnostic writings, the (lost) Acts of Pilate, and Phlegon). Chapter 10 is on ancient Christian sources outside of the NT (e.g., Clement of Rome, Ignatius, Quadratus, Barnabas, and Justin Martyr).

For me, the chapter on the archaeological evidence was exceedingly weak, especially Habermas's heavy reliance on the Shroud of Turin which he defends as authentic. I fail to see how it is relevant to the question of the historicity of Jesus. Even if it were proven to be from the first century, it could be any man and doesn't point specifically to Jesus. Habermas also repeatedly argues that the image on the shroud was caused by a "scorch" emanating from the corpse. What in the world? I wasn't aware that dead bodies got hot. My layman's understanding is that they cooled off. That whole section was highly distracting and totally irrelevant to the argument of the book.

The problem is, Habermas is not a critical historian, and this comes out in his handling of historical documents in Ch. 9 (Ancient Non-Christian Sources). In this chapter, he includes too many works that are clearly historically worthless. For example, he includes the Toledoth Jesu, a late Jewish work from the middle ages that gives a scurrilous account of the life of Jesus as part of a clearly anti-Christian polemic. Then there are the Gnostic writings, which do not have any independent historical value and are clearly dependent on the canonical Gospels. It's not even clear if these documents are referring to Jesus as a historical person, since they are more interested in their Gnostic speculations. Habermas does this weird dance where he admits that the Gnostic writings are esoteric, theologically oriented, and freely incorporating Gnostic speculations, but then says these qualifications "do not necessitate unreliable reporting of historical facts about Jesus" (p. 215)--as if they were in any sense purporting to be reporting historical facts in the first place! He then concludes that we should be "cautious" about using the Gnostic writings as independent historical evidence. No, we shouldn't be cautious; we should set them aside. I am left with the impression Habermas is simply trying to increase the total tally of ancient historical sources that refer to Jesus. It is a shame, because there really are solid pieces of evidence in this chapter (especially the Greek and Roman sources, Tacitus, Suetonius, Josephus, etc.). But by including the worthless amid the valuable, and giving "cautious" credibility to the worthless, it diminishes the credibility of the other evidence, or at least it diminishes our confidence in Habermas's overall argument.

Returning then to my quest for a response to the modern Jesus deniers, I must say that this book is not the answer. To be fair, Habermas wrote this book before the modern Jesus deniers (Richard Carrier et al), so it is perhaps not totally surprising that I was disappointed in my quest. My disappointment in the book is largely due to the fact that I wanted it to do something that it wasn't written to do. My disappointment was compounded by the poor historical reasoning, reliance on the totally irrelevant Shroud of Turin, and use of historically worthless writings like the Toledoth Jesu and the Gnostic documents. On the other hand, one can dig through the book and find some good nuggets, especially the argument about the early Christian creeds (ch. 7) and *some* of the documents examined in the non-Christian sources (ch. 9).