I follow Richard Carrier on Twitter. Richard is currently one of the foremost proponents of Jesus Mythicism. Last year I read his book “On The Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt”, and while I wasn’t exactly convinced by his arguments, I found them at least plausible. In his timeline, there was a discussion among two other Twitter users, and I found the below tweets particularly interesting:
… contrived and contradictory nativity stories in gLuke and gMatt. Then there is the fact that Paul met his brother. Hard to do if the guy in question didn’t exist. Details here: https://t.co/7nfqDof4Zs
— Tim O’Neill (@TimONeill007) August 15, 2018
In another tweet, Tim, the user who tweeted the above statement, states that the existence or non-existence of Jesus is not particularly important to him, but that he finds it more convincing that he did actually exist simply based on the historical record. This is not to say that the Jesus of the New Testament accurately portrays the historical figure of Jesus, but that there is a historical figure behind the legend found in the Gospels, nothing more. Having given the above tweets more thought, I think its one of the most convincing arguments I have come across in favour of Jesus’ historicity recently. While this may sound similar to the Criterion of Embarrasment that is sometimes used by apologists to argue in favour of the reliability of the Gospel accounts of Jesus, I don’t think that it is necessary to go that far, given the internal contradictions and other problems we have with the source material.
