Nope, mythicists, Nazareth is real

And, Jonathan M.S. Pearce, while he may, or may not, have some credibility as a philosopher, is losing more and more on biblical studies issues, and a Christmas vacation has let me detox from reading him at Patheos, due to not having time to look at daily Disqus updates from someone I don't actually follow any more, information which Disqus' notification system has failed to, or maybe deliberately refused to, process.

This is a follow-up to an earlier post, about a post of his where I wound up blocking multiple mythicists, starting with an outright liar.

(Per an update below, originally inserted in the middle of this piece and being kept there even as it lengthens, I appear to have picked up some persnickety Gnu baggage on MeWe, who's also moving into lie-land.)

Said outright liar claimed Nazareth didn't exist in the time of Jesus. I presented a 2009 archaeological study that said "yes it did." He then claimed the Israeli Antiquities Authority pulled back somewhat from the author's statements.

(Pictured at right: A house in Nazareth dated to the first century CE and believed by some Christians to be the house of Jesus' childhood.)

First, that's not the same as rejecting the findings. Second, new archaeological study, from 2015 and ongoing to the degree it can, has found new evidence that says yes it did exist then. His response? Handwaving and talking about Helena. (He then pulled out Jesus ben Pandera, with his one mythicist website claiming he lived circa 100 BCE. Wrong. That's conflating the idea that the HJ may have been based on a Jesus crucified by Alexander Jannaeus with the ben Pandera of the Toledoth Yeshu.) More here on the actual existence of first-century Nazareth. Tis true that we cannot date to more precisely in the first century, but that alone undercuts mythicists.

And, Pearce himself started looking ever more like a mythicist fellow traveler at a minimum in a follow-up post nine months later, last December. From a new post, I quote.

Rene Salm’s thesis in The Myth of Nazareth: The Invented Town of Jesus that Nazareth did not exist at the time of Jesus, according to archaeological analysis, and not until at least 70 CE.

This is simply not true. One cannot generally date archaeological evidence of habitation to that precise of a time. I'm sure Pearce's quoted author would say something like "but the Judean revolt." And I would respond: Rome did not put every village in Galilee and Judea to fire and the sword. Oh, and I'll take Ken Dark, author of the second linked piece three paragraphs above, over Rene Salm any time. James McGrath, whom I will also take over Salm, offers indirect further evidence for the existence of Nazareth at the time of Jesus.

I want to quote McGrath, as it's another line that to some degree is applicable to mythicists in general:

Even before recent work was done, however, we had a Jewish inscription related to priestly courses which mentioned Nazareth in roughly the third century. One merely had to note the unlikelihood that priests resettling after the destruction of the temple in the year 70 would have founded a town with the name of a fictional site invented by Christians, and one had sufficient evidence to make it likely that Nazareth existed before then.

That's followed by this:

For those who may have bought into the “Nazareth never existed” nonsense, I encourage you to reflect on the fact that you have listened to the archaeological equivalent of young-earth creationists. They might well be genuinely skeptical in other areas, but in this one they’ve bought into a conspiracy theory, and one that simply does not fit the evidence we’ve long had, much less the evidence that has come to light more recently.

Sorry, but it's true.

Dark also notes elsewhere how soon after Jesus' death Christians were to put labels on some sites as being part of Jesus' history. They still may not be accurate, but the earliest of the labelings could reflect an oral history going back further than the first written sources and so, at a minimum, should NOT be rejected out of hand. 

(Update: After posting this to a Philosophy of Religion group on MeWe, I've run into someone exemplifying mythicist tactics and who also looks like a Gnu Atheist. First, he rejects linkage between Nazareth's alleged non-existence and mythicism. When I accuse him of selected reading, he doubles down, claiming that the dating of Nazareth is impossible because the original dig is unscientific. I responded by pointing out Dark's piece, noting he's an academic archaeologist, and that he illustrates how to do comparative dating in such cases. I finished by second response by directly asking him if he's a Gnu as well as if he's a mythicist. [I also think "Cheap Philosophy" completes the trifecta by being a scientism guy.] And, as of 48 hours after my call-out, he hadn't responded. Per the old not-so-cliche? "Silence gives assent."

And, 18 days later, that's truer yet. Cheapo thought he had me by saying Yardenna Alexandre is also an academic archaeologist. Problem for him? She doesn't actually refudiate Dark at all! Nutgraf opens the piece:

Nazareth may be best known for its famous ancient resident — Jesus — but as British-Israeli archaeologist Yardenna Alexandre notes in this week’s The Times of Israel Podcast, the once small village with huge name recognition existed well before and well after his lifetime.

Otherwise, he didn't answer my two questions, and so I posted the "Silence gives assent" as part of my response.

It gets worse. He then went on to lie and claim that Dark said he'd found Jesus' house. He then ground-shifted again and became a Gnu Atheist biblical literalist, saying that the New Testament calling Nazareth a "town" not a "village" undermined it. Nope. All that means is that the gospellers, writing 45-75 years later and not from Galilee, were uninformed of the size of Nazareth, and perhaps, along the lines of Nathaniel wondering in John if anything good could come from Nazareth, figuring it "had to be" a town not a village.

The guy has outrightly lied more than once, been unfamiliar with what I said myself and what Ken Dark had said, and been unfamiliar with Alexandre as an alleged refutation of Dark. It's Gnus like this that lead me to call them a modern version of village idiot atheists.)

Pearce says he's "not sold on mythicism" (my emphasis) but he certainly doesn't reject it, claiming he finds Salm's work "interesting though." It must be noted that Salm is not an academic, or even close. Shades of Joe Atwill, he's a music teacher!!! If anything, he's anti-academic vis-a-vis biblical scholarship. You may not be "sold" on mythicism, Jonathan ... but you're close to duck-quacking. Pearce appears to be a budget British version of Mark Carrier (who now claims early Christians thought Jesus was a space alien, or maybe a British Neil Carter. He's got just an M.S., not a Ph.D., but otherwise promoting himself, doing freelance teaching, etc.? The same. And for someone with some sort of academic background to call Salm "interesting though" and surely knowing Salm's background? Pearce is close to, if not full-on, duck quacking.

So, yes, Pearce, that's why I'll take LOTS of people over Salm.

AND, lots of people over you. And, now that I see you've been at Skeptic Ink as well as Patheos, I'll add to that. Especially given that you're arguably an Islamophobe.

(Update, June 12: Pierce says now he leans away from mythicism, and actually, see below as for how it plays out, cites things like the scandal of particularity to boost a historical Jesus claim.)

Finally, there's the scandal of particularity, perhaps strongest in John, where Nathaniel sneers in John 1:45, "Can anything good come from Nazareth?" and John 7 having the rhetorical question about the Messiah not coming from Galilee. Per Pearce's post in question at his comment, I agree with him than Matthew 2 mangles "netzer." BUT ... Matthew is doing pesher on the Tanakh via the Septuagint. (The author of the Gospel was almost certainly a Greek-speaker.) And, perhaps, this is his attempt to explain away where Jesus is from with hand-waving, or to deliberate conflate different Hebrew words into a bad pun or three, shades of the Yahwist. The wrongness, deliberate mangling, or whatever, is no proof that Nazareth didn't exist. None.

Per History for Atheists, what we're seeing Pearce do is a commonplace among mythicists: Attack Matthew not for using the wrong word, or botching two Hebrew ideas together (which is still possible), but for deliberate substitution as sleight-of-hand. In this case, it's also a "fail." A Greek-speaking Jew from the diaspora, more familiar with Galilee perhaps than Mark but not that familiar, would likely not know that this was a sleight of hand. And, as HfA notes, Mark uses a different Greek word than Matthew, meaning at a minimum, both aren't committing the same wrong.

The most likely story, given he had one known Zealot (anachronistic to a degree) and one possible Sicarian disciple is that Jesus was born and raised in Nazareth, and that this was indeed an embarrassment. As gospelers reached the second and third generations, they not only invented a birth for him in Bethlehem, but also invented a Davidic family tree which most likely is totally untrue in both Matthew and Luke.

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Pearce himself claims not to be a mythicist but has said the historic Jesus idea is basically silly. It's less silly than accepting at face value the claims of a non-academic like Salm, dude. Philosophically, you know what "operationalism" is and you've demonstrated it.

He is also apparently an Islamophobe.