After this introduction on morality, Licona moves to the body of his critique, addressing the debate over the historicity of the Jesus of the Gospels. What he has to say is full of defective reasoning, and what I would call shallow argumentation, in that in contesting some aspect of the opposing position, he appeals to some minor or incidental point (often misunderstood or misrepresented) relating to the issue under debate, and then declares that this destroys the opponent's case. His critique is a long one, and deals with statements in The God Who Wasn't There by Flemming, myself, Richard Carrier, Robert Price and others. While I will address in detail most of what he says about the Jesus Myth theory, I will make only the occasional passing comment on what he has to say about others' contributions, leaving it to them to respond more fully themselves, if they so wish.

The Gospels and Paul

Licona starts by addressing the claim, as stated by Flemming, that there is a gap of at least 40 years, probably more, between Jesus' alleged life and the recording of that life in the Gospels, and that all of the later Gospels essentially derive from Mark. He declares this "far from the truth." But what makes the truth "far" from this statement? He says,

Although it is granted by most scholars that Matthew and Luke used Mark as one of their sources, they had other sources as well. The hypothetical "Q" source which Doherty acknowledges may be one of those sources. Luke reported that many had written accounts of what Jesus said and did before he wrote his Gospel (Luke 1:1)....

Considering that Licona points out in a endnote that "a number of scholars are now questioning whether Q existed," it would seem he is offering such a source (which I do believe existed) only tentatively, and nowhere in his critique does he further address Q or its content to see how well it might provide us with a secure source for Jesus, particularly in the area of biography rather than simply imputed sayings. His use of Luke's Prologue is rather naive, in that he fails to consider the possibility that this is a later addition, especially as prior to the Gospels known as Matthew and Luke, we possess no document outlining anything pertaining to the Gospel story other than the Gospel of Mark. This should lead to suspicion about the early authenticity of the Prologue, with its statement that "many writers have undertaken to draw up an account of the events that have happened among us..." This, along with the next words, "...following the traditions handed down to us by the original eyewitnesses," suggests both the passage of time and points to a period, such as well into the second century, when "many writer's accounts" would indeed have been available. I would also take the opportunity to point out 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. This omission severely weakens the claim that the author of this Gospel is Luke, companion of Paul, since such an author would have had every reason to identify himself in light of what he is saying in the Prologue itself. And in the case that this is a later editor's addition to an existing Gospel of Luke, it also indicates that at the time of such editing, there was no circulating tradition that "Luke" had been its author, else the editor would certainly have made such an identification.

Licona goes on:

Regarding John's use of Mark, the prominent New Testament scholar Larry Hurtado writes that

"probably most (but by no means all) scholars nowadays hold that the author(s) of John (at least at the earliest stage of the process that led to our present text) either did not know of, and refer to, any of the Synoptic Gospels or, at the least, did not use them as sources in the way the authors of Matthew and Luke used Mark (and Q)."

Moreover, most of today's scholars believe that much of the tradition in John is from one of Jesus' disciples, although there is no consensus about who that disciple was. Many believe the author was the apostle John or a minor disciple who traveled with Jesus but was not one of the twelve.

I do not know Larry Furtado first-hand (though I'll have more to say about his reported views later), but he at least betrays some liberal elements in regard to John in the above quote, which is in marked contrast to Licona's own follow-up statement. As I said earlier, Licona has a habit of appealing to "most of today's scholars" when he is really referring to the most conservative circles among them. Other than his appeal (to be discussed later) to various scholars and historians who have rejected the idea that Jesus never existed, the most 'critical' scholar he draws on seems to be the late Raymond E. Brown, and although Brown commands well-merited respect, he is anything but a liberal. Most of Licona's authorities are at the level of Craig Blomberg, whom he cites in an endnote here as supporting the "Johannine authorship" (that is, the apostle John, son of Zebedee) of the Fourth Gospel. There is hardly a "critical" scholar today worthy of that description who would state this with any degree of confidence, or even countenance it at all. And none of them would go so far as to consider that the content of John, especially the teachings, was the product of eyewitness or the authentic voice of Jesus. The type of authority Licona relies on rises no higher into the critical stratosphere than those interviewed by Lee Strobel in his The Case for Christ, and I am not the only one to point out the ultra-conservative nature of Strobel's body of New Testament scholars.

Licona goes on to make a completely unsupportable statement:

Some details in John (e.g., Jesus' arrest & trial) actually cohere better with known historical conditions and are not related to John's theology...

If there is one thing critical scholars are agreed upon, it is that John's content is almost entirely determined by theological considerations. Prominent among these is the equation of Jesus with the paschal lamb, his identification of him as such. To that end, he has changed the very day of the crucifixion from that of the Synoptics so that Jesus' death on the cross coincides with the slaughter of the lambs in the Temple on Passover eve, rather than the first day of Passover itself. Paschal Lamb imagery is used throughout the entire Gospel, and features of the story and the teachings placed in Jesus' mouth are altered to fit such theological interests. He introduces, alone among all the evangelists, the piercing of Jesus' side by the Roman soldier in order to conform to a perceived prophecy that "no bone [of the lamb] shall be broken." I am not sure what Licona has in mind in his reference to details particularly in John's arrest and trial as "coher[ing] to known historical conditions," but it is precisely events in those final scenes of Jesus' life as presented by John which lead critical scholars to see Johannine dependence on the synoptics. He fashions the basic structure of the whole business just as they do, and it is telling that he employs the same literary structure of "intercalation" first introduced by Mark (it is one of Mark's common fingerprints) in the denial by Peter scene. After Jesus' arrest, Peter is brought into the High Priest's courtyard to set up the scene, then both authors cut away to the scene of Jesus' questioning by the Sanhedrin, then come back to complete the scene of Peter's denial. (Luke is the one evangelist who does not bother to follow Mark's lead here.) John also introduces a number of "fine-tuning" elements over the Synoptic precedents: he further clarifies the role of Joseph of Arimathea and the burial of Jesus; he introduces Jesus' mother to the crucifixion itself where no other record does so; he gives us an entire philosophical discussion between Jesus and Pilate where the other evangelists have Jesus saying almost nothing (in keeping with other biblical 'prophecies'). It is hardly likely that John would be privy to all these fuller traditions, sometimes in contradiction to the other Gospels, while the remaining evangelists were not; rather they make best sense as his own amendments and additions in keeping with his own purposes. (Those changes involve the astonishing elimination of the establishment of the Eucharist at the final meal, and the complete excision of Gethsemane!) The dramatic difference between Jesus' teachings in John and those of the rest of the Gospels is inexplicable unless the former are simply the product of the Johannine community, imposed on the synoptic story line. None of this gives us any confidence that John is working either from history, or independently of the synoptic writers. Conservative scholarship is rightly perplexed as to who in Jesus' circles could possibly have been "witness" to such divergence in tradition, and we can see the figure of the "beloved disciple" as an invention of the author of John to provide his community with its own link back to Jesus himself.

Flemming's whole point, and my own, is that if there is so much evidence of literary connection between the various evangelists, with all of the essentials (especially the biographical ones) going back to a single original author, namely Mark, the historicity of any of it is thrown into serious doubt. If none of the elements of the story can be found in the wider non-Gospel documents of the first century (we can talk about Acts later), if there is no trace of the wealth of diverse traditions about Jesus and his life—not just the Gospel way of presenting them—which ought to have been saturating the Christian communities of the time, the actuality of a Jesus of Nazareth as portrayed in the Gospels rests on very shaky ground. Again, there is nothing "hyper" about this skepticism. It is a simple and natural proposition justified by the record itself.

For Johannine dependence on the Synoptics, I recommend Robert Price's The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man. Many of the points he makes relating to this can be found in my review of that book on this website. Price's observations ought to resolve the "no consensus" (Robert Funk, Honest to Jesus, p.239) situation among scholars in regard to the source of John's passion story.

Licona objects to my "radical" dating of the Gospels: an 85-90 approximation for Mark and the rest by around 125. This is certainly not radical by the standards of truly radical scholarship (which is a wide phenomenon today, and not just among Jesus mythicists) in regard to dating. Licona points to the view of "nearly all modern scholars" as holding to the traditional dating of Mark around 70 and the rest by the end of the century. But that's just what it is: a scholarly tradition, virtually a bandwagon effect. It is based on very little, and is open to contention as much as any other opinion in this field. It is certainly not based on attestation, since clear attestation of any of the Gospels does not exist much before the middle of the second century. The 'early-as-possible' dating of the P52 fragment of John is self-serving and cannot be guaranteed before 150. Critical scholars such as Helmut Koester acknowledge that Gospel-sounding elements in turn-of-century writings like the Didache or the letters of Ignatius are more likely to come from oral tradition and not written Gospels, and there is other evidence in such writings to indicate that their authors do not know any written Gospel.

Dating the Gospel of Mark to 70 or shortly after is based almost entirely on Jesus' apocalyptic prediction of the Temple's destruction in Mark 13 and its versions in the other Synoptics. But I have pointed out indicators in the passage itself which suggest otherwise, including Jesus' own words which seem to be formulated to allow for some time to have passed after the destruction of the Temple. Many of the conditions alluded to are compatible, sometimes better so, with my later date than the traditional one. These arguments are laid out in The Jesus Puzzle, p.194-5, and I won't detail them here.

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'.

In answer to Flemming's statement that the letters of Paul are virtually all we have of the history of Christianity beween Jesus and the Gospels, Licona points to Acts:

The book of Acts is usually dated to have been written between AD 61-85. Even if we date Acts on the outer end, we have a document that is a history of the Church between AD 30-61. That is, it was written only 25-55 years after the events it purports to describe, given the outer limits of a critical dating.

The year 85 is hardly the limit of the critical dating of Acts. Several scholars (John Knox, Burton Mack, J. C. O'Neill, J. T. Townsend) place it well into the second century, and I have presented arguments in The Jesus Puzzle (p.269-71) for regarding it as the product of the Roman church to counter 'heretical' views, especially about Paul, during the Marcionite period. As in the case of the Gospels, the early dating of Acts is hardly based on attestation. There is none for this document before the year 170. That such an account of the early Church could have existed for a century and be drawn on by not a single Christian writer is simply inconceivable. As for some of the arguments apologists make for dating Acts to 62, prior to Paul's death since no mention is made of it, I'll quote from my response to Lee Strobel in Challenging the Verdict (p.18-19) as an example of a type of common sense thinking that needs to be brought more often to the claims made in this field:

Well, I have to say, Dr. Blomberg, that this is a pretty shaky line of deduction, since it’s based on a very uncertain starting premise. There could be any number of reasons why the author of Acts chose to end his book where he did. For example, it has been suggested that Acts’ plot line is symbolic of the faith’s early expansion from Jerusalem to Rome, from a Jewish beginning to a gentile culmination, so the author may well have wanted to avoid ending on a negative note. That symbolic progression would have been somewhat compromised by having Paul get his head chopped off.
     It also strikes me as a little naïve to assume that Luke just happened to write his work in that narrow time span after Paul’s arrival in Rome but before he met his fate....I could add that much of Acts contradicts the information supplied by Paul himself in his letters, and thus it is highly unlikely that this document could have been written in the lifetime of Paul. If Acts was indeed written by Paul’s “beloved physician,” how could he have gotten so many things wrong? If it was not, and yet was still written before 62, the author would have been forced to go directly to Paul for much of his information, since traditions about Paul’s movements and experiences would hardly have been circulating so soon.
     For example, Acts portrays Paul on his conversion as immediately subordinating himself to the apostles in Jerusalem, but the epistles show him operating quite independently and in occasional conflict with them; he fails even to contact them for three years. The so-called Apostolic Conference in Acts 15 has Paul and the apostles in Jerusalem coming to an agreement on the question of gentile observance of the Jewish Law, yet in Galatians 2 these issues are still unresolved after that meeting. And so on.

Licona refers to the "early kerygma" involving stories of an historical Jesus, but this is simply an appeal to Acts. We have no secure reason for dating Acts so early, or for relying on it to contain accurate historical information. Since there are obvious tendential features of Acts' portrayal (as in Paul cooperating entirely with the Jerusalem apostles, in clear contradiction to his own letters), since dramatic elements like the Pentecost experience and the martyrdom of Stephen are nowhere to be found in the rest of the early Christian record, since all the speeches are from the same authorial hand and lack virtually all of the high Christology found in the early epistles, and for many other reasons, Acts must be rejected as providing anything that can be reliably used to verify claims about the early nature of Christianity or an historical Jesus.

Besides relying on the unreliable, Licona is not above arguing using various fallacious mechanisms, one of which is begging the question.

Contrary to Flemming, there are a number of reasons for believing that Paul was familiar with the historical Jesus. First, since Paul was a committed Jew, he would have been in Jerusalem during the Passover as Jesus would have been. Thus, there is a good possibility that both Jesus and Paul were in Jerusalem at the same time and that Paul even heard Jesus teach. Second, Paul declares that he opposed the Church to the point of persecuting its believers. Acts reports that Paul had heard the testimony of Stephen about Jesus just before Stephen was martyred. And surely others, both the persecuted and the persecutors, would have shared information about the historical Jesus with Paul.

This happens so often, and not only from Licona, that one really has to assume that such debaters do not understand the principle of begging the question. Flemming has made the statement that "Paul doesn't believe that Jesus was ever a human being. He's not even aware of the idea." He bases this on the fact (or claim, if you like, since it can be—and has been—challenged) that within the catalogue of Paul's own words we receive no statement or indication that Paul regards Jesus as someone who was a recent human being on earth. In other words, this is a conclusion, accurate or otherwise, drawn first-hand from the primary evidence itself. To 'disprove' this, Licona points to various considerations which amount to begging the question: that is, he draws alleged deductions from other ideas which entail the assumption itself of the very issue in question.

That is, in answer to the statement that Paul's words present no knowledge of an historical Jesus, Licona says that Paul was likely in Jerusalem at Passover and could thus have bumped into Jesus at the time of the events surrounding the passion. There is, of course, no statement or evidence anywhere that this actually happened, but this assumes the existence of Jesus and his presence in Jerusalem at the time of an historically true Gospel story. Licona is using this assumption (which is the question under debate) to help 'disprove' that very question as stated by Flemming. It is even more blatant and obvious when Licona argues that Flemming's statement is wrong, that Paul would have known about an historical Jesus, because certain people would have shared information about the historical Jesus with Paul! The latter is again, an assumption, based on nothing evidentiary. While Flemming's statement is based on direct evidence, that is, the interpretation of Paul's words and silence in the epistles, Licona thinks to counter that with a presumption, not only not based on any direct evidence (since no one records, including Paul himself, that he was told by anyone about an historical Jesus), but on something that relies on Flemming's statement being a priori wrong. He is trying to prove something wrong by essentially stating it as being wrong. That's begging the question, a blatant case of it, and it's a logical fallacy. Too many people like Licona can't recognize that, and we'll see more examples of it as we go along. (Bishop Spong, despite being an intelligent and critical scholar, was guilty of precisely this kind of question begging in recent correspondence: see my response to Gordon in Reader Feedback 25.)

If Flemming had simply stated that Paul would have had no chance to know, or know about, an historical Jesus, then Licona's arguments would have been legitimate. They would simply have provided arguments for that "chance to know." They do not provide counter evidence for the deduction drawn from Paul's letters that he in fact did not know or know of an historical Jesus.

Licona goes on:

Third, Paul wrote: "We have known Christ according to the flesh" (2 Corinthians 5:16). This seems to imply that he had some knowledge of Jesus' earthly life.

This is a perennial favorite, but as certain translations (like the NEB, which translates kata sarka as "worldly standards") and certain scholars (like C. K. Barrett, see his Second Epistle to the Corinthians, p.170, as detailed in endnote 14 of The Jesus Puzzle) have shown, the "according to the flesh" modifies "have known" and not "Christ." It describes the disposition of the believers, not the nature of Christ.

Fourth, on three occasions in Paul's letters he shows that he is familiar with the sayings of Jesus (1 Cor 7:10; 9:14; 11:1, 2, 20-25)....

What Licona is not familiar with is mainstream scholarship's concept of "words of the Lord," the practice of Christian prophets like Paul declaring that they have received and are delivering pronouncements of Christ from heaven (in the same way that "John" receives and passes on the words of Jesus in the book of Revelation). Licona's "sayings of Jesus" as delivered by Paul fall naturally into that category, especially as he never speaks of Jesus as a human teacher, and seems ignorant of teachings far more important than the paltry directives about divorce and reimbursing apostles. (See also The Jesus Puzzle, p.29-30 for other indicators of this interpretation.) In 1 Thess. 4:9 he declares that the one who has taught us to love one another is God himself, not Jesus. As for 1 Corinthians 11:23f, we will revisit that later, but Paul's declaration in verse 23 that he got this information "from the Lord himself" indicates he is speaking of a personal revelation from Jesus to him, and not anything known through historical tradition.

Sixth, Paul reports that he went to Jerusalem to visit Peter. The word he uses for visit in Greek is historēsai, from which we derive the English word history. Thus, as many scholars have noted, during Paul's first visit with the apostles as a new believer, he is certain to have asked them for details about the Lord he now served, details of both his earthly life and his teachings, the same information each of us would be interested in if we were now in Paul's place....

"He is certain to have asked them..." More question-begging of the sort discussed above. And if Paul is "certain" to have been interested in such details, why do they never appear in his letters? If his listeners and converts were certain to have been equally interested, why does he never give them any, even in situations were such references would be pertinent? I have no doubt that, in some other context, Licona has equally argued that Paul doesn't mention such details because he wasn't interested in them, which is a common 'explanation' for Paul's silence found throughout apologetic, and even mainstream, debate on this point.

As for historēsai, Licona is drawing a page from Lee Strobel, his interview of Gary Habermas in The Case for Christ (p.229). I'll reply as I did in Challenging the Verdict (p.196):

The problem is, Dr. Habermas, that you have given a debatable interpretation even of this single word. You’ll note that even the NIV, the translation I just gave of the Galatians verse, does not bear you out. There, historeo is rendered in its usual meaning, that Paul is simply going to Jerusalem to “get acquainted with” Peter, not to investigate him or anything else. Bauer’s Lexicon defines the verb this way: “To visit for the purpose of coming to know someone or something.” The Analytical Greek Lexicon gives: “to visit in order to become acquainted with,” and points to Galatians 1:18. Since Peter is in the accusative case, this makes him the object of the ‘visit for acquaintance.’ If this were a formal investigative inquiry, as you put it, one might expect the object quoted would be Jesus, the doctrine, the creed, the tradition, or whatever.
     On the other hand, Bauer does quote a scholar who reads the verb in this case as meaning ‘to get information from,’ and that is certainly one of the meanings the Greek word can have, though translators rarely choose it. So perhaps we can allow for a certain amount of leeway in that direction. The question is, what sort of information might Paul have been seeking? How the Jerusalem group formulated their gospel? In what parts of the country they were active? Whether they might agree or disagree with Paul’s view of the Law? Peter’s preference in travelling suits? It could have been anything. Since Paul gives us nothing remotely concrete about the matter, and never says that he got information on the faith from anyone, we are not entitled to simply read what we would like into the situation and presume this as evidence for the position we wish to advocate.

Licona's other few points involve a "may indicate" and a "could have been" and (in a quote from Paul Barnett) even a "There can be no doubt that..." Unfortunately, this is the sort of argumentation that the anti-mythicist position too often is forced to have recourse to, unbacked by any evidence.

In the matter of the Lord's Supper, Licona says that Flemming's claim that Paul "never quotes anything that Jesus is supposed to have said," is easily debunked, pointing to 1 Corinthians 11:24. "Paul is obviously aware of the Jesus tradition known by the Evangelists (Mark 14:22; Matt 26:26; Luke 22:19)." As I pointed out, it is anything but obvious, since Paul says he got these words "from the Lord himself." Paul would hardly make such a claim of personal revelation if such words and traditions were circulating in oral transmission based on knowledge of an historical event. He'd look like a bit of an ass. (The perennial apologetic argument based on apo vs. para has been shown to be invalid, as in practice these two prepositions were interchangeable.) Once this is realized, we have to ask is this Paul's perceived revelation about a mythical event, along the lines of the sacred meals of other savior-god cults? We might also ask whether the Gospel rendition of this meal and these words are ultimately based on such a mythical tradition, whether from Paul or some other source.

Paul is familiar with Pilate and John the Baptist in his speech in Acts 13:25,28....

But only if we can depend on Acts being reliable as history, which I have shown we cannot, much less that this or that speech in it represents words actually spoken by the person into whose mouth they have been put. There is certainly no mention of either of these figures in Paul's own letters—or in any other non-Gospel writing of the first century. (They do occur for the first time in Ignatius in the early second century; and Pilate is given passing mention in 1 Timothy 6:13, which is one reason why conservatives are very anxious to try to discredit the mainstream judgment that the Pastorals are second century forgeries written in Paul's name. And no critical scholar would agree with Colin Hemer who Licona reports "argues that the speeches in Acts are probably summaries of what certain apostles taught on a specific occasion." "Probably" means wishful thinking, since there is no evidence that such is the case.)

As for another perennial bone of contention, Galatians 1:19 with its reference to James as "the brother of the Lord," this has been done to death. While Flemming does not in his DVD, I have certainly provided much in the way of evidence and argument to support the thesis that the word "brother" does not refer to a sibling here, but to a believer and follower of Christ, which is the way the word is consistently used throughout the epistles as applied to all sorts of people. (See my Response to Gerry in Reader Feedback 22.) It naturally does not fit well, as Licona points out, with the Gospel 'report' that Jesus had brothers, including a James, but the latter evidence cannot be used to determine the meaning in the epistles, since this is the very issue under contention: what does Paul's reference in Galatians mean, if there is no evidence from him or his contemporaries, and much against it, that their "James" was the sibling of a human Jesus? The Gospel linkage could very well be based on traditions of a group of apostles, and their leader, who were called by this term many decades earlier, now misunderstood or simply adapted to the new story. Then there is always the possibility that the phrase began as a marginal gloss by some later scribe, to identify the James Paul had spoken of according to that scribe's understanding. (On 1 Timothy 6:13, see also the Appendix to my Article No. 3: Who Crucified Jesus?)

Comparing Jesus to the Mystery Cult Deities

Licona gives us an excerpt from Flemming's DVD interview with Robert Price, in which Price compares an actual historical figure like Caesar Augustus around whom legends collected but who is securely locked into history, and Jesus, so many of whose stories cannot be so locked but are instead scripturally derived or are outrageously improbable. Licona answers this in a somewhat haphazard fashion, and I will simply comment on a few of his points here. Price has referred to Herod's slaughter of the innocents (in the Matthew nativity story), and while Licona declines to offer a detailed refutation of the denial of such an event, it is clear that he accepts it as historical, which identifies where he stands on the 'critical' spectrum. Moreover, he then goes on to provide one defense of sorts, appealing to Lee Strobel's rationalization for why the event does not appear in Josephus or anywhere else, namely that, well, Bethelehem was a small place and Herod's action would only have involved a few infants in a small village in an unpopular section of the Roman Empire and would it really have caught the attention of a number of ancient historians? As I said in response to Strobel, Bethlehem was only six miles from Jerusalem, which is hardly backwater. Would Josephus (is he an historian for whom Judea would have been unpopular?), who meticulously recorded the atrocities of Herod's rule, have regarded such a barbarous act, despite the alleged small numbers involved, as unimportant to mention? Licona further offers, "we should not be surprised if only one source reports it, in this case Matthew." I don't know why not. Matthew was not an historian, let alone a contemporary, and the incident is part of a passage which seeks to give Jesus a wondrous birth account; the slaughter element is clearly a reworking of an identical biblical precedent pertaining to Moses (as well as of non-biblical similar legends attached to other ancient rulers like Sargon). For Licona to defend it as historical is little short of ludicrous. We might well ask if he finds it unsurprising that only one source, namely Matthew, records the entire business of the visitation of the magi, the slaughter, the flight into Egypt, while another Christian source, namely Luke, has a nativity tale that entirely lacks such things and has its own incidents based on scriptural inspiration?

Licona makes a brief foray into the field of conservative scholarship's regular attempt to discredit the ties between Jesus and the mystery deities. Martin Hengel is quoted as pointing out how pagan gods who died violent deaths differed from Christian reports about Jesus, and that crucified gods "can be tormented for a while, but can never die." One part of this position seems to contradict the other; and Hengel cannot be referring to Osiris, Attis or Adonis, among others, who definitely died, in quite bloody fashion. The appeal to Hengel is further garbled (whether due to Hengel or simply Licona himself) by going on to mention "Greek heroes" who cannot be allowed to suffer a painful and shameful death like crucifixion, but are rescued at the last minute. This is mixing, or confusing, savior-god mythology with Hellenistic romance plots, and neither serves to demonstrate that Jesus could not belong to either or both categories as portrayed by the Gospel writers. Nor does it discredit the point Price is making, that so much of what is attributed to Jesus is fundamentally of a mythical or fictional cast, and historically improbable in nature.

Licona refers to the oft-claimed difference between the Gospels and the savior-god myths, namely that

the resurrection of Jesus is not reported to have taken place in the gray and distant past. Rather, it was linked (1) to the time of Tiberius and Pilate, (2) to a specific location: Jerusalem within Judea, and (3) to numerous eyewitnesses who were still alive, including Jesus' own family members. That the Jesus of whom Paul spoke is a contemporary rather than a mythic figure from an unspecified time in the past could not have been any clearer.

By now, I don't need to point out that this is more question begging. Licona's three points are precisely what we do not find in Paul, who never links Jesus' death to any specific time or location (without us lassoing 1 Timothy into Paul's corral), whose "eyewitnesses" are simply to visionary experiences (like his own) of a scripturally-revealed dying and rising savior—but that's a matter in regard to 1 Corinthians 15 which I won't go into here. It is the Gospels, and the Gospels alone during the first century, that make such a placement in time and location, and if the traditional myths of the mysteries are placed in a primordial past, it is because they were of ancient provenance, whereas Christ belief of the Pauline sort was of recent vintage. When it eventually became historicized in the Gospels, Mark would have had no reason to set his savior in a distant past. It would have been very reasonable to tie him to more recent history, especially as this would have coincided with the time of the earliest, by now legendary, apostles of the Christ like Peter and Paul. It would still have been sufficiently displaced by time and war so as not to interfere with any question of veracity or verifiability—if indeed Mark was concerned over such things. If his original tale was meant only as allegory, or a fictional rendition of someone he might possibly have regarded as historical, then he would not have been.

Too many of the arguments made by those who would discredit the commonality between the Christian and pagan versions of intermediary Son religious philosophy ironically do not take into account the fact that there are unique factors involved in the Christian manifestation, but that these differences do not have to spell any fundamental difference in historical quality between the two expressions. In that regard, I will jump ahead in Licona's critique to deal further with the mystery deities.

In a section he calls "Parallelmania" Licona engages in several pages of rebuttal to the common observation that many of the elements in the myths of the pagan savior gods find close parallel in the story of Jesus. Now, the whole question of these parallels is certainly a thorny one. The scholarly work of finding such correspondences between Jesus and figures like Osiris, Adonis, Tammuz, etc., is an old one, beginning in the late 1700s. Its heyday was in the 19th and early 20th century and to some extent it has fallen into disrepute; certainly no major scholars over the last half century have undertaken a significant review of the primary sources on which such parallels were based. Those primary sources are also part of the problem. As I said in my book review of Tom Harpur's The Pagan Christ:

Modern skeptics of the field of comparative religion, with its claims of close correspondence between the elements of the Jesus story and a multitude of precurors in the mystery and salvation religions of the era, may have a case of sorts to make when they dismiss such parallels as being often unclear, exaggerated or unfounded. The primary sources for such things are a wide and uncoordinated array of texts and fragments of texts, artifacts, frescoes, uncertain records of oral traditions and rituals, excavated temples and places of worship (some ruined by Christian depredations), many requiring interpretation and a careful gleaning of their significance. There have no doubt been parallels suggested, or even declared with confidence, between Jesus and this or that 'savior god' in ancient cultures, which rest on shaky ground or have turned out to be erroneous. Christian apologists are ever at pains to point out these uncertainties and errors. But a few overstated claims and an inevitable degree of ambiguity where some features are concerned does not destroy the entire case, and serves only to provide some handy red herrings for determined apologists. The overall picture is not significantly compromised and is indeed beyond question. There are enough common features between Jesus and antecedent savior figures and their mythologies to make the principle valid. The story of Jesus is not original, much less historical. It owes its life blood—and many of the moles on its skin—to mythical motifs and far more ancient ideas that are found not only throughout the Near East but literally around the world, often in cultures that had no direct contact with those now familiar to us, making such expression endemic (some might say 'epidemic') to the human mind....

Again, Licona claims that "most scholars" have abandoned the History of Religions School that regarded parallels as conclusive sign that Christianity was cut from the same cloth as ancient myth. Well, it's not a case of having "abandoned" it so much as making a concerted effort to discredit it, for reasons that are quite obvious. Orthodox scholars have long recognized the danger presented in the picture of a Christian genesis out of pagan salvation religion, and have done their best to squelch it. I have encountered no better debunking of this very biased (and even dishonest) campaign than that of Robert Price in his Deconstructing Jesus. As I say in my website review of that book:

Jonathan Z. Smith ("Dying and Rising Gods" in Encyclopedia of Religion) and Gunter Wagner (Pauline Baptism and the Pagan Mysteries) are only two of many offenders who have naively or arrogantly twisted, misread and misrepresented the Greek mysteries and Pauline Christianity in order to divorce Jesus from his fellow cultic saviors: Dionysos, Attis, Osiris & Co. No one can read these pages [88-91] and ever again allow such special pleading tactics any credence.

Licona appeals to several timeworn arguments against the principle of parallels:

Further research has revealed that many of the parallels to which they [the History of Religions school] refer postdate the Gospels. Thus, it is most likely that those parallels were the result of other religions who copied the Christian story rather than the other way around. Second, no examples cited exhibit all of the points we find in the Gospels. Hence a number of the parallel accounts must be combined in order to mirror Jesus. Third, no miracle-worker per se existed within two hundred years on either side of Jesus. Fourth, many of the parallels cited are weak. Fifth, parallels can be seen in just about anything...

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. There is precious little writing per se about the mysteries (not the least because it was officially forbidden), and what did find its way onto paper comes mostly from the CE period. But no dispassionate analyst is going to maintain that such things did not go back into earlier times. Such earlier evidence tends to be of the sort I mentioned in the Harpur book review, artifacts, frescoes, fragmentary texts, or the writings of ancient historians, playwrights, etc., who happen to deal with related subjects, and so on. That gods like Tammuz, Adonis, Dionysus, Osiris had myths which contained many of the same features as we find in the story of Jesus is simply undeniable. This is not to say that myths and cults of these gods would not have undergone some evolution over time; no religion stays static indefinitely, and that includes Christianity over its first few centuries. And there is always a certain amount of syncreticism going on, and that too includes Christianity in its formative processes. But to simply dismiss the common elements between Christianity and the pagan mystery religions as a case of direct borrowing from the former by the latter from the second century on is apologetic nonsense.

First of all, we have the witness of a writer like Celsus, around 160-180, whom Origen did his best to refute. He accused the Christians of having nothing new, of borrowing or stealing everything from the widespread myths of the time. Then we have Christianity's own apologists like Justin and Tertullian being forced to deal with such accusations, not by denying that the mysteries had possessed such features before Christianity came along, but by admitting that while they did predate Christ, they were the responsibility of Satan and his demons who counterfeited them ahead of time. (We laugh at such rationalizations today, but some modern apologetic antics aren't much better.) Licona actually undertakes to address Justin's remarks, which I will address shortly.

Some of Licona's above-quoted rebuttal involves a common device among apologists. Find and play up any differences one can find, subject the material to minute dissection to see where exact comparisons are lacking, and then claim that this is decisive and disproves the entire case. (As the saying goes, "If it's not an exact parallel, it isn't a parallel.") This, too, is nonsense. No one is claiming that the story of Jesus is a mirror image of every aspect of savior god mythology, and certainly not of any one particular god's mythology. Rather, what we see is a commonality of themes and basic ideas, not all of which are universally shared. Christianity emerged from a broad cultural segment of the ancient world, with Jewish elements of one form or another as a prime component. Judaism itself was not monolithic (as Richard Carrier has laid out concisely in his article "The Spiritual Body of Christ" in The Empty Tomb, which Licona addresses in his critique), and some Jewish circles outside Judea were significantly hellenized. The degree of commonality of themes and elements, including specifics, between Jesus and the pagan myths is extensive, even striking; they are enough to justify the conclusion that in many respects they are indeed cut from the same cloth.

Licona notes some of the parallels that Flemming "drops" on his viewers, including,

Stars Appeared at Their Birth...Healed the Sick; Cast out Demons; Performed Miracles...Betrayed for 30 Pieces of Silver; Celebrated Communal Meal with Bread and Wine; Which Represented the Savior's Flesh and Blood...Resurrected on Third Day; Ascended into Heaven...

Licona claims that "no evidence is provided to show that these stories have a dating any earlier than 100 years after Jesus," and a little later he claims that regarding resurrection, "the first clear parallel does not appear until long after the life of Jesus, probably Adonis around AD 150." In the above list, I would allow that "Betrayed for 30 Pieces of Silver" probably represents one of those poorly supported, and too-close parallels with a specific Jesus feature, but the rest can hardly be denied as widespread mythemes of the ancient world, variously applying to gods, heroes or "divine men." As for Adonis himself, Everett Ferguson (Backgrounds of Early Christianity, p.239) notes: "the Adonis myth perhaps most clearly indicates the resuscitation of a god, but even here it is not strictly a resurrection. These beliefs are more closely allied to the cycle of nature, and the mysteries seem to have had their origin in the agricultural cycle." Ferguson also notes (p.221) that more specific reference to a "resurrection" of Adonis does indeed come from the second century, but probably under the influence of the Egyptian cult of Osiris, not Christianity.

Licona himself gives us a quote from Justin's Dialogue with Trypho which directly refers to Bacchus (Dionysus) "being torn in pieces, and having died, he rose again, and ascended to heaven," as well as to Hercules who "ascended to heaven when he died." Justin is being forced to address the parallel nature of Greek traditions like these to those of the Christians, and as we noted, he put it down to the work of evil demons. Licona, of course, has another explanation: the pagans stole from the Christians. But Justin wrote in the middle of the second century. Are we to believe that when Justin noted those parallels, the entries were not yet dry in the mystery cults' books concerning such resurrections and ascensions, having just been appropriated by these ancient cults from the newcomer Christianity, not to mention all the other details and parallels Licona and others suggest pagan religion "copied" from the Christian story? The idea is ridiculous. The Christians themselves seem barely familiar with their own traditions, if we are to judge by the fact that almost nobody before Justin shows any knowledge of the Gospel events and the features of Jesus' life, that Justin is the very first to quote from those Gospels, and almost the first to equate the Son and Logos with a man who had recently lived. Before the time of Justin, pagan writers, satirists and historians have barely taken notice of Christians, let alone of an historical Jesus, and most second century apologists seem to have felt secure in presenting a "complete" picture of the Christian faith without even mentioning him. And yet all these ancient cults suddenly felt it necessary or desirable to adopt features of the Jesus story in wholesale fashion? Preposterous.

This is how I put it in my "cross-examination" of Gregory Boyd in Challenging the Verdict (p.89-90):

Before we leave this issue about borrowing, I would like to call the court’s attention to another point which renders highly questionable the idea that the mysteries took from Christianity. Let me quote Celsus as quoted by Origen: “Are these distinctive happenings unique to the Christians—and if so, how are they unique? Or are ours to be accounted myths and theirs believed? In truth, there is nothing at all unusual about what Christians believe.” Now, Celsus was a pagan hostile to Christianity who wrote in the latter part of the second century at a time when the mystery cults were flourishing, and he is not the only one to claim that the Christians believed in nothing new. Could someone like Celsus have been totally unaware, if your suggestion is accurate, Dr. Boyd, that within his own lifetime this new Christianity had been the fountainhead of all the major features of the mysteries, that scarcely a few decades before he was writing, those age-old mysteries had revised the myths of their own gods according to Christian rites and doctrines? This is an idea that is genuine nonsense, to use your own term. Besides, considering the hostility which pagans in general held toward the Christian religion, something attested to by early Christian writers including the second century apologists, is it feasible to suppose that such pagans would have been anxious to recast their ancient mysteries according to the despised Christian doctrine, to reinvent their gods along the lines of the Jesus faith they were currently bad-mouthing and condemning on all fronts?

Licona also treats us to the spectacle of himself attempting to discredit Justin's own discussion of the parallels. He calls them "weak," pointing out the differences, for example, between the resurrection of the sons of Jupiter with that of Jesus, since the manner in which they "rise" from a state of death, and the circumstances involved, are quite different. Of course they are. They arise from different cultures, their stories have totally different settings, much of the underlying philosophies are quite different. But Justin was able to recognize what Licona refuses to: that the essence of the theme is the same; both are different expressions of the same basic idea. Licona would no doubt argue that the tradition of the Star at Jesus birth is completely unlike the tradition of a comet at Julius Caesar's birth because one is a star and the other is a comet. That may be a bit of an exaggeration on my part, but let me make my point by quoting Robert Price in Deconstructing Jesus (p.89):

Smith's error is the same as that of Raymond Brown, who dismisses the truckload of comparative religion parallels to the miraculous birth of Jesus. This one is not strictly speaking a virgin birth, since the god fathered the child on a married woman. That one involved physical intercourse with the deity, not overshadowing by the Holy Spirit, and so on. But, we have to ask, how close does a parallel have to be to count as a parallel? Does the divine mother have to be named Mary? Does the divine child have to be named Jesus? Here is the old "difference without a distinction" fallacy.

Just because I choose to plant roses and you choose to plant geraniums, or because our two backyard soils may have different ingredients which favor one or the other, does not mean that they are not both flowers and gardens, or that we have not indulged our green thumbs through common motives and impulses. We both come up with the basic idea under the influence of a traditional practice throughout our urban society; our own garden's layout may even be at least partially the result of viewing our neighbors' gardens and being influenced by what we see.

There are naturally inevitable differences in origins and cultural influences between the pagan salvation mythology and that of Christianity. The mysteries are ancient because their roots go back into prehistory and are dependent on the agricultural cycle of yearly death and rebirth. The myths of the savior gods symbolized these processes and guaranteed rebirth in an afterlife for the initiate. And that afterlife, as Greek philosophy progressed, became the survival of the soul or spirit only, not the body. In contrast, Christianity was not directly rooted in the agricultural cycle, and the Jewish presence in Christianity introduced an element of physical resurrection (anathema to the Greeks). This too, however, underwent a progression from a "spiritual body" (Paul said that flesh and blood couldn't enter the kingdom of heaven) to a raising of the body in flesh, reflected in a similar progression for Christ, as early thought about Christ raised in spirit was supplanted by the Gospels' portraying him raised in flesh. Christianity also had a particular focus on sin and its forgiveness, which the pagan cults scarcely shared, so Christ's features were adapted to those interests. Because of divergent factors like these, it is entirely unrealistic to look for lockstep parallels.

But as Justin recognized, they did have common themes, and often common details for those themes, if only because there are only so many ways the human mind, and sectarian circumstance, will translate those themes into specific traditions and linkages with the god or founder. Baptism is a universally 'cleansing' rite, in one way or another. At a 'sacred meal' what else are the devotees to do but eat and drink, and it is inevitable that these things will be given a sacred significance, usually traced to the god and attributed to him in a mythical inaugurating ceremony. Great men's births must be accompanied by some portent; and their careers will be opposed by those, god or man, whom such careers will threaten. The features of those careers will tend to follow common patterns, whether relating to miracles, disciples or conflicts with others. And they will usually meet some unpleasant fate, with that experience embodied in story lines which have universal elements to them. And so on. Our brains tend to operate along similar lines in much of what they come up with, no matter what the variety of culture and specific interests we may have; parallels and similarities are what we should expect to find, and the various expressions of them will feed off each other. But for one of those religious expressions to claim that its version of things has nothing to do with any of the others, but just happens to be historical reality while the rest are mere myth, is myopia in the extreme. In the case of Christianity, when we also see that its particular translation of the mythemes are in conformity with specific passages in the scriptures, the claim to historical reality becomes naive in the extreme.

Parallelomania

Licona spends a few pages engaging in a dubious exercise we've all seen before. Coincidental parallels are noted between ancient Rome and the United States, between Jesus and John F. Kennedy, between Abraham Lincoln and Kennedy. But Licona is comparing apples to oranges. Let's take the case of Lincoln and JFK. Here are a few of the parallels:

And so on. No one would doubt that these are coincidences, pure and simple, not the least because we know that both men were historical. Licona is facetiously suggesting that, if we followed the lead of Jesus mythicists, an historian a couple of centuries hence might conclude that JFK was a myth, created to embody a 20th century version of Abraham Lincoln. Similarly, in the case of coincidences between Jesus and JFK, future historians might conclude JFK was a myth to embody Christian theology in the 20th century; and likewise, the history of the United States, being coincidentally similar to Rome's, would be a myth to parallel the Roman Empire.

But in the first and third cases, Rome and Abraham Lincoln are historical entities. We know that. That's a given. In each case, Licona is suggesting that someone, or some later group, would create a myth (or interpret something as such) modelled on an historical precedent. What would lead a future historian to do that is not clear; if the archetype is historical, why would the antitype be mythological? In any event, this is entirely opposite to the case of Jesus. The precedents to the Jesus story are mythical. We more or less understand how the myths of Osiris, Mithras, Dionysos, etc., were formed and evolved, and we can recognize the characteristic features of mythical figures and stories. They have characteristics which are peculiar to mythical figures. If we find striking similarities in those features attributed to Jesus, we are led to place him in the same category, not in the opposite one. Without a priori assuming that Jesus is an historical figure (which is the issue under debate, a 'fact' for which there is so little reliable evidence that such a debate is possible) we would interpret such data about Jesus as placing him in the mythical category. It makes little sense to suggest that if the data about JFK bore a strong parallel to the data of a figure who was regarded as historical, that anyone would place him in the opposite category. If it be retorted that the very number of parallels would lead someone to think that this commonality had to be an artificial one, thus making the later one an alleged invention, this is shot down by the fact that we do see (as Licona has shown us) that such coincidences can exist between two known historical figures, and therefore there would be no necessity or impulse to see either one of them as artificial.

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. The same is not true of the data in regard to JFK and Lincoln. None of the elements show any purpose at all, neither for elevating status nor casting some significance on the lives of the figures. They are purely random, and unrelated to each other. There is a big difference between being born in a given year and being born of a virgin. The latter has theological significance whereas the former does not. In the case of Lincoln and JFK, one year would be as good as another.

As I said, Licona suggests in theory that some future historian could interpret the coincidences of birth years, or similar names of Lincoln's and JFK's successors, etc., as indicating that the later example of JFK was deliberately formulated to create a parallel with Lincoln. JFK might become mythologized on the basis of such parallels, as supposedly an historical Jesus is suffering today at the hands of those who would turn him into a myth. But the ridicule element in this is only made possible by the fact that we know JFK is not a myth. If we stood a few centuries hence, and could find little evidence in the historical record that a reputed JFK actually lived, if he was a religious figure all of whose features had mythical significances, and were shared by other figures we knew to be mythical, then there would be nothing ridiculous about such a reasoning process. It wouldn't prove that we were necessarily right about JFK being mythical, but it would present a strong probability, especially when weighed with other indicators.

Parallels between Lincoln and JFK are obvious coincidences. That's the whole point of making this comparison, and the assumption that they are coincidences is necessary to make the exercise meaningful. When we turn to Jesus it is not obvious that these are coincidences; they would need to be argued as such, and that is a difficult thing to do, and certainly Licona does not do so. To simply declare that they are, in order to make the parallel legitimate between the two cases, is once again to beg the question. In fact, it would be almost impossible to make the case that the parallels between Jesus and the savior gods can be put down to coincidence. That a set of multiple circumstances relating to birth, events surrounding that birth, upbringing, career, death burial and resurrection, would happen solely by chance to coincide with sets of themes and even some minute features found in savior god mythology, Hellenistic romance novels, and scriptural passages, and yet nonetheless be historical—even if some of those features in regard to the mystery deities are set aside as overenthusiastic—strains the bounds of credibility.

Licona makes the statement that no miracle-worker per se existed within 200 years on either side of Jesus, and a little later, that I speak of "would-be messiahs and miracle workers that plagued Palestine throughout the first century." But here he is putting words in my mouth. I am not saying that any of these figures were declared to be, or declared themselves to be (as far as we can tell) "The Messiah." But Josephus tells us of a number of figures who acted messiah-like, and even promised messiah-like results. Judas the Galilean began the zealot movement, promising his countrymen freedom from Rome. Theudas, toward the middle of the century, promised the miracle of dividing the river Jordan so that his followers could cross over. There was also an unnamed Egyptian who claimed that his command, like Joshua's trumpet, would knock down the walls of Jerusalem. When someone gathers forces around him, challenges the Roman authorities and promises miracles will happen in the overthrow of Israel's subjugators, that's a would-be messiah. He would certainly be so in the popular mind. As for the zealot leaders who provoked the War and the downfall of the nation, they can hardly be denied delusions of messiahship. In all these cases, if it looks, talks and walks like a duck, it probably thinks it's a duck.

Licona, quoting Twelftree, acknowledges that there are figures who "perform a single miracle or two during their lifetime, but they are not to be compared to Jesus." But this is short-sighted on a number of counts. With one major exception, we don't have an account of a miracle-worker's career comparable to the Gospels, though we have surviving traditions about this or that individual performing reputed miracles in general, such as certain Jewish rabbis. We also have testimony to the widespread practice of magic and miracle-working, even if no surviving names are attached to it. (For statements in principle on this, see for example Burton Mack, Myth of Innocence, p.209.) And when we offer that one exception, namely Apollonius of Tyana, whose reputed miracle-working rivalled the reputed miracles of Jesus, what does Licona do? He imputes that it was all made up by Apollonius' biographer Philostratus over a century later! As if there would have been no traditions of miracle-working going back to, or near to, Apollonius' career which Philostratus could have drawn on. No, he made up the whole idea himself, and moreover, did it all in imitation of Jesus of Nazareth. We are not allowed to 'win' on any count, no matter how unlikely the argument that has to be put forward.

Actually, the tradition that Jesus (even if historical) worked all those miracles is on no more secure ground than the traditions about Philostratus. Not a single Christian writer of the first century outside the Gospels so much as mentions miracles by their Jesus, a subject often conspicuous by its absence. To find the first reference to Jesus being a miracle-worker one has to go beyond even Ignatius to the epistle of Barnabas, and even he fails to give any examples. When we also consider that miracle working was expected to accompany the approach of the Kingdom, when we consider that most of the miracles in the Gospels are midrashically modelled on miracles stories of the Old Testament, we have reason to believe that nothing goes back to any recorded historical miracle-working (genuine or not) by Jesus. In fact, believers and apologists are faced with a dilemma. If miracle-working was such a rarity, and yet Jesus of Nazareth uniquely performed—or was reputed to have performed—all or even some of these wondrous deeds, how can it be that not only contemporary Christian writers are silent on them, they created no stir which would impel non-Christian commentators of the time to make any mention of them either?

Licona says he is "not attempting to split hairs" in regard to the resurrection of Romulus.

"Resurrection" meant that the corpse that had died was returned to life and transformed into an immortal body. If we view every story of a post-mortem appearance as a parallel to Jesus, then we have to include every ghost story and grief hallucination, from past to present.

But not only is he indeed splitting hairs, he is cutting them according to his own rules and definitions, namely the Christian ones. "Resurrection" may mean the above to Christians (with a leaning toward the way Paul expresses things, rather than the Gospels), but the mysteries had their own concepts of resurrection, what constituted their own equivalent. If Greeks believed only in the survival of the spirit into an afterlife, then a physical resurrection to earth for the god—in any form of body—would not have formed a part of their thinking. But the effect for them would have been essentially the same; both would have conferred the same benefit. As long as the god overcame death in some way which invested him with some power that could be transferred to the initiate, the theme was the same. In imagining that a spiritual Christ in the spiritual realm had been killed and rose from death, Paul was simply creating or supporting a variant of the mystery cult theme. When the Gospels put forward the idea that he had lived and died on earth and rose on earth in flesh, the theme was carried a step further toward the literal. This does not change its fundamental nature as another expression of a universal mytheme.

Licona dismisses the case of Asclepius, "raiser of the dead and healer of all diseases," as a pertinent parallel to Jesus, even though he was slain by another god. Why? Apparently because the story of Asclepius "occurs in the foggy past with no marks of historicity." But that's not the point. The Gospels, for their own reasons and circumstances, place an historical Jesus in recent history, whereas the pagan traditions, being more ancient, did not. But given that new setting, we see the Gospel story as following the themes of the Asclepius story. That is what is significant. Despite Licona's denial, it is "a strong parallel to Jesus," and Robert Price's use of it is not a "very poor" example; just as many post-mortem appearances to gods or heroes are legitimate parallels to the post-resurrection stories in the Gospels, since all serve the same purposes. It is ironic that Licona belittles such parallels, saying that "we would have to include every ghost story and grief hallucination from past to present," when there is no evidence in Paul that the visionary experiencing of the risen Christ was anything but that: the conviction that they had seen the spiritual Jesus, an entirely spiritual entity, or "ghost" if you like. And even if we were to assume an historical, crucified Jesus, such visions could very well have been a "grief hallucination."

Before we go on, I should mention that I was taken aback by a little detail in this section of Licona's critique. In offering one of the Psalms, he says "The psalmist David is writing poetically..." David?? Does Licona actually support the ancient fantasy that the Psalms were written by David? This would place him so far beyond the low end of the critical spectrum he would disappear from sight.