When it comes to Jesus, virtually all scholars agree that he existed. This is a point that Britt and Wingo agree on. More importantly, they acknowledge that they are going up against the consensus here.
There are a couple of scholars who stick out that do argue that Jesus most likely didn’t exist though. Quite possibly the most famous today is Richard Carrier. His book, “On the Historicity of Jesus,” is a well-researched work, and reads like an academic text. I’m currently working on a full response to that work as well, and it will come out in due time.
Carrier is pretty well known because he’s active in the community, and has been for at least two decades. As I was going through my own journey, I recall interacting with him a bit on at least one internet forum. Even today, at least on his website, he seems quite engaged with the community.
Because of this, one can probably see Carrier as one of the big figureheads of the mythicist view. Britt and Wingo may disagree with this evaluation. In a TikTok video from May, 23 of this year, they called him a “little respected scholar who can’t even get a job in his own field.” Not pulling any punches, they also made the claim that his “peers in the field don’t take him or his work very seriously.” They finish off by saying that “animals tend to lash out when they feel threatened, and this is no different.”
So what led Wingo (who was present in the video) to make such a claim? It was a rather brutal review of their book by Carrier, titled “Statistical Stylometrics: The Good, the Bad, and the Horrid (Part 1:Paul).”
According to Wingo, who doesn’t actually mention Carrier by name, but made it clear who was being referenced, the review wasn’t legitimate and was only an attempt by Carrier to boost his own book sales and stay relevant by attacking others on social media who have more active followings. What Wingo doesn’t do is actually address what was wrong with Carrier’s critique, and in fact misrepresents it by saying that not only did Carrier attack Britt and Wingo, but also stylometry and a second-century dating in general.
It’s this latter part why I’ve focused on this. Because it demonstrates how Britt and Wingo manipulate and distort data and the writings of others. It demonstrates how they approach this material as a whole.
The blog post that Carrier wrote was published on May 22 of this year. Unlike what Britt claims though, it does not attack stylometry, nor does it attack a second-century date. This former point should be clear just from the title. And in fact, Carrier does highlight one good example of a mathematical stylometric study.
Before Carrier even gets into the heart of his post, he mentions Bart Ehrman’s book, “Forgery and Counter-Forgery,” as a good example of nonmathematical, or standard, stylometry. Once Carrier moves into his three main examples, he cites Katarina Laken’s study, “An Authorship Study on the Letters of Saint Paul,” as a good example of mathematical stylometry.
Carrier never attacks the field of stylometry. He highlights good uses of it. But he does point out that, as with any method, “it can be grifted.” What he warns of, and demonstrates in this post is that there are a lot of bogus stylometric studies, and we have to be wary of cons.
Now to be fair, Carrier is quite rough on Britt and Wingo, calling their “study” a garbage-dump that might be outright fraudulent. It’s quite clear that Carrier doesn’t accept this as a legit study, as he uses quotations when he introduces it as a study. The entire first paragraph by Carrier here is harsh, where he highly suggests that “Christ Before Jesus” is a grift.
Carrier really does tear apart the work. But he doesn’t tear apart the idea of the second-century dating of the New Testament. In fact, he directs his readers to an earlier post he wrote that looks at two other defenses of the case (those by Trobisch and Vinzent).
Instead of attacking this later dating, Carrier says he welcomes both projects. He doesn’t agree with the dating, but sees how both works contribute to the discussion, and, even though he thinks the overall conclusions are wrong, they are still useful books.
As we can see then, two of the claims that Wingo made about Carrier prove to be false here. Neither did he attack stylometry, nor did he attack a second-century dating.
Carrier does offer some legitimate critiques though. Such as, Britt and Wingo don’t show the actual metrics, which poses major issues. He also points out that they never point out what sources they are using for their Greek texts, nor do they actually show what they are doing. Their methodology simply isn’t spelled out. And because of that, you can’t reproduce their study.
Other issues that Carrier brings up are how Britt and Wingo don’t tag or parse the Greek text, they don’t say what words they counted or “how did they demarcate ‘words’ in inflected Greek.” As we saw previously, in the discussion about Britt’s and Wingo’s methodology, all of this is rather important.
One thing that Carrier really focused on was Britt’s and Wingo’s “ignorance of Greek.” The issue that he mentions is the discussion of Luke 8:11-15 and how Britt and Wingo claim that it doesn’t use the word “he.” As I already pointed out, there are a lot of problems with their discussion here, but what Carrier points out is that “in Greek the word ‘he’ is implicit in the inflection of a verb. Greek does not require the explicit pronoun.”
He further explains that Greek can represent a pronoun with more words than we do in English. Carrier states that he “can extract many instances of ‘he’ across those verses, depending on what I count.”
There are just some fundamental mistakes that Carrier points out as well, such as the Greek text we have of Irenaeus is a modern back translation, so what we would be tracking in a stylometric analysis is the translator’s style. Or that, as I continually repeated, stylometry doesn’t discern chronology or sequence.
The conclusion that Carrier gets to is that either Britt and Wingo have no idea what they are doing, or they are pretending they know what they are doing and it’s all for a con. He leans toward the latter.
Carrier does have a very harsh critique. But he raises some very great points. Points that Wingo simply ignores, and instead responds to with a drawn-out logical fallacy, where he distorts what Carrier actually did. That’s not scholarship, and it shows a complete lack of willingness to even engage in the discussion, which raises massive red flags.
Getting beyond Carrier, the other major scholar who takes the mythicist position is Raphael Lataster, who wrote the book, “Questioning the Historicity of Jesus.” While I have the book, I haven’t begun reading it. But it’s worth mentioning as it’s one of the few actual academic works on the subject.
Outside of these two individuals, the mythicist position is largely held by lay people. Robert Price is the one exception here, as he has a Ph.D. in Systematic Theology and the New Testament, with both having a more theological bent. His work just isn’t peer-reviewed, which places him kind of on the fence here.
That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. My own background is in Religious Studies and History, and then Theology. So I’m not devaluing them. Individuals without advanced degrees can, and at times do, put forth wonderful scholarship and arguments that need to be considered.
But it is also worth noting who the scholars are on the mythicist side in order to be informed and to be aware of the lay of the land.