Epistle to Ansgar: Letter 18 (Historicity of Christ)
15 June 2025 AD
Trinity Sunday
Dear Godson,
In 1334, the Holy Father decreed the Sunday after Pentecost to be devoted to the feast of the Holy Trinity, as this is a central feature of the faith found in no other religion.
When heretics break away from the Holy Mother Church, please note the central claim: Gnostics deny the physical reality of Christ; Arians deny the full divinity of Christ; Photians deny the divine authority or ability of Christ to send out the Holy Ghost; Protestants deny the physical presence of Christ in the bread and wine, and that the priesthood acts in the person of Christ; Muslims call the Holy Ghost an angel, and deny Christ is God. Seculars deny God is God.
In other words, the heterodox reject the divinity of the Son, the Father, or the Holy Ghost, or reject all three.
This is for several reasons:
First, the claim that God Himself became His own son as a sacrifice, meant to die a shameful death, crucified hence hung on a tree — a death so shameful no Roman citizen could suffer it, and which the Jews regarded as sign of accursedness.
Second, the great and central claim of monotheism is that God is one, and has no partner, no offspring, no one and nothing as His equal. Jews or Muslims or Unitarians unable or unwilling to ascribe unity to the Trinity regard this lack of unity as a insurmountable stumbling block. They mistake trinitarianism as polytheism.
Third, religious zealots among both orthodox and heterodox recoil fastidiously from the notion of a physical and material divinity: the idea of a heavenly being undergoing the hungers, deprivations and indignities of eating and excreting, fasting and thirsting, much less being mocked, scourged and tortured is paradoxical for a Supreme Being, purely spiritual, infinite and dwelling in infinite bliss from eternity.
Finally, the Trinity is paradoxical and mysterious. How could the two be one? How could one be father to the other? It if it impossible that the Father should suffer, how it is possible for the Son, who did suffer, be one and the same with Him? Every human analogy we might make concerning a supreme being with one substance and three persons leads to misunderstanding, if not a heresy. We literally cannot conceive of anything or anyone else like this, either in reality or fiction, not even as a thought experiment.
Doubt is a natural and normal response to paradox, but the cure to doubt is proper catechization, that is, reading the Fathers who pondered and clarified this mystery of the faith.
It requires the use of reason to grasp an abstract concept, namely, what makes a person and what makes a substance and it might be possible for a divine being to share one property without sharing the other (which is something never seen on earth in any other case, and cannot be clearly imagined).
An abnormal and unnatural response to doubt is to enflame rather than answer such questions, and to indulge in speculations resting on ever little evidence or none. Occam’s razor is the invaluable rule of thumb for separating untenable speculation from tenable theory.
If the assumptions needed to support the theory are adopted merely for the sake of the theory, and not supported by other evidence, and not needed to explain other facts, one may be multiplying assumptions unnecessarily. Better to rest on a theory that makes fewer assumptions, and more believable ones.
The least reasonable doubt one is likely to encounter, but one which is currently fashionable, is the theory of Mythical Jesus.
This is different from the theory of Historical Jesus.
The theory of Historical Jesus is that an wandering preacher named Jesus, no different from any other false prophet, did walk the earth, preached heresy, and was executed by authorities, but his hysterical followers later inflated him into godhood by means of repeated falsehoods and pious frauds accumulating over generations. The theory of Historical Jesus says that there is a core of fact about which all stories of signs and wonders, virgin birth, resurrection, and ascension were later false and credulous accretions.
The theory of Mythical Jesus is that there is no core of fact.
Jesus was a literary character from the first, merely an invention, or a parable, never meant to be taken as literal, but whom later generations of followers, gullibly, falsely, and absurdly took to be historical fact and divine reality. This theory holds stories of Jesus no different from stories of Hercules or King Arthur: fanciful tales no one was ever meant to take seriously.
There is little to say about the Mythicist Theory, aside from that it has no support in any serious scholarship either Christian or secular.
There are a few arguments to support the idea. The first is the “Argument from Silence.”
This argument runs that if Jesus ben Joseph had been a real wandering preacher in the First Century Roman province of Judea, then contemporary records would have been written of the him, and been preserved through the centuries. Since there are no such records, there is no Jesus ben Joseph.
This theory holds that First and Second Century writers to invented Jesus as a literary device, or a parable, such as is found in Midrash writings, and either fraudulently or negligently allowed their audience to interpret the matter literally.
The problem is that the assumption that ancient figures leave contemporary paper trails is not just false, it is laughably false.
Hannibal of Carthage, the greatest general of Africa, who came within arm’s reach of taking Rome, after famously driving elephants across the Alps, has no surviving documents or monuments written in his lifetime mentioning his name.
Even the greatest and most famed of ancient figures is rarely written and preserved in public monuments or histories until years or generations after. What percent of fragile ancient scrolls and parchments, copied by hand, might survive the wars and arsons of history is a matter of speculation.
In this case, we are not dealing with a figure great and famed in his lifetime, but with a carpenter whose time as a wandering preacher lasted three years or so, in an obscure and tumultuous province on the outskirts of the Empire, whose capital city, including any scrolls and records not hand-copied elsewhere, was razed and burnt within the next generation from these events.
Jesus was only famous after his death, and news of his life was spred, at first, by wandering preachers, by word of mouth.
The other problem is that we do have contemporary written accounts. We have four biographies written within living memory by eyewitnesses or their close associates, and a score of epistles.
These sources are disregarded by the Mythic Jesus theory on the grounds that they contradict the Mythic Jesus theory. There is no other evidence calling them into question.
Or, rather, to be precise, any argument calling these sources into question as historical documents applies equally well to accounts of Caesar and Pompey and other ancient figures appearing in ancient accounts.
Not one gospel, not one epistle, not one verse, nor word, nor syllable, not even the jot above the smallcase iota, not even by so much as a hint, offers any grounds to believe Jesus was a parable. The men who allegedly wrote these parables died under torture rather than admit they were parables.
Indeed, the gospels and epistles give details of time and place, which no ancient myth, play, poem, or other religious writing ever gives or would ever give. Only ancient histories and ancient biographies are written in this fashion. If a story of Hercules mentions the name of a king, contemporary with him (such as King Thespius whose fifty daughters Hercules impregnates), he is also a mythical figure, whose year cannot be identified. The idea of using realistic details in unrealistic settings to give an illusion of verisimilitude was not invented until after the invention of the modern novel in the Sixteenth Century.
Mythic Jesus theory then explains the suddenly spread and persecution of the early Catholic Church by saying that a large number of people for no imaginable reason whatsoever took these parable writings, ignoring any testimony of the parable writers to the contrary, and suddenly believed Jesus to be a real person, and to be a divine being, in direct contradiction of Jewish thought, teaching and tradition.
There is no parallel in any other religious figure in any period of history suddenly being elevated to divinity after being invented as a parable or fiction.
This would be the same as if modern men and women, in our day and age when JK Rowling is still alive and able to contradict us, adopted a belief in Harry Potter as literally real, thought witches and wizards in a British boarding school actually and really flew on broomsticks and played rugby in midair, and that Voldemort was a real menace from which only the Chosen One could save us.
The other problem with the argument from silence is that none of the contemporary or near-contemporary writers has any business discussing the news from Judaea, or were attempting to chronicle every wandering preacher or religious leader in the area of the time.
Imagine, please, if one were to demand the names of cult leaders arising in Alexandria in 100 BC, or in Carthage, or in Spain, or in northern Gaul. Do we have the names of any surviving Druid leaders from the time of Caesar? Any name of a heretic who preached against Jupiter-Ammon, or Mithras, or Serapis? No? What about the name of political agitators living in Ionia or Rhodes? Anyone crucified in Libya? The names of wandering preachers in Sicily?
Except, of course, any writer who does take an interest, such as Pliny the Younger, Tacitus, Suetonius, Lucian, Thallus and Philo or surviving letters of Marcus Aurelius, who do mention Christ and the Christian, and make mention of (at least) what the followers of Christ said about him — not one of which says he is a parable mistaken for a real figure.
But while Philo mentions Pontius Pilate, he makes no mention of other faith healers or would-be messiahs (of which there were many in those days) such as Anthronges and Theudas, or Hillel and Honi or John the Baptist.
On the other hand, Josephus in his Antiquities of the Jews mentions folk like this, and mentions Jesus as well, indeed, mentions him twice, and calls him a wonder-worker, or, depending on the translation, a worker of παραδόξων ἔργων – “paradoxa erga” that is, “deeds difficult to interpret” — the same word he uses for the prophet Elisha.
Here is the passage from Josephus:
“Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man; for he was a doer of paradoxical deeds, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles. He was Messiah. And when Pilate at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him; for he appeared to them alive again the third day; as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him. And the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day.”
Various scholar have cast doubt on the authenticity of the passage, asserting that later Christian writers either added words to Josephus or invented the whole passage as a pious fraud. The problem is that the wording and grammar follows the style of Josephus precisely, and no surviving manuscript lacking the doubted words exists.
Moreover, the doubt is based on the circular argument that since Jesus was not the Christ, no one could or would claim he was the Christ, so all surviving documents saying otherwise must be forgeries, or the product of Christian hysteria, deception, or gullibility.
Even with the doubted words kept in place, it is possible to read the passage merely as stating what was believed by the Christians at the time — but it is not possible to read the passage as saying the Christians, over the protests of parable writers, mistook a parable for a literal account, and claimed that certain events occurred in Jerusalem in 30 to 33 AD despite the contrary memory of everyone still alive in the city at that time.
This raises the next question, of who were these parable-writers, and when and what did they write, and why did they give rise to a next generation of gullible fanatics who insisted Jesus was real and historical? Why did eyewitnesses in their written accounts claim to have seen these events with their own eyes?
The best Mythical Jesus argument says that the letters of Paul are earlier letters, and make no mention of Jesus as an earthly being, for the Gospel accounts recording his birth and death comes from an estimated decade or so later. The problem with this is that even the letters scholar think to be the earliest refer to Jesus as having been born after the flesh, or according to the flesh, and to have been crucified.
There is at least one advocate of the Mythic Jesus theory, an amateur with no scholarly background, who argues a commonplace the Platonic or Neoplatonic conception of philosophy current in the First Century was that the middle heavens were a region where airy versions of material events took place as images, archetypes, or representations of unimaginable or purely abstract events happening in the upper heavens.
In this conception, the Mythic Jesus being crucified and resurrected is a metaphor, in the same way that Necessity is the Mother of Invention, or Truth is the daughter of Time, so that any account of the labor pains of Necessity or Truth, or their marriage or christening of their children, is part of an elaborate figure of speech.
And therefore St. Paul, when he speaks of birth, crucifixion, and resurrection, was speaking not of real events happening on earth, but heavenly events happening only as images or ideas in a spiritual realm of timeless archetypes.
The main problem with this theory is that it is false.
Saint Paul is very clearly referring to a physical and real person, and talking to believers who believe likewise. He says Jesus was born as a Jew, of a mortal mother (Gal 4:4). He says Jesus that he had a human flesh and was a descendant of King David (Rom 1:3), of Abraham (Gal 3:16), of Israelites (Rom 9:4-5) and of Jesse (Rom 15:12). Saint Paul mentions the execution by earthly rulers (1Cor 2:8, 1Thess 2: 14-16) that Jesus was crucified (1Cor 1:23, 2:2, 2:8, 2Cor 13:4) and that he died and was buried (1Cor 15:3-4). And he says Jesus had an earthly brother called James who Paul himself had met (Gal 1:19).
Now, even if we say all these events were meant by Paul to be archetypal and spiritual, or that James was symbolically rather than actually a male relative of Jesus, one must ask why Luke and Mark within a few years, while Paul was still alive, mistook all his messages, and invented times and dates and events describing these things in detail.
The other problem is that no surviving literature of Platonism or Neoplatonism gives this account for the inhabitations of middle heaven, or describes this realm of images that move through a set diorama of events. The Platonic archetypes have a remarkably different meaning and purpose in Plato’s philosophy.
Finally, since we have surviving records of Jewish and Gnostic objections to Orthodox Christianity, and, in come cases, very elaborate descriptions of every point of an argument and its every refutation, one must note that there is there not a single hint, not an word, not a syllable, not even the jot above an iota, of the original parable-writers rebuking or correcting their followers for historicizing a non-historical figure.
For example, St. Paul does not write to warn the Nicolaitans to follow the true and original faith that Jesus existed only as a spirit being in the middle heaven, and never walked on earth. Nor does St. John condemn St. Paul for saying Christ never was born of the flesh. Indeed, quite the opposite. St. John, the Book of the Revelation, reports the Nicolaitans are hateful to Jesus. St. John condemns all who claim Christ did not appear in the flesh as beholden to the spirit of the Antichrist.
Which makes the claim of the Mythicist even less believable: for there were indeed early heretics, followers of Simon the Magician or Nicolas or Valentinian, who claimed Jesus, being divine, could not have existed as a fleshly body on earth, but must have been an solidified form or appearance composed of colored forms of air or aether or some other heavenly substance, like a dream-form or hologram, merely existing the senses of those who saw him. But not one of their surviving arguments or reports of their arguments appeals to the mythic nature of Jesus, nor his existence as an image in middle heaven, in order to show that he was too rarefied to be a physical being.
Whether or not there was a historical Jesus who was a prophet, as the Muslims say, or a man who performed no miracles, as Freemasons say, is not the question here. Even those who believe Jesus was not God, or not sent from God, are not so absurd as to claim Jesus never existed at all. There is simply no scrap of evidence, not even a scintilla, to support the theory.
A Christian should stand ready to answer any reasonable doubt that arises in his mind, or which skeptics might delight to spread abroad. But of unreasonable doubts, it is sufficient merely to show that it is unreasonable, and say no more.
Yours,
John Charles Justin-martyr Wright
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
