Should You Believe Jesus Was Historical?
Historians’ consensus, charitable readings, and reasonable doubts
Was Jesus an historical person or is Christianity a myth-based religion like all the others? And how should the nonexpert who’s not emotionally committed to Christianity decide what to think about the question of Jesus’s historicity?
History isn’t a science
We might begin by seeking out the consensus of experts and deferring to their opinion.
It turns out that most historians who focus on the New Testament and on Jesus scholarship believe Jesus was a historical figure. So does that settle the matter? If you ask pompous NT historians like Bart Ehrman, he’d say yes it does, and the alternative viewpoint, known as the Christ myth theory, is just so much ignorance spewed by cranks on the internet.
But there are three problems with appealing to this consensus. First, history isn’t a science, and when we appeal to consensus that isn’t based on the practice of scientific methods, we’re in danger of committing a fallacious appeal to popularity. The reason is that without the shield of scientific methods, our opinions are subject to a host of cognitive biases, prejudices, political agendas, and so on. Tribes form when folks who share the same biases pool their…
