Not only did Jesus not exist, he was also a lying bastard! The implications of Robert M. Price’s appeal to the 2nd Century writer Celsus.

Robert M. Price

I have to admit that I don't like debates very much. Too often they represent two guys who may or may not know what they're talking about presenting evidence to an audience that is not well enough informed on the subject to know whether what the guys are saying has any validity to it or not. Very often they represent nothing more than displays of confident assetion and rhetorical posturing.

Unlike atheist/mythicist debaters like the late Christopher Hitchens, Dan Barker, and Richard Dawkins, all of whom sometimes very dramatically display (or displayed) their ignorance of the basic facts relating to what they assert, [1] Robert M. Price actually knows his stuff. Still when I look at Price's arguments, I very often feel that he is rubbing the evidential fur the wrong way.

In a debate with Bart Ehrman, Robert M. Price begins his opening salvo (36 minutes) by attempting refute the following statement from page 96 of Bart Ehman’s 2012 book, Did Jesus Exist:

“The idea that Jesus did not exist is a modern notion. It has no ancient precedents.”

Price's quotations include one from the second-century, anti-Christian philosopher Celsus that he puts forward as denying Jesus existence:

“It is clear to me that the writings of the Christians are a lie, and that your fables have not been well enough constructed to conceal this monstrous fiction.”[2]

But Price's quotation doesn't do justice to Celsus' position, or if it does then we must argue that Celsus not only denied that Jesus existed, but that also he held that this non-existent Jesus added insult to injury by lying about having been virgin born!

Fact: Celsus did accuse Jesus of lying but he did not accuse him of not existing.

Celsus, in the process of making his attempted rebuttal to Christianity, invents a Jewish character which he presents as debating with Jesus about his claims. Celsus' work survives only in the form of lengthy quotations in Origen's refutation of it in the book Contra Celsum.

Celsus claims, first of all, that Jesus actually invented the story about his being born of a virgin. The reality, he says, was that Jesus' mother had been a poor Jewish woman who scraped a living from her spinning and who had been turned out of her home by her husband, a carpenter, after he had discovered that she had committed adultery with Jesus' "real" father, a soldier named Panthera.

Celsus' Jesus in poverty ends up hiring himself out as a servant in Egypt, where he eventually learned the magic arts before returning to his homeland and presenting himself as someone important (1:28-32). Eventually, Celsus claims, Jesus was punished for his crimes by the Jews (2:4,7).

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1. See, for example, "On Christopher Hitchens' not knowing the difference between a 'Synoptic' and a 'Canonical' Gospel; "Soundings from the Rubbish Stream: Atheist Dan Barker, in good Mythicist tradition, petends he's familiar with the writings of Philo of Alexandria"; "Why Does Richard Dawkins Think The Council of Nicaea Chose The Gospels When He Might Easily Have Been Better Informed?"

2 This quotation from Celsus has been circulating for a long time among mythicist writers without any indication as to its context.  Its actual source is Joseph Hoffman's reconstruction in Celsus On the True Doctrine: A Discourse Against the Christians (trans. R. Joseph Hoffmann; New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 64, based on Contra Celsum 2.26 (ANF 4.442).  Roger Pearce over at www.tertullian.org has done a good job tracing this erroneous mythicist commonplace here.