If Jesus didn’t exist, if he was originally believed to have lived and died in outer space, how did our Christianity come to exist? How could an earthly Jesus just get invented like that, and the original view of him forgotten? That’s the question Jonathan Tweet still keeps going on about. Even though it’s both fully and succinctly answered in On the Historicity of Jesus. Which he is supposed to have read. Yet in our debate, he didn’t seem to be aware of any of it. He still does not, even after being prodded about it repeatedly on Facebook lately.

Last month I addressed his other claim that the “cosmic seed” hypothesis (that Jesus’s body was manufactured directly from the sperm of David) is implausible and therefore, if it is even so much as proposed, it should reduce the probability of any theory of Christian origins. That charge is multiply fallacious (minimal mythicism dosn’t require the cosmic seed hypothesis; the cosmic seed hypothesis is not implausible in context; and proposing it has no effect on the probability of minimal mythicism). But you can get the why for that from last month’s article, The Cosmic Seed of David.

Here, I address the second question:

How did a pseudo-historicist Christianity eclipse the original sect’s beliefs?

Analogy in Resurrection Apologetics

Of course, On the Historicity of Jesus already thoroughly answers the question (see Element 22 in Ch. 4, with Chs. 8.12 and 12.3).

But it helps to look at how exact the analogy is to resurrection apologetics. Christian fundamentalists are just like Jonathan Tweet: after atheists calmly explain what most likely actually happened to launch the false belief that Jesus rose from the dead, the fundamentalist asks, with outraged incredulity, “How did the religion go from internal visions to detailed narratives of physical on-earth encounters in the Gospels then? You can’t explain that!” And when any atheist offers any explanation of how that could have happened, they declare “All your explanations are implausible!” It’s the same silly argument.

We have no record of how the religion shifted from internal visions (which is the only experience Paul talks about anyone ever having of the risen Jesus) to the elaborately historicized appearance narratives in the Gospels. Does that therefore mean the latter are therefore true? No. To the contrary, I suspect Tweet himself would agree they are 100% false. In truth, the first apostles only had personal inner visions of a risen Jesus. The Gospels wholly fabricated all the historical on-earth encounters with the risen Jesus. Yet that then became the solely attested belief thereafter, believers even “reading it back in” to the Epistles of Paul.

So if Tweet accepts that that happened for the resurrection, why can’t it have happened for the rest of the Gospel’s contents? Nothing that would stop that from happening for historicity belief, stopped it happening to resurrection belief. So why would it stop it happening for historicity belief?

All the sects that kept teaching the original version (that Jesus was only seen in inner visions, not touched and handled and eaten with on hills and in homes) were overrun and driven extinct, and all their literature destroyed. Or only stuff they wrote that is suitably ambiguous was preserved—like, for example, the few Epistles of Paul we are allowed now to read. We don’t get to hear anything they had to say about the complete radical change in how the resurrection of Jesus was understood. We don’t get to see how that change came about and overwhelmed the church, eclipsing every other view. Now every source we have insists Jesus was touched and handled and eaten with on hills and in homes, and not simply experienced in inner visions (or else, vaguely doesn’t specify either). Gosh. How could that happen?? It’s so implausible!! Jesus must be risen!! God be praised!!

If you don’t buy that reasoning, neither should you buy Tweet’s.

“You can’t explain how that switch happened” is simply not a logically valid objection to the conclusion that, in fact, it happened. Resurrection belief did in fact radically switch from “inner visions” to “historical-physical encounters, complete with veridical details and whole conversations.” It happened in the exact same time frame. In exactly the same documents. We get to see no one gainsaying it or calling foul. We get to see no evidence of how that change came about or even why; much less of how it drove extinct what the original witnesses were actually preaching, and consumed the entirety of extant Christian literature. And yet that is exactly what happened. And however it happened, is exactly how it would have happened to historicity altogether.

Phenomenologically, the historicity of Jesus, and the historicity of the Gospel resurrection narratives, are exactly the same. Likewise all the public miracles that were made up yet never gainsaid either: the sun going out for three hours, stars hovering over cities, the temple square ravaged, hordes of zombies descending on Jerusalem, hundreds of babies slaughtered, thousands of pigs drowned, thousands of people miraculously fed with Star Trek replicator food. All made up. Never gainsaid. We never get to hear from anyone who was really there, that none of that ever happened. So why should we expect to hear it for anything else? Inventing a mere man, is far easier (OHJ, Ch. 6.7).

In OHJ I provide extensive background knowledge on this, which is identical whether one is speaking of how the transition occurred in resurrection belief, or historicity belief. Origen’s giveaway about the principle of double truth—literal stories are invented to save the ignorant masses, while educated elites know the real truth is within the allegory, and dare not expose this to the rank and file lest they lose faith and become damned—all exactly as Plutarch said how Osiris cult reasoned: Elements 13 and 14 (Ch. 4). All of the records we would need to test and know what happened in the transition period (of about fifty years—an average human lifetime)—literally all those records, every single last one—were destroyed, and are never mentioned, quoted, or referenced by anyone, ever: Element 22 (Ch. 4) and Ch. 8. Whatever the original witnesses and their faithful successors had to say about the newfangled versions of events suddenly appearing, we never get to know: Ch. 6.7. Yet some hints survive of there having been Christians who preached the earthly Jesus was mythical: Chs. 3.1 and 8.12. Yet we aren’t allowed to see how ancient that view was or when or how it started…was it in fact the original view? We have no evidence it wasn’t.

This holds for historicity as firmly and plausibly as it holds for the resurrection. There is nothing implausible about this having happened, or about its matching exactly the evidence we now have. Because all the evidence that would expose it having happened, was destroyed. And that’s not conjecture. We know it for a fact. Christians didn’t just stop writing letters and homilies and polemics for a whole human lifetime. So it had to all have been destroyed. Even whatever they were arguing orally, as they must have been, is totally lost. Also a fact. But the literature is also gone.

The treatises 2 Peter was forged to rebut? Destroyed. The original edition of the Ascension of Isaiah? Destroyed. The original collection and version of Paul’s letters? Destroyed. All the cosmic-Jesus literature Irenaeus says he was attempting to rebut? Destroyed. All the supposedly “Docetist” treatises of early date we have no good reason to trust anti-Docetist apologists were representing accurately? Destroyed. Everything written by every Christian for a hundred years who would have had even a dogmatic reason (much less a genuinely informed reason) to challenge anything in the Gospels? Destroyed.

And this is why we don’t know how, when, or why resurrection belief shifted from personal inner visions, to physical earthly encounters. And it’s why we don’t know how, when, or why historicity belief shifted from personal inner visions, to physical earthly encounters.

My Brief Summary of What’s Most Likely

Nevertheless, in OHJ I summarized in just a few pages what most likely happened. Tweet has yet to show any sign of ever having read this. But here it is, verbatim (pp. 608-10):

Between the 30s and 70s some Christian congregations gradually mythicize the story of their celestial Jesus Lord, just as other mystery cults had done for their gods, eventually representing him rhetorically and symbolically in overtly historical narratives, during which time much of the more esoteric truth of the matter is reserved in secret for upper levels of initiation (Elements 11-14, 44-48). Right in the middle of this process the Jewish War of 66–70 destroyed the original church in Jerusalem, leaving us with no evidence that any of the original apostles lived beyond it. Before that, persecutions from Jewish authorities and famines throughout the empire (and, if it really happened, the Neronian persecution of 64, which would have devastated the church in Rome) further exacerbated the effect, which was to leave a thirty-year dark age in the history of the church (from the 60s to the 90s), a whole generation in which we have no idea what happened or who was in charge (Element 22). In fact this ecclesial dark age probably spans fifty years (from the 60s to 110s), if 1 Clement was written in the 60s and not the 90s (see Chapter 8, §5), as then we have no record of anything going on until either Ignatius or Papias, both of whom could have written well later than the 110s (Chapter 8, §§6 and 7). It’s during this dark age that the canonical Gospels most likely came to be written, by persons unknown (Chapter 7, §4), and at least one Christian sect started to believe the myths they contain were real, and thus began to believe (or for convenience claim) that Jesus was a real person, and then preached and embellished this view. Because having a historical founder represented in controlled documents was a significant advantage (Chapter 8, §12; and Chapter 1, §4), this ‘historicizing’ sect gradually gained political and social superiority, declared itself ‘orthodox’ while condemning all others as ‘heretics’ (Chapter 4, §3), and preserved only texts that agreed with its view, and forged and altered countless texts in support. As a result, almost all evidence of the original Christian sects and what they believed has been lost or doctored out of the record; even evidence of what happened during the latter half of the first century to transition from Paul’s Christianity to second-century ‘orthodoxy’ is completely lost and now almost wholly inaccessible to us (Elements 21-22 and 44). No element of the theory I just outlined is ad hoc. The letters of Paul corroborate the hypothesis that Christianity began with visions (real or claimed) and novel interpretations of scripture, and this is not a fringe proposal but is actually a view shared by many experts. The idea of a ‘celestial savior’ is corroborated by documents such as the Ascension of Isaiah and has precedents in theologies like the continual death-and-resurrection of Osiris, and is found even in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Euhemerization of god-men by placing them in historical contexts was commonplace in antiquity. That ancient texts could have symbolic and allegorical content is well established in classics and religious studies, has ample support in the sociology of religion and was common practice in ancient mystery cults and Judaism. Christianity did possess the central features of ancient mystery cults. And the fact that such ‘mysteries’ were kept secret and revealed only to initiates, who were then sworn to secrecy, is a well-known fact of ancient religion. Everything else is an undeniable fact: the Epistles do reveal the constant vexation of novel dogmas; the devastating events of the 60s did occur; the history of the church is completely silent from then until the mid-90s or later; a historicist sect did later gain supreme power and did decide which texts to preserve, and it did doctor and meddle with numerous manuscripts and even produced wholesale forgeries to that same end—and not as a result of any organized conspiracy, but simply from independent scribes and authors widely sharing similar assumptions and motives. The only element of the basic myth theory that is even incredible (at least at first look) is the idea that a transition from a secret cosmic savior to a public historical one happened within two generations, and without a clear record of it occurring. But the unusual circumstances of a major disruption in the church opened the door to rapid developments in its dogmas, and the complete silence of the record in the following period blocks any attempt to argue ‘from silence’ that there was no transition from myth to legend. That this development did not get recorded is because nothing got recorded. When we consider the prospect of newly evangelized Christians, handed a euhemerized Gospel, but not yet initiated into the full secret, and then being set loose to spread their unfinished beliefs and founding their own churches and developing their own speculations, the idea that a myth could be mistaken as and transformed into ‘history’ in just a few generations is not so implausible as it may seem, particularly given that the geographical distances involved were large, lifespans then were short, and legends often grow with distance in both time and space. There may even have been a ‘transitional’ state of the cult in which the historical narratives were seen as playing out what was simultaneously occurring in the heavens (so one could believe both narratives were true), or in which certain sect leaders chose to downplay or reinterpret the secret doctrines and sell the public ones as the truth instead (as Origen seems to have thought was a good idea). Any number of possibilities present themselves; without any data from that period, we cannot know which happened. Hence I already dealt with this objection more than adequately in Chapters 6 (§7), 7 (§7), and 8 (§§4 and 12). For comparison, even if we granted historicity, then we do not know how some sects transitioned to a cosmically born Jesus in the Christianities Irenaeus attacks as heresies (Chapter 11, §9) or a cosmically killed Jesus in the Ascension of Isaiah (Chapter 3, §1), or to a Jesus who lived and died a hundred years earlier (Chapter 8, §1). Thus, our ignorance in the matter of how the cult transitioned is not solved by positing historicity. Either way, we’re equally in the dark on how these changes happened.

Now. Find what in all that is implausible. Implausible in context. Good luck. Because none of it is.

We could stop there. That’s my summary in just a few paragraphs. Honestly, nothing more need be said. But if you want more detail, read on.

What Happened Looks Really Suspicious

How did the creed go from this:

I want to remind you … By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain. For what I received I passed on to you as of greatest importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared… [by revelation to a select few: 1 Corinthians 15:1-8]

To this:

Stop your ears when anyone speaks to you at variance with the Jesus Christ who was descended from David, and came through Mary; who really was born and ate and drank; who really was persecuted under Pontius Pilate; who really was crucified and died in the sight of witnesses in heaven, and on earth, and even under the earth; who really was raised from the dead, too, His Father resurrecting Him, in the same way His Father will resurrect those of us, who believe in Him by Jesus Christ, apart from whom we do not truly have life. [Ignatius, Trallians 9, written between 110 and 160 AD (see scholarship summarized in OHJ, Ch. 8.6)]

How did the creed change so radically, into so conspicuous an assertion of historicism, in just 60 years? That’s as weird on historicity as it is on mythicism. Note what’s changed:

Paul said Jesus “came into being from David’s sperm” (genomenou ek spermatos Dauid, Rom. 1:3; see OHJ, Ch. 11.9). Ignatius now insists we have to say Jesus came “from the descendants of David” (ek genous Dauid). Conspicuously, precisely the thing Paul never said.

Paul said Jesus “came into being from a woman,” and his surrounding argument implies that by this he meant from the woman “Hagar…an allegory” (Gal. 4:4; see OHJ, Ch. 11.9). Ignatius now insists we must say Jesus is “from Mary,” not some generic “woman” in an argument about allegorical women. Notably Paul never mentions a Mary. Not in any creed he attests (see OHJ, Ch. 11.4). So why is her name now important to affirm in the creed?

In both places Paul said Jesus was “made” (ginomai) not “born” (gennaô), by choosing the same word Paul uses to signal divine manufacture (of Adam and our future resurrection bodies), and never of human birth, in conspicuous contrast to the word Paul does always use of human birth. Ignatius conspicuously reverses the vocabulary, and insists we now must say “born” (gennaô) not “made” (ginomai). Exactly the same way we know Christian scribes tried doctoring the manuscripts of Paul (in both Rom. 1:3 and Gal. 4:4 at the same time, thus proving they were well aware of the problem I’m pointing out: OHJ, p. 580, n. 91; hence though both words can mean birth, Christians were aware Paul’s usage did not).

Paul said Jesus ate and drank in a vision (1 Cor. 11:23; see OHJ, Ch. 11.7). Ignatius now insists we must say Jesus ate and drank for real. Why is that suddenly important?

Paul said “the archons of this eon crucified” Jesus (1 Cor. 2:8; see OHJ, pp. 47-48, 321-22, 565-66), language evocative of celestial demonic powers (OHJ, Ch. 5, Element 37), while also saying the Roman authorities never would have (Rom. 13; see OHJ, pp. 565-66). Ignatius now insists we must say Pontius Pilate crucified Jesus, and shun anyone who says otherwise as an agent of the Devil. So who was saying otherwise? Why did the name of the crucifier become important to the creed?

Paul essentially says there were no earthly witnesses to Jesus before his resurrection (1 Cor. 15:3-8; Rom. 10:14-16; Rom. 16:25-26; see OHJ, scripture index, pp. 667-68). Ignatius now says we must say there were. Why did that become necessary? Why did that enter the creed? When? How?

Historicists have theories to explain this. But are they correct? Docetism was the threat Ignatius is retooling the creed to combat, they’ll say. But Ignatius never mentions Docetists. And the only texts we have that show anything like Docetism date a century later, and they don’t say anything like what’s in Ignatius (e.g. some of those texts say Jesus switched places with Simon of Cyrene, which is clearly not what Ignatius is talking about or arguing against). So how do we know what those whom Ignatius is responding to were actually teaching? We don’t get to read anything they actually wrote, not even in quotation. Christian apologists were notorious liars and misrepresenters of their opponents, so we can’t trust them. And none of the later documents that survive that are called Docetic reference the doctrines Ignatius is concerned about. Were the folks Ignatius is writing against those later, unrelated Docetists we have some writings from and that later apologists opposed—or actually mythicists? We aren’t told; but it sounds a lot more like mythicists (OHJ, pp. 317-20), the same ones 2 Peter was forged to rebut (OHJ, p. 351). We can’t show otherwise.

What we are left with is a creed (in fact several quoted by Paul) that never references any historical detail placing any of Jesus’ activity on earth, then a blackout of fifty some years, during which the Gospels get written, and suddenly, a lifetime after the Gospels began circulating, the creed has been retooled to include details that only first appear in them—Mary, Pilate, a human birth with Davidic ancestors, dinner parties, earthly witnesses to the Crucifixion. Not only do they suddenly get added to the creed, they become essential to the creed: we are told we must condemn any Christians who reject them. Which means…there were Christians who rejected them. And we don’t get to hear from them.

Plausibility Derives from Context

What makes a theory plausible or implausible is not what we now in the modern age think is normal or weird, but what was normal or weird in the era and region this actually happened in. Tweet seems to be relying on his modernist intuition, balking at all the weird-ass shit the ancients believed—which is exactly ass-backwards. All that weird-ass shit they believed back then was normal. So anything that coheres with it is plausible. That’s how plausibility operates in historical reasoning. Anything else is anachronism.

I wrote in OHJ (p. 53) what I repeated in the Tweet debate:

The manner in which Osiris came to be historicized, moving from being just a cosmic god to being given a whole narrative biography set in Egypt during a specific historical period, complete with collections of wisdom sayings he supposedly uttered, is still an apt model, if not by any means an exact one. Which is to say, it establishes a proof of concept. It is in essence what all mythicists are saying happened to Jesus.

This is the model from which the last two of the five components of the hypothesis of minimal mythicism are derived, as I lay out in OHJ (ibid.):

4. As for many other celestial deities, an allegorical story of this same Jesus was then composed and told within the sacred community, which placed him on earth, in history, as a divine man, with an earthly family, companions, and enemies, complete with deeds and sayings, and an earthly depiction of his ordeals.

Which was typical. All savior deities like Jesus had this happen to them. All of them, so far as we can tell. We know of not a single exception. So it’s not even unusual. To the contrary, Jesus being the lone historical one would be unusual. Likewise for several other myth-classes Jesus belongs to. The largest and most detailed, and thus the most informative, being the Rank-Raglan class. But others as well. In fact, Jesus belongs to more myth-heavy reference classes than any other purportedly historical figure I know (see my discussion here).

And then:

5. Subsequent communities of worshipers believed (or at least taught) that this invented sacred story was real (and either not allegorical or only ‘additionally’ allegorical).

This was likewise the case for all other mystery cult savior deities, all Rank-Raglan heroes, including Moses (and John Frum and Ned Ludd and King Arthur and the Roswell aliens). Again, it’s what typically happened. And what typically happens, is by definition not implausible.

We have a precedent not just in Osiris, but every other mystery religion, all of whose saviors are of dubious historicity yet were placed in history in fake tales or biographies, the functional equivalent of “Gospels” for their respective religions. We also have the precedent of Moses himself. Made up. Complete with history, named siblings and parents, teachings, deeds, birth and death, and so on. We do not need to explain “how” all these people got made up and believed real. We know that’s what happened. So it’s not really all that sensible to demand a specific account of how the same thing happened to yet another Jewish lawgiver and mystery savior. There are a dozen ways it can have happened to Moses, or to Osiris, or to Bacchus, or John Frum, or Ned Ludd. To all of whom it happened. There are likewise a dozen different ways it can have happened to Jesus. And we can’t know which, because all the evidence from the very period in which it happened, was erased. So we don’t get to find out.

This is the basic point that is lost on Tweet. His behavior with respect to Jesus on this point is as irrational as if he used the same argument to insist Osiris and Bacchus and Moses and Frum and Ludd existed. Or, again, that a resurrected Jesus must really have shown his wounds to Thomas and eaten fish with Peter, because it’s “implausible” that the whole religion could transition from inner visions to such detailed narratives without anyone on the extant record noticing or mentioning it. Sorry, but no. That’s simply not even implausible. It is, indeed, obviously what happened.

All the Contributing Factors

In OHJ I discuss numerous factors that could have contributed to the transition. And they are as applicable to how Jesus became historicized, as to how his resurrection did.

I discuss the Noll Thesis: historicizing mythical founders is actually anthropologically normal, and is driven by its polemical advantages (pp. 352-53). We see it in the Cargo Cults (Element 29, Ch. 5), the Mystery Cults (Element 11, Ch. 4; and 31, Ch. 5), the Hadith, Torah, Mishnah, and beyond. A religion that converts its disparate revelations and inspirations into the singular deeds and teachings of a made-up “historical founder” is inherently more successful in the marketplace of ideas, quite likely to drive extinct its less-adapted ancestor. As in fact happened (e.g. the original mystical resurrection teaching was driven extinct by the physical dinner-buddy resurrection teaching).

I discuss Origen’s Confession: that controlling the masses requires feeding them literal stories, because they won’t be moved (and thus won’t be saved) by allegory or esoteric cosmologies (Elements 13 and 14, Ch. 4). And his confession is so detailed and frank, it’s entirely credible to suspect Origen knew or suspected Jesus never walked the earth, but would never admit it for fear of destroying his religion, by causing the illiterate masses to abandon it and thereby fall into the clutches of Satan. There was therefore a strong incentive among the church elite to push historicity.

I also discuss the role of historical accident: the sect that just happened to be positioned to gain Constantine’s ear and thus secure total power on his fortunate coattails was the most fundamentalist and literalist sect of them all, as we can see from the absurdist idiocy of Constantine’s primary advisor (Lactantius) and the infamous dishonesty of his secondary advisor (Eusebius). Had the dice rolled the other way, mythicist Christians may have been the ones suppressing the “heresy” of historicism. But for the very reasons Origen and Noll point out, that may have been causally improbable. The historicist heresy was in fact the most innately adapted for success and dominance. And once it was secure in absolute power, it decided all document survival for a thousand years.

One might object and say, “they didn’t destroy the collection at Nag Hammadi.” But the collection at Nag Hammadi is late; no manuscript in it even dates before Constantine. And even by the most favorable conjectures, none of the texts those manuscripts preserve were composed any earlier than the second century, and most were composed in the third. Useless. If we had a comparable find for first century Christianity, indeed it probably would decide this debate once and for all. But alas, we don’t get to see anything like that. And that’s the problem. Why don’t we get to see anything like that?

The bottom line is, all the sects of Christianity we hear about by the end of the second century, including what became “orthodoxy,” were evolved elaborations that did not match the original teachings of Peter or even Paul. And yet every sect declared the others heresy. But which teachings of which sects were the late aberrations, and which still resembled the original sect? It’s statistically impossible that the sect that won total power “just happened” to be the only one with true beliefs, that no other sects retained true facts of the original sect, that were abandoned by the sect that became politically victorious. So what is actually the heresy? The cosmic Christ doctrines the “orthodoxists” condemned, as we see in Irenaeus and the Ascension of Isaiah? Or are those self-proclaimed orthodoxists the heretics? It’s as likely one as the other. We have no evidence by which to prove either. So we can assume neither.

That leaves us back at square one: we know the Christianity that decided what documents we get to see is nothing like the original, and therefore certainly underwent radical transitions that we have no record of. So we can’t balk at there having been radical transitions that we have no record of. Therefore, balking at that is a non sequitur. It has no logical effect on the probability of any hypothesis. Historicists have as many radical transitions to explain as the mythicists. They simply differ on which details were transitioned.

What We Learn from Pliny the Younger

One factor I don’t mention in OHJ in as much detail as I should is what we discover about Christianity from the one letter about it we find in Pliny the Younger’s government correspondence (pp. 342-430), the first time in history anyone ever noticed Christianity in any known literature (Josephus almost certainly never having mentioned it): Christianity appears to have experienced a first century bottleneck of failure and subsequent revival.

In Pliny’s letter to Trajan, written around 112 A.D., he reveals two interesting facts: he had never been present at any trial of Christians and had no idea what they believed or why it was criminal; and most of those reported as Christians in his province had left the faith, years or decades before he even inquired.

The second fact is telling. The first fact is peculiar. By the time he wrote that letter, Pliny the Younger had been a Roman Senator for 25 years. He had served as the ancient equivalent of the Chief of Police at Rome, the Capitol of the Empire, with a population above a million. After that he had served as the ancient equivalent of the Attorney General for the whole Empire. Then as Consul (akin to being Secretary of State and Interior). Then served as the governor of Bithynia (a portion of what is now Turkey) for two years before any Christians were brought to his attention. And he had also governed that same province a decade before that. So he wasn’t even new to the province or its legal matters.

And yet, somehow, this most legally experienced man in the Empire, had never once ever seen a trial of Christians and knew nothing about them or even why it was illegal to be one. That entails Christianity was recruiting so poorly as to be almost nonexistent—even after eighty years, nearly two average lifetimes, of evangelizing across three continents. That most of those who could be rousted up as Christians had already left the religion, verifies the conclusion: people were losing interest; membership was scarce and dwindling.

Put those two facts together, and we must conclude something alarming: quite possibly, Christianity almost died out. It was so uninfluential, so small, so unsuccessful, that by the end of the first century and dawn of the second, they had never even appeared on Pliny’s radar, anywhere, ever, in several decades of his legal and administrative experience. In fact, it was so unsuccessful, that it was even losing membership. Pliny expressed worry that, all of a sudden, Christians could be found everywhere, but it’s evident this was hyperbolic alarm based on no actual facts or statistics (akin to McCarthy’s fear of Commie Spies infiltrating the government and social elite). Yes, probably a few Christians could be found in many a city or town. But it’s clear from Pliny’s own account that most of those accused were never Christians or had long ceased to be. Only but few maintained their confession of faith. And they were so rare, it was a labor even to find them, and until he was pressed to search, he’d never encountered a single one in all his career.

It’s notable that this apparent failure or downturn in the fortunes of the religion, corresponds exactly with when new missionaries attempted to revive it with new, exciting doctrines and texts: the Gospels. And when is a radical reformation of a cult going to be most successful, but when most old believers had left, its founders were all long dead, and the sect is so small and anemic no power existed to stop or gainsay you—and when anyone of the old guard still around, you could easily dismiss as themselves being the revisionist heretics! One hardly needs any further explanation of how the religion could transition from mystical to historicist doctrines—in the resurrection as much as in the existence of Jesus. Same difficulty. Same opportunity. Same causes and mechanisms of success. If the one happened—and it unquestionably did—the other could have happened, with nothing else having to be posited but the theory itself.

Conclusion

By 100 A.D., even most adults who had read the first edition of Mark would be dead. The original witnesses and founders would have been long dead. In fact, they would likely have been dead before Mark was even written—there is, after all, no evidence of any apostle still being alive after 70 A.D. And Pliny’s report entails Christian converts were a scattered few; most had even abandoned the religion altogether. And this, for a mystery religion with secret doctrines, the easiest to alter without anyone noticing or being able to prove them altered.

So think about it. If someone started selling the Gospels as real histories, who could prove that untrue by then? The witnesses were all long dead. Anyone who knew them, could be gainsaid by liars claiming to have known them, and who could tell the difference? The celestial theory could be claimed the heresy and condemned, and people ordered to shun anyone still advocating it as of the Devil…precisely as we see Ignatius doing.

After all, who by then could prove the celestial doctrine the original even if it was? If it was never written down, if it was a mystery only transmitted by word of mouth to initiates, no evidence would exist that what they were told, and thus what they were teaching, was actually the truth. And if it was written down, who could prove that was not the forgery? Faced with copies of the original text of the Ascension of Isaiah and the Gospel of Matthew, who could prove which was written first? Who could prove which preserved the doctrines predating the War? Anyone who gainsaid the historicists, could be condemned a heretic. And no one would be the wiser. From there on out, it was all just a matter of mere politics which “version” of the church’s history would win out. It was in no way anything anyone could decide with evidence.

And we don’t get to hear any of that debate anyway. Just as it was all erased for the resurrection; so just as easily it would have been erased for historicity. Indeed, it would have been the very same documents and statements being erased.

If anyone who “knew” (despite that being impossible to know) that the religion began with inner visions, and that the absurd narratives in the Gospels of angelically occupied empty tombs and meeting and eating with a risen Jesus were fabrications, how would we know? Anything they said or wrote to call that out, was erased. It is not extant, quoted, cited, or mentioned. And if meeting and eating with a risen Jesus could be fabricated that easily, and never be gainsaid in any extant records, and win over the entirety of the church, why couldn’t the exact same process result in just as easily fabricating meeting and eating with Jesus altogether? What would stop it from never being gainsaid in any extant records and winning over the entirety of the church? Fabricating a dinner with someone after they died is no easier than fabricating a dinner with someone before they died. So if the one succeeded—and it did—then just as easily could the other have.

And that’s why we have nothing left to explain.