Jesus Puzzle: Chapter 20

Chapter 20 Critiqued:

First, it is crucial to remind the reader that illiteracy was high during the first century C.E. and that written records start showing up more frequently at the turn of the second century C.E. onwards.
Doherty wrote: “Obscure references in obscure historians such as Thallus and Phlegon, to supposed eclipses which may or may not be identified with some tradition about the darkness at Jesus’ crucifixion, have in any case reached us exclusively through the filter of later Christian commentators. Origen and Julius Africanus may well have put their own spin on what the historians actually said; Africanus comes to us only second-hand. No case can be made based on references like this, and it is a mark of how thin the evidence really is that they would be considered of any evidentiary value” (TJP:203).

Imagine the following scenario sometime in the distant future: The Jesus Puzzle no longer exists in print and no copy of it is known to exist. Further, there is no historical record of Earl Doherty ever existing except the name attached to the book.

Other writers quote from and mention it, using the ideas presented in this lost work to argue that there was no historical Jesus.
There is no way to verify how accurately the other writers are quoting Earl Doherty’s The Jesus Puzzle.
Following Doherty’s logic, no case could be made that The Jesus Puzzle ever existed or even Earl Doherty himself.

Now for a real historical scenario: Doherty’s source criteria will be applied to the existence of Alexander the Great below:

“That we know anything at all about Alexander is primarily due to the ancient literary sources which discuss him” (ATG:2).
“However, this is an essential part of the study of history, and the study of Alexander poses a major source problem” (ATG:2).
“Many, many histories of Alexander were written in antiquity, but most are known only by title or in fragments because of the circumstances of historical survival. These included eyewitness accounts by men who had accompanied Alexander’s expedition (the so-called ‘primary sources’), who were at least in a position to tell the truth about the parts of the campaigns they knew about in so far as they understood it, although bias or even malice might have crept in” (ATG:2-3).
“There were also later writers who both made use of these eyewitness accounts and drew upon the wealth of popular stories which quickly grew up about Alexander.”
“The most reliable of the latter group (so-called ‘secondary sources’) form the basis of all modern histories of Alexander the Great” (ATG:3).
“The best known of these writers is Lucius Flavius Arrianus, ‘Arrian’ in anglicized form, who was a Greek from the Roman province of Bithynia” (ATG:3).

“Although his exact dates continue to be debated, he lived in the last decade or so of the first century AD throughout the first decades or more of the second century; that is, more than four hundred years after Alexander’s death, and therefore without any personal knowledge of his subject” (ATG:3-4).
“Arrian states that he based his history on two main eyewitness accounts available to him: that of Ptolemy, Alexander’s boyhood friend in Macedonia and later a general (subsequently to become King Ptolemy I of Egypt), and that of a man named Aristoboulos, usually considered a civil engineer of some kind. We do not know why Arrian chose these sources nor how good they were. Since other Alexander sources do not use them, we have no independent evidence for their worth or otherwise” (ATG:4).
“Much of the difficulty in interpreting Arrian arises from this lack of knowledge about his sources” (ATG:4).
“Arrian has been criticized in many areas, but despite the problems of his sources and his late date, his Anabasisappears to be our best history of Alexander” (ATG:5).

“The second important secondary source for Alexander is Diodorus Siculus” (ATG:5).

“Living so much later and facing a task of enormous scope, Diodorus was clearly dependent on earlier sources for his material, but in Book XVII he does not identify them (or it)” (ATG:5).
“The significance of Diodorus and the vulgate tradition is that it gives a very different picture from that later found in Arrian, and scholars must try to reconcile the two” (ATG:6).

The third major, and secondary source, comes from the field of biography rather than history (ATG:6). Plutarch, a Greek of the second century AD wrote a work entitled Life of Alexander

“To achieve this, Plutarch uses sources liberally, and quotes them. Not surprisingly, these are often sources not found in the ‘proper’ historians of Alexander” (ATG:7).

Now, back to Doherty’s comment: “Africanus comes to us only second-hand. No case can be made based on references like this…”

Regarding Alexander the Great, in review: “Arrian states that he based his history on two main eyewitness accounts available to him: that of Ptolemy, Alexander’s boyhood friend in Macedonia and later a general (subsequently to become King Ptolemy I of Egypt), and that of a man named Aristoboulos, usually considered a civil engineer of some kind. We do not know why Arrian chose these sources nor how good they were. Since other Alexander sources do not use them, we have no independent evidence for their worth or otherwise” (ATG:4).

Arrian may have put his own spin on what the eyewitness accounts available to him actually said.

Regarding Julius Africanus’ citation of Thallus Compared with Arrian’s Citations of Sources:

Julius Africanus cited Thallus around 221 C.E. (THJAELC :196).
Thallus’ work that Africanus cited, and only fragments of it exists solely in the writings of others, was written around 52 C.E., which would place Thallus very close to the time of eyewitnesses (THJAELC :196).
This means approximately 169 years passed between Thallus’ documentation stating “…a most fearful darkness; and the rocks were rent by an earthquake, and many places in Judea and other districts were thrown down” (JAEWXVIII:130) and Julius Africanus quoting/citing it.
This particular work was also cited by other writers (THJAELC :196).
In comparison to Arrian, who lived during the last decade of the first century C.E. through part of the second century C.E. about 400 years after Alexander the Great’s death (June 10, 323 B.C.) (ATG:95), and when the alleged eyewitness accounts would have been written.
Since other Alexander sources do not use them, we have no independent evidence for their worth or otherwise” (ATG:4).
In other words, unlike the case of the work Africanus cited from Thallus, no other ancient writer cites the eyewitness sources Arrian cited for events in Alexander the Great’s life.

In short, Doherty should disregard all of the historical documentation of events from Alexander the Great’s life if Doherty is to be logically consistent.

Further, Christian commentators also provide quotations from other historical sources that are now lost.