Chapter 3 Critiqued:

• Doherty wrote: “In 334 BCE, Alexander the Great led his army of Macedonians out of Greece and into Asia, he faced the ancient empire of the Persians and an even more ancient Oriental world with deep social and religious roots. Ten years later, when he reached Babylon after a path of conquest which swung as far east as India, the Persian empire lay in ruins and that ancient world was already being inundated by Greeks…Alexander’s grand vision of a new unified world of East and West was stillborn, for in 323, at the age of 33, he died of fever in Babylon after a drinking party” (TJP:31).

• It is ironic that Doherty presents information about Alexander the Great as if all of the information was fact while questioning all of the historical data about Jesus of Nazareth. In fact, this could almost be an example of Doherty holding a double-standard.

• The historical documentation for Alexander the Great is quite poor in comparison to the historical documentation for Jesus of Nazareth.

• 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" (ATG:3).
• “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 Anabasis appears 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 CE 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).
• Doherty wrote: “Like the savior gods of the mystery cults, Christ Jesus offered deliverance from these evil forces, for the sacrificed god of the Christians was said to have placed all the supernatural powers of the universe under his subjection” (TJP:32).
• Go to the critique of Chapter 11 of The Jesus Puzzle for a discussion of the mystery cults and Christianity.