Greg Koukl's Failure -- How NOT to Argue Against the Pagan Copycat Thesis

I'm a big fan of Stand to Reason Ministries, and Greg Koukl (the president of STR) is the biggest reason why I feel that way. (In fact, I'm proud to have Greg's autograph on the book on Relativism that he co-authored with Frank Beckwith.) I strongly recommend both his website and (especially) his weekly podcast.

There are rare (and I emphasize, rare) occasions when I find myself disagreeing with Koukl when it comes to apologetics (rarely), theology (not too often) or bioethics (practically never). Disagreements on certain social and political issues might be a bit more freqent, but that's beside the point for now. This post is a brief critical commentary on one such issue of disagreement.

Greg's opening commentary on STR's radio broadcast on february 8th was a critique of the "pagan copycat thesis" as it is put forward in the movie Zeitgeist (and also in certain books by radical fringe scholars and scholar-wannabes). I agree with Greg's assessment that the copycat thesis is without rational merit, but I disagree with his way of arguing for this conclusion. He basically claims that even if we grant the alleged mythological parallels with the life of Jesus in all their fullness (which would mean that the outline of the basic life story of Jesus would be paralleled by many mythical figures throughout history, including pre-christian ones), this provides no evidence that the story of Jesus is mythological and non-historical. He quotes C. S. Lewis to the effect that one must show that a person's view is false before it is meaningful to ask why it is false. He then goes on to briefly review some of the facts concerning the evidence and scholarly conclusions in favour of the historical reliability of the New Testament documents.

Now, it seems to me that Greg misses an important point. We are dealing with a situation where we assess various hypotheses in light of the evidence. Part of that evidence is the existence of significant pagan mythological parallels (remember, this is granted only for the sake of an argument). If we have in our background knowledge an established pattern of stories written in a mythological genre of literature about godlike beings and the story of their virgin-births, miraculous lives, 12 followers, deaths, and resurrections, and we find the Gospels conforming to this pattern, then surely this counts as evidence for the hypothesis that the Gospels are similarly mythological in character. As far as I can see, this is a simple fact of how inductive and abductive reasoning concerning various competing hypotheses works. This fact is not negated by appealing to the admittedly compelling evidence for the historicity of the Gospels. In other words, the evidence for the Gospels' being mythological does not cease to be evidence simply because the evidence for their historicity is much stronger and thus outbalances it. Greg's original claim is thus mistaken. (I also think that I can show how the illustrations that he gave, namely, the case of Titanic and the "Michael Shermer argument" support my point of view when they're properly assessed.) What Greg should have argued for is the view that the evidence for the historicity of Gospels is so much stronger than the evidence for their mythological nature that the balance of probability is overwhelmingly in favour of the historicist view.

What I've written above takes for granted (for the sake of an argument) the assumption that Greg took for granted for the sake of an argument, namely, that there are clear and numerous pagan parallels to the Gospels. But in fact, this assumption is clearly false (and it's known to be false in contemporary mainstream scholarship). The pagan parallels are neither clear nor numerous (even though claims about such parallels -- often relying on old and unreliable authors who give no primary sources --- are numerous, at least on the internet). Even less numerous are such parallels in pre-christian mythology. And in any case, the obvious disanalogy with such parallels is the positive historical case that can be provided for the Gospels and other NT documents (the proximity of writing with the events, the presence of eyewitness influence, the indicators of historical genre in the Gospels, archaelological confirmation, etc). But this is a wholly different argument than the one that Greg was making. Greg's argument as it stands seems based on a confusion. Think of a simple analogy. My fingerprints on the murder weapon does constitute evidence for the hypothesis that I committed the murder, even if there is a wide array of additional and very compelling evidence against the hypothesis that I committed the murder.

When it comes to the radical revisinionist views of Christian origins, the evidence is clearly on our side, and the last thing that we need is a (otherwise competent) Christian apologist who presents poor arguments against these radical view. That would only give false impression of credibility to the pagan copycat/mythicist position that actually rests on very weak foundations.