Atheists aren't stupid. Can we please stop pretending they are?
The Julius Caesar Edition
Warning, snark sightings ahead.
This is my plea - can we evangelicals please stop acting like atheists are stupid? Because when a fellow Christian makes a mic-drop claim showing how logical Christianity is, followed by a statement that atheists are just so blinded by their prejudice that they can’t accept the evidence right in front of their eyes, chances are good that the mic-drop claim is not telling the whole story.1 And then we look like the stupid ones.
For example.
Here’s one that I first heard from a pulpit2 in 2022: “There’s more evidence for Jesus than there is for Alexander the Great.” A quick Google search located the claim online, which comes from the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.
There is more evidence that Jesus rose from the dead than there is that Julius Caesar ever lived, or that Alexander the Great died at the age of 33. It is strange that historians will accept thousands of facts for which they can produce only shreds of evidence.
As someone who is both a Christian and a history student, when I read this my eyes rolled so hard in my head that my husband heard them all the way down the hall. And speaking of rolling, I really hope Billy Graham is rolling over in his grave right now and not personally responsible for this statement.
Let’s Compare, Shall We?
So we’re comparing apples to apples, we’re going to look at evidence for the existence of Julius Caesar and the existence of a living, breathing, fully-human3 Jesus during the first century AD, particularly since the two were almost contemporaries.
Let’s begin.
Julius Caesar wrote at least two books that we still have replicas of (Commentaries on the Gallic Wars and Commentaries on the Civil War). Jesus wrote zero books.4
Point to Caesar.
Two different people who personally knew Julius Caesar wrote things about him that we still have copies of, his frenemy Cicero and his adopted son and heir Caesar Augustus. Similarly, two different people who personally knew Jesus5 wrote things about him that we have today, the apostles Matthew and John. You can argue, like The Gospel Coalition does, that evidence in terms of (a) age of the oldest manuscript still in existence and (b) number of copies of ancient manuscripts is better weighted toward Jesus than it is toward Caesar, and I’d accept this point. However, you also have to acknowledge that nobody debates the authorship of Cicero and Caesar Augustus’s works (or Julius Caesar’s for that matter), while scholars debate6 whether the Gospels of Matthew and John were in fact written by the two disciples who went by those names (given that the authors of these two Gospels do not actually name themselves in the Gospels).
So I’ll call this one a tie.
But the real kicker is that we have coins7 featuring Julius Caesar that were minted during his lifetime. We have zero coins featuring Jesus either during his lifetime or in the first few centuries after his death. So if we’re using the same standard for coins that The Gospel Coalition above uses for manuscripts, clearly this is a…
Point to Caesar.
Additionally, we have remains of an entire temple that was built over Caesar’s gravesite just a few years after his death, with contemporary textual evidence that the memorial marked the correct spot. In contrast, textual evidence only exists for Jesus’s reputed burial site an entire three hundred years after his death.
Point to Caesar.
We have not just textual but also archaeological evidence for Caesar’s (likely) biological son Caesarion and his adopted son Octavian (aka Caesar Augustus, the same Caesar Augustus who is mentioned in the Gospel of Luke). We have zero archeological evidence for any of Jesus’s immediate family members.8
Point to Caesar.
Is it really necessary to continue at this point?
It is only by taking an extremely narrow view of “evidence” that we can claim that there is more reliable evidence for Jesus than for Julius Caesar.
And, sure, you can put the caveat “manuscript” evidence in the title like The Gospel Coalition does. But then in the body of the article the author switches from “manuscript” to “historical” evidence, without making clear that “historical” evidence also includes archaeological evidence, none of which is discussed in the article. To be clear, this is a bait and switch tactic, and hardly honest.
If we can’t even get the facts straight about things that people can touch and see with their own eyes, how do we expect unbelievers to take us seriously when talking about the more intangible claims of miracles and resurrection contained in the Bible?
If we want unbelievers to take our evidence seriously, we also have to take them seriously. And that includes their intelligence. We worship a God called logos, which in the Greek means reason and logic as much as it means Word.9 Let’s start acting like it.
So if anyone from the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association is listening, can you please, for the love of all that is holy, remove this devotional? At best, it’s ignorant. At worst, it’s flat-out deceptive.
And Gospel Coalition, you can do better than this.10
We can all do better than this.
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I looked at another claim in the post Is Your Pastor’s Preaching Really that “Biblical?”
Not my current church, just FYI.
I personally also affirm the fully-God part of Jesus, but here we’re just looking at whether Jesus physically existed in a specific, historical time and place. If you want to compare Jesus’s claims to divinity with Caesar’s claims to divinity, you’ll have to ask a theologian, not myself.
“But Jesus wrote the entire Bible because he’s part of the Trinity” is cheating, not evidence. Here, we are talking about Jesus physically putting hand to stylus for the purpose of writing a document, or dictating to someone for the express purpose of writing a document (as Paul does to Tertius in Romans 16:22).
“I know Jesus because he lives in my heart” is also cheating, not evidence, unless you’re willing to accept from an unbeliever the statement that “I know Caesar existed because my heart tells me so.”
For possible reasons why this isn’t more widely known, see Jeremy Steele’s post Why Pastors Hide Academic Bible Scholarship from their Congregations
I do need to point out that it is hardly surprising that we don’t have any coins or other contemporary archaeological evidence for Jesus. In his day, Jesus was a relative nobody from the outskirts of the Roman Empire, whereas Julius Caesar was the ruler of the territory that became this same Empire shortly before Jesus’s birth. It’s natural that a military and political leader leave behind more evidence of his existence than a day-laborer from the metaphorical backwoods.
I can’t let this one slide. The Gospel Coalition article linked above concludes with, “If we believe what the best sources say about Julius Caesar, then we should believe what the best sources say about Jesus Christ.” We don’t believe everything that the best sources say about Julius Caesar. Otherwise, we’d take his claims to divinity at face value, too.