Julius/Jesus Part 2

I don’t know if John C. Wright read my previous post on this topic, but he has since written more about it on Twitter/X. Wright has a paid account, so it is a long-form tweet, although not an essay. I’ll quote it in parts, but the structure is a list of sources of evidence for the assassination of Caesar, a list for the resurrection of Jesus, then a further list for Jesus of later sources, and then an evaluation.

“There is more and firmer historical evidence for the resurrection of Christ than there is for the assassination of Caesar.
More evidence:
Just as a matter of numbers, sources for the death of Caesar by assassination in the Senate:
· Cicero (a contemporary, not an eyewitness),
· Nicolaus of Damascus (a contemporary, not an eyewitness),
· Plutarch (not contemporary),
· Suetonius (not contemporary),
· Appian (not contemporary) and
· Cassius Dio (not contemporary).
No eyewitnesses.”
x.com/johncwright2001/status/2…

I’ve already cited more evidence than this list, but there are some interesting elements. Cicero, notably, was a critic of Caesar and a man favoured by the men who killed Caesar, as well as being a well-documented historical figure in his own right. He was not an eyewitness to the assassination itself, but he was a witness to (indeed was directly involved in) the direct consequences of the assassination. Now perhaps, JCW is contending the possibility that Brutus et al. didn’t actually murder Julius but just hid him away and faked a body etc., etc. However, if we go down that route, NOBODY (except divine beings) saw Jesus actually rise from the dead, even if we take all the “eyewitness” accounts seriously. The various witnesses saw a man crucified, and days later saw the man alive. In my earlier post, I took that scenario as what we are looking for evidence of for “the resurrection”. It would be unreasonable to demand an autopsy and a subsequent doctor’s report on the health of Jesus on the following Sunday. The same applies to Caesar. Sure, I don’t know if Mark Anthony and Cassius weren’t in it together or an umbrella man on the grassy knoll near the Forum, but likewise, let’s not get into possible Jesus-body doubles or bribed centurions.

Nicolaus of Damascus is an interesting one of JCW to include. He’s an interesting figure because of his connections to Biblical history, as he was (apparently) somebody who knew King Herod the Great¹ and wrote a biography of him. Nicolaus also wrote a biography of Caesar Augustus, which naturally mentions that Julius Caesar was assassinated: csun.edu/~hcfll004/nicolaus.ht…

As with the other evidence I’ve cited (including artefacts), the information comes from two conflicting sides (pro-Caesar and anti-Caesar) but agree on the salient detail: Julius Caesar was assassinated.

Onto Jesus:

“By contrast, reports of Christ risen in the flesh after death, being seen, touched, eating a meal (which ghosts are not alleged to be able to do)
· John (contemporary eyewitness)
· Matthew (contemporary eyewitness)
· Mark (contemporary, eyewitness)
· Luke (contemporary eyewitness)
· Jude (contemporary eyewitness)
· Peter (contemporary eyewitness)
· James (contemporary eyewitness)
· Paul is contemporary, and saw the Risen Christ
· The author or authors of the Didache is contemporary.”
ibid

Hmmm. Firstly, that’s actually just five accounts: Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and (sort of) Paul. We’ll come back to them. The New Testament has the Letter of Jude², but it makes no claim to being an eyewitness to the events of the resurrection. Likewise, we have a letter from James, but it’s not clear he’s the same James as mentioned elsewhere and it also doesn’t make a claim to being an eyewitness to events of the resurrection. Likewise, for the epistles of Peter: although they do refer to the resurrection of Jesus, the writer does not claim to be an eyewitness. Actually, he does describe events he definitely did not see, such as Jesus visiting souls in hell.

Paul we discussed in the previous post which leaves the four gospel writers. Tradition identifies them with apostles, but the identification is not present in the gospels themselves. Only the Gospel of John makes a claim of being an eyewitness and in a bit of an oblique way, by highlighting one nameless follower of Jesus throughout and then at the end, identifying the account with that nameless follower. John³ does place himself both at the crucifixion and the empty tomb and at later encounters of Jesus.

Matthew, Mark and Luke appear to be closely related accounts but don’t claim to be written by eyewitnesses but credibly could have drawn from accounts by people close to events. Tradition identifies the authors as apostles, but those traditions are complex. Early traditions with the gospel of Mark was that the author was a follower of St Peter who wrote down Peter’s words. If we take that at face value, then JCW is double counting Peter. Matthew as a gospel is likewise anonymous but later attributed to an apostle. Luke is traditionally attributed to a follower of Saint Paul, rather than a direct follower of Jesus.

However, the three synoptic gospels are clearly drawing from related sources, so that’s not really even three roughly contemporary accounts, more like three versions based on maybe two sources. They don’t claim to be eyewitness accounts as such. Maybe, based on traditions, one of them (Matthew) was, but this is a thin claim.

The last on JCW’s first list is the anonymous author(s) of the Didache. This is a fascinating document that was long known about but was thought lost until the 19th century. It is a very early listing of a set of beliefs Christian should have, as a kind of catechism. It does help establish the age of a lot of Christian doctrine. Notably, the Didache does talk about the eventual resurrection of the dead but doesn’t discuss the resurrection of Jesus as an event as such, although it does say that the Lord will be returning. It’s not evidence of the resurrection except in the tangential sense of being evidence for Christianity.

It would be churlish to say there is no weight of contemporary eyewitness evidence there, but what there is muddy and unclear.

“Firmer evidence:
Reports on the assassination of Caesar come from two contemporaries. Other sources up to two centuries later.
If we allow testimony from two centuries later, in both cases, in the case for Christ we can list
· Clement of Rome,
· Mathetes,
· Polycarp,
· Ignatius,
· Barnabas,
· Papias,
· Justin Martyr,
· Irenaeus,
· Hermas,
· Tatian,
· Theophilus,
· Athenagoras,
· Clement of Alexandria.”
ibid

Except, these are all drawing again from the same sources,

We then get a different kind of argument:

“Also, the number of surviving Gospel and Epistle manuscripts is ten times that of any Roman historian, and was spread more widely, and recur with fewer scribal errors. In terms of the robustness of the preservation of documentary evidence, there is no comparison.”
ibid

This is a stronger argument. There’s not a pile of actual manuscripts from the exact time period. What we have is later copies, and of those copies, there are more and earlier copies of the Gospels than, say, the writings of Cicero. So, if we were arguing with somebody claiming that a chunk of Roman or Christian (or both) history was made up later, Christian history sort of has the edge…except it was all written within the sphere of influence of Rome.

Additionally, as I pointed out in the previous post, the physical evidence (inscriptions, coins etc.) for the assassination of Julius Caesar is more extensive and earlier, but also part of a broader continuity of evidence about Rome in general.

“Case for Caesar v Case for Christ:
Twenty authors to Caesar’s six, in manuscripts that are more numerous and better preserved, including seven contemporary authors to Caesar’s two, and two eyewitnesses to Caesar’s none.
Twenty is more than six. Seven than two. Two than zero.”
ibid

Twenty retellings of the same story from the same sources are not more evidence of the event itself. It is evidence that early Christian communities believed in the resurrection, and that would be relevant if somebody was claiming that this belief was a later invention. The surrounding historical evidence of early Christianity gets more substantial as the movement grew and hence gained in impact. The eventual footprint of Christianity was huge, but the initial impact was small – AND that is consistent with the canonical story of Christianity. Sure, from a cosmic level, if the story is to be believed, the resurrection was a huge deal, but at a mundane level in the world of 33ish CE, it was a minor event, assuming that it happened (i.e. that followers of Jesus saw him alive after his apparent death).

The impact of Caesar’s assassination was much larger in the short term. The impact is seen in the very Gospels that JCW references. Why are the Roman Emperors mentioned in the Gospel (Augustus and Tiberius) called “Caesar”? Why is that a title they adopted? By itself, that “Caesar” had shifted to a title for an emperor is just a tiny piece of evidence. However, it is part of a much larger network of information we have about the time period. Why is Augustus Caesar (a person attested to in some of the sources JCW is citing for the resurrection) claiming his adopted father was murdered and how is it that he is Emperor of what was a Republic?

If we take, say, the Acts of the Apostles or Paul’s letters and try to make sense of them without the context of Roman history, it becomes a challenge, particularly as Paul is (according to the New Testament) a Roman citizen. This broad contextual aspect of history works both ways. It lends credence to the history of Paul (and hence early Christianity and the claims made by Paul to some degree) but also to wider events. Paul’s epistle to the Philippians is addressing the people of the Romanised Greek city of Philippi. This is the same city near the Battle of Philippi where the leaders of the plot against Caesar fought the forces of his supporters decades earlier.

1. The earlier one ↩︎
2. Na, na, na, nana-naaaa ↩︎
3. It’s as good a name as any for the author ↩︎

#bible #christianity #faith #god #jesus

Camestros Felapton

2026-10-15 05:09:17

Julius and Jesus

I came across a claim made by John C. Wright in a larger piece he wrote about scepticism. Looking around, I found other people online making a similar claim:

“There is more and firmer historical evidence for the resurrection of Christ than there is for the assassination of Caesar.”
scifiwright.com/2026/10/blind-…

He also claimed directly afterwards that there is more evidence for the miracles at Lourdes than for the Big Bang, but that comparison is of two things so unlike each other in terms of phenomenon and what counts as evidence that it makes for an unwieldy discussion.

The resurrection-v-assassination does feel more tractable. We have two events and two historical figures. Jesus died (or left) in about 33 CE, and Julius Caesar died in 44 BCE, both within the extent of Roman civilisation, so while the two events are separated by several decades, they aren’t from vastly different eras.

Before we go further, we need to consider what evidence is. There are multiple competing models of evidence in the philosophy of logic, but in general, evidence lends support to the belief that a proposition is true. Evidence doesn’t guarantee truth; it can be of varying quality. We expect it to be cumulative (more is better), but in some cases evidence may be contradictory (i.e. two pieces of evidence may support a claim when looked at separately, but when looked at together, the two pieces are in conflict).

For historical evidence, we also need to consider how detailed the claim is. For example, the assassination of Julius Caesar is believed to have occurred on 15 March, but imagine we found an eyewitness account of the event that dated it as 10 March? Is this positive or negative evidence? It supports that the assassination took place but contradicts the date. Put another way, it supports the claim “Julius Caesar was assassinated” but undermines the claim that “Julius Caesar was assassinated on March 15”.

The issue of the nature of the claim is of particular import given one of the claims is “the resurrection of Christ”. There is scant physical evidence of people returning to life after being dead for many hours, but that’s holding the claim to an unachievable standard. In terms of the kind of evidence that might exist, by the “resurrection” we should judge by a set of events that there could have been human eyewitnesses to: i.e. Jesus died, his body was placed somewhere, and then, sometime afterwards, he was seen alive. This is not being overly generous to Wright’s claim.

Imagine if tomorrow, a historical dig found documents that could be accurately dated (somehow) to Jerusalem 33 CE written by an impartial observer stating that a man known to have been executed by the Roman authorities was seen by the observer alive the following day. Such a document would be incredibly exciting for Christians around the world, even if it didn’t mention Jesus by name and contradicted a notable detail (alive the next day, rather than on the third day). We would clearly regard such a document as evidence of the event known as “the resurrection of Christ”. So, let’s be generous and skip over the “how” and count anything in which Jesus appears to have died but was later seen alive. This way we can stick to evidence rather than articles of faith.

However, even by this standard, the kind of event we are discussing is not a well-attested one. It is not impossible for somebody to have appeared to have died but later to have been seen alive, but it is an unusual set of circumstances. Political assassinations of notable political leaders are a kind of event that we have many historical and contemporary examples of. If we include political killings in general (e.g. examples where the state kills somebody for political reasons but using a judicial process), then the killing of Jesus counts as an example. So, to start with, we have more reason to regard an assassination as plausible than a resurrection (even with generous parameters).

We then have the two people concerned. I won’t detail the substantial evidence for the existence of Julius Caesar. It’s a lot, but it is also part of the historical context for the resurrection of Jesus, as that claim includes his execution by agents of the Roman Empire. Jesus is more than likely a historical figure (aside from anything else, the existence of Christianity implies his existence). The nearest contemporary evidence for his existence is the writings of Paul, but other later Christian writings imply earlier sources as well. However, the weight of evidence for Julius Caesar far outweighs that of Jesus. That’s hardly a surprise, given the relative standing of the two figures during their own lifetimes. Julius Caesar was a major player in the powerful Roman Republic. The relative lack of contemporary evidence for Jesus is what we would expect if he actually existed.

Still, the issue is the comparable weight of evidence. With historical evidence, we can think about the comparison in terms of how big a conspiracy theory we would need to have for the person NOT to have existed, but for there still to be the same amount of evidence. For Jesus not to have existed, we need Saint Paul to have been extraordinarily convincing, and there is some evidence of Christian groups around Jesus’s brother James as well; it would be a stretch. Still…the bulk of the evidence is the existence of Christian belief around the time after the apparent death of Jesus.

For Julius Caesar not to have existed requires a whole set of contemporary accounts of his existence not to be fiction, as well as the Roman Republic to have dissolved itself and reconstituted as an empire with an emperor within living memory of his death based on a popular fictional character. People do get heated up about fictional characters, but they don’t typically start civil wars about them.

So in terms of [event]-[person], we have:

Event	Person
Assassination: well-defined type of event with many historical precedents	Julius Caesar: well-documented figure during his lifetime and in the immediate aftermath of his death.
Resurrection: loosely defined type of event with limited historical precedents	Jesus: probably a historical figure but no documents from his lifetime, and some documents within a couple of decades of his death.

We could stop there, as the comparison is already stacked in favour of one side. We have a not-unusual event occurring to a well-attested figure versus an unusual event occurring to a less well-attested figure.

So why would John C. Wright make such an odd claim?

We do have a lot of details about the assassination of Julius Caesar, but in terms of historical narratives, that complete story is best laid out in the works of later Roman historians. For example, if you look at the Wikipedia article on the assassination, it cites works by Cassius Dio, who was born 165 CE and Suetonius, who was born 69 CE. If you are generous in dating the Gospels, maybe the extant complete narratives of the resurrection of Jesus predate the extant complete narratives of the assassination of Caesar. We don’t know when, say, the Gospel of Mark was written, but 70 CE is an estimate which would put it earlier than, say, Suetonius’s De vita Caesarum (112 CE).

That’s not what Wright’s claim states, though, and when I look at similar claims online, you get the same switching around i.e. the idea of the resurrection being better attested is a claim that looks for the earliest written accounts of the resurrection with later accounts of the assassination. For example, Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians is cited as historical evidence of the resurrection, and it is indeed direct evidence of belief in the resurrection of Jesus as an important article of Christian faith:

“³ For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures;⁴ And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures: ⁵ And that he was seen of Cephas, then of the twelve: ⁶ After that, he was seen of above five hundred brethren at once; of whom the greater part remain unto this present, but some are fallen asleep. ⁷ After that, he was seen of James; then of all the apostles.⁸ And last of all he was seen of me also, as of one born out of due time.”
en.wikisource.org/wiki/Bible_(…

The letter is commonly dated to 53-57 CE, so reasonably close to Jesus’s lifetime and within the lifetime of people who would have known him. Paul is also writing as if this is something the people he is addressing already know about and that is a common belief within the community.

However, with the assassination of Julius Caesar, we have references to it from much closer in time to the event. It’s not just documentuary evidence, there is, for example, a coin minted during the conflict following Caesar’s death that features Brutus one side and a reference to the Ides of March on the other, along with two knives (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ides_of_… ). The Res Gestae Divi Augusti is a inscription from 14 CE describing the life of Emperor Augustus, written in the first person (i.e. the original text was possibly written by Augustus himself prior to his death ). It doesn’t give the details of Julius’s death but is clear that he was murdered:

“Those who butchered my father I drove into exile, avenging their crime by legal judgements, and afterward, when they made war upon the republic, I defeated them twice in battle.”
en.wikisource.org/wiki/Transla…

What makes the claim particularly absurd is that if we take Christian beliefs about the life of Jesus at face value we should expect this difference in evidence. On the one side, the life of a man with a small but significant following beyond the core of a major empire, versus a famous general, a ruler of that predominant power in that region. More relevantly, confirmation of a biographical fact about Jesus, adds no more weight to the spiritual or moral claims of Christianity.

#bible #christianity #faith #god #jesus

Ides of March coin - Wikipedia

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