Commentary: It's absurd to say 'Jesus never existed

From the repeatedly debunked controversy about the Starbucks' Christmas cups to the constant clattering about the intolerant references to Christianity in "A Charlie Brown Christmas," every holiday season has its fair share of absurd outrage.

But this year, Big Think's Philip Perry takes the cake with an article titled, "A Growing Number of Scholars Are Questioning the Historical Existence of Jesus." In his piece, Perry writes:

Today more and more, historians and bloggers alike are questioning whether the actual man called Jesus existed. Unfortunately, many of the writings we do have are tainted, the authors being religious scholars or atheists with an axe to grind. One important point is the lack of historical sources. In the bible, whole chunks of his life are missing. Jesus goes from age 12 to 30, without any word of what happened in-between.

It is worth noting, before we examine the facts that easily debunk Perry's premise, that even big-name atheists like Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens, both of whom entertained the idea, never seemed to fully buy into the narrative that "Jesus never existed."

In his book "The God Delusion," Dawkins asserted that it is possible "to mount a serious, though not widely supported, historical case that Jesus never lived at all." And Hitchens, in his book "God Is Not Great," claimed Jesus' existence is "highly questionable."

Nevertheless, neither man made those claims bedrock principles of their atheism.

In the Dec. 20 article, Perry tried to delegitimize the Scriptures by noting they were penned by authors "who wanted to promote the faith." I won't argue there — of course they were advocates for their faith. However, as biblical scholar Benjamin Corey, a writer for Patheos' Progressive Christian Channel, points out in a post on the matter, claiming that takes away the writings' credibility is a textbook example of the genetic fallacy:

First, dismissing the Gospel accounts outright is the genetic fallacy – it’s rejecting information because you have already decided you do not like the source. Now, resisting the genetic fallacy doesn’t mean one blindly accept the Gospel accounts, but it does mean one has to actually contend with the information inside of them. Simply their existence and prevalence in this same time period speaks to the fact that they were at least based on a person who in fact existed.

Then there's Perry's assertion that there is no written record of Jesus' life on earth:

St. Paul is the only one to write about events chronologically. Even then, few facts about Jesus are divulged. Paul’s Epistles rest on the “Heavenly Jesus,” but never mention the living man. For such an important revolutionary and religious figure, there are surprisingly no eyewitness counts. And the writings we do have are biased. Roman historians Josephus and Tacitus do make a few, scant remarks about his life. But that was a century after Jesus’s time. So they may have garnered their information from early Christians. And those threadbare accounts are controversial too, since the manuscripts had been altered over time by Christian scribes whose job it was to preserve them.

First of all, I'm not sure that — at the time — historians would have described Jesus as "such an important revolutionary and religious figure," so it's understandable not everything he said or did was recorded. And, in addition, most information was documented orally, not in written form.

Furthermore, as Perry passingly mentions, there is extra-biblical record of Jesus' existence. Tacitus, a famed historian from the Roman Empire, documented not just Jesus' life on earth but also that his followers were called Christians and he was executed at the hands of Pontius Pilate.

"While those are the two most compelling references in my mind, there are still others that either reference Jesus, allude to Jesus, or directly mention early Christians during this period," Corey wrote. "In short, for an obscure rabbi, the external references to him and his followers actually exceed my expectations for this context and period."

Corey's not the only one to reject Perry's absurd assertion, either.

Atheist Tim O'Neill wrote on Monday that scholars have "about as much evidence for Jesus as we have for other, analogous preachers and prophets of his time. In fact, we have slightly more for him than most."

So when it comes down to it, it's just manifestly absurd to suggest "Jesus never existed." You may not like him and you may not believe in him, but there's little to no doubt he once walked among us.

But I guess it just wouldn't be Christmas without a seasonal outbreak of outrage.