Some days ago, I mentioned Nick Peters’ post about some silly claims by a group called Mythicist Milwaukee that has since generated comments from a couple of mythicsts – including someone with a rather silly website titled the “Jesus Birther Movement.” Given both MM and JBM consider Acharya S a Bible scholar, that should give you some indication of the level of interaction one might expect. I did note, however, that MM made a post about the Nick Peters article that stated “They are champions of misdirection, deflection and mischaracterization. The first blogger completely misconstrued the Celsus picture.”
Since Peters had only mentioned an interaction but didn’t provide a link, I did not know the context of their discussion. So I went to MM’s website to verify the graphic about Celsus was as bad as Peters had claimed. Well, it was. Below is the graphic:
MM titled it “Celsus Jesus is a Myth” so it certainly looks as though they are asserting that Celsus claimed Jesus was a myth. However, as anyone who bothered to read the extant text from Celsus’ work criticizing Christianity would know, he never once claimed Jesus never existed. As Peters noted, Celsus believed Jesus had performed miracles but that he did it through sorcery and trickery. Thus that claim by Peters was spot on. As for MM claiming Celsus was a church father, as mentioned I have not been able to locate the forum where their exchange occurred so I cannot comment apart from stating that, if it is true, then MM has exposed themselves as completely incompetent. However, given the incompetence on display at their website and Facebook page (most recently displaying a graphic heralding a fake Pope Paul III quote), it would not be much of a surprise.
Then there is the matter of their claiming it came from a work by Celsus titled Against Origen. Of course, in reality, the work was by Origen and was titled Against Celsus. When you cannot correctly list either the title or author of your source correctly, one would not expect much in the way of expertise. The quote originally came from Celsus’ The True Word, a work which is not extant except for the quotes of it from Origen’s response to it. From this misattribution, it is fairly clear that MM has never read the quote in context but merely copied it from another source.
In fairness, one might argue that MM did not intend “against Origen” to be the title of a work but rather was just stating Celsus wrote it in response to Origen. However, this does not get MM off the hook as it displays an equal level of incompetence. For Celsus not only was not responding to Origen, but he wrote the work about a decade before Origen was born. Apparently, MM never bothers doing anything resembling research before blindly reproducing their quotemined sources.
