In his latest book, Outgrowing God: A Beginner’s Guide (Random House, 2019), Richard Dawkins sets out to give older children and teens an introduction to reasons to doubt religion. Unfortunately he manages to perpetuate a series of historical myths in the process and the book is characteristic of prominent New Atheists’ careless attitude toward history.
Most atheists come to that position more or less on their own. For me, being raised by a scientist in a family of scientists and engineers probably inclined me toward rational analysis of things from an early age. But apart from reading the cheekily sceptical newspaper columns of Australian treasure and public atheist Phillip Adams, I do not recall anyone greatly influencing my gradual unbelief. It was a high school class on comparative religion that gave me my lifelong interest in the origins of Christianity and I do remember reading up on the Problem of Evil, all of which led to some questioning and eventually to me becoming a fledgling atheist by the end of my teens. Certainly none of my teachers or lecturers, several of whom were themselves atheists, did anything more than encourage me to think and question and show me how to research and structure my arguments. Essentially, I worked it out for myself.
The luminaries of the New Atheism, however, think “religion poisons everything” and that the world would be a much better place with less of it. Preferably, none. So they tend to be rather more evangelical than the hands-off guides and mentors of my youth. Peter Boghossian, author of A Manual for Creating Atheists (Pitchstone, 2013) certainly does not believe that people can be left to come to their own conclusions and proposes active “street epistemologists” who take every opportunity to “to talk people out of faith and into reason”. This seems very high minded in theory, but in practice it sounds as though Boghossian’s minions would be more annoying than effective. Most evangelists are, after all.
Dawkins appears to have adopted the strategy of “get them while they’re young” – a version of the Jesuits’ Aristotelian principle of “give me the child until he is seven and I will give you the man”. Unfortunately Dawkins cannot actually apply that idea, since he thinks the indoctrination of children is a form of child abuse, so Outgrowing God seems to be pitched at young people who are slightly older – an early teenaged audience, judging from the tone of the writing and the level of his arguments. This places some constraints on the writer, since that audience means nuanced discussion has to give way to generalisations in many cases.
So some of Dawkins’ claims could be disputed and alternatives could be presented, but he is trying to present generally accepted scholarly views, presumably allowing his young audience to sort out the subtleties and controversies later on. Fair enough. However, it is not his generalisations that are the problem with this book. It is the errors. And when it comes to history (I will leave any errors regarding theology, philosophy and science to others), there are many and they indicate – yet again – a decidedly sloppy approach on the part of an author who the book’s blurbs trumpet loudly as “one of our greatest explainers, thinkers and writers”.
Dawkins’ book has two parts: “Goodbye God”, which leads the young reader to question the idea of God by presenting it as just another among many ancient myths, and “Evolution and beyond”, which presents science as a sure alternative to religion. This is essentially a distilled form of Dawkins’ whole, rather simplistic, attitude to the subject. For him, religion was and is little more than a failed attempt to do what science does better – explaining the world and how it works. His brisk assessment is that all one has to do is realise that religion is simply silly mythology, riddled with errors and misunderstandings, and then grasp that science does the job far better. Then you abandon God, embrace science and live happily ever after. Simple.
Of course, this ignores the fact that religions have never been only about explaining the world and how it works and provide all kinds of other utility: ethical frameworks, sources of meaning, transcendental experiences, social networks, psychological supports etc. This is why, to the bewilderment of people like Dawkins, religion has survived the rise of science and, despite repeated rumours of its imminent demise, seems set to continue for quite some time.
For Dawkins, this can only be because not enough people have grasped how silly it is and how much better science is. Intelligent people who take it seriously are just imagining the naked emperor is clothed and so deluding themselves. And those who reconcile science with their religious beliefs are merely accommodating its silliness and just need to wake up to themselves. For Dawkins, all religion is effectively at the level of the dumber forms of evangelical fundamentalist Christianity; it is just that some other forms are better at hiding it. So his message to his teenaged readers is that religion is just stupid myths and they should embrace science because it is factual. The end.
In his presentation of this simplistic thesis, however, Dawkins stumbles over quite a few “facts” of history.
Constantine and Nicaea
Dawkins does not get off to a very spectacular start when, in the book’s opening argument about the great variety of gods, he confidently informs his readers that the modern dominance of variations of Yahweh among all the gods worshipped in history is easily explained:
It’s a historical accident – the adoption of Christianity as the Roman Empire’s official religion by the Emperor Constantine in AD 312 – that led to Yahweh’s being worshipped around the world today.
The idea that it was Constantine who made Christianity the official religion of the Empire is a persistent myth and one derived from a long and largely Protestant theological tradition. Early Protestantism saw itself as returning to the original form of Christianity and reviving the true form of the early faith that had been warped by the Catholic Church over the centuries. This led to the adoption of a version of Church history that traced the rise of Catholicism to a devil’s bargain the Church made with the wicked Constantine. In return for an end to persecution and access to political power, the Church allowed itself to be subsumed into the Roman Empire’s apparatus by a scheming emperor and so lost its previous purity and integrity.
This is a distortion of history. Constantine’s conversion gives every indication of being sincere, even if the sophistication of his Christian belief was initially very low. Far from giving him some great political advantage, his conversion to a minority sect made up mainly of the lower classes did not endear him to the substantially pagan Senatorial and equestrian classes, which were the core of political power in the Empire. It was the loyalty to him of the Army and his ability to ruthlessly eliminate rivals that secured him ultimate power, but this was despite his strange new religion, not because of it. And as Christianity slowly but exponentially increased its numbers in the Empire, it increasingly conformed to the society in which it grew, with its outsider and radical status gradually declining. Christianity was already becoming a Roman imperial faith and Constantine’s adoption of it was as much a reflection of this as a catalyst for its acceleration.
But in the Protestant tradition Constantine is the villain of the story of how the Church lost its way and the myth that he made Christianity the official religion of the Empire, shackling the faith to the Whore of Babylon, is persistent as a result. In fact, Constantine was clearly aware that his new religion was not popular among some key political factions and trod lightly around the matter. His policy extended the previous edict of Galerius of 311, which gave Christianity a reprieve from persecution in return for prayers “to their God for our safety, for that of the republic, and for their own, that the commonwealth may continue uninjured on every side”. In 313, Constantine and his then co-emperor Licinius revived this edict in opposition to the renewed persecution of Christians of the rival emperor in the east, Maximinus Daia, and so ordered the release of Christians who had been imprisoned or enslaved and the return of confiscated Christian property. Constantine and Licinius extended this religious liberty to all cults and sects, not just Christianity.
Once he became sole emperor in 324 his policy of general religious toleration became firmly established. He certainly favoured and acted as a generous patron of Christianity, but he did not impose it on the Empire. Obviously the adoption of Christianity by Constantine and almost all of his successors had an impact on the growth of the once marginal sect, but Christianity was already growing exponentially and is likely to have dominated the Empire demographically by the end of the fourth century anyway. The slow transition from the largely pagan Empire he inherited to the point where Christianity was the dominant and majority faith occurred over the next one or two generations and Christianity was not declared to be the sole official public religion until the Edict of Thessalonica, jointly issued by Theodosius I, Gratian, and Valentinian II on 27 February 380. This was 43 years after Constantine died.
But Dawkins is so enamoured with this erroneous idea that he repeats it twice more in the book. The fact that Dawkins could get something so basic wrong in this book’s opening pages is an indication of his laziness when it comes to history. He clearly did not bother to check this “fact” that he repeats several times – less than a second on Google would have informed him it was wrong. Like many anti-theist polemicists, if a historical idea he has heard somewhere suits his argument, it will do. No checking necessary. So much for a steely rationalist adherence to “facts”.
So it is no surprise that the sloppy work continues with another myth about Constantine: the claim he created the canon of the Bible at the Council of Nicea:
The canon was largely fixed in AD 325 by a conference of church leaders called the Council of Nicaea, set up by the Roman Emperor Constantine – the one whose conversion led to Europe becoming Christian. He made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire.
Dawkins loves this myth so much that he repeats it no less than seven times in his short book. But, again, it is total nonsense. Not only was the canon not “largely” set at Nicaea, it was not even discussed at that council. As I have detailed here before (see The Great Myths 4: Constantine, Nicea and the Bible) this myth can be traced to a quip by Voltaire and has been perpetuated in popular culture ever since. The idea that the Bible was actually selected by a committee presided over by a scheming emperor and that many texts were excluded from it on the whim of Constantine is too delicious for some to resist. It is one of the various “facts” that are not facts presented as “history” to millions of unsuspecting readers in The Da Vinci Code (2003), but we should expect Dawkins, as one of our “greatest thinkers and writers”, to do his homework a little better than the lowbrow airport novelist, Dan Brown.
In fact, the process of the canon’s development was all but complete long before Constantine was even born and he had pretty much nothing to do with it. Not only was it not even discussed at the Council of Nicaea, but the first time it was discussed in any council at all was at the local synod at Hippo in 393 AD; that is 56 years after Constantine died. It was not discussed by a full ecumenical council until the Council of Trent in 1546: a whole 1209 years after Constantine’s death. Dawkins has bungled basic history again.
“Fifty Gospels”?
But, once more, Dawkins is not interested in checking what he is claiming because this factoid suits his agenda perfectly. His book’s second chapter is entitled “But is it true?” and aims to get his young readers to question the veracity of the Bible. He gives a bald summary of the origins of the New Testament texts, with heavy emphasis on how little they can reliably tell us about Jesus. Then he returns to the issue of the canon and his nonsense about the Council of Nicaea:
As I said, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were only four out of a large number of gospels doing the rounds at the time of the Council of Nicaea. I’ll come on to some of the lesser-known gospels in a moment. Any of them could have been included in the canon, but for various reasons none of them made it. Often it was because they were judged heretical, which just means they said things at odds with the ‘orthodox’ beliefs of council members. Partly it was because they were written slightly more recently than Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. But, as we’ve seen, even Mark wasn’t written early enough to be potentially reliable history.
This is a remarkable distortion of what happened. Leaving aside the fact “the Council” deciding on the canon is pseudo historical fantasy, the Christian scholars who examined and debated which texts were worth using in the long process of the development of the canon from the later second century to the mid fifth century were not actually idiots. This is borne out by the fact that they arrived at a selection of four gospels which even the most sceptical modern scholars agree are, in fact, the earliest, the closest to the ideas of the first generations of the Jesus Sect and, overall, the most likely to preserve actual historical traditions. This was thanks to their application of principles which they had inherited from the Greek philosophical tradition, which already had centuries of experience in sorting original authoritative texts from later pretenders and pseudepigraphical frauds.
Dawkins tries to downplay the idea that later gospels were somehow any less legitimate than the canonical ones by saying they “written slightly more recently”, but in most cases the difference is substantial and not “slight” at all. A couple of non-canonical gospels – Thomas or Peter, perhaps – could be said to be written around the same time as the later canonical ones, but most are much later. Most of them date to the mid to late second century, which makes them a whole century after gMark. This is not “slightly more recently”.
But, warming to his theme, Dawkins claims that the method of selecting just four gospels had little to no logical basis at all:
Irenaeus …. was convinced that there had to be four gospels, no more and no fewer. He pointed out (as though it mattered) that there are four corners of the earth and four winds. As if that wasn’t enough, he also pointed out that the Book of Revelation refers to God’s throne being borne by four creatures with four faces. This seems to have been inspired by the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel, who dreamed of four creatures coming out of a whirlwind, each one of which had four faces. Four, four, four, four, you can’t get away from four, we obviously have to have four gospels in the canon! I’m sorry to say that’s the kind of ‘reasoning’ that passes for logic in theology.
As alien as this kind of ancient thinking based on symbolism and symmetry seems to us, we are talking about a culture permeated with the idea that the world was a reflection of the divine. But the key point here is that Irenaeus is making a post facto argument. He is justifying the already well-established preference for the canonical gospels and finding symbolic resonances and parallels for them, not using this fourfold symmetry as a primary argument for these four books.
What Dawkins does not seem to understand from his clearly very light reading on the matter, is that the debates about the canon barely involved the gospels at all. With the exception of that of Marcion, all canonical lists and references we have from the second century onward include all the canonical gospels and none of them even consider any other gospels. The debated texts were all lesser epistles or works like The Shepherd of Hermas or a couple of apocalyptic texts, including Revelation. The idea that a large number of Christian scholars were paying a lot of attention to the Gospel of Judas and considered it on the same level as the canonical gospels but were thwarted by the Council of Nicaea because of Irenaeus’ four winds symbolism is a cute little story, but total nonsense.
But Dawkins does not let small things like facts get in the way of his arguments once he has the bit between his teeth. His teenaged audience is assured that there was effectively no difference between the gospel attributed to Mark and the one attributed to Judas – a text he places great emphasis on in this section of the book and which he erroneously claims “was probably nearly as old as the four canonical gospels”. It is actually much more likely to be about a century later than them.
He also claims his fantasy “Council” selected their four gospels from a plethora of “extra gospels, about fifty of them”. This bizarre exaggeration is, I suppose, slightly better than the “more than eighty gospels” supposedly considered in the equally silly account in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, but it is still total nonsense. In fact, we have copies, fragments of or references to perhaps 14 to 18 other gospels, not “about fifty”. Where Dawkins is getting this nonsense is anyone’s guess [Edit – see note below], but he appears to be doing no more than repeating stuff that has simply appealed to him because it suits his argument. There is little to no sign of any actual research here.
The stupid thing about his bungling of the history here is that, if he had bothered to do some actual research, he could have told the real story of how the Christian Bible came to be. It would not have the same level of “gotcha” impact as his Dan Brown-style fantasy, but it would still have informed his young audience that the Bible did not arrive from heaven on a gold cushion and that it actually developed from a long and entirely fallible human process – one that got some things right (e.g. selecting the four oldest gospels) and many things wrong (e.g. accepting as genuine a number of texts we now recognise as pseudepigraphical imposters). Properly handled, this genuine story of competing versions of Christianity struggling for dominance over 250 years and the selection and rejection of texts in this tumultuous context could still make a thoughtful teenager carefully reconsider how they see “the Good Book”. And it would have an added advantage that Dawkins’ clumsy pseudo historical nonsense does not have: it would actually be factual.
If Dawkins was better at history, his book would serve his purposes better. But he does not care enough to get things right. Accuracy is not the point, landing punches is.
Like a Virgin
After making a clumsy mess of how the canon came to be and why some books were chose over others, Dawkins makes a similar hash of criticising the reliability of the gospels. Someone who actually took the time to understand this issue could easily make the point Dawkins is trying to make – “you cannot take the gospels as documentary histories” – and do so with careful reference to critical scholarship. But Dawkins seems incapable of anything above the level of sneering internet atheist tropes.
He begins:
The long gap between Jesus’s death and the gospels being written gives us one reason to doubt that they are a reliable guide to history. Another is that they contradict each other.
This is a reasonable start and he proceeds by noting well-known contradictions in the list of the names of the twelve disciples or in the genealogies in gMatt and gLuke’ infancy narratives. A better guide could have used this to get his young readers to think about how these contradictions could have arisen, what they tell us about the transition from oral traditions to literary ones and whether the gospel writers were intending to write what we think of as history at all. But Dawkins does not seem to know about any of this and certainly does not care. His bald analysis does not rise much above “contradictions = wrong!”
His analysis of how prophecies shape the gospel narratives is similarly ham-fisted.
Yet another problem with taking the gospels as historical truth is their obsession with fulfilling Old Testament prophecies. Especially Matthew. You get the feeling Matthew was quite capable of inventing an incident and writing it into his gospel, simply in order to make a prophecy come true. The most glaring example is his invention of the legend that Mary was a virgin when she gave birth to Jesus.
That gMatt is full of elements which seem wholly derived from Jewish scriptures seen as Messianic prophecies or pressed into service as such by the writer is pretty clear. But to Dawkins, this simply means the gMatt writer is just making things up “without a hint of shame”. He does not contemplate that, perhaps, both the gospel writer and his audience knew exactly what he was doing and that these elements were not meant to be read literally as historical.
That aside, Dawkins’ bold claim that the idea of the Virgin Birth is “[Matthew’s] invention” ignores the fact that the story of Mary’s virginity is also told independently in gLuke. So clearly it predated both these gospels and was not “invented” by the gMatt writer. Dawkins also has a internet atheist’s weak grasp of how Jewish exegesis works. He notes that gMatt refers to Isaiah 7:14 as a prophecy of Jesus’ birth to a virgin, but he then argues:
Matthew totally misunderstood the prophecy. …. it’s clear from the Book of Isaiah itself – though apparently not to Matthew – that Isaiah was talking not about the distant future, but about the immediate future in his own time. He was talking to the king, Ahaz, about a particular young woman in their presence, who was pregnant even as he spoke.
In fact, the writer of gMatt would have been very aware of the context of the Isaiah text he uses. What Dawkins does not seem to understand is that exegesis of this kind involves taking a text out of its context and highlighting a second meaning for it. So, for the gMatt author, Isaiah 7:14 had one meaning in its context, but a second and different meaning on its own. Of course, the point could still be made that much of the use of this exegesis in the gospels means at least some of the episodes it supports are of dubious historicity, but Dawkins does not seem to know anything much about the subject or too care to learn.
So he bumbles on with another piece of stock village atheist fare:
The word Matthew quoted as ‘virgin’ was almah in Isaiah’s Hebrew. Almah can mean virgin; but it can also mean ‘young woman’ – rather like the English word ‘maiden’, which has both meanings. When Isaiah’s Hebrew was translated into Greek in the version of the Old Testament called the Septuagint, which Matthew would have read, almah became parthenos – which really does mean ‘virgin’. A simple translation error spawned the entire worldwide myth of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and the Roman Catholic cult of Mary as a kind of goddess, the ‘Queen of Heaven’.
So it is all just a “simple translation error”! Unfortunately this neat story does not quite work. The translators of the Septuagint were not exactly morons and were very careful to reflect the Hebrew they were translating as closely as they could, though translating from a Semitic language (Hebrew) into an Indo-European one (Greek) was often tricky. Παρθένος (parthenos) certainly meant virgin, but was often applied to any young woman of marriageable age (since they were meant to be virgins). So this was actually a perfectly acceptable word to translate the Hebrew almah.
Exactly how the concept of Mary giving birth as a virgin arose is not clear. It may be that it did come from reading the Greek version of Isaiah 7:14 very literally, so long as that text was already seen as a Messianic prophecy. Judaism had a long tradition of prophets or other holy men who were conceived miraculously by someone who, strictly speaking, should not have been able to conceive, so the infancy stories of Isaac, Samuel and Samson all involve a mother who was either known to be infertile or who was already past menopause. The story of Jesus’ miraculous conception falls into this tradition, though in this case its a virgin who miraculously conceives. So did this prophetic tradition attach itself to Jesus first, with Isaiah 7:14 pressed into service to support it later, or was it the other way around? It is impossible to tell. But Dawkins’ “gotcha” story is not going to help his audience even begin to ask this kind of question, because he simply does not know what he is talking about.
Dawkins’ grasp of things does not improve in his chapter on the Old Testament, which he titles “Myths and how they start”. For example, he tries to highlight the parallels between the Noah story in Genesis and Babylonian analogues that tell versions of the same story. But, again, he makes a total mess of it.
He begins by noting “Noah story comes directly from a Babylonian myth, the legend of Utnapishtim”, but then he declares that the “Utnapishtim story … comes from the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh”. This is wrong. The only version of the Gilgamesh story that contains a flood is the one in Akkadian – that is Babylonian, not Sumerian. There are earlier Sumerian stories about Gilgamesh, but they do not include any flood. And there is a Great Flood story in Sumerian, but it does not involve Gilgamesh.
He then claims his supposedly “Sumerian” Epic of Gilgamesh “was written two thousand years earlier than the Noah story”. In fact, the actually Akkadian Epic was written less than 1000 years earlier. Dawkins also bungles multiple other elements in this section. In an entertaining thread on Twitter, Cambridge Assyriology post-grad George Heath-White skewers Dawkins over these and other bungles, including mixing up the animals in the Gilgamesh and Genesis stories, and claiming that the Sumerian flood legend, like the story of Noah’s Ark, ends with a rainbow. It does not. Heath-White also managed to track down where Dawkins did his “research” and so how he managed to get everything so wrong. It appears this “great explainer, thinker and writer” cribbed all this error-laden stuff from a crappy little website called HistoryWiz.com, complete with broken links, graphics that do not load and a quaintly 1990s feel. To call this “shoddy” would be a compliment.
Scientists Try History
But the whole book has this distinctly slapdash feel – as though it was written in a hurry, largely from half-remembered stuff that Dawkins recalls reading somewhere, with little to no actual research or even basic fact-checking and a polemical drive that overrides everything else. He manages to grudgingly admit Jesus most likely existed, but says:
But how much do we really know about Jesus? Can we be sure he even existed? Most, though not all, modern scholars think he probably did.
Dawkins should be familiar with how Creationists make similar statements that “not all” scientists accept evolution, skipping around the fact that “not all” really means “actually, almost all except a tiny few contrarians (many of whom have overwhelming ideological biases)”. Which is what “not all” means in Dawkins’ sentence as well, though his young readers are unlikely to realise this and he does nothing to assist them.
He flirts with Jesus Mythicism or makes Mythicism-adjacent comments elsewhere in the book as well. In his opening section he asks:
How do we know Julius Caesar existed? Or William the Conqueror? No eye-witnesses survive; and even eye-witnesses can be surprisingly unreliable, as any police officer collecting statements will tell you. We know that Caesar and William existed, because archaeologists have found tell-tale relics and because there’s lots of confirmation from documents written when they were alive. But when the only evidence for an event or person wasn’t written down until decades or centuries after the death of any witnesses, historians get suspicious.
Of course, here Dawkins is trying to get across the idea that the Bible cannot be taken at face value, but historians do not “get suspicious” about sources which are “decades or centuries after the death of any witnesses”. Or rather, they are “suspicious” (i.e. critical) of any and all sources, regardless of when they are written, and may or may not place weight on sources for a whole range of reasons, the date of composition just being one of them. His claim that non-contemporaneous sources are immediately “suspicious” echoes the weird online Myther fetish about the lack of contemporary sources for Jesus.
He goes on to assure his readers that ‘[a]nother thing that worries historians is that there are hardly any mentions of Jesus in histories outside the gospels”. Actually, historians are not “worried” about this at all, given that they would not expect there to be many more such mentions than we have for analogous Jewish preachers, prophets and Messianic claimants of the time. And, in fact, we have more such mentions for Jesus than we have for any other such Jewish figure. But here Dawkins works to dismiss at least one of those mentions. He quotes the Testimonium Flavianum in Josephus AJ XVIII.63-4, introducing it by saying “Josephus had only this to say” and then noting:
Many historians suspect this passage is a forgery, stuck in later by a Christian writer. The most suspicious phrase is ‘He was the Messiah.’ …. He wouldn’t have just dropped in a casual ‘He was the Messiah’. It does sound very like a later Christian forgery. That’s certainly what most scholars now believe.
It is unclear whether Dawkins is saying most scholars believe the “He was the Messiah” element is a later interpolation or if he is claiming most scholars think the whole passage is a forgery. The former claim is correct. The second is not. Intentionally or not, he definitely gives the strong impression that the whole passage can be dismissed and gives no indication he even knows that most scholars consider it to be partially authentic (see Jesus Mythicism 7: Josephus, Jesus and the ‘Testimonium Flavianum’).
He also says that Josephus’ work has “only” this to say about Jesus, so it appears he is – like many internet atheists – totally unaware of the second reference to Jesus in Josephus – AJ XX.200 – which almost all scholars regard as authentic.
He does a better job on the Tacitus reference to Jesus in Annals XV.44; noting its hostile tone as good evidence that it is not a Christian addition (“No later insertion by Christians here!”), but he finishes the point with another note that the “balance of probability, according to most but not all scholars, suggests that Jesus did exist.” This includes another Creationist-style “not all” thrown in for polemical effect.
The whole book has the tone of thoughts by someone who has not read widely on any of the historical topics, and certainly nothing much beyond second-hand and endlessly repeated tropes and books by friends and people he likes. Dawkins’ wife, the actress Lalla Ward, read the audiobook version of Catherine Nixey’s execrable The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World (2017), despite it being a distorted caricature of history and slammed as rubbish by actual historians. So it is not surprising that Nixey gets a nod in one of Dawkins’ very few footnotes, supporting his reference to “the manic determination of the early Christians to destroy images of rival gods”.
Dawkins also cites “my friend the psychologist Steven Pinker” and his doorstop of a book The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011), saying:
He shows how, over the centuries, over the millennia, we humans have been getting nicer, gentler, less violent, less cruel. The change has nothing to do with genetic evolution and nothing to do with religion. Whatever is ‘in the air’ has been moving in what we can broadly see as the same direction from century to century.
Dawkins makes no secret that he is a fan of his friend’s book. A couple of years after its publication he gushed about it on Twitter:
The answer to his sneering question about “why it took a scientist to write it” is “because no historian would bungle the history in it so badly”. Pinker’s errors, dubious and creative historical “statistics” and general playing fast and loose with history to make it fit an ideological agenda may have to wait for a future article here. In the meantime the scrupulous history blogger, Spencer Alexander McDaniel, does an admirable job of skewering Pinker in his detailed critique – see Steven Pinker’s “The Better Angels of Our Nature” Debunked on McDaniel’s highly recommended Tales of Times Forgotten blog.
The problem here is not that Dawkins just gets a few things wrong about history. He is a scientist, not a historian, many popular writers bungle bits of history and even historians get things wrong when talking about periods or topics outside of their specialisation. But Dawkins is making a plea for relying on facts over beliefs, for questioning things you may like to believe and for checking things you have simply been told. Yet his book is riddled with evidence that he does not practice what he preaches. His mistakes are many and they are not minor – some of them are absolute howlers. And it is not as though he needed to spend days buried in dusty monographs to check them. A few moments on Wikipedia would have told him his claims about Nicaea were dead wrong. The fact that historywiz.com looks and reads like it was written by a high school student in the 90s should have been enough to make him question its validity as a source. And surely he has enough learned friends from Oxford who he could have asked to check his claims about the New Testament or Josephus.
But it appears Dawkins does not actually care about facts when it comes to history. As Nathan Johnstone has noted in his critique of New Atheist historiography, Dawkins and his cohorts do not see history as something worth truly understanding. They see it – or their garbled version of it – as a quarry for stones they can hurl at their religious opponents. Dawkins clearly did not even think to check the things he says about history. Like all hidebound zealots, he already knows he is right. Which, given the topic of his little book for teens, is richly ironic.
Edit 28/11/20 – I keep seeing variants on this “fifty gospels” claim and so decided there must be some influential, if mistaken, source as its point of origin. It actually did not take long to track down. I regularly find that these often-repeated myths can be traced back to a eighteenth or nineteenth century “free thinker” or anti-clerical book and have then been repeated as “facts” ever since. Many of the myths I debunk on History for Atheists have their origin in Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776) – the ones about the burning of the Great Library, for example, or the murder of Hypatia. Voltaire is another common source of these myths. As noted above, a quip he made about the selection of gospels seems to be the source of the fiction that the canon of the New Testament was decided at the Council of Nicaea.
So it is not too surprising to find he seems to be the source of the “fifty gospels” claim. “Voltaire” was the pen-name of François-Marie Arouet (1694-1778), the French wit, philosopher and critic of Christianity. He gives a sceptical potted history of Christianity in Volume 3 of his Dictionnaire philosophique (1752) based on the understandings of the time. It reads rather quaintly now, but was positively (and deliberately) scandalous in 1752.
In it he talks about the way early Christianity fractured into competing sects in its first centuries and says:
The different flocks of this great rising society could not, it is true, agree among themselves. Fifty-four societies had fifty-four different gospels; all secret, like their mysteries; all unknown to the Gentiles, who never saw our four canonical gospels until the end of two hundred and fifty years.
It seems this “fifty-four” sects, each with their own gospel, includes those that wrote the four canonical gospels, because a little later he writes of the “the authors of the fifty rejected gospels”. So, by removing the four canonical gospels from his fifty-four he arrives at … fifty gospels. This means he later declares:
Fifty gospels were fabricated and were afterwards declared apocryphal.
This seems to be the ultimate source of the “fifty gospels” claim, though how Voltaire arrived at the figure in the first place is not clear. Voltaire’s whole chapter on Christian history can be found here.
If Voltaire came up with the figure, its propagation seems to be, in substantial part, thanks to the American “Founding Father” John Adams (1735-1826). Unlike Voltaire, Adams remained a Christian but had some unorthodox views and was highly critical of Christianity’s role in history. In an often-quoted letter to John Taylor (14 December 1814), Adams laments the ills effects of religious entanglement with government:
What havoc has been made of Books through every Century of the Christian Æra? Where are fifty Gospells condemned as spurious by the Bull of Pope Gelasius. Where are the forty Waggon Loads of Hebrew Manuscripts burned in France by order of another Pope, because suspected of Heresy? Remember the Index expurgatorius, the Inquisitions, the Stake, the Axe the halter and the Guillotine; and Oh! horrible the Rack.
Here we find our “fifty gospels” again, but now they are being condemned by Pope Gelasius (492-496). This sounds slightly more well-founded than Voltaire’s reference and Adams seems very certain about it, since he refers to Gelasius as the villain again in another letter, but this time he has the pope burning the “fifty gospels”. In a letter to François Adriaan van der Kemp (23 January 1813) he asks:
Why have the most important Parts of Livy, Tacitus, Aristotle &c been destroyed? Why have the most important Work of Cicero, his Discourses on Government, been annihilated? &c &c &c without end? I can conceive of no plausible Answer to these questions, but this a conspiracy between Roman Catholick Divines and Roman Imperial Politicians, have burned every Thing in Pagan and Christian Antiquity which Stood in the Way of their Views of Spiritual and temporal Despotism. Why did Gelasius burn fifty Gospels at once?
So did Gelasius really condemn and burn “fifty gospels”? Well, no. Adams seems to have taken Voltaire’s “fifty gospels” and added them to the fact that Gelasius handed down the Decretum Gelasium which mandated the canon of the New Testament as defined by the Synod of Carthage in 419. Gelasius’ decretal also rejected any gospels other than the four canonical ones, so Adams put this together with Voltaire and decided that Gelasius must have condemned the mythical “fifty gospels”. The “burning” part seems to have come from his imagination.
It is very likely Adams did not have access to a copy of Gelasius’ decretal, but if he had, he would find that Gelasius actually only lists nine gospels that he considered to be apocryphal or heretical. Not “fifty”.
So Dawkins is the latest in a long line of well-intentioned but biased people who repeat historical “facts” that are not facts. Voltaire and Adams had the excuse of living in periods where checking these things was difficult. Dawkins does not.
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