Baseball, eh? Time to turn a double play.
The following are problems and errors I quickly discovered in just a breezy review of the first eight minutes of that video.
1. Atwill says the Romans had "fought against a messianic movement in Judea" and the gospels were meant to replace "that version of messianic Judaism." (~1:00)
First of all, the First Jewish War was not waged by a "messianic movement." It is a common error to conflate violence or militarism on the part of ancient Jews with some sort of messianic zeal or agenda.
No one is recorded as claiming to be a messiah, or that his followers claimed him to be a messiah, or that he was fighting to bring about the arrival of a messiah. Bar Kokhba was hailed as a messiah by Rabbi Akiva during the later revolt of 132-135, but we're not even sure if
he understood himself that way.
The first revolt failed spectacularly in part because it was not a cohesive movement. The militants were divided into multiple factions of aristocrats and commoners, and they spent more time
fighting each other than the Romans.
2. Atwill identifies the "genre" of the Gospels as typology. (~1:52)
Typology is
not a
genre. Rather, it is a cultural-textual
theory of history in which ancient Jews, and subsequently Christians, found linkages between what they believed were actions of God separated in time. Typology as a practice can be incorporated into various genres. The consensus of scholarship holds that the genre of the Gospels is ancient biography. See Richard Burridge,
What Are the Gospels?: A Comparison with Graeco-Roman Biography 2nd ed. (Eerdmans: 2004). Burridge is a classicist who saw that some were beginning to argue the gospels are biographies, thought that they were wrong, and then changed his mind after extensive research.
3. Atwill says all the stories in the Gospels "are taken from another book," namely, the works of Josephus (~4:00).
Well, Robert M. Price says almost all the stories are midrash of the OT. Dennis MacDonald says they're reworked stories from Homer. Maybe there's a baseline problem with the mimetic theory here with such competing claims.
4. Atwill urges persons to compare the Gospels and Josephus in English translation to see the parallels for themselves. (~5:25)
MAJOR problem. As I demonstrated in my refutations of the Atwill fan in 2015, one needs to compare the original language to be certain about the potential parallels. I showed examples where the supposed convergence was an artifact of translation and disappeared when the actual Greek texts were juxtaposed.
5. Atwill says that both "ministries" of Jesus and Titus begin at the Sea of Galilee. Atwill compares the "fishers of men" account in the Gospels with the naval battle in Josephus (~6:30).
I found no less than
three compounding errors here. And that is leaving out the critiques of Atwill's parallelomania that have already been raised.
5.1. Which Gospel chronology does Atwill prefer, and why? And how does he avoid the charge of selection bias? In Mark, the first narrative after Jesus' baptism and temptation is the calling of the first disciples from their boats (1:16-20). This is repeated in Matthew (4:18-22), who quite slavishly copies Mark's chronology throughout his Gospel. But in Luke, the beginning of Jesus' ministry is his synagogue sermon in Nazareth (4:16-30). Luke further narrates an exorcism, healings, and a preaching tour
all before the "fishers of men" story. John provides a radically different version of Jesus' first recruitment of followers that has no "fishers of men" element and doesn't even take place in Galilee, but miles away, on the opposite side of the Jordan River from Judea.
So Atwill draws the parallel by randomly choosing the beginning of Jesus' public ministry in two of the four gospels. Or, more accurately, because Matthew copies Mark so thoroughly, one out of three gospel chronologies.
5.2. And it gets worse. The naval battle recounted in Josephus,
War of the Jews 3.10.9
is not the first military action by Titus in Galilee. By this point, Titus has already participated in the siege of Jotapata (where Josephus fought on the side of the rebels), the capture of Tiberias, a battle outside Taricheae, and the seizure of that city. So, the so-called "beginning of Titus' ministry" occurs after multiple significant incidents.
5.3.
And it gets even worse, because Titus doesn't appear to participate in the naval battle.
Read it for yourself. His father Vespasian commands the makeshift Roman fleet and Titus isn't mentioned as being involved at all. In all likelihood, he remained onshore with the rest of the army.
6. Atwill says that the "typology with Moses ends" in Matthew just before the so-called parallels with Titus begin. (~7:14)
Actually, I should point out that there are two errors here. First, the typology Atwill reviewed at the beginning of the video, the narrative set in Matthew 1-2, draws connections not between Jesus and Moses, but
Jesus and Israel. The argument by Matthew here is that Jesus embodies in his person the "true Israel" and the "faithful son" of God (that Israel in its sins was not).
That being said, Matthew
does draw connections between Moses and Jesus, and these occur
throughout the Gospel. For example, Matthew organizes Jesus' teaching into five major discourses to reflect the five books of the Torah. The first of these is the Sermon on the Mount, which will occur in chapters 5-7,
after the "fishers of men" episode.
Eight minutes in and all is sound and fury, signifying nothing.