What irks me to no end is his casual misuse of Ancient History. I don't know what it is about religious apologists and believing scholars. They love to trot out comparisons to Greek and Roman history, and very often they completely misconstrue and misuse it to make it sound like the historical case for Jesus is solider than it is. (And I say this as someone who believes it is sufficiently solid without these unforced errors.)
I present my transcription of Licona's comments, followed by my initial brief response to this miscarriage of history. I don't mean to pick on Professor Licona. Professor Licona is true to form. Most apologists and scholars of New Testament I have heard or read on the subject misrepresent the evidence from antiquity. In this they show themselves to be kinda sloppy when it comes to practicing sound historical methodology.
Prof. Licona wrote:OK. So. I don’t think you would find a single Classicist today who would doubt or historian who would doubt that Caesar was assassinated on March 15th in 44 BC. So, um, we have a number of sources who attest to that: Appian, Cicero, Dio, Livy, Nicolaus, Plutarch, Suetonius, and Velleius. The only testimony that’s even close there to being an eyewitness testimony is Cicero, and the way his letter that he mentions this in, um, it, it, he doesn’t even say he was there. Um, so he would have been alive at the time, but he doesn’t say he was there, but it’s just assumed that he is. That is the closest thing we have to eyewitness testimony, something written by an eyewitness on the assassination of Caesar . . . .
This is factually incorrect. We possess letters to Cicero and Mark Antony written by the two most famous of the conspirators, Brutus and Cassius, who plunged their daggers into Caesar on the Ides of March. It is hard to get more eyewitness than frank admissions from the perpetrators themselves, and this is what we have. The quality and credibility of this evidence when weighed against the evidence for Jesus is such that any statement failing to acknowledge the huge gap between them must be born of ignorance, incompetence, or both.
Such ignorance and incompetence, sadly, is endemic among New Testament scholars and apologists. Prof. Licona is not to be individually blamed. What is blameworthy is an educational system and ecclesiastical culture in which people holding PhDs are allowed to blather on about Ancient History, evidently without the foggiest clue about it, in the furtherance of their own arguments about Jesus.
Here is my suggestion to all New Testament scholars and Christian apologists (of different stripes, obviously including LDS):
Do not presume to pontificate on Ancient History just because you read somewhere some Christian scholar or apologist making what seemed to you a plausible claim favorably comparing the evidence for Jesus with some famous person or event in the history of antiquity.
Just don't do it. You're probably gonna get it wrong. No, it is simply not the case that the evidence for Jesus looks good next to the evidence for Alexander the Great or the assassination of Julius Caesar. In both cases, we have either fragments or complete texts from eyewitnesses to the lives of both men. Yes, we do possess references to the assassination of Caesar by the men who perpetrated the act and gloried in their handiwork.
You only get by perpetrating this offense against history (unconsciously, I am assuming) because too many people are ignorant of the facts. But I am losing patience with it, and it is getting to the point where I am beginning to feel it is my professional duty to make sure your inaccurate and misleading arguments are publicly answered.