On the matter of the historicity of Jesus, Bart Ehrman has replied to what I recently summarized about the problems with Paul’s reference to brothers of the Lord in the Epistles. In Carrier and James the Brother of the Jesus (already distorting his facts in the title; Paul never uses the phrase brother “of Jesus”), Ehrman outlines a logically valid argument:
The historical man Jesus from Nazareth had a brother named James. Paul actually knew him. That is pretty darn good evidence that Jesus existed. If he did not exist he would not have had a brother.
I agree. Hence I’ve long noted this is the best evidence there is for historicity. I even count it as 2 to 1 in favor of historicity in OHJ. The problem, however, is not the validity of the argument, but its soundness. A sound argument has to be not only valid, but its premises also have to be well-established as true—and not in doubt. Otherwise any doubt we have in the premises transfers to the conclusion, and we then have to doubt the conclusion as much or even more. And ample doubts exist as to the central premise: that Paul ever says he knew an actual biological brother of Jesus (much less a Jesus “of Nazareth,” since Paul never mentions anything like Nazareth or “Nazarene” being connected to Jesus).
Ehrman complains about the length of continuing debates. Reading the peer reviewed literature of his own field is too hard for him, you see; a waste of time, really. So I’ll summarize my response to him (which is explained in more detail below) in two sentences, so he can save himself the time it takes to learn facts and just catch up on what’s wrong with what he is saying:
Multiple experts in the peer reviewed literature have already established that he is probably wrong about the grammar of Galatians 1:19; and he is rebutting an explanation essentially the opposite of the one I actually presented in the peer reviewed literature. Since he is on both accounts not addressing the peer reviewed literature of his own field, he has not said anything even capable of rebutting it.
That was said in under 70 words. Ehrman can hardly object that 70 words is too much for him to read. If he wants to actually respond to the actual peer reviewed literature of his own field, he will have to read more than 70 words. But if “the peer reviewed literature refuting me is too wordy therefore I can’t be bothered to read it” is his reply, he is literally declaring himself no longer interested in doing actual professional history and has joined the ranks of every armchair hack he despises.
My Basic Point
In what I designated Argument 12 of Ehrman’s defense of historicity in the Ehrman-Price Debate I summarized the problem:
Paul also never says Jesus had biological brothers. Brothers by birth or blood appear nowhere in Paul’s letters. He only knows of cultic brothers of the Lord: all baptized Christians, he says, are the adopted sons of God just like Jesus, and therefore Jesus is “the firstborn of many brethren” (OHJ, p. 108). In other words, all baptized Christians are for Paul brothers of the Lord, and in fact the only reason Christians are brothers of each other, is that they are all brothers of Jesus. Paul is never aware he needs to distinguish anyone as a brother of Jesus in any different kind of way. And indeed the only two times he uses the full phrase “brother of the Lord” (instead of its periphrasis “brother”), he needs to draw a distinction between apostolic and non-apostolic Christians (more on that below; but see OHJ, pp. 582-92).
Then I summarized some of the details elaborating on this under Argument 14. The relevant citations and evidence are in my peer reviewed book, at the pages designated.
Ehrman concedes that “brother” can be meant non-literally, a “spiritual brother” as Ehrman describes it, meaning “someone who is connected by common bonds of affection or perspective to another.” That actually isn’t what any peer reviewed mythicist argument claims. Christians were not brothers because they were “connected by common bonds of affection or perspective.” They were brothers because they were at baptism the adopted sons of God. Literally. Paul explicitly says that. And this made them all brothers of the Lord Jesus. Again, Paul explicitly says that. And I reiterated this point in my assessment of Ehrman’s Argument 14. It was disingenuous of Ehrman to only respond to the non-peer reviewed arguments for mythicism and ignore the peer reviewed arguments. Ask yourself, why would he do that?
Ehrman also says this can’t be the meaning in Galatians 1:18-19 because there the James thus called a brother of the Lord is being differentiated from Cephas (Peter) the Apostle. As I wrote in my summary, that’s indeed true: Paul is making a distinction; he uses the full term for a Christian (“Brothers of the Lord”) every time he needs to distinguish apostolic from non-apostolic Christians. The James in Galatians 1 is not an Apostle. He is just a rank-and-file Christian. Merely a Brother of the Lord, not an Apostolic Brother of the Lord. The only Apostle he met at that time, he says, was Cephas (Peter), the first Apostle (according to 1 Corinthians 15:5 in light of 1 Corinthians 9:1). Likewise the “Brothers of the Lord” Paul references in 1 Corinthians 9:5 are, again, non-apostolic Christians—and thus being distinguished from Apostles, including, again, the first Apostle, Cephas.
Given what we have from Paul, this is just as likely, if not more likely, than the alternative reading, because we have evidence direct from Paul that he knows of cultic Brothers of the Lord (as in Romans 8:29 he says all Christians are brothers of the Lord), but no evidence he knows of biological brothers of the Lord, a significantly different category of person. So when Paul says “Brothers of the Lord,” he never says which kind he means; and had he known that there were two different kinds of such brothers, the cultic and the biological, he would need to clarify which he meant. That he never clarifies which he meant, means he only knew of one kind. And the only kind of such brother we can clearly establish he knew, was the cultic. And if even that doesn’t move you, he still doesn’t tell you which he meant; so you can’t otherwise claim to know.
The Peer Reviewed Literature on the Grammar
Ehrman now asks how this can work when “no one can think that Cephas / Peter was not also Jesus’ “brother” in this spiritual sense” too. But it works the same way as now, when, for example, we distinguish pastors and priests from just “Christians.” If we say “the only Pastor I met was John, but I also met the Christian, Jacob” we are not saying Pastor John is not also a Christian; we are saying Jacob is not a Pastor—but still a Christian. This is why Paul’s grammar is so convoluted in Galatians 1:17-19. Rather than simply say “I met two Apostles, Cephas and James the Brother of the Lord,” a way of saying it that would definitely mean Cephas was not whatever a “Brother of the Lord” was, Paul chose instead to say:
I did not go to Jerusalem to those who were Apostles before me [then]…[but] after three years I went to Jerusalem to visit Cephas and stayed with him for fifteen days. But I saw no other Apostles—just the Brother of the Lord James.
Bible translations are written with Christian dogmatic assumptions, so how this gets translated varies widely, in some cases more clearly trying to make this James an Apostle, other times more honestly making that ambiguous, as Paul’s actual vocabulary entails. You can see a broad comparison at Bible Hub, ranging from the more honest “I saw none of the other apostles–only James, the Lord’s brother” (NIV) to the more distorted “The only other apostle I met at that time was James, the Lord’s brother” (NLT). The latter is definitely not what the Greek says. It’s an interpretation of what the translator thinks the Greek text means; but it’s not what the text says. The former is closer to what the text actually says.
As I wrote in OHJ (pp. 588-90):
Whether Paul is actually lying about any of this is not relevant to what Paul wants the Galatians to think and thus what Paul means to say here. And what he means to say is that no one in Judea ever met him. He swears to this most emphatically (Gal. 1.20). He admits there were only two exceptions, Peter and James, and only for a brief time (and that years after he saw the Lord personally). But in saying so, why didn’t Paul just say ‘of them that were apostles before me [1.17] I met none except Peter and James [1.18-19]’? Why does he construct the convoluted sentence ‘I consulted with Peter, but another of the apostles I did not see, except James’? As L. Paul Trudinger puts it, ‘this would certainly be an odd way for Paul to say that he saw only two apostles, Peter and James’.[n. 98] To say that, a far simpler sentence would do. So why the complex sentence instead? Paul could perhaps mean that he consulted with Peter (historeô) but only saw James (eidô)—that is, he didn’t discuss anything with James. But if that were his point, he would make sure to emphasize it, since that would be essential to his argument. Yet he doesn’t. In fact, if he is saying that he saw none of the other apostles, that would entail he was claiming he did not consult with any, either.
So it’s just as likely, if not more so, that Paul means he met only the apostle Peter and only one other Judean Christian, a certain ‘brother James’. By calling him a brother of the Lord instead of an apostle, Paul is thus distinguishing this James from any apostles of the same name—just as we saw he used ‘brothers of the Lord’ to distinguish regular Christians from apostles in 1 Cor. 9.5. Indeed, this would explain his rare use of the complete phrase in only those two places: he otherwise uses the truncated ‘brother’ of his fellow Christians; yet every time he specifically distinguishes apostles from non-apostolic Christians he uses the full title for a member of the Christian congregation, ‘brother of the Lord’. This would be especially necessary to distinguish in such contexts ‘brothers of the apostles’ (which would include kin who were not believers) from ‘brothers of the Lord’, which also explains why he doesn’t truncate the phrase in precisely those two places.
I here cite Trudinger’s peer reviewed article demonstrating that the grammatical construction Paul uses in Gal. 1:19 is comparative. In other words, “Other than the apostles I saw no one, except James the Lord’s brother.” Thus, the construction Paul is using says James is not an Apostle. And both Trudinger and Hans Dieter Betz (who wrote the Fortress Press commentary on Galatians) cite a number of peer reviewed experts who concur (OHJ, p. 590, n. 100). There were of course Jameses who were Apostles. So Paul chose this construction to make clear he didn’t mean one of them (or a biological brother of Cephas, for that matter). He meant a regular “Brother of the Lord,” an ordinary non-apostolic Christian. But a Christian all the same—which was important for Paul to mention, since he had to list every Christian he met on that visit, lest he be accused of concealing his contacts with anyone who knew the gospel at that time.
Ironically, in his attempt to answer Trudinger, George Howard, the only person to answer Trudinger in the peer reviewed literature (OHJ, p. 590, n. 101), observed that the examples Trudinger referenced still involve “a comparison between persons or objects of the same class of things,” such as new friends and old friends belonging to the general class of friends, and indestructible elements and destructible elements belonging to the general class of elements. But that actually means Cephas and James belong to the same class (Brothers of the Lord, since Jesus is “the firstborn of many brethren…”), which entails the distinction is between Apostolic and non-Apostolic Brothers of the Lord, just as Trudinger’s examples show a contrast being made between destructible and indestructible elements and old and new friends. Howard’s objection thus actually confirms the very reading I’m pointing to. It thus does not in fact argue against Trudinger at all—who would agree both Cephas and this James belonged to the same class of things: Christians. Howard’s only other objection was to suggest Paul could have said James was not an Apostle by an even more convoluted sentence; when Occam’s Razor entails the reverse, that Paul would have said such a thing, had he intended to say such a thing, in a much simpler way, not a more complex one—after all, it would be far easier to just say “I met two apostles.” Exactly as Trudinger observes. (I discuss in OHJ several other simpler ways of saying the same thing than Howard suggests.)
What does Ehrman have to say in response?
Nothing in response to the peer reviewed literature. (He addresses neither my discussion of this in my peer reviewed book, nor in that of Betz, nor in the peer reviewed articles of Trudinger or Howard, all of whom I cite in my book.)
Starting to see a trend here?
The Consequences of Ignoring the Peer Reviewed Literature
Because Ehrman stalwartly refuses to read and respond to the peer reviewed literature, he instead tries to argue that I said Cephas was therefore not a Brother of the Lord. Since that is not what I have ever argued, but essentially the opposite, he simply isn’t replying to what I have said. Ehrman would know this if he would just read my book, the actual peer reviewed literature, instead of pretending to know what it says by “interpreting” my summaries of it on my blog. Paul is not saying in Gal. 1 or 1 Cor. 9 that Apostles were not Brothers of the Lord any more than Pseudo-Aristotle using the same construction meant that indestructible elements were not elements or that new friends were not friends. This is the very point of Greek grammar Trudinger explains, and that even Howard concurs on. Again, saying you met “no one but Pastor John, except the Christian Jacob” is not saying Pastor John is not a Christian. It’s saying Jacob is not a Pastor—but nevertheless still a Christian.
Because Ehrman stalwartly refuses to read and respond to the peer reviewed literature, he instead tries to argue that Paul never said all baptized Christians were brothers of the Lord, even though in fact Paul says all baptized Christians were brethren because they were the brethren of the Lord, and they were so because by baptism they were adopted as the sons of God, and that is the reason they would inherit God’s kingdom: being his sons, and therefore rightful heirs. Jesus differs from them in being the adopted son of God solely in respect to being the first one so adopted (and of course being assigned the special privileges of the firstborn: command over God’s estate). Romans 8 is all about this. I cite many other passages concurring and supporting—in the peer reviewed literature Ehrman continues to ignore, and thus remains ignorant of, and thus never responds to: OHJ, Chapter 4, Element 12 (p. 108, with n. 101).
Because Ehrman stalwartly refuses to read and respond to the peer reviewed literature, he instead tries to argue a point of Greek grammar challenged in the peer reviewed literature. Indeed, challenged not only by Trudinger, but even Howard, and by several others cited by Trudinger and Betz. Ehrman refuses to read the peer reviewed literature, and thus makes responses that only expose the fact that he is ignorant of the peer reviewed literature of his own field; that he does not know the underlying Greek grammar of the Galatians passage and has not compared it with the same construction elsewhere in ancient Greek; that he does not know what experts have said in the peer reviewed literature about the underlying Greek grammar of the Galatians passage when compared with the same construction elsewhere in ancient Greek. And accordingly, he fails to respond to the peer reviewed arguments against him. He instead ignores the peer reviewed literature of his own field and arm-chairs a response to a blog post that told him to read the peer reviewed literature of his own field.
Why is anyone still listening to this guy?
Why did Paul just say James another brother of the Lord instead of what is actually written? Like saying another Christian instead of using the brother of the Lord?
Because that’s how Greek worked. You’d commonly just say things like “Cephas the Apostle and Brother James.” You didn’t need to say anything more for hearers of Greek to know what you mean. Likewise the use of the definite article doesn’t work in Greek exactly like it does in English. It is routine for Paul to say “So-and-so the brother” of many Christians whom even Ehrman agrees are cultic and not biological brothers. See OHJ, p. 589, n. 99.
I’ve also pointed out using Biblehub the prefix historicists claim is used 155 other times in NT, including Paul to describe Brothers in both context, it’s not uniquely as they claim sibling
I’m not sure what you mean, but English instances of the article won’t correspond perfectly to Greek instances, because it doesn’t translate that way. There are many cases where in English we have to leave the definite article out because it violates English syntax, yet the definite article is still there in Greek (because it doesn’t violate Greek syntax). And sometimes it’s vice versa.
I cite verse examples in the cited note.
Also every other example using that prefix uses human names, “the Lord” is a mythical title, Paul continually uses term “Jesus IS Lord” or that Jesus is our slave master? & James is the brother of the slave owner/ sir?
Translation ἀδελφόν brother is used by Paul to describe non siblings;
Romans 14:10, 1 cor 8:13, 2 cor 8:18 in fact majority he uses that term brother = followers not sibling
A recent study by Reidar Aasgaard found Paul uses that word 122 times and only twice does he mean it literally—conveniently, the very two times historicists need him to be. This is contrary to usual probability logic. Normally that would signal it is unlikely he means it literally those two times.
He seems to think james the brother is also james the pillar. In response to a blog question about the gospels having james the pillar of Galatians 2 being the son of zebedee this is his response:
No, the James of ch. 1 is also the James of ch. 2. Galatians was written long before Mark and Acts, of course, and is not presupposing knowledge of them (or any of the other Gospels)
If the James of ch. 1 is also the James of ch. 2, then this would make the same James a Pillar (and probably also the James who saw the Risen Christ before Paul in the apparitions list of 1 Cor 15), and therefore an apostle. Do you think that mythicism needs inevitably the strict distinction between the two Jameses ?
Yes.
Paul cannot mean the same James in both places. This is already in contradiction with Acts (which places Paul’s visit in Gal. 2 at the same time James the Pillar dies, yet Paul says nothing about that James being killed when Paul visited, but instead that that James was still around long after that, in Gal. 2:9-12), and that’s not the only occasion where Acts has lied about the chronology of Paul’s travels (see my related comment and of course Ch. 9 of OHJ).
The Pillars, Cephas, James and John, correspond too obviously with the top three “disciples” narrated in the Synoptic Gospels. And there they are certainly Apostles; and that James is the brother of John, not of Jesus. No brother of Jesus is numbered among the Apostles in any of the Gospels. To the contrary, the Gospels all have Jesus renounce his family, and they clearly don’t know that that ever changed (they have no evident knowledge of any brother ever even joining the church at all; Luke alone claims such in Acts 1, but no such fact is noted in his Gospel and they immediately disappear from history even in his own narrative in Acts).
So it’s not likely even on the historicity thesis that the James in Gal. 1 is the same as in Gal. 2 (and many experts concur, as I cite). It’s even less likely on ahistoricity. It’s not impossible (“Brother of the Lord” could be some special policed title that regular baptized Christians were not allowed to use even though in fact they are brothers of the Lord; but there is no evidence of that, any more than there is evidence of Paul meaning biological brothers by it). But it’s not probable (though maybe more probable than interpolation; interpolation is likewise possible, but without internal or external evidence, it’s inherent probability is worse than 1 in 200 and arguably 1 in 1000, and therefore the least likely explanation of the text).
BTW, I’m skeptical of the James line in 1 Cor. 15:7 (it makes no sense there and is not a believable line by Paul’s hand), though I don’t require it to be an interpolation for ahistoricity to obtain; because it doesn’t identify that James as a brother of anyone, much less Jesus, whereas it is clearly identifying that James as an Apostle (and one of importance, hence most likely, yes, the Pillar, if Paul wrote that at all).
It’s funny that Ehrman here argues you can’t interpret Paul using the Gospels, given that he does that constantly everywhere else. Once again, he has no coherent method. He drops methods when they don’t go his way, and picks them back up again when he needs them, producing numerous self-contradictions. This is not the first time he has done this.
You can, of course, explain Gospel content by appeal to Paul when you have strong coordinating details and you can show the most likely explanation is common sourcing. That the Pillars, the top Apostles, were Cephas and the brothers James and John is the simplest explanation of both the content of Gal. 2 and the Synoptics and Acts (which were written with knowledge of the Epistles). To avoid that you have to come up with a more convoluted or conveniently coincidental explanation (both of which are by that very fact inherently less likely, due to the laws of probability—the presence of coincidences and convolutions both being less likely than their absence, by definition, unless you can make a case for the coincidence or convolution other than just presumption).
Regardless, numerous experts in the peer reviewed literature (and several official translations of the Bible) agree that the James of Gal. 1 is not the James of Gal. 2, so Ehrman cannot stand on certainty here. That he doesn’t mention that there is no agreement on this in his field even in the peer reviewed literature and translations is another example of his deceptive behavior. He misleads the public by making assertions as if they were an undisputed fact, that in fact are widely challenged by his peers. Which is ironic, because he criticizes amateur mythicists for doing exactly the same thing (and even falsely accused Doherty of doing it). Another example of his incoherent method. He can commit any sin he wants as long as it gets the result he wants; and then denounce that sin as soon as it benefits him to.
Though in OHJ I give the full citations on pp. 589-91, for those who want to pursue them directly:
L. Paul Trudinger, ‘[Heteron de tōn apostolōn ouk eidon, ei mē iakōbon]: A Note on Galatians I 19’, Novum Testamentum 17 (July 1975), pp. 200-202.
George Howard, ‘Was James an Apostle? A Reflection on a New Proposal for Gal. I 19’, Novum Testamentum 19 (January 1977), pp. 63-64.
Hans Dieter Betz, Galatians: A Commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Churches in Galatia (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1979), p. 78.
What about Philippians 1:12-14: “Now I would have you know, brethren, that the things which happened unto me have fallen out rather unto the progress of the gospel; so that my bonds became manifest in Christ throughout the whole praetorian guard, and to all the rest; and that most of the brethren in the Lord, being confident through my bonds, are more abundantly bold to speak the word of God without fear.”
This would appear to be a third use of the full ‘brothers of the Lord’ phrase.
That’s a mistranslation. Paul actually wrote “confidence in the Lord” not “brothers in the Lord.” As most translations now agree. Compare the translations here. See OHJ, pp. 584-85 n. 94.
Thanks. Even without Greek knowledge, I can see that the sentence reads much better that way.
Update: Illustrating his contempt for the peer review process of his own field, and his laziness in not even paying attention to what his critics say, Ehrman has posted the following in his comments:
Why does it matter that I published the argument through peer review? Does Ehrman never cite his own peer reviewed demonstrations of conclusions? He never says “I proved that years ago, see my book Orthodox Corruption of Scripture“? Or “I proved that just recently, see my book Forgery and Counterforgery“?
What would Ehrman think of a scholar who said “That’s worthless. I don’t care that it was peer reviewed. Since Ehrman wrote it, it deserves no credit or response. He can’t have proved anything under peer review that no one else has.” Such a view would destroy all peer review (no one could ever prove anything new, since there can never be a “first” to do so, because of the requirement that someone must already have done so, so nothing new can ever be published under peer review in his field). And Ehrman himself would laugh at anyone who said such a thing: “I know your book is part of the peer reviewed literature of my field, and indeed the latest peer reviewed literature on the subject I’m making declarations about, and it is normally an obligation on scholars to know and address the latest peer reviewed literature on a subject they make confident declarations about, but I don’t need to read or respond to that one, because you wrote it.”
When Ehrman ever publishes any defense of history under peer review (he still hasn’t done so; no one has in nearly a hundred years), I will certainly regard it as the latest and most important literature on the subject that I’d be obligated to read and respond to. I would not declare it a waste of my time to even look at it “because Ehrman wrote it.” That would be childish and irresponsible. It would be, quite simply, fundamentally unprofessional.
It’s only worse that I mentioned several other peer reviewed scholars supporting my case that Ehrman has also not responded to. Yet he seems to think I only cite myself here (and in OHJ, which he has revealed again he still hasn’t read) when in fact I cite Trudinger, Howard, and Betz, who I note in turn cite many other scholars as well, all on an important key element of my case. So Ehrman is so unprofessional and lazy that he can’t even be bothered to read the article he is responding to, as demonstrated by the fact that he didn’t know (yet he would know if he’d read this article above; or my peer reviewed book as he is morally obligated to do as a professional) that I do not only cite my own book, but several other peer reviewed experts that he is also ignoring and not addressing.
This laziness resulting in embarrassing errors of fact is not a new phenomenon for him. I have documented several examples before. And in some of those cases, rather than admit he screwed up, he lied about what he actually said. And IMO, liars deserve to occupy the worst circle of hell in the scholarly community.
Update: A patron found another discussion in the peer reviewed literature of the grammar of Galatians 1:19. It’s not as on point as Trudinger, Betz, or Howard, but I’ll quote it for relevance:
James Boyer, “Other Conditional Elements in New Testament Greek,” Grace Theological Journal 4.2 (1983) 173-188.
Around p. 180:
Boyer thus punts on the question of what Gal. 1:19 means. But he says it’s an “only-alternative” exceptive construction like the others he cites.
He cites Rev. 21:27, for example, which says “and there shall in no wise enter into it anything unclean, or he that maketh an abomination and a lie: but only they that are written in the Lamb’s book of life,” where clearly the latter category is excluding the former (i.e. those in the second category are not unclean, abominable, or a liar). One might say this is like Gal. 1:19 where the second category (“brother”) excludes the former (which would say those in the that category are never apostles), but Gal. differs in two respects: Gal. 1:19 says “another of the apostles” and not “no apostles”; it therefore does not say, as Rev 21:27 does, that the second category wholly excludes the first (so some apostles may yet be brothers, and all Paul is saying is the next person he mentions is simply just not an apostle). Galatians is using a different construction, correctly identified by Trudinger as the genitive of comparison. Thus, it says “other than apostles I saw only the brother James.” So Rev. 21:27 is not directly analogous. Paul’s construction is not saying apostles aren’t brothers; it’s just saying he met someone other than an apostle, someone who happened nevertheless to at least be a brother (and not some outsider or family member of an apostle’s household etc.).
Boyer also cites as an example Rev. 9:4, “they should not hurt the grass of the earth, neither any green thing, neither any tree, but only such men as have not the seal of God on their foreheads,” which again lacks the genitive of comparison and is thus a good parallel for Rev. 21:27 but not, again, Gal. 1:19, except in representing the exceptive force of the idiom (in both cases the second category is supposed in some sense to not include the first, but this construction, not used by Paul, is far stronger in its exclusion than the comparative construction Paul used).
Boyer then cites as an example Matthew 12:4, “it was not lawful for him to eat it, nor for them who were with him, but only for the priests.” This is again not the comparative construction. It could be rendered “it was not lawful for him to eat it, nor for them who were with him, except the priests,” if we imagine David or some among his entourage were priests (which Boyer notes is not a plausible assumption), but that’s still not a grammatical parallel for what Paul is saying in Gal. 1:19.
So though Boyer acknowledges something problematic about the exceptive force of Gal. 1:19 (so much so he is worried about its implications and thus just avoids the question altogether), he doesn’t really analyze its distinctive grammar. Trudinger and Howard do (as do the others cited by Betz).
You write:
That the Pillars, the top Apostles, were Cephas and the brothers James and John is the simplest explanation of both the content of Gal. 2 and the Synoptics and Acts (which were written with knowledge of the Epistles).
I read that according to some scholars (for example, Tom Dykstra), ”Zebedee” is an allegorical allusion to a corrupted guy named “Acan son of Zebedee” in Josephus, Antiquities V:33-44 (the same story of Joshua 7:1-25), the effect being that the two Pillars James and John are implicitly despised by the pauline Mark as thieves of goods that belong to God (not coincidentially, the financial obligation that has been imposed by the Jerusalem ‘pillars’ on the Gentile Churches – Gal 2:10 – was perceived by the Paulines as a theft).
Stantibus rebus, if the real father of James ”son of Zebedee” was the same earthly father of Jesus (i.e. the carpenter), then it becomes very impossible to think that ‘Mark’ arrived to despise the same Joseph of Nazareth (and by corollary, the historical Jesus himself!), by calling him with a so negative name as ”Zebedee”.
The proto-catholic Hegesippus had a reason to intrepret the James ”brother of Lord” in a biological sense: counter-balance the Paul of Marcion.
Hegesippus, who explictly writes against Marcion, would have been regarded by the latter as one of ‘those who defended the Jewish belief’ and united the Gospel with the Law and the Prophets’. Hegesippus’ quote ‘leaves no room for Paul as an authority’ ….Hegesippus reconnects the Church’s beginnings firmly with Jerusalem and the Temple, and roots the young community deeply in the wider family of Jesus and his brother James.
Against, but also partly aknowledging Marcion, Hegesippus paints James as ‘the Just’ who was announced by the prophets, carries all the Marcionite ascetic ideals (no wine, a vegetarian, no cutting of hair, no perfumes, no bathing) and makes people believe in the resurrection and judgement. He is portrayed like a Jewish-Christian alternative to the Pauline Marcion: Jesus’ earthly family counts against Paul’s visionary authority of the Risen Christ.
(Markus Vinzent, Christ’s resurrection in Early Christianity and the Making of the New Testament, Ashgate 2011, p.99-100, my bold)
Just before, the prof Vinzent, talking about the Papias’use of 1 Peter against Marcion, writes:
Moreover, 1 Peter calls Christ ‘the Just’, who has suffered ‘for the unjust’, an allusion to and summary of Isaiah (53:1-12), and also a clear stance against Marcion, who equated the ‘Just’ with the God of the Jews to distinguish him from the true God of Love.
(ibid. p. 98)
Several texts in the Tanakh makes it clear that Jacob/Israel was regarded as the son of God. For example, the famous “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son”.
If Jacob was the son of God according to the Old Testament, and Jesus was the Son of God according to the New Testament, then Jacob and Jesus had to be earthly brothers in some way or another, according to the proto-catholic Hegesippus, in reaction against Marcion (who rejected entirely the Old Testament).
That’s speculation. Useless. Speculation in, only gets you speculation out. That’s the same error Price made in the Ehrman-Price debate. You can’t assert as probable things you are simply speculating might be the case.
More credible is Vinzent’s theory of why a family was invented for Jesus. Still speculation, but it happens to be one with strong background support in the way that evidence was used, the timing of its creation, and the suspect nature of its grounding evidence.
See my discussion of Hegesippus and Papias in OHJ, Ch. 8.7-8.
That’s too speculative. And we have no need of committing to any such specific hypothesis. The practical utility of inventing family, and converting apostles into family, subsumes hundreds of possible hypotheses for how that would come about, so it is folly to reduce your prior by committing to only one of hundreds of possibilities, when any of those possibilities has the same effective result.
Hi,
Prof Bermejo-Rubio criticizes your point of Proving History in his new article about the CoE, when he writes:
“This material is also overlooked by Carrier, Proving History”
(p. 14, n. 56)
…the ‘material’ being the presumed pattern of seditious clues found in the Gospels.
According to this prof, only a real seditious Jesus may make sense of the following three declared facts:
1) we have disiepta membra of sedition. The risk is to see the single trees, but not the entire forest.
2) any single element of the pattern is semi-hidden by other invented material, sometimes created to the precise goal to neutralize the relative seditious element.
3) the pattern is been tamed deliberately sometimes. So we have the paradox of episodes who are clearly fantastic and not-historical even if they allude to sedition.
My personal counter-argument would be similar to your answer to Lena Einhorn. I quote again your words from there:
“…the Gospel authors were just borrowing “modern” ideas with which to construct their stories of Jesus.
Just as they lifted the story of Jesus ben Ananias, from the era of Nero, to fabricate a plot for their Jesus ben Joseph (OHJ, pp. 428-30), they may well have done the same for The Egyptian, and indeed may have borrowed from all the Josephan Christs to build their mosaic (all of whom were portraying themselves as a Jesus Christ, i.e. a messianic Joshua reborn: OHJ, pp. 67-73, 245-46).
if they ldid like those seditious figures, it is natural that they would have made also their invented Jesus like them, causing as a side effect the three ”facts” described above.
Therefore it’s simply not true the opinion of J. A. Trumbover in The Historical Jesus and the Speech of Gamaliel (Acts 5.35-39), when he says:
“… we can be fairly certain That no Christian (including Luke) would want to initiate such a process […] It Seems highly unlikely source That any Christian would want to paint the Christian hero in terms reminiscent of failed revolutionary or prophets.”
(p. 15, n.59 of the Bermejo-Rubio’s article)
A modern analogy would be as follows: If it is a Western fashion that women exhibit freely their body, then this does not mean that an Iranian media is right to define “prostitute” Carla Bruni.
What do you think about?
I’m not sure I understand your second argument; though it might perhaps be the correct one. Your first argument doesn’t work, though, IMO. I don’t think any of the supposedly violent-revolutionary material Bermejo-Rubio focuses on is such. I also don’t think such material would have been added in the way you suggest. It wouldn’t have been useful, but even counter-productive. And that’s also why Bermejo-Rubio can’t be correct, either. On his theory, this is precisely the kind of material that these authors wouldn’t have included. Thus, that such passages appear in the Gospels is highly unlikely on his hypothesis. That makes his hypothesis a bad hypothesis by definition. A good hypothesis is one that makes the evidence highly likely. Not highly unexpected.
This is also a kind of “fallacy of convenience”: ignoring all evidence against you, cherry picking evidence that supports your theory, and then claiming your theory the best (worse, he even invents excuses for why this unexpected evidence would “sneak past” these authors, as if they were unthinking robots). These authors are supposed to be disguising this fact of a violent backstory by erasing what actually happened and adding fictive pacifist material, and yet, they don’t think to remove this offensive material? That is what makes no sense. This is the problem when historians don’t frame what they are saying in terms of probability. All of his excuses…are they even probable? No. More likely, Bermejo-Rubio is simply wrong that any of those passages are promoting violence. They have some other allegorical meaning.
And allegorical meanings is what we know these authors were composing with, e.g. the fig tree story, the Barabbas story, etc. Anything you read literally in the Gospels, odds are, you are reading wrong. And that’s what Bermejo-Rubio is doing wrong. He isn’t explaining why these authors chose to include this material. His theory not only doesn’t explain that, it predicts that they wouldn’t, the opposite of what we observe. That’s falsification, not verification.
Bermejo-Rubio’s hand-waving insistence that they just had to include such material because it was so popular is simply untenable. The Gospels themselves refute any such trend. Each author felt free to erase or change anything he wanted; and when he didn’t, he alters it in a way that attempts to explain it, he doesn’t leave it cryptic. There clearly was no scruple about maintaining popular material an author didn’t like or didn’t try to explain in a way that suited him. (Nor is there in fact any evidence that any of this material was popular. Bermejo-Rubio is simply presuming without evidence that any of this material predates the Gospels.)
For example, there is no sense in which the clearing of the temple was ever historical. That never happened. It makes zero sense and is wholly unrealistic and implausible, and unrecorded by the one historian, Josephus, who surely would have included it had it happened (had it happened in any historically credible way, as Bermejo-Rubio’s theory requires). No. It was a fiction invented by Mark to illustrate a point he wanted to make about why God allowed the temple to be destroyed by pagans. (See my discussion of this, citing Hamerton-Kelly, in OHJ, pp. 433-35.)
See also my previous discussion of these kinds of logical errors Bermejo-Rubio is prone to.
BTW, thank you for calling my attention to his article. Keep me apprised of any such items you discover! It’s a good contribution to the debate. I think it’s worth writing a response article to that journal. I’ll plan on doing that in the coming months.
My argument is only one, not two. Basically, it asks:
Is not to find ‘seditious clues’ in the Gospels equivalent to claim that the authors were doing midrash from the Josephian Christs ?
My counter-argument assumes that Bermejo-Rubio is right in finding apparent ‘seditious clues’ into the Gospels but that he is wrong when he assumes only his theory as unique possible explanation. I argue that there is another alternative (and better) reason (capturing all that same ‘evidence’) and it is: if it was an ancient Jewish fashion to imagine subversive messiahs, then why couldn’t the invented Jesus be also ‘subversive, but never seditious’?
For example, Richard Miller writes:
The New Testament works were often subversive, but never seditious, in their endeavor to trascend the political structures of their day.
(Resurrection and Reception, p. 137)
That holds for material that is merely subversive. But Bermejo-Rubio is talking about material that, taken literally, entails violence (like mentioning the disciples having swords, etc.). The problem is he is reading such passages literally. And the Gospels were not written to be taken literally. Exactly as Mark warns the insider to understand in chapter 4. Gospel authors didn’t add a mention, for example, of counting swords among the disciples (Luke 22:35-38) because it was some sort of memory fragment they couldn’t delete (Mark and Matthew deleted it on that theory, refuting the theory; it’s also wholly unintelligible and wildly implausible that such a scene ever happened, or that anyone would bother to remember it for sixty to eighty years), but because they weren’t talking about literal actual swords (nor could having two swords among a band of twelve possibly have ever related to any real rebel intentions; that would be like planning to capture the temple mount with a walnut and a piece of string). Whatever his past or training, Bermejo-Rubio just hasn’t escaped the biblical literalism of fundamentalists.
About the James affair, I find another evidence in the same Hegesippus (!) about his identity with a mere baptized Christian.
So Hegesippus, per Eusebius:
No iron implement had touched his head, he had never visited a bath house, had never eaten meat. He did not own a change of clothing and wore only a threadbare linen garment, as it says in the Gospel, “The young man fled, and left the cloth where with he was clad.”
Hence, according to Hegesippus, “James the brother of Jesus” is the “young man”.
But in Mark the “young man” is often considered an allegory of all the baptized Christians. For example, this old article makes a case that the young man who fled naked from the scene of Jesus’ arrest in Gethsemane and the young man (reappearing?) in the tomb to announce Jesus’ resurrection were originally created as symbols of the baptism ritual for new converts to Christianity.
Hence the next logical step is short: ifeven Hegesippus identified the James of Gal 1:19 with the “young man” of Mark 14:51-52 and Mark 16:5 – himself a symbol of all the Christian “brothers”- , then the evidence is very strong that the James of Gal 1:19 was originally a mere baptized Christian even for who invented an earthly brother of Jesus: Hegesippus (or his source).
What do you think?
That doesn’t hold. That later Christians tried linking the two figures centuries later, tells us nothing about what Paul actually originally meant. To the contrary, those later Christians were starting from assumptions already contrary to Paul’s or not attested in Paul and based on late wild legends. So that wouldn’t tell us anything useful. Also, that’s not in Eusebius or Hegesippus. The text you quote comes from the medieval author Epiphanius, writing in the 5th century. And he does not credit it to any previous author. It looks clearly to be his own inference; he probably read the mere “wore linen” in Hegesippus, and then conjectured a link to the linen-wearing boy in the Gospel of Mark on his own.
My impression is that Bermejo-Rubio defends his theory (as the best and more simple one) simply by denouncing those who interpret allegorically the ”seditious” material of being without an explanation about precisely what would work as allegory behind, for example, the Two Swords saying.
How do you answer to this his particular criticism?
That’s an example of not knowing how probability theory works.
We have confirmed pericope after pericope was written with allegorical and not literal intent (Chapter 10 of OHJ summarizes the scholarship). This entails that the prior probability another pericope will have been written that way is high (above 50%) regardless of whether we know what the nonliteral intent was (OHJ, pp. 443-56). In other words, the evidence is abundant that “writing their stories nonliterally” is what the Gospel authors do. Therefore, we need evidence that they ever did otherwise; without which, we have to assume the rest is the same. This is essentially the same point established by Stephen Law’s Contamination Principle (OHJ, p. 394 n. 14).
If we could show that it is highly expected that we would know what the secret meaning of every story was, then our not knowing would be unexpected, and as such would generate a likelihood ratio favoring the argument Bermejo-Rubio wants to make. But to the contrary, not only has no one shown that, the evidence is abundant that we should expect not to know what every secret meaning was (e.g. the numerology in the Gospel of John: OHJ, pp. 505-06). Not only because it was deliberately intended to be hidden (Mark 4; OHJ, pp. 108-24), but also because the religion changed so rapidly and had such diverse sectarian ideologies (and yet almost no documentation was preserved about any of it) that the secret meanings were clearly very rapidly lost (the example of how quickly the purpose of John’s Lazarus and Cana narratives, and of Mark’s Barabbas narrative, were lost to almost all early Christian authorities).
So on the hypothesis that every pericope in the Gospels is nonliteral, we should expect to observe a large number of those pericopes with lost meanings. That’s entailed by the theory. Therefore, observing a large number of those pericopes with lost meanings cannot argue against their being nonliteral. It would violate probability theory to think that. Just as it would violate probability theory to argue that we should not see runs of matching sequences in lottery numbers; in actual fact, coincidental runs are expected, and in fact we can predict exactly how many we will observe, so observing them does not argue the lottery is rigged. At all. Much less enough to allow us, a la Bermejo-Rubio, to assume the lottery is rigged.
So it is simply not logically valid to argue “every pericope for which we don’t know the allegorical meaning is literally true.” That is the exact opposite of the correct conclusion on sound probability reasoning from the evidence available. It’s like observing someone lying repeatedly, and then concluding that in any case where you can’t tell if they are lying, they are telling the truth. No. Once you’ve established that they routinely lie, you should assume everything they say is a lie until you can independently confirm any specific thing they are saying is true. And in the case of the Gospels, we have no access to any means to do that (all independent sources are lost, by which we would “fact check” the Gospels on any pertinent matter; the exceptions are not pertinent, e.g. our ability to corroborate independently that Pontius Pilate was governing Judea at the same time as Caiaphas served in the priesthood, a fact that itself has nothing to do with Jesus or Christianity).
Mr.Carrier… with your reading – did Paul only meet two “Christians” / “brother(s) of the Lord” in Jerusalem? Doesn’t that seem unlikely? 😛
Yet it’s exactly what Paul says.
He thought it was weird himself. Hence in the very next line he swears by God he isn’t lying. And then says he remained unknown by face to every Christian in Judea, but for those two. So Paul is very explicit on that point: he did indeed only meet two Christians in Judea. Until literally fourteen years later (as he then proceeds to explain).
This is weird whether Jesus existed or not (and whether we read the verse traditionally or not). So its being weird isn’t useful data for deciding that question.
Mr Carrier:
So then according to your reading, in the context of the epistle: Why was it so important for Paul to assure the Galatians that he was not lying about that he only met two Christians(Cephas and James) in Jerusalem?
Read the entire chapter. Someone accused him of being a fake Apostle, of just repeating what humans told him, and not having received it directly from Jesus, as was required to be an apostle. Evidently originally by someone else posing as an apostle claiming Paul’s gospel was false (to which Paul responds that they are the false apostle, communicating with false spirits). So he writes an elaborate defense insisting that’s impossible. He did not receive his information from humans, but directly from Jesus (he insists), and couldn’t be faking that (he insists), because he never even met with any Christian authorities who could give him the secrets confirming one an apostle (hence he has to insist he never conferred with any apostle or any insider; he prosecuted Christians in some vague way he never details, but in such a role the Galatians would assume they’d not have told him anything secret that confirms one an apostle; though we can doubt that, the Galatians could not, and Paul is glossing over it and just focusing on his friendly relations with Christians, which he insists did not even occur for three whole years after his “vision”).
Thus he says no Christian in Judea had ever even met him until then (as he says: no one there knew him by face). To avoid being caught out in a lie, he thus has to name every Christian he did meet (lest someone respond by saying, “Oh, no one knew you by face, huh? I heard two Christians met with you there!”), so he says he met only one apostle, and another (baptized, hence initiated) Christian. Until another fourteen years passed, when he met with the “Pillars” there as a unit. He couldn’t say “I only met one apostle” lest, again, someone raise suspicion by pointing out he did meet with a baptized Christian besides that apostle, and thus could have gotten information from him, and why did he not mention that other person, yet swear by God he met no one “but” Cephas? Etc.
His rhetoric involves throwing out multiple arguments in his defense against the charge, including the argument from time (I didn’t even meet these guys for three years) and the argument from paucity (and even then I only met two dudes in-the-know) and the projection defense (I’m not the fake apostle; whoever told you I’m a fake apostle is the fake apostle!) and so on.
The obvious context is that the Galatians did not trust human tradition; one could only be an apostle (and thus an authority) if one received a revelation. And received it from the correct spirit (the real Jesus; as opposed to the fake Jesus spirits Paul says others are claiming to have had revealed to them). Notably, Paul only here knows of anyone meeting Jesus in visions; the idea of anyone meeting him in person, even fakes pretending to have, is not even on his radar as an argument to make or answer. And that he has to insist so adamantly and elaborately on never having met a human (including a human Jesus) suggests the Galatians did not know of that as a thing, either. So this actually evinces an absence of a historical Jesus.
For example, Paul is not here tasked with answering the charge that the other apostles met Jesus in person and he only met him in a vision. Yet, that should be the argument he has to rebut. That he is not even aware of such an argument, entails he was never posed it; which entails no such argument was available to anyone. Which entails no one met Jesus in life. Instead, he has to insist he met Jesus in visions just like all the other apostles did (1 Cor. 9 & 15). Any other way of learning the gospel would make him a fake in the eyes of the Galatians. And that’s weird. Unless Jesus didn’t exist.
Richard,
In your reply here about Paul’s description in Galatians of his meeting with Simon Peter and the brother of the Lord, James, you make some errors of reasoning.
1) Nowhere is it claimed in the epistles of genuine Pauline authorship that the contents of the gospel of the other apostles were “only” received directly from God through some supposed divine revelation. It is clear that they did receive it divinely, but never is it only said to all be of direct divine revelation and not from the earthly Jesus.
2) Paul is claiming his gospel is divinely received in Galatians in his effort to defend its authority against another gospel being taught to them. It is impossible to deduce from what Paul says in Galatians what exactly this other gospel was, or if its authors claimed it only to be of direct divine revelation like Paul claims his to be.
3) Paul himself mentions to the Galatians that he DID receive information from Peter directly (Galatians 1:18). Thus he already is admitting that some of his knowledge about Jesus was not from his sole divine revelations/visions. Paul himself mentions in a few places, such as at 1 Corinthians 11:23, that Jesus was a person on earth with earthly followers, whom he passed teachings/information to.
4) You also need to realize that just because Paul or any other Christian at the time is saying their message or gospel is ultimately of divine origin, it does not mean that the information contained did not involve actual information passed on from those who witnessed or followed a historical Jesus figure circa 30 – 45 AD, or from that Jesus himself. A claim of divine revelation does not necessarily mean it had to be received solely in a supposed vision, dream, message from God, etc. Given they thought Jesus to be in part divine, then something said by a historical Jesus to followers like Peter, or witnessed by Peter, would still in their view be a godly revelation.
5) Just because Paul is claiming the supposed divine authority of his gospel, it does not mean that he had a need to rebut information received directly from a historical Jesus to apostles like Cephas. Paul says that Jesus’ followers received information from him directly (1 Corinthians 11:23), as as well as from revelations or visions. We again aren’t even aware what this “other gospel” was which was being taught in Galatia. Galatia was a region far from Jerusalem, in the northwest remote interior of Anatolia. The Galatians themselves originally spoke a Celtic language, and were thus not even ethnically Greek or Anatolian in the same way as other peoples like the Corinthians, Thessalonians, Ephesians, etc.
I never say Paul said they only received it that way but that Paul only says they received it that way. So please learn how adverbs work. Get my argument correct:
Pre-death communications from Jesus are conspicuously omitted everywhere it should be mentioned. It is, in other words, bizarrely absent. Paul never has to address it (even though he repeatedly should), and never knows about it (even though that should be impossible). See my discussion in Chapter 11 of OHJ of every instance where Paul should be mentioning it yet weirdly doesn’t.
It certainly is possible. Paul explicitly says the other gospel was being received by (evil) angelic communications or human traditions and neither should ever be trusted. Indeed, most importantly, Paul has to swear he never got it from people, which means the Galatians distrusted anyone who claimed to have gotten the gospel from people. Only a revelation counted. That’s what tells us what I’m using this point to illustrate. That, and the fact that this is the argument being made against him; rather than what historicists should expect the argument against him to be: that he, unlike the other apostles, didn’t receive it from the human Jesus when he was alive. Not the other way around. Paul is never faced with that argument, ever. Not in any of his letters. Which is bizarre. Unless Jesus didn’t really exist and was only known through “revelations.”
No. Paul is denying that he learned anything from Peter. That’s the whole argument of Galatians 1. He is not saying he got the gospel from any human being, but swearing he didn’t; he didn’t learn it from Peter, nor a flesh-and-blood Jesus either. And his argument entails both he and the Galatians never trusted any gospel learned from flesh and blood people. That’s why Paul has to try so hard to deny he did.
As for 1 Cor. 11:23, that does not mention any earthly followers. Paul says he received it in a vision (direct “from the Lord”), and accordingly describes no one being present, does not call it a last supper, and quotes Jesus speaking to all future Christians, not his disciples. Many experts concur Paul is not describing a real historical event in this passage (e.g. Gerd Lüdemann, one of the world’s leading experts on Paul: see pp. 96-97 of Jesus). See my entire section on this passage in OHJ, Ch. 11.7.
You have made three errors here.
The word “revelation” never meant being told by a human in person; it was a word that explicitly denied that. So you can’t even get to “possibly.”
And Paul is explicit that he only means revelation in Galatians 1 and 2 Corinthians 12. And based on the laws of physics, he can only mean revelation in 1 Corinthians 9 and 15. There are no other possible places he can mean anything else (other than, again, at best 50/50 either way, which gets us nowhere).
Yet he never does. He is never ever faced with such an argument. Not in 20,000 words of his responding to arguments.
That’s what’s weird. And telling.
Wrong. Paul says there he received that information directly. No mention of followers involved in any way.
I don’t know what that has to do with anything here. It’s also false. By the time Paul is writing, the Galatians had been Hellenized for hundreds of years. Though they did continue to speak a modified Celtic, they were also facile in Greek. That’s why he is writing to them in Greek (and they would have written to him in Greek). And Greek is the only means by which they could access the Scriptures Paul cites and that they relied upon for confirming their faith (e.g. Gal. 3).
Yes, we don’t know what these other gospels were. Only that people were claiming to have received them by revelations and Paul was accusing them of thus having received them from misbehaving angels (Gal. 1:8) pretending to be Jesus (2 Cor. 11:4). And that none of the people Paul calls Apostles were teaching these other gospels (e.g. Cephas, James, John, Paul all acknowledges as teaching the true Jesus, not one of the fake ones). True spirits had to be tested by proving yourself with miracles, moral behavior, and chronological priority. But our not knowing what these other gospels were, and our not knowing who was teaching them, has no relevance to whether anyone ever met a Jesus in earthly life or if he was only ever met by revelation.
“Instead, he has to insist he met Jesus in visions just like all the other apostles did (1 Cor. 9 & 15).”
In 1 Cor 9:2, Paul makes quite clear that some other apostles have rejected him as a genuine apostle. If he is claiming his message is only of direct divine revelation, then other apostles who witnessed a historical Jesus figure may be rejecting his gospel for this reason. Again, nowhere in these chapters does it say the other apostles ONLY received information from visions or direct revelations to them personally. In 1 Cor 15, he specifically says that visions they received appeared after Jesus died, but nowhere says that is the only time they ever met or witnessed him.
And even then, these supposedly divine “visions” likely still contain information actually taught to them from a historical Jesus figure, or information they witnessed such a figure telling to others, which they remembered, and then claimed to be from an otherworldly dream or vision.
“Paul is not here tasked with answering the charge that the other apostles met Jesus in person and he only met him in a vision.That he is not even aware of such an argument, entails he was never posed it; which entails no such argument was available to anyone.”
It’s impossible to say if he was ever posited such an argument. Even if questioned on this not by a far removed people like the Galatians, it doesn’t mean he never was. The “other gospel” being taught to the Galatians very well may have been from someone who saw Jesus when alive, and Paul is claiming to override this by asserting direct divine communication with Jesus through a vision. And in any case, Paul already makes clear Jesus did pass on information directly to followers in verses like 1 Cor 11:23.
And his response is, that he saw Jesus just like they did. He conspicuously does not have to answer here any such argument that his seeing of Jesus was different than theirs. To the contrary, he is clearly unaware here of that even being the case. So it evidently wasn’t.
If so, he’d have to answer that argument. Yet he never does. So no one ever posed that argument against him. To the contrary, everywhere, he assumes visions is how everyone saw Jesus (1 Cor. 15; Gal. 1; Rom. 16:25-26; and as well 1 Cor. 9).
And yet, it’s weird that in the entire gospel account there, the first time anyone ever “sees” Jesus is after his death. That’s weird. Never once does Paul ever mention anyone ever seeing Jesus before his death. Not in any of the many creeds he describes, not in any discussion he ever makes of how anyone learned things from Jesus, not in any arguments against him that he has to answer. And that is improbable. Unless revelation is the only way Jesus was seen.
There is no evidence in Paul that argues this is “likely.” And “possibly” does not get you to “likely.”
That’s the problem. You are confusing what you want to be the case, with what actually is the case in the letters of Paul. That you want Paul to have meant a certain thing, is not evidence he did.
No, it isn’t impossible at all.
It’s precisely the argument he’d have had to address in Galatians 1 (and in 1 Cor. 9 and many other places). Yet he argues exactly the opposite. Paul is repeatedly accused of being a lesser apostle, yet never once is the reason given, that he didn’t know Jesus in life. So it’s clear he never had to address that argument. He isn’t even aware that that’s an argument to address.
That’s simply improbable.
That you want that argument to have existed yet improbably never be posed against Paul forcing him to reply, not ever in 20,000 words of answering arguments posed to him, only betrays your bias, not your objectivity.
“Possibly, therefore probably” is a logical fallacy. Please stop being illogical.
And to the contrary, the only source Paul ever mentions anyone having for these false gospels, is angels and spirits (Gal. 1:8; 2 Cor. 11:4). Or other persons who aren’t themselves Jesus. He never mentions anyone having met Jesus in person preaching any gospel, neither the actual one, nor a false one; indeed, that would be a serious problem for him, which he would have to address. Because if these people he is saying were preaching a false gospel were people who knew Jesus in life, they would have the better claim to teaching the true gospel, and he would then be accused of teaching the false one, having not met Jesus in life. So if these other gospels were being taught by persons who met Jesus in life, Paul would be forced to address that argument or else be refuted and repudiated as the false apostle. Yet Paul is wholly unaware of this. He instead argues no one who receives a gospel from a human is telling the truth; and he has to swear he never learned it from a human, not even a human Jesus. That makes zero sense if anyone was claiming to have better information from him because they knew Jesus in life. That’s why we can know no such argument was ever made against Paul. Because he absolutely would have to respond to it. Yet he responds in exactly the opposite way. Which means he never heard any such argument.
And that’s weird.
Hence the problem.
Paul does not there mention anyone receiving that from Jesus except himself. Which means, by revelation.
““Possibly, therefore probably” is a logical fallacy. Please stop being illogical.”
No they aren’t. Those are the most honest and accurate ways to describe the passages we are discussing here, as you have no evidence to know exactly what Paul meant. All you have is your interpretation of material Paul wrote. You do not have access to his thoughts.
You are committing a plethora of logical fallacies by consistently constructing narratives about “what Paul meant when he wrote this” when you have extremely little to zero evidence to support that interpretation of yours. You just create one interpretation of his words to support another created interpretation by you of other words of his. Any evidence to the contrary, you just dismiss by creating yet another interpretation, no matter how outlandish and unlikely. Your interpretations also do not follow the law of parsimony. This is not only a massive logical fallacy, but revisionism and projection at their finest. Get a grip.
You have not identified any fallacies in my case.
I have identified fallacies in yours, such as the possibiliter fallacy (“possibly, therefore probably” is a fallacy).
All I am doing is reading the texts as written. You are the one importing assumptions without evidence, so as to “get the text” to say what you want it to say. Whereas I am just reading what the text says, and not going beyond that with any further assertions I cannot present evidence for.
“For ye have heard of my conversation in time past in the Jews’ religion, how that beyond measure I persecuted the church of God, and wasted it:” Galatians 1:13
Again according to his own words, despite Paul claiming otherwise, he already would have come into contact with knowledge from Christians even before he went three years later to meet Simon Peter/Cephas for 15 days, and receive information from him.
Thus, Paul admits to receiving information about Jesus from 1)Christians he persecuted, 2) from Simon Peter/Cephas, and 3) finally from James, the Lord’s brother. So despite claiming his knowledge is solely of divine revelation, it’s obvious to the reader it is not. It is impossible to say if the “other gospel” to the Galatians did not contain information witnessed from a historical Jesus figure, whether asserted as such or not.
Just as Paul claims his information is only of divine origin, despite obviously not being the case, the same may be the case for the other gospel preached to the Galatians.
Paul actually does not say he received any information from the Christians he persecuted. He is in fact denying it. He may be lying, but his whole argument is that he is “not lying” (he even swears he is not lying).
You may be unaware, but Christian teachings affirming one an apostle were secret, and not told to outsiders (see OHJ, Element 13). So the Galatians would assume Paul could not have learned those secrets from persecuted Christians (and Paul avoids discussing it; he just swears he didn’t). And Paul says he learned nothing from Cephas and the others. And that he never even met them until he had already been preaching the revealed gospel for three years.
More importantly, Paul never mentions anyone (not even Cephas or James) getting information from Jesus before his death; and Paul never seems aware that that was how anyone learned anything; because he is, again, arguing against the reliability of any information received about Jesus that didn’t come directly from Jesus by revelation. He is unaware of any argument such as “but you didn’t meet Jesus in life and they did.” To the contrary, Paul only knows the argument “anyone who gets the gospel by means other than revelation is a fake.” How do we know that’s the only argument he knows? Because that’s the only argument he rebuts. Yet he would have lost the argument and been expelled as a demonstrated fake, if he was ever posed with the other argument and never rebutted it, especially here.
You have no evidence that Paul did not receive any information from the Christians he persecuted. He obviously did, as any figure in history who persecutes apostates learns a great deal about the religion or apostasy of the people they are persecuting. Paul would be no different when persecuting those he so vehemently opposed at that time. If he persecutes someone for a suspected or known link to Christianity, he obviously would have information on such about those persons, whether gained directly or indirectly. If he interrogated or punished them based on his views of Mosaic Law, then he clearly would have gained information directly.
Paul never says he learned nothing from Simon (Peter) and James, let alone the others. He only says he did not learn anything from them until AFTER his conversion. This does not exclude that he learned information from other Christians earlier, nor that he gained further information from Simon (Peter) and James later. In fact, in other passages Paul appeals to the authority of knowledge of figures who where Christians before he was, and emphasizes that chronological importance.
Paul implies a greater importance or greater respect for the source or content of Simon and James’ information on Jesus by clearly differentiating his received Gospel from theirs when he argues he converted before ever meeting them and receiving the information he gained from them. Paul does not rebut this at all. In fact, he is desperately and consistently trying to be an apologist for his own divinely received gospel despite it clearly being at odds or inconsistent in several ways with the information possessed and taught by Simon and James.
Lastly, Paul makes clear that Jesus’ followers received information directly from Jesus BEFORE he died at 1 Corinthians 11. Paul clearly says there that Jesus told his followers, while dining with them, to remember him.
It’s the other way around. You don’t have any evidence he did—or, more importantly, what it was.
But my point is that it doesn’t matter. So I am not denying he got this from somewhere; I am saying regardless of where he really got it, he claims to have gotten it from Jesus—not from witnesses—which means he had to claim that because that was the only way a real apostle could know of it. Just as he insists in 1 Cor. 9 and Gal. 1 and Romans 16:25-26.
No. Paul never mentions “Jesus’ followers receiving information directly from Jesus BEFORE he died.” Paul does not say the vision he relates was received the night before he died. He says his vision was of what Jesus said the night before he died. Pay attention to the distinction. It’s rather important.
Actually, he tells all Christians this in Paul. Not just someone dining with him. No one is dining with him. Jesus addresses no one but “you,” plural, meaning, as Paul says right after, all future Christians. No one else is mentioned.
ROM16.23 Gaius mine host, and of the whole church, saluteth you. Erastus the chamberlain of the city saluteth you, and Quartus a brother.
1CO1.1 Paul called to be an apostle of Jesus Christ through the will of God, and Sosthenes our brother,
2CO1.1 Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God, and Timothy our brother,
2CO2.13 I had no rest in my spirit, because I found not Titus my brother:
I looked up examples of Paul using “brother” in the KJV. Above are just 3. Most verses using brother use “our brother.” I don’t know if Jesus was historical or not. But the verses above indicate, to me, that there is no question that Paul is referring to a Christian brother. So it seems that Galatians 1:19 uses “brother” differently than all the verses I saw. Of course that doesn’t mean that Gal 1:19 means flesh and blood.
That isn’t grammatically or contextually significant though. As I say in OHJ, pp. 589-90, n. 99:
In other words, “our/my brother” is not a theological statement or cultic title convention, but a personal endearment. Which wouldn’t be applicable in Galatians 1. Apollos is a classic example: Paul didn’t really want to signal him as dear; hence he is always “the brother” and not “our/my brother.”
Both “my/our brother” and “the brother” can refer to a family relation and a term of endearment. It is simple 1st person singular,/1st person plural and the third person singular. You are again showing logical fallacy in ignorance of other interpretations of evidence that you are wrongfully assuming to be mostly or only supportive of your position.
I don’t follow your point. What makes it an endearment is adding a possessive (my/our). Not what person the possessive is in.
And I am just reading the texts of Paul as-is. You are the one importing assumptions without evidence.
Reading this article and the ensuing comments, I have to wonder: why on earth should this particular “battle” between Carrier and Ehrman have any significance to me at all???
Scholars and Historians go through this process of back-and-forth — sometimes for centuries — in an attempt to reach “Consensus” on whichever given topic (in this case, having to do with whether James was a biological brother of Jesus).
I might find the various points and counterpoints interesting, but, do I give a rip about this (seeming) “pissing contest”? Nope. Not one bit.
Dr Carrier – if you’re just looking for random internet viewers to say “oh, yeh, we believe what YOU say, Dr Carrier”, then fine. You’ve got your audience, you’ve got your affecionados. You’re set.
But if you’re trying to persuade other scholars and historians, and joining in the “back and forth” that may eventually lead to some kind of Consensus, then what’s with this focused fight with Ehrman? Do you think he’s the only scholar out there that holds a different view than you?
I guess I’m just having a hard time wondering what your goal is, here….
Catching up on my backlog:
My only fight with Ehrman is my documentation that he lied, relied on basic logical fallacies, and got both the theory and the pertinent facts wrong.
You either care about that or you don’t. If you don’t, then you are admitting you don’t care if people lie and err and get things wrong, which means you don’t care what’s true. Whereas if you care what’s true, you should be more upset at Ehrman for lying, erring, and getting facts and the theory wrong.
Right?
What documentation of what lie? What logical fallacies? You have committed a number of those in your book OHJ.
Ehrman certainly did not get any facts wrong I am aware of on this topic.
Oh gosh. I thought you knew.
Wow.
He has made numerous factual and logical mistakes, and lied about it at least twice:
See Ehrman on Historicity Recap; all the numbered examples starting at §1, but especially §11 and §13.
“As for 1 Cor. 11:23, that does not mention any earthly followers. Paul says he received it in a vision (direct “from the Lord”), and accordingly describes no one being present, does not call it a last supper, and quotes Jesus speaking to all future Christians, not his disciples. Many experts concur Paul is not describing a real historical event in this passage (e.g. Gerd Lüdemann, one of the world’s leading experts on Paul: see pp. 96-97 of Jesus). See my entire section on this passage in OHJ, Ch. 11.7.”
1 Cor 11:23 DOES mention earthly followers. There is nothing concrete in the passage stating Paul received the contents of the passage solely from his claimed vision. Paul claims it had been “revealed” to him – but as I’ve tried to point out to you time and time again, this does not mean you take Paul at his word here. The information Paul claims to have received from a vision could, and often likely was, part of information he received from other Christians, whether it be Simon, James or the Christians Paul encountered while persecuting them before converting.
In any case, Paul very much describes followers of Jesus being present in quotation of Jesus at 1 Cor. 11:23 because he mentions this as a specific event taking place “on the NIGHT he was handed over”, eating and drinking with people and telling them to remember him. This is a historicist passage of a human figure. Mythical figures and deities do not tell human beings to REMEMBER them – it is only historicism of a person or historical persons themselves who are said to wish to be remembered. Almost all experts concur this likely was in reference to a historical event. I personally do not consider Ludemann to be of the world’s “leading” experts on Paul, but even he does not conclude that it was not a historical event, but only that it is a possibility it is not in reference to an actual historical event.
You, again, appear to be the one committing a logical fallacy here by constructing a narrative with little to no evidence to back it up. There is nothing in the quotation of Jesus in 1 Cor.11:23 to support your interpretation of these words only as a message to “future Christians”. The passage is unquestionably written as instructions supposedly by Jesus himself, on a specific night, given to other people or figures in his immediate presence to remember him. How it is written literally has no mention of “future Christians”. Why would an immortal, mythical being need to be remembered? Deities are worshipped, as everlasting and living entities, not remembered as a past person. And only an actual person giving instructions to other human persons would say such a thing.
Only as the people Paul told it to (“For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you: The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread…”). When he mentions sources, he only identifies two persons: himself and the Lord (“For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you”). He also mentions no persons present during the scene he describes (see Mark’s Use of Paul’s Epistles).
But you are right that “this does not mean you [have to] take Paul at his word here.” That he is lying is indeed possible (he might have “really” borrowed all this from previous Christians, such as learned during his “persecuter” phase). I discuss this possibility in OHJ, Ch. 11. But that doesn’t matter to the point, which is that he had to claim this came from a vision (which means it didn’t come from witnesses), and the absence of witness content to the vision (persons present at the event; added by Mark later) confirms that observation, as does the fact that Jesus is speaking to all future Christians in the vision, not just someone at table. So, no one knew of this as a historical event on Earth that any apostles attended.
But “on the NIGHT he was handed over” is not a mention of apostles or followers being present. That would be a circular argument: you have to presume their presence in order to conclude their presence. On this detail (and its relation to Passover lore) see my discussion in OHJ, Ch. 11.7. Paul never says anyone is “eating and drinking” here but Jesus; there are no “people telling them to remember him.” Only Jesus tells this, and only to all future Christians, not some person present at the event (this is like the vision attributed to Peter in Acts, where he sees food in the sky and Jesus tells him things: there is no actual meal here, nor anyone attending it and eating it, and the only one speaking is Jesus, and to all future Christians, through Peter as his revelator).
I think you are confused. The mythicist thesis is that Paul believes this all really happened—in a mystical realm. Not that Paul taught it was fiction. Mythical beings tell human beings to remember things all the time: the entire Quran and Book of Mormon consist of such commands from mythical persons (Gabriel and Moroni, respectively). We conclude they are mythical. But the persons claiming they spoke to them do not.
It was. Paul places the crucifixion of Jesus in recent history. The mythicist thesis does not say otherwise. It only proposes a change of venue: not when it happened, but where it was claimed and thus believed to have happened.
I think you need to actually read the peer-reviewed study here. It is evident you do not even know what the theory is that you are trying to critique, much less that all these things were already noted and discussed there. Read On the Historicity of Jesus (or if you want to start with a summary, then Jesus from Outer Space).
He’s written numerous peer-reviewed studies of Paul, from articles to whole monographs, that are frequently cited across the field. That’s what it means to be a leading expert.
That’s what we say, too. And indeed, I literally cite Lüdemann saying this in OHJ. He doesn’t regard it as Paul’s vision, but possibly that of an earlier Apostle; in any event, invented tradition. But his reasoning, though possibly correct on the second point, is incorrect on the first point: Paul claims it came to him directly from the Lord (attempts to read into this his saying something else all fail to find support in the facts).
Yes there is. He gives instructions that apply to all future Christians, not to just a few people present. There are no people present. And Paul says the “you” in Jesus’s statement means the Corinthians, i.e. all Christians, not just apostles.
There are no people or figures in his presence. Read the text.
You are the one importing assumptions not in the text. I’m just reading the text as written, no added assumptions.
All mythical demigods (the category Jesus falls into) were remembered as past persons. They were even placed in history and given biographies.
And they often said things they commanded or expected followers to remember and pass down, e.g. Romulus’s gospel to Proculus on the road to Alba Longa.
Also, be aware, the Eucharist scene is a reconstruction of the Passover narrative. And the Passover haggadah is entirely about commands to remember things, indeed commands supposedly uttered by Moses—a mythical person. This is a deliberate riff on that.
The claimed historical person of Romulus in that myth was believed to have lived many centuries before the earliest known records of that specific myth.
The earliest Christians were believing there was an actual human person on Earth associated with their belief in Jesus in their own lifetimes or immediately prior.
This is a big difference.
That isn’t any difference that matters here. Joseph Smith began telling people what Moroni claimed he should “remember” about him immediately. The time differential is thus irrelevant. The phenomenon exists. So you can’t say it doesn’t. Nor can you say “there wasn’t enough time” because the parallel here is that both are revelations (as Galatians 1 and Romans 16:25-26 explain), and there doesn’t need to be time for that. People believed revealed truths immediately. Because there was no earthly claim to check or challenge it by. If God said something happened, it happened. And people often claimed gods told them things happened and to remember them. That was commonplace.
The scholarly consensus on Moses as mythical does not mean that he was purely fictional. In fact, the consensus is that there could have been at least some kernel of a historical person at the basis of the Moses myth.
This is because there are Egyptian historical records of many actual people with that name in all the potential claimed timeframe of any Exodus-like event that could have been any basis for the later mythological narrative. We know the myth already existed as early as the earliest prophets in the 9th and 8th centuries BCE.
This timeframe is so distant in the past though that is currently impossible to say whether any historical Moses of any small sort existed or not. We also do not know if a historical Solon even existed, or Leonidas of Sparta for that matter. There’s nothing about them at all until centuries later.
The available evidence for a possible historical Jesus is not only greater than all of these other figures, but also far, far closer to any possible timeframe that such a Jesus person could have lived.
That’s not relevantly true. Very few scholars believe there is any kernel to the Biblical Moses as a person. The consensus is that he was made up as a mouthpiece for new ideas being sold centuries later, and did not do or say any of the things attributed to him. There was no Exodus; the Jews were always native Canaanites. Hence, a mythical person called people to remember things (like the Passover) that never happened. Just as with Moroni, Gabriel, Romulus, and so on.
See The Bible Unearthed for a survey of the actual consensus now.
1 Corinthians 11:23 contains a quotation and presentation of Jesus as a human person on Earth at a specific time – that is the point. It is clear evidence that Paul, as early as the time of writing this letter circa 52 to 58 CE, knew or thought that Jesus existed at some point as an actual historical person on Earth. More importantly, he is stating that Jesus said this at a SPECIFIC EVENT (“on the night he was handed over”), and only during this specific night told someone or some people to remember him. You have no evidence – none – to support to any probable extent that Jesus’ quotation here was only a message to future Christians, or even at all to future Christians for that matter, and not to an immediate audience present with him.
Paul’s claims about receiving much of his gospel from his claimed vision is quite irrelevant. And he never once denies that he also received information from Simon (Peter) and James, and also from others who were “Christians before he was”. He only distinguishes that this only occurred after his claimed vision. I’m not sure I believe him. Do you? I’m skeptical. More importantly, his claim here contradicts his other claims about once persecuting Christians well before his conversion. He could ONLY have persecuted those Christians on religious grounds if he had some significant knowledge of their apostasy and how it violated Mosaic Law. Thus, the important question here is where those very earliest Christians got their knowledge about Jesus from. Were there many figures at or close to their specific time in Judaea who match closely components attributed to Jesus’ life in both Paul’s letters and later in the Gospels? Yes. Were there many such religious Jewish people named Jesus at that specific time? Yes. The name “Jesus” is in fact the most common name mentioned in Josephus’ works for that early to mid 1st century time period in Judaea. We know this from his Antiquities specifically. Thus there is a high probability of some sort of historical person at that time who the very first Christians associated their belief with or attached it to, whether or not they directly followed or witnessed him.
There is no mention of Earth in 1 Cor 11:23-27. Or people present. You are inserting these things without evidence.
Also, Jesus being a common name isn’t relevant. It also means God’s Savior. So we expect God’s savior to be named Jesus. It’s literally a description of what he is. So we can’t discern anything about his historicity from this. This is discussed in detail in OHJ, esp. Ch. 6.
And we already agree he was believed to be human at this moment and that this was believed to have happened at a specific time. Mythicism does not challenge either.
You need to actually read the thesis before you can criticize it. You clearly don’t even know what the thesis is.
And you need to actually read your own Bible. Paul was preaching the gospel and hence the Eucharist for years before he says he even met “an apostle before him.” So if he stole information to claim he got it in a vision, he had to have stolen it from other Christians when he was a persecutor. I discuss this very possibility in OHJ. But Paul still had to insist it came in a vision. Why? Because, Paul explains, that was the only way you could claim to be an apostle. Which means the same was true of all apostles. And this is confirmed in Romans 16:25-26 and elsewhere. I discuss this as well, in several places in OHJ, but esp. Ch. 11. Go read.
One thing I don’t understand is why there does not seem to be much of a gospel, meaning that when Paul sort of lays out the basics, it’s quite simple. Jesus fulfills scripture by allowing himself to be killed, and then God raises him from the dead 3 days later. Jesus will come back soon in order to take the worthy people back to the heaven. The only other thing is the question of whether one needs to become Jewish first or can just adopt Paul’s new idea instead ( and he can claim that is his special revelation from God). If Paul is talking about this so freely, then it must not have been any kind of secret information. He could claim that in a vision Jesus told him this stuff directly, but otherwise what else could there have been? Then we can read in the Didache, highly likely to have been composed after Paul, that there were still these people roaming around claiming to be prophets, but other than the exact time of the Parousia, what could they have been saying that wasn’t already known by anyone who had been baptized? Thanks.
I’m not sure what you are referring to. The comment you are replying to doesn’t mention the secret doctrines of earliest Christianity.
Paul does reference those a few times, but being secrets, he is very cagey about them (for example, every time he says he is telling them “a mystery” he is touching on a secret doctrine); they aren’t the “basic things” of the gospel, but whatever the “meat” is that is taught to higher ranks (the “perfected,” i.e. the “mature”) whereas the basics are the “milk” that are taught to “children” (i.e. lower ranks; Paul outright says this, and it’s terminology common to both pagan mystery cults and Jewish sects: see OHJ, Ch. 4, Element 13).
Every time Paul is “weirdly vague” (who are the “archons of this eon” for example?) it is fair to assume he is avoiding letting a secret teaching slip out in print; he can allude to them, but not describe them. We get hints of the doctrines later on too (e.g. Ignatius explicitly says some of the secret doctrines he can’t “write about” have to do with some sort of complex angelology; Clement of Alexandria says there are several levels of teachings, each more secret than the next; etc.).
But that is a separate matter from apostolicism.
The reason Paul has to claim to have the public gospel from a vision is not that it’s a secret but that if you just hear it from people then you are just a convert, not someone “sent” by Jesus (that’s what the word “apostle” means). If Jesus isn’t supplying you with the information, then you aren’t a real apostle.
What’s weird though is that Paul could have just said Jesus appeared to appoint him and instructed him to get all the deets from the other apostles. So it is odd that Paul vehemently denies this happened. Likewise when he talks about the whole movement, and where all the apostles get their data, he only ever says “revelation and scripture.” Paul doesn’t even know about oral lore (other than lore originating from revelations and scriptures). And he never has to argue that his source (revelations and scripture) is as reliable as personal instruction (being a disciple hand-picked and taught by Jesus in life), which means no one made that argument, which means it wasn’t an argument available to be made. And so on.
On all those issues, see OHJ, Ch. 11.
Dr. Carrier — I came across this reply by Dr. Ehrman (published in April 2022) to your review of his book “Did Jesus Exist?” (2012): https://ehrmanblog.org/fuller-reply-to-richard-carrier/
I am aware that you have said enough about it, but I was just curious about your thoughts on the section titled “The Dying and Rising God”.
He seems to be quoting the same translation that you do in your blog: https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Moralia/Isis_and_Osiris*/home.html
The summary seems to be that he does not believe that Osiris was ever physically resurrected. He writes “Whatever his revivification involves, it is not a return to his physical body, which remains in a tomb some place.”
It is interesting to note that he does not respond to you quoting the same source when you discuss Osiris consorting with Isis after his death, or your treatment of the same source (#78) where you discuss the esoteric and the “public” version, as detailed by Plutarch.
I don’t want to go on for too long, but I was just curious to know your thoughts. Thanks!
You are correct: Ehrman ignores all the evidence contrary to his assertions (including actual pyramid inscriptions, not just Plutarch’s account); and he simply ignores that it is literally called a resurrection (return to life), so attempting to make a fuss about what sort of body it involved is not even relevant (Paul didn’t think Jesus rose in the same body he died in either; and many Jews held to such a two-body view, so it was a common resurrection doctrine of the time: I cover this in The Empty Tomb, pp. 110ff.).
For a summary of this debate, see Ehrman Recap Item 18. Which has been updated since I first responded to that reply, including a soft admission by Ehrman now that he might have been wrong; and including a link to my detailed array of the evidence in Dying-and-Rising Gods: It’s Pagan, Guys. Get Over It.
Also, remember, my peer reviewed monograph refuting him came out after the article of his you are linking to. See On the Historicity of Jesus, Ch. 5, Element 31 (and “resurrection” in the “definitions” section, Ch. 4.3). And a retest of that point was confirmed again under peer review, in Raphael Lataster, Questioning the Historicity of Jesus, pp. 243ff.
Thank you Dr. Carrier. I may have misread, but I rechecked Dr. Ehrman’s blog and his response to you that I linked in my comment was published in April 2022, which is after the publication of your and Dr. Lataster’s peer-reviewed monographs. (Which is also why I was interested to know if you’re planning to respond to his response.)
He also claims that “Did Jesus Exist” (2012) was primarily for laymen, but a cursory reading of your criticisms (bullet points) that he made lots of errors even for a layman book.
Regardless, thank you for responding.
That date is wrong. Some error on his blog reset the incorrect date. It’s the same article from 2012, unchanged in any way I can tell. In fact Ehrman has not written anything on this subject since 2012 (except things like the vague remarks noted now at the end of item 18 in my Recap).
I am presenting the translated text from Koine Greek of 1 Corinthians 11:23-25:
You do not have any evidence to reject that this quotation of Jesus by Paul at the Lord’s Supper is being given to a direct audience, or that it was not taken from witnesses at an actual supper whom Paul later received information about. You keep asserting that Jesus is not giving instructions to an immediate audience here…but where is your evidence to support that?? I have not seen you provide a sliver of peer-reviewed, scholarly evidence (NOT mythicist created interpretation or ideology, but actual evidence) to show Jesus is not or cannot be talking to actual persons at this supper at an actual historical event. Paul here specifies 1) this event happened on a specific night, 2) that Jesus is eating and drinking out of a cup at a supper, and 3) for followers or believers to eat and drink such a way in order to remember him. These are all possible earthly elements of an actual human person. And you also have no evidence to support that Paul is only making this all of this up as his own “invented tradition”, when we know he received much of his information from earlier Christians.
Paul does not claim in preceding passages either that any of this information came solely from Jesus directly in his supposed vision. He extensively attempts to defend that claim in Galatians, but he does NOT do so in 1 Corinthians. Thus, you have no ability to parse out which portions of Paul’s claims about Jesus are form his own supposed vision or invented tradition, and which is from information he in reality acquired from earlier Christians.
I find a problem in that you put an over reliance on Paul’s claims in Galatians of receiving information from his vision prior to meeting and receiving information from Simon and James. This is irrelevant, because we know that this is false. You know that Paul HAD to have received information from Christians earlier than this supposed vision when he was persecuting them for supposed crimes against Mosaic Law. It is impossible for Paul to have persecuted Christians on religious grounds and not have known about their beliefs and claims. Paul contradicts himself by claiming his vision as the only source of his gospel, while in other passages actively emphasizing his unique persecution of the earliest Christians.
Therefore, this is the ultimate failure of your position. You put a greater emphasis on trusting Paul’s claims of getting his information from his supposed vision, and not an equal reliance on his claims about actively persecuting the earliest Christians in a manner that only someone with significant knowledge of this supposed heresy would be able to carry out. Remember that Paul also mentions others who were “Christians before he was” besides Simon and James, in a manner of accepting a deference to the importance of this greater seniority. And who can forget his massive disagreement with Simon (Peter) at the Council of Jerusalem.
All of this provides us with a large inability to parse out which information about Jesus from Paul’s letters is really of solely Pauline origin (or invention), and which is actually information from various earlier Christians that Paul acquired and then changed or reinterpreted.
The text does not say “wept.” I find it strange you added that. But it wouldn’t matter to your point, because we all agree Paul was being told by Jesus about an event (just not where it occurred or who was present).
What does matter is it does not say “after supper.” That is a distortion that implies a group event. It does not actually say this. It says “after eating.” As in, after Jesus ate the bread. This is in parallel structure with “having given thanks.” The text is describing the actions of Jesus on the occasion indicated. It mentions no one else being there or participating. To the contrary, regardless of who may have been there, Jesus’s words are directed to all future Christians, who obviously won’t have been there.
To argue that “it is possible” there were people present etc. is to concede my argument. Because possible does not get you to probable. And that is precisely my point.
So you must be confusing two different arguments.
To say there is no evidence here says only that: that we cannot assert this is about a historical event the apostles attended, because the text nowhere says that, and even conspicuously omits every detail that would indicate that. This is not the same thing as saying we know it was not attended.
You are thus confusing the argument “we do not know that happened” with the argument “we know that did not happen.” Until you grasp the difference between those two arguments, you won’t even understand the argument you are attempting to respond to, much less be able to formulate a relevant response to it.
He lists only one source: Jesus directly delivered it to him. Therefore, you cannot assert there were other sources. Paul never mentions any, and conspicuously omits mentioning any. Again, this means you do not know what you are claiming is true. Not that what you are claiming is true is known to be false. Those are different arguments.
He uses exactly the same vocabulary in all three places (Galatians 1, 1 Corinthians 11 and 15). And repeatedly affirms the point elsewhere (e.g. Romans 16:25-26).
So again, you are the one who has no evidence for your claim. I am merely pointing that out. I do not have to claim we know what you are claiming is false. All I have to point out is that we don’t know that what you are claiming is true.
You need to get those two arguments distinct before you can make any relevant point here.
“Paul didn’t think Jesus rose in the same body he died in either” – Richard Carrier
Then why did Paul assert that believers in Jesus Christ would have their own literal bodies raised, transformed or resurrected?
Romans 8:22-24:
“We know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved”
Philippians 3:20-21
“But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself.”
1 Corinthians 15:51-52
“Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed.”
Seems like Paul claims in his letters that at least Christians’ literal bodies would be raised changed. If so, then why would you claim that he did not think Jesus had an actual human body which was raised and changed?
Those translations are contentious. “Redemption” for example is a theologically weighted word. All Paul actually refers to is “to release our bodies on payment of ransom.” So…which bodies? The ones waiting for us in heaven per 2 Cor. 5? As you can see, looking at the original Greek without later sectarian theological presumptions changes the sense.
If you really want to understand those verses in context, then you will need to read my scholarly study of them in The Empty Tomb.
But here are some relevant excerpts (though you really need the full context of this discussion):
Likewise in Philippians the verb is actually “change” not necessarily “transform,” and in fact it is more regularly used to refer to changing clothes, and in other places Paul refers to our two bodies as garments (e.g. 2 Cor. 5; as did other Jewish sectarians with similar views of the resurrection). So:
So when he says our lowly body will be changed to match the celestial body, he is thinking in a manner of clothing: he will exchange our current cloak with a better one. That is why he is very clear about this in 1 Cor 15 and 2 Cor 5, eliminating all doubt that he means exchanging bodies, not altering one into the other.
This is also what’s happening in 1 Cor 15:51-52, which verse comes after twenty whole verses of explaining what he means: “When you sow, you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed, perhaps of wheat or of something else, but God gives it a body as he has determined, and to each kind of seed he gives its own body” and per 2 Cor 5 (when he has to explain further to the Corinthians who still were confused) he says when “the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands,” so “meanwhile we groan, longing to be clothed instead with our heavenly dwelling, because when we are clothed, we will not be found naked,” for “while we are in this tent, we groan and are burdened, because we do not wish to be unclothed but to be clothed instead with our heavenly dwelling, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life.” Swallowed up means, of course, destroyed, consumed, leaving nothing left. Paul couldn’t be more clear in both places as to what he means. And while the NIV translation I am using adds the word “instead,” the translators are correct to add that in this case, as it captures the grammatical sense: the sequence is clothed in a mortal body, naked, then clothed in a celestial body.
This is why it is important to note that the section of contrasts in 1 Cor 15 does not have the word “it” in it, when it is translated “it is sown…it is raised”; that is a translator’s conceit, it’s not in the text, nor entailed by it. The text actually says “[one type of body] is sown, [another type of body] is raised.” So when you look at the text without sectarian-colored translators’ conceits, but just read what Paul actually wrote, you get a different result than later theologians and translators want you to.
The reason for this theological shift to conceal and alter Paul’s teaching into a resurrection of the flesh that died (the very thing he explicitly denies, twice) is best explained in Caroline Bynum’s The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336 with support from Dale Martin’s The Corinthian Body.
Actually we can. It’s not simply that Jesus is a common name in 1st century Judaea. It is THE most common name mentioned for persons for that time period in Josephus’ Antiquities, and especially among Jewish religious figures. And at the same time, we also learn from Antiquities that there is a plethora of anonymous prophets and others with many characteristics similar to that described of Jesus. Thus, there is a very high likelihood of religious figures or prophets at that time period named Jesus. The law of parsimony would be that the followers of such a person would likely have had some relation to the emerging religious movement of Christians claiming to believe in a Jesus, and who make various descriptions of their Jesus having elements of an actual human person.
And I’ve read Chapter 6 in OHJ, and you do not discuss or respond to this point as I’ve presented here at all.
Your math is wrong. Which is the peril of being vague. Try being precise. Then you’ll realize the commonness of the name doesn’t matter to my point.
Its actual frequency back then was 1 in 26 (one out of every 26 Jewish men were so named). So the odds that Jesus would “by accident” be called what he turns out to become (God’s savior) is 1 in 26. Whereas the odds that a God’s savior would be assigned the name God’s savior for that very reason is as near to 100% as makes all odds (because that’s literally what he is). So the coincidence remains peculiar. Indeed it’s 26 times more likely the name was theologically assigned than given at birth.
This is all covered in Ch. 6 of On the Historicity of Jesus.
Of course, as I have also noted, this doesn’t mean he didn’t exist. That Jesus was assigned a convenient name is as possible for a historical man as a mythical one. See Ch. 6 again, where I discuss the similar case of the Josephan Christs (who were all depicting themselves as the new Joshua, i.e. Jesus, and thus could have been so-called whether they adopted the name or not).
“That’s not relevantly true. Very few scholars believe there is any kernel to the Biblical Moses as a person. The consensus is that he was made up as a mouthpiece for new ideas being sold centuries later, and did not do or say any of the things attributed to him. There was no Exodus; the Jews were always native Canaanites.”
Wow, that is completely wrong. The consensus among most historians is actually there is at least some historical basis at the root of the Exodus narrative, and that a portion of the earliest Israelites included a small group leaving Egypt and tribes of the southern Transjordan region.
Refer to Avraham Faust (2015) in “The Emergence of Iron Age Israel: On Origins and Habitus”, p. 476:
“While there is a consensus among scholars that the Exodus did not take place in the manner described in the Bible, surprisingly most scholars agree that the narrative has a historical core, and that some of the highland settlers came, one way or another, from Egypt (cf. Bietak 2003;
Gottwald 1979; Herrmann 1985: 48; Mazar
2001: 76; Na’aman 1994: 245; Stiebing 1989:
197–9; Friedman 1997: 82–83; Halpern 1992:
104, 107; Halpern 2003; Dever 1993: 31*;
1995: 211; Tubb 1998: 169; Williamson 1998:
149–150; Hoffmeier 1997; Weisman 1984:
15–16; Malamat 1997; Yurco 1997: 44–51;
Machinist 1991: 210; 1994; Hendel 2001, 2002;
Knohl 2008; see also Levy and Holl 2002; and
see many contributions to this volume).
Mind your semantic games. That “some” settlers emigrated is not “the Exodus” nor anything to do with the historicity of Moses. So your list of scholars doesn’t even pertain to my point.
The consensus view is that the Israelites as a people did not come from Egypt. They were native Canaanites. There was no escape from Egypt under anyone named Moses to newly conquer the Holy Land as foreign invaders. That was a later legend. Nearly all your listed scholars agree with this point; and even more so all OT scholars today.
See Wallach’s analysis of this development.
As for the historicity of Moses, most scholars do assert that there is or may be, at the very least, a kernel of a historical person at the foundation of the legend:
“A Moses-like figure may have existed somewhere in southern Transjordan in the mid-late 13th century s.c., where many scholars think the biblical traditions concerning the god Yahweh arose” – Dever, 2001
“Van Seters concluded, ‘The quest for the historical Moses is a futile exercise. He now belongs only to legend.’ … “None of this means that there is not a historical Moses* and that the tales do not include historical information. But in the Pentateuch, history has become memorial. Memorial revises history, reifies memory, and makes myth out of history.’ ” – Miller, 2013
“Three views, based on source analysis or historical-critical method, seem to prevail among biblical scholars. First, a number of scholars, such as Meyer and Holscher, aim to deprive Moses all the prerogatives attributed to him by denying anything historical value about his person or the role he played in Israelite religion. Second, other scholars diametrically oppose the first view and strive to anchor Moses the decisive role he played in Israelite religion in a firm setting. And third, those who take the middle position…delineate the solidly historical identification of Moses from the superstructure of later legendary accretions…Needless to say, these issues are hotly debated unresolved matters among scholars. Thus, the attempt to separate the historical from unhistorical elements in the Torah has yielded few, if any, positive results regarding the figure of Moses or the role he played on Israelite religion.” – Nigosian, 1993
Mind your semantic games. A “Moses-like” figure is not Moses. Nor is “possible” (“may”) the same thing as “probable.”
Almost all scholars today agree the Exodus is a myth and the Moses character there largely if not entirely (as the word “may” entails) an invention. Nigosian’s “second” type of scholar remains a fringe fundamentalist view. It is not the dominating consensus of the field. And he doesn’t even say otherwise (mind your semantic games again).
And that was 1993. The field has shifted even further toward the new consensus in the past thirty years. See, again, Wallach, who studies the shift among all three positions Nigosian outlines and how the first position grew to dominance in the over forty years since the new scholarship of the late 70s and early 80s exploded the old consensus.
You can find the new consensus explained in The Bible Unearthed and more recently (and more importantly) in Ancient Israel: What Do We Know and How Do We Know It? (Revised Edition) which gives the most up-to-date survey of the field and why the first position described by Nigosian has so fully prevailed by now.
“And he never has to argue that his source (revelations and scripture) is as reliable as personal instruction (being a disciple hand-picked and taught by Jesus in life), which means no one made that argument, which means it wasn’t an argument available to be made. And so on.” – Richard Carrier
Paul actually does mention in several of his letters a deference to Simon (Peter) and other Christians who were Christians before he was, emphasizing that fact as in a manner where that seniority has special importance or trust.
“So if he stole information to claim he got it in a vision, he had to have stolen it from other Christians when he was a persecutor.” – Richard Carrier
Nope. He likely did receive much of his information from the Christians he persecuted years before his vision. But this does NOT mean at all that the information about Jesus he gives in his letters did not contain information he actually gained after his vison, like that he mentions he received from Simon and James. He likely used both in his own preaching and writings at the time his epistles were written.
The point here though is that it is a fact that we have but a limited ability to parse out which of his information in his letters is gained from Christians prior to his vision, after his vision, or from his own invention.
No scholars I’m aware of think that everything he mentions about Jesus in his letters is solely or even largely from his own creation or invented tradition.
Mind your semantic games. Paul never mentions learning anything about the gospel or Jesus from Peter. That Paul deferred to his authority in deciding who would be included or excluded from mission work is not the same thing.
And you seem confused. Paul persecuted Christians before his vision. So if, as you think (and I also suspect), he learned information from them, that information preceded his vision.
And Paul never mentions receiving anything from Cephas and James (we don’t know that Cephas was then known by the name Simon so I assume you mean Cephas, i.e. Peter). In fact he swears up and down that he didn’t in Galatians 1. He says he was preaching the gospel (and hence the eucharist) for years before he even met them; and he says when he finally did meet them he learned they were preaching the same gospel all along (apart from Paul’s innovation with regard to recruiting Gentiles, which he says was the only difference between them). He outright says they imparted nothing to him.
That’s simply how it is. There is nothing else to “parse out.” Paul never mentions any information arising prior to Jesus’s revelations to the first apostles (1 Cor 15:5). Paul never mentions any information coming from anywhere else. And when he lists where information came from, he lists only revelation and scripture (e.g. Rom 16:25-26).
So you just can’t create evidence that doesn’t exist. That’s the evidence we have. It does not go beyond.
“Paul claims it came to him directly from the Lord (attempts to read into this his saying something else all fail to find support in the facts).” – Richard Carrier
All Paul says here is that he “received from the Lord” (it was revealed it to him). Paul does not clarify anywhere in 1 Corinthians that he received these specific quotes of Jesus at the Lord’s Supper “directly” from the Lord via his vision. Paul could very well mean here he received it indirectly, via other apostles (Jesus’ direct followers or witnesses, or from their own claimed visions), but ultimately from the Lord.
This is irrelevant anyway as to the possibility of this containing quotations from the historical human Jesus. Even if Paul is claiming to have received this information somehow directly from the Lord, we know obviously that he did not, as is the case with much of the rest of this information about Jesus. And we know he acquired at least some of it from earlier Christians.
The only other possibility is that Paul fully invented these sayings of Jesus at the Lord’s Supper, claiming them solely as being from his personal vision. That is highly, highly implausible, because such an important direct instruction from Jesus about an event that would be required to be commemorated by all Christians would have placed Paul somehow above Simon Peter and James in terms of authority about Jesus in the early Church. This was very much not the case, as is evidenced by his dispute with Simon Peter at the Council of Jerusalem. Paul himself never even claims this greater authority, and in fact frequently alludes to and defers to the greater authority and seniority of Simon and James in his epistles, and even to other earlier Christians like Andronicus and Junia (also referred to as apostles) at Romans 16:7.
Paul’s language does mean he received it directly from the Lord. It’s the same vocabulary as in Galatians 1.
There is no mention of intermediaries. He denies any existed in Galatians: when he finally met apostles, he found what he was preaching was the same, they “added nothing”; and before that he’d been preaching it all for years, based on what he swears up and down was only a vision from Jesus. And that’s simply what Paul says. You cannot go beyond. Paul says nothing to warrant it.
Paul very likely did learn this information the normal way (he is probably lying in Galatians), but all that information consisted of was visions and scriptural readings (1 Cor 15:3-8; Rom 16:25-26). And Paul reveals in Gal 1 that this was the only way these things were supposed to be learned (that’s why he has to swear he didn’t learn it any other way).
That’s simply how it is. There is no evidence in the Epistles that goes beyond this.
“See The Bible Unearthed for a survey of the actual consensus now.”
Finkelstein and Silberman do not once claim there is zero historical basis to the Exodus narrative, or even Moses or a Moses-like figure. They specifically assert that consensus among most scholars is that there was at least some degree of historical basis for it from some actual events. This scholarly consensus is also outlined conclusively in Faust, A., 2015, “The Emergence of Iron Age Israel: On Origins and Habitus”, in T.E. Levy, T. Schneider and W.H.C. Propp (eds.), Israel’s Exodus in Transdisciplinary Perspective: Text, Archeology, Culture and Geoscience, Springer, pp. 467-482
Mind your semantic games again. I did not say “zero” either. I said what Finkelstein and Silberman say: that the Exodus and Moses are mythical constructs invented centuries after the fact; the Israelites were native Canaanites, they did not invade Canaan from Egypt; Moses mythically represents generic characters, not any specific person; etc.
Faust, meanwhile, does not represent the consensus. He is attempting to argue against it, with a much less ambitious claim about nomadic Jews. For an actual update on the consensus see Grabbe’s Ancient Israel.
And yet even Faust does not defend Moses. The word “Moses” doesn’t even exist once in the chapter you cite. Faust’s position is that only a few hundred Israelites (not all Israelites) may have come from Egypt or the Transjordan at some point, but that the story in the Exodus is a fictitious exaggeration of this. And even Faust’s position has not prevailed in the field. It’s deemed too speculative, or even self-contradictory (see Grabbe).
“People believed revealed truths immediately. Because there was no earthly claim to check or challenge it by. If God said something happened, it happened. And people often claimed gods told them things happened and to remember them. That was commonplace.”
Guess what was also commonplace around the time of Jesus in much of the Greco-Roman world? People deifying not only very recently deceased persons, but even actual persons who were still alive! An example would be the deification of Hadrian’s companion or “favourite” Antinous, and also Apollonius of Tyana, not to mention other actual figures even in Judaea itself who were deified or semi-deified as prophets and messiahs.
Furthermore, revealed truths were also very often challenged, as the Christians’ claims were by various non-Christian persons and authorities. And we known that Paul’s claimed revealed truths were in fact challenged by other, earlier Christians, including Simon Peter himself at the Council of Jerusalem.
You are unable to parse out which of Paul’s information about Jesus is actually his own invention, and which is gained or reinterpreted from earlier Christians.
I don’t see any relevance of your remarks here to anything I said.
Obviously not everyone believes everyone’s visions. That’s not at issue. And obviously real people also got deified. So did mythical people. That’s not at issue either. The question is, which people are we talking about regarding any given point, and how often were deified people real vs. mythical. These questions can only be answered empirically.
Hi Richard,
I come back on Ehrman’s identification of James the Brother Gal. 1:19 with James the Pillar in 2:9.
You said:
“To avoid that you have to come up with a more convoluted or conveniently coincidental explanation… Regardless, numerous experts … agree that the James of Gal. 1 is not the James of Gal. 2”
So I asked him on his blog about that:
https://ehrmanblog.org/carrier-and-james-the-brother-of-jesus/#comment-158129
and found that he is even more crazy than I thought.
In this case, you said the Myth hypothesis is weaker because it needs to defend “the brother of the Lord” as a kind of title. Agree. But the historicist position looks untenable. Do you agree?
From all Christian’s literature or not, I have counted 8 ref. to brothers and sisters of Jesus:
2 in Mark (6:3, 3:21;31-35) copied in Matt and the second in Luke, 2 in John (2:12, 7:3-5;10) and 1 at the beginning of Acts (1:14),
2 possibly in the Epistles (Gal. 1:19 and 1 Corinthians 9:5) (but contested)
1 possibly in Josephus (but interpolated?)
many in Hegesippus (too late)
Do we really have nothing else?
Justin Martyr, Polycarp, Papias, Irenaeus, Theophilus, Tatian, Athenagoras, Minucius Felix, Didache, Shepherd of Hermas…
I’m not sure what you mean.
I cover all this in Ch. 11.10 of OHJ. So I can only recommend you consult that.
There is no record of Jesus having brothers before the Gospel of Mark invented them; and he has Jesus renounce them (showing no knowledge of any of them even becoming Christians, much less leaders). They aren’t even in the public history of Acts (no brothers of Jesus ever appear or play any role in the public history of the church beginning at Acts 2; Acts 1 depicts nothing public, or plausible, and just expands on the material in the Gospels).
Everything else just gets the info from Mark (all Gospels, any other authors who might mention them later, etc.).
As to the question of assuming the James in both Gal. 1 and Gal. 2 is the same, that is indeed just a theological assumption. Ehrman says if they were different they would be labeled differently—and they are: one is identified as a rank-and-file Brother of the Lord; the other as the Pillar. The Pillar is never called the Brother of the Lord; and the Brother of the Lord is never called the Pillar.
Indeed, as Trüdinger showed, the whole point of Paul’s convoluted grammar in Gal. 1:19 (see Galatians 1:19, Ancient Grammar, and How to Evaluate Expert Testimony) is to make clear this is not any Apostle of that name. He is, in other words, specifically telling us this is not the James of Gal. 2. Thus every scholar who agrees James the Pillar is an Apostle and that the James in Gal. 1 is not an Apostle agrees with me that they are not the same people. Trüdinger cites examples.
At any rate, since Ehrman’s prediction (that if Paul meant them to be different, he’d say so) logically compels him to agree with me (because Paul says so). But Ehrman disdains logic; he does not obey its dictates. So he won’t admit any of this. And that’s why it is futile to argue anything logical with him.
I watched some recent videos of you responding to some things from Bart Ehrman, Kipp Davis, etc… and though I’m not sure I agree with your conclusions or how you even frame things I found it interesting and I thought you presented yourself very respectfully in response to them. Though then I found these blogs posts… and this one in particular. Holy crap. I’d suggest this was a different person completely. Whatever the legitimacy of your substance you come across and apply essentially troll tactics and tone here. Quite harsher and more petty than any of the critiques from these people I’ve seen (which admittedly are petty as well, but wow, nothing like this).
I mean I’ve been bouncing between Bart’s blog and yours and though yours is far longer and contains a lot of substance (the quality of which I won’t make a claim in either direction) Ehrman’s tone comes across as someone annoyed and impatient to move on and a bit dismissive and yours comes across as a petulant child again more akin to an internet troll.
I mean your premise that he Ehrman doesn’t want to read your book and doesn’t want to spend much time debating with Mythicists so hence he’s an armchair historian hack. Wow. I mean you could just take him at face value that he doesn’t see the merits in mythicist arguments and just genuinely doesn’t want to spend his time in those discussions.
Also I think we get it, you are referencing (and submitting) peer reviewed literature, you don’t need to mention it literally 49 times seemingly as a guise to troll Ehrman. To apply your own level of skepticism, do you know he doesn’t read other peer reviewed literature? Where’s your proof there. I guess it makes a 50/50 but like you I’ll say 2/3rds he does. If so then it’s just yours and the ones you referenced he doesn’t want to read. Just because it’s peer reviewed doesn’t make it absolutely true. Certainly BIblical scholarship has to have quite a bit of peer reviewed literature that one can’t read them all, certainly if people have their own initiatives. “peer reviewed” isn’t in and of itself a weapon you can just brandish constantly pretending to have the high ground. “peer reviewed” scholarship in any field commonly contradicts and disagrees with each other… yet it feels like you wield that term like your peer reviewed work and those that you cite are the only legitimate ones. That all other scholarship is inferior. Almost like the fundamentalist Christians I left many years ago, brandishing labels like “the word” or “scripture.” I mean if someone were to find a “peer reviewed” scholarship that contradicts your readings of Galatians does that immediately invalidate your “peer reviewed” scholarship.
I mean your tone here is insane. You really almost had me going, thinking about buying your book, diving deeper… though now I get why you get treated the way you do. From seeing this vs the videos I’ve seen you have a split personality. On videos you act significantly more respectful and when someone is a bit dismissive and doesn’t want to read your book (and yes is a bit petty themselves) you go into full troll mode on them in your blogs.
Ehrman never shows any awareness of what the mythicists arguments even are, and often doesn’t even know we have arguments for the things he says. So he clearly has not read any of our academic work. Even after a decade (you can find interviews of him where he says the most ridiculously ignorant things about our studies). And this is how he chooses to treat us. He deserves to be called out for his actual behavior.
Note you are coming in at the end of a two-decade long argument, where we keep being denigrated for not passing anything under peer review. We are thus forced by their own argument to mention that their claim to that is false. This is their doing, not ours.
It is particularly insulting to have Ehrman make this point in his own book that was not a peer reviewed academic study but an unvetted popular market book (resulting in quite a large number of errors).
You should not mistake this for any belief that peer review is confirmation. We have never said that. That is a false accusation made against us by our opponents. We have always maintained that all peer review does is establish a study meets the standards of the field and thus should be taken seriously, not that it is correct.
It is them who keep dismissing our positions and arguments as not really peer reviewed, instead of taking it seriously by reading it and engaging with what it actually says.
You should be aware, several experts in the field have called Ehrman out for his misbehavior here, including Philip Davies and Justin Meggitt.