In April of this year the Biblical History Skeptics talked shop for three hours with Tim O’Neill (this Tim O’Neill) and I was invited to talk shop about that with Godless Engineer last month. The latter video has now gone live and you can watch it here. Following is a companion article reiterating and expanding on what we discuss in that video. So if you prefer starting with video discussions, you can go watch that, and come back here for the footnotes.
Introduction & Summary
Here I address the roughly half of that BHS video that criticized challenges to the historicity of Jesus, on which I completed a fan-funded postdoc research project and published the first peer reviewed book in nearly a hundred years (On the Historicity of Jesus), including an associated peer reviewed book on method (Proving History) and a collection of related peer reviewed journal articles (Hitler Homer Bible Christ). Godless Engineer and I will do a future video on the other half of theirs, which addressed questions in the history of science, the subject of my Columbia University dissertation—which I later adapted into two books (The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire and it’s more focused prequel Science Education in the Early Roman Empire).
In general, though, throughout this three hour video I found Tim O’Neill not to be the raging, lying, ad-hominem-spewing crank he usually is. Instead he is polite and reasonable throughout, and merely wrong a lot, in a totally ordinary way. Half the things he and his hosts, Chris Hansen and Bryan G., say are still incorrect (and I include them all together as O’Neill only rarely corrects their mistakes). But only from incompetence and amateurism, rather than dishonesty.
This interview also convinces me O’Neill is not a fake atheist or a crypto-Catholic as we have sometimes suspected. He’s definitely an atheist and a skeptic, and ultimately a sincere guy who just happens to be highly triggered by bullshit, and thus sees bullshit even where it isn’t. And I now think that’s what trips him up; that and his arrogance and bad temper, which when triggered can cause him to slip into lies and ad hominem—none of which you see in this video, because he’s among friends and thus never confronted with any of his mistakes. But mostly it appears O’Neill’s heart is in the right place: when he sees modern myths presented as facts by his fellow atheists, he rightly wants to call them out—but then too quickly buys into exactly the contrary myths. Which is very ironic, considering he actually points out the common folly of others doing that in this video. Yet he does that himself more than once in this very same video.
The first half hour of which is introductory and useful to get a sense of who O’Neill sees himself as and what he is doing. During which he admits he’s “not a scholar” but “an interested amateur” (Bryan and Chris do likewise in their YouTube channel’s About page). He makes several reasonable points about Catholic apologism and why atheists need to be criticized when they also get history wrong. I agree and have often taken on, for example, bad Jesus mythicism myself, as well as the same inaccurate claims this gang tackles in the history of science (though my conclusions differ).
Here I’ll list the mistakes they make in their video, that Godless Engineer and I discuss in our video, on the subject of mythicism—and also some of the things they get right. But you’ll notice a common theme: their reading of sources is often lazy and thus inaccurate (they clearly don’t read anything carefully, yet time and again arrogantly mock others for reading those same sources correctly, an embarrassing combination) and rather than settling on reality, which usually lies in a nuanced middle, time and again O’Neill leaps all the way from one incorrect position to exactly the opposite incorrect position. For example, as I’ll discuss in a future article, it is true Christians did not burn the library of Alexandria (and I’ve always said so); but neither did any of the other people he claims did, after making a total hash of his source materials. The same thing happens with his treatment of Jesus mythicism.
Preliminaries
Any of you who have ever read his articles and tweets on Jesus mythicism may be shocked to hear Tim O’Neill explicitly says in this video that he “would never say mythicism is out of the question,” that “it’s absolutely possible,” that he agrees it’s “not a ridiculous idea,” and that he merely thinks it’s not “the best idea.” This is a stark example of how he comes across as reasonable in this video in direct contrast to the irrational vitriol you find him spewing everywhere else.
Any of you who know how to read a price point on Amazon may also be shocked to hear my book on the historicity of Jesus can only be procured for the outrageously high price of “eighty dollars.” They go on about this for a couple of minutes. Which is weird. Because it’s totally false. And it’s hard to fathom how they made this mistake. But it is presciently illustrative of their sloppy incompetence throughout this video, exemplifying their inability to even take the time to correctly read a price list on Amazon or anywhere else Historicity of Jesus is sold.
For those anchored to reality, you’ll find my book On the Historicity of Jesus (hereafter OHJ) has always been available for $35 or less in paperback, $26 or less on kindle, and $15 or less for the format Bryan even said he preferred: audible. The latter even read by me—which was quite a feat, representing over thirty hours in a professional recording studio, which my audio publisher, Pitchstone, fully funded, and for which I wasn’t paid (I only get a royalty per unit sale). I even wrote a letter to my publisher making a social justice argument that my book be simultaneously released in the more affordable paperback edition, contrary to the usual practice of academic publishers.
I point this out because this seemingly trivial error is actually a paradigmatic example of how these guys get everything else wrong. They get basic obvious facts wrong (like, what my book costs) and then also get totally wrong the phenomenon they actually mean to criticize (the overpricing of academic monographs). They thus end up mocking the wrong target, and thus end up looking ignorant rather than savvy. When just working a little harder, just a little, they’d have avoided both mistakes.
A real example of what they meant to criticize is how Brill only released Raphael Lataster’s new peer reviewed book on historicity in hardback at the far more inaccessible price of $210; which is not at all unusual for academic monographs today. The scholars writing books for academic presses rarely have any say or control over that, so it’s ignorant of these guys to criticize the scholars for that; it’s an abuse committed by publishers, publishers our present system essentially forces scholars to publish with to get peer reviewed. I have often publicly condemned this trend—by correctly targeting the actual perps: academic publishers.
All of this is a reminder of a lesson all three need to learn: before resorting to criticism (much less ridicule), make sure you actually know what you are talking about.
Agreements
But first, where we agree. They say many things I’ve even said myself. For example, I wrote a whole article making their same point that using Jesus mythicism to combat Christianity is not a valid strategy: see Fincke Is Right: Arguing Jesus Didn’t Exist Should Not Be a Strategy. That Jesus didn’t exist is far less certain a conclusion than that he didn’t rise from the dead. So you should be arguing the latter, being on much stronger ground there, with less to defend to reach the conclusion. That’s why in every debate I’ve done on the resurrection of Jesus, I’ve always stipulated Jesus existed as a working assumption. Likewise any other claim in Christian theology or doctrine: you can far more easily and far more effectively take these down without arguing Jesus didn’t exist.
I also agree with O’Neill’s psychological analysis of most (particularly amateur) mythicists: their justified sense of betrayal and anger after realizing the religion they’d been sold is a lie makes them more prone to believe mythicism, to add “the lie of historicity” to their list of grievances. After all, they rightly don’t trust anything or anyone anymore in connection with Christianity. But then O’Neill falls into the fallacy fallacy: just because someone reaches a conclusion fallaciously does not mean the conclusion is false. There are atheists who are atheists for fallacious reasons; that doesn’t mean there is no valid case for atheism. Ditto mythicism. As I discovered to my own surprise, having for years been hostile to mythicists myself—until I did a thorough fact-check and found that even after getting rid of all the bad and misinformed arguments for mythicism (and there are a great many of those!), what remains is still a reasonably strong case. I didn’t expect that.
And O’Neill and I agree on many of those bad or misinformed arguments. When all three go into attacking Atwill, they are singing my own tune. I likewise don’t buy the more exotic arguments of Robert Price, such as that all the letters of Paul are second century forgeries (that’s fairly unlikely). When shortly after the start of the second hour O’Neill goes into “false parallels” drawn by amateurs and cranks between Jesus and other gods, I agree with all his examples; and with how he explains Jesus’s virgin birth legend as an amalgam of pagan and Jewish ideas. There are valid parallels to be found, more than O’Neill seems to recognize, but not as many nor of the same kind nor of the same purpose or significance as many amateur mythicists have claimed. (See my more recent articles on Dying and Rising Gods and Virgin Births.)
When O’Neill says debates aren’t a great way to advance discussion, I have often made exactly the same point. O’Neill and I agree on how Christianity came to dominate the Roman Empire and subsequently the Western world (e.g. see Chapter 18 in my book Not the Impossible Faith). O’Neill concurs with me that we should not be reading the Gospels as literal, documentary accounts, but as symbolic myths, whose details are selected to sell ideas, not history. (We only disagree on just how much actual history we can be confident they used to do that with.) And I agree with his skepticism of the claim that Nazareth didn’t exist when Jesus would supposedly have been born there. Its existence isn’t even relevant (see OHJ, index, “Nazareth”). But there isn’t any good evidence it wasn’t there either.
But then they get lots wrong…
Seeds of David
O’Neill and gang like to make fun of the idea that the earliest Christians may have thought Jesus’s mortal body was literally manufactured directly from David’s sperm (as prophecy had to be taken to say to evade being falsified by history) simply because they think it’s weird. But in so doing they only illustrate how out of touch they are with what was considered weird in antiquity. The cosmic sperm hypothesis is actually ordinary in the context of the kinds of beliefs people then held. They also thus demonstrate their lazy incompetence in reading even the scholarship they intend to critique by never noticing what I’ve repeatedly said on the point: that mythicism does not require the cosmic sperm hypothesis. So they don’t listen to why it’s plausible; and they don’t listen to why it’s not even a necessary hypothesis. (See The Cosmic Seed of David and, for related treatment, Yes, Galatians 4 Is Allegory.)
As I note in OHJ, Irenaeus documented many far weirder beliefs about Jesus’s cosmic birth, and Jewish lore already had precedents for it. But I should have also mentioned as precedent the Babylonian Talmud, Niddah folio 16, where we are told an angel takes up every “drop” of semen to heaven “and places it in the presence of the Holy One” and asks, “Sovereign of the universe, what shall be the fate of this drop? Shall it produce a strong man or a weak man, a wise man or a fool, a rich man or a poor man?”
If Jews could so readily come up with this bizarre idea, then the idea that God could store one of those drops from David that the angel would thus have delivered for inspection—all to effect His secret plan to defeat Satan and fulfill an otherwise failed prophecy—cannot even be called strange. It’s no weirder than the “fact” that Paul relates without blush that God “stores” our future resurrection bodies for us up in heaven (in 2 Corinthians 5) or that God manufactured Eve’s body from Adam’s rib. Likewise, Zoroastrianism, which originated the entire idea of an eschatological messiah subsequently taken up by Judaism, embraced essentially the very same belief: that the messiah would be born from the sperm of the ancient Zoroaster stored for thousands of years in a sacred lake.
But Paul could just as easily have meant Jesus came from the seed of David in whatever nonliteral, allegorical way he believed Gentiles came from the seed of Abraham. And either way, even the Gospels make clear that Jesus did not come from the “Seed of David” the usual way—they explicitly make clear Joseph never imparts that seed to Mary, yet both Matthew and Luke make explicitly clear their genealogy through David is only of Joseph (not Mary, contrary to Christian apologists who hope you don’t know how to read). They thus both depict God manufacturing Jesus’s body in Mary’s womb. What seed then did he use? And how did it derive from the belly of David? Whatever answer you give for them, would then apply to Paul. Either way, you don’t get “Jesus was a descendant of David.” And thus you can’t get to historicity this way.
You can’t legitimately mock an idea if you ignore every fact that renders it plausible. And yet this is how they operate throughout the video: leaving out everyhing that makes an argument plausible or sound, and then make fun of it for lacking anything making it plausible or sound. You just aren’t going to learn the truth through this method. You’re better off ignoring their ignorant pronouncements and just reading OHJ or whatever is my most recent article on the point. Judge for yourself—with all the facts.
Mettinger on Marduk
A good illustration of all these same mistakes, born again of lazy reading, is how they completely bungle what I and Tryggve Mettinger said about the status of Marduk as a dying-and-rising God. It starts with a false assertion about the content of my book. First they correctly state that I survey the mytheme of “dying and rising gods” in “Element 31” on page 168 of OHJ and there say I will reference it again later; then they incorrectly state that despite saying that, I never do—claiming I then make no use of it. That’s false. I reference it quite prominently and significantly on pages 212 and 611 of OHJ. Did I say lazy? A simple search of the very affordable kindle edition could have corrected them and prevented their embarrassing mistake. For example.
They then falsely claim that Mettinger denied Marduk was a dying and rising god. That’s false. To the contrary, he argues in various of his writings that Marduk is often coterminous with Ba’al (or Baal), and then goes on to demonstrate Baal was indeed a dying and rising god, contrary to mistaken interpretations by earlier twentieth-century scholars. Which leads us to two really funny things about their video rant over this: (1) they cite the page number in my book where I discuss this, but somehow completely failed to notice what I plainly write there, “Marduk (also known as Bel or Baal, which basically meant ‘the Lord’)”; and (2) they later go on to admit that the evidence for Baal being a dying and rising god is actually pretty good (Mettinger, they say, is “more correct than Mark S. Smith” on this, timestamp 2:16).
So in their lazy ignorance, they simultaneously make fun of me for defending a thesis that they later admit is sound! Not only do they actually agree with what I say about Marduk, aka Baal, but they agree Mettinger refuted Smith’s previous misinterpretation of the Baal myth and thus updated and corrected previous scholarship on this point, exactly as I say in OHJ. Wow. Own goal, guys.
This typifies their criticism of my book: they don’t even read it, screw everything up about it, get key facts wrong, and make fun of me for being the incompetent one, when I’m the only one who handled this material competently. For example, they try to claim I cited scholars arguing for this conclusion about Baal who actually argue against it, depicting this as some sort of mistake. It’s not. Because it’s not what I did. Because they don’t read. I only cite Mark Smith (and Frymer-Kensky) to indicate the now-obsolete works Mettinger refuted, which nevertheless still contain the very evidence that proves Mettinger’s point. My footnote on this, the very footnote this gang is going on about, literally begins: “Previous attempts to deny that these were dying-and-rising gods have been thoroughly refuted by Tryggve Mettinger,” followed by my citation of Mettinger. I then list the previous scholarship he refuted. Why are they complaining about this? Because they didn’t read the note and thus get completely wrong what it said and who it is citing for what.
They also don’t discuss the evidence, by the way. For any dying and rising god claim. They just arbitrarily side with outdated scholars, the very ones they later admit are obsolete and incorrect, rather than with the most recent and up-to-date scholarship. Which is the exact opposite of how one usually should employ scholarship. If you wish to insist that the latest scholarship has not superseded the old, you need to explain why. You need to actually mention and address the evidence. Really. That’s Competence 101.
Eliade on Zalmoxis
They do this again with my treatment of Zalmoxis. They ignore all the actual evidence. Then claim I didn’t read one of my cited sources, Mircea Eliade, on the status of Zalmoxis as a dying and rising God. But in so doing they only demonstrate it’s the other way around: they didn’t read Eliade carefully, but so lazily as to incompetently misread what he said.
Here is what Eliade says about Zalmoxis in the work I cite: “the ‘revelation’ that he [Zalmoxis] brings to the Getae is communicated through a well-known mythic-ritual scenario of “death” (occultation) and “return to earth” (epiphany),” and features in Zalmoxis’s case “the return of Zalmoxis in the flesh.” Eliade then compares this story with that of Aristeas, another person who died, visited the afterlife, and came back to life to tell of it. Eliade says “Zalmoxis’ disappearance, his ‘death’, is equivalent to a descensus ad inferos as a means of initiation,” which he accomplished so that “by imitating the divine model, the neophyte undergoes a ritual ‘death’ precisely in order to obtain the non-death, the ‘immortality’ which the sources emphasize.”
Note the key word here: equivalent to. Eliade does not say this was a katabasis (what the words descensus ad inferos means: a descent to the underworld without dying, the most famous exemplar being Odysseus). Eliade says the death and resurrection of Zalmoxis performed the same function as a katabasis. And Eliade goes on to show the pattern extends across many examples of resurrections and descent stories. He is explaining that the commonality extends to both. He is not saying they are therefore literally identical. Death and resurrection is one way to accomplish a visit to the dead. Nowhere does Eliade say that Zalmoxis “really” just descended to the underworld alive. He instead simply accepts what we’re told: that the Getae believed Zalmoxis had died and risen from the dead.
Not only is this surely what they believed because that’s what Herodotus reports they believed, but also because the only version of the story in which Zalmoxis doesn’t die is the one Greeks made up to mock the Getae as dupes for believing Zalmozis died—and to mock the Getae, they borrow a story from their own legends about Pythagoras. And in that version, their polemical mockery of Getan belief, Zalmoxis does not descend to hades at all: there is no katabasis. In fact we have no account of Zalmoxis that involves a katabasis. None. Not from the Greeks. Not from the Getae. To the contrary, the only way the Greeks could accuse Zalmoxis of faking his death by hiding in a cave is if the Getae’s actual belief was that he died. Exactly as Herodotus said it was. And Eliade says nothing to the contrary. (See my whole section on Zalmoxis in Chapter 3 of Not the Impossible Faith, where I show Christian apologists making the exact same mistakes as these atheists just did.)
Rather than reading the actual sources carefully, and actually reading Eliade’s statements carefully and in the context of his whole thesis, they instead try to “reinterpret” Eliade’s use of scare quotes around “death” to somehow try and deduce that he was claiming Zalmoxis wasn’t believed to have died. But that is clearly not what Eliade anywhere says. Those scare quotes are used solely to carry Eliade’s point that his thesis was of a universal trope that includes both actual deaths and descents alive. He is not questioning that the Getae believed in the death of Zalmoxis. He is highlighting its ritual universal meaning in the context of different ways of visiting the land of the dead. Indeed he links them all by connecting this trope to a universal shamanic system of beliefs in which the soul leaves the body to visit the land of the dead, which as Eliade himself says, is pretty much what it means to actually die.
As Eliade says: “Zalmoxis was compared to Cronus or to certain specialists in ecstasy (ecstasy being considered a temporary death, for the soul was believed to leave the body).” This is what Eliade is saying the Getae taught about Zalmoxis: he died; then rose back to life; then taught his followers how this could obtain immortality for themselves. That’s what a dying and rising savior god is. By definition. A story everyone knew who learned Greek to the level exhibited by Paul and the authors of the Gospels, because Herodotus was a standard school text at that level.
At 2:15 O’Neill tries to criticize comparing Jesus to Osiris by relating all the differences in their stories, such as how they died and how they rose, but those differences are irrelevant. They both die and rise from the dead. And thereby become personal saviors that people baptize themselves into to receive eternal life, or take communion to the same end, or both. There is no possible way to claim this is just a meaningless coincidence. Particularly as this trope extends across numerous other ethnic mystery cults, including that of Zalmoxis.
Risen Savior Cults
At timestamp 2:17 they falsely claim there is no evidence of beliefs in dying and rising gods still extant in the Roman Empire. Thus demonstrating they didn’t read OHJ, where I extensively show this is false with regard to Romulus and Adonis and Asclepius and Hercules and Osiris and Dionysius, for all of whom I cite Imperial sources (including sometimes even pre-Christian sources). Cicero. Plutarch. Lucian. Origen. And more. All make very clear these were still going beliefs, and widely known.
Moreover, we actually don’t know the Zalmoxis cult that Herodotus recorded wasn’t also still going, or that the Baal or Hercules-Melqart or Inanna-Adonis cults that were still practiced in Syria and Tyre, for example, didn’t still include the death-and-resurrection element that had always been central to them before. So in another sign of their incompetence, they conflate our having no sources on what these cults were teaching with evidence they weren’t teaching certain things. That’s not valid reasoning. The latter cults were still salvation cults and still practiced and popular. So might also have been Zalmoxis cult. We cannot say what they weren’t teaching; and it’s not plausible that they’d have abandoned this popular element of it. So their reasoning isn’t even sound in these cases; while their premise is completely false in the others, for which we do have sources testifying to their resurrection aspects still going strong in the Roman Empire.
Consider the case of Baal, that god this gang even admitted might indeed have been a dying and rising God as Mettinger correctingly demonstrated. Baal had been adapted into the central figure in the Roman-era mystery cult of Jupiter Dolichenus, about which we have no texts—so we cannot say what they “weren’t” teaching about Baal. Whereas being a salvation cult built on a legendary dying and rising god, it seems strange to suggest they would have jettisoned the idea. In Not the Impossible Faith (which I cite in OHJ) I show how the theme of resurrection was actually rising so much in popularity in the early Roman Empire that it was even being made fun of, such as in plays where pet dogs rise from the dead, or Petronius’s Satyricon where the hero goes on a sacred quest for the resurrection of his penis. If something is so ubiquitous people are even making fun of it, you can’t be arguing it wasn’t culturally influential.
To be fair, it’s Chris and Bryan who screw this one up the most. O’Neill sort of corrects them at one moment, by admitting the dying-and-rising-god trope did exist and did influence Christianity somehow, but he doesn’t explain further, merely saying there is a difference between “influence and derivation,” although it’s not clear what he thinks that difference is, and he never says. But like he himself said for the virgin birth mytheme, where the Christian idea was a syncretism of pagan and Jewish beliefs about miraculous births of heroes, O’Neill should realize it’s the same for the resurrection of Jesus: as the particularization of a mytheme, it is produced by a syncretism of pagan and Jewish beliefs about resurrection and its relationship to salvation. Indeed, so popular was this juxtaposition all around them, it’s more amazing it took so long for the Jews to come up with one of their own.
Getting Syncretism Wrong
Around this point they totally botch the idea of syncretism. They falsely claim that when syncretism occurs (when a dominating and a local religious tradition are combined to form a new religion) there are always “leftovers,” random flotsam and jetsam retained for no particular reason. No. That does not happen. And that they think it does shows they have not studied this phenomenon at all.
Syncretism always transforms what it borrows, and creates an amalgam, in which only what is wanted is kept. The example they give to the contrary only illustrates their ignorance; for it’s of a completely different phenomenon: the beast Leviathan being in the Bible is not a product of syncretism. It’s a fossil. Yahweh isn’t a syncretism with Baal. Yahweh is an evolution of Baal. Baal simply means Lord. It was a generic name for God among all the Canaanite tribes. Yahweh is simply the local name of the local Baal of one of the tribes of the Canaanites. The Jews were not syncretizing some other native religion of their own with Canaanite religion. The Jews actually were Canaanites. They then wrote stories claiming to be from somewhere else to justify their genocide of neighboring Canaanite tribes. Yahweh keeps many of the features of Baal and his lore because Yahweh was Baal. He was not “merged” with Baal. So this gang doesn’t seem to understand the difference between the evolution of a local religion, and actual syncretism between a local and another, usually dominating society’s religion.
For a correct example of syncretism, you should look at how Judaism was transformed by exposure to Zoroastrianism: before it had no end-times apocalypticism, no Satan as the enemy of God, no resurrection (at all much less at the end of days), and no flaming hell where sinners are tormented after death, nor even much of any idea of the dead living in heaven. The original Jewish belief was of the dead remaining forever asleep, their souls only capable of awakening by witches; and only the rarest of heroes got to live in heaven, and not by dying, but by being taken up while still alive (like Elijah and Enoch and in some legends Moses). But after becoming subject to the Persians, Judaism adopted all those things from Persian Zoroastrianism, after modifying them to suit Jewish ideas and sensibilities and contexts. There are no “leftovers.” There is only what they borrowed, and how they changed it by merging it with their local ideas.
In a similar misunderstanding, O’Neill says (around timestamp 2:19) that the Gospels share no narrative elements with other dying-and-rising tales. That’s been thoroughly refuted under peer review by Richard Miller, and others. See OHJ, “Element 47,” for example (in Chapter 5). The most similar storyline is of Romulus, for whom there were still publicly enacted passion plays, which Mark 15-16 tracks aspects of in outline. Mark simply combines this with emulations of the legend of Jesus ben Ananias and scriptural and Judaic material. But you can’t say the similarities with Romulus and other pagan translation stories are just a coincidence. Again, they borrow what they like, change and add what they want, and leave out what they don’t. Thus explaining why there are no dildos and dismemberments and other borrowed ideas from Osiris myth, for example: those narrative details were the least palatable to Christians when Mark wrote. They had no use for them.
But that of course all relates to Mark’s construction of a myth. And this is where they also get confused quite a lot, mistaking the original sect’s beliefs with what legends got spun out for it a lifetime later in the Gospels. These narrative details in Mark did not likely exist in Christianity before his creative application. Christianity began, as we can plainly see in Paul, with a much more esoteric and mystical dying and rising savior myth. It had more in common with the cosmic myths of Osiris, which were advocated by a priesthood whom Plutarch tells us also derided the vulgar myths about dildos and dismemberments as convenient falsehoods.
Understanding what the Gospel authors are doing with analogous myths in the constructing of their own requires reading what I actually say about this in OHJ (particularly Chapter 10). These guys didn’t. Because they are too lazy to develop anything like a competent critique. Likewise understanding how the general tropes of mystery religion surrounding Judaism at the time influenced their construction of a mystery religion of their own—a process not the same as what’s going on in the Gospels—requires actually reading what I separately say about that (particularly in Chapter 4). Again, these guys just didn’t. So they have no relevant critique to offer.
Euhemerization
They not only get Syncretism wrong, they get Euhemerization wrong. You can see my two articles on that, for a complete discussion. But here, for example, they get wrong the story arc for the myths of Baal. They incorrectly start with the earthly myths of Baal as a historical king, when in fact Baal was originally a sky god—a celestial—not someone who did things on earth. The latter was a later invention, placing the originally celestial Baal into human history as a historical agent and weaving stories about him with mytho-symbolic content—the usual first stage of euhemerization.
Baal did also get euhemerized further—and today we would instead say rationalized—into a regular king about whom, it was then claimed, those legends then arose. If that had actually happened it would be called deification, not euhemerization; it’s only euhemerization when that isn’t what actually happened. Euhemerization is the opposite of deification, by representing a historicized mythical God as a king deified, when in truth no such person ever existed to be deified. He began a sky god. Placing him on earth came later. That’s ancient euhemerism.
Mythicists point out it appears that Jesus followed the same arc: he starts out as a celestial revelatory being in Paul, gets euhemerized into a mytho-symbolic historical actor in the Gospels (just as happened to Baal; and likewise Osiris, etc.), and then later gets rationalized into a regular guy about whom those legends arose. That’s what we’ve been doing to Jesus ourselves since the 19th century. But there is no actual evidence that “rationalized Jesus” ever existed, any more than “rationalized Baal” or “rationalized Osiris.” Our earliest evidence places these figures in outer space, celestials, known only by revelation. Likewise our earliest evidence placing Jesus on earth does so in exactly the same way Baal originally was: as a mytho-symbolic supernatural hero who ascends to celestial glory.
And here it becomes clear these guys rely too much on an argument from ignorance that is a particular folly when you aren’t studied enough in the context to have a reliable intuition in the matter.
O’Neill asks, for example, why Jesus is characterized as an apocalyptic prophet if he has been euhemerized. The answer is the same as for everyone else euhemerized: Osiris gets euhemerized as a Pharaoh; Romulus as a Roman aristocrat; Hercules as an itinerant warrior. Mythologers choose the model that most resonates with their religion and message. Christianity was from the beginning an apocalyptic cult preaching that Jesus had revealed to them from on high that the end was nigh and that his resurrection was the “firstfruits” of the general resurrection at the end of days.
So obviously when they euhemerize Jesus, that’s going to be the model they would use: not a warrior (that was exactly the opposite message the Christians wanted to send), not as an aristocrat much less a ruler from the privileged class (that was also exactly the opposite message the Christians wanted to send), but as a Prophet of Old, on the model of Moses and Elijah, whom the Gospels directly model Jesus after. And the closest analog in their own day were the apocalyptic prophets. And so that is what Jesus became. When they wanted to modernize their scriptural heroes, that was the analog that made the most sense, that would carry the most resonance with their intended audience and their messaging.
Similarly, O’Neill also asks why Jesus is in Galilee. He evidently doesn’t know scripture required him to be. Or that such a location was remarkably convenient for Mark’s messaging. As I show in my article on Mark’s Use of Paul’s Epistles, the very passage of Isaiah, Isaiah 9, that predicts the messiah will come out of Galilee calls it “Galilee of the Gentiles,” perfectly suiting Mark’s repeated messaging that the Gentiles will be saved along with the Jews (see Chapter 10.4 in OHJ). Thus Galilee allows Mark to have Jesus interact as often with Gentiles as with Jews and still be solidly in the Holy Land and in agreement with scripture. It also gives him a body of water in the middle of it all to emulate the miracles of Moses in.
Notably, Paul never shows any knowledge that Jesus ever had any connection with Galilee. That idea first appears with Mark. And the other Gospel authors entirely get it from him. There is no other source for it. So it’s actually one of the least credible facts claimed about Jesus.
Is Anything in the Gospels True?
O’Neill gets a little muddled on the point but if you follow him all the way through he does outline correct options for explaining the content of the Gospels, rightly criticizing the black and white fallacy of saying there are only two possibilities: it’s all fictional or it’s all true (I don’t actually know any atheist who says that, but still, if any do, they’re wrong). It could instead be that some of it is true. There is also, however, a fourth possibility O’Neill completely neglects: that we don’t know.
It might be all false. That’s different from saying it is all false. Its being all false is compatible with all the evidence we have, far more than O’Neill seems to realize (he shows no sign of having read Chapter 10 of OHJ or Chapter 5 of Proving History). And we all agree it’s unlikely to be “all true,” as that requires latching onto a barrel full of absurd improbabilities, as O’Neill himself points out. So the question is: Can we know if anything in the Gospels is true? That the answer is “no” is not the same thing as saying “we can be certain it’s all false.” And I think O’Neill is confusing the two; yet we are saying the former, not the latter. Most of us are simply saying “we can’t discern whether anything in the Gospels is true, therefore we can’t use them as evidence for the historicity of Jesus, even if anything in them happens to be true.”
O’Neill does sing many a standard tune, such as that there are a number of things in the Gospels that evince historicity, because each such supposed thing “only really makes sense if it did happen.” He immediately uses the example of the baptism of Jesus by John—and gets everything wrong about how Mark constructed that story. Which is ironic because O’Neill just correctly discerned how the Barabbas narrative is obvious rhetoric. He doesn’t seem to know why the John the Baptist story is, too. And this is the thing: for every example one might cite, when you correctly examine what’s actually in these stories and how they are placed, they all fall apart as obvious rhetoric and theological devices. There is nothing left over. And that’s why we can’t use the Gospels as evidence of anything.
In my book Proving History I have a whole section on this (index, “John the Baptist”). And for that I found and cite numerous peer reviewed treatments of the John the Baptist scene that plainly point out that Mark has obviously invented it to suit his purposes—contrary to those who don’t notice this and thus mistakenly think it goes against Mark’s interests. It doesn’t. It’s an etiological myth, a category of myths that explain the origins and meaning of rituals—in this case baptism, in which Mark has the famous John “the Baptist” declare Jesus his superior and successor. Which is not a statement against interest; it’s exactly what Mark would want to invent.
Mark then uses John as a deus ex machina by which Jesus can go through a baptism and thereby represent for Mark’s readers what a baptism is—which is an adoption by God to become a Son of God (making this Mark’s birth narrative for Jesus), and an anointing of the messiah, and at the same time a symbolic death and resurrection. Which is why Mark has Jesus begin his story with a symbolic death and resurrection, and end his story with an actual death and resurrection, so readers would get the point what a baptism is: what Jesus went through, so shall you. There are many elements borrowed and reversed between the two stories as I show in OHJ. There is nothing here Mark wouldn’t readily invent. So we can’t know that any of it is true.
Even that this event takes place in the Jordan: Josephus makes no mention of John ever baptizing in the Jordan. No other source does. It appears to be a Markan invention. Mark is reversing the “Moses in the wilderness” narrative, where the Jews went through temptations in the desert and failed, then crossed the Jordan into the holy land. In both cases by “Jesus” miraculously parting the Jordan: Joshua, remember, is the same name. Mark has Jesus “part the Jordan” symbolically through baptism. He even retains the literal reference to a “parting” with the parting of “the heavens” that Mark adds to the story. The Jesus story then reverses the Joshua story: Jesus leaves the Holy Land to reenter the desert and be tempted and this time succeed, thus reversing and thereby undoing the failure of the Israelites of old. As several peer reviewed scholars have noted, the specific temptations are even paralleled; and like the Israelites, Jesus is miraculously fed in the desert. This is as obviously myth as the Barabbas narrative.
O’Neill correctly explains why later Gospels wanted to change Mark’s story; but none of those reasons make Mark’s story any more likely to be historical. Later authors are simply trying to explain or improve on Mark, or rewriting Mark to match newly evolved beliefs. That only tells us that Mark’s version was getting play, so they needed to address it, to “fix” it. As they do with everything else in Mark. That does not mean any such story ever preceded Mark. And we have no evidence at all that it did. And what we have no evidence of, we ought not assert as known.
Similarly, around timestamp 2:35 O’Neill claims we have a more human Jesus in Mark and a more divine Jesus in John and that this is the opposite of what we should expect on mythicism. But that’s incorrect. Jesus in Mark never behaves like a human: even when he isn’t doing works of wonder, he is acting very strangely compared to any real person; moreover, he is a supernatural being from the very start, parting the very heavens, defeating the Devil, and he continues as such in every subsequent chapter. If you count up incredible events, and divide by number of words, there actually is no greater miraculism in any other Gospel. The rate of the amazing per thousand words is the same, or as near enough as makes no statistically significant difference.
What does change is that Mark never says he is writing true stories, and he even implies in Mark 4:9-13 that he is not. Matthew then sort of implies he is writing up a record of events, but only very weakly, by adding references to the events he relates fulfilling prophecy. Then Luke is the first author to actually claim to be writing history, and to structure his narrative to resemble a history. But he’s still cagey as to whether he means that literally or not. John is then the first author to ever say that his stories are literally true and that he is telling those stories so you’ll believe that they actually happened.
Contrary to O’Neill, this sequence among the Gospels is the exact opposite of what we’d expect on historicity. We should expect to start with more mundane recollections and memoirs, more historical accounts, and move over time to increasingly mythical, legendary, and allegorical accounts. Instead the first ever account to place Jesus in earth history is completely mytho-allegorical all the way through. And never says it’s otherwise. That’s weird. And that’s why we doubt any of it’s true.
The Nazareth Question
The same goes for the idea of Jesus hailing from Nazareth. That actually isn’t evidence it’s true. Because that was predicted in scripture every bit as much as an origin at Bethlehem was. The first author to try and make both prophecies fit together is the very author who tells us both origins came from scripture: Matthew. The passage he refers to is either now lost or has become altered, as we know happened a lot (see “Element 9” in Ch. 4 of OHJ). So it is not the case that the only place the idea could come from is Jesus really hailing from there.
It also wasn’t originally “Jesus of Nazareth.” The actual word was Nazorian in Greek, which doesn’t mean a person from Nazareth. The Christians themselves were called the Nazorians, as Luke reveals in Acts, yet they didn’t come from Nazareth either. It clearly meant something else. The original meaning is now lost, though various scholars have proposed different possibilities (I discuss all this in Proving History, and a little more in OHJ; see in each, index, “Nazareth”). Mark appears to have simply picked the closest sounding town to that epithet in Galilee, and thus chose that town to base Jesus in. We have, again, no evidence anyone ever associated Jesus with Nazareth before Mark did. And what we have no evidence of, we ought not assert as known.
Notice I actually agree with O’Neill that we can’t say Mark’s single verse mentioning Nazareth is an interpolation. Unless we have independent evidence making that likely, its probability remains the base rate of interpolation, which is at best 1 in 200 and at worst 1 in 1000. So any theory that requires that verse to be an interpolation is not likely to be a probable theory. We simply don’t need this conjecture. Matthew already tells us it was derived from scripture, and he couldn’t get away with saying that if it wasn’t true; likewise the label attributed to Jesus already clearly doesn’t match the town, thus linking it to that town was evidently an afterthought.
The same goes for the theory that Nazareth “didn’t exist.” Here they all rightly criticize that idea’s most fanatical proponent, that piano teacher, Rene Salm. I share the same opinion they do. His crank theory that Nazareth didn’t exist in the early first century is simply not tenable on present evidence. We might not be able to establish with certainty Nazareth did exist then, but we have enough evidence to grant that odds. So no argument that requires Nazareth not to exist can carry much probability either.
However, to be fair, they were not being wholly judicious in their reasoning here. One of them says he contacted the excavators of a farm house near modern-day Nazareth, but it does not seem to occur to him (or any of the others) that that is not evidence Nazareth existed. Farm houses were everywhere. They don’t have signs on them that say “this house is within the town limits of Nazareth.” They have no labels on them at all. And that farm house wasn’t even in what we now call Nazareth.
So they’re being a little gullible here. And I say that, let me remind you, as someone who doesn’t buy the argument that Nazareth didn’t exist. But we have to be fair to the evidence: we don’t really have all that good archaeology for Nazareth; we can’t even establish that the town currently called Nazareth, is the one anciently called so. But there are reasons why this is that don’t permit the likes of Salm to jump to the conclusion that there was no Nazareth at all.
Frankly, one of the best evidences for Nazareth is the inscription listing where Jewish priests were taken in after the destruction of the temple in 70 A.D., because among the towns listed is indeed Nazareth. There is no way a town could be developed enough to take in priests in the year 70 that hadn’t been around for at least a century. Salm has had this pointed out to him, and he promptly invented conspiracy theories about that inscription being forged. You just can’t win with nutters like that. So I’m totally on the same page with O’Neill there. The error is to conflate the likes of him, with me.
Conclusion
In the end, it’s clear Tim, Chris, and Bryan have some lessons to learn. They need to actually read the things they intend to critique, they need to actually read their own sources more carefully, and they need to get more informed about what they are speaking on. And above all, they need to learn how to be their own best critics, so as to catch and thus avoid the kinds of errors and fallacies they keep relying on. These are lessons nearly every critic needs to learn.
-:-
For more embarrassing failures of Tim O’Neill on this subject, see:
- On the Gullibility of Bart Ehrman & the Asscrankery of Tim O’Neill
- More Asscrankery from Tim O’Neill
- A Primer on Successful vs. Bogus Methodology: Tim O’Neill Edition
Carrier’s interpretation of Romans 1:3 makes no sense.
First, microscopes weren’t invented in NT times, so there’s no way they could have known anything about sperm cells. Seed =/= sperm.
Second, in Bauer, Arndt, Gingrich and Danker (BAGD), the standard lexicon of NT Greek, the verb used in Romans 1:3 is γίνομαι, which means “to come into being through process of birth or natural production, be born, be produced.” Even though γίνομαι can mean “to manufacture,” Romans 1:3 is conspicuously absent from this section.
Consulting BAGD again, we find that σπέρμα is used metonymously to refer to “descendants, children, posterity” in Romans 1:3 and other passages.
Paul is just saying Jesus is a descendant of King David, that’s it. Only tortuous mental gymnastics and fantastic leaps of logic could get this to mean god manufacturing Jesus from a cosmic sperm bank.
They didn’t need to know that sperm were microscopic, dude. They just needed to know that semen caused pregnancy. Richard uses phrases like “sperm bank” or “outer space” for modern pedagogical reasons: It’s a better way of imagining what he is arguing the ancients may have thought. Nothing in mythicism depends on Jews knowing about literal, actual sperm.
And in OHJ, Richard shows that Paul conspicuously uses the phrase he uses for manufacture there. Maybe Richard is wrong, but you have to actually challenge that point.
My point is translating σπέρμα as “sperm” is not accurate. In BAGD, σπέρμα literally means seed or semen, not sperm. It’s not a good pedagogical method for what “the ancients may have thought” because they had an imperfect understanding of reproduction and knew nothing about sperm.
If you haven’t noticed, I pointed out that in BAGD, Romans 1:3 is listed under γίνομαι’s meaning as “to be born,” not under “to manufacture.” Richard has yet to respond to this.
No shit! Because like you said they didn’t know sperm existed, so why would they talk about it?! But they didn’t need to know about sperm and nothing Richard says hinges on them knowing about it! God just needed to “store the seed” (see how that makes sense from ancient agricultural metaphors) and plant a new heir! You’re getting caught up on Richard using the word “sperm bank” to try to communicate to us with a term we know. He’s not saying that’s what the ancients thought. A “cosmic grain silo” may be a better term for their understanding according to Richard, and you’re not responding to that.
You’re missing the point.
Whether it’s a “cosmic sperm bank” or a “cosmic grain silo” is irrelevant. Any plain reading of the NT contradicts Carrier’s interpretation. I’ve already shown this from BAGD, which gives very different translations for σπέρμα and γίνομαι.
Actually, no, Mario. A plain reading, based on Paul’s idiom, does not contradict my interpretation. It instead casts doubt on the dogmatic interpretation of the modern Church.
You seem resolved not to listen to us or even attempt to understand why this is.
No, you’re missing the point. You made two arguments, one of them isn’t supportable. You should concede that point, that the microscopic nature of sperm is irrelevant and so doesn’t count as an objection.
As for the Greek: Richard answered this in OHJ and here. He explains that in Paul there is a distinction between the word he uses for making and for being born. You’re citing a lexicon of New Testament Greek in general. And Richard is arguing that the BAGD in this respect is wrong. And he shows that that’s reasonable because he shows how later scribes rather suspiciously changed the word that Paul used, because they knew it was weird. You respond to none of this, nor did you prove that the BAGD is the standard lexicon when Noah called you out on this. You also accused me of being circular when I said that there the BAGD authors may have made theological assumptions that colored their interpretation. No, Richard has argued this case directly. Not assumed it. You can disagree, but that’s not circularity.
Richard keeps saying to you “Meanwhile, with ginomai, you are confusing a dictionary that tells us what many authors used words for, with what Paul used words for. To do correct history, you must read an author by that author’s own idiom, not by the idiom of other authors. If you don’t know that, you don’t know how to do history”. You keep not responding to this point.
Prove that Paul did not use gennao to mean “birth” or that Paul did not use ginomai to mean manufacture, as Richard argues Paul uses exclusively in the context of things like the manufacture of future non-human bodies. And prove that it is not true that “ Christians even found it so weird themselves, they tried doctoring later manuscripts to replace this word that Paul only uses of manufacture and “coming to be,” with Paul’s preferred word for birth”. You may also want to admit that Richard doesn’t count this as evidence for his conclusion, just calls it a wash because either way it is actually pretty weird (and certainly is conspicuously not supported by other passages of Paul saying that Jesus had a human, physical life).
“No, you’re missing the point. You made two arguments, one of them isn’t supportable. You should concede that point, that the microscopic nature of sperm is irrelevant and so doesn’t count as an objection.”
It is relevant if Carrier is trying to make sense of the New Testament using anachronism, which is a fallacy. Since sperm is not an accurate translation of what Paul is trying to say, it distorts, rather than clarifies his meaning.
“You’re citing a lexicon of New Testament Greek in general. And Richard is arguing that the BAGD in this respect is wrong. And he shows that that’s reasonable because he shows how later scribes rather suspiciously changed the word that Paul used, because they knew it was weird.”
In order for Carrier to prove BAGD wrong, he would have to go through all of the available sources – papyri and ostraca, the Septuagint, contemporary Judeo-Christian and pagan Hellenistic literature – to show that these words mean what they say he does. The advantage of BAGD over Carrier is that the authors have examined all available sources to establish word usage and meaning in the Judeo-Hellenistic world of the NT. They even show their sources in case you want to check. Unless Carrier has done this, his conclusions are worthless. So far he hasn’t done this.
Whether scribes changed a word centuries later is totally irrelevant to what the word meant and how it was used in a 1st century AD context.
“Nor did you prove that the BAGD is the standard lexicon when Noah called you out on this.”
It is the most exhaustive lexicon on the market, with the most in-depth coverage of Koine Greek. There is no other lexicon like it. It is indeed the standard lexicon.
“You also accused me of being circular when I said that there the BAGD authors may have made theological assumptions that colored their interpretation. No, Richard has argued this case directly. Not assumed it. You can disagree, but that’s not circularity.”
You dismissed BAGD as biased with no other argument, apart from your say-so. How is that not circular? How can Richard establish bias without reference to the actual contents of BAGD? Show me where he has done this.
“Richard keeps saying to you ‘Meanwhile, with ginomai, you are confusing a dictionary that tells us what many authors used words for, with what Paul used words for. To do correct history, you must read an author by that author’s own idiom, not by the idiom of other authors. If you don’t know that, you don’t know how to do history’. You keep not responding to this point.”
No, I’ve actually explained why you cannot “read an author by that author’s own idiom”:
How can you understand an author’s idiom without understanding the idiom of contemporary authors writing in the same language? It’s standard linguistic usage in the Hellenistic world that determines interpretation and translation of the NT, not your own idiosyncratic biases from the 21st century.
BAGD translates words like σπέρμα and γίνομαι according to ancient Hellenistic usage, based on all available papyri, inscriptions, ostraca and contemporary authors. This tells us how words were used in the NT. BAGD even lists the passages from those ancient sources illustrating word usage, in addition to citing passages from the NT that accord with standard linguistic usage in the Hellenistic world. You can easily verify these passages for yourself. We know γίνομαι at Romans 1:3 means “to be born” because its usage in that context is the same in all other contemporary sources. This is how we know your belief that Romans 1:3 means “cosmic sperm bank” is wrong; it contradicts our knowledge of NT Koine Greek.
“Prove that Paul did not use gennao to mean ‘birth’ or that Paul did not use ginomai to mean manufacture, as Richard argues Paul uses exclusively in the context of things like the manufacture of future non-human bodies.”
I just did. The authors of BAGD, after consulting all available Hellenistic sources, have established that the meaning of ginomai in Romans 1:3 is “birth.” Unless Richard has gone through all of the available sources, like BAGD, and can actually show his work, like BAGD, his claim that ginomai means “manufacture” is without foundation. We can’t just make up definitions for words based on the spur of the moment. In this case, Richard still bears the burden of proof.
“And prove that it is not true that Christians even found it so weird themselves, they tried doctoring later manuscripts to replace this word that Paul only uses of manufacture and ‘coming to be,’ with Paul’s preferred word for ‘birth’.”
How is this relevant to what Paul actually meant in Romans 1:3, which can only be established with contemporary source material? Hint: It’s not.
First, there’s a good chance that Romans 1:3 is part of an interpolation (see https://vridar.org/2015/02/17/jesus-the-seed-of-david-one-more-case-for-interpolation/ and many others– Deterring argued this strongly). Second, where do you get that BAGD is the standard lexicon of NT Greek? I have a seminary masters and some doctorate work (before I left the faith) and BAGD wasn’t even an afterthought. Nevermind the fact that the authors no doubt carry the bias of the faith. Stop quote mining books that make your point and survey all of the texts.
Detering has no plausible argument for these conclusions. His method is hopelessly circular and cannot produce probability for any of his conclusions.
BAGD is among the world’s most respected Greek lexicons. It has long been considered the standard lexicon for those wishing to do serious work in the field. I don’t know where or when you attended seminary, but it’s been that way for well over half a century. Even Bart Ehrman, an atheist scholar, considers BAGD a standard lexicon.
But if you don’t like BAGD, we can use some other lexicon. How about Thayer’s? In this lexicon, γίνομαι is defined as “to be born,” with Romans 1:3 and Galatians 4:4 listed as examples of this usage. Again, Richard’s views aren’t supported by the lexicons.
First, ancient people didn’t know semen was a microscopic cell. They thought it was the literal drops you can see.
Stop trying to understand the ancient mind with modern concepts. Ancient people did not believe the things about the world you do. Their view of the world was very different. And you cannot understand them, or their beliefs or anything they write, if you don’t understand that.
Second, I already said ginomai can be used in some authors for birth. But Paul never does. He always uses a different word. You can only interpret Paul by reading Paul. You can’t pretend Paul used words the way some other random author did, when we can tell Paul didn’t use it that way but a very different way.
Third, Paul uses “seed” as “descent” allegorically when he says Gentiles are the seed of Abraham. And he outright says Jesus descended from no one but came from outer space in Philippians 2. So no, we cannot tell whether Paul means descent in Romans 1:3.
Please pay attention to the evidence.
But aren’t you the one who says god made Jesus from David’s sperm, which was stored in a cosmic sperm bank in heaven? Or am I missing something?
If, as you say, Paul never uses γίνομαι to mean “to be born,” then why is this contradicted by every major Greek lexicon? Why does BAGD define it as “to be born” at Romans 1:3? The same goes for σπέρμα, which is never translated “sperm” in any major lexicon. If what you were saying is true, I would be able to verify it using BAGD and Thayer, but I can’t. How do I know you’re telling me the truth if all of the standard lexicons contradict you? Or are they all wrong and you just happen to be right?
Lexicon of New Testament Greek. Not Greek Greek. See the problem? Richard is arguing that the field has had a bias toward interpreting words in ways that don’t actually make sense unless you presuppose theological conclusions Paul was trying to make, but that’s circular. One has to be agnostic as to what point Paul is trying to make until one can put together a picture from context. Richard has done so. You are free to disagree but you can’t just fallaciously make an appeal to authority. Why, beyond your understanding of the specific words, is Richard wrong in context? He’s done you the courtesy of explaining why his interpretation makes sense in light of what has been said and what Paul means. You haven’t.
No. I specifically said it is not necessary to assume they believed Nathan’s prophecy was fulfilled literally (which requires God preserving David’s sperm, a completely plausible thing in the context of actual ancient beliefs about God and cosmic events, particularly with respect to messianic and supernatural figures).
If you don’t know that, you aren’t paying attention.
Read the actual article The Cosmic Seed of David.
Meanwhile, with ginomai, you are confusing a dictionary that tells us what many authors used words for, with what Paul used words for. To do correct history, you must read an author by that author’s own idiom, not by the idiom of other authors. If you don’t know that, you don’t know how to do history.
“Richard is arguing that the field has had a bias toward interpreting words in ways that don’t actually make sense unless you presuppose theological conclusions Paul was trying to make, but that’s circular.”
Aren’t you begging the question by accusing NT scholars of bias? Shouldn’t you establish that first with hard evidence before dismissing 300 years of biblical scholarship as untrustworthy?
“Meanwhile, with ginomai, you are confusing a dictionary that tells us what many authors used words for, with what Paul used words for. To do correct history, you must read an author by that author’s own idiom, not by the idiom of other authors.”
How can you understand an author’s idiom without understanding the idiom of contemporary authors writing in the same language? It’s standard linguistic usage in the Hellenistic world that determines interpretation and translation of the NT, not your own idiosyncratic biases from the 21st century.
BAGD translates words like σπέρμα and γίνομαι according to ancient Hellenistic usage, based on all available papyri, inscriptions, ostraca and contemporary authors. This tells us how words were used in the NT. BAGD even lists the passages from those ancient sources illustrating word usage, in addition to citing passages from the NT that accord with standard linguistic usage in the Hellenistic world. You can easily verify these passages for yourself. We know γίνομαι at Romans 1:3 means “to be born” because its usage in that context is the same in all other contemporary sources. This is how we know your belief that Romans 1:3 means “cosmic sperm bank” is wrong; it contradicts our knowledge of NT Koine Greek.
What you’re doing is taking an ancient author, divorcing him from his historical context and assuming he believed in modern 20th century ideas. That’s not called doing history, that’s called doing anachronism.
It doesn’t matter whether mythicism requires the “cosmic sperm bank” hypothesis or not, the fact is you believe the “cosmic sperm bank” hypothesis is the likeliest interpretation of Romans 1:3.
As I have previously shown, BAGD shows that you are wrong.
BAGD even lists the correct interpretation and translation of Romans 1:3, which is based on the entirety of Hellenistic literary sources.
Mario, you are not listening to anyone here. You are misusing the dictionary, and not acting like a responsible interpreter of texts. This has been explained to you multiple times now.
Doesn’t matter what Mario hears, Richard, he refuses to pay attention. His dictionary says that the word means one thing…he doesn’t care how Paul actually uses the language himself, only what his dictionary and 300 years of unbiased “scholarship” as he calls it tells us. He’s a believer. The mind of a bible believer has a bias that Fort Knox itself tips it’s hat to.
This idea that the gospels show Jesus being progressively historicized is a hard to follow one. Regardless of the supposed intention of the authors or Paul’s belief in Jesus’s divinity (which are irrelevant), it is a fact that the synoptics focus exclusively on the historic missionary activity of Jesus on earth. John is the only gospel that deemphasizes Jesus’s historicity to focus on his existence as the preexistent Logos, devoting an entire prologue to it. In fact divine preexistence is alluded to throughout the gospel (see 8:58, 17:5). Not once do the synoptics discuss Jesus ahistorically, as a preexistent being. John cares less about the historic activity of Jesus than the other gospel writers, which makes his gospel the least historicizing one.
If anything, the gospels show a trend toward dehistoricization, with John being the one that most focuses on Jesus’s divinity.
First of all, that still doesn’t answer a problem even Bart Ehrman agrees exists (though he confines it to the margins): the idea of a low-to-high Christology ignores that Paul has an exceedingly high Christology.
Second, John still has Jesus appear in the same time period. John’s Jesus monologues for much longer than the others. There is no cagey possibility like with Mark that the entire thing is supposed to be read through allegory. It’s a much more literalist text. He interacts with Jews, he’s in the Garden of Gethsemene, he’s at specific feasts and performs specific miracles. John’s Jesus may be more fabulous, but he’s also at least as, and arguably more, entrenched in a specific time and space. So there’s actually no progressive dehistoricization: John is writing a history (that non-Christians view as fictive) of a fabulous being, but it’s still a history and a specific one.
First, Paul’s high Christology is a problem for those who believe Jesus was historicized. It’s quite possible low and high Christologies existed from the very beginning, but different writers chose to emphasize those aspects of Jesus that best served their theological purposes.
Second, you’re forgetting that the gospel of John begins with the Logos prologue, not to mention the various references to Jesus’s preexistence throughout. As the preexistent Logos, Jesus existed outside time and space, before the creation of the universe. This would make John’s gospel less historical than the synoptics, not more.
No it isn’t! Paul’s high Christology is exactly what we would expect if the cult was founded from the start with Jesus as an archangel! It’s not clear in Richard’s proposed timeline when the cult became a mystery cult, if it were always a mystery cult or acquired that later, but either way Paul would be an insider (possibly writing to other insiders though I grant the degree of his correspondence is weird).
But for historicity, it is bizarre that a real-life cult leader has the surviving written work of a key proponent of the religion who met the people, in person, who the Gospels would claim and historicity would claim were the first members of this cult never talks about the real guy. Read Scientology’s biography of L. Ron Hubbard, or look at the Falun Gong, or any modern example where we know the guy exists: there are mythological claims, true, but also real, totally mundane facts about the people in question. There isn’t, for example, a bizarre lack of information about where this guy was for decades! Paul never uses what the historical Jesus said when he was preaching as a means of settling arguments.
Notice how you have to resort to speculation: ” It’s quite possible low and high Christologies existed from the very beginning, but different writers chose to emphasize those aspects of Jesus that best served their theological purposes”. It’s also possible that the cult was founded by Peter based on visions of an archangel, but you dismiss those possibilities as not likely. Why is it likely, at all, that a cult founded by a real person would have such variance as to whether the cult’s founder was even a friggin human being? Surely the cult leader would be pretty clear as to whether he was a human Messiah or a demigod or an angel! It makes no sense that the very nature of their leader would vary that much, and it makes no sense that stories about the leader and his teachings would be so unimportant to the earliest adherents.
And I’m not forgetting that John starts that way. You’re cherry-picking around the fact that, aside from John’s version of “Once upon a time”, he describes a Jesus who is deeply, physically human, there in person, talking and teaching and doing stuff. As Richard pointed out to you, to no response, if mythicism were true then one would anticipate that writings by the church elite would discuss Jesus in high Christology terms (check) then the earliest myths would be cagey filters that would see if people would get excited by this earthly teacher and could learn the hidden allegories (check; Mark is entirely mythico-allegorical) and then the stories would become way more literal and direct, just like all marketing does. John checks the third box: By that point, the cult (within mythicism) had clearly either ceased being a mystery cult or had ceased being coy with their marketing and just had their divine being say he was a divine being. But if the cult were founded by a real person, we would expect that the earliest stuff in the cult was a mix of fantasized stories about a guy who is otherwise real (e.g. a cult I personally know has a very real founder who has been seen by cult members to walk through walls, but you know it’s nonsense brought about by slavish devotion and even he doesn’t claim to be able to do that), more benign and random stories that still put the good in a good light, maybe even some stories about people who left the cult and didn’t like the real person. That’s not what we see. Historicism has to explain that progression of evidence, and thus far people like Ehrman don’t even try.
Hold on, where does the NT say that Jesus was an archangel? Hebrews 1:4 makes it clear that Jesus is superior to the angels.
Paul does quote from Jesus’s teachings to settle disputes, see 1 Corinthians 11:23-26. He also clearly sees Jesus as a human being, despite his high Christology, see Romans 1:3 and Galatians 1:19. He’s pretty clear that Jesus is human all throughout his writings.
You make it sound that an early high Christology detracts from the historicity of Jesus. The earliest sources for Vespasian present him as a miracle-worker who healed the blind and sick, but that doesn’t detract in any way from his historicity. Why should it do the same for Jesus?
“Archangel” basically means superior to angels, as in, supreme angel. Hebrews does not say Jesus wasn’t an angel. It says he was exalted over all the angels. Exactly what Philo says of the same figure in Jewish angelology (the firstborn son of God, the agent of creation, the image of god, the high priest of God’s celestial temple, the Logos, etc., Philo says is an “archangel of many names”). Read Bart Ehrman, How Jesus Became God, for the evidence the Christians (including Paul) believed Jesus was an angel.
You are confusing “became a human being” (Philippians 2) with “was a human being.” The Christians did not believe Jesus always was human. They believed he was an eternal supreme (arche-) messenger (-angel) of God who briefly assumed a body of flesh to die in. Then was exalted back to angelic lordship. Jesus was human only briefly. He was at all other times the supreme angel of God. This is clear throughout Paul and other pre-Gospel texts like Hebrews. I cite all the verses demonstrating it in OHJ. Read it.
Read Hebrews carefully in context. “In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, 2 but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom also he made the universe. 3 The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word. After he had provided purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven. 4 So he became as much superior to the angels as the name he has inherited is superior to theirs.” Jesus performed an action that ascended him to the position of the Sun, “inheriting” a name. That’s a preexistent divine being, ergo an archangel, exalted beyond that. Exactly as Richard describes from Philo etc.: an angel that’s a divine high priest. Moreover, Hebrews is not clearly Pauline (and the consensus seems to be that it’s not Paul at all due to stylistic differences) and is not certainly dated. If it dates from before the Temple’s destruction, that’s especially devastating to historicity, because that would again be an early claim by the cult that Jesus did a bunch of stuff (noteworthily seemingly not on Earth) that made him a super-God, and not at all an earthly man. You’re squirming out of a simple fact that everyone agrees on, even Ehrman: Paul is weirdly silent about the actual Jesus.
As for 1 Corinthians 11:23-26: Read carefully. Paul “received” that. Directly. But no one claims that Paul met the living Jesus! As Richard makes clear in the most basic version of the mythicism thesis, every single claim that Paul makes about Jesus’ supposed teachings are from revelation or scripture. Paul never describes a Sermon on the Mount, or teachings in a synagogue. There’s no description of when Jesus had to resolve some dispute among living members of the cult. Contrast that with the hadith or even the New Testament. There, we have instances where a theological question or a question of morality is settled. Take Jesus in the (much later addition) of sparing the woman accused of adultery. Jesus there is posed as a cagey person who comes up with a clever piece of teaching that also communicates broader themes of the Gospel. Hadiths overwhelmingly describe Mohammed entering a place or doing a thing and settling some specific dispute: See 4397 for example. Now, a lot of hadiths aren’t authentic, but the point is that a huge swath of Mohammed’s life is described in biographical details from the very first sources we have. I’m not an Arabic scholar, but there’s still a pretty obvious difference. Even when it comes to the Buddha, whose historicity is absolutely in question (and I say this as a Buddhist), we have stories that describe the Buddha coming to a place and teaching a lesson to specific characters. Why does Paul not have anything like that? That’s a question for any theory to answer. You can’t just duck out of it.
Yes, an early high Christology makes Jesus less likely to be historical. Even if you were right that Vespasian’s earliest sources only described him as a healer, that’s still not a literal god in Heaven giving revelations and commands, the highest of the archangels, so it’s a far less mythologized comparison (and so obviously so that I have to question your motivation in choosing it), and he founded a freaking dynasty. Tacitus wrote a history about him. So did Suetonius. We have friggin coins depicting him as emperor. Yes, he’s one of the emperors for which there is less certain information, but we still have a history written by a friend of his, Josephus, describing his actions! There is nothing like this for Jesus. And I wonder why you keep trying to ask a version of this same question when you keep getting the same response: If you find someone as mythologized for whom reliable sources testifying to their existence are as scant and poor as Jesus, we’ll doubt their existence too! And despite your complaints about the cosmic sperm bank, you fail to miss the point of the argument which also establishes the difference: Richard has made an argument for a specific scenario. He isn’t just saying that Jesus could be mythical, he’s saying that there is a specific chain of events that can be reasonably inferred from the evidence. If you can do that for Vespasian, and make an argument from evidence that Vespasian being mythical is actually a better explanation with a specific indication as to why such a cult may have emerged, then you’ll be on your way. But without that, the analogy fails, and the fact that you are erecting a strawman is clear.
“That’s a preexistent divine being, ergo an archangel, exalted beyond that.”
Aren’t you simply begging the question here? He is the Logos, but Logos =/= archangel. Where in the text is he described as an “archangel”? He is nowhere described as an archangel or angel anywhere in the NT. Moreover, Jesus is a very strange name for an angel, given that all angels have names ending in “el.”
“Moreover, Hebrews is not clearly Pauline (and the consensus seems to be that it’s not Paul at all due to stylistic differences) and is not certainly dated. If it dates from before the Temple’s destruction, that’s especially devastating to historicity, because that would again be an early claim by the cult that Jesus did a bunch of stuff (noteworthily seemingly not on Earth) that made him a super-God, and not at all an earthly man.”
This is wrong, because Hebrews mentions “the days of Jesus’ life on earth” (Hebrews 5:7). There were probably divinizing and humanizing elements at the earliest stages of the Jesus tradition.
“Paul is weirdly silent about the actual Jesus.”
That’s not true. Paul said a number of things about Jesus as a human being, see Romans 1:3, 5:15, 9:5, Galatians 1:18-19, 4:4, 1 Corinthians 15:21-22 and other passages.
“As for 1 Corinthians 11:23-26: Read carefully. Paul ‘received’ that. Directly. But no one claims that Paul met the living Jesus!”
How is whether it was “received” or not even relevant? How does it change the fact Paul is referring to Jesus as a human being while he was on earth? There is no other parallel to this, except the gospel accounts.
“Yes, an early high Christology makes Jesus less likely to be historical.”
There are also early traditions about Alexander the Great as a demigod, but that doesn’t make him any less historical.
“Even if you were right that Vespasian’s earliest sources only described him as a healer, that’s still not a literal god in Heaven giving revelations and commands, the highest of the archangels, so it’s a far less mythologized comparison (and so obviously so that I have to question your motivation in choosing it), and he founded a freaking dynasty. Tacitus wrote a history about him. So did Suetonius. We have friggin coins depicting him as emperor. Yes, he’s one of the emperors for which there is less certain information, but we still have a history written by a friend of his, Josephus, describing his actions! There is nothing like this for Jesus. …
If you find someone as mythologized for whom reliable sources testifying to their existence are as scant and poor as Jesus, we’ll doubt their existence too!”
Tacitus is only valuable in the case of Vespasian, but not Jesus? Why?
If we barely have any direct contemporary evidence for a major historical figure like Hannibal (an inscription), then how can we expect contemporary evidence for some obscure Jewish preacher in some insignificant corner of the Roman empire? To demand that kind of evidence is unreasonable, given the fragmentary state of the ancient historical record. If you were familiar with modern historiography, you would know that biblical scholars use an actual set of criteria to establish historicity, not contemporary evidence, which is absent in the vast majority of cases.
“Richard has made an argument for a specific scenario. He isn’t just saying that Jesus could be mythical, he’s saying that there is a specific chain of events that can be reasonably inferred from the evidence.”
But Richard’s argument is an invalid one because it’s based on a mistranslation of the Greek.
“If you can do that for Vespasian, and make an argument from evidence that Vespasian being mythical is actually a better explanation with a specific indication as to why such a cult may have emerged, then you’ll be on your way. But without that, the analogy fails, and the fact that you are erecting a strawman is clear.”
Except I never made that claim, just that mythical elements in someone’s biography doesn’t mean that person never existed. There is more to establishing historicity than just contemporary evidence, which is why biblical scholars usually rely on the historical method.
“Angel” means “messenger.” Any supernatural messenger of God is an angel. Jesus is a supernatural messenger of God. Therefore Jesus is an angel.
This is just one of a dozen ways you simply stubbornly refuse to listen to us or understand what we are saying or even respond to it.
You’re done here.
Non starter anyway. Go read Dennis MacDonald and you can kiss historicity of anything in the Gospels goodbye…from Mark to Luke to John…ALL based on Greek epics. And don’t read JP Holding on MacDonald…read MacDonald’s actual scholarly works (there’s three of them and they aren’t cheap but they are definitive), not a third-rate amateur apologists reviewing a trade paperback by the same author.
Straw man. No one here is arguing for the historicity of the gospels, which are all based on transparent falsehoods anyway. However, just because the gospels are filled with childish babble aimed at stupid and/or ignorant people does not mean Jesus did not exist in some meaningful historical sense. Consider the evidence:
We have a contemporary of Jesus mentioning him in a series of letters soon after his death. We also have four biographies of Jesus, two references to Jesus in Josephus and another in a Roman source, all written by near-contemporaries of Jesus. All of these sources place Jesus in a specific historical place and time: Roman Palestine, mid-30s AD, under the Julio-Claudian dynasty. We can’t say the same thing for any truly mythical character.
Another reason we know Jesus existed is Occam’s razor; positing an historical Jesus requires the least number of assumptions and best fits the evidence, unlike the highly convoluted arguments for ahistoricity.
I understand that the typical Christian is a nasty piece of work, but that doesn’t mean we should go around spreading insupportable falsehoods ourselves. We’re so much better than Christians!
We also have . . . two references to Jesus in Josephus and another in a Roman source, all written by near-contemporaries of Jesus.
• Secular contemporary scholars (e.g. Maurice Casey and Bart Ehrman) who have written a defense for the historicity of Jesus, do not resort to “Non-Christian sources” for attestation of the historicity of Jesus in their works.
Per Lataster, Raphael (2019). Questioning the Historicity of Jesus: Why a Philosophical Analysis Elucidates the Historical Discourse. Brill-Rodopi. ISBN 978-9004397934.
There are no convoluted arguments for ahistoricity. The arguments are very straightforward. They do require putting facts back in context, but that’s how history is done correctly. It is not “making things convoluted.”
And there is no contemporary of Jesus who clearly places Jesus on earth as a recent person anyone met. Paul’s letters seem rather to say the opposite.
And many biographies were written of non-existent people, particularly savior heroes like Jesus. So having anonymous mythical biographies written a lifetime later about a savior hero is not evidence a savior hero existed. Not for any. And thus neither for Jesus.
And yes, those non-existent people were usually dated to specific eras, even specific years, as you’ll see in ancient chronologies, which school children were forced to memorize.
Meanwhile, Christians east of the Roman Empire were circulating Gospels claiming Jesus died in the 70s BC under the Hasmonean regime, not the Romans. In fact Babylonian Jews were aware of no other version of Christianity than that.
You really need to stop arm chairing this and read On the Historicity of Jesus to get the facts straight.
How is positing a widespread conspiracy to historicize Jesus in the early Church as parsimonious as saying Jesus is the founder of Christianity? Aren’t you just adding a few extra steps that require additional explanation?
“And there is no contemporary of Jesus who clearly places Jesus on earth as a recent person anyone met. Paul’s letters seem rather to say the opposite.”
That’s not true. We have Galatians 1:18-9 and 1 Corinthians 9:1-6, which clearly establishes Paul as a contemporary of Jesus. These verses show that Paul saw Jesus as a “recent person” that people had met. That James, the “brother of the Lord,” was a real historical person who lived in the early 1st century AD is confirmed by Book XX.200-203 of Josephus’s Antiquities.
Can you give me an example(s) of an obviously mythical character placed in a specific historical time and place by both contemporary and near-contemporary sources? The same as we have for Jesus?
Mario, we are not proposing any conspiracy. Read OHJ, index, “conspiracy.”
Galatians 1 and 1 Corinthians 9 do not “clearly” say anything about Jesus being on earth. You’ve been told why. Repeatedly.
There is no “Brother of the Lord” in Josephus. And all the evidence shows Josephus either did not say “Christ” either or just had that told him by historicizing Christians. So this affords no reliable evidence. This is thoroughly explained in OHJ. Read it. Respond to its arguments. Stop your armchair ignoring of it.
As for rapid legendary development, read my whole section on it in OHJ (Ch. 6.7). Read what I say in OHJ about the Cargo Cults (particularly John Frum) and Ned Ludd (the index has both). Read OHJ Ch. 8.1 that shows Christians placing Jesus in the 70s BC being executed by Jews and not Romans (who weren’t even in Judea then). And on and on.
Stop being ignorant. Get out of your armchair. Read the work, then respond to the work’s arguments. Or else you will be banned here. You’ve been given multiple chances. Three strikes and you are out. For good.
No, John is historicizing Jesus’s divinity. Mark allegorized it. Matthew turned it into a scripture. And Luke is the first to represent it as a history. And John is the first to insist everything he says is literally, historically true. That’s all fact. That’s the sequence. Denying it is denying reality.
Meanwhile, John did not add anything not already in Paul. And Mark is based on Paul. So there was no progression “to” John’s Jesus. The only difference between John’s Jesus and Paul’s is John is repeatedly insisting Jesus was really on earth. That’s it.
There’s obviously some confusion over terminology. To historicize is to make historical, i.e. to situate someone or something in a historical time and place; it doesn’t mean insisting on the “literal truth” of everything you say. For reference:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/historicize
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/historicize
If John is presenting Jesus as a preexistent Logos, who existed outside time and space before the creation of the universe, he’s not historicizing Jesus, but mythologizing and deifying him. If Jesus is beyond time and space, he’s outside history, not in it. As Logos, Jesus is ahistorical, which makes John’s gospel even less historical than the synoptics, which always focus on the historic missionary activity of Jesus. To say otherwise makes absolutely no sense in light of the evidence.
Mario, the problem is that John isn’t writing a D&D primer on a god’s folio. He doesn’t describe Jesus as a purely divine being and list his qualities and characteristics. He places Jesus on Earth, and has Jesus say that Jesus is all those things, directly. That means that he is putting the man, in this case god-man, Jesus squarely on Earth, which means historicizing him.
By your own definition, and based on Carrier’s timeline in the previous comment, John is historicising Jesus, by placing him in Judea around the year 0.
It’s irrelevant that John gave a backstory that included elements that we now know to be mythical… even on the C-D hypothesis Mark believed that Jesus was a real being in a real place. It’s mythical in the sense that we conclude that that place does not exist, not that the authors did. Therefore John is not “mythicising” Jesus by adding those elements.
What John is doing is taking elements of Mark’s allegory (and the subsequent historicisation by the other gospel authors) and is insisting that they actually happened (unlike Mark, who intended them as allegory), and elaborating on them as history. This is what is meant when one says that John is historicising (euhermerising?) the work of Mark.
I’m not sure how this isn’t clear and obvious from what’s been said above? But then, you seem to think that Carrier’s use of the word ‘sperm’ invalidates his argument on the seed of David, so you must be fairly obtuse…
That’s not quite correct.
It begins with Mark having Jesus say literal stories that are false are told to keep the secret allegorical truth hidden that will only be told to initiates. Just as Plutarch says the Osirians did with the biographies of Osiris.
Then Matthew “embellishes” Mark’s technique by adding allusions to the things he is saying fulfilling scripture, thus further disguising the truth but making it now look like scripture.
Then Luke takes this a step further and instead of making the allegory look like scripture, he makes it look like actual history, using all the markers of historical writing, but still never explicitly saying that what he is preserving is literally true rather than the correct allegory (the correct version of “the parable” of Jesus).
Then, for the first time ever, John comes along and outright says it’s not allegory, it’s literally true, and you’d better believe it because it’s literally true. Indeed a perfect example of this is how John takes Luke’s parable of Lazarus and turns it into a literal historical event that was never recorded before. I discuss this in Chapter 10.7 of OHJ.
You’ve lost track of the argument then. Mark 4 is a cipher that explains they are representing their story as history to disguise the truth from outsiders. Just as other religions did (e.g. Osiris cult). What John does differently is stop doing that: he denies he is doing that and insists what he says is literally true and is to be taken as literally true even by believers. And he is the first author ever to say that.
Thus it goes:
Mark writes an extended parable to disguise the teaching.
Matthew makes it look like scripture to disguise the teaching.
Luke is then the first to make it look like a history to disguise the teaching.
The John is the first to insist he isn’t disguising anything but writing what even insiders had better regard as literally true.
That’s the sequence of events.
The story gets more concretely historical over time.
Which is the opposite of what we should expect. We should first have mundane memoirs and letters about Jesus and his impact and the controversies about him among those meeting or confronting him. Then this evolves into more elaborate mythical legends. Just as happened with Alexander the Great. Instead we get elaborate mythical legends right out of the gate. Skipping everything else. And then gradually those legends are wrapped more and more to look like history, and then finally are insisted upon as history.
So you have a very idiosyncratic definition of historicization, rather than the conventional one found in dictionaries. Do you have any sources defining historicization the way you define it? According to you, to historicize means to claim something is “literally true.” What is this based on?
Where does John claim that what he is writing is “literally true”? Please show me where it says “literally true” in John. How does saying something is “literally true” make something more historical? Why is Luke’s gospel, which uses an actual historical methodology similar to the one used by classical historians, less historical than John, which relies on no such methodology? Please explain this to me because none of this makes any sense.
Mario, we’ve already told you where. We cited and quoted the verses.
There are indeed mythical legends about Alexander the Great, the Roman emperors and others that arose during or sometime after their lives. The earliest accounts of Alexander mention his “divine birth.” Satyrus and Pompeius Trogus come to mind. Alexander was even worshiped and called “son of Zeus” during his own lifetime.
I have already mentioned that the earliest sources for Vespasian mention that he healed the blind and the sick. Augustus was also considered a miracle-worker in the earliest sources. Yet you would not deny the historicity of any these people. Why do you have this double standard?
“By your own definition, and based on Carrier’s timeline in the previous comment, John is historicising Jesus, by placing him in Judea around the year 0.
It’s irrelevant that John gave a backstory that included elements that we now know to be mythical.”
No, it’s not irrelevant because Jesus’s preexistence and divinity are mentioned throughout John’s gospel. John does indeed historicize Jesus; he also mythologizes him far more than the synoptics.
“What John is doing is taking elements of Mark’s allegory (and the subsequent historicisation by the other gospel authors) and is insisting that they actually happened (unlike Mark, who intended them as allegory), and elaborating on them as history.”
Saying something is true does not make it historical; only using an actual historical methodology can make something historical. This is what separates Thucydides from Homer’s Iliad and, to a lesser extent, Luke from John. You’re not scoring any points around here by regurgitating Carrier’s BS.
“But then, you seem to think that Carrier’s use of the word ‘sperm’ invalidates his argument on the seed of David, so you must be fairly obtuse.”
Pointing out that σπέρμα and γίνομαι do not mean what Carrier says they mean certainly does invalidate the existence of a “cosmic sperm bank.” If you can’t see that, you haven’t been paying attention.
“Mario, the problem is that John isn’t writing a D&D primer on a god’s folio. He doesn’t describe Jesus as a purely divine being and list his qualities and characteristics. He places Jesus on Earth, and has Jesus say that Jesus is all those things, directly. That means that he is putting the man, in this case god-man, Jesus squarely on Earth, which means historicizing him.”
You’re totally missing the point.
Yes, John is historicizing Jesus, but he is also mythologizing Jesus far more than the synoptics. He does this by focusing on Jesus’s eternal preexistence as the Logos. This is why Carrier’s belief in progressive historicization from Mark to John breaks down. It’s not supported by the evidence.
Mario, Mark was a Pauline. We thus know he believed in the preexistence and divinity of Jesus.
You seem to be confusing his extended parable (the literal story meant to deceive) with what Mark actually believed (and what insiders would actually be taught his text meant, per Mark 4). John is not “increasing” the mysticism of Jesus belief. He is simply making it more literal and explicit—he has ceased using the allegorical tricks of the synoptics, and in fact repudiating them, by now insisting he isn’t writing allegory but literally true stories. The beliefs represented aren’t new. All the Synoptic authors will have believed the same things of Jesus. You keep confusing their technique of hiding their beliefs behind allegories with John’s decision to stop doing that, a decision that represents an increasing historicization of Jesus.
Until you understand this, you won’t understand what any of us are talking about here. And to you certainly won’t understand the Gospels.
Mario, you not responding to the difference in quality of evidence is extremely disingenuous. Maybe you have a point and maybe you don’t, but you cannot establish that Richard’s standard means that Vespasian, Alexander, etc. don’t exist. Because
a) None of them were as mythologized as Jesus. Period. “A dude is super cool and has Zeus’ blood in his veins” is not the same as someone who fulfills numerous prophecies, is anointed by a key leader of a respected faith (John the Baptist), lays down a canon of law, and engages in numerous mythical and allegorical actions. Nothing Jesus does sounds like something a normal person does, nor his disciples. This is why Richard uses the Rank-Raglan list. Your only objection to it is subjective. How? How is it any more subjective than me determining the quality of the evidence of, say, a piece of coinage? There are clear criteria in Rank-Raglan. And if it’s subjective, as Richard keeps saying, then it should be trivial for you to generate a totally different list from Richard’s where historical figures dominate. No one does this. So you’re just making excuses for not engaging with the argument. You’re not even bothering to try to explain why Vespasian is as mythologized as Jesus, even as you yourself cite examples of people describing Jesus as literally the Right Hand of God, having saved the world from sin! It just screams disingenuity.
b) We have evidence for these people that overcomes them being otherwise mythologized. You keep downplaying or ignoring that and it makes your argument bunk.
and, most importantly
c) No one has put forward an alternative theory for how we today have the stories of Vespasian et al.
That’s what you keep ignoring. When you come up with an alternative explanation for our surviving accounts of Vespasian, then the analogy will be complete. For now, by constantly making a comparison to some random figure who was mythologized to some extent with no regard for either the degree of evidence of their historicity or the degree of mythologicization, you are constructing a strawman by pretending that Richard is just inferring mythicism from those two points of data. In fact, it’s not just the paucity of data but the specifics about that data that makes Richard make his argument. You are free to disagree, but you have to actually explain why a mystery cult doesn’t explain the evidence better or as well. Every one of your objections thus far has missed the mark on this front.
Mario: The problem remains twofold.
First, you keep conceding that Paul had a high Christology. But that means that the trajectory goes from a high, to a low, and back to a high Christology from Paul to Mark to Mathew to Luke to John. By just looking at the Gospels, you strawman the argument badly.
Second, you’re not responding to Richard’s point or to mine. In fact, you’re arguing circularly. Richard is arguing that Mark, and Matthew, and Luke, actually had a high Christology, and only told stories with a low Christology, just like the other mystery cults. You can’t deny that by insisting that the intended Christology is low: that’s the argument to be made.
And you’re focusing only on literal events rather than looking at the genre and intent of the piece, which means you keep functionally conceding the argument. Yes, John’s Jesus is much more explicitly a divine being (though if you actually look carefully, all four Jesuses still do miraculous things, and the followers don’t, and all of them position Jesus performing actions with massive mythological significance so all show Jesus as a grand king which means all of them are mythologized). But that’s not the point. The point, as Richard keeps saying and you keep not responding to, is that Mark writes a highly cagey story that comes off like a myth or “Just So” story, Matthew writes the story *as scripture, and only Luke and John act like it’s history. That is weird if the cult was founded by a real guy. We would expect that the earliest stories would be the most literal, containing the highest proportion of claims that are clearly not meant to be taken as allegorical.
For example:We shouldn’t be seeing a Sermon on the Mount, a thesis statement on the entire ministry, appearing after Mark. The earliest stories should be as much of what Jesus actually said and did as possible. Yes, if you circularly presuppose that the real cult lost touch with reality and had an ascending Christology then you can explain John’s Christology, but not the fact that only John is writing a literalistic text.
Even the scholars know this, Mario. Lots of presupposed versions of Q and other hypothesized documents are sayings Gospels. Because even the non-mythicists clearly know that it’s weird that we don’t have surviving texts that describe what the supposed teacher-founder of the cult actually said. Unlike, say, even Buddhism, where the Buddha’s life is highly mythologized but we get a very early, very clear ideology being espoused.
“Maybe you have a point and maybe you don’t, but you cannot establish that Richard’s standard means that Vespasian, Alexander, etc. don’t exist. Because
a) None of them were as mythologized as Jesus. Period. ‘A dude is super cool and has Zeus’ blood in his veins’ is not the same as someone who fulfills numerous prophecies, is anointed by a key leader of a respected faith (John the Baptist), lays down a canon of law, and engages in numerous mythical and allegorical actions. Nothing Jesus does sounds like something a normal person does, nor his disciples.”
Alexander was also heavily mythologized at an early date. He was the son of a god, was born from a virgin and even fulfilled prophecies. This tradition probably emerged during his lifetime. He even demanded divine worship from his own men. Let’s not forget the large body of myths and legends about Alexander that arose after his death, with their tales of sorcery and the miraculous. Again, mythological elements, even if early, on their own do not prove anything.
Furthermore, you’re overexaggerating the mythologization of Jesus in the NT. There’s mythical elements, obviously, but not enough to obscure the historical character of Jesus. A coherent, demythologized account of the man can still be discerned. He is primarily seen as a man throughout the NT, which is why he is rarely, if ever called god.
“This is why Richard uses the Rank-Raglan list. Your only objection to it is subjective.”
Yes, it is indeed subjective because the language used is vague and open to interpretation. The criteria could be interpreted in such a way as to include just about anyone. To be a Rank-Raglan hero, one must score a 12, which is entirely arbitrary. The scale could easily be used to classify Alexander the Great as a Rank-Raglan hero, so its obvious this scale (and any others like it) cannot be consistently used to determine historicity.
“You’re not even bothering to try to explain why Vespasian is as mythologized as Jesus, even as you yourself cite examples of people describing Jesus as literally the Right Hand of God, having saved the world from sin! It just screams disingenuity.
b) We have evidence for these people that overcomes them being otherwise mythologized. You keep downplaying or ignoring that and it makes your argument bunk.
and, most importantly
c) No one has put forward an alternative theory for how we today have the stories of Vespasian et al.”
What are you talking about? All I said was that mythological elements, whether they arise early or not, on their own do not undermine historicity.
You seem to think that absence of contemporary evidence determines historicity, but that’s not true; absence of contemporary evidence doesn’t prove anything, which is why biblical scholars rely on the historical method instead.
“For now, by constantly making a comparison to some random figure who was mythologized to some extent with no regard for either the degree of evidence of their historicity or the degree of mythologization, you are constructing a strawman by pretending that Richard is just inferring mythicism from those two points of data.”
No I don’t. It’s because you (and Richard) assume early mythologization implies lack of historicity, but it doesn’t. That was the purpose of bringing up Alexander and Vespasian, who were both mythologized early, but are still considered historical.
“You are free to disagree, but you have to actually explain why a mystery cult doesn’t explain the evidence better or as well. Every one of your objections thus far has missed the mark on this front.”
What are you talking about? I haven’t made any claims about a “mystery cult.”
No. We don’t. Since you continually willfully refuse to listen to us or understand what we are arguing, and have been warned about this again and again, you are hereby banned. We don’t want to hear from you again. You won’t behave yourself and only waste everyone’s time. Goodbye.
“First, you keep conceding that Paul had a high Christology. But that means that the trajectory goes from a high, to a low, and back to a high Christology from Paul to Mark to Mathew to Luke to John. By just looking at the Gospels, you strawman the argument badly.”
Again, both low and high Christologies were present at the time of Paul, so there’s no straw man here. I’ve also never conceded anything.
The NT tends to emphasize Jesus’s humanity, rather than his divinity, which is why he is seldom called god or equated with god throughout. These Christologies later evolved into the two dominant factions of Christianity which, by the 4th century, were the Nicene and the Arian parties. They both claimed their teachings could be traced back to the early Church.
“Second, you’re not responding to Richard’s point or to mine. In fact, you’re arguing circularly. Richard is arguing that Mark, and Matthew, and Luke, actually had a high Christology, and only told stories with a low Christology, just like the other mystery cults. You can’t deny that by insisting that the intended Christology is low: that’s the argument to be made.”
Whether you see it as historicization or the progressive revelation of a high Christology, it contradicts the historical evidence and what most scholars think. There were both low and high Christologies at the time of Paul. In the NT, Jesus is seen primarily as a human being, which is shown by its strong undercurrent of subordinationism / adoptionism and the paucity of references to his divinity.
“The point, as Richard keeps saying and you keep not responding to, is that Mark writes a highly cagey story that comes off like a myth or ‘Just So’ story, Matthew writes the story *as scripture, and only Luke and John act like it’s history.”
No convincing evidence has ever been provided showing that Luke and John are pretending to write “histories.” Luke is the only one writing a history, using an actual historiographic methodology; his narrative is the most structured chronologically speaking and actually situated in world history. He does not write good history, but he is nevertheless writing history. John is not writing history at all. Carrier has yet to show how insisting an account is “literally true” makes it historical or even if John ever says his account is “literally true.” Until he can show this, his interpretation will remain highly unconvincing.
“Yes, if you circularly presuppose that the real cult lost touch with reality and had an ascending Christology then you can explain John’s Christology, but not the fact that only John is writing a literalistic text.”
No, he is not writing a “literalistic” text. This has never been proven by either you or Carrier. Where does John say his text is “literally true”? He doesn’t say that anywhere. Stop reading what you believe into the text. The NT contains two Christological strands, but the low Christology is the most dominant.
“Because even the non-mythicists clearly know that it’s weird that we don’t have surviving texts that describe what the supposed teacher-founder of the cult actually said.”
Is that so unusual? We don’t have surviving texts from Zeno of Citium or Aristippus of Cyrene, but that doesn’t mean these men never existed. We know what they believed in because of what other men said.
“Unlike, say, even Buddhism, where the Buddha’s life is highly mythologized but we get a very early, very clear ideology being espoused.”
How are Buddha’s teachings much clearer than Jesus’s? They were put down in writing centuries after his death, unlike Jesus, so it would be much harder to figure out what Buddha actually thought compared to Jesus.
I find it interesting how often people are tripped up by syncretism. For example: let’s say it were true that there were no extant dying-and-rising cults at the time of Christianity. So what? People in the development and creation of religions go back to the well all the time. Nietzsche, though not religious, used Zarathrustra elements despite Zoroastrianism being from his perspective a dead religion; and you can see all sorts of weird, seemingly dead ideas that come back in Afro-Caribbean religions. Modern Christianity thanks to the ascension of the Enlighenment tends to include lots of elements that echo the Greeks (e.g. the way a lot of people think of Cupid/Eros as being an angel), despite the fact that those living adherents are long gone. “No one was actively worshiping in that fashion at the time, therefore no one could have borrowed that idea” is obviously fallacious.
Even a liberal Jesus with all the supernatural elements cut out still lays claim to historically enunciating doctrine. The problem of claiming a real person actually taught this or that tenet the historicist wants to call a revelation is simple enough: We have more reason to believe the teachings were mythical as one of Plato’s myths. The indications of secret teachings further undermines the theology, unless one commits to a church claiming continuity with the past. And even then the historical record of changes in any alleged institution preserving the truth seems to require a commitment to continuing revelation. This brings us right back to believing in superstition.
The claim Jesus rose from the dead should make everyone question anything said about the supposed teachings as well. The whole point of historicism is to somehow claim some sort of reality for the religion without openly conceding the superstition.
That’s not really true. Plenty of scholars, including plenty of non-Christian scholats, agree little or nothing attributed to Jesus is true yet still insist Jesus existed. So that cannot explain the appeal of historicity. It’s more likely just a juggernaut, to borrow a metaphor first introduced by Goulder.
The reason mainstream scholars accept the historicity of Jesus is because all of the evidence points in that direction. Yes, all of the stories about Jesus are superstitious bullshit, but that does not mean he never existed. Alexander the Great was born of a virgin and different Roman emperors worked miracles, but we know they existed. The evidence for Jesus includes Paul’s letters, the gospels and two references in Josephus (even though one is a partial interpolation), plus Occam’s razor, which destroys all convoluted arguments for the ahistoricity of Jesus
But Mario, the difference is that for Alexander we have the physical records, writings and archaeology to establish he existed, and even to trace a timeline that explains why an emperor like him would be deified. Moreover, it makes sense that someone with his immense and unparalleled impact on history would, in a superstitious time, be immediately saddled with myths. As Richard points out with the Rank-Raglan scale (and you can use any approach to mythologicization you like, they’re all going to come up with similar conclusions), Jesus is in a class of his own if he were a real person. He would have been so mythologized, so rapidly, such that the very first words about him describe him essentially as a god (Paul’s letters) and the next pieces are mythico-historical allegories that sound much more like pieces about Ned Ludd or Hercules than a real person. The people who are like Jesus in terms of relevant mythological markers (like being a remarkable king, laying down a body of law, having portentous encounters with important historical and mythological figures, going to the sea for great adventures, etc.) overwhelmingly don’t exist. People like Alexander, where there’s a mix of mythology and reality, tend to exist; people like Jesus don’t.
Do you care that even Ehrman admits that Paul’s letters describe almost nothing about the man and all the things being described sound like they’re about a pre-existent archangel? If Jesus were just an ordinary cult leader, isn’t it odd that the second generation of converts, people like Paul who became leaders and spoke directly to the founders of the sect, know so little about their supposed founder’s life on Earth and care so little? I am a historicity agnostic and I must admit that’s super weird. It evinces a cult that became unhinged incredibly rapidly despite their leader dying apparently very early on.
Occam’s razor says that religious figures are apt to lie and their claims in themselves are not evidence. There goes the gospels, and I think Paul too. Not even Acts dares to tell us what became of that guy, whom I always imagine as sounding like Nixon. Philo Judaeus had a particular interest in Pilate’s oppressions, but he knows nothing of Jesus. A Jesus who was not crucified by the Romans? The problems with Josephus’ references are notorious. But even supposing they were real, what does a Jewish sect with some sort of hereditary succession have to do with the Jesus of the Bible? There seems to be a reason why the New Testament loves it multiple uses of common names with no explanation of which is which.
Further, the historicity of Jesus is about insisting a real person taught something, then was murdered, then people made up stories about him. Occam’s razor says, the stories of an apocalyptic cult about their savior to come are not historical, especially not when they decorate their stories with a few random facts. The historicity of Jesus is an incoherent concept, and there is no honorable reason for insisting on it.
If we applied the same standards to Jesus as we do to more prominent people like Alexander, we would end up dismissing the existence of most people who ever lived in the ancient world. The Rank-Raglan scale is subjective anyway and doesn’t allow us to consistently determine historicity. Just because there are myths about Jesus doesn’t mean he never existed. Just because we have minimal historical information about Jesus doesn’t mean he never existed
The reason why we know Jesus existed is because of our sources: we have contemporary and near-contemporary authors placing Jesus in a specific historical and cultural context. We know when Jesus lived and we can date his ministry, trial and execution with some degree of precision, to the early 30s AD. You cannot say this for any mythical character.
“Occam’s razor says that religious figures are apt to lie and their claims in themselves are not evidence.”
The myths about Jesus are irrelevant. It is just more parsimonious to assume Jesus as the founder of Christianity than the existence of some widespread, secret conspiracy in the early church that led to the historicization of a divine Jesus. The latter involves too many steps requiring additional explanation, which means it must be ruled out because of Occam’s razor.
No, Mario, the same standards do not lead to doubting the historicity of Alexander the Great.
This has been extensively explained already. Read the damned book. It’s very affordable. If you keep making arguments showing you haven’t even read the book, and keep failing to respond to those arguments, I will permanently ban you from making blog comments.
You’ve been warned.
“No, Mario, the same standards do not lead to doubting the historicity of Alexander the Great.”
May I clarify something?
My point was that there are other grounds for establishing historicity, not just contemporary references in historians. Isn’t this why Jesus’s historicity is usually dismissed by mythicists? If we apply the same criteria to Alexander the Great, then we could easily deny his existence because there are no surviving contemporary historical accounts of his reign, not until Diodorus, which is centuries later. Yes, there are a few fragments from primary sources, but these are all secondhand and their authenticity can easily be doubted if we apply the same mythicist standards to deny the historicity of Jesus.
That’s all I wanted to point out. Lack of contemporary references doesn’t mean non-existence. I won’t bring this up ever again.
“But Mario, the difference is that for Alexander we have the physical records, writings and archaeology to establish he existed, and even to trace a timeline that explains why an emperor like him would be deified.”
The evidence for Alexander the Great isn’t as good as you think it is. There are no surviving contemporary historical accounts of his reign; the earliest account we have was written over 250 years after his death. There’s a few fragments from primary sources, but they’re all secondhand, which means their authenticity is difficult to ascertain. There’s some contemporary archaeological and numismatic evidence, but it isn’t as unambiguous as some people make it out to be. There’s plenty of room for interpretation.
The situation for Hannibal is even worse; apparently he can only be directly linked to a single contemporary inscription. There’s also a fragment, but it does not mention Hannibal by name.
Given the fragmentary nature of the evidence for world-historical figures like Alexander and Hannibal, how is it even rational to expect contemporary evidence of an obscure Jewish preacher in some provincial backwater? The demand is a totally absurd one. Very few people who lived in the ancient world can be documented with those kinds of sources, which is why no modern historian or biblical scholar evaluates the historicity of people and events on the basis of contemporary evidence. It’s a logical fallacy to equate absence with evidence.
Everything you just said, Mario, is false.
You’ll discover that fact when you read my section on the evidence for Alexander in OHJ.
But you won’t get to comment on it further here. You are banned for persistent misbehavior against repeated warnings.
“As Richard points out with the Rank-Raglan scale (and you can use any approach to mythologicization you like, they’re all going to come up with similar conclusions), Jesus is in a class of his own if he were a real person. He would have been so mythologized, so rapidly, such that the very first words about him describe him essentially as a god (Paul’s letters) and the next pieces are mythico-historical allegories that sound much more like pieces about Ned Ludd or Hercules than a real person. The people who are like Jesus in terms of relevant mythological markers (like being a remarkable king, laying down a body of law, having portentous encounters with important historical and mythological figures, going to the sea for great adventures, etc.) overwhelmingly don’t exist. People like Alexander, where there’s a mix of mythology and reality, tend to exist; people like Jesus don’t.”
This is not true at all. The same Rank-Raglan scale can be used to show that Alexander is even more of a myth than Jesus, simply because the language is so vague it can be interpreted to mean anything.
There isn’t a shred of proof this scale is a reliable indicator of historicity.
It’s also based on controversial ideas in the long-discredited field of psychoanalysis, so it doesn’t have much going for it.
Do biblical scholars and historians of antiquity even use this tool? No, they rely on historical-critical methodology when assessing historicity, not bogus scales. And according to this methodology, Jesus was indeed a real person.
Explicitly refuted in OHJ. And where no reference to “psychoanalysis” is involved.
You have been for months now arguing things without having read the book you claim to be rebutting. This is intolerable behavior. This and several other offenses, after multiple warnings now, has resulted in your permanent ban from commenting on my blog.
“Do you care that even Ehrman admits that Paul’s letters describe almost nothing about the man and all the things being described sound like they’re about a pre-existent archangel? If Jesus were just an ordinary cult leader, isn’t it odd that the second generation of converts, people like Paul who became leaders and spoke directly to the founders of the sect, know so little about their supposed founder’s life on Earth and care so little? I am a historicity agnostic and I must admit that’s super weird. It evinces a cult that became unhinged incredibly rapidly despite their leader dying apparently very early on.”
Even if this is true, it doesn’t mean Jesus never existed. Not even Ehrman denies the historical existence of Jesus, so you’re committing the fallacy of authority by quoting him.
Absence / presence of contemporary references is not used to establish historicity. In case you didn’t know, biblical scholars and historians of antiquity rely on something known as historical-critical methodology to determine what’s historical and what isn’t. One element of this methodology is the criterion of embarrassment. This means that if something is embarrassing to a group, it is more likely than not to be historical. According to the OT, the Messiah was not supposed to die. Yet Jesus, a self-proclaimed Messiah, was killed in the most embarrassing way possible, crucifixion. Since a crucified Messiah is embarrassing and would have been a source of mockery from Jews and pagans, it is more likely than not that Jesus was crucified.
There are many other tools inside the historian’s toolbox that are used to establish historicity, not just this one. When used together, they all show that Jesus was a real historical person. The idea that it’s just contemporary evidence that establishes historicity is a laughable one.
“No, Mario, the same standards do not lead to doubting the historicity of Alexander the Great.”
I think more clarification is needed. I don’t want to leave the impression I believe the evidence for Alexander is in any way comparable to that for Jesus:
Imagine if someone said there are no surviving contemporary historical accounts of Alexander, therefore Alexander wasn’t a real person. Of course, you would naturally object to this. You might point out fragments of primary sources, but your interlocutor might object on the grounds these fragments are secondhand, therefore of questionable authenticity. Then you would point to numismatic and archaeological evidence, which would be decisive.
My point is that just because we don’t have contemporary source material, doesn’t mean that person never existed. There are other means of establishing historicity besides contemporary historical sources or even archaeology. For less well-attested persons like Jesus, we can show he existed using the historical-critical methodology, which has been successfully applied in biblical studies and classical history.
I’m surprised the tools of biblical scholarship are never discussed here.
Anyway, I’ve just received my copy of OHJ in the mail, so the next time I discuss the historicity of Jesus, it will always be in direct reference to the book. I’m really looking forward to going through this book, since you so strongly recommended it.
The claim that many scholars who concede nothing of the teachings can be attributed but still insist on historicity for some other reason puts far too much credence in their professions of neutrality. I believe they are disingenuous.
Most people who accept the supernatural obviously do not use their beliefs much in everyday life, as they don’t work, don’t provide objective benefits. The alleged benefits, such as a life of cosmic meaning, or the creation of a just world, or a new life after death can be imagined far more easily than rain to end droughts, or the miraculous defeat of enemies or the healing of wounds. But, for people who refuse to accept a materialist outlook, immortality in the heavens/outer space is more easily believed.
This may seem a commonplace, but setting a story “long, long ago” functions the same way. Insisting on the historicity of Jesus is a concession that there may be a miracle-working Jesus. The insistence on historicity is about letting those who choose to believe what they want. Because, after all, if there was a real Jesus, then there must be some grain of truth to the stories about Him.
Also, the notion there really was a Jesus is about giving Christianity, however purged of miracles, a separate origin story, with an imaginary novelty, a break with an unsavory past or other inferior cultures. And, after two thousand years (allegedly) there is yet simultaneously a glorious antiquity, which is having it both ways. Even if you’re only into morals a la Jefferson, it’s still better to have a real martyr than an imaginary one.
Last, there is the insistence on historicity as an excuse for still collecting salaries for studying the New Testament, an exercise as useful in many ways as studying the foreign policy of King Arthur. I don’t this this is terribly important, but it’s there.
Just because Jesus was a historical person does not mean the Jesus of theology ever existed, nor does it make the falsehoods upon which the Christian religion is based true.
Likewise, just because we acknowledge the historicity of Alexander the Great or Augustus does not mean there was a divine Alexander or a miracle-working Augustus. One doesn’t logically entail the other. Your reasoning is flawed.
There is historical evidence that Jesus existed, i.e. contemporary and near-contemporary sources placing Jesus in a specific historical and cultural context. We know when Jesus lived. However, we cannot say the same thing for any mythical character.
With or without a historical Jesus, study of the NT is still valuable because it sheds light on the past.
Suggested minor corrections:
1. In section Agreements, paragraph 4, line 6, “jesus” should be “Jesus.”
2. In section Seeds of David, last paragraph, penultimate line, some word (perhaps “recent”) is needed between “most” and “article.”
3. In section Eliade on Zalmoxis, paragraph 4, line 7, “to” is needed after “nothing.”
4. In section Euhemerization, paragraph 6, lines 2 and 3, “of the” should follow “opposites.” In paragraphs 6 and 7, each occurrence of “messaging” should be “message.”
5. In section Is Anything in the Gospels True, paragraph 2, sentence 3, the first word (“It’s”) is incorrect. In paragraph 3, line 1, “a” should precede “number.” In paragraph 4, lines 1-2 should be “found and cited.”
The use of “messaging” is correct. And the use of “opposite message” “found and cite” are correct. The rest, fixed.
Chris H has written a response over at The Amateur Exegete where he claims that you have misrepresented both Mettinger and Eliades:
https://amateurexegete.com/2019/12/24/a-brief-note-on-richard-carriers-inability-to-read-why-aging-unemployed-bloggers-need-bifocals-guest-post-by-chris-h/
I was wondering how you respond to that?
Can you point me to where he says anything that isn’t already refuted by what I said here above?
Hansen present the following quotes in support of his position:
• Mettinger, Tryggve N.D. (2004) [1998]. “The “Dying and Rising God”. A Survey of Research from Frazer to the Present Day”. In Batto, Bernard Frank; Roberts, Kathryn L. (eds.). David and Zion: Biblical Studies in Honor of J.J.M. Roberts. Eisenbrauns. pp. 373–386. ISBN 978-1-57506-092-7. “First published in: Svensk exegetisk årsbok 63/1998.” [NOW BOLDED]
• Mettinger, Tryggve N. D. (2001). The Riddle of Resurrection: “Dying and Rising Gods” in the Ancient Near East (Coniectanea Biblica, Old Testament, 50). Almqvist & Wiksell International. ISBN 978-91-22-01945-9. [NOW BOLDED]
• Mettinger, Tryggve ap. Hansen, Chris (24 December 2019). “A Brief Note on Richard Carrier’s Inability to Read: Why Aging Unemployed Bloggers Need Bifocals (Guest Post by Chris H.)”. The Amateur Exegete.
• Eliade, Mircea (1972). Zalmoxis: The Vanishing God. University of Chicago Press.
• Marinov, Tchavdar (2015). “Ancient Thrace in the Modern Imagination: Ideological Aspects of the Construction of Thracian Studies in Southeast Europe (Romania, Greece, Bulgaria)”. In Daskalov, Roumen; Vezenkov, Alexander (eds.). Shared Pasts, Disputed Legacies. Entangled Histories of the Balkans, Vol. 3. BRILL. ISBN 978-90-04-29036-5.
Thank you. I appreciate the work you put into assembling that. It helps a lot.
I don’t see anything here that contradicts what I argued above.
In OHJ I only address Marduk in relation to his equation to Ba’al and thus am talking about Mettinger’s discussion of Ba’al. I am explicit about that. The single Assyriatic mock text about Marduk isn’t anything I discuss in OHJ and isn’t relevant to anything I say in OHJ.
And none of these quotes of Eliade contradict my highlighted quotes of Eliade. Hansen is confusing Eliade’s discussion of a general category of shamanic death and rebirth rituals (which includes actual cave descents, actual deaths and resurrections, and actual souls leaving bodies in rituals, all different versions of dying and rising) with the specific variant exhibited by the Getae’s mythology of Zalmoxis. This is why Eliade says Zalmoxis’s death and resurrection is “equivalent to” a descent myth, rather than “is” a descent myth.
By continuing to mistake “equivalent to” with “is,” Hansen keeps repeating the false claim that the Getae believed Zalmoxis only descended and didn’t die. Herodotus explicitly says the reverse. And indeed, in no text anywhere is it ever said the Getae ever associated any of this with a cave. The cave was a joke made up by Greeks poking fun at the Getae, which the Greeks borrowed from Pythagoras myth. And even in their joke, Zalmoxis never descends to the underworld. The cave is simply used to hide in and pretend he was dead. Which is not a belief any Getae held.
So there literally is no “descent myth” for Zalmoxis. Not anywhere. Not in reported beliefs of the Getae. Not even in the joke invented by the Greeks. And nowhere does Eliade actually say otherwise.
Dr. Carrier, what leads you to conclude that Matthew and Luke only vaguely claim that they’re writing literal, historical events? It seems that by claiming that the events described fulfilled prophecy (as in Matthew) or that the events were investigated so that the reader may know the exact truth (as in Luke), Matthew and Luke are rather straightforwardly claiming to be recording literal, historical events, no?
On a related note, many people cite Mark 9:1 as an embarrassing verse that therefore has a historical core, so how would you interpret it on your view? Do you think it might be a subtle encouragement that the end of the world is near and that some of them might live to see it?
By merely saying events fulfilled prophecy, Matthew doesn’t say why he is saying that; particularly given that we know he’s making it up (e.g. when he invents two donkeys for Jesus to simultaneously ride in on, an adult and a baby donkey). So is this more “parable so they will not understand and turn and be saved” stuff, or is it a reference to the cosmic truths underlying the allegory, or is Matthew actually trying to convince fellow Christians those things happened? It’s unclear. He never outright says any of that.
Similarly, Luke clearly wants someone to think he is writing a literal history. But who? Outsiders? Or insiders? Is the story he is relating “with precision” the allegorical story he is getting precisely right, or the literal story he is getting precisely right? Again we know Luke fabricates; so is he lying? And if so, to whom? Is this more Mark 4 stuff, where Luke is just doing what Jesus said to do, and tell literally false tales that conceal allegorical truths? Or is Luke breaking with that tradition and now actually trying to convince his fellow ranking Christians these things actually happened? It’s unclear. He never outright says.
Only John outright says. And he is the first author ever to do so.
Luke is clearly writing history.
He admits to carefully investigating his sources so as to prepare an accurate and orderly account of the life of Jesus, not unlike Josephus’s prologue to the Antiquities. Of the 4 gospels, only Luke situates his life of Jesus in the context of Roman or world history, even using the reigns of historically well-documented figures to chronologically structure his account. Not only that, but Luke’s narrative is linear, with a more systematic chronological arrangement of source material than the other gospels. This is not unlike Thucydides, whose history was also linear, with events determined by cause and effect.
These elements of Hellenistic historiography — the critical approach to primary sources, the placing of the narrative within the context of world history, the linear and systematic chronological ordering of events, the sense of causality — are not mere “trappings of history,” nor is Luke “pretending” to write history; these elements are so interwoven into Luke’s account they determine overall narrative structure. If they were mere “trappings,” their removal would not affect narrative structure, but this is far from being the case.
When we get to John, we see none of these elements. There’s none of Luke’s historiographic methodology: there’s no interest in primary sources, no sense of world history, no interest in linearity and causality, even a weaker chronological structure. John’s account is obviously non-historical. Just because he says his account is true does not make it historical. Do you even know what historical means?
If John was more historical than Luke, it would be even more reliant on historiographic methodology. To say otherwise is to admit profound ignorance of how history was written in the Hellenistic world, which required use of source material and some reliance on historiographic methodology. You don’t see any of that in John. At best, John is a work of mysticism.
This is more than enough to show there was no “progressive historicization” of Jesus in the gospels. What we see is both high and low Christologies present at the very beginning of the Jesus movement, with different writers emphasizing different ones.
(Whether Luke was a good historian or not is another matter altogether. He was obviously not in the same league as Thucydides or even Herodotus and a good deal more credulous.)
Mario, if Luke is writing history why is he plagiarizing the LXX line-by-line?
The raising of the widow’s son is is plagiarized line-by-line from Kings.
You basically contaminated this entire page with your incompetence.
Talking about Luke without talking about Acts seems like omitting context to me.
Actually, Luke doesn’t quite do what historians did: he conspicuously does not name his sources or how he used them or that what they said was meant historically and not allegorically. He never engages critically with his sources (not even once do we see him ever doing so). Thus Luke wants someone to think he is writing history, but is careful to never explicitly say he is, or to explicitly do what historical writers do.
Luke is thus doing (or could be doing) what Jesus does in Mark 4: telling a story he expects outsiders to mistake as meant literally, while teaching his followers secretly that they are only meant allegorically. Which is a clue to everything Mark is doing himself (see Crossan’s The Power of Parable and my section on Mark’s mythographic technique in OHJ, Ch. 10.4).
Unlike Luke, John explicitly says what he is saying is to be taken as literally, historically true. The one thing Luke assiduously avoids ever saying. And indeed, John appears to be doing this in argument with Luke, for example taking Luke’s mere parable of Lazarus and turning it into a literally, historically true story about Lazarus, that reverses the entire argument Luke had been trying to make with it.
“Actually, Luke doesn’t quite do what historians did: he conspicuously does not name his sources or how he used them or that what they said was meant historically and not allegorically. He never engages critically with his sources (not even once do we see him ever doing so). Thus Luke wants someone to think he is writing history, but is careful to never explicitly say he is, or to explicitly do what historical writers do.”
You’re assuming ancient historiography was unified in its aims and methods, when in truth it was loosely defined. Classical historiography was just one approach, which emphasized use of highly polished language, critical engagement with sources and was aimed at high brow audiences, among other things. Thucydides is the chief representative of this genre.
Another approach to historiography was described by Lucian. The task of the historian, according to Lucian, was to write orderly fact-based narratives appealing to the common man. Luke belongs to this tradition more than the classical. Not only does he set out to write an “orderly account” based on the facts as he knows them, but the literary structure of his account is the most systematically chronological of the gospels. The simple language and novelistic details were incorporated to enhance its appeal to the common man.
In this tradition, Luke is indeed writing history. Is it good history? No it is not. His gospel contains too many novelistic and hagiographical elements for it to be taken at face value. These elements were deliberately exaggerated to appeal to a low brow audience. In terms of historicity, Luke is similar to the Historia Augusta, an account that can still be used, but with caution because one must dig through a mass of falsehoods surrounding an historical core.
I’m going to backtrack on that. Luke is not writing history, he’s writing historiosophy, which means he’s using certain historical events to illustrate a theological belief or theme. His intention is not to write accurate history, but to proclaim before a gentile audience that Jesus is the Messiah. I don’t see how this changes the fact that Luke is the gospel with the largest number of historicizing elements.
Luke wants to create the appearance of that. But coyly phrases things so as to make it unclear what he is doing “accurately”: preserving the history, or the allegory.
John is the first Gospel author to make clear he intends readers to take what he is saying as literal truth, and he appears to be arguing against Luke’s attempt not to make that clear.
This has been explained to you repeatedly.
You keep ignoring what we tell you. You’ve been warned about this multiple times now.
I’m done with you. You are heretofore banned from commenting on my blog.
Mark 9:1 was most likely written before 80 AD, when it could still be claimed someone somewhere was still alive, to stretch the timetable, but keep it within the immediacy of those first reading Mark.
It’s an attempt to explain why it didn’t happen in 70 (when the temple was destroyed) or immediately after (Daniel 9 would straightforwardly predict the apocalypse should thus have occurred in the year 73) but still is expected to happen “any time now.” This is how the apocalypse gets reinterpreted in every generation since, over two thousand years and going. It’s always “any time now” (in fact, most usually, “within our lifetime”). And the myth has to be reinterpreted or rewritten to keep that immediacy, despite its previous immediacy being refuted.
This makes sense. Do you think that Mark was composed in parts, then? I ask because your arguments in On the Historicity of Jesus seem to indicate that Mark is a unified whole with a single author.
Yes. I think it’s pretty clear Mark is a unified whole by a single author (except for the “Long Ending” which is a late interpolation). And we know this text had to be composed after 70 and most likely after 74 (since it’s shows use of the War by Josephus).
Traditional lore held that the maximum human lifespan was 120 years, so Mark could have written (and thus incorporated 9:1) as late as the dawn of the Bar Kochba revolt (in the 130s AD), imagining his audience to understand any teen or child standing with Jesus could survive to the 130s. Although I personally think Mark is dealing with the more urgent matter of the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 and thus writing much closer to that year.
Hi Richard,
Chris Hansen recently published a paper rebutting your views on Zalmoxis in the Journal of Higher Criticism. Are you planning to respond?
Sure. If you send me a copy. I can’t read it otherwise.
on biblical academic, a christian apologist by the name of korvexius wrote :
Furthermore, in Robert Price’s own Journal of Higher Criticism appeared another article this year discarding Carrier’s rubbish claims on Zalmoxis titled A Thracian Resurrection: Is Zalmoxis a Dying-Rising God who Parallels Jesus? I was amazed Price would publish a response to Carrier, but he did it alright.
https://old.reddit.com/r/AcademicBiblical/comments/efpuqh/tim_oneill_the_biblical_history_skeptics_on/
dr carrier, have you already addressed price ?
Never heard of it. Email me the paper though and I’ll blog about it.
The following is a log of previous blog article comments by Mario Van Kirk.
“What Did Paul Mean in Romans 1:3?”. Richard Carrier Blogs. 27 November 2019.
“Kamil Gregor on the Historicity of Jesus”. Richard Carrier Blogs. 31 October 2019.
Richard,
I still disagree with your translation of the heavens as “outer space” in the NT. It’s just ridiculously anachronistic and imprecise. Paul actually speaks of a three-tiered heavens (2 Cor. 12:2–4), which happens to be filled with various cosmic entities (thrones, dominions etc., see Col. 1:15-16). The heavens are maintained by Christ, their creator. The entire act of creation and maintenance of the universe sounds Middle Platonic, with god needing an intermediary, Christ, to create and sustain it. In Eph. 6, the church is warned against cosmic rulers, who oppose god.
How is outer space an accurate translation of the heavens, οὐρανός? Is our modern conception of outer space teeming with cosmic entities as well who may control and destroy us?
Not to mention the NT belief in a firmament separating the oceans of the heavens from the primeval waters at Mark 1:10-11, similar to the OT. “Torn apart” indicates there is a barrier between heaven and earth.
Also, what lexicon translates οὐρανός as “outer space”?
I should also point out that in the ancient Greek geocentric worldview, the corruptible lower heavens were sublunary and the unchanging higher heavens were superlunary. The sublunary and superlunary spheres were very different from each other metaphysically speaking. Calling this “outer space” is anachronistic, confusing, imprecise and inappropriate.
You seem intent on using RC’s choice of words as grounds to dismiss his thesis, whether it’s “sperm” or “outer space”. At some point you’re going to have to get past linguistic choices and grapple with the actual arguments they’re putting forward.
Your description of sublunary vs superlunary systems is something I personally learned from reading RC’s publically available corpus; that you don’t realise that this in no way diminishes his theory indicates either lack of effort or lack of reading comprehension.
Wrong. I’ve already explained to you that it is actually anachronistic now to call it “heaven,” and “outer space” is in fact closer to what they actually believed—and far less confusing and far more precise and appropriate.
That you just ignored my showing this to you here before and are now just arguing in a circle by repeating assertions we already refuted is more evidence I should simply ban you now. This plus your many other offenses I’ve called out and warnings I’ve given you are more than sufficient to take that step.
I’ll address your last remaining comments, then ban you permanently from commenting on my blog.
Since you are here just ignoring my refutation of the same point to you earlier and repeating the same refuted points as if I never responded to them, and have been warned several times against this and other offenses, you are heretofore banned.
Dr Carrier
‘Heretofore’ means ‘thus far’;
I think u ment ‘henceforth’…
Cheers.
Actually it means before now. I banned him before making that statement. This is one of numerous thread-closing comments about his ban.
MARIO VAN KIRK is hilarious .So much confidence yet so wrong about everything
11 points that refute Jesus mythicism:
(A) We have near contemporary sources for the life of Jesus (or Yeshua bar Yosef). These are 5 independent Christian sources (i.e. not dependent on each other for material), in addition to an independent Jewish and an independent Roman source. They are: (a) the 6 genuine letters of Paul, (b) the pre-Pauline creeds, (c) the Q or Quelle source, (d) the synoptic gospels, (e) the gJohn, (f) the historian Josephus (Testimonium Flavianum) and (g) the historian Tacitus (Testimonium Taciteum).
The earliest sources we have are the pre-Pauline creeds, dated a few years after the crucifixion of Jesus, in the late 30s.
Because of multiple attestation, these sources, when taken together, all provide evidence that Jesus lived and was crucified in early 1st century Roman Palestine.
(B) According to scholarly consensus, non-Christian historians Josephus and Tacitus both make genuine references to Jesus, who they regard as a real historical person.
On Josephus’ reliability as a historian:
“In behalf of Josephus, it must be recalled that all these defects… were widely shared among ancient historians, few of whom brought critical tools to their craft in any modern sense. Josephus, in fact, was more reliable than most historians of his day. Whenever he is not referring to himself, his material is basically reliable.”
Historian Paul L. Maier
On Tacitus’ reliability as a historian:
“If Tacitus was not a researcher in the modern sense, he was, however, a writer whose reliability cannot be seriously questioned.”
Historian Arnaldo Momigliano
(C) Paul was a contemporary of Jesus, who wrote about him 20 years after his death. Far from seeing Jesus as a heavenly, celestial being, Paul saw him as a real person. Jesus had a Jewish mother (Gal. 4:4) and a brother named James (Gal. 1:18-19), who is also mentioned by Josephus (Ant. XX.197). He was descended from King David (Romans 1:3), Abraham (Gal 3:16) and the Israelites (Romans 9:4-5).
Paul mentioned other historical details from the life of Jesus, such as his execution by earthly authorities (1 Cor. 2:8), crucifixion (1 Cor 1:23, 2:2, 2:8, 2 Cor 13:4) and burial (1 Cor 15:3-4).
(D) Unlike mythical figures, all of our sources situate Jesus within a specific historical and cultural context. We actually know when Jesus lived and died (6-4 BC to 30-36 AD).
(E) The evidence we have for Jesus is similar to that for all other Messianic claimants, like Theudas and Judas the Galilean, although there is somewhat more documentation for Jesus.
(F) There is archaeological evidence for Caiaphas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caiaphas_ossuary) and Pontius Pilate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilate_stone), who were major players in the arrest, trial and crucifixion of Jesus. This not only shows these were real people, but further enhances the notion that Jesus was historical.
(G) A historical Jesus is the best explanation for the origins of Christianity since it makes the least number of assumptions, minimizing the possibility of error. No other explanation has ever been shown to be as parsimonious as the historicity of Jesus.
Mythicism requires intellectual gymnastics that make it difficult for scholars to take seriously. Occam’s razor demands that we repudiate mythicism as a serious alternative to a historical Jesus.
(H) The historical-critical methodology used by biblical scholars has established that Jesus was a real person. The criterion of embarrassment, which is part of this methodology, states that sayings or events that cause embarrassment or difficulties for the church are not likely to have been invented. This increases their likelihood of authenticity. There are two elements of the gospel narrative that are best explained by this criterion:
(a) In the Jewish tradition, the Messiah was not supposed to die without completing his mission (i.e. re-establish Davidic dynasty, usher in era of unprecedented peace and prosperity, transform Israel into seat of world government etc.). Yet Jesus, a self-proclaimed Messiah, was crucified like a common criminal. Romans saw crucifixion as one of the most shameful ways to die, but among Jews, it was seen as particularly abhorrent because it meant the condemned person was accursed by Yahweh. Given the shamefulness of crucifixion and the fact Jesus’s life contradicted Jewish Messianic expectations, it is unlikely his crucifixion was invented by Christians. This shows that Jesus was, in all likelihood, a real person.
(b) gLuke and gMatthew go to great lengths to explain, not without contradiction, how Jesus was born in Bethlehem despite being from Nazareth, since the Messiah was prophesied to come from Bethlehem (Micah 5:2). If Jesus never existed, why bother mentioning an insignificant town like Nazareth? Why not tell the story without it, instead of going to great lengths to reconcile these contradictory details? The only reasonable explanation is a historical Jesus who came from Nazareth, which is why this couldn’t be left out of the narrative.
(I) There is no evidence of Jesus mythicism in the ancient world. Jewish and pagan opponents of Christianity never denied the existence of Jesus.
(J) “[G]iven that most human beings in antiquity left no sign of their existence, and the poor as individuals are virtually invisible … [w]hy would we expect any non-Christian evidence for the specific existence of someone of the socio-economic status of a figure such as Jesus at all? To deny his existence based on the absence of such evidence, even if that were the case, has problematic implications; you may as well deny the existence of pretty much everyone in the ancient world.”
Dr. Justin Meggitt, Senior Lecturer in the Study of Religion, University of Cambridge (2019)
(K) “Virtually no scholar working in the field of New Testament studies or early Christian history doubts the historical existence of Jesus of Nazareth. Indeed, the arguments of those who deny his historicity are usually judged by most working professionally in the discipline to be ‘so weak or bizarre that they relegate them to footnotes or often ignore them completely.’ Works advocating such a position are often dismissed ‘with amused contempt.’”
Dr. Justin Meggitt, Senior Lecturer in the Study of Religion, University of Cambridge (2019)
This is incredibli insipid thin apologia grul. surprising givn the welth’v resourcis here that make light wurk’v the points – 6 authentic letrs don’t speak’v a hisorical jesus – not in secular sens. jesus is much ‘histri’ as a ‘demun’ is. Truli mind bogglingli daft.
Recommendation for Mr. Van Kirk: Please read Dr. Carrier’s Proving History (re historical method), OHJ (re mythicism, which you have purchased), and Hitler Homer Bible Christ (re Josephus and Tacitus), peer-reviewed sources that address your concerns.
He hasn’t listened so far. He won’t now.
None of this is true and all of it’s refuted.
All these arguments are refuted in OHJ and PH.
Since you refuse to read OHJ or PH or my comments or my blog articles or address any of their arguments after being asked to repeatedly now, you are heretofore banned from commenting on my blog.
• Corrente, Paola; Castillo, Sidney (3 June 2019). “Philology and the Comparative Study of Myths”. The Religious Studies Project.
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SC: . . . your doctoral thesis [2013] revolves around the concept of dying god, right? And the presence of gods with this feature in Mediterranean and Middle Eastern civilisations. Could you share with us some of your major findings?
PC: Well, I think the most important is that the dying god does exist! Because, as you know, this category is very controversial. So now the position is that it was a wrong idea that the dying God does not exist – that it was a misunderstanding. And things like this. But studying, especially some texts – again, from Mesopotamia and from near Eastern tradition, and texts from Greece too, about Dionysus – so studying these texts and these myths I found out that the dying god exists, actually. And it is very curious that these three gods from Mesopotamia, Ugarit and Greece – or say from Mesopotamia, from Near East and from Greece – which are, like, the most certain examples of a god who dies and comes back, are ignored usually.
Dr. Carrier I’m curious if you’ve seen this. Most in the top 10 are atheistic countries correct? Do you think there is something to that?
Ranked: The 10 Happiest Countries In The World In 2019
Finland
Denmark
Norway
Iceland
Netherlands
Switzerland
Sweden
New Zealand
Canada
Austria
… 19. United States
https://www.forbes.com/sites/duncanmadden/2019/03/28/ranked-the-10-happiest-countries-in-the-world-in-2019/#2cde23e048a5
I don’t know what you are asking me. You need to ask a more specific question.
My apologies it wasn’t specifically related to the topic at hand. I just seem to recall you saying something to the effect that most predominantly religious countries have higher crime rates, etc, This article/study seems to confirm that those countries are also not top of the list when it comes to happiness (well being).
Probably not a surprise to you. Just curious if you had seen this report before.
Now on a another completely separate note I was wondering if there is a specific version of the Bible (Old and New Testament) that you would recommend.
I recall you saying something to the effect that English versions of the Bible weren’t translated well (into English). Realistically speaking I’m not going to learn Greek or Hebrew. So is there a specific version of the Bible that you would recommend? Or at least one that is less bad than all of the rest? If no such thing exists have you considered writing your own version with a “proper” translation. Or at least ab annotated version if the Bible that points out all of the bad translations?
I still don’t understand what your question is.
If you are asking about studies regarding the correlation of crime rates and religiosity and life satisfaction and religiosity, there are indeed several, published by Phil Zuckerman, Gregory Paul, and others (e.g. for one of the latest summary of studies, see the book Sacred and Secular).
As to the Bible, not really. All translations distort. I will often use the NIV or NAS as among the “cleaner” texts, but even they cannot be uniformly trusted. And there are no annotated translations that do what you want. The best you can do is, when a reading is important, compare numerous translations to see if you can detect ideological “fudging” in some of them. But even that is not foolproof, as there are still places where all translations disguise the real meaning by making the same assumptions about what they think the text is “supposed” to say or by all mistakenly attributing a modern rather than and ancient context for understanding the words in the text. You also might not know which variations are the “fudging” and which more honest to the text or context. There simply is no substitute for being able to look at the underlying language and knowing the actual context of that language’s use.
Nevertheless, Biblehub can generate such a comparison on any single verse for you (example).
I also teach some skills in using resources even for laypeople to get at the underlying language, not as well as an expert can but better than you could without that training. I will be offering my Introduction to New Testament Studies course again sometime this year.
“Nevertheless, Biblehub can generate such a comparison on any single verse for you (example).”
Gal 1.19.
The only translation that seems currect out’v that weltr is the “God’s Wurd” wun.
But I only no that owing tu ur effurts. The communtries ar’v littl help and misleding if recugnising the wurding.
Note that that may be the case for this verse, but it may be a different translation that’s closer to the text in another verse, and so on. So you can’t find “one” translation to count on. They all suck. They just suck in different places. And there’s no way to tell but to check in every case.
Dr. Carrier wrote:
“There simply is no substitute for being able to look at the underlying language and knowing the actual context of that language’s use.”
Response: I can certainly understand and appreciate that. I was hoping that maybe just maybe someone with the qualifications (and without theological bias) might’ve already taken on such an endeavor and produced such a product already.
Pragmatically speaking that probably makes more sense than individual amateurs taking a stab at it.
Or at the very least just produce an exception list of all of the versus that are improperly translated that one could use in conjunction with one of the existing standard translations.
It’s interesting, but I don’t know of any complete translation of the Bible by sufficiently qualified unbelievers. They are all by Christian dogmatists (or Jewish in some cases), although the best ones are rightly accomplished by teams, not individuals.
The closest I know is Crook’s Parallel Gospels (Crook is a fully qualified scholar, and an atheist), but it’s just the Gospels, and his translation technique is clunky (he chose to translate every word identically, ignoring context, in the hopes that we could re-interpret according to context ourselves; that’s debatable, but in any event, it looks weird, and isn’t quotable). Robert Price did something akin with The Pre-Nicene New Testament, but his translations are even more contentious and interpretive than standard translations, and thus just replace one bias for another even more distortive bias. Which is an inevitable problem no matter who does the translation.
The reason is perhaps too obvious: translating the Bible competently is such an enormous project, it would require millions of dollars in funding to cover the hours of work required (and writing a critical commentary verse-by-verse is no easier; it takes the same amount of time, or even more). And no one but believers are willing to front that kind of cash. There also would be insufficient money in selling the result to pay even a fraction of the cost, so that can’t motivate or fund it either.
Such a project would be especially difficult because any translator will of course introduce their own bias into the translation, and the effort to control for that or make it transparent is even more expensive in time (hence Crook’s strategy of not even interpreting the text at all; and he could only complete four books out of the sixty or so that comprise the whole Bible; and the result is of mixed utility).
Just an FYI:
Mulvihill on dying and rising deities v. Carrier
• Mulvihill, J. R. (2017). “The dependence between the gospels and pagan literature with regard to death and return; towards a method for evaluation”. North-West University.
Thanks. I’ll add that to my list of things to examine.
Re, Seeds of David. From what I’ve read, there’s very little evidence to show David was a real person. Some newer evidence has helped push him closer to being a real person. Do you have an opinion one way or the other about David, real or legend?
There is some (albeit disputed and indecisive) archaeological evidence David existed “as a person,” a warlord of some capacity, and no usable evidence to the contrary; I consider the matter undecidable on present evidence.