I recently realized a minor underlying fact in the background knowledge I laid out in my peer-reviewed book On the Historicity of Jesus has gone unnoticed. It seems trivial to me, but too many things do. I realize this stuff I take for granted is really shocking or mind-blowing to many, because they’ve been seeing the Bible only through the distorting lens constructed by Christian apologists. Even non-Christian scholars and atheists from birth can fall victim to this, as so much of the “cultural narrative” about Christianity and the Bible that is transmitted even in secular circles (even professional, academic circles) actually originated in Christian apologetics, sometimes centuries ago, and it has long since lost its obvious signal of origin. In short, you don’t know many of the things you were told are false. Because even secular experts and enthusiasts continue to unknowingly perpetuate these ideas.
Students who’ve taken my monthly course on the historicity of Jesus across several years now have repeatedly remarked on the fact that there are tons of examples of this even just in OHJ, indeed even in just the first few chapters; and that work in no way even aimed to find or touch on them all, only the ones relevant to examining how certain we can be that there was ever really a Jesus at the origin of Christianity. But none of them until recently had mentioned the one I am writing on today: that in the time of Paul, Christians believed references to “the Lord” in ancient Jewish scriptures actually meant Jesus—literally. Even when the scriptures declared that “the Lord” said this or that, Christians believed it was Jesus Christ saying it. What this means is what I’ll elaborate on today, reusing and expanding on some of the material you’ll find (along with more examples and detail and cited scholarship) in On the Historicity of Jesus.
Revelations of the Lord
You’ll find this listed as Element 16 of the relevant background knowledge in Chapter 4 of OHJ (pp. 137-41), the opening summary of which is:
The earliest Christians claimed they knew at least some (if not all) facts and teachings of Jesus from revelation and scripture (rather than from witnesses), and they regarded these as more reliable sources than word-of-mouth (only many generations later did Christian views on this point noticeably change).
The first example I give there comes from Paul himself, who is explicit on the point:
My gospel and the preaching of Jesus Christ [is] according to the revelation of the mystery which was kept secret for long ages, but now is made visible through the prophetic scriptures and is made known to all nations, according to the command of the eternal God, for the obedience of faith.
Romans 16:25 & 16:26
In other words, Paul outright says even the preaching of Jesus (as well as the whole gospel) is known by revelation and scripture. No mention of human tradents. The idea that these things were known from the Apostles Jesus preached to in life is completely absent here. There is a lot more evidence of that specific point that I list in OHJ. But here my interest is not in arguing that this appears to have been the only way anyone thought anything about or from Jesus could be known (I make that detailed case in OHJ and summarize in my much more accessible work Jesus from Outer Space). Rather, here let’s even just assume there was a historical Jesus and at least “some” of his teachings and preachery came from his historical ministry and subsequent word of mouth. Even if that’s the case, it is also the case that “some” of his teachings and preachery “came” from revelation and ancient Jewish scripture—and this is no mere theory but an actual documented fact. As I show in Element 16 and in Chapters 8.5 and 11 of OHJ.
Only a part, but an important part, of this evidence consists of the evidence in Galatians 1 where Paul swears up and down, repeatedly, that he did not learn the gospel from oral tradition, but revelation alone, thus illustrating the order of values: he and his congregations respected mystical spirit communications far more than human traditions (see Chapter 11.2 and 11.6 of OHJ). Paul is actually there fighting the accusation that he might have gotten some of the teachings of Jesus from eyewitness sources—the accusation, mind you. Pay close attention to that fact: Paul had to write an entire chapter desperately insisting he did not learn anything from eyewitness sources, because the Galatians actually thought learning such things from witnesses would make Paul a fraud.
Moderns don’t get this. Because they’ve been told over and over and over again that Paul had to argue his revelations were as good as eyewitness sources. But that’s false. It’s a later Christian apologetic fabrication. Throughout his letters Paul not only never makes that argument, he repeatedly indicates the opposite was the case: eyewitness (human, oral) sources were considered by all Christians then as unreliable and no one trusted them. Anyone who claimed to have the teachings of Jesus that way was dismissed as of no account. This was literally the accusation leveled against Paul that he had to write the entirety of Galatians 1 to rebut; and his defense was to accede to the principle leveled against him by his fellow Christians that human, eyewitness sources carry zero authority, requiring him to instead swear up and down that he never used them—that he had the only kind of sources any Christians then trusted: direct communications from the celestial Jesus himself inside Paul’s mind, and trusted written records of past such spirit communications to long dead prophets.
And that last part is the one perhaps least noticed and understood by most people today: Christians in Paul’s day—Paul included—thought Jesus had spoken to the ancient prophets, and therefore prophecies in the Jewish scriptures, even the Psalms, were literally the words of Jesus—spoken by Jesus, using the prophets who recorded them, “like musical instruments” as Athenagoras would say. They could therefore be quoted as the words of Jesus. And with total confidence that they really were; no further eyewitness testimony to Jesus required. This was more than the belief, still commonly voiced today, that the scriptures told us authoritative things about Jesus. As for example when Paul says we must resort to the scriptures to “teach us” things about Jesus (Romans 15:3-4) and that we should not “go beyond” the scriptures in our claims about Jesus (1 Corinthians 4:6) or when Paul says we learn of the crucifixion and burial of Jesus “from the scriptures” (the actual meaning of kata tas graphas, the ancient idiom for a source citation, in 1 Corinthians 15:3 and 15:4).
The truth went beyond that. They didn’t just learn things about Jesus from hidden messages they found in the scriptures; they learned things from Jesus in those hidden messages. It’s also important to realize “the scriptures” meant to them not just what we now call the Old Testament but also additional books besides, since “the Old Testament” as a thing did not exist when Christianity arose. So when Paul or any other early Christian author says “the scriptures” they meant a larger body of texts than “the Old Testament,” including such works as Enoch and the Wisdom and Psalms of Solomon and possibly even the Assumption and Revelation of Moses. They also meant versions of even our Old Testament scriptures that said different things than ours now do. (On both points see evidence and cited scholarship in Element 9 of OHJ. These points are another of those little “facts” often not known to the public, though in this case at least usually known to scholars.)
How This Affects Interpretation
We see the clearest example of what I mean in the early epistle of 1 Clement (which, contrary to later Christian tradition, many scholars and I believe dates to the 60s A.D. and thus to very near Paul’s time: OHJ, Ch. 7.6). There we find countless “quotations” of things “Jesus Christ” said—and never once is any attributed to any oral tradition or witness. In every single case the only sources cited are revelations and scripture:
Clement assumes that Jesus ‘speaks’ to us through the scriptures. Clement didn’t even have to say this. He simply assumes that a quotation of scripture can be described as a quotation of ‘Christ’ without explanation or citation—the fact that [even Paul’s] Corinthians don’t need this to be explained to them entails this was routinely understood within the churches of the time: that Jesus speaks through scripture, rather than human tradition.
On the Historicity of Jesus, p. 312
Indeed, when Clement wants to cite “sayings” of their “Lord” and “master” in support of any point (such as that God will save the penitent: 1 Clement 8; or that God will raise the dead: 1 Clement 24–26; or that we must not succumb to pride and hypocrisy: 1 Clement 30), he quotes ancient scriptures (and that extensively), not Jesus in any kind of pre- or post-Gospel-tradition; and he gives examples (of repentance, forgiveness, resurrection) only from ancient scriptures, never from any kind of pre- or post-Gospel-tradition. Which means there were no Gospel traditions. Not of stories about Jesus. Not of things Jesus said or taught. Clement could only find examples and teachings to get from Jesus by mining ancient holy books.
The book of Hebrews likewise claims to quote “Jesus” but in fact repeats lines from ancient scripture (e.g. Hebrews 10:5-10, claiming Psalm 40:6-8 records the words of Jesus). But again this is even more explicit in 1 Clement, where “commandments” of Christ (49.1) appear to come by revelation or scriptures; Clement mentions no other source—except through Apostles as proxies for either. For example, Clement says the Apostles learned “through our Lord Jesus Christ” that they must establish offices and rules of succession in the church (44.1), even though most scholars would doubt that that is true (it’s a concern most scholars admit only arose later). Nevertheless, Clement seems to imagine the Apostles learning this from Jesus, through scripture (42.5). Clement never mentions any other source on this point.
Yet some of these “scriptures” Clement quotes no longer exist; we don’t know what books he is quoting. For example, Clement says to the Corinthians (while clearly assuming they know what he is referring to):
Remember the words of our Lord Jesus, for he said, ‘Woe to that man! It would have been good for him not to be born, rather than cause one of my chosen to stumble. Better for him to have a millstone cast about his neck and be drowned in the sea than to have corrupted one of my chosen’.
1 Clement 46.7-8
This is clearly represented as a quotation of one unified saying, yet in the Gospels it is quoted as two completely unrelated ones: one part spoken during Jesus’ ministry, in the presence of a group of children, about people tempting his followers to sin (“Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him if a great millstone were hung round his neck and he were thrown into the sea,” quoted exactly in the first Gospel of Mark, then evolving over time as it passed through Matthew and Luke), then another part is spoken about Judas at the Last Supper (“Woe to that man, by whom the Son of Man is betrayed! It would have been good for that man not to be born,” thus again in Mark, evolving later in Matthew and Luke).
Clement does not know of the Judas story. He elsewhere elaborates many examples of betrayal as lessons for the Corinthians—evidently never even having heard of the paradigmatic betrayal in Christian myth to teach by, Judas. So here we see the phrase “Woe to that man! It would have been good for him not to be born” was never originally anything Jesus said about Judas, but a generic statement about those who lead the Lord’s “children” to sin, meaning Christians (Jesus’ “chosen ones” per Matthew 18:3-7; see also Element 13 in OHJ). Which means Jesus almost certainly never said this—because it reflects the concept of a church community, of “believers” in Jesus that did not exist until after he had died. Which makes this a good candidate for a post-mortem revelation (Element 16), or once again some pre-Christian scripture that Clement is quoting but we no longer have (Element 9). Because apart from this and one other instance (13.2-3), for Clement the words of Jesus always come from scripture. They probably also did here as well. We just don’t have the scripture he is quoting.
All of this evidence means that when Paul quotes scripture as the sayings of the Lord, he in fact literally means Jesus said those things—to the prophets who wrote them down, which Paul is now quoting. And he did not have to explain this; his Christian audiences already concur that these are the sayings of Jesus. So when Paul tells us, for example, that he has “a commandment from the Lord” (e.g. 1 Corinthians 14:37 and 1 Corinthians 7:9-11) we actually don’t know whether he means by revelation (as in Galatians 1 or 2 Corinthians 12) or from some scripture he believes records the ancient words of the spirit-being Jesus—a scripture we just no longer happen to have; or one we do, but which said different things then than our copies now do, or which they were interpreting a certain way. For example, when Paul says “the Lord commands” that those who work for the gospel be paid, it appears Christians understood him to be quoting or “interpreting” a now-lost ancient scripture (compare 1 Corinthians 9:14 and 1 Timothy 5:18, possibly a variant reading or “interpretation” of an ancient version of Levitucus or Deuteronomy from where we find, only in different words, a lot of the teachings now “attributed” to Jesus: see Dennis MacDonald’s Two Shipwrecked Gospels for some examples).
Likewise when Paul says “it is written” that “‘It is mine to avenge; I will repay’ says the Lord” (Romans 12:19; quoting Deuteronomy 32:35 and then, as if also spoken by “the Lord,” Proverbs 25:21-22), Paul means Jesus said this—as in, said it to the ancient prophet Moses, who merely recorded the Lord Jesus Christ’s words on a scroll. And Paul’s readers knew that, and believed it. Hence likewise Romans 14:11, “It is written: “‘As surely as I live,’ says the Lord, ‘every knee will bow before me; every tongue will acknowledge God’.” Paul means everyone will acknowledge God by bowing to his Lord Jesus (Philippians 2:10: “at the name of Jesus every knee should bow”), and he is “quoting Jesus” from, in fact, Isaiah 45:23. Likewise 2 Corinthians 6:17, where Paul says “’Come out from them and be separate’, says the Lord; ‘Touch no unclean thing, and I will receive you’,” quoting this time a pesher mash-up of Isaiah 52:11 and Ezekiel 20:34, 41. Note that “says the Lord” is not in these verses in the actual scriptures Paul is quoting. Though the original chapters, each written by an ancient prophet speaking the Lord’s words, might indicate it, Paul himself is adding into the specific lines he quotes the reminder that the Lord says these things. And we well know the Lord for Paul, and his Christians, meant Jesus (e.g. Philippians 1:2, Philippians 2:11, Philippians 2:19; 1 Thessalonians 1:1, 1 Thessalonians 2:19, 1 Thessalonians 4:2; Philemon 1:3, Philemon 1:5, Philemon 1:25; Galatians 1:3, Galatians 6:14, Galatians 6:18; 2 Corinthians 1:3, 2 Corinthians 11:31, 2 Corinthians 13:14; Romans 1:7, Romans 5:1, Romans 10:9; and especially 1 Corinthians 1:2, 1 Corinthians 6:11, 1 Corinthians 8:6; etc.).
Conclusion
So when Paul ever says “the Lord” in his letters, he does indeed mean Jesus Christ, as the eternal spirit acting as intermediary between God and men, in his exalted pre-incarnate state. The creedal hymns in Romans 1 and Philippians 2 explain that Jesus briefly renounced this status and submitted to humiliation and death to prove his loyalty to God, and for that he was reassigned that role and elevated even further to be God’s stand-in. But he was God’s Lord already before that (Paul repeatedly confirms this: see Element 10 in Chapter 4 of OHJ). We already know that in Jewish angelology the “Archangel of Many Names” already had that role before what Paul would say was that very angel’s incarnation in Jesus (and Philo might even have already understood one of that angel’s names to be “Jesus,” literally “God’s Savior,” before Christianity contrived the idea of his descent and sacrifice). So this “Lord” could reveal secrets and teachings not only to his newly chosen “messengers” (the meaning of “apostle” being “one sent”), but to all the ancient prophets. The old scriptures thus directly contained the words of Jesus himself.
In 1 Clement we see both of these ideas: the Lord Jesus as revelator (speaking to Apostles), and the Lord Jesus as in effect the Metatron: when God “speaks” to Moses or any of Prophets or even Psalmists, it is actually Jesus (the Lord) speaking to them, as God’s instrument. In Jewish angelology this role was often played by the Metatron, the Angel of the Face, meaning the face of God (any instance in the Bible in which anyone claims to “see” God, they actually were seeing God’s stand-in, this angel). For example, the burning bush was actually this angel, whose voice God speaks through—so it is both God speaking, and a subordinate angel speaking, as if that angel were God’s speaker system. The Christians were equating that angel with their Jesus: hundreds of years ago, the eternal Lord Jesus spoke to those prophets, just as such, and for them those revelations are as valid as any new ones Paul or any Apostle receives from the Lord Jesus directly—because to them, it’s exactly the same process.
Indeed, for Greek-speaking Christians (the only ones we have any writings from), they trusted specifically the Greek Septuagint as the holy and inspired scripture collection containing the direct sayings and teachings of Jesus—which they trusted as such because they believed the legend of the Septuagint: that seventy Rabbis went each into a separate cubicle to translate the Hebrew scriptures into Greek and when they came out to compare they miraculously found their translations were identical to every jot and tittle, thus had God proved its authenticity evermore. Christians could thus treat the scriptures as the reliable and direct word of Jesus himself, speaking God’s mind and thus speaking the words of God. From God, to Jesus, to the Prophet or Apostle. That was their understanding.
This makes it difficult to know what Paul means when, for example, he says he has a “commandment from the Lord.” He could mean “found in scripture” or “delivered to me personally,” because Paul would have seen no relevant distinction between those, nor would anyone he was writing to. He “might” have also meant some human tradition, as historicists insist, but there is actually no evidence for that, and ample evidence against. This is a Christian apologetic tradition. Not anything the evidence actually supports our believing. But even if you remain lost in that con, and continue to believe that Paul “could” be quoting eyewitness tradition of “disciples” Jesus taught in life, you still don’t know when or if he ever means that. Because we know for a fact that he trusted direct revelations and revelations from Jesus to ancient prophets as of equal or even greater authority, and never makes any distinction as to which source he intends when quoting or referring to anything he claims Jesus said.
Dr. Carrier wrote:
“Paul is actually there fighting the accusation that he might have gotten some of the teachings of Jesus from eyewitness sources—the accusation, mind you. Pay close attention to that fact: Paul had to write an entire chapter desperately insisting he did not learn anything from eyewitness sources, because the Galatians actually thought learning such things from witnesses would make Paul a fraud.”
But couldn’t this all be interpreted another way?
Might one suggest that the accusation (real prospect) of someone having learned from eyewitness sources suggest that there were in fact eyewitnesses to earthly Jesus to start with? And the only reason such claims were disregarded was simply because they fall under the category of hearsay (not themselves a direct witness)?
No. Because that’s precisely never the argument he addresses. Paul never even mentions that argument. Never once in 20,000 words across seven long Epistles. It was therefore never leveled at him.
Remember, Paul is addressing the argument that human sources are rubbish, only revelations of Jesus transmit “the gospel and teachings of Jesus,” which entails there were no human sources, that the only way anyone could learn these things was by revelation or from someone (“the apostles before me”) who had learned it by revelation.
Paul never faces the argument that “they knew Jesus in life and you didn’t,” he only ever faces the argument “if you didn’t have a revelation of Jesus, you can’t be an apostle.” Which entails all apostles learned the gospel by revelation. Only revelation conferred apostolic authority. So Paul has to struggle to class himself with the other apostles who learned all this stuff by revelation. (There is a lot more evidence in the Epistles confirming this; as I note, I survey all of it ion OHJ. But the fact is already clear from Galatians 1, and the absence of the other argument you are describing anywhere else in the Epistles.)
Fantastic article that brings clarity to the issue!
If you know any of these books, could you give it a thumbs up or thumbs down to help me decide whether to purchase it? Thomas Brodie’s Mark and the Elijah-Elisha Narrative; John Allen Paulos’s Irreligion; James A. Lindsay’s Dot, Dot, Dot: Infinity Plus God Equals Folly.
Mark and the Elijah-Elisha Narrative is Winn, not Brodie, but yes, it’s a seminal and valuable work. Irreligion is too disorganized, random, brief, and 101 to be of any use to anyone but the most absolute of beginners; I don’t recommend it. And I don’t know Lindsay’s Dot. But Lindsay writes well and in organized fashion, and often knows his stuff, so the odds are good that it’s good on what it’s about (infinity theory and its relation to theology).
Thanks for the helpful reply! I’ll avoid Paulos and order Lindsay.
One Amazon reviewer of Winn wrote:
Comment on this quote?
Did Thomas Brodie write any book you recommend?
Whoever wrote that quote doesn’t know what they are talking about (Winn’s criticisms of MacDonald may be misplaced, but that won’t matter for Winn’s thesis, which is the point of the book).
Brodie famously wrote The Birthing of the New Testament which is one of the seminal works in this area and definitely recommended if you want to deep dive into memetic theory and the Gospels’ construction from the Septuagint. You should note that MacDonald studied under Brodie and employs Brodie’s work and methods.
Your reply is a gem! What is MacDonald’s full name, and what book by him do you recommend?
That’s the very Dennis MacDonald himself, of course (with whom I have debated historicity several times; just search the name on my blog), author of The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark. I recommend starting with his more recent summary in Mythologizing Jesus. He applies the same analysis to the Septuagint, establishing the Gospels build stories for Jesus out of the Greek Bible, in Two Shipwrecked Gospels, but that is an extremely advanced and esoteric academic treatise that can be difficult for a lay person to navigate. I recommend Brodie for that subject instead (per above).
I am beginning to suspect that we need to start to mark references to “Going out of Egypt”, such as “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt” to have possibly originally been “I am the Lord your God”!
So previous to the Scribes leading exiles back to the holy land under Ezra and colleagues, one can imagine zero references to “being in Egypt”. Rather there would be a memory that Egyptians were ruling and dominating the Proto-Hebraic Canaanites within the hilltop tribal settlements inland of Philistine land.
So “The Lord” might refer to God, Elohim, for example), or “The Lord” to eventually the proto-Christians might have evolved to mean also “The Chosen Representative” of God.
But when might have the latter coalesced around an imagined or actual figure called Jesus?
There’s a lot of academic scholarship needed to examine critically all pre-C.E. Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic manuscripts to see how the concept of “Lord” was separated from the singular concept of God, a lone supreme being or the most powerful of the proto-Israelite pantheon of Gods.
I thank you Dr. Carrier for your pushing our dialog towards a rightful rejection of the dramatization of the mere “dreams” of Paul as “real historical events” witnessed by “disciples”. That and the attempt to conjure up “proofs” of a resurrection, again by “witnesses” is the beginning of the Catholic Churches practice of seeking and questioning of “Witnesses” in validating miraculous healings and so beautifying more and more “Saints” for the populace to visit and get blessings. This is akin to opening up franchises for McDonald’s all over the World!
However, if we’d follow the earliest intents of Christianity, it might have been to rally around the core values of Judaism as opposed to worshipping Emperors or Greek Gods imposed by the occupiers of Judea. In practice, a theoretical messenger’s name “Jesus” could have found itself fused to the concept of “The Lord”, or person who represents the word of God to us.
Asher Kelman M.D., Ph.D.
Notice no “Lord Your God” passages ever appear in Paul. We thus can’t ascertain how they would be interpreted. But I assume they’d read it in the “two powers in heaven” sense as discussed in the Talmud: those passages would be taken to mean the God and his Lord (or through his Lord), i.e. as referring to two entities united in voice and cause, not the same entity. Making Jesus identical to God did not arise until at least a century later.
Speculation is idle. All we know is that they were never in Egypt, and didn’t write those stories even in the period they are purported to have happened. That’s a mainstream conclusion now.
Depends on whether you read Philo as already referring to this archangel as named Jesus before Christianity arose. If not, then the earliest such construction appears to be the innovation of Peter, claiming a “revelation” that Philo’s archangel had undergone the cosmic sacrifice and was thereby assigned the new name of Jesus (God’s Savior). That could even be true of a historical Jesus (as there is no reason why the man should necessarily have actually been so conveniently named Jesus—that sounds like an appellation assigned to his function, rather than an incidental given name, much like Cephas/Peter must have been: see OHJ, Chapter 6.5 re: “Josephan Christs”).
A very long process that is lost in a chaos of variant readings most of which are Medieval and thus entirely unhelpful.
Dr. Carrier,
I found this essay very helpful in clarifying things I had read in OHJ–thank you for sending this out.
Also, I have heard that there are scholars who also believe that Abraham, Moses and other OT figures were created as myths and are not historical, and also that the conquest of Caanan at a god’s command was created as a way to justify a local tribes take over of their neighbor’s lands. Can you point me to some credible, scholarly sources that would be looking into these ideas? I would be interested in reading any good books on these topics.
Thank you, Elaine Olson
It’s not just “there are scholars”; this is fully the mainstream consensus now.
See The Bible Unearthed and my article A Test of Bayesian History: Efraim Wallach on Old Testament Studies.
This is already covered in OHJ with a full bibliography (p. 215, with n. 157). Everything you need is there.
I only recently learned that there has been suspicion about the fictional natures of Moses, Jesus and Abraham since the 10th century – starting with rumours of a mythical text (which was forged centuries later) known as the Treatise of the Three Imposters.
Looking forward to reading more about it – ordering books from the stacks and reserving my seat at the Bodleian 🙂
Meant to type Moses, Jesus and Mohammed, d’oh.
The TTI is bogus. You should ignore that and consult the resources I directed you to. Those are real academic materials.
About this :
« Remember the words of our Lord Jesus, for he said, ‘Woe to that man! It would have been good for him not to be born, rather than cause one of my chosen to stumble. Better for him to have a millstone cast about his neck and be drowned in the sea than to have corrupted one of my chosen’.
1 CLEMENT 46.7-8 »
Clement 13:1-2
Can we imagine that Mark, Matthew and Luke wrote theirs equivalences (Mt 26:24, Lk 17:2, Mt 6:14-15, Mt 7:1-2, Mt 7:12, Lk 6:31, 36-38) knowing this epistle ?
These verses in the gospels seems too close in the idea with the verses from Clement to be just a coincidence, particularly Lk 17:2.
In my POV, either the gospels have knowledege of this epistle and they use it lioe they did wih Pauline epistles.
Either this verses from clement and the gospels came from oral tradition about Jesus.
I can’t imagine it can be just a coincidence.
What’s your thoughts about this ?
Best regards,
As I argue in the article, the other evidence in Clement strongly supports the conclusion that Clement himself got that quote from some lost scripture.
It is very unlikely he made it up (it’s clear the Corinthians were already familiar with it) and we have no evidence that revelations of Jesus had been written down yet, so as to be so exactly quoted.
So odds are, Clement and the Evangelists are each, separately, using that lost scripture as a source text (which must have contained a lot more material, which also might be in the Gospels; we just don’t know because we don’t have that source text). It would originally not have been a Christian text, but some Jewish apocalyptic or wisdom piece, that they are “reinterpreting” as the words of Jesus.
The only alternative is that the quoted material was an exactly-preserved oral teaching of the revelatory Jesus, or some lost unknown written collection of the revelations of Jesus, or possibly (this is the least likely, IMO) one or the other of those again but from a real historical Jesus, something he said during his ministry. In which case, again, Clement and the Evangelists would have been getting this material separately, independently, from that same source.
So there is no way to connect the Evangelists to Clement’s letter. It is possible they are using it as a source text, but then it would be odd that they’d lift only this one single thing from it. It seems more likely that letter was as yet unknown to them (i.e. it was circulating separately, in different communities) or not deemed authoritative enough to employ. They don’t seem to have used it generally; so it is unlikely they used it specifically. More likely Clement and the Evangelists are drawing separately on some common source (whatever source that was).
Is this material (the ‘Woe to that man’ and subsequent line) in what could be considered material from Q?
If so wouldn’t it be independent (of the synoptics) attestation to the existence of Q?
Technically it would not normally be considered a Q saying as both pieces are found in Mark (and their separation preserved in Matthew and Luke). But since the whole Q theory constructed on that rule is fallaciously circular, I can’t really comment on what scholars imagine doing with these verses in respect to Q. Scholars are not consistent in their decisions (e.g. some include one but not both pieces to Q, even though they have no real reason to count or ignore either). Because there really is no coherent theory as to what actually is supposed to have been, and not have been, in Q. Which is one of several reasons I think Q theory is bogus and should be abandoned.
I am interested in understanding if the constant use of the Septuagint in preference to Hebrew scripture undermines the historicity of Jesus. Do you have a specific article?
I don’t understand your question. Constant use by whom? And undermine how?
Maybe you mean:
Does the fact that the Gospels have Jesus usually reference or quote the Septuagint rather than Hebrew or Aramaic versions of Scripture undermine the historicity of Jesus? Since, obviously, a Galilean reformer is unlikely to have gone around speaking Greek all the time and using the Greek edition of Scripture as his base text.
The answer is no, because all that that undermines is the historicity of his saying those things, which is not the same thing as the historicity of the man himself. Thus, we can be quite sure (as Dale Allison proves) Jesus never spoke the Sermon on the Mount. That was invented by someone after the Jewish War, for a Hellenized Diaspora audience to cope with the absence of the temple cult (see OHJ, index, “Sermon on the Mount”). But that doesn’t mean Jesus didn’t exist.
It is becoming more and more mainstream to admit the Gospels are total fiction, and represent nothing of the real Jesus (or, if anything, we can never know what: see, for example, Robyn Faith Walsh and the Gospels as Literature), and that even things attributed to him in the Epistles (which is scant little) may yet have simply been dreamed or hallucinated after his death (per Romans 16:25-26; e.g. Lüdemann and Piñero both think 1 Cor. 11:23-25 came that way and doesn’t go back to a historical Jesus)—and instead to insist that, nevertheless, these sayings were made up for a real person; we just don’t know what that person really said.
This is an example of what I categorize as “minimal historicity” in OHJ (Ch. 2): the belief that we can be sure there was at least some guy, who charismatically earned some fanatical followers and got himself killed, and was believed to have risen again to give marching orders from beyond the grave; but nothing else we’re told about him is true or verifiable.
That is a position one can always retreat to (or near to) when confronted with the fact that Jesus would not have gone around quoting the Septuagint. So that fact is not itself sufficient to argue against anything like minimal historicity (I discuss this in Ch. 11 of OHJ).
TL;DR – In terms of how we understand stories as being either “myth/fiction” or “history,” isn’t “minimal historicity” (as you defined it) really a mythicist position?
Hi Dr. Carrier!
My name is Douglas Robinson and I recently purchased your MVP Course, “New Testament Studies for Everyone.”
One of your lectures sent me to this blog entry, and now I’m here weeding through the comments because everything is just so damn interesting.
So thank you for your work, and for making such an affordable course.
This is my first time taking an MVP course, or anything like it online. Funny as it may be, you can thank Dr. Kipp’s Youtube reply to me (under a recent video attacking mythicism) as my impetus to finally get your course (and thanks also to The Tippling Philosopher for directing me to the deal). I’m through 4 lectures now, and I’m so hooked I just bought my 5th Edition Greek New Testament (admittedly the Greek/English Reader version).
Anyway, I wasn’t planning to leave any comments until I finished the course, but this snip tugged at a recent wound:
“This is an example of what I categorize as “minimal historicity” in OHJ (Ch. 2): the belief that we can be sure there was at least some guy, who charismatically earned some fanatical followers and got himself killed, and was believed to have risen again to give marching orders from beyond the grave; but nothing else we’re told about him is true or verifiable.”
As you know, this is essentially Derek at Mythvision’s position now, which I challenged as being, for all intents and purposes, a mythicist position. He disagreed; but, if all sayings and actions of Jesus of the Bible are non-historical (either coming from scripture or revelation), and ‘Jesus’ might not have been the historical figure’s given name, then what does it matter to the myth/history debate if there was ‘some guy’? Aren’t we at a mythical figure right here?
We even have several historical ‘guys’ who would fit, if we’re only looking for a loose basis, yet historicists all seem to say it’s none of them. We’re supposed to believe it’s the guy who didn’t write anything, and no contemporaries attested to, that sparked the lone messianic movement to survive the era.
For my money, Jesus of the Bible is as much a fictional or mythical character as George Costanza of Seinfeld. To what extent there is ‘some guy,’ that guy is not George Costanza; he is Larry David. Historicists might as well assume the historical “Jesus” is anyone from Yeshu’a ben Joseph (the one that died ~4 BCE) to Judas of Galilee or the Shepherd King, or Jesus ben Ananias (or that different communities had different figures in mind at different times)….but that shouldn’t mean there is a historical Jesus anymore than the existence of Larry David means there is a historical George Costanza.
It may be interesting to glean the extent the myth is based on the history, but the former is still the myth, and it contrasts with the history. It confuses the categories if we say George Costanza from Seinfeld is a historical person. We know that would be a false statement, yet that’s what minimalists say about the historical Jesus. And heck, Larry David actually wrote words that George said, which is more than we expect from the historical Jesus, yet it would still be incorrect to say George Costanza was a real/historical person.
I suspect there may be something I’m missing. I understand why Christian-leaning scholars would cling to minimal historicity as a last refuge, but why don’t atheists consider it simply another type of mythicism?
No. Mythicism is shorthand not for “mythologized people” but for “mythical people.” Mythologized people are historical. Mythical people are not. Both are mythologized, maybe even heavily. But “mythicism” designates the sub-set of mythologized people who didn’t exist at all. Whereas minimal historicity posits the opposite: that some historical Jesus existed, even if he was almost entirely fictionalized.
I articulate in OHJ what minimal conditions are needed for there still to be a historical Jesus and how this differs from the mythicist model of Christian origins.
As to the “what does it matter” distinction, that depends on what you mean. If all you mean is “Why is this important,” that’s simply a question about relative subjective interest. There is little objective sense in which anything is more important than anything else, when the effects are trivial—as they are in this caase (it really matters no more than whether Confucius or Homer “really existed,” the material difference to the world on either conclusion being quite trivial). One just has to care, for whatever reason. If one doesn’t, then it’s just not a subject that interests them.
But if you mean to ask something more substantive, like “How are the two explanations of the origins of Christianity different?” or “How does this materially affect YouTube atheism or the academic industrial complex?” then there are more substantive answers.
They differ in respect to how the religion began: a great man who inspired followers to venerate him and build a religion out of some kernel of his teachings despite his murder (the Joseph Smith model); or private mystical revelations of an imaginary being later converted into a historical one a generation later (the Angel Moroni model).
That is different enough. But the difference also has consequences: if you grant the first model, then it becomes an explorable and arguable domain of discourse to ask what Jesus really did and taught. The effect of this on the field is obvious: hundreds of books arguing for this or that version of a historical Jesus, all of which predicated on the mostly undefended assumption that there was one.
Whereas if you grant the second model, what we should be doing as scholars (what all those hundreds of books should have been spending their time on instead) completely changes (for an example of what that change looks like, see my blog on Robyn Faith Walsh’s book, even though she is still working from within the first model; I discuss other effects in the last section of OHJ).
This is in turn the answer to the second thing you could mean: material effect. Admitting the first model is false renders almost the entirety of every scholar’s career a monumental waste of time, pursuing completely incorrect premises and thus getting comnpletely useless results. That’s a hard pill to swallow. It’s easier to simply deny the model is dead and try to make challenges to it go away (often with ad hominems and lies; certainly with fallacious rhetoric or lame excuses).
The effect on YouTube Atheism has more to do with Cult of Personality issues and Identity Politics (whether you are for or against either model stamps you as “one of us” or “one of them” in these Groupthink enclaves, and with that comes a whole baggage of personal grievances likewise aligned yet materially unrelated).
There is also an issue of conflict over approach. Some want to use mythicism to argue Christianity is false; others see that as discrediting atheism because it is weak and counter-mainstream and attached to a lot of amateur crankery—which it is, I’ve been fighting to break that link for years now—and thus are vehehemtly “against” mythicism. Neither approach is correct. See my article “Fincke Is Right” for more.
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BTW, I very much commend your method for responding to the likes of Kipp Davis: don’t trust anyone (not even me); go and check and find out who is not telling you the truth, and how often! The result is more than just enlightenment on the one issue. As you are discovering, there are whole wells of interesting things to explore and discover down any one of these rabbit holes!