On Sunday, February 27, at 8:30am I will be presenting a paper, “Field Update on the Case Against the Historicity of Jesus: Recent Peer-Reviewed Publications For and Against.” You can find the program here. And if you want to attend and register in advance the conference page is here (you can also register on site but that might cost more).
I had considered following that with a pubmeet in town, but covid restrictions appear likely to remain in force there. So I will have to play that by ear. If you are interested in hanging out with me and talking shop (and maybe buying a signed book or two) between six and eight that evening, please PM me on Facebook or email me with “Conference Hangout” in the subject line (I won’t see emails labeled otherwise; I get too many!).
I’ll then be able to stay in touch and let you know if anything comes together in that window (so watch your FB and email comms that day). It will all depend on what rules are in force, and what bars or restaurants are open nearby (and their allowed capacity) on that very evening. I may or may not be able to pull something together; and where it will be I won’t know until the last minute.
I am open to offers and suggestions regarding that, either as to venues to consider, or if you live nearby and want to host a small party for the purpose in your home, or any other ideas. Just reach out per above and we’ll discuss.
Dr. Carrier,
I came across this article (from Dec 2020) on the crossexamined.org and was curious if you had ever seen and responded to it. I search your Blog but couldn’t find a reference to it or the author.
What I find interesting about this “critical appraisal” of your position that Jesus may have never existed, is the author appears to have actually read and attempts to rebuttal specific points of your findings and arguments. I would be intersted in hearing your response to this particular author/article. And given the popularity of the crossexamined.org website it might be good exposure of your work (OHOJ) to debate this person in either a blog or live format.
DID JESUS EXIST? A CRITICAL APPRAISAL OF RICHARD CARRIER’S INTERPRETATION OF THE PAULINE CORPUS (by By Jonathan McLatchie)
https://crossexamined.org/did-jesus-exist-a-critical-appraisal-of-richard-carriers-interpretation-of-the-pauline-corpus/
That isn’t a peer reviewed journal so it wouldn’t pertain to the present issue (which is my Brea talk). It’s just Christian apologetics propaganda. But I’ll look into whether it warrants a blog reply or not. I’m especially intrigued by your assessment, since that sounds like something worth attention. Keep an eye on my blog feeds.
It would be great if you had a response to the above article. It is Christian apologetics, but quite sophisticated, delving a lot into interpretation of contested verses Pauline text using ancient Greek. I can see some flaws in the apologist’s arguments such saying that Paul knew of and described Jesus’s life but then the only knowledge before the trial and crucifixion are that Jesus was of the seed of David and was born of a woman. But I cannot analyze the Greek interpretations. And there are minimal ad hominem attacks on you compared to most apologetics. Please do an analysis of the above article.
Per my analysis (link), none of his arguments “from the Greek” are actually even relevant to anything I have actually argued. It’s basically legerdemain; he is counting on you not knowing the things he says about the Greek are irrelevant to my case. I give some examples; but most are self-evident once you compare what he says, with what is actually argued in my book.
Update: I just completed my analysis of that today: On Jonathan McLatchie’s Objections to Jesus Mythicism.
Hi dr. Carrier,
a past Mythicist, Hermann Raschke, was the first to discover that Pilate is in Mark not because a historical Pilate crucified Jesus, but because a phonetically similar word in Hebrew, מָּלַט , (PaLaT) means : to release, to set free. Pilate is the Roman governor who is, already in the name, totally devoted to release Jesus, to set him free, because he has judged Jesus innocent. It is a curious “divine coincidence” that prevents us from accepting both the irony and the historical fact.
Do you agree that this coincidence is too much impossible to be a true coincidence, and that therefore the argument is sufficient, alone, to confute the claim that precisely a historical Pilate crucified a historical Jesus ?
Thanks in advance for any answer,
Giuseppe
Alas, such speculations can’t be proved.
Because yes, such coincidences are too commonplace. When you allow an entire language’s vocabulary (hundreds of thousands of words; millions when including conjugations and declensions and compounds) and any required retrofitting of its phonetics to get a match you want, and yet with someone we know actually existed exactly when the religion did indeed begin (it is not as if Pilate is being invented or placed in the wrong historical context), hence for whom we have no need of further explanation for his inclusion in the story (any more than for Caiaphas or Herod or John the Baptist), then the odds of random accidental connections approaches 100% (see Everything You Need to Know about Coincidences).
You need more evidence than just an incidental match. Mark often invents characters using such a nominal logic (Barabbas, Bartimaeus, Jairus, Joseph of Aritmathea), so we have precedent. But we can show in each of those cases the name is multiply, and not trivially, apposite, or even (as well) highly uncommon (not common words or names, or people we already know really were there at the time and really would involve themselves in these things as depicted, so there is nothing “unusual” about their being placed in the story where they are).
No such arguments are effective for Pilate and any commonplace Hebrew word. The comparison there is incidental, singular, and trivial; and the man is already known to have really existed and operated as police authority in that place and time.
It’s similar to saying “Pontius” means river and his actions brought us the “River of Life.” That’s just a coincidence. There is no evidence of anything intentional. And this illustrates how easy it is to find trivial linguistic matches, when you allow literally any link of any significance at all to count. With millions of possibilities that would produce some trivial connection, many such matches by accident are inevitable. This is called the Multiple Comparisons Fallacy.
Giuseppe: To be sure, the Hebrew word you’ve used (מלט) is a root meaning “rescue” or “escape” (depending on the form), but it is incorrect. The root is with mem (not peh). It is not PaLaT. What you’ve written is MaLaT. I don’t know of a root פלט that means anything like that. There is a root with those letters that means “to emit, to discharge.” The root you typed takes forms in the piel (מלט millet), meaning “he rescued, helped escape” and niphal (נמלט nimlaat), “he escaped.” Neither of these sounds anything like “Pilate.”
Jason (Hebrew Teacher)
Thank you. I appreciate expert notes like this in my blog comments. Super helpful.
Answering Richard Carrier “why the Gospels are myth”
http://christiancadre.blogspot.com/2020/01/answering-richard-carrier-why-gospels.html
Perhaps another one for you to review and respond to.
Can you be more specific? What in that article requires any rebuttal? At a glance it looks like lazy low-brow apologetics. So can you point to any argument in it that (a) actually responds to something I said in the lecture it’s supposed to be responding to and (b) you yourself can’t immediately rebut as obviously fallacious or factually false? In other words, what do you need me for here? Help me out.
Joseph Hinman wrote:
In general I think he is making a fair point that one doesn’t have to be a Historian or even be attempting to write history for their writings to considered historical. We can obviously think of countless examples of that.
So what do you think of his attempts to excuse the Gospels (specifically) for not meeting historical requirements based on that specific argument?
He’s right on the logic but wrong on the premises. It is true that it would be fallacious to argue “the Gospels merely do not resemble history books of the time, therefore they are full of lies,” as there were many genres for communicating true facts that weren’t “histories” (like epistles and speeches). But no one argues this. He’s thus attacking a straw man. Meanwhile, every one of his premises is actually false.
The authors of the Gospels necessarily had completed advanced Greek composition, the ancient equivalent of graduate school, the highest level of literacy then achievable. It was impossible to compose stories in Greek the way they do otherwise. So they were most likely wealthy elites, or at least well-to-do members of the upper middle class (like Galen or Lucian, to pick folks most analogous) or the functional equivalent (e.g. thoroughly educated slaves, most likely at the time of writing freedmen, who were among the most significant influencers in the Roman Empire). They were not “partially literate.” (This is covered in a few chapters in Keith Hopkins’ book Sociological Studies in Roman History).
What’s more important is not the authors’ social status and skillset, but their audience and intentions. Which you can discern from the structure and content of what they write, and what we know of the elite skills taught in the schools they attended, and the literary practices of their entire class. What we find is that fake history and mythography was an elite genre, routinely used by everyone; and the Gospels’ content and structure matches examples of that genre and not at all any examples of real history written at the time (regardless of genre). So we can tell their intentions were not even to tell the truth.
As to their audience, we have a startling reveal on that point from Origen (whose remarks parallel what Plutarch says of the sacred literature of other religions at the time, like Osiris cult): they are written to save, not to tell literal truths; those of more literate education can thus glean from the Gospels allegorical meanings, but the hoi polloi need to believe the stories are historically true and so we need to let them keep believing that, lest they not be saved. And yet even Origen had become dogmatically committed to defending the historical truth of even the most absurd tales in the Gospels, exhibiting in himself the same fear (that if they are not true, he has been conned, and his faith is in vain; which is conversely the Gospels’ aim: to fabricate a history that renders their ideological claims true). In alignment with Origen’s fleeting admission, however, there is nothing in the Gospels that even looks like someone trying to preserve true events. It all looks quite the contrary: fantastical narratives designed to convey lessons and ideological points, wherein “what really happened” not only has no use, it more typically gets in the way.
See, for example, my articles Establishing the Biblical Literalism of Early Christians and Mark’s Use of Paul’s Epistles. And likewise relevant is how Eusebius, a high literary elite, routinely fabricates and lies in constructing even what he presents as a researched history, all to influence and control an ideological narrative and preserve faith. This isn’t even what the Gospels do (Luke-Acts comes closest, but has many hallmarks of being only a pretense at that, e.g. Luke will write a preface that resembles real histories of his day, yet omit everything from it a real history would include, like the names and titles of his sources and why he trusted them). Yet even Eusebius the historian was doing it (see for example How To Fabricate History: The Example of Eusebius on Alexandrian Christianity).
So Hinman’s conclusion does not follow from the actual facts.