just before i took my longest break from Facebook [over mostly-Trump-adjacent outrage fatigue] in 2017, Vox’s piece “The Bullshitter-in-Chief” became my most effective blood pressure medication. It finally dawned on me (or at least, it was greatly comforting to be convinced) that the truth-content of the donald’s punchbowl-turds was entirely irrelevant to his purpose du jour.

nowadays I’m far more worried about how staggeringly corrupt and wasteful the GOP, election campaign cycles, and SCOTUS are.

Certainly vis-a-vis the Jesus of theology. Which is the only one we have any writings about.

Colette, your “simple truth” is the claim that Christ is either liar, Lord or lunatic. That is far from simple and far from true. A far more elegant and simple explanation is that Christ is imaginary.

It always takes more words to prove a claim false. A false claim can just be stated in a single sentence. Whereas all the reasons it’s false require explication.

That’s a lot of words to deny a simple truth.

Its psychological appeal rests upon the charismatic sway of Lewis’s wildly popular Narnia books, especially the inspiring depiction of Aslan the lion as a Christ figure. The most vivid statement of the Christian symbolism in Narnia is this, explaining in suitably emotionally resonant and simple terms why Jesus is superior to all other religions because he incarnates the eternal supernatural God from beyond the physical universe: “though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation. She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backward.”

To imagine this author as actually a profound theologian rests upon the appeal of this children’s story as a new Christian myth, and fully suits the motivated reasoning of those who deceptively assert the logical status of the trilemma.

It is by no means clear that this is correct. Paul’s Christology is hotly debated…

That Christian dogmatists try to debate the scholars who have demonstrated that this is a fact of history is to be expected. I am only interested in what the facts of history tell us was actually the case at the time. I am not interested in Christian dogmatists attempting to rewrite history to conform to their now-different beliefs. That their beliefs don’t match that of the original Christians is embarrassing. So this is difficult for them to accept.

If, instead, you want to know what the facts actually are, I cite the relevant scholarship and evidence on this point in On the Historicity of Jesus, Element 10, Chapter 4. See also Bart Ehrman who makes the same points as I do (and cites even more scholarship supporting us) in How Jesus Became God. His and my reading of the evidence is actually mainstream (as in, not the position of fundamentalists and apologists, but of objective and honest scholars).

Charles Gieschen’s book Angelomorphic Christology…

That book actually presents only evidence for my view, and backs literally everything I said in substance (just not in vocabulary). Gieschen presents no evidence for his “special interpretation” of Jesus as a “different kind” of angel from any others (he only has modern Christian dogma to cite for that position, not ancient evidence of any kind, which is quite the contrary). But Gieschen shows with evidence that Jesus was separate from God by being drawn out of the substance of God and materializing one aspect of God (the Logos). But he can’t dogmatically accept that this is, basically, an act of creation. So he plays semantics with what the word “create” means. That’s Christian dogmatism, not scholarship. He drops the ball as an honest scholar at that point. But in the rest he makes clear: he is saying the same thing I am.

When you ignore the word “create” and just look at what Gieschen is describing, he is literally describing exactly what I am: at one time God was a unified being; then he separated out of himself the Logos part, making it then the first archangel, and assigned it certain powers and privileges. Whether you call this “creating” that angel or not is a silly semantic argument. By any normal meaning of the word, it’s an act creation: that separate being didn’t exist as such, then was formed into being by God’s will. That’s creation. That the created being was made “out of” the mystical substance of God is no more relevant than that Adam was made “out of” the clay of the Earth. Made is created. Trying to quibble over that is just more eye-rolling desperation from embarrassed Christians who don’t want to admit the facts as they are.

This is very much not what the author of John thinks about Jesus. In John 20:28, Jesus is explicitly called “Ο Θεος”…

Incorrect. In the Greek Thomas uses the nominative, not the vocative (theos; not thee, as we see Jesus crying out to God in the vocative in Matthew). Even when those are treated as interchangeable (though the NT never shows that being the case, e.g. that passage in Matthew), we are left not knowing which the author means. But the tendency to prefer the correct vocative case in the NT (per Matthew) argues for the nominative being intended. And even if one wanted to deny that, you still can’t claim to know it wasn’t. So this case has to be interpreted in light of all the other evidence, as I document, which is toward this being a nominative declaration, not a vocative.

In other words, this is a declaration just like any we make today when we say “My God.” We don’t mean the person we are saying this to “is” God. Of course, today we don’t mean this literally at all. But even for those who do mean it literally today, they are saying something of God’s will and design are present in what they have witnessed; they are not calling someone they are saying this to “God.”

Thomas is thus being made here to acknowledge the presence of his Lord and his God (indeed, distinctively: it’s not “my Lord and God” but “my Lord and my God,” two separate things). Thus, we have the same doctrine represented here as I explained (and, indeed, as Gieschen explains): Jesus is the manifestation of God, per my previous point; just as the Metatron was, to Moses in his encounter with the burning bush, per contemporary Jewish thinking when this text was written. It does not mean they are literally identical.

This is evinced by the repetition of “my” (indicating two separate entities are being identified rather than one entity with two roles) and the absence of the vocative (the form one would use when addressing the entity you are thus naming) and supported by all the other evidence I already adduced (which is conveniently here being ignored; but honest historians don’t get to ignore inconvenient evidence).

Dr Carrier,

“medium connections” had this to say :

OK, so there’s a lot wrong here. Let’s start with this:

Paul, our earliest and most reliable source, makes very clear that Jesus was not Yahweh, that he was a being created by Yahweh, separate from him and speaking for him, merely the functional equivalent of an archangel upon whom Yahweh bestowed his authority.

It is by no means clear that this is correct. Paul’s Christology is hotly debated, and there are many scholars who would contest what Carrier says here. For example, see Charles Gieschen’s book Angelomorphic Christology, where it is argued that Paul viewed Jesus as a sort of theophany or manifestation of YHWH, inspired by traditions about the “Angel of the Lord” from Hebrew scripture. In particular, Gieschen specifically denies that Paul viewed Jesus as a created being, saying that he instead “identifies Christ within the mystery of the one God of Israel.

Even John 1:1, often claimed as asserting Jesus “is” God, actually only asserts the common Jewish theological view… [that] in the beginning was only God, then God started separating out of himself beings he created and assigned powers to (the angels), and the first of these was the Logos.

This is very much not what the author of John thinks about Jesus. In John 20:28, Jesus is explicitly called “Ο Θεος” (“O Theos”), a term reserved exclusively (by Jews, at least) for God in the fullest sense. John does not think that Jesus was an angel, or a created being, or anything like that; he thinks that Jesus is God. So if Carrier wants to advance this interpretation of John 1, he first has to show that it wasn’t written by the same author as the rest of John, since if it was, it scuttles his entire argument (as we know John doesn’t believe what Carrier is claiming).

Meaning, after God then created Jesus out of himself and made him a separate Logos, and tasked him with carrying out the creation and governance of the world on God’s behalf, Jesus was no longer God.

Again, this is absolutely not what John thinks about Jesus. If Jesus is “no longer God” following the events of John 1, then why is he explicitly referred to as such in John 20:28?

P.S. I am not so sure Trump really believes anything he says. Narcissists will play at believing things, with apt success even, if it benefits them (e.g. if it gets cheers and “followers”; or makes money). And Trump has exhibited this behavior countless times (changing what he claims to believe as soon as it is convenient for him to do so; and saying different things privately than what he says publicly). This may be one of those things. There is testimony, for example, that Trump has acted in ways suggesting he doesn’t actually believe the election was rigged (for instance, in private he has said the cranks lobbying him on that point are crazy and their claims not believable).

This is worth pointing out because liars are also a common denizen of the ranks of religious founders and defenders. And they can look exactly like crazy people—when it suits them to do so. Which is: when the crazy they are emulating is treated with authority and reverence by the audience they want to exploit or convince.

That would depend of course on what definition of insane one is using. That actually isn’t a term in psychology (it is a term in law, which employs a very narrow definition thereof). Mental illness and mental disorder are the scientific terms. And delusions are a clinically-assessed mental disorder or mental illness. So, in a meaningful sense, anyone captured by a delusion is insane: they no longer correctly perceive reality and this will negatively affect their lives.

You are right though that “colloquially” people associate the word “insane” with more debilitating disorders; and Lewis hyperbolized this to its farthest extreme (and being a terrible philosopher, the resulting equivocation fallacy eluded him). This is why you end up with the illogical argument, “so-and-so is delusional; ergo, insane; insane people are not competent to handle their own affairs; ergo so-and-so should be committed to an institution.” The definition of “insane” has been switched mid-argument here, producing an equivocation fallacy, essentially just like Lewis’s. It’s generally just pragmatically easier to avoid the word “insane” so as to avoid triggering such erroneous reasoning in people who don’t actually know what that word means.

See my article Problems with the Mental Illness Model of Religion.