This April 29 (a Wednesday evening) I’ll be in San Jose on panel for the discussion “Jesus: Mything in Action” alongside the always entertaining David Fitzgerald and Robert Price, at Harry’s Hofbrau at 7pm. There will be a lot of Q&A opportunity for the audience. So this will be awesome. They are encouraging Christians to attend with their toughest questions (in fact they say, “feel free to invite your Christian apologist friends”). And our host will be leading with the toughest questions he can find, too. Want to see us grilled about the claim that Jesus never really existed? Details and tickets here.
Take note: limited seating, so get your tickets early!
Description of what to expect:
Historians and Apologists have been arguing for centuries about the evidence for a historical Jesus, the Mythicist theory takes the position that Jesus may never have existed as a real person and has compelling evidence to support it. Join us as we invite the top three scholars/authors in the field to discuss the best and worst evidence for a historical Jesus.
For example:
Paul was said to have acquired his information from the disciple Peter and Jesus’ brother James – is this not reliable?
What is the mystery faith connection?
Due to oral traditions of the time – it is likely that the Gospels captured an accurate account of events?
….and much more! Bring your questions to the table!
I hope to have at least a good chunk of OHJ read by the 29th, but for our Christian friends who almost certainly will not have heard of the Romulus biography and such, is there a collated web site or something that would allow someone to begin to get exposed to the idea of mythic writings being quite common in biblical times?
Sorry, I’m not sure what you are asking for.
It would be interesting to hear you three discuss, even if briefly, some of the many issues you disagree on. Dating and authorship of the “seven undisputed” Pauline epistles and the existence of Q are some of the most prominent ones. In the “Christmas special” in The Thinking Atheism, I got the feeling you don’t really agree with Price’s endorsement of Margaret Barker’s ideas on the significance of Mary’s genealogy in Matthew. It would have been interesting if you could have discussed the issue on air, but I understand that a 1h show forces some restraint and focus.
Just heard Price’s April 4th podcast, and he seems to be really annoyed to have to repeatedly answer questions like “Richard Carrier argues for X, you argue for Y, why?” In this episode, it was about the existence of Q, and he ended up sarcastically saying something like “Richard has probably looked at this in more depth than I have, so I’ll have to reassess the issue, one of these days.”
Well, sure, those things are interesting, and maybe they will come up, but some don’t actually have any effect on the probability of mythicism (e.g., if Q exists, it’s just one more fake Gospel written in Greek; we already have forty of those, so adding one more is of no consequence) or make mythicism less likely (e.g., if the entire Pauline corpus is a second century forgery, then we actually have no evidence of a pre-Gospel Jesus as pre-existent being without a ministry). And in every case, IMO, they rest on too many ad hoc speculations (and I include Q in that remark). And to move toward respectability, we should be getting away from unnecessary speculations. We criticize the historicists for relying on them. So we shouldn’t be relying on them either.
For those of who can’t make it, any chance of an audio or video recording of this being available later on?
I don’t know. I never have any hand in that. It’s up to the event organizers. Best advice is to check with them and/or google around for it a couple weeks afterward to see if one went up.
Richard, this may be a bit off-topic but i feel like it is still close enough: some apologists have said that the NT passage where Jesus is allegedly stabbed on the cross, with “blood and water immediately pouring out”, is evidence for the authenticity of the crucifixion story, since the torments he endured beforehand would cause a buildup of various water-like fluids (such as pericardial fluid, but perhaps others that can accumulate in an injured or recently deceased body) and they would have started coming out after his body was punctured on the side. Personally, i find it questionable that a distinct mix of blood and other fluid would actually pour from such a crude wound. But I don’t know much about this subject. What do you think?
Factually implausible. The quantity of any clear fluid in the case (even granting all the un-evidenced assumptions it requires) would have been invisible a spear’s length away. It’s also literarily naive. It’s blood and water because John is emulating the Cana narrative (water turned to blood when it was not his hour; water and blood when it was his hour). There’s a reason no other Gospel had ever heard of this before. Just as they’d never heard of the Cana miracle before. John is a fabricatory Gospel, it has no real sources. See On the Historicity of Jesus ch. 10.7.
Thank you for your response, Richard; it has been useful for someone i’m currently having a discussion with (or rather a discussion against). I’ve no intention of belaboring the point and even feel out of place asking about such a topic in this thread, but if I could get just two more notes of clarification. First, there would NOT be a particularly high volume of such ‘non-blood’ stuff to come out of a body in that scenario, right? Also, clear liquid, that actually did end up coming out of a body in such a scenario, would probably be mixed with blood as well and thus, not really clear, correct?
Yes.