Early this Saturday morning I’ll be joining Robert Price, David Fitzgerald, and Harrison Mumia of Atheists in Kenya in a live broadcast event held in the Metro Hotel in Nairobi, Kenya. I won’t actually be in Africa (at least not this time!). This will be a Google Hangout and Q&A before a live Kenyan audience. The subject? The existence of Jesus and the truth of the Bible, Old Testament and New. Expect interesting questions from the audience in this highly religious country. And experience a feel for the rise of atheist activism in Kenya, as Mumia is heading what may be the highest profile organization of nonbelievers on the continent.
The event Presentation: Did Christ Ever Exist? will happen this Saturday, October 31 (2015). Though it will be an evening event there, it will start at 7am in the morning here in California. And it will be possible to watch from around the world. For more details follow the link!
(The link for viewing should be posted on that Facebook page shortly before it airs. Many thanks to Mythicist Milwaukee for inspiring and helping put on this event!)
Richard,
One of my favorite anti-faith quotes came from Jomo Kenyatta, first prime minister of independent Kenya:
“When the missionaries arrived, the Africans had the Land and the missionaries had the Bible. They taught us how to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened them, they had the land and we had the Bible.”
Cheers
I am familiar with your interpretation of “the brother of the lord” passage in Paul, but if we bracket that for a moment and just go with the usual interpretation that Jesus had a brother James, this seems to pose a problem for Ehrman. Ehrman says “The apostle Paul understood Christ, before coming into the world, to have been the great angel of God, a divine being who was absolutely a pre-existent divinity, but was not on a level equal with God. He then came into the world in order to fulfil God’s plan, died for sins, and was exalted, as a result, to a position of even greater power and authority as one actually *equal* with God.” It seems kind of awkward to reconcile the idea that Jesus was the great angel of God with the idea that Jesus had a brother (since the virgin birth narrative was post-Pauline).
There are ready responses to that, of course. He can be a half-brother or a post-virgin brother. The Catholics already had this problem for millennia. So they already contrived the solutions. I’m sure Ehrman would just default to them.
I also find it hard to reconcile Ehrman’s claim that Jesus in Paul was “the great angel of heaven,” with the idea that Jesus was also the “seed” of David. By the way, has Robert Price read your book “On The Historicity Of Jesus? It would be interesting to hear his take on your book.
Incarnation theology in antiquity could make ready sense of that.
I assume Price has read OHJ and liked it. But you’d have to ask him!
For those who want to watch live, use this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmXZeMEWz88
Thanks, Harrison!
Richard,
Why haven’t you done an interview with The Young Turks on Youtube?
Sam Harris and Reza Aslan already have done interviews:
https://www.youtube.com/user/TYTInterviews/videos
They have to ask me. You can recommend it to them if you want to see that. But their thing is generally current events, not ancient history.
P.S. It looks like they put their Sam Harris interview on their other channel:
Thanks for this Carrier. And Harrison, this is great work! Keep it up!
The hoax exists in not recognizing the obvious. No one made up the accounts of Christ’s life. No one could have. Many died who were accused of promoting this jesus character when they could have lived by merely acknowledging they made up the whole thing.
Sorry. But, that’s not true.
In your book OHJ, you say the crucifixion narrative was, in part, invented as a rewrite of Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53. On his blog, Ehrman argues Isaiah 53 would not have inspired the crucifixion narrative because it was not originally about the messiah: http://ehrmanblog.org/the-suffering-servant-of-isaiah-for-members/ I disagree with Ehrman. I think Isaiah 53 inspired the crucifixion narrative. For instance, in Acts:
The conversion of Ethiopian Queen Candace’s eunuch is yet another Acts parody of a
story prized by the resistance. The eunuch “who had charge of all her treasury” was on the
road to Jerusalem and was reading the “suffering servant” passage from Isaiah (53:7–8),
when Philip approaches him saying “Do you understand what you are reading?”. (Acts
8:30). After interpreting the text, Philip convinces the eunuch to declare “I believe that
Jesus Christ is the Son of God” and immediately baptize himself.
As Gould argues, a fascinating story from Acts is Simon Peter’s famous “tablecloth vision” from Chapter 10 [It will be recalled that “Peter” (i.e., “Rocky”) is a nickname that Simon has acquired, presumably because his support of Jesus was “solid as a rock”.] Peter is going to be invited to dinner by a centurion, Cornelius from the Italica regiment in Caesarea, who is improbably described as “fearing God”, “giving many gifts to the poor”, and “supplicating God continuously” (Acts 10:1-2). Peter has a vision in which a heavenly tablecloth descends, covered with various animals, which he is instructed by a voice to “kill and eat. ‘Surely not, Lord!’ Peter replied. ‘I have never eaten anything impure or unclean.’ The voice spoke to him a second time, ‘Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.’ ” (Acts 10:13-15). Later, Peter summarizes his visit: “You are well aware that it is against our law for a Jew to associate with a Gentile or visit him. But God has shown me that I should not call any man impure or unclean.” (Acts 10:28).
This story is one of the most revealing and explosive in the entire New Testament. First, it demonstrates unequivocally that the whole “inclusivist message”, which is directly attributed to Jesus via innumerable Gospel stories, was in fact completely foreign to the historical Jesus. Otherwise, it would not have been necessary for Peter, one of his closest and “rockiest” supporters, to receive a vision about it well after Jesus’s death. Thus, this story, by itself, tells us that vast portions of the Gospels, in which Jesus is pictured as associating and engaging in table fellowship with all kinds of forbidden persons (tax collectors, prostitutes, etc) and dismissing Jewish dietary law in favor of a universalist, humanitarian message (“What goes into a man’s mouth does not make him unclean but what comes out of his mouth, that is what makes him unclean.” Matt 15:10), are just invented from whole cloth. In fact, it is astonishing that anyone can remain a believing Christian after pondering this clumsy addendum to the Jesus Gospel stories.