I’ll be teaching my one month online course on the historicity of Jesus this December: the best arguments pro and con, the cultural and historical background, the competing theories of the origins of Christianity, and more. We’ll go through my book chapter by chapter and discuss its contents, and look at some additional resources and challenges. And by the end you’ll be able to converse informedly about all the main issues in the debate: what the best evidence is for the historical Jesus, why it can be questioned and how, and how you can decide for yourself whether theories without one are better or not. You will also have the opportunity to ask me all the questions you want, challenge me with all the arguments you’ve run into, and otherwise pick my brain on all the related issues you think important.
The course, Questioning or Defending the Historicity of Jesus, begins December 1 (my birthday, incidentally!) and goes one month, covering four units, one per week. There are no timed events so you can do the readings or post questions or engage in the forum discussions whenever you want, any day and time that suits you. All the course materials, including the discussions, stay available for you to consult or download for an additional month after that.
The only course text you must acquire (if you don’t already have it) is my book On the Historicity of Jesus. Everything else will be provided. For a more complete course description, and how to register, visit the course announcement page.
Please acquire the required text in print or kindle or any format available, except the audiobook, which won’t be functional for the needs of the course. So you should only get that in addition to another version, if you get it at all. And be aware it probably won’t work with the whisper function either, since the read text differs from the printed text (I had to incorporate footnote commentary into the main text, and read out descriptions of diagrams and tables, so the audiobook is complete, but not verbatim or in the same order as the kindle text; the audio also doesn’t contain the useful indexes and reference lists and citations).
I think that you tend to bury the lede with the historicity argument. Whether Jesus is a wholly fictitious person invented by Mark or someone whose exploits have been greatly exaggerated isn’t a very interesting question or one that we can expect to answer.
What you demonstrate is something rather different, namely that we have evidence that plausibly suggests that there was some form of Jesus cult celebrating a purely revelatory being that Paul and James were members of.
Similarly the debate as to whether Mohamed was a real person isn’t very interesting if the alternative theory is that his character was merely the result of the exploits of a series of military-religious leaders being amalgamated.
I find it very interested that all the founders of the major religions turn out to be such slippery figures historically.
How likely are you to be repeating this course at some point? I’m torn between waiting to do it later in (probably vain) hopes that life may be a bit more hectic then, and doing it now to be sure I don’t miss the chance!
I offer it roughly once a year. When exactly varies. But usually no sooner than six months from now and no later than twelve months from now.
Is there an estimate on how many hours a week the course would take? I’m interested but I’m worried I simply won’t find the time to actually complete the course…
You can apply as many or as little as you want. There is no grading. Some people don’t do any of the work, just the readings, and the read the discussions, and that’s it. Some don’t even do that much, but just glean what they can given their available time. But those who can do more will participate in varying degrees, like answering one of the three or four challenge questions each week and reading an evaluation of their answer, or answering all he challenge questions each week, or anything in between.
The readings can also be downloaded, so you can continue with them after the course. You can also download the discussions by the end, for later review. The only thing that stops is the ability to continue asking questions of the instructor or answering the test questions after the course ends.
So you can set the amount of work you put in. And benefit a lot even with little.
You can see how “On The Historicity Of Jesus” makes some interesting points. For example, (1) you argue that Jesus was meant to replace the Temple system. Mark is probably dated after the fall of Jerusalem to the Roman army in 70 CE. There are hints of this. In chapter 13, “the little apocalypse,” the words seem to describe the pain endured by the residents of that holy city during that catastrophe. The people are urged to flee into the hills of Judea and even to Galilee. In the story of the transfiguration of Jesus in chapter 9, Jesus is portrayed as having replaced the Temple as the meeting place between God and human life, for the shekinah, the light of God that once was thought to have enveloped the Temple, now is made to shine on Jesus. That story makes no sense unless the temple is no more. (2) I also don’t have any problem with you interpreting the “James, the brother (adelphos) of the Lord (Gal 1:19)” passage as referring to James as a non-apostle baptized Christian, instead of being a blood brother of Jesus. Mark, for instance, though he wrote that Jesus had blood brothers, still preserves an early tradition whereby non family members of Jesus were still identified as Jesus’ family if they had sufficient faith: “Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother (Mark 3:33-35).” The followers of Jesus were also known as “the Brethren (eg. Luke 22:32),” another way of saying “Brotherhood,” so all Paul might have meant in Gal 1:19 is “Brother James.” Anyway, lots of interesting stuff to discuss in Carrier’s “On The Historicity Of Jesus.”
You are an interesting fellow. For a long time I wondered if Christianity started out as some sort of Conspiracy to lie about a God-man to people in order to make the world a better place. I have expressed this in four or five comments in the comment section here: http://vridar.org/2015/09/21/comments-open/#comment-73290 You have also raised the issue that Christianity might have started out as a noble lie (cf. Plato in the Republic). In your essay “Why The Resurrection Is Unbelievable” in the anthology “The Christian Delusion,” you write: “It’s also possible the first Christians ‘claimed’ to have had these visions [of Jesus] even when they didn’t. They could have done so simply to join, lead, or support a movement whose moral goals they approved and believed should be implemented and preached to society for the good of their fellow man (Carrier, The Christian Delusion, pg 306).”
You also anticipated the current debate about whether the Jews anticipated a killed messiah. You write “Some Jews even suspected the end would shortly follow the death of the messiah (Daniel 9:25-27), (Carrier, the Christian Delusion, pg. 306; also cf Carrier, The End Of Christianity, 56, 372n9)
Interesting stuff.