I’ll be debating renowned New Testament scholar Dr. Craig Evans at Kennesaw State University in Kennesaw, Georgia, this April 13 (2016) at 7pm in the Social Sciences building, room 1021 (parking in the West Parking Deck). Co-hosted by Ratio Christi and the Atheists, Humanists, and Agnostics at KSU. Q&A will follow. We’ll be selling and signing books in the Social Sciences Atrium afterward. Details here.
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Richard Carrier is the author of many books and numerous articles online and in print. His avid readers span the world from Hong Kong to Poland. With a Ph.D. in ancient history from Columbia University, he specializes in the modern philosophy of naturalism and humanism, and the origins of Christianity and the intellectual history of Greece and Rome, with particular expertise in ancient philosophy, science and technology. He is also a noted defender of scientific and moral realism, Bayesian reasoning, and historical methods.
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Congratulations on arranging a public debate with respected NT scholar, Craig Evans. I just finished watching the YouTube debate between Dr. Bart Ehrman and Dr. Craig Evans from 2012: Religion Soup: Ehrman / Evans debate, night 2.
I came away impressed with the scholarly credentials and career accomplishments of both men in general and the informed highly tenuous arguments (educated speculations really) specifically made by each man. Though I believe for obvious reasons that no empirically sound conclusion can be reached from the flimsy textual inferences drawn on throughout the debate, I applaud bringing the debate into a public square and leaving the self-serving pronouncements of absolute TRUTH to the dustbin of the fan-boy blogosphere.
Will your debate be recorded for YouTube presentation?
I don’t know about recording. That’s not up to me.
The Society of Biblical Literature didn’t record my formal SBL Conference debate with Kenneth Waters on this topic. But CFI did record my formal academic debate on this topic with New Testament professor Zeba Crook. You can find the latter debate online. Likewise my debate with Catholic scholar Trent Horn.
This isn’t new. I’ve done at least three formal debates with well-qualified experts on this. (And I’m not counting all the debates on it I’ve had with under-qualified Christian apologists.) Craig Evans I suspect will make a respectable case on par with Zeba Crook. And I’ll point out that what they have isn’t enough to establish the proposition. Therefore, historicity agnosticism is the most they can hope for. Already seven fully qualified experts agree.
Excellent! I’ll be there.
I had a look and saw one of the comments “I would love to see a debate where Carrier is challenged to defend his own authorship, scholarly status, and even existence on the basis of his own ludicrous standards”
These people seem to think it is all or nothing. Either your credulously accept any claim about authorship and historical validity, despite evidence, or you reject absolutely everything. There is apparently no middle ground there.
It’s worse than the more usual examples of Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar, at least in those cases people can be forgiven for historical ignorance, but with someone living, they have to ignore the thousands of pages of writings and other documents, hundreds of eye witnesses (that can actually be interviewed) and dozens of videos just to start.
I know. It’s absurd.
I know you said that recording is not up to you. Can you at least find out if it is planned to be recorded and made available?
Assume that it won’t be. Until I hear otherwise.
If one is made and gets posted, I’ll announce when I know the link. But often these things get recorded and the recording mysteriously disappears. And often the organizers don’t have the funds or means for recording in the first place. So my inclination is to not count on a recording being made or released. If I hear they will be making one, I’ll mention it here though.
dr carrier
you said in one of your debates that paul believed that his jesus divested his powers and that meant according to you that a powerless jesus could not perform miracles. so according to paul, his jesus was not a miracle producing person, right?
Not during his incarnation. Paul’s Jesus is otherwise a superbeing who creates and governs the universe before and after that. So, definitely a miracle-worker. He simply abandoned that power for the brief time he was incarnated to die. Which means if Jesus was a historical person, not only Paul but the original Christians even (since Philippians 2 preserves a pre-Pauline Christian gospel), did not believe that, and had no legends yet of, Jesus performing miracles. That appears to be a later legendary evolution of their belief. Of course, anyone who trusts the Gospels thinks otherwise. But there is no evidence in Paul of it being otherwise, and the earliest creed appears to deny miracle-working (since it says Jesus abandoned his divine powers and became a slave to the elements). As does 1 Corinthians 1:20-25 (which says no signs were performed by Jesus).
I asked on the Facebook page and I was told that it would be recorded. I hope you get creamed Mr. Carrier! >:D Haha just kidding may the best scholar win. 🙂
Everywun says Paul’s letters (the authentic wuns) are pre-gospel – does that include the so-call’d oral gospel tradition? The gospel did not become gospel the day the writer indited the wurds.
We don’t have a copy of anything before Paul’s letters. So we don’t know what any oral tradition consisted of.
“Craig Evans I suspect will make a respectable case on par with Zeba Crook. And I’ll point out that what they have isn’t enough to establish the proposition. Therefore, historicity agnosticism is the most they can hope for. Already seven fully qualified experts agree…”
I assure you, Richard, no new consensus will emerge from this debate, from qualified experts, or any other peer-reviewed scholarly works because the absence of evidence renders the question impossible to resolve. I suspect the predominant consensus that Jesus existed will hold sway. All the debaters can do is appeal to divergent conclusions based on persuasive interpretations of text. Methodology can help with analysis of the meager “given.” Unfortunately no matter how hard you bear down methodology cannot supply new evidence.
For what it’s worth (2 cents?), here is what I believe is going on. Jesus historicity cannot be decided on the basis of first hand evidence or first hand independent eyewitness accounts that rise in number and quality to the level of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Logically, the sparse, biased textual evidence can only generate various interpretations that form consensuses along a spectrum from: Jesus existed as a real person “in some sense” to: Jesus did NOT exist as a real person “in some sense.” Poisoning the well is the recrimination of ideological agenda. Christians side with scholars, some (but not all) of them believers, who argue the case for the historical Jesus while Mythicists, overwhelmingly atheist proponents bolstered by an atheist fan-boy base argue for the Celestial Jesus who has no earthly counterpart. Both sides should agree that they must deal with ancient forms of historiography that distort references to persons and events with supernatural intervention, prophecy and purpose. The exercise produces thousands of pages of scholarly analysis of textual and archaeological evidence, variously synthesized into more or less coherent interpretations of the probabilities for the historicity or ahistoricity of Jesus.
As an atheist layman I’ve leaned toward mythicism, then swung back to a highly qualified view of an historical Jesus. Aside from finding the arguments from textual documentation more credible, I find the circumstantial evidence even more credible: We know historically that a cult of Jesus emerged in first century Palestine around 35 CE.. If the central figure of that cult was contrived and depicted originally in an exclusively mythical narrative perhaps a century earlier, then we would probably have direct evidence of the theological fabrication from contemporary sources. Among the hundreds or several thousands of Jews inducted for decades before the alleged birth of Jesus into a mystery cult believing in a celestial messiah sacrificed by demons in a heavenly sublunar realm, literate members familiar with the fabrication would likely record the mythic content explicitly on parchment. Paradoxically for the ancients, a divine mythic narrative would be complete in itself with no need to fictionalize a profane earthly shill to validate it. Someone would have known and written down that the myth is the divine reality.
Even more likely, because most Jews rejected the messianic claims of the Jesus cult, disillusioned ex-members or informants would have swarmed to denounce the pagan heresy of a humanized blood sacrifice instigated by Yaweh in the heavens, and exposed the false prophets that promulgated the blasphemous lies. Significantly no such documentation, exposee, or denunciation of mythicist narrative origins of Jesus have been discovered.
What we do know is that the emergence of the Jesus Cult into historical accounts coincided with an alleged trauma -specifically the crucifixion of SOMEONE whose teachings members of this cult were following. Apparently the historical evidence for the crucifixion of the SOME TEACHER-LEADER ignited a sequence of events that led to the founding and development of the Christian religion. Whether the “Jesus” of the Gospels ever said a word that is recorded therein is doubtful though arguable on tenuous grounds. But the existence of some itinerant rabbi, probably a charismatic peasant, probably preaching some form of populist apocalyptic message, who remains obscured in the fog of ancient legend probably existed as a human focal point for the incrementally contrived edifice of Christianity.
Both sides already do. No actually qualified, non-fundamentalist expert in this debate thinks otherwise.
See OHJ, Element 44, pp. 214-22; my discussion and quotation of James Crossley are representative of the whole field. At most some scholars have not taken stock of the implications of these facts, necessitating that I and the likes of Crossley remind them. But plenty already have taken stock.
But you are right on that more general point, that what each individual scholar wants to be true is more guiding of their results than any valid method, from whatever pereidolic pattern they see in the data seduces them into thinking is “the truth,” and each sees a completely difference face in that toast, resulting in the chaos in the field I document (and document many other experts also documenting) in Chapter 1 of Proving History. They can wallow in this. Or they can wake up and start correctly applying logically valid methods. Whether those methods end up being mine or not is besides the point. They still have to find a method that’s valid and apply it correctly. I predict that when they do, they will stumble out of the brush into the clearing exactly where I already am. But they won’t even be able to find any clearing in that thicket until they realize they are lost in the weeds.
Or in the 70s B.C., as Christians and Jews east of the Roman Empire believed. Or in the 50s A.D. as many Christians even in the Roman Empire believed. (See OHJ, Chapter 8.1.)
I do think the 30s is most likely, as when scripture predicted, and the first visions occurred. But that does still make it hard to explain how Christians themselves could disagree so widely on when their religion began.
The only actual source we actually have that places the origin in the 30s is the Gospel of Mark. One single, decades-late, highly fictionalized source. (Though many scholars try hard to clamp their ears and deny it, all other Gospels we have that place the events there, are just redactions or rewrites of Mark.)
They may well have.
But since all literature outside the NT produced by every sect of the entire church across three continents composed in the first 80+ years of the religion has completely vanished, and is not even known in quotation, we can’t talk about what was or was not in that literature. We only get hints, such as in 1 Peter that references a Christian sect regarding the Gospels as mythical, or the Ascension of Isaiah whose earliest redaction we can now reconstruct indeed places the whole thing in the sky, not on earth (thus, someone did write it down…and Medieval Christians tried to hide it by doctoring it up).
All of this and more is discussed in OHJ, in sections specifically devoted to exactly this question (Ch. 8.12–with 8.6 and 3.1 and Elements 21 and 22, pp. 148ff.).
Indeed. Not even denunciation of the historicist claims either.
We have zero writings from any Jewish opponents of Christianity for literally hundreds of years. Why do you think that is? Because Jews never had any objection to or differing perspective on anything Christians ever said?
Of course not. The reason we don’t have a single Jewish writing about Christianity for centuries (nor even any quotation from or even mention of one) is that Medieval historicist Christians chose to throw it all in the trash, and preserve not even a single word of it.
The first example to survive the destruction of Medieval scribes and time is the Babylonian Talmud, and there the Jews only know of a Christianity that claimed to have begun in the 70s B.C. and challenge no other version of it, and do so with no evident knowledge of what really happened. (And even that Christians tried to doctor away; as we can tell by comparing Talmuds in Christian hands with Talmuds out of Christian hands.)
So you can’t argue from the silence of documents you don’t have. Because you do not know what is in them. (Proving History, index “Argument from Silence”.)
The letters say that was someone in outer space, only ever reported as having been seen in visions, teaching from heaven and through hidden messages in scripture (Rom. 16:25-26, Gal. 1, 1 Cor. 15:1-8).
Not until decades later and after a devastating war that laid waste to Israel did it ever get mentioned by anyone that this Jesus may have been an actual person. And only in a highly mythical fable (OHJ, Ch. 10.4).
Paul never mentions Jesus ever having disciples or a ministry or performing miracles or meeting or saying anything to anyone while alive (OHJ, Ch. 11). Paul never mentions Jesus ever being killed by anyone on earth (mainstream experts are correct to reject the mention in 1 Thess. 2 as an anti-Pauline interpolation). Paul never has to respond to any Jewish polemic against Jesus having been an executed convict or ordinary man. Because there was no such polemic. Paul says no Jews ever saw Jesus, other than the apostles, that the only way to have heard the preaching of Jesus is through the apostles telling people what they saw and were told was hidden in the scriptures (Romans 10:14-21). The only arguments Paul reveals the Jews had against what Christians were claiming is that it was contrary to scripture, and no adequate signs from heaven endorsed it. None ever argued that the account of events were other than Christians claimed, or that Jesus was a blasphemer or an insurrectionist tried and executed for his crimes, or anything else that connects with the tall tales in Mark (as we can see in Paul’s letter to the Romans, aimed in part at a Jewish audience; and in the letter to the Hebrews, aimed at dissuading Jewish Christians from being persuaded by Jewish arguments to return to traditional Judaism). The Babylonian Rabbis centuries later were the first to ever try such an argument in print that we know of, and they deployed it against a Christian sect teaching a 70s B.C. Jesus not crucified by Pilate but stoned by the Sanhedrin, decades before the region was ever even occupied by Romans.
So your reasoning falls apart at every seam. We just can’t get there from here.
Agnosticism is the best you can get.
I think there is enough evidence to get a little further. But there is certainly not enough to get to a minimal historical Jesus.
And this is evident from the fact that all the things that persuaded you of that, turn out not to be true or valid. You don’t know what Jews and Christians were saying in the first century, except what Medieval historicist sectarians chose to let you, and what they chose to let you see was absolutely nothing from anyone who disagreed with their sales pitch. None of the minimal Jesus you want is in Paul. Nor any evidence it was ever anything Paul had to contend with as a competing view, from Jews or anyone.
Meanwhile, forging evidence was the standard mode of literary production in the Christian sect that survived and decided what to preserve (OHJ, Element 44).
So, you have the complete erasure of all competing evidence in the first century of the religion; combined with an extensive recourse to forging and interpolation and editing documents in favor of their own view. That’s an extremely difficult filter to see through. It has obscured almost every possible thing that could be known about how the religion actually began.
How are you preparing for this debate?
I’m preparing for the Bass debate now. Reviewing available Bass debates and rehearsing the material I already have produced pertaining to the question. For the Evans debate, which is a month after the Bass debate, I’ll be doing much the same.
It will be recorded and a link will be posted on the Ratio Christi Kennesaw Facebook and YouTube channel for evaluation.
I love that Ratio Christi’s motto is “Defending Truth and Christianity”. Don’t they know the Bible says a man cannot serve two masters?
Dr. Carrier,
I quite enjoyed the lecture. I thought you made a great case, though Evans was no pushover. Thank you for signing my copy of your book. One contended extrabiblical argument did not come up at the debate. I, an atheist and former Christian, have come up against statements in the Talmud that are said to confirm the historicity of Jesus. As a non-Jew, I am not as familiar with the Talmud as I might be. I know you addressed some of the Talmudic statements in your book. Since the Talmudic arguments were not raised by Evans at the debate, do you have anything to add as far as whether or not the Talmud provides any extrabiblical support for an historical Jesus?
The Talmud puts Jesus being killed in a city other than Jerusalem in the 70s B.C., a hundred years before Pontius Pilate. And he is executed by the Sanhedrin, by stoning, not by Roman crucifixion (the Romans wouldn’t even be in Judea for another decade or more). It’s hard to fathom how that supports his historicity. It actually argues against it. It shows Christians outside the Roman Empire (where this Talmud was composed) were placing Jesus in a completely different historical era than Mark (and all subsequent responses to and redactions of Mark) did. Which is not likely to happen to someone who actually exists; but is definitely something that can happen to someone who doesn’t. See OHJ, Chapter 8.1.