The Christ Myth Theory

The Nazareth one.

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"Checking On Carrier - Dr. Kipp Davis & Dr. James F. McGrath". @time:01:08:00 YouTube. Potential Theism. Oct 27, 2023.

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Did Mark Also Say Jesus Was a Nazorian?​

A final example is the problem of what “Nazarene” means in the oft-repeated moniker “Jesus the Nazarene.” Because that’s largely a contrivance of modern scholarship. The manuscripts don’t quite vindicate this reading. Most Gospel texts don’t say “Nazerene” at all. They mostly say “Nazorian.” Which does not refer to someone from Nazareth. And how could dozens of verses all get switched from Nazarene to Nazorian? The collective evidence suggests, on text-critical grounds, that it went the other way around: only after it was decided that this word is supposed to refer to Nazareth did it start getting switched out for the correct form for that sense. Nazorian was probably everywhere the original reading. How else would Matthew never have heard of any other form of the word? Just as with “Jesus Barabbas,” it is more likely Mark also consistently wrote Nazorian, and that his text was “fixed” more successfully, owing again to their being fewer manuscripts to control (then and extant).

As I note in OHJ, even the author of Acts does not appear to know of the Nazarene appellation, imagining the Christians called themselves “the Nazōraioi (Acts 24.5), which in English corresponds to ‘Nazorian’, by analogy with Athēnaioi, ‘Athenian’.” Nazors (or Nazor) isn’t a town at all, much less the town of Nazareth. Epiphanius likewise knew the original Torah-observant sect of Christians by this same appellation, the Nazorians (OHJ, 281–82). This has serious implications (OHJ, 401–02; emphasis now added):

It should be clear that Nazōr– and Nazar– are completely different roots; and –eth and –ai are completely different terminations. The original meaning was probably not a town of origin but an attribute or label (a name with a secret meaning, as I show in Proving History some Christians in fact believed). This lack of connection between the terms is actually an argument for the historicity of Nazareth (at least when the Gospels were written), as there is no other explanation why Nazōraios would generate an assignment to Nazareth other than that there was an actual Nazareth and that sounded close enough (otherwise, if the evangelists were inventing the town, they would have named it Nazōrai).
Conversely, this also argues that Jesus did not come from Nazareth, as otherwise there is no good explanation why he was called a Nazorian (Mt. 26.71; Lk. 18.37; Jn 18.5-7 and 19.19) and his followers Nazorians, other than that this was a term originally unconnected with Nazareth and therefore preceded the assignment of that town to Jesus (it’s not as if Matthew, e.g., needed to find scriptural confirmation that he originated in Nazareth; Mark didn’t, and neither did Luke or John). Otherwise Jesus would have been called a Nazaretos (‘Nazarethan’) or a Nazaranos (‘Nazaran’).
Mark created the loosely similar word, Nazarēnos, for this purpose, unless that was a later scribal modification. And we have reason to believe it was, because Mk 10.47 originally agreed with the other Gospels in saying Nazōraios (e.g. in Codex Sinaiticus); Mk 14.67 may have (e.g. Codex Koridethi and Codex Sangallensis 48); as might Mk 16.6 (e.g. Codex Sangallensis 48 and Codex Regius); and there is significant confusion in the mss. as to the spelling in Mk 1.24, as also in those other three verses, leaving all cases accounted for—for Mk 1.24 alone [the manuscript concordance of Reuban] Swanson identifies no less than five different variant spellings …
[Meanwhile] Matthew knows no other spelling than Nazōraios (and he was using Mark as a source). John also knows no other spelling than Nazōraios. Luke uses Nazarēnos only twice, only one of which is a lift from Mark (Lk. 4.34, redacting Mk 1.24), the other introduced in a story unique to Luke (Lk. 24.19), but elsewhere, in another lift from Mark, he uses Nazōraios (Lk. 18.37, redacting Mk 10.47), and this spelling can’t have come from Matthew, who does not use the word at all in his redaction of the same story (in Mt. 20.29-34). It therefore must have come from Mark, which argues that Mark originally wrote Nazōraios.
Notably, in Luke’s one lift from Mark that reads Nazarēnos, the manuscripts again don’t agree on the spelling (some seven variants are known, including spellings similar to Nazōraios); and in his one unique use, a great many mss. in fact read Nazōraios. … [So] it would appear that Nazarēnos was a later scribal invention and might never have been in the Gospels of Mark or Luke originally.

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So…

[It] should already be obvious from the fact that Christians were originally called Nazorians (Acts 24.5), and the originating sect of Christianity, which remained Torah-observant, continued to be so-named for centuries [per Epiphanius]. Yet Christians [themselves] neither came from nor were based at Nazareth. So the word clearly meant something else. And this is explicitly admitted in later Christian sources [as I document in Proving History; index, “Nazareth”]. In fact, that the messianic fable had to be set in Galilee was already established in scripture (Isa. 9.1- 7); and scripture likewise insisted the messiah had to be a ‘Nazorian’ (Mt. 2.23, obviously reading some scripture or variant we no longer have…
These facts obviously inspired the selection for Jesus’ home a town in Galilee with the nearest-sounding name, ‘Nazareth’. That this is what happened is supported by the fact that those two words (Nazōraios and Nazareth) are not at all related, yet Matthew reports that scripture said Jesus would be a Nazorian, and Acts says the Christians were called Nazorians, and Epiphanius confirms a Torah-observant Christian sect did exist in Palestine called the Nazorians, and Jesus is frequently called a Nazorian in the Gospels (in John and Matthew, he is only so called). So the scripture and the name came first; the Gospel narrators then forced a fit, as best they could, with otherwise unrelated background facts (like a town with a near-enough-sounding name).

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Of course, a real man could have been assigned this town for scriptural and mythopoeic reasons; so the historicity of Jesus is not undermined by this revelation. But one of the favorite arguments for his existence is tanked by it. You can no longer deploy the Hitchens maneuver and claim Jesus “must” have existed because we can’t otherwise explain how he came to be “from Nazareth.” And thus it matters that text-critical considerations actually strongly argue for Mark and Luke consistently having used the unrelated word “Nazorian,” and all manuscripts ever attesting “Nazarene” are later scribal emendations to solidify the historicizing myth of his origin and get rid of the original esoteric meaning of what a “Nazorian” actually was.

Conclusion​

So problems for your pet theories can both arise or vanish with credible textual criticism. Scribal error was so common, and the kinds of errors that were particularly common actually perform so very well as explanations of many difficulties or oddities in our surviving text of the Bible, that there is no need to resort to convoluted armchair apologetics or wild speculations about an author’s hidden intentions. And attending to the manuscript history as well as the text-critical context of any crux in the extant text can often be crucial to assessing what might actually have happened. You certainly don’t want to overlook it.

This does not mean just any text-critical theory you can come up with is therefore probable. You need a preponderance of evidence supporting it in each particular case. Manuscript evidence is nice, but you won’t always have it; and even when you do, it might not always be clear. But you can have evidence in the form of there being a definite problem with the text that needs some solution; plus the high probability of a text-critical solution at that point given the inherent and surrounding Greek (or even the variations found across the Synoptics, for example); and the lack of any evidence to the contrary; as well as what intelligent authors were back then more or less likely to do usually; and other considerations.

There are many examples I already explore in various other places, such as in On the Historicity of Jesus, where I discuss evidence that, for instance, Codex Bezae preserves more original readings of Luke-Acts than our critical edition does. Just two cases in point:

• Emmaus might have originally been Oulammaous (OHJ, p. 483). There are good text-critical reasons to think so. And they stem in part from recognizing that what we know as “the Emmaus narrative” is actually a mythic recapitulation of the story of the boy Jesus in the temple, the author of Luke deliberately inventing both tales as end-caps to his entire Gospel. Which is an observation now recently confirmed by a new study (yet without noticing the evidence in Codex Bezae) by Reverend Dr. Rob James, Professor of Anglican Formation and Studies at the Vancouver School of Theology: The Spiral Gospel: Intratextuality in Luke’s Narrative (James Clarke, 2023). To its results, which independently replicate and thus corroborate several of my own arguments, can now be added the manuscript evidence from Codex Bezae of Emmaus being a multi-step corruption for the correct Septuagint reading of Oulammaous, a.k.a. Bethel, a.k.a. “God’s House.”
• Codex Bezae also provided evidence that Luke’s empty tomb narrative might have originally said the stone covering Jesus’s tomb took “twenty men” to move (OHJ, p. 486). Because that would align Luke’s version of the story symbolically with the Antiquities of Josephus, wherein we learn it took “twenty men” to open the doors to the Jerusalem temple. Whoever wrote that line was clearly drawing from the Antiquities of Josephus in order to equate the tomb of Jesus with the temple of God, and thus Jesus leaving the tomb with God leaving the temple (thereby and therein inaugurating a new divine order). To suppose a later scribe “figured out” that Luke-Acts draws often from the Antiquities of Josephus and thus dug into that and found this detail and thus “added” this line to Luke to somehow improve its ingenious application of the Antiquities to improve on the mythical symbolism of the tale seems less likely than that…Luke is the one who did this, and all other manuscripts lack the line because it was lost in transmission, deliberately or by error. One of those theories requires more, and more improbable, coincidences than the other.

So there are many reasons, from the mundane to the scary, why textual criticism is an essential methodology for studying and understanding the Bible and its creation and transmission.

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--Carrier (15 November 2023). "How Textual Criticism Can Help or (Sorry) Hurt Your Cause". Richard Carrier Blogs.

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It hasn’t received a good write-up in the literature. It’s even sometimes one of those things scholars didn’t think to check and thus don’t even know about (and thus they are surprised to be told the word nazarene is nowhere in Matthew, for example, but repeatedly only nazorian). And the others just know it but don’t think very hard about it. But all will know, once they look, the grammatical point in Greek: nazôr- does not make sense for nazar-, and thus it’s a “crux,” a difficulty in need of explanation.

As to the possible transmission history, the authors clearly do know how to spell Nazareth, and thus were they only looking at a Hebrew spelling of NZR (which requires us to believe a Hebrew document was being consulted and not oral lore), and then assumed it meant the town, they would not translitterate it as Nazôraios but some appropriate Nazar- term (as later scribes started doing). So they clearly understood the word did not refer to the town, and yet that they had to preserve the long-o (omega) sound for some reason. So it remains to ascertain what that reason was. It wasn’t the town. So it had to be something else.

One can speculate on an older mistake, same as Isaiah’s “almah” (young lady) becoming the Septuagint “parthenos” (virgin), and then driving a whole Christian pesher construction of Jesus’s Nativity around that. Matthew says “he will be a nazorian” was in scripture somewhere. We know they were using different books than ours, and the same books with different readings than ours, so the passage he was looking at has been lost to us. But it must have been a key text probably even as early as Paul’s generation (he likely would have known what Matthew was talking about and what it meant vis Jesus). Could that have been a NZR that got rendered in a Greek (Septuagintal?) translation as Nazoraios when really it meant, say, just Nazirite?

I discuss this possibility (as others have noted it) in Proving History (index, “Nazareth”). This is all speculation. But “if” that’s what happened (and that’s “if”), then there are still two possible ways it could have gotten into Christian lore, either them reading the Greek as having some special other meaning (than Nazirite for example, or Netzer, “The Branch,” and so on; I discuss the options proposed), or the translators of the Scripture into Greek themselves having intended some special other meaning (which must be lost to us now) that the Christians then picked up on.

Anyway, that’s many levels of speculation at that point, so not much we can do with this information at present. Maybe someday someone will find a clue that sorts it all out. For now, all we can say is, the Christians clearly took it to mean something important, and whatever that was (it can be any of half a dozen things), it was not “a town.”

As to scholarship:

My treatment in Proving History and On the Historicity of Jesus (each case, index, “Nazareth”) is combined the most on-point. But I cite useful references in PH:

• J. S. Kennard, “Was Capernaum the Home of Jesus?” Journal of Biblical Literature 65, no. 2 (June 1946): 131–41.
• —— , “Nazorean and Nazareth,” Journal of Biblical Literature 66, no. 1 (March 1947): 79–81.
• W.F. Albright, “The Names Nazareth and Nazoraean,” Journal of Biblical Literature 65, no. 4 (December 1946): 397–401.
• To which one could add the fuller study of Ray Pritz, Nazarene Jewish Christianity: From the End of the New Testament Period Until Its Disappearance in the Fourth Century (Brill 1988), esp. pp. 11-18.

I notice there is even a Wikipedia page, though I didn’t evaluate it. Likewise the discussion there under just the term. But they mention, I see, many of the proposals. I see Britannica has an entry, but it’s paywalled.

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--Comment by Richard Carrier on November 17, 2023 at 10:58 am per "How Textual Criticism Can Help or (Sorry) Hurt Your Cause". Richard Carrier Blogs. 15 November 2023.

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I think Mark is a sectarian in Paul’s clade. Indeed, I think he’s his first mythopoeic advocate. That doesn’t mean they ever met, of course. I suspect not, but there is no way to know.

On manuscript distribution, that’s unknowable because we don’t know what the intentions were or the investment scale. For example, was this just for select churches to read out? Or was it a propaganda campaign seeking to flood the market of ideas? Or was it a literary exercise circulated only among certain literary houses and thus maybe aimed at certain library collections (per Walsh)? Etc. Since we don’t know (we have no reports at all from the period of their composition; the only thing close comes from Papias a generation or two later, and it’s obviously completely uninformed and gullible), we can’t say.

We can say more about the anti-Marcionite edition that included Mark (which will have been composed two average lifetimes after Mark), since that clearly appears to have had a propagandistic intent and appears to have had a lot of money backing it, and this is even evidenced by the fact that it succeeded: it flooded the market so conclusively, not a single extant manuscript comes from any text but it, and we are finding such manuscripts even within fifty to a hundred years of its publication (which means there were so many in the market by then that they appear in the record even after statistical wipeout).

Comparatively, therefore, we can say that Mark (original) was nowhere near that widely published. But that could be because of limited investment funds, not necessarily a lack of desire to win some propaganda war. But one can speculate it’s more likely Mark’s agenda was more in-house, and because he (and his backers) had no competition yet (assuming no prior Gospel existed), the need of scaling production would not have been as immediate. Even Matthew, which I think did intend to “replace” Mark, was aimed at a different market (Torah observant churches). Luke and John (or our redactions thereof) were written so close to the flooded Edition in time that even if they were scaled, it soon swamped them.

So, all that said, my guess would be somewhere between 10 and 100 copies were made in Mark’s lifetime. Whereas the Edition clearly was mass produced (and so rapidly as to even compromise quality; cf. link on the edition above). It must have generated something on a scale of 100 copies a year, if not 1000. And that sounds like a lot, but it really isn’t, as I discussed in respect to manuscripts of Daniel:

Every major city and base of leadership in Judea would have at least one copy within mere weeks of its promulgation. And from there, dozens of copies could be made a year. But if there were even just ten “initial edition” copies disseminated to elite centers, and then each was in turn copied only twice a year, after just ten years (much less forty), there would be over ten thousand manuscripts of Daniel in Judea (a relatively small geographic era I should remind you; little bigger than Vermont). I need not claim there were so many; my point is that it makes no sense to claim such a book couldn’t or wouldn’t be all over Judea in no time at all.

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So it really comes down to purpose. Did Mark’s generation think it sufficient to have only one copy per church and thus not scale beyond that? If so, they could easily hit that mark within a year, much more so ten. But they might then not have continued, reserving resources merely for maintaining the copies they had.

On that last question, possible, yes, but very unlikely; so if we had to say that (if, for instance, Paul mentioned a boy Jesus), this would greatly reduce the probability of mythicism, probably by enough even to make it a less probable hypothesis (it would depend on exactly what Paul said about the boy Jesus; e.g. if he said he lived on Venus, well, that’s one thing, but if he said he lived in Galilee, that would end the matter, and if he was ambiguous, it would depend on how ambiguous and what other precedents in Paul we could adduce to assess it by).

As for Mark, I do not believe Mark had any idea of his book being taken literally by Christians. That intent seems to arise slowly after him (Matthew flirts with it by fleshing out the biography and saying it was all predicted by scripture, thus he is selling the myth as just like Deuteronomy or Exodus or any Life of Moses; Luke starts pretending it’s history; John then insists you take it as such or be damned). When Mark wrote, everything is allegory.

And he isn’t at all interested in expounding any cosmology of Jesus. As I expounded in my last comment, his book is all about behavior (what does Baptism mean and why should you get one? How should you react to the temple’s destruction? How should you market the gospel? How should you deal with enemies and doubters? Etc.) rather than metaphysics (Where does Jesus live? Who really killed him? Is Jesus an angel? What order of angel? What is his body made of now? What was his body made of then? Etc.).

So the birth of Jesus is simply irrelevant to Mark’s intentions. His book is not about any such thing as that. To Mark’s design, the Baptism is the Nativity (his mythical adoption as God’s son, and thus his “birth” is represented allegorically that way).

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--Comment by Richard Carrier on November 21, 2023 at 12:57 pm per "How Textual Criticism Can Help or (Sorry) Hurt Your Cause". Richard Carrier Blogs. 15 November 2023.

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As to what Mark thought: we can’t tell because Mark isn’t anywhere talking about the cosmology of his beliefs (even allegorically; that’s why there isn’t even a Nativity narrative, and even when Matthew adds one it isn’t really concerned with cosmology as much as aligning Jesus more with Moses; etc.).

The Gospel is all about the gospel, which we would categorize as a moral-political theory (what people should do, how they should behave). For example, even when he discusses the apocalypse, he is vague on details (how exactly will Jesus himself be commanding armies of angels, what exactly will they do when they get here, and where will they all be in the meantime—like, the third heaven, the seventh, flittering about several heavens?), but focuses, rather, on how we should respond or behave, both with respect to the coming of it, and with respect to its arrival.

Another example is the demons all proclaiming him Lord. This directly contradicts not just Pauline but even Orthodox doctrine that the whole point was that the demons would not know it was Jesus until after they killed him, when it was too late. Mark “nods” to this element with his whole theme of “the messianic secret” (Jesus keeps commanding people not to tell anyone; they do anyway). But in no way is Mark being coherent to the theological model of salvation he surely believed in. This indicates he had no interest to be. Since it’s all post hoc allegory anyway, all he needs is a nod, not a coherently literal adherence to it. Just as with the fig tree episode, where Mark does not care that what he has written, taken literally, is wildly illogical (why would any sane rational entity expect figs on a tree out of season??); because it is the symbolic meaning that matters (it is no longer the season for figs = it is no longer the time for the Jewish temple cult).

Because of this, we can’t really extract things from Mark that we can’t find attested elsewhere. Like, what is he doing with the messianic secret? It makes no logical sense. Unless you know about 1 Cor. 2. What is he doing with this illogical fig tree story? It makes no logical sense. Unless you know about the Jewish War and the existential relevance of the temple cult. And so on.

And even then, the allegory is about behavior (how we should react to the temple being destroyed by heathens; how we should react to the messianic secret now), not technical doctrines about the cosmological system. Even when he has Jesus discuss one item of metaphysics, the nature of resurrection bodies and our ensuing life (will we be married in heaven? i.e. Mark 12:25), his focus is on behavior, how we should react to this understanding, what we should do. He doesn’t go into what it even means that “we will be like angels.” For Mark, the only important point is how it relates to behavior (in effect, “you will not claim wives in the afterlife so stop arguing about it”).

Another example is how Mark creates a deliberate symbolic connection between the baptism scene (which is a mock death and resurrection) and the death scene, where in both cases the heavens split (in the latter case, one will get that only if they know the temple curtain had the heavens depicted upon it and represented the barrier between God and men), and in one case the spirit descends upon him (as a bird) and in another it leaves him (he “expired” literally is the word “spirit left,” preserved even in the English: ex spir[it]). Okay, sounds like some cosmology maybe? And later spinoff sects tried to make technical hay over this. But really Mark is talking about behavior again; the literalism of his passages is not meant to even be logical, much less factual. What is a baptism? It is breaking the barrier between God and man by an indwelling of his Spirit, so you should go get one; it replaces the function of the temple cult, so you don’t need Levitical rules anymore; and so on.

Even at death, the message most likely is that the body is no longer relevant (the spirit leaves the shell because the shell has been cast off). That sort of contradicts a physically empty tomb, but again, Mark does not aim for literal coherence. It’s all metaphor. The empty tomb is itself a symbol of the empty (and thus irrelevant) body (hence “you will not find him here,” he’s somewhere else now). Which again is about behavior (how we should react to cadavers and tombs, what we should expect for ourselves in the end, what we should do, where we should look, etc.).

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--Comment by Richard Carrier on November 17, 2023 at 10:19 am per "How Textual Criticism Can Help or (Sorry) Hurt Your Cause". Richard Carrier Blogs. 15 November 2023.

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Rhea said:

Interesting. I hadn’t thought about the math of the copying pace of the erly books. Interesting to think about who their audiences were.

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Swammerdami said:

I don't remember if I linked to this video before or not:

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dbz said:

Swammerdami said:

I don't remember if I linked to this video before or not:

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LOL, given the April Fools date and final quote of the video "Is There Any Hard Evidence That Jesus Actually Existed?". @time:00:27:00 YouTube. Today I Found Out. Apr 1, 2023.

"Did Jesus of Nazareth actually exist? The evidence says yes". OpenMind. 24 December 2018. With the weight of all this evidence, for Meyers "those who deny the existence of Jesus are like the deniers of climate change."

Conflating the quality/quantity evidence for the historicity of Jesus with the evidence for climate change is suitable for Today I Found Out. Apr 1, 2023.

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Swammerdami said:

You watched the whole thing and THAT is the "refutation"...

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• Williams, Margaret H. (2022). "Early Classical Authors on Jesus". Bloomsbury Academic.

Williams says that Josephus doesn’t count as a “classical” author (p. 2 n. 4). I don’t understand why not; he is a competent Greek author and a Roman citizen. Not treating him as a Classical author is kind of like treating an American Jew as not really an American. So I suspect the real reason Williams skips him is closer to what she says on p. 54, that the material in Josephus “has suffered so badly through subsequent Christian ‘editing’ that Josephus’s original words (assuming that there is a genuine Josephan core to this evidence) can no longer be identified with confidence.”
[...]
Overall, ECAJ is a useful work. Williams provides background for the authors and texts she examines, and throughout is thorough enough in citation and discussion that anyone who wishes to treat of these authors on Jesus definitely must read her book.
[...]
Even by her own assessment, none of the sources Williams examines establishes any evidence for Jesus independent of the Gospels and Christians echoing them. The historicity of (a mundane, and hence rather insignificant) Jesus is not challenged by this state of affairs; but neither can it be supported by it. Evidence for historicity simply must be sought elsewhere.

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--Carrier (30 November 2023). "Margaret Williams on Early Classical Authors on Jesus". Richard Carrier Blogs.

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steve_bank said:

The idea that Josephus or any other writings from the day on Jesus are factual is ridiculous.

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• "THESE Are The Flawed Foundations of Biblical Studies". YouTube. Godless Engineer. Nov 22, 2023.

steve_bank said:

The idea that Josephus or any other writings from the day on Jesus are factual is ridiculous.

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• John Gleason presents the cosmology likely understood by Paul, per “Proof THIS Scholar Doesn’t Even Know His FIELD!”. @time:00:03:00 Youtube. Godless Engineer. Dec 5, 2023.

Info:
============
1. The Apocalypse Of Moses
2. Adam’s Burial in Outer Space
3. 2 Cor 12:2-4, Revelation of Moses 37:4-5, 40:1-2, and 2 Enoch 8-9
Chapters
============================================================
00:00 Introduction
01:04 Overview Of Ancient Jewish Cosmology
09:24 Where Is Paradise Located
13:45 Explaining The Uphill Battle
19:21 A song talks about Heaven, so it’s ridiculous
20:50 McGrath Lies About Paradise
24:38 Adam Is A Real Human Being
28:51 Is Eden And Paradise The Same Thing?
32:32 McGrath Feigning Reasonableness
36:37 “Someone Should Do Scholarship on this”
39:40 McGrath Blaming Dogmatic Thinking
41:13 Conclusion

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steve_bank said:

Rhea said:

Interesting. I hadn’t thought about the math of the copying pace of the erly books. Interesting to think about who their audiences were.

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Given the paper of the day, poor lighting, and the ink and pen of the day how long would it take you to copy the bible?

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Swammerdami said:

An overwhelming 99%+ majority of competent (non-Christian) historians are rather certain that Jesus of Nazareth did exist. Before following the easily-befuddled down the Carrierist rabbit-hole, Watch this YouTube!

The "Christ Myth Theory" is sheer crackpottery.

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Rhea said:

steve_bank said:

Rhea said:

Interesting. I hadn’t thought about the math of the copying pace of the erly books. Interesting to think about who their audiences were.

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Given the paper of the day, poor lighting, and the ink and pen of the day how long would it take you to copy the bible?

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It would take me approximately 3 months. Probably a lot less. I calculated 10 pages a day, which I know I can do, but would likely get faster if it were my whole job.

That estimate is for the entire bible. I think the thing I quoted was for only parts of the bible.

But still, it was very interesting to consider how the speed of duplication and the size of the investement in duplicating resources would influence whether different books of the bible got more or less traction than others.

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• An Aramaic-speaking man named Jesus -- let's not bother translating into native form -- is born in Galilee, ca 5 BC.
• In the late 20s AD, Jesus is baptized by John the Baptist.
• At sometime he becomes known (when may be unclear) as Jesus of Nazareth.
• This was a time when much of the world, and especially Judaea, was ready in somewise for a change, for a new cult.
• Jesus led some "ministry" for 1 to 3 years.
• He was a preacher. Probably.
• He wrote the sermon and parables attributed to him. Maybe.
• He was a charismatic healer.
• He performed wonders and marvels.
• Did he wreak havoc at the Temple?
• What really happened on "Palm Sunday"?
• Jesus was executed on the cross by order of Pontius Pilate. 30 AD and 33 AD are the most popular guesses.
• On the third day after execution, Jesus' tomb is seen to be empty. ???
• Sightings of a still-living Jesus are reported.
• One or more cults develop around this crucified Jesus of Nazareth.
• PROBABLY: In addition to Saul of Tarsus (Paul the Evangelist), the three most noteworthy early Christians were Simon Bar-Jona (Peter, Cephas), John 'Boanerges' Bar-Zebedee, and James Jesus' brother, known as James the Just. Probable.
• The cult(s) grew very rapidly. By the 50s AD the cult has spread to Asia Minor, Greece and even Rome. Growing popularity may have contributed directly or indirectly to the Jewish Revolt of 66 AD. The rapidity of the religion's growth strongly points to a specific martyr, NOT to decades-long mythmaking.
• The continued history of Christianity is a matter of public record, your Honour.

Rhea said:

Swammerdami said:

An overwhelming 99%+ majority of competent (non-Christian) historians are rather certain that Jesus of Nazareth did exist. Before following the easily-befuddled down the Carrierist rabbit-hole, Watch this YouTube!

The "Christ Myth Theory" is sheer crackpottery.

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I am often struck by what seems like a false dichotomy in this discussion, though.

That “Jesus Existed” or “Jesus didn’t exist.”


What feels like a much more likely situation is whether Jesus existed as described and the “99%+ majority of competent historians” need to answer THAT question.

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Rhea said:

Paul Bunyan was likely based on a real lumberjack, Fabian Fournier. (I believe he’s on tiktok now as Thoren Bradley). But the fact that 99% of competent historians think so does not make a single one of the Paul Bunyan tales “true.”

Ditto Dracula
Ditto King Arthur
Ditto Santa Claus.

Because, honestly, if Jesus “existed” to the same degree that Dracula and Paul Bunyan did, then it is fair to say “Jesus” did not exist.

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