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The Christ Myth Theory

 
 
 
Chrissy Hansen 2024-12-06 says:
No my position is not particularly mainstream. I hold that not only is the debate on Jesus’ historicity irrelevant, that the whole of Jesus as a persona at the origins of Christianity (mythical or historical) is completely irrelevant… so the whole of the Quest for the Historical Jesus is, in and of itself, a waste of time. Essentially, I’m advocating that we dissolve the entire subfield, or at the very least relegate it to only studying the reception history of Jesus (e.g., how Jesus was perceived in sources, rather than trying to reconstruct an historical individual/mythical deity).

It is my position that the entire debate is wrongly hinged on the assumption that Jesus’ historicity is important for understanding Christian origins, which I think is just completely invalidated by a more critical sociological approach to Christian origins, and also is irrelevant to how we deal with our extant sources (gospels and what not). I’m essentially taking the Soviet approach. After the Christ-Myth debate in the Soviet Union more or less settled at the end of the 1960s, scholars like Livzits just dismissed the importance of Jesus (regardless of whether he lived or not) altogether as being irrelevant for critical evaluations of Christian origins.

IMO, I think the entire debate (regardless of who is right) is misguided and none of the problems in this field will be fixed by just creating a “Quest of the Mythical Jesus” in place of a historical one. It will just be the same roundabout circus this one already is. Best to just dump all of it and do away with Jesus once and for all.
Screenshot 2024-12-06 at 22-42-58 McMaster Journal of Theology and Ministry - Volume Twenty-Tw...png
--"McMaster Journal of Theology and Ministry - Volume Twenty-Two (2020-2021)". McMaster Divinity College.
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Hansen published an academic review of my colloquial summary, Jesus from Outer Space, in the McMaster Journal of Theology and Ministry...
--Carrier, Richard (31 July 2022). "Chris Hansen on Jesus from Outer Space • Richard Carrier Blogs".
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I just watched Richard Carrier's friend Godless Engineer interview Jacob Berman on the Christ Myth theory. I liked it very much and Berman said he thought some of the best evidence for the historical Jesus is 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16 where Paul says:

14 For you, brothers and sisters, became imitators of the churches of God in Christ Jesus that are in Judea, for you suffered the same things from your own compatriots as they did from the Jews 15 who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets and drove us out; they displease God and oppose everyone 16 by hindering us from speaking to the gentiles so that they may be saved. Thus they have constantly been filling up the measure of their sins, but wrath has overtaken them at last.
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Clearly if Paul thought the Jews killed Jesus then Paul thought Jesus was a historical person who lived on earth, not a myth. This is a heavily debated passage, but I've been arguing for a while in agreement with Paul specialist Prof. Benjamin White that the passage is authentic to Paul. I really flesh that out in some of my recent Secular Frontier posts on the "The Next Quest For The Historical Jesus" collection of essays, particularly:

(16) The Next Quest For The Historical Jesus: Class Conflict by Robert Myles​

(20) The Next Quest For The Historical Jesus: Death and Martyrdom by Michael Barber​

(24) The Next Quest For The Historical Jesus: Violence and Trauma by Nathan Shedd​

I don't completely agree with Berman, but here is the interview from yesterday: .

I think 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16 is compelling against mythicism and a lot of recent research is pointing in that direction like the ridiculous trial of Jesus by the corrupt Jewish high council meeting on Passover eve of all things! Carrier recognizes this is a potential problem for mythicism and has his own take on the passage here.
 
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Trobisch’s Origin of Christian Scripture is mostly about the editorial decisions made in composing and redacting the contents of the NT—and is the first study to consider that in such detail as crucial for understanding those contents. As such, Trobisch supplements Walsh (who focused on the literary production of the books of the NT) by adding a concomitant focus on the editorial production of those books in the NT.

By contrast, Vinzent’s Resetting the Origins of Christianity looks outside the Bible at the context of Christian literature and propaganda that produced the Bible we have. His study is mostly about deconstructing the lies and fabrications of (particularly ancient) Christian ‘historians’, and thus demolishing the edifice that most studies of Christian origins are still (inexplicably) based on, like an overly gullible trust in the narratives of Tertullian or Eusebius or Irenaeus, and all their ideological kin.

As such, I welcome both projects. They not only contribute documentation of what are all-too-often neglected or scoffed-at realities, but they even support the findings of myself and Raphael Lataster.
--Carrier, Richard (26 February 2024). "Was the Entire New Testament Forged in the Second Century? • Richard Carrier Blogs".
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M>>> Matthew Britt
J>>> Jaaron Wingo
GE>>> Godless Engineer
Meeting the Authors of Christ Before Jesus: Godless Engineer said:
[21:55]
M>>> Scholars have known for a long time that especially the Pastoral Epistles which is first Timothy second Timothy and Titus were not written by the same person that wrote the rest and there are only seven that they generally attribute to this Paul figure so when we look at it we're able to see if that's true or not and if it's not true then every letter you take away from Paul even the the ones that aren't authentic that takes away a little bit of biographical information about him because each one has a little bit of info and the way we get we Whittle it down to a point where there's very little and we can talk about that in a bit.

More importantly we can look at the gospels and the reason the gospels are important is because right now you know people generally date Mark to 70 to 80 or so somewhere in that range sometimes they'll say 67 to 70 or something uh but it's right after the fall of Jerusalem in the first uh Roman Jewish War when we look at the Gospel of Luke we actually able to tell that a certain claim that was made at the end of the second Century about the authorship of the text is either true or false and it turns out that Luke looks like it was written in the 130s to 140s and if that's the case then you know the others would probably be around that time we know that John looks like it was relying at least in part on parts of Luke um Matthew seems to be in response to some aspects of this this uh I guess you could call it Proto gospel but at the time it was probably the first gospel written in the 130s or 140s.

The claim is uh that Marcion wrote the first gospel and that he that was his claim and that later Christians added the first three or four chapters of Luke and the last chapter of Luke and other content in there around the year 144 he either wrote it or or published it you know that part's a bit disputed and not clear the heresiologist especially uh Irenaeus said that no actually Marcion cut those chapters out and so what we're able to see is that when we look at a chapter level we would be able to tell did the same person write all of that text and then that would make Irenaeus's claim true and that would mean that the text was older than Marcion when it was published and so it would date back prior to 144 or is it actually the case where those first chapters were added by later Christians. It turns out those first three or four chapters were added by later Christians and the first Claim about the authorship of that gospel or at least the core content is dated to the 130s or the 140s and that turns out to also line up with the Bar Kokhba revolt.

Mark 13 is used to date Mark to the Jewish Roman war in the first century. That's actually very likely to be about the Bar Kokhba revolt in the 130s and then so that pushes pretty much all the gospel material into the 130s 140s and later. To tie that back into mythicism if you're not just looking at the first gospel story written 30 years or so or 60 or so years after Jesus you're looking at a 100 plus years before you get the first written story about Jesus

[25:10]
[highlight=cornsilk]J>>> Not only that, but we see the evolution of the religion because the earliest attestation to the Christians that seems reliable and to be fair uh the attestation is from Pliny the Younger and there's already some questions using stylometry. There's already some questionable material there um but if it's authentic the first attestation to the Christians would be from Pliny the Younger in 111 and he doesn't mention anything about them that's in connection to Judaism uh to Judea any Jewish man that they worship he doesn't even say that it's a man doesn't say the name Jesus uh just connects them with a Christ figure um and so over time we see this character evolve not only does the First Gospel that's published would be evangelin from Marcion um in the like the early 140s maybe late 130s at at earliest um at at that particular point the gospel didn't have a birth story it just it kind of had Jesus as a demigod who came down descended out of heaven and over time he gets a birth story he gets a genealogy and there's you know 40 plus gospels that are written around this time to the third century and they just each one is more Fantastical than the rest you know it just gets more and more Bolder crazier claims.[/highlight]

[27:15]
M>>> So with Mark 13—that is paralleled in Matthew 24 and Luke 21—it's called the little apocalypse or the Olivet discourse. That is generally assumed to be talking about the fall of the Temple and it on the face value it is talking about the fall of the temple. But we can identify that the author of that is not the same author as the rest of Mark which is problematic uh even that aside there is very clear reference to something standing on the Temple mount the abomination of desolation uh St Jerome was writing on his commentary on Matthew that the Matthew version and also Mark and Luke by extension was either talking about when Pilate put pictures of um the emperor in the Temple or something like that which there's no evidence for and there may be one other claim for or it was a spiritual thing or it was talking about the Bar Kokhba revolt. So people knew it even back then that one of the possible things I was talking about was the Bar Kokhba revolt which happens in 135 and that destroyed all of Judea and we think that Mark 13 is using the same approach that Daniel does.

If you're familiar with the Book of Daniel, it is probably written in the 160s BCE but it's cast back about 400 years more uh but we know it's about 160 BC because it's talking about the original first destruction of the temple uh by the Greeks and they use the same language abomination of desolation when they put a statue in there and that's why they use it in Mark is because in 135 or around that time period after emperor Hadrian more or less wiped out the entire population of Judea and had Jerusalem there he put up a statue of Jupiter and himself and we have attestation to the statue in multiple sources.

When we tie that in with the fact that we can tell that the first three or four chapters of Luke were written by a different author than the rest of Luke and that the claim was that either this was from the same author and Marcion stole it or Marcion originally wrote the first chapters 4 through 23 or so and then other Christians tacked on to it around the same time as the Bar Kokhba revolt you start putting these things together the fact that the first collection of Paul's letters that we have comes from the 130s or 140s also with Marcion um you know we don't have really any attestation to Paul prior to that aside from you might say uh first Clement which we can get into the dating and the letters of Ignacius and Polycarp which again we can get into the dating.

It all seems to just happen around this 130 area and that's when we start seeing you know responses to Christianity you know Celsus starts replying probably 30 years after that it all starts to happen around this one time and we have evidence from multiple angles that it looks like that's when this really kicked off not to say that there weren't Christians before but that the story of Jesus and the early Apostles came from that era.
[30:08]
"Meeting the Authors of Christ Before Jesus". @time:00:21:55 per 2:18:26. YouTube. Godless Engineer. 31 August 2024.
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[30:09]
...there's three iterations of Christianity in the second century:
  1. The earliest form of Christianity which would be like a mystery cult, so to speak, that doesn't have a gospel or Jesus really concept .
  2. Then there's more of like the you could say gnostic period where it's almost a blend between this mystery cult or a pretty good blend between the mystery cult and Christianity as we know it.
    and
  3. The third would be well Christianity, as we know it, with the gospels and everything like proto Catholicism...
[30:42]

"Meeting the Authors of Christ Before Jesus". @time:00:30:09 per 2:18:26. YouTube. Godless Engineer. 31 August 2024.
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31:20
GE>>> The question of Jesus existing as a mythical person rather than as a real physical person on Earth .

J>>> Part of the issue is the fact that a lot of the [highlight=yellow]information even in the natural sense for Jesus is either lifted from you know some kind of Prior work[/highlight] uh or just doesn't really make much sense at all.

For instance in reality there's no evidence whatsoever or no good evidence to put Nazareth as an actual Community or actual town city there in the first three decades of the first century um there's evidence of you know human civilization in the area sure but I mean I can go out into the woods here in rural Texas and find money and forks and tires that doesn't mean that there's a city there um it just means that people are in the area of it um it Nazareth never shows up in any lists or Maps uh until oh my gosh I think from a non-Christian standpoint I don't think it shows up until the third or fourth Century um Josephus himself is From Galilee never mentions uh never mentions Nazareth but mentions a town that's pretty much right next to it it's not very big called sephus he mentions that multiple times um or never yeah yeah now another but part of the issue there is that within the gospels uh Nazareth is referred to as a place that has a synagogue which is already another an anachronistic kind of issue there uh but on top of that it's referred to in a negative sense as if people know uh they don't like it they say oh what good can come from Nazareth but that doesn't even line up with what Matthew says which he claims that there's a prophecy that says Jesus comes from Nazareth to fulfill what the prophets say but we don't have a prophecy that mentions Nazarene or Nazareth or anything it's not a town or a city that's mentioned in the Old Testament.
33:23
"Meeting the Authors of Christ Before Jesus". @time:00:31:20 per 2:18:26. YouTube. Godless Engineer. 31 August 2024.
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36:51
[highlight=cornsilk]M>>>We think that the Marcionite branch or some Proto Marcionite branch is more or less the origin for the Christian beliefs and they believed that Jesus was more or less a demigod like jiren was saying his first appearance is actually in Luke four what we call Luke 4 now at least where he descends into capernium he went down into capernium is how it's translated now but in the original version marcion's version he literally descends from the sky we have multiple attestations to this.

And you can see in the Gospel of Luke where the editors the later Christian editors in the 140s 150s 160s actually flip verses and they get the they mess the whole story up and you don't really see it it's not talked about a lot but it's Luke 4 let's see 23 right Jaren [/highlight]

J>>>Yes Luke 4:23 is the in you you can notice that or you can see in the English version of the Bible you can see where it's that's where it's more or less starting to stitch together with marcion's prior gospel

[highlight=cornsilk]M>>>Right so what happens there is it's that line you know physician heal thyself um they say do here in your hometown because he just arrived at Nazareth again what you did in capernium well two problems with that first off in the story of Luke he has not been to capernium yet he doesn't go to capernum until 4:31 and on top of that he hasn't performed any Miracles or signs or healings yet because he doesn't do that until later in Luke but what happened is the later proto Catholic editors of what we have of Luke today messed up the order in marcion's gospel and so we can see that textual evidence there on top of the fact that we can see the prior three chapters were added on by a later author so the original Gospel of Luke at least was marcion's version and it's very possible that it was the original gospel and that's exactly when we start seeing attestation to all these figures for example Justin Martyr writing in the 150s and 160s never says the name Paul one time.

So he doesn't have access to gospels he he has what he calls Memoirs of the Apostles and maybe they're textual gospels at that point but he doesn't have our four gospels he seems to use some variation of the Gospel of Peter and before that we don't have anybody talking about gospels even if you attribute like ignacius and Clement to earlier they don't talk about any gospels so like you said you know the gospels might have been based on Paul whether it was that way or the other way around it's clear that nobody's really talking gospels until much later [/highlight]

J>>>Right so in order for the Jesus to be a historical figure uh that people are following and somehow connected to this Christianity it would have to be something that after 30 would have been so small that we don't see any sign of them whatsoever uh but somehow the story lives on and once Pliny runs into them up in Northern Asia Minor which means they spread so far from Judea that they go all the way to Northern Asia Minor uh that he doesn't even find a connection with Judaism or really anything there

There is a letter um quoted by a former slave of emperor hadrien that mentions that uh the Christians live exist in Alexandria this is in the 130s um and he says he's writing to a friend in Alexandria he says hey there's Christians in Alexandria Egypt but there's also uh there's also Christians up in the northern part of the Roman Empire and they worship Serapis Christus.

Now Serapis, in specific, was a God that was worshiped in Asia Minor um as well as you know Marcion comes from Sinope as Matthew stated that is the biggest city in the specific province that Piny the Younger was governor in 111 so it it's just there's no there's no evidence of connection between a Jesus figure and Christianity and the earliest form of Christianity.
A good 80 80 years after the supposed death of this person it just it's not just an argument of Silence from for Jesus it's for Jesus it's for Paul it's for the disciples it's for thousands of supposed Christians there's just nothing there but we do see it later as part of an evolution

And that's that's I guess where I'm coming from that I understand that people say hey how does dating the text later prove that Jesus doesn't exist and it's like okay if you understand how religions evolve if you understand how thought evolves over time we can see that in a much clearer view if things are in the second century that's why people like Bart Ehrman don't exactly want to um assume that Jesus is is uh fictional because if we have texts that are in the first century if we have texts that are dated with these mainstream dates then it's you know it's not that far off from the supposed death we don't see that Evolution like we're talking about as clearly.
42:16
"Meeting the Authors of Christ Before Jesus". @time:00:36:51 per 2:18:26. YouTube. Godless Engineer. 31 August 2024.
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I had never heard of the Britt/Wingo book, so I looked it up. Britt said "We never claim to be scholars or experts." As far as I can tell there is no academic journal reviews of the work except by Chrissy Hansen, but it is behind a paywall . There seem to be a few written reviews on Amazon, one positive one by Nicholas Covington who has been supportive of Carrier's mythicism in the past, and one from Jason Wilson who calls their methodology incorrect. No need to read the book at this time but I'll check it out if it gets some academic buzz behind it. Thanks for sharing!
 
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Peter Kirby said:
GakuseiDon said:
Peter Kirby wrote: ↑Sat Dec 07, 2024 9:48 pm

So what parts and aspects of the literature do you think are best explained by "a historical Jesus"?

What do you do with the rest?
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I don't think there is any "rest". Some kind of a historical Jesus is the best explanation for the letters of Paul and the Gospel of Mark.
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Would you agree with:

(a) The relevant aspects of the early Christian literature are explained better on an assumption that their authors knew (at least indirectly) of a historical Jesus crucified in Palestine by Pilate.

Part of the misinterpretation (in my opinion) seems to be that you're not allowing the texts to be subdivided into parts and aspects. So if there are a dozen passages in the letters of Paul and a few aspects of the Gospel of Mark that support an explanation of those parts and aspects that involves a historical Jesus, then "a historical Jesus" is "the explanation" of the texts of Paul and of Mark.

It's exactly those explanations that "need not be relevant to the question of historicity" that I'm talking about. I would suggest that, if we're going to understand even the letters of Paul and the Gospel of Mark, we're going to want some such explanatory ideas. Not just "a historical Jesus."

For example, there may be some relevant explanatory background in contemporary Judaism or in prior interpretations of the scriptures, apart from whatever might have been expressed by a historical Jesus.
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maryhelena said:
GakuseiDon said:
Peter Kirby said:
What do you do with the rest?
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I don't think there is any "rest".
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I don't usually like to get involved with the Jesus historicity issue - but Christmas is upon us and one can't get out of ones front door without being confronted by it - let alone put on the TV. Yep, commercialization now in top gear. But what about that innocent babe in a manage - or is it perhaps that ''rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? (Yeats).

Consequently, if it's open season for picking a flesh and blood man during the time of Tiberius and Pilate, a flesh and blood man on whom to place ones theological resurrection notions - then is it not time for this 2000 years Jesus search to admit defeat. An historical gospel Jesus figure was never enough, it was always an assumption never a reality. Historical reflections within the gospel story are just that, remembrances not of a historical gospel Jesus but reflections on Jewish history under Roman occupation of Judaea. The gospel Jesus figure simply the means to that end - the focus, the story element that captures that history.

Yes, some people do leave their mark on the lives of other, they leave their footprint, as it were. But in the case of the assumed historical gospel related Jesus figure - once the miracles are ditched - what on earth did his assumed followers see in him. What was the footprint he left in their lives? In other words - what in heavens name did he do ? What did he say? .......nothing at all as the gospel writers put words in his mouth. What are the criteria for a historical identification of this gospel Jesus figure?

Methinks - the gospel writers would be turning in their graves were they to know that their Jesus figure has become a farce, an absurdity, a fantasy worth only a kindergarten school nativity play.
  • xmas rant over - for this year...... ;)
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Here Is The Gist Of My Response To Carrier From Above​

In the few years since I wrote this essay there have been developments in what scholars call ‘the quest for the historical Jesus.’ One of the main contentions is that if we do not get more rigorous in uncovering the Jesus of history, the idea that Jesus never existed or that we can say nothing about him reliably will become the default position. Justin Meggitt, who has been a target of mythicists, writes:

First, even if denial of the historicity of Jesus is rarely found among scholars within the field, the increasing popularity of this position in wider culture is unavoidable. While I won’t rehearse arguments I have made elsewhere about this phenomenon, unless those working in New Testament and Christian origins continue to think critically and publicly about what can be said about Jesus, it is likely that the denial of the historicity of Jesus will very soon become the de facto position in wider popular and academic discourse. This might not appear to matter to some in the field, who have no theological investment in whether Jesus the man existed or not, but—and this of those without power from history. It is all the more grotesque in the case of Jesus because we possess so much, relatively speaking, that claims to tell us about his life. Compare our sources about him with those that we have for similar contemporaries such as the Egyptian prophet or Theudas. Despite the challenges posed by the earliest sources we have for Jesus, especially the difficulties that arise from both the fecund imagination of the early Christians and their lack of discrimination when deciding what traditions they should pass on, this wider ethical imperative, not to perpetuate the silencing of the poor in history, makes the Quest a necessary undertaking…. Although some have recently been more optimistic about the “quest for the historical apostles,” there is little that can be established historically about any of them, as virtually all the sources, including the accounts of their martyrdoms, were written at least 150 years after their deaths. (2024, pp. 765-766, 782)
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There is nothing inherently implausible in the mythicist position that Jesus started out as a vague savior myth who later became put into historical fiction, because we know this process did occur in other ancient sources: euhemerization. On the other hand, this mythicist interpretive model starts to fall apart when we consider with Ehrman that Christianity didn’t start with a vague salvation figure since, for instance, Mark preserves a Jesus tradition that cuts against his Pauline bias of promoting the cross/resurrection as the focal point of the religion. For Jesus starts out his ministry teaching the coming Kingdom of God, not of himself, and teaches the story of the rich young man who will be saved by keeping the Law and giving all his money to the poor (exemplified by the disciples who left everything worldly behind in order to serve God’s messenger). Keep in mind that Paul said, to the contrary, that if righteousness (being right in God’s eyes / justification, NRSVUE) came by keeping the Law, then Christ died for nothing (Galatians 2:19-21; also see Ephesians 2:9). We can see a historical Jesus who was transformed into the Christ of cross/resurrection theology after he died (e.g.,in the pre-Pauline Corinthian Creed). The example of the sheep and goats in Matthew makes the same point, and so Mark has to awkwardly invent passion predictions that the disciples can’t understand, so that he might negotiate the idea that Jesus knew that he would die and even though this was on no one’s radar (e.g., the disciples got violent and fled at the arrest). Ehrman comments:

In Mark he predicts his passion explicitly three times (8:31; 9:31; 10:33-34) and implicitly refers to it repeatedly elsewhere. Same with Matthew. Luke has him predict it four times; and he does so in various ways throughout John. The question I’m dealing with is not whether the Gospels portray Jesus as anticipating his death, but whether Jesus himself actually did so. The Gospels are written by believers in Jesus’ death and resurrection living 40-65 years later and basing their accounts on the stories about Jesus that had been in circulation for all that time. There are many things recorded in the Gospels that almost certainly did not happen and sayings of Jesus he almost certainly did not actually say. Historians have to figure out which is which. Which passages record what actually happened and which are based on later stories about Jesus? Passion Predictions seem most likely to be ways of showing that as the Son of God Jesus knew all along what was going to happen at the end of his life. He was not taken by surprise! (Ehrman, 2024)
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As an interpretive model, I think that mythicism fails both on a general level and in terms of its inability to appropriate certain specific pieces of important evidence. A recent representative example is Paul’s claim that the Jews killed Jesus. Obviously, if Paul thought that the Jews killed Jesus, then Jesus was a historical figure who lived on Earth. This passage has traditionally been taken by some to be a later post-Paul insertion into Paul’s text, and Carrier follows this skeptical reading. But as we moved away from the blanket “pro-Jewish Jesus” model—a model of interpreting that became popular with such works as the Jewish Annotated New Testament in the early 2000s—weight began to be restored to a Jesus who belonged in intra-Jewish conflict where one Jewish faction would be nasty to others in trying to establish who were the true representatives of God. Why is this important? Recall that Paul supposedly writes:

For you, brothers and sisters, became imitators of the churches of God in Christ Jesus that are in Judea, for you suffered the same things from your own compatriots as they did from the Jews who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets and drove us out; they displease God and oppose everyone by hindering us from speaking to the gentiles so that they may be saved. Thus they have constantly been filling up the measure of their sins, but wrath has overtaken them at last. (1 Thessalonians 2:14-16).
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This passage seems to fit exactly with what can only be a satirical account of the trial of Jesus in Mark, where the experts on Jewish law and tradition go into creative contortions time after time to make their transgressing of God’s will seem respectable, highlighting the letter of the Law (the Jewish High Council) vs. the Spirit of the Law (Jesus: e.g., adultery is even a lustful eye).

As Paula Fredriksen and Stephen Young note, we are not describing antisemitism here, but an intra-Jewish polemic trying to establish that the Jesus faction was the true one. This Markan reception history of Paul is the lens through which we should understand Paul’s claim that the Jews killed Christ, and in fact Mark, who used Paul as a source, was probably inventing his story out of Paul’s claim. Paul expert Benjamin White finds it unconvincing that a later scribe added the 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16 material to Paul as it is so reflective of what we see about certain Jewish characterizations across many New Testament sources, as Nathan Shedd, Sara Parks, and Joel Marcus demonstrate.

Some elements that mythicists point to are the lack of detail about Jesus in Paul, plus Mark understood as allegorical literature. But this needs to be qualified in a way that favors historicity, not mythicism. Paul says that he resolved to know nothing among you but Christ and him crucified (1 Corinthians 2:2), which suggests that Paul knew far more details than he provided, but omitted them because of apocalyptic urgency. In the same way, the Gospels indicate this selective process of choosing details, which—though problematizing the quest for the historical Jesus since much has been omitted—does lend weight to the idea that the writers had sources about Jesus and weren’t just inventing out of whole cloth. Yes, there was mythmaking like imitative haggadic midrash (and mimesis), but this technique at the time was done to historical figures like the Teacher of Righteousness by the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Mark Goodacre notes the selectivity of the New Testament writing process, for instance. Source criticism has also progressed since Carrier rejected the Q source hypothesis. While the existence of “Q” (the material common to Matthew and Luke that’s not derived from Mark) may have once been rejected in favor of Luke merely copying Matthew, scholars like Sarah Rollens now show that the Q material is distinct from Matthew in terms of content, form, and purpose, and so Carrier is wrong to deny it. It is certainly important for Carrier to deny Q, as it doesn’t mention the crucifixion, and that event is the foundation of Carrier’s vague savior myth construction.

So while I think that mythicism makes sense in general, it becomes unreliable as an interpretive paradigm when we get down into the trenches and start debating the issue verse by verse. In this regard, Carrier will make general probability arguments analogous to ‘if we put the names of the figures as heavily mythologized as Jesus into a hat, the likelihood of pulling out a historical figure is no better than one in three.’ But this probability observation doesn’t change the fact that certain issues—like that of a Jesus who didn’t teach himself, but taught the Kingdom of God, or Paul’s teaching that the Jews killed Jesus—are kinds of recalcitrant evidence that falsify (in Karl Popper’s sense) the mythicism interpretative paradigm.

Bibliography

Barber, Michael. Death and Martyrdom in Crossley, James; Keith, Chris. The Next Quest for the Historical Jesus (p. 735-763). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.

Fredriksen, Paula. The Late Latin Quest in Crossley, James; Keith, Chris. The Next Quest for the Historical Jesus (p. 300-312). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.

Goodacre, Mark. Missing Pieces in Crossley, James; Keith, Chris. The Next Quest for the Historical Jesus (pp. 185-295). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition (2024).

Hamilton, John. (1992). “The Chronology of the Crucifixion and the Passover.” Churchman Vol. 106, No. 4: 323-338.

Meggitt, Justin. THE RESURRECTION AND COMPARATIVE MICROHISTORY in Crossley, James; Keith, Chris. The Next Quest for the Historical Jesus (p. 764-795). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition. (2024)

Myles, Robert. Class Conflict in Crossley, James; Keith, Chris. The Next Quest for the Historical Jesus (p. 457-475)). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. Kindle Edition (2024).

Rollens, Sarah. Scribal Galilee in Crossley, James; Keith, Chris. The Next Quest for the Historical Jesus (pp 392-415). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition (2024).

Shedd, Nathan. Violence and Trauma in Crossley, James; Keith, Chris. The Next Quest for the Historical Jesus (pp. 718-734). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition (2024).

White, Benjamin. (2024) New Insights Into The New Testament Conference 2. Q and A session.

Young, Stephen. Myth and Mythmaking in Crossley, James; Keith, Chris. The Next Quest for the Historical Jesus (pp. 272-297). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition (2024)
 
^There seems to be something wrong with the quotation from Meggitt:

This might not appear to matter to some in the field, who have no theological investment in whether Jesus the man existed or not, but—and this of those without power from history
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Meggitt's idea seems to be we traditionally do history employing categories from what we can learn about the rich and famous in antiquity and so the poor and marginalized get left behind because they don't leave the same kinds of evidence. The idea is to develop new ways of doing history developing new categories that allow us to learn more about figures who were poor, did not write anything, etc.
 
As a life-long atheist I don't really "have a dog" in any Christianity debate. The historicity question interests me mainly as a reminder of how bad even intelligent people are at estimating probabilities, especially in extreme cases, e.g. when a good estimate would be 97+% or 3-%. More than one intelligent person has baffled me by asserting that any binary choice is a 50-50 proposition.

I've mentioned previously that some of my 30+ U.S. patents are in the field of probability estimation, but that has very little to do with my claiming to be competent. In fact, common-sense is the main skill needed to decide many questions. As one example, in 1968 I and my friends learned of alleged illegal signaling by the British Team (specifically the Reese-Shapiro pair) at the 1965 World Contract Bridge Championship in Buenos Aires. This was a big scandal with details widely written up. Many seemed to think Reese-Shapiro were innocent. I studied the evidence and quickly concluded that the allegations were correct, with odds of many millions-to-one. The chance they were cheating was 99.999+%. Part of the certainty lay in the fact that illegal signaling is FAR more plausible than concocting fake evidence of such cheating. And indeed, almost on his deathbed and with Reese already deceased, Boris Shapiro confessed -- "That wicked man made me do it."

Another example:
Swammerdami said:
[Oct 16, 2024]
...
Trump will probably sweep all seven swing states.
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Anyone even slightly adept at mathematics knows that Bayes Theorem is trivial, on a par with 2+2=4. Yet Bayes Theorem can point anyone toward an estimate of the historicity question. Just don't pin your hopes on the fraudster Richard Carrier. Here are some formulae to start us off:
P(X) + P(~X) = 1​
Definition 1: Odds(X) = P(X) ÷ P(~X)​
Definition 2: Dff(X;A) = P(A|X) ÷ P(A|~X)​
Bayes formula 3: P(X|A) = P(X) ⋅ P(A|X) ÷ P(A)​
Corollary 4: Odds(X|A) = Odds(X) ⋅ Dff(X;A)​
Corollary 5: Odds(X|A+B+C+D) = Odds(X) ⋅ Dff(X;A) ⋅ Dff(X;B) ⋅ Dff(X;C) ⋅ Dff(X;D)​
Heuristic 6: Odds(X|A+B+C+D) = Odds(X) ⋅ (Dff(X;A) ⋅ Dff(X;B) ⋅ Dff(X;C) ⋅ Dff(X;D))^0.8​
Let's explain these formula a bit.
1. P (probability) and Odds are alternate ways to express the same probabilistic fact. If P = 90%, Odds = 9; P = 75%, Odds = 3; P = 10%, Odds = 1/9.
2. Dff(X;A) tells us how strong a clue A is. If A tells us nothing about X, then Dff = 1
3. The Bayes formula is trivially true -- even the moron Carrier knows it.
4. This is derived by writing also P(~X|A) = P(~X) ⋅ P(A|~X) ÷ P(A) and then using #1 and #2 to simplify.
5. This is true only if the clues A, B, C, D are mutually independent.
6. The a priori estimates we will need, Dff(X;A), Dff(X;B), etc. are fuzzy, "subjective", and error-prone and suspicion of the numbers may be wise. In #6 I show a simple way to dampen our enthusiasm about our intermediate estimates.

Of course when we apply this framework to a specific problem, we'll need specific estimates for, e.g. Dff(X;A) and controversy will ensue! Still, it would be pleasant to know we're all "playing with a full deck" and at least have some common-sense understanding about the utility of clues.

Expert historians agree that reports of James as the brother of a flesh-and-blood Jesus is a very strong clue. Evidence for this connection -- which we will call 'A' -- is found in the writings of Josephus, Paul, "Luke", Hegesippus, and the three synoptic gospels. Letting P(X) be an estimate of historicity without the James clues, what is Dff(X;A) ? If Jesus were historic, it would come as no surprise that his brother might become prominent in the early Church. If Jesus were mythical, how would we explain the seven sources pointing to the brother? -- that issue leads to factor Dff(X;A].

I understand that most of the thread participants have no appetite to consider this clue objectively, nor even to pursue probability estimation. But Carrier's approach -- in effect setting Dff(X;A) = 1 for any A that is inconvenient -- is dishonest.

Suppose I think Dff(X;A) is 25. (Dff(X;A)^0.8 = 13.1) Applying #6 above, a prior estimate P(X) = 0.01 yields P(X|A) = 0.12. Prior P(X) = 0.10 yields P(X}A) = 0.59. Prior P(X) = 0.90 yields P(X}A) = 0.99. In other words, A is a very strong clue that should increase our confidence in historicity.

We will all agree to disagree on a good estimate for Dff(X;A). The Carrierites will continue to drink Carrier's Kool-Aid and believe there are THREE different Jameses mentioned in the various sources. And ignore that in the ENTIRE Bible there is ONLY ONE verse where a named human is called "Lord's brother."

BUT no matter how ignorant your estimate of P(X;A) may be, Understand that it is intellectually dishonest NOT to factor this clue into your final estimate P(X|A+B+C+D).
 
Swammerdami said:
...don't pin your hopes on the fraudster Richard Carrier. Here are some formulae to start us off:
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Richard Carrier on November 13 said:
For the nonreligious, it tends to be some sort of emotional hostility to “mythicism evangelism,” whereby mythicism is used to mock or refute Christianity or promote wild conspiracy theories that make atheists (and thus, they worry, themselves) look foolish (rather than merely a serious exploration of history), making it again [highlight=cyan]an identity threat issue.[/highlight] It can also be other things (
  • financial motives;
  • social motives;
  • personal motives;
  • academic motives;
    etc.
). I’ve seen various different motivations spill into view with this.

The problem is that delusionality and irrationality are a natural tendency of human beings, so becoming obsessed with angrily defending a false belief is something humans are just prone to. Critical thinking is unnatural; it goes against our innate intuitions, and is literally scary. That’s why so few do it, at all, much less commit to it as a core life value.
--Comment #39494 [NOW FORMATTED] per "Matt Kovacs Demonstrates What's Wrong with Atheists Clinging to the Historicity of Jesus". Richard Carrier Blogs. 12 November 2024
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"Dr. Carrier Takes Your Calls On Bayesian Calculations". YouTube. Godless Engineer. 8 November 2024.
 
dbz said:
  • A case of emotional hostility to “mythicism evangelism”
    cf. Carrier: 2013. [ "Fincke Is Right: Arguing Jesus Didn't Exist Should Not Be a Strategy" ]
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I've told you before that I am interested in YOUR ideas, if any, not just Carrierist regurgitation. (Quoting from your Messiah's Scripture to answer every little question is another way the Carrierist cult resembles the "Dinosaurs never existed" Christians.) When I delete the quotations from your post, I'm left with only a single sentence, or rather a single noun phrase. And that phrase -- "emotional hostility" -- is some sort of ad hominen. It's good to see you're still being you, I guess.

And if you're touting Carrier as a teacher of probability or statistics, then you really ARE in a ... "rapture-like cult", to borrow a phrase from another Infidel. 8-)
 
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1Heidegger1! said:
I think 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16 is compelling against mythicism and a lot of recent research is pointing in that direction like the ridiculous trial of Jesus by the corrupt Jewish high council meeting on Passover eve of all things! Carrier recognizes this is a potential problem for mythicism and has his own take on the passage here.
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Is 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16 compelling for Historicity?

[29:01] Adair >>> This one [hypothetical] reconstruction—blames the Jews—but it doesn't seem to have this Temple reference. So I believe that's what Jacob was going for saying, "Hey, here's a version of Paul blaming the the Jews for Killing Jesus but without the part that's most obviously impossible in before 70 CE".

Now here's the problems with that. The reconstruction that that's based on, I went and double checked on the reconstruction. And the thing is, we can't say that that part isn't there—is that conversely—we just can't guarantee that it was in those earliest letter Collections. And that's different it's not that we can show it's not there is that we can't show that it was there those are two different things. And so we can't take the absence of evidence as evidence of absence in this case. [highlighted 29:50]
GE and Adair.png

--"Dissecting Aaron Adair's Debate against Jacob Berman". YouTube. Godless Engineer. 21 December 2024.
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[18:14 ] The canonical Paul is a later reworking of an older version of Paul.
  • Notice I didn't say the original version that is attested by Marcion in his "Apostolikon" [meaning "collection of apostles"].
I also don't accept any of the dating of the gospels to be in the first century. Rather I think that both Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all were creations after the publication of Marcion's New Testament.
  • The first New Testament ever! [was Created/Assembled by Marcion] Published after 140 CE. Maybe even after Justin.
--Jack Bull (3 December 2024). "Did Jesus Exist? Jacob Berman and Dr. Jack Bull Versus Dr. Aaron Adair and Neil Godfrey". YouTube. History Valley.
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rgprice said:
  • Clearly the Pauline corpus has many writers.
The character of Romans, Galatians, Colossians/Ephesians, 1 & 2 Thessalonians, are all very different. Are the Pauline letters really a loose collection of anonymous letters that were edited together with the introduction of a single fictional author?
  • Yes someone wrote them
I do think that at least the letters other than Romans, Colossians, Ephesians and of course the Pastorals may have been real letters of correspondence.
  • But the issue is,
If there were a real Paul, then where were the defenders of the real Paul? Where were the real people who actually knew anything real about him? It seems to me that the only people we ever hear from are people whose only knowledge of Paul comes from reading the Pauline letters or other stories that were invented about Paul.

I go back and forth on whether I think Paul really existed . . . Christianity comes from nowhere, with no one to refute various wild interpretations. So all of this seems to indicate that the writings came first and the writings were then open to interpretation and there was never anyone from any real communities who really worshiped Jesus prior to the publication of writings about him. Thus all belief in Jesus stemmed from writings and there was never a real organic body of Jesus worshipers.
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Hi dbz

Thanks for your comment. Personally, I'm not persuaded by the Marcion Priority argument and find Dennis MacDonald persuasive on the idea that Marcion abridged Luke: I think Paul's idea that the Jews killed Jesus is attested to in Mark's reception history of Paul.

Pauline expert Benjamin White disagrees with the idea that "The Jews Killed Jesus" passage is inauthentic and does not find reason to dismiss it as an interpolation. Paul seems to be a first century apocalyptic Jew navigating through other Jews like the pharisees, Essenes, he says he is not of the super apostle Christ group, etc., and we know from the Dead Sea Scrolls these groups were always going after one another as to who the true people of God are. In this way it was common back then for Jews to be calling other groups of Jews mean and nasty things. It is certainly plausible Paul speaking among gentiles to speak badly of Jews he thought killed Christ. I would note too Paul thought the apocalypse was underway, he says the resurrected Christ being the first fruits of the general resurrection harvest of souls at the end of the age, so he thought the judgment of the enemies of God had begun, and so need not refer to post-70 CE destruction of Jerusalem.

As I noted in an earlier post, the gospels have expertly crafted a satirical Jewish trial scenario (e.g., meeting on Passover eve) to show the Jewish elite manipulating God’s word and Jewish tradition in order to provide “surface respectability” to the process even though they knew God wouldn’t let them kill Jesus and so they tricked Rome into doing it. To flesh out Paul’s description of the Lord’s Supper, Mark has superimposed two scriptures from Paul, the one about the Lord’s supper (1 Cro 11:17-34) and the one that the Jews killed Christ (1 Thess 2:14-16), inventing the character of Judas, as the name suggests representing the Jewish people who turned on the historical Jesus.

Reception history isn't a solid historical lock, but it does reflect how a writer was being understood very early.

Happy Holidays!
 
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