Richard Carrier’s “On the Historicity of Jesus” now out

[Kharakov]

It’s difficult for me to find people that believe in all sorts of weird stuff too, despite when there is an overwhelming amount of evidence to the contrary to their position such as the creationists, psychics, astrologists, etc, Holocaust deniers, 911 truthers, etc, but they do exist.

Yeah. But such a great prevalence? 40+%?? I find that number hard to believe- yet I've lived in educated and/or relatively affluent areas the majority of my life, so maybe my world view is skewed by my particular experiences , which includes doubt of certain things that are presented as facts by anyone or any group (even someone I trust, or someone who is an expert in their field).

Then again, why doubt the media... except if there is some type of guiding force, for example, that guides or molds who is called (using various means), or even what calls are recorded and acknowledged. Or even, for example, if there is a large, interconnected group of people, who have agreed to present themselves as believing in certain ideas, in order to achieve certain specific ends.

No. There are multiple scenarios in which theistic evolution could occur, in which there is still a young earth. MRSA evolving (allele frequency increase) now, or perhaps resistance to plague back in the "dark" ages (you know, it would be interesting to look for a specific gene prevalent in European and Mediterranean populations, probably been done).

I’m not familiar with MRSA or other diseases being used as an argument for a young earth, nor can I fathom how an argument could be presented for it. I’ve read a bit on the Evo/Cre controversy, certainly haven’t heard all of the arguments, and that one escapes me. If you have a cite that covers it, I’ll look at it.

What I was saying is that there are scenarios in which the earth could be several thousand years old, and evolution could occur (arguably, the emergence of various S. Aureus varieties over the past century is evidence of evolution).

I think Stephen Hawking also has considered, maybe even supports such a hypothesis, not entirely sure, and I know there are others, but I don’t know to what extent, and if it includes an intact past, present and future.

Hawking and Hertog's work "Populating the Landscape: A Top Down Approach" (PDF on Arxiv.org), describes one of the approaches he took. I've brought that up in conversations about how observations of certain pasts have an impact upon what paths we are on (although the paper itself doesn't exactly say that this occurs).

The generating functions or series in mathematics would be quite different in how it was applied in physics or cosmology.

Sorry, miscommunication due to equivocation. I'm referring to mathematical functions that generate specific objects, not what the term "generating functions" refers to, instead "generating" "functions" (functions which generate).

Basically, objects exist that have smoothly connected whole past, present, and futures (much like a block universe), generated by specific functions. The behavior of the objects over time can be described by other mathematical functions that relate parts of the object to other parts of the object.

So while everything appears to be causally related when you look at the object over time, the mathematical relationships which describe the evolution of the object (GR is one of the many mathematical relationships that describe the evolution of the actual physical universe), are not causally related to the evolution of the object.

The following object is generated by a specific function, and the relationships between various parts of the object can be described by other functions that are not the generating function itself, and even if it appears that there is a causal relationship between rates of rotation of varying parts that can be described by the way the parts relate to one another, there is not (although there is a causal relationship between the generating function and the orbital rates of various parts).

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In other words, the equations of GR, while they describe the evolution of spacetime from one point in time to the next, are not indicative that matter and spacetime share a causal relationship with one another, but instead the behaviors are caused by a generating function that generates both (matter and spacetime, and the appearance of a causal relationship between the 2).

Now, I don't think we can narrow life, the universe, and everything down to a generating function. Colors, beauty, tastes, beings which care for and love one another, etc. indicate a certain multiplicity of forms of energy that show something far greater than a simple function.

Things far easier for me to grasp and support for a very old earth are the strata of sedimentary rocks that are many miles deep in certain basins. Some layers consisting of just a fraction of an inch, others feet, but when you consider the depth that many of these basins can go, and when you figure how much time is involved to create each strata, the various life forms in such layers, the mass extinctions of life over time in various strata, for me, anyway, it erases any such notions of a very young earth.

It does sound pragmatic to accept the various things that are shown by nature, but also to apply various concepts that we learn later in life. I hardly doubt that one would consider a 20,000 year old artifact found in WoW indicates that the WoW universe is >20 years old.

From this, I don't see how we can even make a claim that the sedimentary rocks indicate something other than something about the story line of the universe we find ourselves within. We don't know that the universe wasn't created by other generations, with the express intent of teaching us to live with one another, and that the "past" we have been taught exists is anything other than something that has been decided to be presented to us in order for us to learn various basic concepts about life and living with one another.

My journey for all of my adult life is still applying a strict adherence to naturalism. Not sure how others like yourself that once understood and accepted that, could consider otherwise, without it being an extraordinary amount of evidence to override that.

Or to reform what you consider to be natural. It's not like any of us started out with complete knowledge.

 

[Razncain]

Yeah. But such a great prevalence? 40+%?? I find that number hard to believe- yet I've lived in educated and/or relatively affluent areas the majority of my life, so maybe my world view is skewed by my particular experiences , which includes doubt of certain things that are presented as facts by anyone or any group (even someone I trust, or someone who is an expert in their field).

I don’t recall hearing much from the 40+% of them in my schools or in college either, and I’m in the Bible belt. In my church it was a different matter as is many churches. And of course, my rural areas of TX are fairly dominant of conservative theology over the radio channels, as well as quite a few religious TV channels.

Gallop polling over 30 years on this matter. It’s just as disheartening to find 16% of US science teachers are Creationists according to ABC polling. But don’t recall any of my teachers ever teaching that either.

Hawking and Hertog's work "Populating the Landscape: A Top Down Approach" (PDF on Arxiv.org), describes one of the approaches he took. I've brought that up in conversations about how observations of certain pasts have an impact upon what paths we are on (although the paper itself doesn't exactly say that this occurs).

Still sounds interesting, even if the paper doesn’t say it occurs, although I’m not able to grasp good portions of it. Did string theory finally get some predictive power? Never read a single book on it dealing with just that, but years back when I was trying to wrap my head around some of this it said it could have predictive power if certain hypothetical machines were capable of being built.

Sorry, miscommunication due to equivocation. I'm referring to mathematical functions that generate specific objects, not what the term "generating functions" refers to, instead "generating" "functions" (functions which generate).
{snip}

Basically, objects exist that have smoothly connected whole past, present, and futures (much like a block universe), generated by specific functions. The behavior of the objects over time can be described by other mathematical functions that relate parts of the object to other parts of the object.

Yeah, probably more my bad than yours. It has some heavy philosophical musings to deal with on time, but not much agreement on what it all entails in that article. This article goes further with time than what I’m used to seeing, even for death in a four dimension world.

It does sound pragmatic to accept the various things that are shown by nature, but also to apply various concepts that we learn later in life. I hardly doubt that one would consider a 20,000 year old artifact found in WoW indicates that the WoW universe is >20 years old.

From this, I don't see how we can even make a claim that the sedimentary rocks indicate something other than something about the story line of the universe we find ourselves within. We don't know that the universe wasn't created by other generations, with the express intent of teaching us to live with one another, and that the "past" we have been taught exists is anything other than something that has been decided to be presented to us in order for us to learn various basic concepts about life and living with one another.

There are many natural sciences that would have to be set aside, to not consider it a very old earth and universe. This is more plausible to you to seriously contemplate that we just don’t know with much certainty, and that maybe other generations created our universe with the intent of teaching us how to live with one another? If you can give this much lattitude, there would be an infinite amount of scenarios to consider, I would think, and based on not much more than just what the imagination could muster up.

I’ll let you have the last say on this. Got my elderly dad for the month of August, and he’s a handful to watch. But still will be checking in on occasion. Or if others want to comment more on Carrier’s book, I’ll make time for that as well.

 

[Kharakov]

Hope you enjoy your time with your dad, despite and/or because of the fact that he's a handful. I did want to say something to more clearly define my position on nature (and not setting aside the sciences), but that will wait until you both want to, and have time for, a conversation about... time.

Ohh, and I totally didn't plan to have my 666th post be at precisely 6:05 PM. (a PM from my F0E)....

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I was not aware of it until I thought about time, which was after the post I just made about time, and I looked at the time stamp of my post.

Ohh, BTW- 605 is masonic for F0E. and we all know what a PM is..

Not that anyone would ever believe me that these coincidences happen to me in my life... sheesh. Obviously the 605 could orchestrate stuff to mess with each and every one of us on an individual basis, to make us happy.

Still remember when I was pissed at God, and ended up writing a nasty note at the old forum, and noticed it was post 7,605,666 after I posted it (and edited in the part about <G> F0E 666...). I am the only one to get that post number at the old forum, right?

 

[bleubird]

I and may be a few here have no idea what you are on about.Seems to be an argument of parentheses.

 

[Razncain]

After you posted your original OP, I went to Amazon to put the book on my wishlist and saw DM's review. He's very disingenuous and an out and out liar.

You can easily see Carrier wash the floor with him, but as Carrier himself commented, DM refused to accept he'd lost and instead goes around telling people he won. Carrier shouldn't bother to give this loser the time of day, but he has to confront him, lest people actually believe in Marshall's lies.

credoconsolans, did you find time to read Carrier's book? If so, I hope you do a review on Amazon, and share your opinion.

 

[ApostateAbe]

JJ Ramsey made this comment on the Patheos blog:

Another issue is how useful the Rank-Raglan criteria are in the first place. The impression that I get from them is that they are less a description of natural recurring patterns in the literature, and more of an attempt to fit Christian mythology and the mythology about Greek heroes together.

The biggest tell that I see is in the first criterion, "The hero’s mother is a virgin," which tends to be applied to the Jesus of the Gospels in the obvious, literal way, while being applied very loosely to other figures, e.g., treating the hero as born of a "virgin" if his father was a god, glossing over whether the god had sex with the hero's mother. The second tell is how other criteria have broad leeway into how they are applied. Take point two, for example. There is a vast difference from a story standpoint whether one's father is a king or someone who'd actually realistically end up on the throne at some point, like a prince, or someone whose genealogy has a king from some distant past, but has no intent or likelihood of assuming royal power. Odysseus's parentage is the former, and Jesus' purported parentage is the latter.

[ETA: Come to think of it, both of my "tells" are symptomatic of someone taking the story of the Jesus of the Gospels and the stories of Greek heroes and then describing both in vague terms such that they look superficially similar. That's not finding a natural pattern, but rather playing a language game.]​

Stuart Murray made this point in his 1-star Amazon review:

The problem here is that Jesus doesn't just belong to the class of mythic heroes; he also belongs to the class of messianic figures who were killed by the Romans, and it seems that all of them existed. So why shouldn't we use Jesus' membership of this class to calculate the prior probability?​

I think these are good points. So, Richard Carrier needs to robustly justify his preference for the Rank-Raglan hero pattern over the pattern of messianic figures who were killed by the Romans. His use of Bayes' theory would otherwise fail for the same reason as predicted: his output value is only as good as his input values.

 

[No Robots]

Mythicists simply refuse to recognize the thoroughly Jewish nature of the New Testament. They are thus a relic of the old days of Bible scholarship.

 

[lpetrich]

Mythicists simply refuse to recognize the thoroughly Jewish nature of the New Testament. They are thus a relic of the old days of Bible scholarship.

What "thoroughly Jewish nature", and how do mythicists supposedly do that? Why don't you *read* some actual mythicists some time? You will find that they are something other than Jew-hating ogres.

 

[No Robots]

Interested parties may want to start with "The Gospel as a document of the history of the Jewish faith" by Leo Baeck (large-ish pdf download).

 

[No Robots]

See also Constantin Brunner's extended critique of mythicism:

This is not criticism, lumping things together from various remote regions of the world, and in part from entirely different periods from those that concern us; it is like seeing all the stars in a single plane. In all this, misunderstanding, twisting the facts and specious interpretation play a considerable part, and then to exclaim: "Now do you see? Do you see where these Jews got all this!"—this is what makes criticism into a sin against learning. This is not learning, it is stupidity.​

 

[No Robots]

Contrast the foregoing with this from the mythicists:

Price gives us ten pages [151-160] of parallels between the sayings of Q1 (the apparent bedrock layer of the Q document) and Cynic-style pronouncements of famous sages like Epictetus, Seneca, or of those reporting on Cynic philosophers, such as Diogenes Laertius. There seems little doubt of the ultimate provenance of the core teachings of the Gospel Jesus -- and it isn't a Jewish one.--Earl Doherty review of Deconstructing Jesus by Robert M. Price​

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My purpose is to try to undermine any assumption that the content of Q1 ought to be seen as deriving from a Jewish Jesus.--Earl Doherty comment on Richard Carrier's review of The Jesus Puzzle: Did Christianity Begin With a Mythical Christ?​

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The idea of worshipping a crucified deity did predate Christianity and had entered Jewish society within Palestine.--Richard Carrier​

The founders of mythicism, Bruno Bauer and Arthur Drews, were anti-semites.

 

[Perspicuo]

Deleted.


...

 

[credoconsolans]

After you posted your original OP, I went to Amazon to put the book on my wishlist and saw DM's review. He's very disingenuous and an out and out liar.

You can easily see Carrier wash the floor with him, but as Carrier himself commented, DM refused to accept he'd lost and instead goes around telling people he won. Carrier shouldn't bother to give this loser the time of day, but he has to confront him, lest people actually believe in Marshall's lies.

credoconsolans, did you find time to read Carrier's book? If so, I hope you do a review on Amazon, and share your opinion.

Hi, not yet. Am in the middle of buying a house and having health issues, so I haven't had a chance to sit down with some quiet time to read it.

 

[NobleSavage]

I'm no scholar but that seems as goofy as the the Drake Equation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation

I suppose most of us generally think in probabilities, but probably not as precise as assigning actual specific numbers, which is what Bayes’ Theorem does. It is popular in probability theory and statistics with mathematicians. We often hear the general consensus from NT scholars is that Jesus was a historical person. That seems only natural; the vast majority of NT scholars are Christians. Carrier devoted a chapter to BT in his latest book, and also assigned probabilities to which would be for the most favorable odds to a historic Jesus he could have possibly given (such as a little more than the 32% figure) as opposed to ones he actually thought were more realistic which had the numbers coming in less than this. And he’s not considering a supernatural Jesus. What ballpark figure would you think is more reasonable?

Sorry for taking so long to answer you. First, I'm not qualified to give much of an answer. In my mind it's about 50% with a 30% margin of error.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

Mythicists simply refuse to recognize the thoroughly Jewish nature of the New Testament. They are thus a relic of the old days of Bible scholarship.

If by that you mean that the NT is midrash and therefore fictional, you may have a point.

 

[No Robots]

I would certainly encourage anyone to explore the connections between Midrash, the New Testament and fiction.

 

[cornbread_r2]

Carrier forcefully responds to someone he thinks has misrepresented his work.

 

[ApostateAbe]

Carrier forcefully responds to someone he thinks has misrepresented his work.

Carrier has a habit of overreacting to every relevant criticism. I don't know if that is his honest personality type or if it just a way to relate to his fan base.

 

[cornbread_r2]

Carrier has a habit of overreacting to every relevant criticism. I don't know if that is his honest personality type or if it just a way to relate to his fan base.

In this instance, I think Carrier's response was appropriate for a couple of reasons. First, I agree that the misrepresentation was egregious. Second, the misrepresentation appeared on a prominent Catholic apologetic website that holds itself up as a broker for intellectually honest discourse. Carrier's response was also a shot across its bow, in effect, warning it to do a better job of finding responses to his work.

 

[whollygoats]

I would certainly encourage anyone to explore the connections between Midrash, the New Testament and fiction.

Okay.

How about The Birthing of the New Testament: The Intertextual Development of the New Testament Writings, by Thomas L. Brodie. Will that do?

For those who don't wish to wade through Father Thomas' extensive textual analysis, you can just obtain a copy of his Beyond the Quest for the Historical Jesus: Memoir of a Discovery.

The good father is a mythicist. And he seems to quite agree with you No Robots, that the New Testament is nothing but a recasting of Hebrew Bible teachings. Specifically, Septuagint translations of those teachings. He seems quite convinced that the Jesus figure is a mythic construct of a specific gentile intellectual community of early second century Syria/Anatolia. It is ALL midrash and Jesus is a pesher.

All in all, he seems to match quite closely to the early Christian communities which Burton Mack postulated in his analyses of the scriptural precedents.

Oh, and he answers the question of Q.