The Christ Myth Theory

[Politesse]

Carrier writes, "I am not engaging in “tactics.” I am simply stating what is true. If I had found the odds of historicity to be 50/50, that’s what I would have reported my findings to be. I reported what I found."[25]

If you believe that, I've heard there's a lovely bridge for sale in Brooklyn.

Fad Bayesians want the comfort of numbers to legitimate their subjective assumptions, but if those numbers are "assigned" on the basis of pre-existent bias rather than derived from any real set of data, they are meaningless to any serious scholar. No one goes to a fad Bayesian argument first; it's the recourse, the backup position, of a person who has realized there is no substantial empirical evidence in favor of their claim.

 

[dbz]

Fad Bayesians want the comfort of numbers to legitimate their subjective assumptions, but if those numbers are "assigned" on the basis of pre-existent bias rather than derived from any real set of data, they are meaningless to any serious scholar. No one goes to a fad Bayesian argument first; it's the recourse, the backup position, of a person who has realized there is no substantial empirical evidence in favor of their claim.

Carrier's work on historical method, Proving History: Bayes's Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus[177] promotes the use of Bayes' theorem

to analyze highly uncertain problems in history, as Carrier notes, "All historians use it, unknowingly, to generate every claim they make about history."[189][190]

Comment by Richard Carrier—4 July 2020—per "Open Thread On the Historicity of Jesus". Richard Carrier Blogs. 29 June 2020. "[A]ll historians who are arguing validly, even though they can almost never explain what it is about their arguing that makes it valid, are in fact already arguing with Bayes’ Theorem. In other words, we can fully model their argument with Bayes’ Theorem and thus explain why what they are arguing is valid—even though they are not consciously aware of this fact about their reasoning. See my article "Bayesian Statistics vs. Bayesian Epistemology" (and philosophy of history expert Aviezer Tucker’s demonstration in Our Knowledge of the Past and Efraim Wallach’s demonstration with respect to the evolution of the consensus on Old Testament historicity)."

Carrier (31 October 2021). "Doing the Math: Historicity of Jesus Edition". Richard Carrier Blogs.

The simplest form of the Bayesian equation to use for this purpose is the Odds Form, in which the odds on any claim being true equal the prior odds times the likelihood ratio, which is the relative odds of the evidence being as it is. This is the form I use in my peer reviewed work On the Historicity of Jesus.

Carrier (29 May 2018). "A Test of Bayesian History: Efraim Wallach on Old Testament Studies". Richard Carrier Blogs.
The article is by Efraim Wallach, titled “Bayesian Representation of a Prolonged Archaeological Debate,” in Synthese 195.1 (January 2018): 401-31. The abstract reads:

This article examines the effect of material evidence upon historiographic hypotheses. Through a series of successive Bayesian conditionalizations, I analyze the extended competition among several hypotheses that offered different accounts of the transition between the Bronze Age and the Iron Age in Palestine and in particular to the “emergence of Israel.” The model reconstructs, with low sensitivity to initial assumptions, the actual outcomes including a complete alteration of the scientific consensus. Several known issues of Bayesian confirmation, including the problem of old evidence, the introduction and confirmation of novel theories and the sensitivity of convergence to uncertain and disputed evidence are discussed in relation to the model’s result and the actual historical process. The most important result is that convergence of probabilities and of scientific opinion is indeed possible when advocates of rival hypotheses hold similar judgment about the factual content of evidence, even if they differ sharply in their historiographic interpretation. This speaks against the contention that understanding of present remains is so irrevocably biased by theoretical and cultural presumptions as to make an objective assessment impossible.

Lataster drew together the Carrier-based arguments of the previous chapters and set out first, Carrier’s probabilistic summaries of them all, and secondly, his (Lataster’s) alternative calculations.

Godfrey, Neil (27 October 2019). "Review part 10: Questioning the Historicity of Jesus / Lataster (Conclusion)". Vridar.

[2.3 Bayes’s Theorem]
At this point, in order to justify the two-part plausibility of hypotheses, we can make use of Bayes’s theorem.

Heilig, Christoph (2015). Hidden Criticism?: The Methodology and Plausibility of the Search for a Counter-Imperial Subtext in Paul. Mohr Siebeck. ISBN 978-3-16-153795-0.

 

[steve_bank]

I watched a show on the Roan catacombs. It was more entertianmet than academic, but one thing that can be seen is a mixing of pagan and Chrtian burial prctces, tomb art and symbols, and images of an afterlife.

One pagan idea of an afterlife was a lush green garden predating Christian ideas of heaven.

 

[dbz]

[The problem with the argument from authority] ...belief in Jesus’s historicity has come a priori of many scholars’ historical study of him, and the argument that their acceptance of the ability to study him historically proves his historicity is mere circularity.

Just as significantly, the existence of a critical mass of scholars who do believe in Jesus’s historicity will almost certainly have shaped the way that all other scholars write about the subject. Unless they are strongly motivated to argue that Jesus was not real, they will not arbitrarily provoke colleagues who do believe in his historicity by denying it casually. After all, as academics, we ought to want to advance arguments that persuade our colleagues — and getting them offside by needlessly challenging a point not directly in contention will not help with that.

—Pattenden, Miles (19 January 2022). “Historians and the historicity of Jesus”. ABC Religion & Ethics.​

There are, to date, no academic journal reviews of Lataster 2019 or Brodie 2012. But there have been four attempted critiques of Carrier 2014 (one of which being a few pages in a book rather than a journal, but functionally the same):

• Christina Petterson in Relegere 5.2 (2015): 253–58. On which see A Bizarre Review in Relegere.
• Daniel Gullotta. “On Richard Carrier’s Doubts.” Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 15.2–3 (2017): 310–46. See On the Historicity of Jesus: The Daniel Gullotta Review.
• Simon Gathercole. “The Historical and Human Existence of Jesus in Paul’s Letters.” Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 16.2–3 (2018): 183– 212. See The New Gathercole Article on Jesus Certainly Existing.
• M. David Litwa. How the Gospels Became History: Jesus and Mediterranean Myths (Yale University Press: 2019): 22–45. See Litwa’s Confused Critique of Mythicism.

More on these in a moment. I don’t include Chris Hansen on this list only because their promised peer-reviewed monograph on the subject hasn’t been published, they have only reviewed Jesus from Outer Space which is not the peer reviewed study of Carrier 2014 (although for my response nevertheless, see Chris Hansen on Jesus from Outer Space), and their various critical journal articles don’t directly address the question but skirt around it. But they do use all the same invalid or dishonest tactics. I’ll be publishing a reply to all that in future. But so far, there’s been no organized response to OHJ from them.

Crucially, there have been several critical responses to scholars deploying the kinds of rhetoric found in these reviews, making the point that doubting historicity is actually more plausible than they aver, and that their resort to unscholarly tactics to hide this is a black mark on the field that isn’t helping their case:

• By Philip Davies, in “Did Jesus Exist?” The Bible and Interpretation (August 2012).
• By Raphael Lataster, in his review of Carrier 2014 in the Journal of Religious History 38 (2014).
• By Justin Meggitt, in “‘More Ingenious than Learned’? Examining the Quest for the Non-Historical Jesus.” New Testament Studies 65.4 (2019).
• And of course by Richard Carrier and Raphael Lataster, in separate presentations at the 2021 International eConference on the Historical Jesus.

Each of these scholars [i.e. Davies, Lataster, Meggitt, Carrier] make important points historicists would do well to heed—especially regarding the bogus circular deployment of “argument from consensus” as an excuse to not even look at the evidence. The whole point of passing peer review is to establish that the consensus needs to be re-examined and defended against that actual challenge, not simply presumed and used as an excuse to ignore the challenge. That is dogmatism. A field is only respectable if it takes peer review seriously; which entails taking peer-reviewed challenges to the consensus seriously. If such challenges won’t even be examined, much less addressed, then a consensus has no epistemic value.

Moreover, contrary to what this tactic pretends—for example, Bart Ehrman still to this day lies to the public by claiming “no” scholars in the field take this seriously—doubting historicity is becoming mainstream: as of this writing, there are twenty experts (people with relevant PhDs, most even sitting or emeritus professors in a Biblical studies field) that have since gone on the public record agreeing that Jesus might not have existed—admitting either its plausibility, or their agnosticism, or outright doubt. As of this point in 2022 these include:

1. Thomas Brodie (Op cit.)
2. Richard Carrier (Op cit.)
3. Raphael Lataster (Op cit.)
4. Justin Meggitt (Op cit.)
5. Philip Davies (Op cit.; and personal testimony to Carrier and Lataster)
6. Robert Price (e.g. The Christ-Myth Theory and Its Problems)
7. Thomas Thompson (e.g. The Messiah Myth)
8. Hector Avalos (Ames Tribune 2 March 2013)
9. Zeba Crook (Facebook 30 December 2017)
10. Arthur Droge (CAESAR 2009)
11. Tom Dykstra (Journal of the OCABS 2015)
12. David Madison (public remarks to Carrier at GCRR 2021)
13. Darren Slade (Ibid.)
14. Steve Mason (remarks to Harmonic Atheist at min. 28:30)
15. Richard Miller (in Varieties of Jesus Mythicism)
16. Kurt Noll (in Is This Not the Carpenter?)
17. Emanuel Pfoh (Ibid.)
18. Francesca Stavrakopoulou (Twitter October 2016)
19. James Crossley (in Lataster 2019)
20. Carl Ruck (Mythvision interview May 2022)

This has grown from a mere handful ten years ago. So it cannot be claimed that “no” scholar takes this seriously—or even that only “fringe” scholars take it seriously. And these are only the experts who have gone on record. Of course, the negative opinions of scholars who have not read either Carrier 2014 or Lataster 2019 can carry no weight, because they don’t know what the evidence and arguments are and thus can have no informed opinion of them. But among scholars who have read them, and still even some who haven’t, quite a few are abandoning [reason for] blind adherence to the dogma of historicity. Whereas those who claim to have read either book and remain opposed to this concession are almost all Christian apologists—the least reliable experts to be polling the opinion of on this.

—Carrier (22 August 2022). "What I Said at the Brea Conference". Richard Carrier Blogs.​

• Neil Godfrey highlights some quotes of Fischer, David H. (1970). Historian's Fallacies. Harper Collins. ISBN 978-0-06-131545-9.

Many have attempted to establish a doubtful question by a phrase such as

• most historians agree . . .
• it is the consensus of scholarly opinion that . . .
• in the judgment of all serious students of this problem . . .

The fallacy of the prevalent proof makes mass opinion into a method of verification. This practice has been discovered by cultural anthropologists among such tribes as the Kuba, for whom history was whatever the majority declared to be true. If some fearless fieldworker were to come among the methodological primitives who inhabit the history departments of the United States, he would find that similar customs sometimes prevail. There are at least a few historians who would make a seminar into a senate and resolve a professional problem by resorting to a vote. I witnessed one such occasion (circa 1962) as a student at the Johns Hopkins University. A scholar who was baffled by a knotty problem of fact literally called for a show of hands to settle the question. An alienated minority of callow youths in the back of the room raised both hands and carried the day, in defiance of logic, empiricism, and parliamentary procedure.
If the fallacy of the prevalent proof appeared only in this vulgar form, there would be little to fear from it. But in more subtle shapes, the same sort of error is widespread. Few scholars have failed to bend, in some degree, before the collective conceits of their colleagues. Many have attempted to establish a doubtful question by a phrase such as “most historians agree . . . ” or “it is the consensus of scholarly opinion that . . .” or “in the judgment of all serious students of this problem . . . .”

When an historian asserts that “X has not been extensively investigated,” he sometimes means, “I have not investigated X at all.”

A historian has written, for example, “While the role of dope in damping social unrest in early industrial England has not been extensively investigated, every historian of the period knows that it was common practice at the time for working mothers to start the habit in the cradle by dosing their hungry babies on laudanum (‘mother’s blessing,’ it was called).” This statement is often made, and widely believed. But it has never, to my knowledge, been established by empirical evidence. The reader should note the hyperbole in the first sentence. When an historian asserts that “X has not been extensively investigated,” he sometimes means, “I have not investigated X at all.”

A book much bigger than this one could be crowded with examples.

A fact which every historian knows is not inherently more accurate than a fact which every schoolboy knows. Nevertheless, the fallacy of the prevalent proof commonly takes this form–deference to the historiographical majority. It rarely appears in the form of an explicit deference to popular opinion. But implicitly, popular opinion exerts its power too. A book much bigger than this one could be crowded with examples. One will suffice here, for the sake of illustration. Every schoolboy knows, and most schoolmasters, too, that Mussolini made the trains run on time. But did he? Ashley Montagu observes that “there was little or no truth in it: people who lived in Italy between the March on Rome (October 22, 1922) and the execution at Como (1945) will bear testimony to the fact that Italian railroads remained as insouciant as ever with regard to time-tables and actual schedules.” And yet, the myth still runs its rounds, with a regularity that Il Duce was unable to bring to his railroads.

—Godfrey, Neil (15 October 2017). "The Fallacy Few Historians Have Avoided". Vridar.​

• Per tag https://vridar.org/tag/scholarly-consensus/

I’ve always found it odd that people consider a PhD in theology or divinity any kind of qualification of authority on matters of historical truth in the Bible. In fact these degrees should indicate that the person is NOT a reliable expert on such matters. Degrees in theology and divinity are actually degrees in bias. By their very nature the fields of theology and divinity entrench unobjective biased views of the material, not objective views of it. That people with such degrees should be considered exports on maters of biblical history is a total sham.

This isn’t to say that one can’t have such degrees and be objective, but there is nothing about the training provided for those degrees that promotes objectivity.

As for “what can we do”, I think to a degree we are doing it here. I think calling it out and talking about, even if we aren’t considered authorities helps, because at least some people listen to reason. It’s a slow spread, but bit by bit it helps. I used to be in the same boat of thinking that that field of biblical studies was a normal academic field where the exports were reasonable, but now I see otherwise due to seeing what people like Doherty and people on message boards and places like this have had to say.

Lastly, I think the issue of sort of fundamentally debunking Christianity is very important. This isn’t an issue of just typical history (and even general history I think can be very important). History matters, it affects how people view themselves and the world and impacts political positions that impact policy. You mention climate change, and I would content that belief in end-times prophecy and and theology is a major barrier to political action on climate change. And this is why debunking Christianity is important. It’s also why, in my book (and others I’m working on now) I focus on the issue of prophecy and show how the Christian belief in prophecy is a product of misguided literary interpretation, kind or trying to exposure how the magic trick was done.

—r.g.price 2019-01-04​

The existence of phlogiston was at one time agreed upon by all chemists. That did not mean that all scientists had a clear and single understanding of the nature of phlogiston.

This insistence on existence is conspicuous especially given the acknowledged fundamental disagreements about phlogiston’s theoretical status, about its constitution, about its properties and even . . . . about the very meaning of ‘existence’ of a chemical substance.
Boantza, Victor D., and Ofer Gal. 2011. “The ‘absolute existence’ of phlogiston: the losing party’s point of view.” The British Journal for the History of Science 44 (3): 321.

Phlogiston existed, so went the consensus at one time, even though there was a wide range of explanations about its properties and how it was constituted.

Is it not reasonable to compare the many views of the historical Jesus, many of them incompatible, such as

• a Jewish apocalypticist
• a Jewish preacher,
• a charismatic hasid
• or a Cynic-style sage

—Godfrey, Neil (18 October 2018). "The Phlogiston Jesus". Vridar.​

 

[dbz]

"Harvard Philologist Says "No Historical Jesus"". YouTube. Aug 3, 2022.

Gnostic Informant ​

2 weeks ago
Touchdown for the Mythicists !

Well I'll be. A well credential classicist/philologist professor has said he is a Mythicist, with a fresh approach.
His argument is simple: Christianity is a Hellenistic religion, not a Jewish one. It has borrowed from Judaism for exotic ethnicity.

Posted by u/AractusP, 4 August 2022: Classicist Carl AP Ruck: “I'm a Mythicist” r/AcademicBiblical

 

[Swammerdami]

Anyone who thinks I believe historicity because I like to go along with consensus is unfamiliar with my positions on the Amerindian Hypothesis, the Shakespeare Authorship and, for that matter, the Lindbergh kidnapping.

Several weeks ago I thought the chance of historicity was only 90% but this has risen to 95% as I've seen only useless whinings from the mythicist crowd. My 95% estimate would fall if I read any intelligible answers to my questions.

Well I'll be. A well credential classicist/philologist professor has said he is a Mythicist, with a fresh approach.
His argument is simple: Christianity is a Hellenistic religion, not a Jewish one. It has borrowed from Judaism for exotic ethnicity.

The Gospels, while written in Greek, contain considerable material that was clearly translated from Aramaic. This does NOT refute the exotic ethnicity hypothesis, but it reduces the likelihood.

 

[dbz]

The Gospels, while written in Greek, contain considerable material that was clearly translated from Aramaic.

1) Peter as the putative founder of Christianity may have created a pesher that he used to recruit followers to his cult. This hypothetical pesher would have revealed God's plan for Jesus to bring about salvation. It could of been written in Aramaic or Greek.

2) Paul did not write in Aramaic.

"What The Heck Is The Apostle Paul Up To? | Robyn Faith Walsh PhD". YouTube. MythVision Podcast. 3 June 2022. @TIME:00:10:12

..Paul knows Plato really well . . . his native tongue is Greek...

3) The Markan text was written at least forty years after the Christian religion began (then an average human lifetime), and thus was responding to recent events (the destruction of Jerusalem). We can not explain the origins of Christianity by appealing to the Markan text or to the author's motives; The Markan text is a latecomer that was responding to profound changes in the religion and its circumstances. The religion itself began long before it was known that the Romans would actually destroy Jerusalem (early Christian thinking was then more in line with Daniel, which never mentions this, but only the temple’s “desecration,” after which God and his angels would destroy everything).

It is commonly maintained that the Gospel of Mark was originally written in Greek, and that the final text represents a rather lengthy history of growth. For more than a century attempts have been made to explain the origin of the gospel material and to interpret the space between the related events and the final inscripturation of the contents of the Gospel.

Plausibility is no assurance of historicity. Simply removing some texts to an otherwise unknown Aramaic source and arguing that the narrative conforms with Old Testament teachings does not bring us any closer to ensuring that a narrative is describing a genuine historical event.

Godfrey, Neil (21 November 2010). "Casey's historical method (2): Aramaic and the fallacy of 'historical plausibility'". Vridar.

​

 

[Swammerdami]

The Gospels, while written in Greek, contain considerable material that was clearly translated from Aramaic.

1) Peter as the putative founder of Christianity may have created a pesher that he used to recruit followers to his cult. This hypothetical pesher would have revealed God's plan for Jesus to bring about salvation. It could of been written in Aramaic or Greek.

2) Paul did not write in Aramaic.

Unclear. Do you acknowledge that parts of Matthew's and Luke's Gospels were certainly translated from Aramaic or not?
(This is a Yes/No question.)

 

[dbz]

Do you acknowledge that parts of Matthew's and Luke's Gospels were certainly translated from Aramaic or not?
(This is a Yes/No question.)

• No

Casey offers the second installment of his study into Aramaic sources that underlie the gospels. His first volume sought to provide plausible reconstructions of Aramaic material that stood behind Mark, the second volume applies this methodology to argue for Aramaic sources behind material shared uniquely by Matthew and Luke, the Q source.

Foster, P. (2004). [Review of An Aramaic Approach to Q: Sources for the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, by M. Casey]. Novum Testamentum, 46(3), 289–291.

Plausibility is no assurance of historicity. Simply removing some texts to an otherwise unknown Aramaic source and arguing that the narrative conforms with Old Testament teachings does not bring us any closer to ensuring that a narrative is describing a genuine historical event.

Godfrey, Neil (21 November 2010). "Casey's historical method (2): Aramaic and the fallacy of 'historical plausibility'". Vridar.

 

[Swammerdami]

Do you acknowledge that parts of Matthew's and Luke's Gospels were certainly translated from Aramaic or not?
(This is a Yes/No question.)

• No

Well, Thank You for finally giving a Yes/No answer to a simple Yes/No question! I wasn't expecting that.

But I think your answer is wrong. Upthread I gave two arguments for the Aramaic claim — well-known arguments clearly presented in Ian Wilson's book IIRC. Would you care to argue against that evidence?

 

[dbz]

Upthread I gave two arguments for the Aramaic claim — well-known arguments clearly presented in Ian Wilson's book IIRC. Would you care to argue against that evidence?

• No

[The Criterion of Aramaic Context holds that] if there is evidence of an “Aramaic-language based unity between the participants, the events depicted, and concepts discussed” underlying the extant Greek text, then this suggests the account goes back to the original Jesus, who most likely conversed in Aramaic.

The first difficulty with this criterion is that it isn’t easy to discern an “underlying Aramaic origin” from an author or source who simply wrote or spoke in a Semitized Greek. The output of both often look identical. And yet we know the earliest Christians routinely wrote and spoke in a Semitized Greek, and regularly employed (and were heavily influenced by) the Septuagint, which was written in a Semitized Greek. This is most notably the case for the author of Luke-Acts, and is evident even in Paul.

Many early Christians were also bilingual (as Paul outright says he was), and thus often spoke and thought in Aramaic, and thus could easily have composed tales in Aramaic (orally or in lost written form) that were just as fabricated as anything else, which could then have been translated into Greek, either by the Gospel authors themselves or their sources. Indeed, some material may have preceded Jesus in Aramaic form (such as sayings and teachings, as we find collected at Qumran) that was later attributed to him with suitable adaptation. So even if we can distinguish what is merely a Semitic Greek dialect from a Greek translation of an Aramaic source (and we rarely can), that still does not establish that the Aramaic source reported a historical fact.

Consequently, Semitic features in a Gospel pericope do not make its historicity any more likely, other than in very exceptional cases (where we can actually prove an underlying source that we otherwise did not already suspect), and even then it gains very little (since an underlying source is not automatically reliable). Whereas one might have hoped such features would lower [the probability of this evidence on non-historicity] relative to [the probability of this evidence on historicity], there is no evidence in [our background knowledge] that warrants that conclusion. Even the best cases would lower it but little; and most cases, not at all.

As Christopher Tuckett says: “We should not forget that Jesus was not the only person in first-century Palestine; nor was he the only Aramaic speaker of his day. Hence such features in the tradition are not necessarily guaranteed as authentic: they might have originated in an early (or indeed later) Christian milieu within Palestine or in an Aramaic-speaking environment [outside Palestine].”

Or as I’ve noted, they might have originated in a Semitic-Greek-speaking environment (of which there were many across the whole Roman world), or even a pre-Christian milieu. Even a chronological trend is not dispositive, since Stanley Porter finds evidence the tradition could become “both more and less Semitic” [over time]. Unfortunately there are just too many ways a Semitic flavor could have entered the tradition of any saying or tale, and we have no way to tease out their relative probabilities. So when it comes to Jesus, this criterion effectively has no value for discerning historically authentic material.

(pp. 185-86)

Carrier, Richard (2012). Proving History: Bayes's Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus. Prometheus Books. ISBN 978-1-61614-560-6.

Cf. Carrier (4 March 2014). "Critical Review of Maurice Casey's Defense of the Historicity of Jesus". Richard Carrier Blogs.

 

[Swammerdami]

Upthread I gave two arguments for the Aramaic claim — well-known arguments clearly presented in Ian Wilson's book IIRC. Would you care to argue against that evidence?

• No

[The Criterion of Aramaic Context holds that] if there is evidence of an “Aramaic-language based unity between the participants, the events depicted, and concepts discussed” underlying the extant Greek text, then this suggests the account goes back to the original Jesus, who most likely conversed in Aramaic.

The first difficulty with this criterion is that it isn’t easy to discern an “underlying Aramaic origin” from an author or source who simply wrote or spoke in a Semitized Greek.
. . .
Many early Christians were also bilingual (as Paul outright says he was), and thus often spoke and thought in Aramaic, and thus could easily have composed tales in Aramaic (orally or in lost written form) that were just as fabricated as anything else, . . .

I've reddened two parts of your (or Carrier's) response to call attention to them. I'm not familiar with Semitized Greek, but I doubt it provides the rich rhyming, punning, and metrical forms that support the Aramaic hypothesis. The next reddened comment is a way to "hedge bets" — It replaces "No, not Aramaic" with "Yeah, probably, but who cares!" Debating with this Carrier is like trying to catch an eel with one's bare hands!

Although you will claim that possible bilingualism of Greek Gospel writers allows you to ignore the evidence that many Gospel sources were Aramaic, I'll answer briefly here, to cater to the remote possibility that someone is reading this thread with an objective mind-set.

1. Unlike "Semitized Greek", Hebrew and Aramaic are very close. Rhymes and puns in one language are likely to work in the other.
2. The Sermon on the Mount becomes poetry when translated into Aramaic, much as "On the bridge at Avignon" becomes two perfect rhyming amphimacer (cretic) feet when translated into French. (This is Ian Wilson's claim, but the thesis was developed by Burney: see below)
3. The Aramaic word for 'to cleanse' /dakkau/ mutated into 'give alms' /zakkau/. This explains why Matthew 23:26 is rendered peculiarly in Luke 11:41. Does anyone think the dakkau/zakkau orthographic conflation is plausible in Semitized Greek? Did bilingual Gosepl writers insert the error deliberately to "prove" there was an Aramaic source?
4. There are other examples similar to #3. Why does Matthew's Sermon on the Mount become the Sermon on the Plain in Luke? Again, the cause is similarity between two Aramaic words.
5. Matthew 11:7 "And as they departed, Jesus began to say unto the multitudes concerning John, What went ye out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken with the wind?" The Hebrew word for "reed" strongly resembles the Hebrew/Aramaic word for "zealot." Pun?
6. "When C.F. Burney translated the sayings of Jesus back into Aramaic, he was struck by the degree to which they had a rhythmic shape, like so many of the prophetic sayings in the Old Testament." Burney's book was published in 1924 — has copyright expired? — but I cannot find a copy on-line. This source summarizes some of Burney's arguments. When translating the Gospel's Greek back to Aramaic, Burney finds rhymes, puns, alliteration, meter and especially verse patterns that resemble those found in Hebrew Psalms. The rhythm, rhymes and puns are all lost in the Greek rendering. Therefore the Lord's Prayer, the Beatitudes, etc. were all composed in Aramaic and NOT in Greek, whether the writers were bilingual or not.
7. Although most of these examples apply to Matthew and Luke specifically, there is also evidence that Mark's and John's Gospels also had some Aramaic sources.

 

[dbz]

Christian scripture teaches that god alone is good (Luke 18:19). Marcion, following Plato, went further by his assumption that god, to be god, must be good—in fact the Good and source of all good for all beings. This [MIDDLE] Platonized Christian divinity was immensely powerful but had one limitation: he could not do evil. Indeed, it was sacrilegious to say that god did anything morally base.

By Marcion’s time, belief in god's exclusive goodness had become cultural common coin. The idea appears in Philo, Plutarch, Alcinous, Numenius, and Apuleius—all leading Middle Platonists of the period. The Chaldean Oracles scold the ignorant: “you do not know that every god is good, you drudges. Sober up!” Bellerophon, a character in one of Euripides’s famous plays, declared “If the gods do something bad, they are not gods.” The idea that god(s) must be good was widespread. In essence, then, all Marcion had to show was that the actions and character of the Judean creator were not—or not exclusively—good. Marcion could thereby show that the Judean god was no god at, but rather an imposter. (p. 61)

Litwa, M. David (2021). The Evil Creator: Origins of an Early Christian Idea. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-756643-5. "[Source: Publisher] This book examines the origins of the evil creator idea chiefly in light of early Christian biblical interpretations. It is divided into two parts. In Part I, the focus is on the interpretations of Exodus and John. Firstly, ancient Egyptian assimilation of the Jewish god to the evil deity Seth-Typhon is studied to understand its reapplication by Phibionite and Sethian Christians to the Judeo-catholic creator. Secondly, the Christian reception of John 8:44 (understood to refer to the devil's father) is shown to implicate the Judeo-catholic creator in murdering Christ. Part II focuses on Marcionite Christian biblical interpretations. It begins with Marcionite interpretations of the creator's character in the Christian "Old Testament," analyzes 2 Corinthians 4:4 (in which "the god of this world" blinds people from Christ's glory), examines Christ's so-called destruction of the Law (Eph 2:15) and the Lawgiver, and shows how Christ finally succumbs to the "curse of the Law" inflicted by the creator (Gal 3:13). A concluding chapter shows how still today readers of the Christian Bible have concluded that the creator manifests an evil character."

Christians are further forced to explain Jesus’ relationship to God. Did he remain God, but simply appear human (Docetism), in which case he never suffered, but only appeared to... (p. 12)

O'Brien, Carl Séan (2015). The Demiurge in Ancient Thought: Secondary Gods and Divine Mediators. Cambridge University Press. ISBN978-1-316-24065-6. "This monograph resulted from my PhD thesis at the School of Classics/Centre for the Study of the Platonic Tradition at Trinity College, Dublin."

Cf. Carl O'Brien. Secondary Gods and Divine Mediators: Studies in the Development of the Demiurge in the Platonic, Gnostic Hermetic and Christian Traditions. 2006-07 Completed Theses, Trinity College Dublin: Classics/Centre for the Study of the Platonic Tradition

O'Brien considers the idea of secondary gods and divine mediators in a series of chapters on Philo, Plutarch, Maximus of Tyre, Numenius, the Hermetic corpus, Gnostic texts and Origen.

BALTZLY, D. (2016). THE DEMIURGE [Review of The Demiurge in Ancient Thought. Secondary Gods and Divine Mediators, by C. S. O’Brien]. The Classical Review, 66(2), 375–377.

N.B. the idea that this world is corrupt and evil and we have to escape it is not only entirely orthodox, it’s canonical (2 Peter 3, 2 Peter 2, 1 Thess. 4, Jude, Romans 8, Galatians 4, 1 John 2, 1 John 5, Ephesians 6, Colossians 2, 1 Corinthians 15, 2 Corinthians 4-5).

 

[dbz]

IMO, a sophisticated first_CE Platonist (i.e. middle platonic) would understand evil in the same way that something being "cold"—can be understood as merely the absence of heat. All (Loddy, Doddy, and Everybody) have the potential to be good in the same way that every atom (understood as a ball on the Newtonian billiard table universe) has the potential to have heat. Thus a person is evil if they are not living their full human potential. As the bible says; since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, "men abandoned natural relations with women and burned with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men … They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed, and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, and malice." because they are 'COLD' (i.e. not fulfilling their potential to be good), thus have "a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done." Cf. Romans 1:28

 

[bleubird]

View attachment 39990

 

[bleubird]

We are soooo special!

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

If anyone genuinely wishes to sharpen their appreciation of the mythical Jesus question they ought to research Paul Bunyan. It's a fascinating read complete with oral tradition finally making it into poetry and verse anonymously, and then refined over time. The surname "Bunyan" is often associated with a French logger named Bon Jean. Is that our historical Paul Bunyan or is he an amalgam including Fabian Fournier, aka "Saginaw Joe" and nameless other tall tales? And even Babe has her own interesting development.

Even the language of the original stories was edited over time to appeal to a wider audience, removing lumberjack slang and jargon, replacing it with widely understood phrase and verse.

Of course, no one worships Paul Bunyan as a god so people are willing to write it all off as folklore or even "fakelore" as it was once labeled. There is certainly abundant "fakelore" associated with the Jesus tale.

 

[steve_bank]

 

[Swammerdami]

I answered a question in the "Historical Karen" thread. My response really belongs here.

Carrier employs Bayes ridiculously but nobody complains about THAT, except for me.

What is ridiculous about his assumptions? Do you have a better way to analyze the historicity of the Jesus claims?

I've no problem with the principle of Bayesian analysis, but I think it is impossibly difficult to apply in many complicated cases. Does Mark's narrative read like it's based on a flesh-and-blood man (as C.S. Lewis insists) or like it's pure fiction (as some others insist)? I don't know. Do you? The analyst would get very different results from different opinions, but Carrier avoids the issue by simply crossing apparent authenticity of narratives completely off the list of evidence to be examined.

Here's a clearer example. In his Book XX, Josephus confirms the identity of the "Lord's brother" Paul describes in Galatians 1:19:

So [Ananus] assembled the sanhedrim of judges, and brought before them the brother of Jesus who was called Christ, whose name was James: and some of his companions. And when he had formed an accusation against them as breakers of the law, he delivered them to be stoned.

Mythical men do NOT have flesh-and-blood brothers. If Josephus really wrote this, it would show that he thought Jesus called Christ was a real historical person. The evidentiary value would be HUGE. But was this Josephus text doctored in the 3rd or 4th century by a Christian? I don't know; do you?

And what if the original was "brother of Jesus whose name was James" with only "who was called Christ" interpolated? It would still have some evidentiary value. (Yes, Jesus was a common name — that's why suffixes like "the son of Damneus" or "who was called Christ" are appended — but why mention the brother at all?)

What are the odds? I don't know. Maybe — wild guesses — 5% that the original Josephus never mentioned this James at all; 25% that he mentioned James but no brother; 40% that he mentioned the brother but not "called Christ", 30% that the paragraph is as Josephus originally wrote it? And there are plenty of other relevant facts. The head gets dizzy imagining the complicated flow graph that defines the Bayesian calculations required.

So what weight does Richard Carrier give Josephus' writing in his Bayesian flow graph? Zero. With a Z. (That approach DOES avoid a lot of unpleasant arithmetic! ). "Your Honor, the entirety of Josephus' writings are inadmissable. I will move for a mistrial if opposing counsel shows any James or Jesus mention in Josephus to the jury again." ZERO. Carrier decides that Josephus' mentionS of Jesus were probably interpolations, but probably morphs into 100% certainty BEFORE he ever trots out Bayes' Theorem.

Do you understand my objection? Raise your hand if you do; you'll be the first one.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

Mythical men do NOT have flesh-and-blood brothers. If Josephus really wrote this, it would show that he thought Jesus called Christ was a real historical person. The evidentiary value would be HUGE. But was this Josephus text doctored in the 3rd or 4th century by a Christian? I don't know; do you?

Josephus is writing hearsay. He thought Jesus was a real person based stories he heard of perhaps things he read about. Old lumberjacks told stories about being with Paul Bunyan.