The Christ Myth Theory

[dbz]

...solution to the James....

• KISS it goodbye...

Sound methodology requires (1) that we attend to the effect of our unevidenced assumptions on the probability of our theory; (2) that we attend to how likely our theory makes all the evidence (including what isn’t in evidence, not just what is); and (3) that we compare our theory’s merits in these regards to any other viable theory, especially the most viable competing theory you can find or contrive.

Here is the text in Greek (which I extracted from the industry’s digital standard, the TLG):

(199) ὁ δὲ νεώτερος Ἄνανος, ὃν τὴν ἀρχιερωσύνην ἔφαμεν εἰληφέναι, θρασὺς ἦν τὸν τρόπον καὶ τολμητὴς διαφερόντως, αἵρεσιν δὲ μετῄει τὴν Σαδδουκαίων, οἵπερ εἰσὶ περὶ τὰς κρίσεις ὠμοὶ παρὰ πάντας τοὺς Ἰουδαίους, καθὼς ἤδη δεδηλώκαμεν. (200) ἅτε δὴ οὖν τοιοῦτος ὢν ὁ Ἄνανος, νομίσας ἔχειν καιρὸν ἐπιτήδειον διὰ τὸ τεθνάναι μὲν Φῆστον, Ἀλβῖνον δ’ ἔτι κατὰ τὴν ὁδὸν ὑπάρχειν, καθίζει συνέδριον κριτῶν καὶ παραγαγὼν εἰς αὐτὸ τὸν ἀδελφὸν Ἰησοῦ τοῦ λεγομένου Χριστοῦ, Ἰάκωβος ὄνομα αὐτῷ, καί τινας ἑτέρους, ὡς παρανομησάντων κατηγορίαν ποιησάμενος (201) παρέδωκε λευσθησομένους. ὅσοι δὲ ἐδόκουν ἐπιεικέστατοι τῶν κατὰ τὴν πόλιν εἶναι καὶ περὶ τοὺς νόμους ἀκριβεῖς βαρέως ἤνεγκαν ἐπὶ τούτῳ καὶ πέμπουσιν πρὸς τὸν βασιλέα κρύφα παρακαλοῦντες αὐτὸν ἐπιστεῖλαι τῷ Ἀνάνῳ μηκέτι τοιαῦτα πράσσειν· μηδὲ γὰρ τὸ (202) πρῶτον ὀρθῶς αὐτὸν πεποιηκέναι. τινὲς δ’ αὐτῶν καὶ τὸν Ἀλβῖνον ὑπαντιάζουσιν ἀπὸ τῆς Ἀλεξανδρείας ὁδοιποροῦντα καὶ διδάσκουσιν, ὡς οὐκ ἐξὸν ἦν Ἀνάνῳ χωρὶς τῆς ἐκείνου γνώμης καθίσαι συνέδριον. (203) Ἀλβῖνος δὲ πεισθεὶς τοῖς λεγομένοις γράφει μετ’ ὀργῆς τῷ Ἀνάνῳ λήψεσθαι παρ’ αὐτοῦ δίκας ἀπειλῶν. καὶ ὁ βασιλεὺς Ἀγρίππας διὰ τοῦτο τὴν Ἀρχιερωσύνην ἀφελόμενος αὐτὸν ἄρξαντα μῆνας τρεῖς Ἰησοῦν τὸν τοῦ Δαμναίου κατέστησεν.

The old Whiston translation renders this as (emphasis mine):

[The] younger Ananus, who, as we have told you already, took the high priesthood, was a bold man in his temper, and very insolent; he was also of the sect of the Sadducees, who are very rigid in judging offenders, above all the rest of the Jews, as we have already observed; when, therefore, Ananus was of this disposition, he thought he had now a proper opportunity. [The Roman prefect] Festus was now dead, and Albinus [his replacement] was but upon the road; so [Ananus] assembled the Sanhedrin of judges, and brought before them the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James, and some others; and when he had formed an accusation against them as breakers of the law, he delivered them to be stoned: but as for those who seemed the most equitable of the citizens, and such as were the most uneasy at the breach of the laws, they disliked what was done; they also sent to the king [Agrippa], desiring him to send to Ananus that he should act so no more, for that what he had already done was not to be justified; nay, some of them went also to meet Albinus, as he was upon his journey from Alexandria, and informed him that it was not lawful for Ananus to assemble a Sanhedrin without his consent. Whereupon Albinus complied with what they said, and wrote in anger to Ananus, and threatened that he would bring him to punishment for what he had done; on which king Agrippa took the high priesthood from him, when he had ruled but three months, and made Jesus, the son of Damneus, High Priest.

MacDonald’s theory requires: that James the brother of Jesus Christ taught the abolition of Torah law or some radical set of changes to it; that Ananus cared so much about that as to have him illegally executed; and that the rest of the Jewish elite were not supportive of that but in fact outraged by it and punished Ananus for it. Already little of this makes logical sense. The Jewish elite persecuted Christians; they didn’t persecute their persecutors. And the only prominent James we know about was part of the pro-Torah faction of Christians, not the Pauline faction who argued for abandoning strict Torah observance. There is no evidence whatever that this (or indeed any) James was teaching radical deviations from Torah law. All evidence we do have suggests he would have been against the Christian factions who did that.

So right from the start, MacDonald’s hypothesis requires inventing ad hoc suppositions, nowhere in evidence, that this brother of Jesus had taken or switched sides with the anti-Torah Pauline sect, and was advocating it so ardently in Judea that the Sanhedrin stoned him for it—an event nowhere recorded, not even in the book of Acts, which mentions no James the brother of Jesus at all, and which only mentions the known Torah-faction James being beheaded, not stoned, and by King Agrippa, not the Sanhedrin (much less Ananus), nor for this reason, and this action being approved by the elite, rather than (as Josephus’s story has it), so ardently opposed by the Jewish elite as to result in Royal and Roman intervention in deposing a High Priest who instigated the murder.

So MacDonald’s theory of this passage requires improbable supposition after improbable supposition even before we get to testing it against the evidence for it.

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--Carrier (27 December 2020). ""What Did Josephus Mean by That?" A Case Study in the Relationship between Evidence and Probability". Richard Carrier Blogs.

• Carrier (9 April 2024). "I'll Virtually Be in Bangor, Maine!". Richard Carrier Blogs.

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[Swammerdami]

• KISS it goodbye...

I've told you over and over to use your own words -- preferably complete sentences -- to summarize any point you think you're making. When we eliminate the quotation from Carrier, itself mostly just the excerpt from Josephus I've posted several times -- (and was the Greek version of Josephus really an important part of the quotation? ) -- , we're left with just the above. Just THREE words.

Three words. Is that really the best you can do, @dbz ?

I DID skim the Carrier gibberish you posted and it was just his usual crap. You're welcome to try again IN YOUR OWN WORDS. Is it even possible for you to compose a long paragraph saying something intelligible, with ZERO quotations from your Almighty Prophet?

 

[No Robots]

The truth is that many, if not most, contemporary biblical scholars take a much more nuanced view than the binary “existed/didn’t exist.”

This is a lie.

In fact, no one in mainstream New Testament scholarship denies that Jesus was a Jew.--William Arnal

 

[steve_bank]

I;d say most of us here do not equate 'new testament scholarship' with profession academic quality scholarship.

New Testament scholarship is limited to what the New Teammate says and a few mentions of a Jesus by people who came later.

Us atheists on the forum have looked at the evidence and have speculated on a range of possible HJs.

That makers us NT scholars. We do not have PHDs from a bible college so we can't call ourselves 'doctor;'.

 

[Tharmas]

The truth is that many, if not most, contemporary biblical scholars take a much more nuanced view than the binary “existed/didn’t exist.”

This is a lie.

In fact, no one in mainstream New Testament scholarship denies that Jesus was a Jew.--William Arnal

Non sequitur anybody?

 

[Tharmas]

New Testament scholarship is limited to what the New Teammate says and a few mentions of a Jesus by people who came later.

That seems awfully myopic of you Steve (nothing personal intended).

 

[steve_bank]

I forgot to say I actually do have a PHD from Bogus Theological College, so you may refer to mer as Doctor Steve. My PHD required a 5000 word thesis and $250.

Myopic?

My conclusion years back was the gospels are a conflation of events and people. That an outspoken Jew was cricked would not have been unusual, Roman justice was brutal. Any hint of unrest or resistance to Rome was crushed.

There was the mass suicide of Jews at Masada when their mountain retreat was about to be breached by Roman soldiers.

Sedition and Jewish rebellion was in the air.

There is the pacific Jesus of Sermon On The Mount. There was the manic Jesus outraged resorting to violence in the temple.There is the Jesus who said give to Rome what is due Rome, to god what is due god.And so on. A Jew preaching compromise with the Romans?

There would not have been one singular Jewish prophet making speeches, prophesies, and uttering words of wisdom. It is what biblical historic Jewish prophets did.

Take your pick. Jesus is whenever a Christian thinks him to be. The idea a Jewish prophet was sent to save the humankind present and future is an invented myth.

I forget the technical name for the technique. Look a the world today and project back in time.

Look at the Mid East today. Swap Israel for Rome and Palestinians for Jews. The same ethnic, racial, political, economic, military, and religious conflict as in the day of a Jesus.

It is not hard to speculate on who an HJ may have been, but there is no corroboration to prove any speculations.

Christian theolgy and biblical 'scholarship' has long been a deep well of profit for both atheist and theist. Christian scholarship generally starts with assumption the thesis is true, Jesus existed.

One fills in the blanks in a scholaly manner to prove HJ existed.

The Discovery Instate has a very slick academic scholarly looking website with scientific papers and books that disprve evolution and prove YEC.

 

[dbz]

New Testament scholarship is limited to what the New Teammate says and a few mentions of a Jesus by people who came later.

That seems awfully myopic of you Steve (nothing personal intended).

• New Testament scholarship could improve a lot by learning maths and logic reasoning.
• Carrier, Richard (2012). Proving History: Bayes's Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus. Prometheus Books.

Conditional Probability: The probability of one event (A) happening given that another event (B) has already happened.

I pick a random day, but I also tell you that it is cloudy on the chosen day. Now that you have this extra piece of information, how do you update the chance that it rains on that day? In other words, what is the probability that it rains given that it is cloudy? If C is the event that it is cloudy, then we write this as P(R|C), the conditional probability of R given that C has occurred. It is reasonable to assume that in this example, P(R|C) should be larger than the original P(R), which is called the prior probability of R.

---

--"Conditional Probability". probabilitycourse.com.

"Conditional Probability". YouTube. Probability Course. 2013.

• Independence: Events are independent if the occurrence of one does not affect the probability of the other. In this case, P(A | B) = P(A).
• Dependence: Events are dependent if the occurrence of one does affect the probability of the other. In this case, P(A | B) ≠ P(A).

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• Disjoint: A and B cannot occur at the same time. Thus P(A | B) = 0
  • Set A: Represents the possibility that King Arthur is not a man.
  • Set B: Represents the possibility that King Arthur is a man.

No Overlap: Since these two possibilities are mutually exclusive, the circles do not intersect. This indicates that the probability of King Arthur being both a man and not a man P(A & B) is zero.

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--"Dr. Richard Carrier's lecture in Bangor, Maine: The Obsolete Paradigm of a Historical Jesus". @time:00:12:00 YouTube. TheKnowledgeNexus. 11 May 2024.

 

[dbz]

In Chapters 4 and 5 of Historicity I enumerate 48 “Elements” as basic facts of background knowledge (some of which are modal facts, i.e. facts about what is plausible rather than definite) that are true regardless of whether Jesus existed or not.

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--Carrier (10 July 2023). "An Ongoing List of Updates to the Arguments and Evidence in On the Historicity of Jesus • §.Varia". Richard Carrier Blogs.

On Carrier's knowledge of late second Temple sectarianism.

It is plausible that counter culture sectarian Jews had conversations about the celestial Jesus Angel dying and rising.

Background Elements to Christianity

• Element 1 The earliest form of Christianity definitely known to us originated as a Jewish sect in the region of Syria-Palestine in the early first century CE. (pp. 65-6)
• Element 2 When Christianity began Judaism was highly sectarian and diverse. (p. 66)
• Element 3 (a) When Christianity began, many Jews had long been expecting a messiah: a divinely chosen leader or saviour anointed … to help usher in God’s supernatural kingdom, usually (but not always) by subjugating or destroying the enemies of the Jews and establishing an eternal paradise.
  (b) If these enemies were spiritual powers, the messianic victory would have been spiritual; or both, as in the Enochic literature.
  (c) Jewish messianic expectations were widespread, influential and very diverse. (pp. 66-7)
• Element 4 (a) Palestine in the early first century CE was experiencing a rash of messianism. There was an evident clamoring of sects and individuals to announce they had found the messiah.
  (b) Christianity’s emergence at this time was therefore no accident. It was part of the zeitgeist.
  (c) Christianity’s long-term success may have been simply a product of natural selection. (pp. 67-73)
• Element 5 Even before Christianity arose some Jews expected one of their messiahs heralding the end-times would be killed before the final victory. (pp. 73-81)
• Element 6 The suffering-and-dying servant of Isaiah 52-53 and the messiah of Daniel 9 have numerous logical connections with the “Jesus/Joshua Rising” figure in Zechariah 3 and 6. (pp. 81-83)
• Element 7 (a) The pre-Christian book of Daniel was a key messianic text, laying out what would happen and when, partly inspiring much of the messianic fervour of the age.
  (b) The text was widely known and widely influential, widely regarded as scripture by early Christians. (pp. 83-87)
• Element 8 (a) Many messianic Jewish sects were searching the (Hebrew and Greek) scriptures for secret messages.
  (b) It follows that the Jews who became the first Christians had been searching the scriptures this way this long before they became Christians. (pp. 87-88)
• Element 9 The early first century concept of scriptures embraced not only writings that became canonized but many more works, many of which no longer exist; further, of those that do still exist, including canonical texts, the early first century versions were sometimes quite different in details. Texts in places were been modified, changed, before their canonical versions were finally settled. (p. 88-92)
• Element 10 Christianity began as a Jewish messianic cult preaching a spiritually victorious messiah. (pp. 92-96)

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"On the Historicity of Jesus". RationalWiki. Retrieved 31 August 2023.

 

[Person19960]

Hm, if only the esteemed Doctor Carrier could speak for himself or defend his work here, on the IIDB.

But if he ever engaged with IIDB and its members, it was over two decades ago.

Carrier had already quit posting on the IIDB by the time I had become active here in, ummm, it was around 2002 to 2004. When I joined IIDB, I had just missed some schism that caused PZ Myers to quit and say he disliked this forum so much that he would not deign to discuss it.

Carrier had also already quit, and did not defend his writings here. When I was on the staff of the II, Inc, Carrier refused to speak to me or meet me, even though he was in Philadelphia with his good friends Sapient and Rook Hawkins of the forum "Rational Response Squad." I wasn't just the II's PR Rep. I was the founder of the Philadelphia Atheists Meetup and was one of the early Atheists Meetup advocates. I gave a workshop on Meetup at the AAI Crystal Clear Atheism conference, the one that celebrated the publishing of New Atheist books by the Four Horsemen of Organized Atheism, the creators of anti-theism.


Anyway, @dbz - who are you? Why do you not have your own ideas? Why are you the only person on IIDB who still carries Carrier's mythicist torch? Do you happen to know why your favorite mythicist has refused public discussion of his assertions and beliefs for his entire career as an author, here on IIDB? Has it not ever occurred to you that there might be a genuine reason why this man ignores this forum?

It's been literally 20 years, dbz. How can you be certain that your pastes of Carrier's quotes are an accurate reflection of your own personal thoughts, @dbz ?

How can we IIDB users be certain? How can we have a conversation with people who refuse to converse with us?

Most of us are here to have discussions with each other, to learn things, and to debate the veracity of our ideas. Do you lack ideas, @dbz?

We can't talk to you. You are not talking to us. Just like the man whose quotes you paste, you are not engaging in the defense of your own claims at all.

Then, if someone were to, say, research the author...? What might they learn of how he has engaged with his audience over the course of his career as a Jesus Mythicist?

Do you even know why I might ask such a thing, @dbz ? Tell me why.

 

[Swammerdami]

• New Testament scholarship could improve a lot by learning maths and logic reasoning.
• Carrier, Richard (2012). Proving History: Bayes's Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus. Prometheus Books.

Conditional Probability: The probability of one event (A) happening given that another event (B) has already happened.

It is to laugh! Richard Carrier (who earned only degrees in ancient history without honors) is touted as a probability expert! dbz presents as evidence to support this delusion of expertise, trivial facts that actual mathematicians learn BEFORE Junior High School!

And despite ream after ream of repetitious nonsense, none of the mythicists here have any comment about James the Brother except problematic links to Works of their Prophet! C'mon kids! If his arguments against James are more than shit, surely you can summarize them in 2 or 3 paragraphs. By all means, link to the Works of your Prophet if necessary, but start with the summary in your own words.

Oh, BTW. If your Prophet computes his probability estimate without considering James, that's a tip-off he hasn't a clue. PROPER probability estimation will use ALL available evidence. Evidence can be discounted, e.g. to counter fears that pre-Christian Josephus copies were all destroyed, but your Prophet Richard discounts inconvenient evidence ALL THE WAY TO ZERO!

 

[Swammerdami]

• New Testament scholarship could improve a lot by learning maths and logic reasoning.
• Carrier, Richard (2012). Proving History: Bayes's Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus. Prometheus Books.

Conditional Probability: The probability of one event (A) happening given that another event (B) has already happened.

It is to laugh! Richard Carrier (who earned only degrees in ancient history without honors) is touted as a probability expert! dbz presents as evidence to support this delusion of expertise, trivial facts that actual mathematicians learn BEFORE Junior High School!

And despite ream after ream of repetitious nonsense, none of the mythicists here have any comment about James the Brother except problematic links to Works of their Prophet! C'mon kids! If his arguments against James are more than shit, surely you can summarize them in 2 or 3 paragraphs. By all means, link to the Works of your Prophet if necessary, but start with the summary in your own words.

Oh, BTW. If your Prophet computes his probability estimate without considering James, that's a tip-off he hasn't a clue. PROPER probability estimation will use ALL available evidence. Evidence can be discounted, e.g. to counter fears that pre-Christian Josephus copies were all destroyed, but your Prophet Richard discounts inconvenient evidence ALL THE WAY TO ZERO!

I've been VERY patient in trying to educate participants in this thread! If my detractors wish to continue, they might want to click the Quote or Reply button on my recent post and comment on any alleged "errors."

But instead we'll see just more praise for the Major Prophet of Hyper-Atheism, who is now regarded as a mathematical genius because he read the Wikipedia article for Bayes' Theorem!

 

[steve_bank]

The best academic review of the OT and NT I read was the Oxford Bible Commentary. Each book evaluated for context and meaning, translation issues, and errors.

Acceding to the commentary the Job story was probably about captivity, and Jews of the day would have seen the meaning. Instead of god created the Earth it could men 'out of chaos god brought order'. A social meaning not a physical creation.

The Oxford Bible Commentary book

The Oxford Annotated Bible is what I used in a comparative religion class and as a reference.

Oxford Annotated Bible - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[steve_bank]

The form of the Jesus gospel myth is not unique and has precedents.


That the supernatural gospel Jesus is a Greek demigod is academically obvious.

Was there a real Hercules, a man behind the stories? We will never know. Yet, his story is of a man who was so strong and courageous, whose deeds were so mighty, and who so endured all the hardships that were given to him, that when he died, Hercules was brought up to Mount Olympus to live with the gods.

The Life and Times of Hercules

 

[No Robots]

That the supernatural gospel Jesus is a Greek demigod is academically obvious.

Only the mythicists continue to deny the obvious, namely, that Jesus is a Jew. This is the core of Jew hatred.

 

[dbz]

That the supernatural gospel Jesus is a Greek demigod is academically obvious.

Only the mythicists continue to deny the obvious, namely, that Jesus is a Jew. This is the core of Jew hatred.

"Only the mythicists continue to deny the obvious, namely, that Herakles is a white male. This is the core of white male hatred." --Euhemerus (
Third century BC white male, philosopher and historian)

 

[dbz]

Only the mythicists continue to deny the obvious, namely, that Jesus is a Jew. This is the core of Jew hatred.

Positive Christianity was the sect of Christianity publicly adopted by the Nazi Party in its 25 Point Programme in 1925. So this was a public and popular sect of the time.

The doctrines distinctive of Positive Christianity were that sects and dogmas were corruptions of the original teachings of Jesus and should be abandoned for a pure true faith; that Christianity should be unified and serve the state; that Jesus was an Aryan speaking truth to power against the Jews, and died as a hero and martyr to the truth; that his teachings would lead to the salvation of all who followed them (in this life and the next); that Paul corrupted the true religion taught by Jesus by plaguing it with Jewish rituals and ideas, producing Catholicism, which was thus deemed a perversion of Christianity (making this very definitely a Protestant sect), responsible for widespread misery in history (a view of Catholicism shared by many a Protestant throughout history); and that true Christianity was also in agreement with traditional Nordic religious principles, because religious truth could be interpreted out of God’s design of nature, so those who attend to deducing God’s will from the laws and operations of nature were seeing the mind of God. In other words, because God made nature, following nature was following God’s will, because its laws and operations embody His will. Positive Christianity was also unitarian—just like the Jehovah’s Witnesses of today, and the Arians of antiquity, and many of the Founding Fathers in the American Revolution.

Hitler himself cited the teachings of Jesus, like feeding the poor, as fundamental to Positive Christianity. Even Weikart quotes him saying so (loc. 1532), with Hitler declaring, “If positive Christianity means love of one’s neighbor, i.e. the tending of the sick, the clothing of the poor, the feeding of the hungry, the giving of drink to those who are thirsty, then it is we who are the more positive Christians.”

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--Carrier (18 December 2016). "No, Hitler Wasn't a Pantheist". Richard Carrier Blogs.

 

[No Robots]

^Hitler saw Jesus as an Aryan fighter. Same thing as calling him a "Greek demigod." Both attempt to efface the Jew.

 

[dbz]

^Hitler saw Jesus as...

A demijew. with a Roman white male daddy. What is the Bayseian likelihood what modern Jews have Roman white male daddy dna

 

[steve_bank]

That the supernatural gospel Jesus is a Greek demigod is academically obvious.

Only the mythicists continue to deny the obvious, namely, that Jesus is a Jew. This is the core of Jew hatred.

"Only the mythicists continue to deny the obvious, namely, that Herakles is a white male. This is the core of white male hatred." --Euhemerus (
Third century BC white male, philosopher and historian)

Playing the 'race card'? You picked the wrong person for that nonsense.

In the 60s when I was in the home of a black neighbor I saw a painting of a black Jesus on the wall. It was not until I got older that I understood the significance.

As to 'white hatred' it is not limited to whites or European Caucasian. Look at the history of Asia, Africa and the Mid East to today.

A black guy in my building was in China during Tienanmen Square, he considers China the most racist state in the world.

I listened to an interview with a black African who chose to go to school in China instead of the west thinking it would be less prejudiced. He found a lot pf prejudice. China's jingoism and Asian rqacial prejudice among themselves is legendary.

BTW, Greeks are and were not Caucasian.

Try again.