Meant to ask what you mean by this. Are you saying there wasn’t enough time between the purported time of Jesus’s existence and the founding of the Jerusalem church for the Jerusalem church to create a fictional historical Jesus out of whole cloth? If so, then the response is that on the mythicist account I’ve been describing, the idea of a historical Jesus didn’t become a thing until after (or late during) Paul’s time.
But I’m not sure that’s what you meant. Is it?
So you’re OK with his having a revelational (i.e., fantasy or dream) meeting with JC, but not with Peter or James?
We don’t know what Paul was forthright about, as we have no proof that a character named Paul, and only him, wrote what we now ascribe to his hand. When you say, “Paul was forthright…”, you are referring to what is written, copied, and typically redacted by unknown sources and scribes.
This is true for most of the Bible. To say, “Jesus or Moses did this or went there,” all we know is someone wrote that down. There is no corroboration for most of it. For all we know, it was a story made up while the scribe was under the influence of his favorite hallucinogen.
Example: Paul’s letter to the Galatians
Yo missed his point. Paul declared that he encountered Jesus in a vision. He described his encounter with Peter as traveling to Jerusalem and getting into an argument with him. If you want to claim that Paul imagined Peter, you should be able to explain why Paul referred to an imaginary person to an audience who would presumably be aware that there was or was not sch a person in Jerusalem at that time.
You can, of course, take the position that Paul made up everything he wrote, but that hardly explains how Christianity got started and spread in Paul’s lifetime with no other agents and a lack of electronic media.
Yes, but he is arguing against the view that they’re authority is greater. My point is that he would have had to do this is if they had some greater claim to knowing Jesus’ teachings (having known him personally) than having it revealed in a vision just as Paul’s was.
That’s what I was saying, yes – I’m sorry if I didn’t read the whole thread carefully enough. But if the idea of a historical Jesus didn’t arise until decades later, who or what is Paul referring to when he talks about Jesus in his earliest letters? Is it a persona he co-opted from the sect in Jerusalem, or one he made up himself? I don’t know how to pursue the argument because if there was no idea that Jesus existed until later I don’t know where the idea of “Jesus” came from.
Paul did no such thing. The writings we have, from unknown sources, describe the encounters, etc. We have only stories. Why do you insist that these must be accurate?
Paul (his writings) may not have invented Peter (the writer may have known of that name), but he very well may have invented everything he wrote about Peter. *We have zero corroborating evidence of any of these events. *
Actually, it explains it very well. There is only one source. Does that make it impossible to spread?
The Carrier/Doherty thesis I’ve been describing is this: Peter, James and John were leaders of a group which claimed to be in receipt of visions of a heavenly Christ who revealed to them that he had descended to the lowest heaven, was there put to death by crucifixion by demons, was raised back to life, and that this death and resurrection had salvific value for people, and this Christ would be coming down to the Earth itself soon. Paul picked up on this idea and also had visions of the same Christ, and gathered a following of his own. Then the parties had to work out who was legitimate, who had charge of what, and so on.
The idea that Jesus was an earthly historical figure didn’t come about until sometime after the gospel of Mark was written. (Mark itself was an intentional allegorization of Paul/Christ’s teachings set as though Christ had been an earthly teacher, and was a pro-Pauline, anti-Petrine polemic.)
That’s the basic idea in outline.
ETA: You asked what Paul was referring to when he mentioned Christ in his earliest letters. Well that’s the interesting thing to me–if you take out stuff scholars independently already think is probably interpolated, and then read the Pauline letters keeping in mind provisionally an assumption that he’s referring only to a celestial figure who appears to people in visions–it works. So the answer to your question is, he was referring to a celestial figure who appeared to him in visions, and not to a historical recently deceased person.
I should add–the two most difficult passages to reconcile with this reading are the “brother of the lord” reference in Galatians, and the place(s?) where Paul refers to Jesus as being a son of David “according to the flesh.”
That’s where all the more intense debate focuses. Carrier’s idea about “brother of the lord” is it is just a way to indicate that he’s referring to a James other than the apostle James, and his idea about the “according to the flesh” line is that (this is going to sound nuts I know) some of David’s sperm was saved and used in the conception of Jesus in the heavenly realms. I know that sounds nuts but Carrier is actually able to point to similar stories being told in cultures relevantly close in time, place and historical connection. So yeah it’s kind of an out-there idea but not completely off its rocker.
That thesis seems to be the result of assuming that Jesus never existed, and then working backwards to make the (fairly scant) documentation we have fit the theory. In other words, it seems much less likely than concluding that there was an itinerant rabbi crucified by the authorities whose followers continued and expanded upon his teachings until Paul came around. The latter, at least, has circumstantial evidence and doesn’t require allegorizing Mark or keeping David’s sperm in a jar for a thousand years.
I don’t know what basis you’re using for drawing that conclusion. A look at Carrier’s book will show that the logic of his argument does not assume Jesus never existed and then work backwards to make the documentation fit the theory. Rather, he goes through all the documentation (well anyway, a giant amount of it and I’ve not yet seen anyone claim he skipped something important), and discusses how likely it would be that the evidence is the way it is on the historicity hypothesis, and on the mythicist hypothesis. He argues that all in all the mythicist hypothesis is shown to be more likely.
Here is Carrier explaining, by invitation, in a very respectable venue, what his view is and some of the basic documentary evidence that he finds suggestive in that regard.
The most basic overall summary of his argument is in the last paragraph:
Yeah, it does sound nuts. Does Carrier actually point to any particular “similar story told in a culture relevantly close in time, place, and historical connection”? Can I actually read such a story myself? Can I be given a precise citation to an ancient document which contains such a story?
19th and early 20th century anti-Christian writers frequently claimed that all or some of the New Testament was copied from pagan mythological sources. Our friend SeekerofTruth did us a favor by posting a long list of such claims in this thread. Of course, when we asked him to provide citations to the ancient documents containing the supposed source mythology, he couldn’t post anything, and he ran away. There’s a long tradition of hoaxes and fabrications coming from those arguing that Jesus didn’t exist. Absent a clear citation to a myth about sperm being carried to Heaven, a skeptic might wonder whether Carrier has chosen to carry on that tradition.
In Romans 1, Paul says that Jesus was descended from David “in the flesh”. The Greek words for this phrase are kata sarx, which Paul and everyone else used specifically to distinguish human beings and our world from the heavenly realms and spiritual beings. Paul uses this phrase again in chapter 9, right in the middle of a paragraph talking about the Israelites, he reminds his readers that Jesus was an Israelite. These aren’t the only instance in which Paul specifically says that Jesus was a human. In chapter 5, Paul describes Jesus as a man (anthropos); once again, Paul and his contemporaries used this word precisely to distinguish humans from angels and spiritual beings.
If Paul believed that Jesus was an angel, we would expect him to say so directly many times; he doesn’t, needless to say. So we’re left with two possibilities: 1. Paul believed that Jesus was an angel but never said so and instead, for some reason, described Jesus with exactly the words we would expect him to use if he believed Jesus was a human being. 2. Paul believed that Jesus was human and said so.
I would say that explanation 2 is simpler, clearer, more logical, and involves less tortuous reasoning. Thus it’s more likely to be correct. Much more likely.
Thanks Frylock.
I read that article, and found it pretty non-compelling. The “similarities” between Osiris and Jesus’ living-and-dying myths have been pretty well debunked elsewhere; but I give Carrier benefit of the doubt that he gives a more robust defense of this supposed parallel in his book.
I’m left unsure how Cephas and his friends - as far as we know, an uneducated lot - "conjured this angelic being’s salvific story from a pesher-like reading of scripture, finding clues to the whole thing especially in the conjunction of Daniel 9, Jeremiah 23 & 25, Isaiah 52-53, and Zechariah 3 & 6. " Granted, I’m using the Gospel accounts of him being a fisherman but since Carrier dismisses the entirety of the Gospels out of hand he can make Peter anything he wants him to be.
Carrier says “On this theory, when Paul says ‘the scriptures’ tell us that Jesus ‘died’ and ‘was buried’ and only *then *was he ever ‘seen’ by Cephas and the apostles (1 Cor. 15:3-5), he means exactly what he says.” But that word “only” is Carrier’s, not Paul’s. There’s no implication that Jesus was not seen before his resurrection unless you are looking for it.
I do need to read more about Philo and his account of a Jewish angel named “Jesus.” I confess to being unaware of this and it sounds interesting.
When Carrier argues that “We also have to remember that all other evidence from the first eighty years of Christianity’s development was conveniently not preserved” he embarks on an argument based on the absence of evidence. ‘We don’t have any contrary evidence until much later, so it’s probably true’ is not convincing.
Also: just because a document is a forgery, does not mean it “cannot count as evidence.” I’m surprised a historian would say that with a straight face. We can glean a lot of information from forgeries. The same is true for the “suspiciously mythical” Gospels.
He concludes with a list of reasonable objections including some we’ve already talked about (brother of the Lord, etc) - I gather these are addressed in his book.
It’s an interesting discussion and if I have the chance in the next few weeks I’ll try to read his book - but I have to say this summary did not really impress me.
Certainly, it is possible that someone writing letters calling himself “Paul” imagined everything that he put into those letters.
HOWEVER, it would be remarkably odd for that author to claim to have a divine manifestation from one person, then turn around and claim standard face-to-face meetings with other people he imagined.
I am making no claims for the accuracy of anything we find in the New Testament, (although the pool of Siloam did have five porticos), but your claim that some author switched his story from one person to the next pushes Occam out the door and slams the door shut.
Really? You find it difficult to believe that fictional stories differ? That the same tale varies over time? Over authors? Over the same author (Tolkien changed the status of Gollum significantly from the original mention of him to the last). Did you know (of course you did) that multiple stories about the same event occur everywhere in the Bible, and there are often incompatible differences, so they can’t all be right, even if some might be?
I’m not sure what you mean by switching a story from one person to the next. Are you talking about multiple authors or multiple stories all supposedly written by “Paul”?
Let me repeat a quote:
There’s the problem. No one can make that claim for most of the entire work. We can’t verify the authorship, we have poor provenance and few originals, in a field where we know that many copies were made, many copies differ, many copies were altered to fit the scribe’s wishes, and accuracy was not of prime importance. And you still want to say that “Paul said this or that” with any assurance?
Sorry, I’m in the middle of a move and my copy of the book is hidden in a box somewhere.
I would have no such expectation myself, and I am comforted by the fact that scholars as prominent as Bart Ehrman also would have no such expectation even while holding the view that Paul in fact believed Jesus was an angel.
As it happens, though, there’s a possibility that Paul did in fact refer to Jesus as an angel at Galatians 4:14.
I noticed that too about him saying a forgery isn’t evidence. There’s no way he actually thinks that, I’d say it was a very poorly chosen phrasing.
Carrier’s use of an argument from silence isn’t to indicate that his thesis is true but just to emphasize how noisy the data are. However, I find this inconsistent with the certainty he assigns to his own hypothesis.
Do have fun following up. The Philo/Jesus thing won’t impress you either, but nobody’s here to impress anyone.
Forgive me if I’m misinterpreting, but it appears that you are saying that because one statement about an historical location matches our current knowledge of it, that other things in the Bible must also be true?
If that’s indeed what you claim, I find it hard to believe that any significant poster here, let alone a mod, considers that to be reasonable logic. It is absolutely not. The Bible mentions Egypt, so does that mean the waters parted for the Israelites to cross the Red Sea? Jericho is mentioned in the Bible. Does that mean Joshua caused the sun to stand still?
Conversely, let’s consider the “13th Strike Rule.” A clock which strikes 13 times not only is in itself false, but casts doubt on the other 12. By that logic, all I have to do is find one falsehood in the Bible, and that makes everything false.
One is G. W. Dennis, Encyclopedia of Jewish Myth, Magic, and Mysticism which he mentions a few of these Jewish legends. One such is the demoness Igrath collecting semen from sleeping men, and once did so from David himself, using his sperm to beget rival kings. Yes, initially, I thought it a bit nuts too, but, then again, we are talking religious texts here.
Irenaeus is another in his first book Against All Heresies where Carrier says we learn of celestial “seeds’ impregnating the celestial ‘wombs’ of celestial ‘women’ and of Jesus being born to a ‘woman of exactly that sort.
Other example given on page 580 and footnote 90.
Carrier references Bart Ehrman The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture (1993, p.239) in which he says of Roman 1.3 and Gal 4.4 later attempts were made to change the wording so Jesus would be ‘born’ rather than ‘made from sperm and a woman.’
He covers more scriptures than I care to put into a post for all of this, but if one’s curiosity wants to know more, they can brush up mostly on pages 575-582 of Carrier’s latest tome.
Some is actually borrowed from the OT itself, sometimes word for word verbatim. A brief sample I have time for in Mark is how the crucifixion scene is a fabrication using Psalms is as follows:
Carrier lists other examples comparing Psalm’s 22.16, where ‘the synagogue of the wicked has surrounded me and pierced my hands and feet.’ He shows Mark used other texts to construct his crucifixion narrative which also included Psalm 69, Amos 8.9 and elements of Zechariah 9-14, Isaiah 53, and Wisdom 2.
Mark in his Passover Narrative must have borrowed from Josephus. The parallels of Jesus Christ with Jesus ben Ananias which the later is thought to be a real person during the 60s, and possibly insane, who then is killed in the siege of Jerusalem roughly in the year of 70, I think also shows, Mark at the very earliest couldn’t have written any earlier than 74-79 CE since this is when Josephus had written Jewish Wars and talks about this particular Jesus (ibid p. 429-430). Too many to list here (over 20), but I’ll list them if others request it and when and if I can get the time.
I was being facetious. One of the very early “myth buster” attacks on Christian scriptures made way too much of the fact that the reference to the five porticos of the pool had to be false because there were no pentagon shaped pools there. Then an archaeological dig discovered that the pool had a fifth portico running into the middle of the rectangle from one side and some of the pro-history crowd made too much of that discovery.