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Ch. 2: The Hypothesis of Historicity (On the Historicity of Jesus by Richard Carrier)

#143: Jan. - Mar. 2016 (Non-Fiction)
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Robert Tulip

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Re: Ch. 2: The Hypothesis of Historicity (On the Historicity of Jesus by Richard Carrier)

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DWill wrote:What are Christian apologetics?
Part of the problem here is that we are not just talking about Christian apologetics when examining the Jesus Myth. Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apologetics states that “Apologetics (from Greek ἀπολογία, "speaking in defense") is the discipline of defending a position (often religious) through the systematic use of information.”

'Often religious' is not 'always religious.' Carrier presents a critique of the belief that Jesus existed, therefore by definition a defence against Carrier's critique is an apologetic for the Historical Jesus, but not necessarily a Christian apologetic or a defence of Christianity. Flann has cited Tim O’Neill, who it appears is an apologist for Jesus but not for Christianity. I am somewhat the reverse, since I consider myself an apologist for a transformed scientific Christianity, but not for Jesus.
DWill wrote:Do they not centrally involve such claims as the special divine characteristics of Jesus, the absolute reliability of the Gospels, the assuredness that Jesus died for our sins and rose to be reunited with his father?
No. Crossan and Borg and Spong are strong defenders of liberal Christianity, and apologists for Jesus, yet do not believe any of those evangelical tenets. Undoubtedly, fundamentalist Christians seek to define Christianity as requiring such beliefs, but recently we discussed the case of Gretta Vosper, who calls herself a Christian but does not believe in God. Fundies have no right to say Vosper is not a Christian, especially since many might consider her ethics superior to theirs. This is obviously bewildering to conservatives, and yet it is reasonable to say that liberal faith, in its efforts to reconcile faith and reason, is seeking to promote an evolved Christianity to make it relevant and believable. The liberal focus on the social gospel, on Christ as an example of speaking truth to power, cannot be simply excluded a priori as Unchristian.
DWill wrote: Not even at the end of that list would come, "oh, yes, that he really existed."
But that opinion is fundamental to all the rest in terms of conventional faith. The tradition has been so secure in its dogma as to accept the HJ as an unquestioned assumption. But if that assumption is false, then the whole house of cards built upon it comes tumbling down. As Jesus Christ Himself was reported to say, a house built upon sand will fall. Evangelical faith is a house built on the sandy ground of false literal belief.
DWill wrote:You yourself have redefined apologetics in order to assert that that single element is more or less sufficient to qualify one as a believer.
Far from it. My point is that the defence of HJ belief against mythicist arguments is of its nature apologetic. That is not a redefinition, as the wikipedia definition makes clear. Whether the apology stands up is a question of logic and evidence.

Carrier argues that minimal historicity involves none of the metaphysical claims of fundamentalist theology. Minimal historicity qualifies one as a believer in Jesus Christ, but not as a believer in Christianity. Obviously these two beliefs have been intermingled and confused, but the mythicist debate separates them.
DWill wrote: Ehrman's reactionary stance (in your view) causes you to consign him to a group with whose principles he is in fact in marked conflict.
No, I am saying Ehrman is an apologist for the claim that Jesus Christ was the founder of Christianity, not for the broader beliefs of Christianity as a religion. His emotional sympathy for his Baptist roots is an interesting topic for psychoanalysis, but does not make Ehrman a Christian apologist.
DWill wrote: The larger question here is why it makes so much difference to stick a label on him or on anyone.
It is not about labels, but rather defining the poles of the debate. If you try to use information to justify the claim that Jesus existed, that is apologetics by definition, even though it is not apologetics for broader Christian claims. Carrier restricts the argument to this narrow minimal question.
DWill wrote:You seem to think of belief as a binary thing, either there or not.
Yes, that is the nature of logic. When asked a question about what you believe, your answer can be yes, no or maybe. But crucially, only yes qualifies you as believing. If you are unsure if Jesus Christ existed, you cannot be said to believe Jesus Christ existed in any apologetic sense.
DWill wrote: Just through observation, and without the benefit of neuroscience, we can see that belief is a word that covers a range of mental states, and that often belief is expressed with different degrees of certainty.
You are bringing red herrings into the discussion. The question here is the status of the belief in the existence of Jesus Christ. Ehrman expresses this belief in clear and simple terms by comparing those who question this belief to Nazis, to illustrate the opprobrium and contempt he holds for any claims to scholarly uncertainty on this historical question.

Saying you believe Jesus existed is not at all like saying you believe Hillary Clinton will become President, but rather like saying you believe the earth orbits the sun.
DWill wrote: you indicate that even the slightest 'historicity' regarding Jesus must come from the realm of faith not reason, deciding the matter in advance, as Flann said.
No, you are again engaged in rhetorical exaggeration. Faith and reason are intermixed. It is reasonable for people to accept a social consensus when they have not investigated the evidence for themselves, although such uncertain belief does involve trust or faith in the reliability of relevant authorities. The same applies with science where people accept scientific claims that they do not understand. Where the HJ question becomes a problem is when people of faith misrepresent the debate and deliberately distort the evidence, claiming a certainty that in fact is contradicted by evidence.
DWill wrote: I could not answer yes or no to this question of my right to pursue happiness. I would need to qualify my answer, just as we often qualify our beliefs.
So in this case your equivocation would mean you are unsure if you have a right to pursue happiness. That reminds me of David Hume's famous skepticism about whether there was a necessary connection between a cause and an effect, or whether we could be sure the sun will rise tomorrow. The signatories of the US Declaration of Independence had a far simpler view on their beliefs in the rights to life and liberty. Similarly, equivocation on the existence of Jesus would contrast with the simple anathema expressed by Ehrman.
DWill wrote:
Disinterested scholars should define apologetics, not Christian believers.
Flann did not misunderstand what I meant by the laughter remark.
Yes, he joined you in your misreading of my remark that “Holding Jesus to have some minimal historicity does make one an apologist.” My remark obviously means ‘apologist for minimal historicity’, not ‘apologist for the full box and dice of magical Christian worship’. Believing Jesus was real does not automatically mean you believe he rose from the dead. It is a shame that such analytical distinctions seem to pass Flann by. That is what happens when believers define their own terms to support an ideological agenda.
DWill wrote: Can you cite a disinterested scholar who has defined apologetics down to the fine details needed to prove your point? I'd be very surprised if one even wanted to touch the subject, because it's not a matter for scholarship in the first place.
The wiki definition of apologetics as “the systematic use of information to defend a position” is perfectly sufficient for this argument. It is not an issue of fine detail, but of marshalling broad claims to support a belief in the HJ. As I explained above, Carrier presents minimal HJ belief as conceptually separate from Christian apologetics. The waters are muddied by the Christian apologists who enter the debate so vigorously to sow confusion.
DWill wrote: Didn't I say that the "greatest figure" remark was inconsistent with his past and current work? It's even directly contradictory to it.
So it is very telling that Ehrman felt the need to resort to such unscholarly emotional language to defend his belief in Jesus. If Jesus really existed there would be no need for such rhetoric on Ehrman’s part.
DWill wrote: But I strain to understand what you're saying about how this expression of piousness should affect how we see his work. That he can't be trusted, or that he must be wrong about everything?
I have said in this thread that people used the authority of Ehrman’s otherwise excellent historical research to falsely claim that the same standards of evidence applies to his claims about Jesus. It doesn’t. I am not using his ‘greatest figure’ piety as an ad hominem criticism of Ehrman's otherwise excellent historical scholarship, just as an illustration to help understand that his specific HJ arguments are weak.
DWill wrote: It seemed unusual to me for someone to go from non-HJ to HJ but not to faith, so I looked into The Gnostic Gospels. You must must not have been so focused on mythicism when you first read the book. The strong historicism is there; see pp. 7-8. She says, for example, "But what we know as historical fact is that certain disciples--notably Peter--claimed that the resurrection happened." This, obviously, is not her saying that the resurrection happened, but you can see the clear historicism.
You are right, it is more than 30 years since I read The Gnostic Gospels, although I have a copy and have looked at parts of it more recently. It was really The Gnostic Paul and her remarks about Gnostics "seeing Christ within" which made me think she avoided HJ comments, but as you say they are there in The Gnostic Gospels.
DWill wrote: By stipulating that anyone who thinks that Jesus could have existed is doing so against reason, you've already decided the outcome.
No, I am saying that that is the argument presented rigorously and at length by Richard Carrier in OHJ, and that I find his arguments compelling. I am not begging the question here at all, I am pointing out that this debate is the equivalent of creation versus evolution, with a very solid evidence based case for Christ as pure myth. We simply would not have the data we have if Jesus existed.
DWill wrote: holding back and indicating some flexibility would be more effective.
My problem with this material is that I see arguments such as Carrier’s trashed by idiots who prevent reasoned dialogue. It makes me angry when Carrier is presenting important factual and ethical material that people such as Ehrman are blind to. Flexibility in this debate should mean recognition that religion is essential to human life and has to evolve to be compatible with reason. It should not mean pandering to ignorant medieval delusions about supernatural entities existing, except as a purely allegorical veneration for traditional language as a beautiful historical artifact.
DWill wrote: Woe be to science if it gets a religion.
A religion with logic and evidence as its highest values would be a very good thing.
DWill wrote:I could be forgiven for thinking that you have just called Ehrman a fundy tub-thumper.
No I did not.
DWill wrote:Try to forget your dislike of him and have a look at the topics he covers in his new book. Is that a fundamentalist writing or a godless heathen? http://www.bartdehrman.com/jesus-before-the-gospels/
Ehrman reminds me of the church in Laodicea described in Rev 3 as lukewarm. I found his attacks on astral interpretations of the Bible to be unforgivably stupid.
DWill wrote: He's not equating mythicists with Nazis; indeed, that wouldn't make any sense at all.
On such a topic precision is important. I said he compared mythicists to Nazis, which is very different from equating them. He implies that denial of the Jewish holocaust and denial of the existence of Jesus Christ have equivalent evidentiary standing, which is an appallingly censorious, stupid and incorrect thing to say. Recall Harrison’s comments about anchoring. The point of Ehrman mentioning Holocaust Denial is to set up an anchoring rhetoric that excludes Carrier from the bounds of reasoned debate, a scurrilous tactic on Ehrman’s part.
DWill wrote: He's saying the two claims are equal in terms of self-evident falsity, which does appear to be his own "taking too far."
Yes, and “self-evident” here is a pure faith statement when it comes to Jesus Christ.
DWill wrote: The early Church is usually agreed to be the institution before 325. The edicts you refer to were issued in 380. Look, even before 325 there was an awful lot of heresy-hunting going on, as well as what could be called an orthodox establishment. No doubt this was hardball. It's important not to assume, though, that full-fledged persecution was happening, if you are assuming that.
A key theme in OHJ is that our historical knowledge and prevalent assumptions about the early church reflects the intervening dominant attitudes of later periods. The edicts of Theodosius in 380 required that anyone caught in possession of heretical literature be executed by the state. With varying levels of zeal, that Theodosian policy applied throughout Christendom for more than a thousand years. As such, Christianity has a very selective view of its past, a history written by the victors. Carrier, and mythicists more broadly, are now trying to consciously correct for the assumptions of Christendom, such as the pervasive tendency to read later Gospel ideas into Paul’s early epistles.

Your term “Hardball” is a useful euphemism for the factional battles of the early church. This was not a game, but rather a winner-take-all religious war about truth and power. My sense is that the early Gnostics stood more for truth while the orthodox stood for power. The HJ trope proved immensely powerful politically in explaining to the masses that the Roman Gods had lost the mandate of heaven, to use the Chinese dynastic idea. But complex Gnostic ideas of a merely spiritual Christ were only relevant to a tiny educated elite, lacking the radical simplicity and relevance and political traction of the Gospels.

As ever in a fight over truth and power, the better material organization won the battle for state control, while the side holding to the deeper spiritual truth is yet to win the war. My own view is that this victory looks at history over the extremely long Biblical framework of a thousand years as a day. Against this eschatological view of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, we can look forward to a coming time when this old myth comes to be interpreted in purely scientific terms as the dawn of the Age of Aquarius. This is happening through the astromythicist understanding that the vision of the early church was that Christ would be imagined as Avatar of the Age of Pisces, and its vision that the Gospel message could come to rule the world in the Age of Aquarius.

This cosmic interpretation aligns exactly with Carrier’s arguments that HJ belief was a late corruption, a degenerate distortion of the original high spiritual wisdom of the Christ Myth. The cosmic interpretation of Christianity against the stellar markers of zodiac ages also aligns with Carrier's his central observation that the Christ Myth originated as purely celestial, and was only later placed into the imaginary historical setting of Jesus of Nazareth.
DWill wrote: I saw an interesting interview with Pagels in which she is asked a question about persecution of gnostics.
That interview certainly is very interesting, by Miguel Connor of AeonByte Radio. He is the most interesting interviewer on religion that I have heard.

It shows clearly that as you say, Pagels certainly does believe in the Historical Jesus. What I found most interesting in it was her comment that “there are very strong presuppositions that we bring with us when people study the beginning of Christianity.”

It is normal and natural to presuppose that Jesus really existed because nearly all of Christian theology and history assumes that as a starting point. But when people are asked to consider their own assumptions they naturally become defensive because they assume their assumption is based on evidence rather than faith alone. So when Carrier challenges this core presupposition on the basis of logic and evidence there is a natural bristling reaction, especially from people with an advanced condition of Christian belief. They assume Carrier must be crazy, that surely the evidence for Jesus is there.

Pagels says in this interview that the unifying theme in Gnosticism is "a conviction about the divine that is within." That is precisely what was rejected by the church as heresy on the basis of the dogma that Christ was a special revelation, a unique objective presence of God in the world, distinct from personal experience, and requiring church priestly mediation to encounter.

So when the Gnostics elevate personal experience it seems they are questioning the dogma of the special revelation in Christ, in a way that aligns to mythicism. And in her Paul book, Pagels’ key theme as also discussed by Carrier is the two level theory of the secret allegory and literal public teachings. My reading is that the secret teaching is that Jesus is spiritual idea, while the public teaching is that Jesus was historical man. It was surprising to me to see that Pagels does not think that way.
Miguel Connor: "In popular culture there’s this romanticized vision of the Catholic Church hunting down Gnostics in the second and third centuries and destroying them. But we really don’t have any evidence. It’s more like they probably just faded away.

Elaine Pagels: Well nothing like that. In fact I assumed when I first wrote that Irenaeus had said they were bad, and so they did just kind of fade away, but the fact is: where did we find these texts? We found them in Egypt in the fourth century-fourth century!-being read, we now think, in a monastery. So if they’re being read in a monastery in the fourth century, they didn’t fade away. People were reading this stuff intensely and with great interest, and they were only stamped out with huge difficulty by Athanasius at the end of the fourth century when he told them to get rid of these other books in his letter of 367. But Christians were reading this material intensely as devotional literature. We can now see that." http://realitysandwich.com/96150/gnosti ... ne_pagels/
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Re: Ch. 2: The Hypothesis of Historicity (On the Historicity of Jesus by Richard Carrier)

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Robert Tulip wrote:This cosmic interpretation aligns exactly with Carrier’s arguments that HJ belief was a late corruption, a degenerate distortion of the original high spiritual wisdom of the Christ Myth. The cosmic interpretation of Christianity against the stellar markers of zodiac ages also aligns with Carrier's his central observation that the Christ Myth originated as purely celestial, and was only later placed into the imaginary historical setting of Jesus of Nazareth.
But as I've pointed out Carrier and Doherty's thesis is riddled with holes. You are in the position of arguing against the historical existence of Paul, or at least expressing scepticism about it. Carrier doesn't and neither do N.T. scholars. You have Peter and the apostles down as non historical signs of the zodiac.

If you do accept Paul as historical how can you allegorize his references to Peter,James,John,Barnabas and the apostles in relation to working and having wives?

When were the churches in Corinth and Rome founded and what did they believe about the person of Jesus?


Carrier is wrong about belief in an historical Jesus being a late corruption. It's there in Corinthians 15 and other Pauline letters and in Peter and John's letters.The textual evidence is against interpolation in 1 Corinthians 15 as Price claims. Carrier doesn't but he just misinterprets it.

When was the first of the canonical gospels written Robert,and by whom? Was the writer of Mark's gospel, Gnostic or orthodox Christian? What was the author's intent, history or allegory?

You reject Tacitus and Josephus and Carrier claims interpolations. Scholars reject this recognizing partial interpolation of one reference in Josephus. But O' Neill's critique of Carrier is correct on James the brother of Jesus called Christ.

On your astral reading Peter,James,John and the apostles never existed and you suggest Paul didn't either, so why do even the gnostics quote from them as authoritative apostolic writings if they never existed? And where does Carrier get his 'hallucinating' apostles from if they are just signs of the zodiac?

You have to imagine a completely different history of early Christianity with no historical evidence to support it.



And in the end it's a conspiracy theory but as I've said repeatedly the recognition of apostolic writings was way earlier than Constantine.
Did the Corinthian and Roman churches take hundred's of years to recognize Paul's letters?

Carrier's own thesis is absurd as I've shown, and I've haven't seen the arguments I've presented against it, answered at all.
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Re: Ch. 2: The Hypothesis of Historicity (On the Historicity of Jesus by Richard Carrier)

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Flann 5 wrote: Carrier and Doherty's thesis is riddled with holes.
Their thesis of the invention of Jesus is true, and abundantly corroborated by evidence. Your riddled view reflects the traditional pulpit logic of Tinkerbell, that wishing makes it so. Just because you want Carrier and Doherty's arguments to be wrong does not mean they actually are wrong.
Flann 5 wrote: You are in the position of arguing against the historical existence of Paul, or at least expressing scepticism about it. Carrier doesn't and neither do N.T. scholars.
No I am not arguing against the existence of Paul. Neither Carrier, Doherty nor myself claims Paul did not exist. Paul's genuine epistles are the earliest extant statement of Christian faith.
Flann 5 wrote: You have Peter and the apostles down as non historical signs of the zodiac.
Carrier notes the clear description that Paul provides of himself as an apostle, while never once using the term ‘disciples’, even in his mention of Jesus and the twelve. The absence of the twelve from history illustrate that they are a mythic concept that appears more like an allegorical reference to the sun and moon in the one to twelve relation of the year and month than any real description of historical individuals.

The Peter discussed in Paul’s epistles as a leader of the church in Jerusalem was subsequently elaborated mythically as the imagined leader of the twelve disciples, a late concept never mentioned by Paul,who never says the three pillars of the church in Jerusalem were appointed by Jesus in life or were followers of Jesus (OHJ 524).
Flann 5 wrote: If you do accept Paul as historical how can you allegorize his references to Peter, James, John, Barnabas and the apostles in relation to working and having wives?
Chapter 11 of OHJ, “The Evidence of the Epistles”, provides an exhaustive and illuminating analysis of these basic questions. Despite mentioning Jesus Christ hundreds of times in his Epistles, Paul never once provides the slightest clear and indisputable historical reference to when and where Jesus allegedly lived, and uses arguments that are entirely compatible with invention of Jesus and simply incompatible with existence of Jesus.

The existence of Christianity is clear, but again, Paul’s references to apostles never connects them to the later Gospel myths of the twelve disciples. Carrier's point here is that we should read the actual texts, as it were face to face, and not distort what they say through a glass darkly.
Flann 5 wrote: When were the churches in Corinth and Rome founded and what did they believe about the person of Jesus?
That is a wonderful and important question. My opinion is that the religious milieu of the early Roman Empire involved extensive contact between mystery groups who had far more complex, practical, connected, informed and realistic views than the fragments that have come down to us. The name Jesus Christ means Anointed Saviour. Therefore, across the empire, the expectation of a messianic transformation of the world was personalized in the figure of an anointed savior, a Jesus Christ.

Your term “person” is a fascinating one in Christology, as it subsequently became the creedal focus of how the two imagined natures, the divine Christ nature and the human Jesus nature, could be united in one person, or 'hypostasis'. So the churches in Corinth and Rome, in synthesizing the range of beliefs from Judaism with Greek philosophy and myth from Egypt, Babylon and India, developed a cultic identity around the shared view that God’s eternal anointed Christ was eucharistically present in the world, as a Saviour or Jesus. This mythic framework appears in Paul’s epistles, as the skeleton of belief that was later enfleshed by the fictional stories of the Gospels.
Flann 5 wrote: Carrier is wrong about belief in an historical Jesus being a late corruption. It's there in Corinthians 15 and other Pauline letters and in Peter and John's letters.The textual evidence is against interpolation in 1 Corinthians 15 as Price claims. Carrier doesn't but he just misinterprets it.
The Scripture Index in OHJ (one of three excellent indexes) provides about one hundred specific separate references to just this one chapter, 1 Cor 15, which is an essential text regarding Christian evolution through concepts such as the Lord’s Supper and the twelve. The church has systematically distorted this text by reading it through gospel tinted glasses. I will discuss this in the OHJ thread on the Epistles.
Flann 5 wrote: When was the first of the canonical gospels written Robert, and by whom?
My opinion is that the first canonical gospel is Mark. I consider that it was most probably written in about 70 AD in Alexandria, and I think of the author as an individual involved with the Buddhist Therapeut monastic community of Lake Mareotis. We can call the author Mark, even though we have no clear data about him. Carrier points out that the church traditions associating Saint Mark and Saint Peter appear to be contradicted by their clashing views on Judaism. The theory involving trips to Rome by Mark and Peter has the appearance of self-serving invention by the Roman Church.
Flann 5 wrote: Was the writer of Mark's gospel, Gnostic or orthodox Christian?
The term Gnostic is a complex and disputed one. I consider Saint Mark the greatest Gnostic, by which I mean that he grounded his faith in knowledge rather than belief, even while he presented belief as the ground for popular faith.

In the interview between Elaine Pagels and Miguel Connor linked by DWill above, the problem of multiple Gnosticisms is discussed, for example on whether the creation is good. If we think of Gnosis as the divine knowledge that supports Christian belief, we can begin to read the Gospels and the rest of the Bible in an allegorical framework that is compatible with modern science by asking in what sense knowledge of divinity is possible. In this regard, my opinion is that the orthodox canon mostly has a greater depth of spiritual wisdom than much Gnostic literature.

I do not think that Saint Mark intended for the inner church to take literally his stories about the historical Jesus. These stories rather had the political intent of producing traction for a mass movement, an outer church, aimed at the long game of destroying the moral legitimacy and divine mandate of Roman imperial rule. As far as Mark's intent is concerned, the literal use of his gospel through the suppression of the inner church by the outer church has the appearance of a slow accident.
Flann 5 wrote: What was the author's intent, history or allegory?
Clearly Mark's intent is allegory, placing the eternal Pauline celestial Christ into the specific historical temporal and spatial context of Nazareth, Galilee, Jerusalem, Pilate and Caiaphas. The key allegorical message is that our fallen earth is redeemed by connection to an eternal divine wisdom, symbolized by the person of Jesus Christ mediating the new covenant as anointed saviour, as explained in texts such as Hebrews.

The deep allegory is the celestial Christ symbolized by the Chi Rho Cross which directly represents and depicts the slow precessional movement of the sun at the spring equinox into the constellation of Pisces as the dawn of the new age. Understanding this crucial point about the meaning of 'on earth as in heaven' is to my reading the key to unlocking the natural wisdom and real intent of the Bible.
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Flann 5 wrote: You reject Tacitus and Josephus and Carrier claims interpolations. Scholars reject this recognizing partial interpolation of one reference in Josephus. But O' Neill's critique of Carrier is correct on James the brother of Jesus called Christ.
Carrier provides extensive analysis of this material, and explains how the traditional readings about James as brother of Jesus Christ are incoherent and make no sense against what the Bible actually says. The partial interpolation line regarding the Testimonium Flavianum (TF) by Josephus is easily refuted by the absence of even this partial mention before Eusebius.

Even the partial mention of the TF would be a dream come true for the numerous Church Fathers who were looking for exactly such a text providing pagan attestation of Jesus, as Carrier well documents. Origen’s Contra Celsus is 'smoking gun' quality simple proof that the partial interpolation claim is false. Origen extensively discusses the very chapter 18 in which the TF now appears. Origen's book is devoted precisely to proving Jesus existed, but he completely fails to notice that exactly what he is looking for is right under his nose. That is not possible. The clear simple explanation is that Eusebius found this absence in Origen to be so embarrassing that he fixed it up by interpolating the TF into Josephus. The partial interpolation line has an ethereal quality, like physicists desperate to sustain obsolete theories that are contradicted by clear evidence.

As for Tacitus, I have heard there are no mentions of his Nero story about Christians burning Rome until more than a thousand years later, again reflecting a claim which would certainly have been trumpeted by early apologists if it existed in the books they read. The reason the early writers never mentioned this Nero story is probably that it did not exist.
Flann 5 wrote: On your astral reading Peter, James, John and the apostles never existed and you suggest Paul didn't either, so why do even the gnostics quote from them as authoritative apostolic writings if they never existed?
I do not suggest that Paul did not exist. His genuine epistles are the bedrock of Christian faith. There was an early Christian church in Jerusalem, as mentioned by Paul in Galatians, but the leaders of this church have no documented connection to the twelve, which is a purely imaginary myth based on a deeply accurate cosmic vision of the structure of time linking the year and the month.

I doubt that you will find many Gnostic texts approving of John’s epistles, especially John's highly political sectarian comments that describe doubts about the Historical Jesus as coming from the Anti-Christ.
Flann 5 wrote: And where does Carrier get his 'hallucinating' apostles from if they are just signs of the zodiac?
I do not personally find Carrier’s speculation about hallucination to be helpful. His whole theory of outer space involves a failure to comprehend the symbolic meaning of astronomy for religion, putting a material lens onto what are spiritual symbolic ideas based in ancient astronomy.

For example, the 'third heaven' traditionally meant either the planet Mercury or the planet Venus, since the moon was imagined as the first crystalline sphere or first heaven in the geocentric cosmology and the sun is the fourth heaven, followed by Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and the fixed stars. For Paul to speak of someone being caught up to the third heaven, assuming this means Mercury, is allegory, not hallucination. The meaning of the allegory appears linked to the hermeneutic role of Mercury or Hermes as divine messenger, but the veiled language Paul uses here illustrates the sensitivity of such pagan ideas.
Flann 5 wrote: You have to imagine a completely different history of early Christianity with no historical evidence to support it.
Unfortunately for you Flann, the truth is the opposite of your assertion. As Carrier patiently and methodically proves, if the history of the early church was as traditionally described, involving Jesus Christ as historical founder, there is simply no way the texts that we have would look anything like they do. The historical evidence is completely incompatible with conventional reading.

If we wish to know what really happened, we must use rigorous historical methods, such as Bayes Theorem, to assess the probability of rival claims. The result of such analysis is that mythicism is entirely possible while historicism is entirely impossible. Christianity simply did not start from Jesus Christ as founder. The New Testament would be totally different if that were the case.
Flann 5 wrote: And in the end it's a conspiracy theory but as I've said repeatedly the recognition of apostolic writings was way earlier than Constantine.
Your constant refrain about conspiracy is false and misleading. While it is true that there were many conspiracies in the ancient world, like the Roman conspiracy to murder Julius Caesar, it is also the case that much of the evolution from the early Gnostic allegory to the later orthodox literalism proceeded slowly and accidentally, involving people acting in good faith, not by conspiracy.

I do not think the Church Fathers who condemned Gnosticism all had bad intent, but their strategic vision of church growth required rejection of confusing and difficult ideas in favour of a simple story. The emotional power of Mark's Gospel is so great that the literal imagination of the outer church overwhelmed the allegorical intent of the early inner church.
Flann 5 wrote: Did the Corinthian and Roman churches take hundreds of years to recognize Paul's letters?
No.
Flann 5 wrote: Carrier's own thesis is absurd as I've shown, and I've haven't seen the arguments I've presented against it, answered at all.
What is truly absurd in this discussion is your contention that heaven exists outside space. Such a false assumption produces a distortion of logic whereby magical miracles become possible and the laws of physics are no longer universal and consistent.

While details of Carrier’s argument can be challenged, such as his theory of the celestial Christ in terms of hallucinations of outer space rather than symbolic allegory, the vast bulk of his detailed textual analysis of the Bible and Christian texts and evidence presents a supremely important and valuable basis for a new scientific paradigm in Biblical studies.
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Re: Ch. 2: The Hypothesis of Historicity (On the Historicity of Jesus by Richard Carrier)

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Robert Tulip wrote:Flann 5 wrote:
Carrier and Doherty's thesis is riddled with holes.


Their thesis of the invention of Jesus is true, and abundantly corroborated by evidence. Your riddled view reflects the traditional pulpit logic of Tinkerbell, that wishing makes it so. Just because you want Carrier and Doherty's arguments to be wrong does not mean they actually are wrong.
Carrier's exegesis wouldn't make the grade in junior Sunday school,and I've given plenty of examples of this. His thesis skews his interpretations
Robert Tulip wrote:Flann 5 wrote:
You have Peter and the apostles down as non historical signs of the zodiac.


Carrier notes the clear description that Paul provides of himself as an apostle, while never once using the term ‘disciples’, even in his mention of Jesus and the twelve. The absence of the twelve from history illustrate that they are a mythic concept that appears more like an allegorical reference to the sun and moon in the one to twelve relation of the year and month than any real description of historical individuals.

The Peter discussed in Paul’s epistles as a leader of the church in Jerusalem was subsequently elaborated mythically as the imagined leader of the twelve disciples, a late concept never mentioned by Paul,who never says the three pillars of the church in Jerusalem were appointed by Jesus in life or were followers of Jesus (OHJ 524).
On your reading of 1 Corinthians 15 ,Paul's references to Jesus post death appearances to Peter,the twelve,James and Paul must be zodiacal for Peter and the twelve and not zodiacal for Paul and James.
Josephus corroborates the execution of James by Ananus.

The Corinthians have to understand it this way on your interpretation, but it makes no sense in reality. Or the saying," I am of Apollos, I am of Cephas and I am of Paul", is subject to the same objection. Are Apollos and Peter allegorical but Paul historical?

You claim they are absent from history but they are found in Paul's letters and in Christian tradition which agrees with the time Tacitus gives on the Neronian persecution.
Robert Tulip wrote:The Peter discussed in Paul’s epistles as a leader of the church in Jerusalem was subsequently elaborated mythically as the imagined leader of the twelve disciples, a late concept never mentioned by Paul,who never says the three pillars of the church in Jerusalem were appointed by Jesus in life or were followers of Jesus (OHJ 524).
This is a strange demand. Do you really think the Galatian Christians would have gotten the impression from Paul's letter that Peter,James and John were not followers of Jesus?

Did they not preach the same gospel as Paul. And how could Paul dispute with a sign of the zodiac about not eating with the Gentiles at Antioch?
I'm afraid the Tinkerbell "wishing" (on a star!) charge fits the astrotheologists like O.J. Simpson's glove.
Robert Tulip wrote:Chapter 11 of OHJ, “The Evidence of the Epistles”, provides an exhaustive and illuminating analysis of these basic questions. Despite mentioning Jesus Christ hundreds of times in his Epistles, Paul never once provides the slightest clear and indisputable historical reference to when and where Jesus allegedly lived, and uses arguments that are entirely compatible with invention of Jesus and simply incompatible with existence of Jesus.

The existence of Christianity is clear, but again, Paul’s references to apostles never connects them to the later Gospel myths of the twelve disciples. Carrier's point here is that we should read the actual texts, as it were face to face, and not distort what they say through a glass darkly.
They butcher Paul's references to the descent of Jesus from Abraham, David, Israel, and Judah, according to the flesh.
He says Jesus was killed by the Judeans. But I'm repeating myself again.
You can go with Carrier's 'exegesis' if you like, but I think it's shockingly bad.
Robert Tulip wrote:Your term “person” is a fascinating one in Christology, as it subsequently became the creedal focus of how the two imagined natures, the divine Christ nature and the human Jesus nature, could be united in one person, or 'hypostasis'. So the churches in Corinth and Rome, in synthesizing the range of beliefs from Judaism with Greek philosophy and myth from Egypt, Babylon and India, developed a cultic identity around the shared view that God’s eternal anointed Christ was eucharistically present in the world, as a Saviour or Jesus. This mythic framework appears in Paul’s epistles, as the skeleton of belief that was later enfleshed by the fictional stories of the Gospels.
So you say Robert, but Paul's self identification as a Hebrew of the Hebrews and a monotheistic Pharisee,and his explicitly negative views of pagan religion say he was no syncretist of pagan myth or religion.
Robert Tulip wrote:My opinion is that the first canonical gospel is Mark. I consider that it was most probably written in about 70 AD in Alexandria, and I think of the author as an individual involved with the Buddhist Therapeut monastic community of Lake Mareotis. We can call the author Mark, even though we have no clear data about him. Carrier points out that the church traditions associating Saint Mark and Saint Peter appear to be contradicted by their clashing views on Judaism. The theory involving trips to Rome by Mark and Peter has the appearance of self-serving invention by the Roman Church.
But Mark's Jesus is no Therapeut monk like ascetic is he? The arguments for Mark's authorship in Rome are well supported.
You play your usual conspiracy card here.
What clashing views on Judaism are you referring to?
Robert Tulip wrote:The term Gnostic is a complex and disputed one. I consider Saint Mark the greatest Gnostic, by which I mean that he grounded his faith in knowledge rather than belief, even while he presented belief as the ground for popular faith.
What exactly is "Gnostic" about Mark's gospel? The parables passage? Mark could hardly have presented a more human eating,drinking,sleeping and dying Jesus in historical, geographical,and cultural Israel and Jerusalem.
You just conveniently 'allegorize' it all away.
Robert Tulip wrote:Carrier provides extensive analysis of this material, and explains how the traditional readings about James as brother of Jesus Christ are incoherent and make no sense against what the Bible actually says. The partial interpolation line regarding the Testimonium Flavianum (TF) by Josephus is easily refuted by the absence of even this partial mention before Eusebius.

Even the partial mention of the TF would be a dream come true for the numerous Church Fathers who were looking for exactly such a text providing pagan attestation of Jesus, as Carrier well documents. Origen’s Contra Celsus is 'smoking gun' quality simple proof that the partial interpolation claim is false. Origen extensively discusses the very chapter 18 in which the TF now appears. Origen's book is devoted precisely to proving Jesus existed, but he completely fails to notice that exactly what he is looking for is right under his nose. That is not possible. The clear simple explanation is that Eusebius found this absence in Origen to be so embarrassing that he fixed it up by interpolating the TF into Josephus. The partial interpolation line has an ethereal quality, like physicists desperate to sustain obsolete theories that are contradicted by clear evidence.

As for Tacitus, I have heard there are no mentions of his Nero story about Christians burning Rome until more than a thousand years later, again reflecting a claim which would certainly have been trumpeted by early apologists if it existed in the books they read. The reason the early writers never mentioned this Nero story is probably that it did not exist.


The fact remains that specialist ancient historians simply disagree with Carrier en masse and give their reasons for this.
Carrier's biased mistreatment of "James the brother of Jesus who was called Christ" is a case in point.
You dismiss every reference by Christian authors as conspiratorial as usual, but in any case not even atheistic and agnostic scholars and historians are impressed with Carriers 'explanations'.
Robert Tulip wrote:Flann 5 wrote:
Carrier's own thesis is absurd as I've shown, and I've haven't seen the arguments I've presented against it, answered at all.


What is truly absurd in this discussion is your contention that heaven exists outside space. Such a false assumption produces a distortion of logic whereby magical miracles become possible and the laws of physics are no longer universal and consistent.

It may be "absurd" on your philosophical naturalism, but on standard cosmology you have no explanation of how you get a universe from nothing. Can't be done,notwithstanding Krausse's smoke and mirrors attempt.
On theism it's not absurd at all.
So I'm repeating myself again. I've presented my arguments on this thread and the original "historic Jesus" thread so I'm leaving it at that.
I can't just keep on repeating myself continually.
Last edited by Flann 5 on Sat Feb 13, 2016 8:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Ch. 2: The Hypothesis of Historicity (On the Historicity of Jesus by Richard Carrier)

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Flann wrote:It may be "absurd" on your philosophical naturalism, but on standard cosmology you have no explanation of how you get a universe from nothing. Can't be done,notwithstanding Krausse's smoke and mirrors attempt.
On theism it's not absurd at all.
An all intelligent being, after existing for infinite time, suddenly decided to create all of reality on a whim. That's absurd. That's beyond absurd. It's a fantasy.

There is nothing absurd about admitting that we don't have the answer, which is precisely what you get from philosophical naturalism. You scoff at the attempted answers, not realizing they are merely attempts.
In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.” - Douglas Adams
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Re: Ch. 2: The Hypothesis of Historicity (On the Historicity of Jesus by Richard Carrier)

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Interbane wrote:
Flann wrote:It may be "absurd" on your philosophical naturalism, but on standard cosmology you have no explanation of how you get a universe from nothing. Can't be done,notwithstanding Krausse's smoke and mirrors attempt.
On theism it's not absurd at all.
An all intelligent being, after existing for infinite time, suddenly decided to create all of reality on a whim. That's absurd. That's beyond absurd. It's a fantasy.

There is nothing absurd about admitting that we don't have the answer, which is precisely what you get from philosophical naturalism. You scoff at the attempted answers, not realizing they are merely attempts.
He has an answer for everything--which is how you know he doesn't have a clue.
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Re: Ch. 2: The Hypothesis of Historicity (On the Historicity of Jesus by Richard Carrier)

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You can waste your time in another thread asking a Catholic "scholar" anything but here is a guy I'd much rather be asking questions:

http://bigthink.com/dr-kakus-universe/c ... of-nothing
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Re: Ch. 2: The Hypothesis of Historicity (On the Historicity of Jesus by Richard Carrier)

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DB Roy wrote:You can waste your time in another thread asking a Catholic "scholar" anything but here is a guy I'd much rather be asking questions:

http://bigthink.com/dr-kakus-universe/c ... of-nothing
The bubble bath multiverse is sheer fantasy. There is not a shred of evidence for any other universe than our one. God is not bound by time. We can't impose our limited knowledge of space and time on the creator of space, matter and time.

The multiverse is just an invented dodge to escape the problem of a universe from nothing. How did this mythical multiverse originate?
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Re: Ch. 2: The Hypothesis of Historicity (On the Historicity of Jesus by Richard Carrier)

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DWill wrote: I don't use 'conspiracy' as an attack word. If the contention is that, for example, some group decided to produce false gospels in a effort to better corral the masses, then conspiracy is simply a description of what has been claimed to have happened.
You have indeed used ‘conspiracy’ as an attack word. You said “claims of conspiracy or undocumented subversion by the Catholic Church are non-starters in terms of the study of history. So the standards of historiography would need to change in order for such 'evidence' to be accepted, and that would be a very bad thing.”

Your language here simply ignores the abundant documented evidence of what you term "subversion". Against standards of historiography, where key evidence is missing, the best method is to construct hypotheses and analyse how well they fit the extant data. Christian history comes to us through a highly selective sieve, whereby the church allowed through anything compatible with orthodox dogma and sieved out and rejected anything incompatible with orthodox dogma. This process was a simple function of laws and accepted standards regarding heresy and blasphemy that emerged from the early church and became the governing principles of Christendom.

To what extent this process involved overt and conscious conspiracy is a difficult and complex question. The late DM Murdock argued in her book The Christ Conspiracy http://www.amazon.com/Christ-Conspiracy ... 473&sr=8-1 that
“the religion of Christianity and Jesus Christ were created by members of various secret societies, mystery schools and religions in order to unify the Roman Empire under one state religion.”
The causal process claimed in this “in order to unify” is what is unclear and in dispute. It is not clear that imperial unity was the intent at the time the Christ Myth was manufactured in the first century, even though that was a historical result of that effort. Nonetheless, as the early church evolved, the focus of Fathers such as Ignatius of Antioch on the power and unity of the church, and the later celebration of Saint Iggy's focus on divine ordination of the hierarchy, does have strongly conspiratorial appearance.

The further conspiracy theory is that the construction of the Christ Myth involved deliberate anthropomorphisation of solar worship, taking attributes formerly seen in the sun and applying them to Jesus Christ. This looks quite obvious. As US Founding Father Thomas Paine wrote
"The Christian religion and Masonry have one and the same common origin: Both are derived from the worship of the Sun. The difference between their origin is, that the Christian religion is a parody on the worship of the Sun, in which they put a man whom they call Christ, in the place of the Sun, and pay him the same adoration which was originally paid to the Sun." http://www.deism.com/paine_essay_masonry_1.htm
Freemasonry is often regarded as a conspiratorial and secretive historical movement. Paine's analysis of its druidic solar origins helps to illustrate how the alienated imperial mentality has suppressed natural religion, as a major historical cultural process. As a result, the suppressed ideas return in hidden form, with their advocates using concealed allegory, for example Son as Sun.

One way to show how evolution of religious language can occur by accident rather than design is in the well loved Christmas carol, Hark the Herald Angels Sing, written in 1739 by Charles Wesley and using music by Felix Mendelssohn. Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hark!_The ... ngels_Sing provides a fascinating case study of the evolution of religious language, for example from Wesley’s “universal nature” to the modern “angelic host”, and from the Bible line at Malachi 4:2 “Sun of Righteousness” to the anti-solar “Son”.

I doubt that these changes were made by deliberate conspiracy, but rather simply reflected popular sentiment regarding prevailing religious belief. These changes show that “angelic host” is allegory for “universal nature”, and “son” is allegory for “sun”, as magical symbolic myths representing something real and objective. The actual ‘light and life’ brought by the sun are imagined as magical attributes of Jesus Christ.

This anthropomorphisation of the Sun as the Son turns something pitiless and inanimate into a resonant animated emotional comfort, a personal savior, or in a recent messianic phrase, hope we can believe in. Pointing out that the allegory is not literally true misses the whole point of the psychological and social meaning of myth.
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Re: Ch. 2: The Hypothesis of Historicity (On the Historicity of Jesus by Richard Carrier)

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Flann wrote:Carrier's exegesis wouldn't make the grade in junior Sunday school
:lol: :roll: :no: :evil: :furious:

no Flann, i used to help out in junior sunday school, we would get them singing

O be careful little mouth what you say
O be careful little mouth what you say
There's a Father up above
And He's looking down in love
So, be careful little mouth what you say

if one of those little mouths had thought to say

i am not born in sin

there would have been a minor riot :-D

there's a father up above and he's looking down in love so be careful little mouths what you say or you'll burn in hell for an eternity :yes:
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