The Jesus myth Part I

[huckelberry]

.....
Instead, I propose the following two questions:

1- Who was Paul referring to when he talked about Jesus the Christ? Was he imagining something closer to the mystic Christ described in Ascent of Isaiah? Or was he referring specifically to a resurrected preacher from Nazareth?

2- What is the original inspiration for the Gospel of Mark? Was it a real person? Or is it fiction that places the mystic Jesus in a historical setting?

Let's assume Jesus was real and is the basis of both the gospel of Mark and Paul's religion. Chronologically, the religion evolved something like this:

A.D. 30: There really is a historical preacher from Nazareth named Jesus who was crucified around the year A.D. 30.

A.D. 50: Paul has a vision of Jesus and preaches what he preached. It has almost nothing to do with the historical Jesus, whom he never met in real life. Yet he instantly becomes the most important proponent of this new religion. The religion is all about having faith in Jesus to be saved. Paul writes letters to all of the various churches, and they believe and accept his teachings. He is one of their leaders.

A.D. 70: Mark gets around to writing the story of the life of Jesus. Mark seems totally unaware that Jesus is a God and that people need to have faith in him to be saved. Instead he sees Jesus as a mortal preacher who preached love, forgiveness, and the end of the world.

A.D. 80: Matthew and Luke write their gospels, and add some sayings of Jesus, but basically corroborate Mark's account. Jesus was a preacher who was crucified by Romans, not a God who was crucified to save people with faith from hell.

A.D. 90: John writes his gospel and Jesus of Nazareth really is a God.

That whole thing gives me whiplash. Could a single religion really evolve like that?

What is incredibly clear to me is that Mark's religion and Paul's religion were different. Mark was following the teachings of a preacher from Nazareth. Paul was following his own revelations, that were congruent with the revelations of other people in his community. Mark and Paul both had religious communities, but they were different religious communities.

Maybe their communities both started with the same Jesus. Or maybe they started with different Jesuses. Mark's Jesus was probably a historical figure. Paul's could have been, but that seems less certain. In any case, they were different religions that only later merged.

I haven't heard anybody suggest this line of thinking, but that is how I see it at the moment.

Thoughts?

Analytics,

I think there is a tangle in your history line. Paul letters would start in the 50s his conversion at least 17 years earlier. The time line is from Galatians where he notes he persecuted the church before his conversion. That would be in the first years after 30 when Jesus is understood to have died. To persecute Paul would have had some familiarity with Christians back in c AD32. He would have know about Jesus even if he had not met him.

It seems questionable to think he immediately becomes the primary force expanding the church. The very unPauline quality of the gospels should argue strongly that there are other vital paths of spread of Christianity. Some people have observed that the entire character of early Christianity is more Mark and Matthew than Paul.Other people were spreading it. Some of those other got into arguments with Paul over circumcision and Kosher meals.

Paul's gospel had more substance than believe and be saved despite condensed versions popular with American protestants. Paul speaks of being transformed living in conjunction with new life in Jesus where love rules.
I find Paul makes most sense if one reads him as trying to understand the implications of Jesus teachings from a vantage point of living after Jesus death.

[Kishkumen]

Thanks Kish. I have conceded all along that I am not knowledgeable enough to rebut Carrier. And you can say you're right and he's wrong all day long, but that can't possibly convince me. I'm pointing out what seems reasonable to me and if its wrong its wrong. I'm happy to see it as wrong if it can be shown to be such. But, sorry, I'm just not willing, at this point, to take your authoritative statements as gospel truth, as they say. I like the challenge and investigation and I'm just getting started, it feels like to me. If this is too low on your totem pole, great. I'm happy to hear it.

All my best to you.

I have told you how it is wrong, stem. He called stories about Osiris “public gospels.” That is simply wrong. Ancient writers were sticklers for generic convention. Look at epistles and there are clear standards and traditions. Likewise with biographies. Epics are yet something else. Those conventions mattered to the ancients, so serious scholars of ancient literature accordingly take these differences seriously. I have seen no evidence that Carrier does or that he really understands this stuff very well. The red flags are everywhere, and yet I am not trusted when I point this out. Neither is Symmachus, or Manetho.

The simple fact, stem, is that for the most part people who know what they are talking about, be it in ancient history, New Testament Studies, or Bayesian analysis, don’t take Carrier seriously because he is an obsessive kook who makes obvious, unforced errors in every category. His Bayesian work has been refuted. His errors there are clear. His treatment of ancient literature is incompetent. Egyptian literature is not Greek literature . . . is not Christian literature. Epistles are not historiography.

You should be able to spot a hack by now. Look at Gee’s apologetics. Hackery. Same with Carrier. The two have a shocking amount of things in common, in fact, with the exception that Gee at least publishes peer-reviewed scholarship in real journals in his actual field. Carrier is so blindingly bizarre, obtuse, and egotistical that he blusters through even caring about that. But the guy is just not normal. Where does he publish his Bayesian stuff? Does he publish it in the usual peer-reviewed venues? If not, why not? I think this is a huge red flag.

[Kishkumen]

I've been thinking about this issue for a while, and what's become clear to me is that the question "Did Jesus exist historically?" is ill-defined. As Stem has said, the answer is yes, there were lots of guys named Jesus.

Instead, I propose the following two questions:

1- Who was Paul referring to when he talked about Jesus the Christ? Was he imagining something closer to the mystic Christ described in Ascent of Isaiah? Or was he referring specifically to a resurrected preacher from Nazareth?

2- What is the original inspiration for the Gospel of Mark? Was it a real person? Or is it fiction that places the mystic Jesus in a historical setting?

Let's assume Jesus was real and is the basis of both the gospel of Mark and Paul's religion. Chronologically, the religion evolved something like this:

A.D. 30: There really is a historical preacher from Nazareth named Jesus who was crucified around the year A.D. 30.

A.D. 50: Paul has a vision of Jesus and preaches what he preached. It has almost nothing to do with the historical Jesus, whom he never met in real life. Yet he instantly becomes the most important proponent of this new religion. The religion is all about having faith in Jesus to be saved. Paul writes letters to all of the various churches, and they believe and accept his teachings. He is one of their leaders.

A.D. 70: Mark gets around to writing the story of the life of Jesus. Mark seems totally unaware that Jesus is a God and that people need to have faith in him to be saved. Instead he sees Jesus as a mortal preacher who preached love, forgiveness, and the end of the world.

A.D. 80: Matthew and Luke write their gospels, and add some sayings of Jesus, but basically corroborate Mark's account. Jesus was a preacher who was crucified by Romans, not a God who was crucified to save people with faith from hell.

A.D. 90: John writes his gospel and Jesus of Nazareth really is a God.

That whole thing gives me whiplash. Could a single religion really evolve like that?

What is incredibly clear to me is that Mark's religion and Paul's religion were different. Mark was following the teachings of a preacher from Nazareth. Paul was following his own revelations, that were congruent with the revelations of other people in his community. Mark and Paul both had religious communities, but they were different religious communities.

Maybe their communities both started with the same Jesus. Or maybe they started with different Jesuses. Mark's Jesus was probably a historical figure. Paul's could have been, but that seems less certain. In any case, they were different religions that only later merged.

I haven't heard anybody suggest this line of thinking, but that is how I see it at the moment.

Thoughts?

Yes. Why is this a question? Are you familiar with the simple fact of how many sects of Judaism there were in the first century CE? Josephus describes them at length. There is a great deal of variety among them. Samaritans also revered Moses. But Jews did not recognize them as Jews. So Christians were, in the first place, offshoots or varieties of Judaism. This is not at all surprising. It fits so well, in fact, that it is hard to see why it should be at all surprising.

[Analytics]

I think there is a tangle in your history line. Paul letters would start in the 50s his conversion at least 17 years earlier. The time line is from Galatians where he notes he persecuted the church before his conversion. That would be in the first years after 30 when Jesus is understood to have died. To persecute Paul would have had some familiarity with Christians back in c AD32. He would have know about Jesus even if he had not met him.

It seems questionable to think he immediately becomes the primary force expanding the church. The very unPauline quality of the gospels should argue strongly that there are other vital paths of spread of Christianity. Some people have observed that the entire character of early Christianity is more Mark and Matthew than Paul.Other people were spreading it. Some of those other got into arguments with Paul over circumcision and Kosher meals....

Thanks Huckleberry. I appreciate the edit you made to my timeline.

What you are saying tends to corroborate my point. My impression is most people think Jesus started out as an apocalyptical preacher, more or less as depicted in Mark. "Unpauline," as you say. Then over the decades, the understanding of Jesus morphed from what's depicted in Mark to what's depicted in Paul's epistles. However, Paul was written first. The story of the apocalyptical preacher came later. The story of the son of God walking among men came after that. The order of that seems all jumbled.

So yes, there were multiple versions of Christianity going on at the same time--multiple versions that were spreading and competing. Stating my question a different way, what did Mark think about Paul? I don't think Mark was a fan; Paul's version of Christ's essence didn't make it into Mark's gospel. It eventually made it into John's, but not into Mark's. Did Mark think of Paul was an apostate or an apostle? Is it possible he saw Paul as a member of a different religion?

Even though they were more-or-less contemporaries, they disagreed on the fundamental essence of who they thought Jesus was. To me, that raises the question of whether their respective traditions do in fact trace back to the same Jesus of Nazareth.

[Analytics]

Yes. Why is this a question? Are you familiar with the simple fact of how many sects of Judaism there were in the first century CE? Josephus describes them at length. There is a great deal of variety among them. Samaritans also revered Moses. But Jews did not recognize them as Jews. So Christians were, in the first place, offshoots or varieties of Judaism. This is not at all surprising. It fits so well, in fact, that it is hard to see why it should be at all surprising.

I get the impression most people think Jesus started Christianity as a well-defined religion, and different forms of Christianity all diverged from that single source. Christianity never being a single well-defined movement is a revelation to me. Is it possible there were people who identified as Christians who didn't think "Christ Jesus" referred to a Nazarene that had very recently walked among them?

[Kishkumen]

I found this interesting set of comments on Carrier’s use of BT:

So, it’s time to put up or shut up. When invited to outline the foundations of his approach to probability theory (which I first did 2 years ago – question 5), Carrier snubs modern probability theory. Axioms, Kolmogorov, Cox, de Finetti … who needs them! But a mathematical theory without foundations is just hot air. Until a rigorous basis for Carrierian probability theory is provided, all his probability claims are meaningless.

Carrier must publish a series of papers in mathematical journals that substantiate his extraordinary claims about the foundations of probability theory, proving – in the face of centuries of work by mathematicians – that:

None of the usual axioms or arguments or theorems are needed.
Probability reduces to formal/symbolic logic alone.
Bayesianism is really a kind of frequentism.
“Quality and quantity of evidence” can be uniquely and precisely quantified.
He made these claims, so this is a task that he has set for himself. Citing his own books is not good enough.

Or else, we’ll know that he is all bluff and bluster. Pressed to present the foundations of probability theory, he has failed utterly. He could have just plagiarised any probability textbook, but instead invented a pile of garbage about conditional logic, building syllogisms, Principia Mathematica, the axioms of arithmetic, and quality of evidence.

See https://letterstonature.wordpress.com/ ... d-carrier/

[Kishkumen]

I get the impression most people think Jesus started Christianity as a well-defined religion, and different forms of Christianity all diverged from that single source. Christianity never being a single well-defined movement is a revelation to me. Is it possible there were people who identified as Christians who didn't think "Christ Jesus" referred to a Nazarene that had very recently walked among them?

So what if “most people” think that? What does that have to do with the historical issue?

[Kishkumen]

I would love to see reactions to Luke Barnes’ criticisms of Carrier’s use of probability.

See https://letterstonature.wordpress.com/ ... er-part-1/

[Kishkumen]

Is it possible there were people who identified as Christians who didn't think "Christ Jesus" referred to a Nazarene that had very recently walked among them?

When? Where? Among whom?

I suppose everything is possible to some degree, but I don’t know what that has to do with the historicity of Jesus. Some people apparently thought Paul and Barnabas were Zeus and Hermes. So is it possible that someone did not know that Jesus was a Nazarene? Is it possible that they would not think of him as someone who walked among them?

Sure.

For some it did not matter at all. Clearly, after the fact, people took Jesus in many different directions.

Carrier argues that Jesus never existed and that he was instead a made up deity who was later given a falsified human existence. That is what I find unbelievable and most unlikely, not that some people thought various things about him after the fact.

[Res Ipsa]

I would love to see reactions to Luke Barnes’ criticisms of Carrier’s use of probability.

See https://letterstonature.wordpress.com/ ... er-part-1/

I had a hard time understanding how what Barnes was saying related to the quotes from Carrier. That’s because this the tail end of a long exchange between the two. I hunted down Carrier’s side of the argument, which basically says that Barnes isn’t responding to his actual arguments. And I think Carrier has the better part of this argument. Barnes doesn’t address Carrier’s argument, which is actually fairly simple.

Here’s a link to the post by Carrier that Barnes was responding to. https://www.richardcarrier.information/archives/9429 Carrier may still be wrong, but I don’t think Barnes shows it.