I'll repeat myself some and hopefully add a few new tidbits and include as items up for discussion.
In my estimation the historicist position should support this claim:
Jesus was an itinerant preacher in Judea sometime in the early first century. Gathered a following, taught something like Christianity, and caused enough noise, enough of a stir, to get himself killed by authorities.
I lay out the evidence under consideration for this claim below.
A mythicist position must support:
Jesus was a cosmic god having sacrificed himself for the heavenly saving of humans.
In the coming posts i'll address this position more fully.
If Jesus really lived and was an itinerant preacher who gained a following and upset authorities to the point of getting killed by them, we have to consider what is the evidence?
There is no contemporary evidence for his life. That's certainly not wholly unexpected on history, particularly for that time period. Some may say, though this is the case, there are other historic figures whom we most often consider real historic figures who have worse evidence for their lives than Jesus. As we've seen this has been used fallaciously in the past. Many experts have overstated the case for Jesus. It appears, though, that there is far better evidence for many historic figures than there are for Jesus. So it would be possible, if he lived, that we'd have good contemporary evidence for his existence. We don't.
The earliest we get, happens to be writings coming from 2 decades or so after he would have died. From Paul an apostle, said to be one who promoted his teaching. A quick survery of repeated points: Paul never references teachings of Jesus. So if Jesus lived and preached, what are his teachings? Paul doesn't know about them, or Paul prefers his own teachings. And Paul claims the teachings he espoused did not come from previous followers, but came directly to him via revelation or as a consequence of his knowing the scriptures. Considering Paul is writing some few years after Jesus, we have to assume, on a historicist position, that Paul would have known someone, or would have ran into to someone who knew Jesus. He never indicates anyone he talked to had known Jesus, or at least never specifically identifies such. Paul does refer to people who came before him who also were preaching Christianity. But he never suggests these people knew Jesus. The closest he gets to something like that is:
1 Cor 9:5
3 For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures;
4 And that he was buried, and that he arose again the third day according to the scriptures:
5 And that he was seen of Cephas, then of the twelve:
6 After that, he was aseen of above five hundred brethren at once; of whom the greater part remain unto this present, but some are fallen asleep.
7 After that, he was seen of James; then of all the apostles.
8 And last of all he was seen of me also, as of one born out of due time.
9 For I am the least of the apostles, that am not meet to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.
Paul had an experience where in he suggested, he visioned Jesus "whether in the body or out of the body" he does not know. He said also the Cephas saw Jesus after a resurrection. And the 12 (oddly suggested since Cephas later was considered one of the 12, and Judas would have been too. That really leaves 10.) But we hear nothing from Cephas, or Peter, or any of the other 10. We should note Paul claims 500 other men or brothers, also saw Jesus and claims some of them still live. But he fails to name any or suggest he knows any of these 500 brothers of Christ.
There are a couple of passages often referred to from Paul that suggest Paul really thought Jesus lived a mortal human life. It is odd to think Paul is preaching Christianity and yet leaves but a couple of possible passages and nothing more to confirm Jesus lived. One would think if Paul really thought Jesus lived, he'd have at least accidentally let it slip he really thought that and he'd give all sorts of peppered evidence to suggest as much as well. But we have very little and those little, under consideration now, appear to be far more inconclusive then the first appear.
In
On the Historicity of Jesus Ch 11 Pgs 507-520 Richard Carrier says this of Romans 1:3 and Galatians 4:4:
Jesus’ father is never named or even mentioned by Paul; nor is his hometown or genealogy or anything else distinctive of an actual man. As noted before, in Rom. 1.3 Paul says Jesus was ‘made from the sperm of David, according to the flesh’, in contradistinction to Jesus being ‘declared the Son of God in power, according to the spirit’, in the one case referencing his incarnation (cf. Phil. 2.5), in the other his resurrection (cf. Phil. 2.9). Likewise, Heb. 7.11-17 says scripture ‘foretold’ that the Christ would ‘arise’ (anatellō) from the tribe Judah, and Rom. 15.12 says scripture foretold that the Christ would be a ‘root of Jesse’ (the father who sired King David). The same is implied in Rom. 9.5 and 15.8. These all hinge then on what it means to be ‘made from the sperm of David, according to the flesh’, since these all reference that same fact. An allegorical meaning is possible.83 But so is a literal one—even on minimal mythicism. Philippians 2.6-11 portrays this fact as an act of divine construction, not human procreation (as noted in §4): Jesus ‘took’ human form, was ‘made’ to look like a man and then ‘found’ to be resembling one (see also Heb. 2.17). No mention of birth, childhood or parents.
In Rom. 1.3 (just as in Gal. 4.4) Paul uses the word genomenos (from ginomai), meaning ‘to happen, become’. Paul never uses that word of a human birth, despite using it hundreds of times (typically to mean ‘being’ or ‘becoming’); rather, his preferred word for being born is gennaō.84 Notably, in 1 Cor. 15.45, Paul says Adam ‘was made’, using the same word as he uses for Jesus; yet this is obviously not a reference to being born but to being constructed directly by God. If so for Adam, then so it could be for Jesus (whom Paul equated with Adam in that same verse). Likewise in 1 Cor. 15.37 Paul uses the same word of our future resurrection body, which of course is not born from a parent but directly manufactured by God (and already waiting for us in heaven: 2 Cor. 5.1-5). Thus, Paul could be saying the same of Jesus’ incarnation.
Scripture said the prophet Nathan was instructed by God to tell King David (here following the Septuagint translation, although the Hebrew does not substantially differ): When your days are done, and you sleep with your fathers, I will raise up your sperm after you, which shall come from your belly, and I will establish his kingdom. He will build for me a house in my name, and I will establish his throne forever. I will be his father, and he will be my son (2 Samuel 7.12-14a). If this passage were read like a pesher (Element 8), one could easily conclude that God was saying he extracted semen from David and held it in reserve until the time he would make good this promise of David’s progeny sitting on an eternal throne. For otherwise God’s promise was broken: the throne of David’s progeny was not eternal (Element 23).
Moreover, the original poetic intent was certainly to speak of an unending royal line (and not just biologically, but politically: it is the throne that would be eternal, yet history proves it was not); yet God can be read to say here that he would raise up a single son for David who will rule eternally, rather than a royal line, and that ‘his’ will be the kingdom God establishes, and ‘he’ will build God’s house (the Christian church: Element 18), and thus he will be the one to sit upon a throne forever—and this man will be the Son of God. In other words, Jesus Christ (the same kind of inference Paul makes in Gal. 3.13–4.29, where he infers Jesus is also the ‘seed of Abraham’ also spoken of in scripture). It would not be unimaginable that God could maintain a cosmic sperm bank. After all, God’s power was absolute; and all sorts of things could be stored up in heaven (Element 38), even our own future bodies (2 Cor. 5.1-5).
Later Jewish legend imagined demons running their own cosmic sperm bank, even stealing David’s sperm for it, to beget his enemies with, so surely God could be imagined doing the same.85 When the prophecy of Nathan is read in conjunction with subsequent history, this would be the most plausible way to rescue God’s prophecy: God could not have been speaking of David’s hereditary line (as no one ever established or sat on an eternal throne), so he must have been speaking of a special son who will be born of David’s sperm in the future, using the sperm God took up ‘from his belly’ when David still lived. For the prophecy does not say God will set up an eternal throne for the one born of sperm from a subsequent heir’s belly, but of sperm from David’s own belly. The notion of a cosmic sperm bank is so easily read out of this scripture, and is all but required by the outcome of subsequent history, that it is not an improbable assumption. And since scripture required the messiah to be Davidic, anyone who started with the cosmic doctrine inherent in minimal mythicism would have had to imagine something of this kind. That Jesus would be made ‘from the sperm of David’ is therefore all but entailed by minimal mythicism.
Paul also never names Jesus’ mother, and only mentions Jesus having a mother in a strangely vague passage, in a chapter where Paul otherwise speaks of mothers being allegorical; he says nothing about Jesus’ mother otherwise.86 The passage in question reads: If you are Christ’s, then you [like him] are the sperm of Abraham, heirs according to the promise. And I say that as long as the heir is a child, he’s no different from a slave. Even though he is lord of all, he is under guardians and stewards until [the day] the father has foreordained. And so we, too, were enslaved under the elements of the universe when we were children. But when the fullness of time came, God sent his son, made from a woman, made under the law, in order to rescue those under the law, in order that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying ‘Abba, father!’ As a result, you are no longer a slave, but a son; and if a son, then also an heir by God. . . . [So, Paul asks, why are you returning to the elements that had enslaved you, whom you know aren’t really gods? Remember how things were when we met? Why re-subject yourself to the Torah law all over again?] For it is written, that Abraham had two sons, one from a slave woman and one from a free woman—but the one from the slave woman was born according to the flesh, and the one from the free woman by the promise. Which things are said allegorically, for these [women] are the two testaments, the first being the one from Mount Sinai, which gives birth to slavery. That’s Hagar—Hagar meaning Mount Sinai in Arabia, which corresponds to Jerusalem now, for she is enslaved with her children. But the Jerusalem above is free, and she is our mother . . . [as scripture says]. So now, [my] brothers, we are the children of the promise, like Isaac [the son of the free woman, i.e., Sarah]. But as in those days the one born according to the flesh [i.e. Ishmael] persecuted the one according to the spirit [i.e. Isaac], so it is now. But what does the scripture say? Cast out the slave girl and her son, for the son of the slave girl will not be heir with the son of the free woman [= Genesis 21.10]. Accordingly, [my] brothers, we are not children of the slave woman, but of the free one. For freedom did Christ set us free [so don’t go back to being a slave to the elements.] (Gal. 3.29–4.7 and 4.22–5.1).
It’s clear that Paul is speaking from beginning to end about being born to allegorical women, not literal ones. The theme throughout is that Christians are heirs of ‘the promise’ (to Abraham), and as such have been born to the allegorical Sarah, the free woman, which is the ‘Jerusalem above’, meaning the heavenly city of God. Jesus was momentarily born to the allegorical Hagar, the slave woman, which is the Torah law (the old testament), which holds sway in the earthly Jerusalem, so that he could kill off that law with his own death, making it possible for us to be born of the free woman at last. This is what Paul means when he says Jesus was made ‘under the law’ and ‘from a woman’; he means Hagar, representing the old law; but we now (like Jesus now) have a new mother: God’s heavenly kingdom.87 That this chapter constitutes a single continuous argument is clear from the fact that it begins speaking about the same themes it ends with: our previous slavery to the Torah law, our being children of the promise made to Abraham (and thus born from Abraham, allegorically), and our being now the children of Abraham’s free wife (again, allegorically) and thus the ‘heirs’ of that original promise (and so no longer enslaved to the Old Testament law). This is how Paul starts the chapter and ends it, and everything in between leads logically from the one to the other. In the process Paul parallels our being ‘under’ (hupo) the sway of the elemental spirits with Jesus being put ‘under’ (hupo) the sway of the law, so we all could be rescued from being ‘under’ (hupo) the sway of that law, and thus of the elemental spirits. That’s why, Paul says, God ‘sent’ his son (thus, a preexistent being) and ‘made’ him (again, genomenos) ‘from’ [ek] a woman just as we are born ‘from’ [ek] a woman—either the slave woman or the free, but either way, not a literal woman. And as for us, so for Jesus (and vice versa).88 It’s obvious to me that by ‘born of a woman, born under the law’ Paul means no more than that Jesus was, by being incarnated, placed under the sway of the old covenant, so that he could die to it (and rise free, as shall we). So the ‘woman’ here is simply the old covenant, not an actual person.
Paul does not mean a biological birth to Mary or any other Jewess. Indeed, that would make little sense here. Other than to reflect his upcoming allegorical point, why would Paul mention Jesus having a mother here at all? What purpose does that fact serve in his argument? It cannot be that this made Jesus a Jew, as in antiquity that fact would have been established by patrimony or circumcision (Exod. 12.48), not the identity of his mother (except in mixed marriages, which cannot have been the circumstance of Jesus—much less what Paul had in mind, as if he was implying Jesus did not have a Jewish father).89 As we have seen, Paul already says (even in this very argument: Gal. 3.16) that Jesus is of the seed of Abraham and David. If all he wanted to establish was that Jesus was a Jew, that would have sufficed. Indeed, Paul cannot be citing Jesus’ birth ‘to a woman’ to establish he was a Jew, for he does not even specify that this woman was Jewish—she is simply ‘a woman’. That isn’t even specific enough to certainly mean a human woman—gods, angels, spirits and demons could also be women, and give birth.90 Even if we just assume he means a human, that is already a rather odd thing to say of a historical man—aren’t all men born to a woman? What woman does Paul mean? Why mention her? And why mention her only in such an abstract way—as simply a generic ‘woman’? The only plausible answer is the answer Paul himself gives us in the completion of his argument: he is talking about allegorical women. Hence the generic term ‘a woman’, and hence the paralleled concepts of being born enslaved to the law and being born free, and hence the whole point of even mentioning this detail about Jesus here in the first place. The assumption that he means Jesus had a human mother simply doesn’t make sense of the text as we have it. So Paul’s reference to Jesus being ‘made’ (genomenos) of the ‘seed’ (sperma) of David and being ‘made’ (genomenos) from a woman are essentially expected on minimal mythicism and thus do not argue against it.
In fact, that Christians were aware of the distinction between Paul saying ‘made’ rather than ‘born’ is proved by orthodox attempts to change what he said from one to the other.91 And in fact we know many Christians did conceive of these things celestially. Irenaeus documents this extensively in his first book Against All Heresies, where we learn of celestial ‘seeds’ impregnating the celestial ‘wombs’ of celestial ‘women’ (e.g. 1.1.1; 1.5.6; 1.8.4), and of Jesus being fully understood as having been born to a ‘woman’ of exactly that sort (e.g. 1.30.1-3). Irenaeus also documents how these Christians saw the Gospels as allegories and not histories. Irenaeus himself assumes the Gospels are histories, of course, but it does not look like they did. How many other Christian sects had thought the same? How many of their ideas date back to the beginning? We have no way to be sure the answer is none (Element 22). All the sects Irenaeus speaks of are as late and evolved as the ‘orthodoxy’ Irenaeus was defending against them, and thus all as divergent from original Christianity (Chapter 4, §3). But they may have retained kernels of the original faith that Irenaeus’s sect had abandoned or suppressed. So the question is which kernels are the more original, and which the later inventions? We cannot answer this from the armchair as Irenaeus did, and certainly not with his specious apologetical methods and biases.
Instead, if we start with minimal mythicism, we can easily predict the original kernel to most likely have been that Jesus was indeed made from a celestial sperm that God snatched from David, by which God could fulfill his promise to David against the appearance of history having broken it. That this fits what we read in Paul therefore leaves us with no evidence that Paul definitely meant anything else. As for Jesus having a mother, Paul never says any such thing—he only speaks of women allegorically in that context. Minimal mythicism practically entails that the celestial Christ would be understood to have been formed from the ‘sperm of David’, even literally (God having saved some for the purpose, then using it as the seed from which he formed Jesus’ body of flesh, just as he had done Adam’s). I do not deem this to be absolutely certain. Yet I could have deduced it even without knowing any Christian literature, simply by combining minimal mythicism with a reading of the scriptures and the established background facts of previous history. And that I could do that entails it has a very high probability on minimal mythicism. It is very much expected. So my personal judgment is that its probability is as near to 100% as makes all odds.
At the very least, the probability that Paul would only ever speak of Jesus’ parents so obliquely and theologically on minimal historicity is no greater than the probability that he would imagine Jesus was incarnated from Davidic sperm on minimal mythicism, making this a wash. But arguing a fortiori, I shall set the latter probability at 50%, against a 100% probability on minimal historicity. Thus, although I do not believe this counts as evidence for historicity at all, I am willing to allow that it might, in those proportions. In other words, although I doubt it, these vague passages might be twice as likely on historicity. The same follows for Paul’s saying that Jesus was ‘made from a woman, made under the law’. I showed how even in context that reads as an allegorical statement, not a literal one. And I am personally certain that’s how Paul meant it. So I believe it has a 100% probability on minimal mythicism, given that such allegories are completely expected (Element 14), and given the context of the whole chapter in which he says it (and the preceding chapter as well, where Paul repeatedly talks about the law as a cosmic force and not a biological inheritance, and about assuming identities allegorically and not literally). But since all this is not yet commonly accepted (I am looking at the text without the presuppositions of historicity that all previous scholars have done), I will argue a fortiori by saying it has only a 50% chance of being what we’d expect given those facts. And for comparison I’ll assume that this bizarre and inexplicable way of talking about Jesus’ mother is 100% expected on minimal historicity—even though it isn’t. So again, although I doubt it, this passage might also be twice as likely on historicity. I will thus tabulate these two features (the references to Jesus being ‘made from the seed of David’ and ‘made from a woman’) separately.
I'm happy to accept the stated levels of probability. Meaning these passages, though rather vague when examined, are better read on historicity than on mythicism. With that, its good to bring them up as arguments for historicity.
In 1 Cor. 9 and Gal. 1:19 Paul also mentions James the brother of Jesus. Here is more from Carrier on that:
The last evidence historicists appeal to (and in my opinion the only actual evidence they have) is that twice Paul mentions ‘brothers of the Lord’, once as a generic group (1 Cor. 9.5) and once naming a specific person as belonging to it: James (Gal. 1.19).
The first of these appears where Paul argues as follows: Am I not free? Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen Jesus our Lord? Are you not my work in the Lord? If I am not an apostle to others, at least I am to you. For you are my seal of apostleship in the Lord. My defense to those who are putting me on trial is this: Do we not have the right to eat and drink? Do we not have the right to take along with us a sister as a wife, as also the other apostles and the brothers of the Lord and Cephas do? Or is it only Barnabas and I who have no right to give up working for our keep? (1 Cor. 9.1-6).
Note that this passage is out of place: the argument that Paul is answering has been lost (whatever charge he says he is defending himself against in 9.3). It would have been explained in the preceding verses, but in fact in the present letter, those verses are on a different and largely unrelated controversy (1 Cor. 8.1-13), and then the subject abruptly and inexplicably changes. Like other epistles, 1 Corinthians seems to be a mishmash of several letters, this being an example of where two were mashed together, and here the preceding part of whatever letter this came from was left out (a curious fact in itself). Nevertheless, from what Paul goes on to say we can tell he was accused of being a lazy moocher (or threatening to be), not earning his keep but just lying about and eating the Corinthians out of house and home. And Barnabas, too, apparently; and evidently a wife in their company (most likely the wife of Barnabas, as Paul elsewhere implies he did not marry: 1 Cor. 7.7-8).
Paul seems to think every traveling minister was allowed to take his wife with him, to be fed by the community along with him, at least if she was a believer (a ‘sister’ of the Lord). Paul’s defense is that every other traveling minister was allowed to do this—that is, to do no other work but minister to the congregation, and in return be fed at the congregation’s expense. He goes on to cite scripture and commandments from Jesus (which on minimal mythicism he would have received by revelation) and other arguments in defense of the principle, but his first argument is to cite the fact that Paul and Barnabas are being singled out unfairly, that since everyone else got to do it, so should they.92 It’s important to note this context. Because Paul is not talking about the right to be married or have wives. He is only talking about the right to bring one with him when he travels and to expect the community to feed her and not expect her or him to work (beyond whatever church business they are traveling for). He is therefore only talking about Christians who are traveling on church business, which would have included not just apostles (those who received revelations of the Lord—the primary qualification he opens with—and thus who were sent by the Lord himself to minister) but Christians of other ranks and duties (those sent by human authorities to deliver letters or conduct inter-church business).
Thus, when Paul says ‘the other apostles and the brothers of the Lord and Cephas’ get to take wives with them on church business without having to work for their keep, he is not singling out the family of Jesus as some sort of specially privileged group never elsewhere mentioned by Paul—not even when he lists the ranks of people in the church (in 1 Cor. 12.28), where surely he would have mentioned it if the family of Jesus was being given special privileges and authority. Rather, Paul is talking about all other Christians, who were all ‘brothers of the Lord’ (Element 12).93 This is evident from the fact that Paul is unaware of any need here to distinguish biological from adoptive brothers. Since all baptized Christians were the family of the Lord.
I'd say it's good evidence on historicity. But it can also be seen as fairly ambiguous.
There are so many more things to explore regarding the epistles, I don't think we need to get hung up too much on these meager passages, as if they should dominate or over-run the rest of Paul's words.
“Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos
