Still no reference to any of the actual facts and logic of the matter. And more denialism, claiming I didn’t present tons of facts when I did. And more ignoring everything I said even against the things you keep repeating.

So there remains no need to keep repeating myself. You lost the debate. Your ego can’t handle that. So now you are just trying to bluster your way into having the last word with shallow and repetitive insults and blurps.

Everyone else knows where the data is.

Padded word count does not make an argument stronger. It conceals the absence of an argument.

Pot and kettle I think, your posts are famously wordy. You’re just deflecting in a humorously Freudian way.

That most of those who could be rousted up as Christians had already left the religion, verifies the conclusion: people were losing interest; membership was scarce and dwindling.

The fact you straight-facedly use the testimony of recanting Christians facing execution as serious evidence of an already weak argument is laughable. That’s certainly crank-y.

I show how the telephone game led from what Clement said to what the Vatican mistook or needed him to have said instead…

No you don’t. You just assert it, weakly with the word may.

legends that may be the output of a telephone game confusing the fact…”

As for the Greek translation, you already point out that the words used are ambiguous and have at least two meanings. Your explanation that the traditional knowledge must have died out with the near death of Christianity seems to be based on the testimony of recanting Christians facing execution and the fact Eusebius made stuff up.

Ever-increasing feverish wordwalls when you have no actual response to real facts and logic is the signature behavior of a crank.

You again ignored almost all the evidence (the vocabulary, grammar, context, timeline), and of what you even mentioned, you simply gainsaid rather than disproved. Which means the cited articles and study already refute your comment, requiring no further reply.

Padded word count does not make an argument stronger. It conceals the absence of an argument.

So all I have to do is refer people back to the actual evidence: outlined in the article here, which referenced further demonstrations of its every point. I then referenced more recent scholarship further establishing it. And all re-explained over and over again in this thread. And continually ignored.

There isn’t any reason to continue conversing with a crank at this point.

“Articles aren’t evidence Christianity “nearly died out at the end of the 1st century.” The evidence in the articles is the evidence of that”

Surely you understand that as a shorthand that’s what I meant?

I read the article on Eusebius and unless there was some specific source in the article that had the answer I was looking for (in which case why didn’t you link to that) what I read was an article about Eusebius being an unreliable propagandist, focused on the history of church in Alexandria. What am I missing?

I read it and accept the point of view expressed in that article, it makes sense and considering I’ve long believed much of the Old and New Testament itself to be propaganda, it wasn’t even controversial to me. Makes sense. But I don’t see how it tells me about the apparent near death of Christianity at the end of the 1st century. What am I missing?

So I read the Switch article and pulled out the bit about Pliny because that seems to address the point “Christianity appears to have experienced a first century bottleneck of failure and subsequent revival”.

So I read that, you seem to be stretching. Straight off the bat we know there are Christians in this particular region, possibly backing up 1 Peter, but it is not the location of any of the major churches so we have to be cautious about extrapolating to the whole of Christianity even if there is a question as to why Pliny seemingly hadn’t come across them earlier.

We know some of those Christians are prepared to die for their faith which says something about the strength of belief.

After some time, as is usual in such examinations, the crime spread itself and many more cases came before me

How much time?

Did it ‘spread itself’ or is Pliny just becoming aware of more of them? More likely the latter but we are talking about a spread here not a dying out. Governments usually catch on to something much later than it actually started.

“These denied that they were Christians now, or ever had been”. You don’t say. That tells us nothing about anything because it is a statement made on pain of execution.

Then we have a passage which I won’t paste about how it is already spreading like a contagion, you’ve read it. So as far as Pliny is aware, with the limits of his knowledge, a sect has been spreading like contagion since he first started executing them ‘some time ago’. From what? From nearly died out?

He then claims that the temples were almost forsaken. What is his source for that? Is it the recanting Christians? That’s my suspicion because he expresses ignorance at the beginning. If there are temples that are public knowledge then the Christians would have been public knowledge. I think its likely the temples were secret and he found out about them from recanters downplaying the Christian community.

How likely is it that from a nearly died out religion, people start hearing that Pliny is executing adherents and want to sign up in ever increasing numbers?

In less than 3 and a half lifetimes it was the official religion of Rome, a feat so incredible it seems like a myth. Can you even fathom what conviction and courage it would have taken to achieve that? The critical mass of believers that would have to be reached. It’s almost a reason to believe if it can give you the tools to take over an empire.

But you say it nearly died out if Pliny hadn’t started executing them? I doubt it. From the 1st to 2nd century Christianity survived, the central ideas expressed in the 1st century survived to the 2nd.

So, anyway, in a somewhat remote region of the Christian world we know that Christians existed and are in some cases prepared to die for their faith and that by 112, some years after the first executions, he is becoming aware of more of them. The rest is conjecture and you have squeezed an awful lot of juice out of that to make it a pillar of your switch theory.

Yes it does give the impression that Christianity was not as prominent at that time as later propagandists suggest, but not that it nearly died out.

All the dates are contested but there does seem to be writings that convention suggests were composed towards the end of the 1st century or the beginning of the 2nd. Writings are like mushrooms, they’re the fruiting bodies of a much wider underlying mycellium of culture and oral history.

You have a 40 year period between 70-80ish AD to 112 AD when you claim Christianity nearly died out and history was lost even though it was still active in Turkey?

We have no evidence of anyone in the two average lifetimes since Clement write discussing what they thought Clement meant. So you cannot arrive at conclusions about that.

My common sense response to that would be that they didn’t need to ‘understand what it meant’ and write an analysis of it in the same way that I don’t normally need to a textual analysis to understand what an English speaker meant writing 40 or 80 years ago. They knew what it meant, they attest to its existence. They were Greek speakers who would have understood context and usage better than anyone today and had access to oral history and other texts.

By around the middle of the 2nd century we have a popular tradition that Paul died in Rome. Irenaeus condemns the Acts of Paul but doesn’t contest the Roman death (It’s interesting that there is an ambiguity in the word used to describe Paul’s death by Irenaues that to my mind echoes the ambiguity in Clement).

But, anyway, no Koine Greek speakers and writers understood Clement or were brave enough to question the Roman location even though the Acts of Paul were condemned as a forgery? Seems odd to me.

I think you can say there is ambiguity about where he died before you can say Paul definitely died in Spain….and more likely Rome than Spain in my opinion.

As for liars and fabricators and knowing better, I’m not a historian. I’m a traffic surveyor who is interested in early Christian history for my own spiritual and intellectual reasons, as well as to try and find some solid arguments against what I think is unhelpful philosophy and thinking in a born again family member and other Christian friends.

This is another word wall but I was speaking to a Christian lady a while ago who had clearly internalised the guilt of Eve in the garden of Eden. I felt a real sadness about that and told her I think it’s time to give Eve a break.

But anyway we are talking about 2000 years of academia and reading of Clement, including by people who have no skin in the game, who have not interpreted Clement the way you have. That’s just how it is. I don’t think you can say with more than 50% certainty that Paul died in Spain.

I think if we take Mark to be the recollections of Peter according to someone who claims to have talked to eye-witnesses then it’s puzzling that there isn’t more myth in it right? It starts when you’d expect it to start, when Peter met Jesus and finishes with an empty tomb cliffhanger, all written in crude Greek. Why so cautious in such an early gospel if the key pillar of theology was always the high Christology stuff? With all that stuff tacked on in later gospels.

Articles aren’t evidence Christianity “nearly died out at the end of the 1st century.” The evidence in the articles is the evidence of that. And I cited two articles and a chapter in a peer reviewed study. You ignored all the evidence in all three places, and just gainsaid them with no discussion of the evidence or why it leads to the conclusion. Which is the behavior of a crank.

We have no evidence of anyone in the two average lifetimes since Clement write discussing what they thought Clement meant. So you cannot arrive at conclusions about that. Everything after that either doesn’t even know the letter exists, or interprets it in light of recently fabricated legends and necessary dogmas. I show how the telephone game led from what Clement said to what the Vatican mistook or needed him to have said instead—that’s how legends arose that he meant both Peter and Paul died in Rome when in fact that is exactly the opposite of what he said. It’s nobvious they made all that up. And it’s obvious how they made it up from material in Clement. And historians have thoroughly documented that Christians make up a lot (almost all Christian historical literature is fabrication or forgery: almost all Gospels, Acts, and Epistles circulating in the first four centuries).

Meanwhile, the Greek says what the Greek says. There is no way to cite fabricators and dogmatists in another century to argue that Clement wrote a different thing than he did, or that Greek grammar worked differently when he wrote than for anyone else in the first century.

In other words, you can’t just ignore evidence, and cite less reliable evidence against more reliable evidence. That’s the behavior of a crank, not a responsible historian.

So you have to actually confront the evidence. Not dismiss it as if it doesn’t exist and requires no response, and certainly not side with unreliable liars fabricating what everyone knows to be false legends as somehow the only ones telling us the truth. You know better.

Again I present my case.

The Eusebius article isn’t evidence Christianity nearly died out at the end of the 1st century. What can be your response? ‘Oh yes it is’. You can’t, once challenged, point to anything in that article that backs up that assertion because it isn’t there. The fact that you can’t trust Eusebius just means you can’t trust Eusebius, how can it therefore prove anything else? So you deflect by claiming I’ve ignored things.

Same with the Pliny article. There’s no real comeback other than these deflecting responses.

So you have not demonstrated convincingly that the information around Paul’s death, which seemed to have been common knowledge to at least two major churches would have died out to such an extent a different narrative emerged a few generations later.

We know that the letters of Clement were circulating in that early period, and yet nobody in the Greek speaking early church or since seems to have come to the same conclusion when it comes to your translation and come up with a story about Paul being eaten by lions in Spain for example. As far as we know.

You have no answer, you have been deflecting ever since.

You were very dismissive and definite about your James argument on here, on YouTube you were much more qualified, so it hardly matters. You have no firm evidence.

There are questions I have about how there seems to be chronological trend in the gospels from less to more myth, from messiah to God, but you won’t engage anyway. I’ll follow the debate with interest.

This is almost the weirdest crank wordwall I’ve ever gotten on my blog.

And once again, it never once mentions or addresses any of the relevant evidence here. You just changed the subject and moved the goalposts and flooded the zone with undefended assertions and omitted details and poorly informed opinions presented as facts, as if to distract.

Which, I guess, fits. It’s what you’ve been doing ever since you rolled off the rails of this conversation several exchanges ago already.

I watched a couple of episodes on Mythvision and the way you present yourself on there is different to the blog. I hope he is on your xmas card list because he will sell you a lot more books to non-devotees than this blog will.

I do have a(nother) thesis. We have a historical Carrier and a mythical Carrier. The first appears on the Mythvision podcast where face to face and in public he is trying very hard and pretty much succeeding in appearing to be a considerate academic.

Then we have the mythical blogger Carrier who is a personal fantasy of a transcendant, imperiously intelligent ubermensch that crushes unbelievers underfoot…a kind of inner Yahweh.

Iin my opinion you shouldn’t blog. Or at least have someone edit them before publishing.

The interviewer bless him, actually tried to give you a couple of opportunities to repent of the way you express yourself but you either didn’t spot them or ignored them.

Like I said, your general theory is compelling to me, but I’m not there.

I always believed that Jesus was probably born out of wedlock, we have no mention of the virgin birth in Mark (or by Paul) and mention of his brothers and sisters. There’s a comment in John that may indicate there were stories of him being born out of wedlock and Jewish tradition that claims he was.

So that seemed like the reason for the virgin birth story to me and then the tying up in knots trying to theologise it.

The virgin birth being made up first seems less likely. Obviously you would need Joseph to not have slept with Mary if you wanted the saviour to have been born a virgin, then you have to have an adoption into the line of David somehow. But if it’s a cosmic sperm, would you need Joseph and brothers and sisters? Wouldn’t it be more powerful to have him as an only child?

I know modern Christians who prefer to see him that way, they react shocked when you say he had brothers and sisters, it lessens him in their eyes. The catholic church doen’t really seem to think you need Joseph (or siblings), they don’t really know what to do with him, he might as well not have existed. He’s almost an embarrasment.

If Paul uses a different word for Jesus’ birth then he obviously considered Jesus to be special, not like others, so he could be using a different word to mark him out and elevate him, rather than demeaning him by using the same word for mere mortals.

There is a problem as well with you implying early church writers made various errors and/or misunderstood Greek. They were nearly all high-level Greek speakers, is it credible that with all the texts they had access to and oral traditions that they somehow misunderstood Paul dying in Spain? Nobody realised it until you? Or other examples you claim. They would have understood context and usage far better than you.

James is mentioned in other Christian writings, in Mark’s gospel, the Gospel of Thomas, various letters. Is there a difference between how he introduces ‘the brother’ as opposed to ‘a brother’ in other fictive contexts? If Paul was the source of the existence of James the brother of Jesus due to misunderstanding is that really credible given they pretty much all had a high literary level of Greek?

In any case the fact that James was the brother of Jesus may have been so well known that he didn’t have to use the ‘brothers in the flesh’ term. That may have been a particular term for Jews to emphasise a point, rather than the general way he talks about biological brothers. Some of his use of Greek might simply be poetic to emphasise Jesus’ uniqueness.

To counter my argument that the memory of Paul’s death would have died out because Christianity died out at the end of the 1st century you link as proof to an article that Eusebius embellished Christian history in Alexandria. That’s not evidence that Christianity almost died out. A weak pillar.

Then you have the letter of Pliny, that you use as evidence, where a Roman senator who is executing Christians says he keeps meeting Christians who have left the faith and apparently they’re all abandoning their faith and ‘Christian, me, no way! Never heard of them’. Yeah, you don’t say.

I read that letter, it doesn’t read to me like evidence of Christianity ‘dying out’, he mentions it spreading like contagion in his particular province. So I call that a weak pillar. We have writings dated to the end of the 1st century right through the 2nd century that belie that idea.

Paul mentions meeting eye witnesses of Jesus, Clement, Papias did, . Why is that not a pillar of historicity? If Paul existed and he mentions meeting Jesus’ contemporaries…?

He mentions a seemingly earthly saying that it’s better to give than receive that he writes in a way that seems like everyone knew. If it was a direct revelation to him then others likely wouldn’t know it so why didn’t he preface it by saying so?

Paul comes across as having a chip on his shoulder about the fact he never met Jesus, he is sniffy about John, Peter and James as ‘so-called great leaders’ he only meets them because God told him to, not because of anything to do with them. So he will always emphasise the risen Christ because that is his whole authority and the rest of ours obviously as well since we could never meet him in the flesh.

Talking about the historical Jesus just undermines his authority to his way of thinking. It has very little relevance to those currently living in his opinion. There might be cognitive dissonance going on too, leading to a more and more esoteric theology distancing from the ugly human tragedy, to a gentile audience more excited by divine stories. A transition from a Jewish to a Greco-Roman religion would be likely to adopt more divine aspects, to Jews I suspect they would view the mythical Jesus as idolatry.

If historicity was decided after the fact, why weren’t the fantastical elements in Mark. No virgin birth, no real resurrection story. A mother who thinks her son has gone mad despite later gospels claiming an archangel visited her. Doesn’t that speak to historicity as well? Why isn’t there more myth in Mark?

Still no argument here. No thesis. No evidence presented. No address of any evidence presented. Just a rambling wordwall of emotional vomit.

You’re obviously spent here. You’ve nothing left to add.

Like I said, this is almost Freudian projection. I’ve read your articles, arguments and viewpoints on this issue. They’re not always easy to read, not necessarily due to the complexity of the argument although you do like to use highbrow language wherever possible, but because there is a breathless, aggressive quality to it and inevitably at some point you use insulting and derogatory language about someone you disagree with. You accuse them of lying or being stupid (which is why I feel comfortable using some direct language towards you although I have accused you of neither of those things).

When I read it I start to pull away for all sorts of reasons, it’s distasteful but it also betrays a mindset that is not best suited to the pursuit of truth in any sense. That requires humility being able to accept the possibility that one is wrong.

The fact you can identify insults and bluster and table-thumping when it’s directed at you but don’t seem to appreciate that your articles often feature the same thing directed at others shows either a lack of self-awareness or game-playing.

You are insulting me by continuously claiming I ignored the evidence. Is this a deliberate tactic? Like faith-baiting, you want to incite a reaction, perhaps try to entrench others in their opinions, be able to claim that the other side is reacting emotionally, helping to distract from weaknesses in your own arguments?

I don’t need to go point by point when it comes to your ‘evidence’. I have presented counter-arguments which would be impossible had I ignored it. You can argue I haven’t understood it, but not that I have ignored it.

I am so far not convinced by your ‘evidence’, which amounts to conjecture since nothing is provable and the sources are ancient, incomplete and unreliable. They are not worthy of the certainty and aggression with which you present your conclusions.

Who cares if Paul died in Spain or Rome? For centuries the church understood Matthew to be the first gospel, now it accepts it is more likely Mark. They did so without much wailing and gnashing of teeth and the location of the death of Paul is less significant than that. If it were as obvious as you seem to believe then it would have been subject to the same scholarship and review as Markan priority, but it wasn’t.

It isn’t obvious.

The other questions around whether the historical Jesus was a myth are actually more compelling to me, but I still find it more likely that some historical figure existed but that much of the early literature about him is embellished and exaggerated.

That’s not an emotional position, that just seems to be the more likely based on the sources we have available.

Most Christians I know are not bogged down by theology. If you ask them directly they may feel like they have to say that they believe the creation myth for example, but it doesn’t play any role in their lives. I know plenty of successful and rational people, engineers and so on, who believe that myth and I would rather go for a drink with them than you, even if you turn out to be right about all of it.

They are polite, humble and considerate, they are Christians because they believe in certain values and find that a life of faith and worship seem to be the best way to maintain them.

Maybe your kind of atheist thinks those things are a weakness encouraged by religion (I think Greek philosophers used to consider excessive humilty unvirtuous, although there’s a difference between humility and self-deprecation) and therefore not required of people like you that have transcended it. Or maybe you are all too lazy to put in the effort it requires to exhibit those qualities, so you would rather undermine religion in an effort to not feel guilty about it.