Good point. Horn only has multiple masters degrees.

Correction: (though he presented this as a much bigger problem than it is, as if this is really denied beyond the most basic of evangelicals, rather than the more subtle point that the meaning of the two names being identical is telling).

Briefly scanning it, it seems… okay. The author definitely thinks Gnosticism is a real analytical category. His theory is basically that Jesus was always a Gnostic entity and that that’s how Paul imagined it. That’s a pretty big failure, and he’s really vague about what he even thinks gnosticism is from what I’ve read, so the argument can’t even be rescued from the anachronism. However, the rest of it seems pretty reasonable: he points out pretty basic methodological issues.

Some of his other work triggers yellow flags for crankery. He has an article called “About the fraudulent and sterile research on the origins of Christianity”, which has some good basic points (e.g. pointing out Jesus is Joshua, though he presents that as . But calling work you disagree with “fradulent” and “sterile”, even in this case, does come off as unscholarly.

He does anthropological research but shows no anthropological methodology I can see beyond pretty basic mythology and his study isn’t in the field.

I would say it’s not bad, just amateur.

That isn’t a peer-reviewed book. Nor does its author have any relevant PhD.

There are dozens of amateur books pushing mythicism. They have a deserved reputation of being terrible. But even apart from that, one has to ask why they can’t survive peer-review. Only versions that do should be taken seriously.

I don’t waste time any more on amateur productions. If a mythicist wants to be taken seriously, they really need to do the work properly, and get it vetted through proper channels.

Note I write as I speak. In spoken English, “no fewer than ours” is correct. The omission of a final verb (“No fewer than ours [does]”) is also common in spoken English; it is called a nominal sentence. And I use periods like semicolons to reflect the actual pauses in spoken English. (I can’t speak to the Italian translator’s choices, which may exhibit a different grammatical formula. I’m only discussing my choices in English.)

As to the concept, “no fewer than” carries the same meaning as “at least as many as.” That is the signaled intention here.

The argument is a fortiori: whatever assumptions we have (which requires committing to no number of them), they have at least as many. Insofar as they can reduce assumptions by converting them into evidenced facts, so can we. Etc.

So I’m not saying anything as to how many assumptions are needed. Could be zero. But it’s definitely no less than any we must adopt. So they cannot claim simplicity by assumption-count.

As to the rest of your comment, I don’t understand what your point is.

There is no certainty; all of this is stated in my study with wide margins of error, the opposite of certitude; whereas it is historicists who are declaring certitude where we are demonstrating none exists. And that is why it takes so much work to prove this: historicity is built on a gigantic tower of assumptions and leaps of reasoning; to show that it is inadequate requires tearing that tower down. That takes a lot of work.

Moreover, to get correct probabilities requires accounting for the actual background knowledge (see my latest article on that) and in my experience historicists all lack a shocking amount of this (different scholars lacking different bits, requiring a sweeping survey of all the bits that at least some scholars lack awareness of), so it has to be surveyed. This is essentially taking them back to school to understand the actual context of the origins of Christianity, often in respects they have ignored, overlooked, or been told the opposite of, requiring a massive corrective effort. That takes a lot of work as well.

Reality is not simple. Anyone who argues “I need simple arguments” is not interested in getting at the true facts of reality.

Is this your error; theirs; or the editor/proof reader’s? The fourth sentence should probably read “Not fewer than ours” to not concede the pass.

Even then you seem to be conceding there ARE hidden assumptions in the Carrier-Doherty model. This is how you get folk taking things in isolation and bashing you with them!

My minimum boils down to the consensus says Paul is our earliest Xtian author – and he says JC was killed by supernatural entities in ignorance. I find it amusing that anyone would want or need a thousand plus pages to prove 1 plus 1 is 2. This seems rather anal; but whatever floats your boat!

It occurs to me that the “Little Apocalypse” is the Marcan author going out of his way (Amongst other things.) to quash any kind of Zealot associations whatsoever; sort of “No, no, we aren’t those people: we got the hell out of Dodge!”. The upping sticks and fleeing to Pella legend seems to serve the same purpose.

Authors include what they want to include; they also exclude what thay want to exclude: G. Mk. has no birth narrative and no resurrection as such. You can make an assumption, pun intended, but as written the text appears non-probative in either direction. Hence the five(?) faked endings various folk added later and the several canonical re-writes.

G. Mk. appears to me to be a deliberately equivocal text; and how you can infer certainty from almost-out-of-the-gate equivocation has me scratching my head.

Sometimes, you have a story or an idea that is so compelling you want to throw it in if you know it will cause confusion over characterization. Sometimes, you’re hiding information from the audience but do need to give them some ideas. Sometimes, a particular symbol gains prominent importance over time.

In the case of the leftovers of the zealot hypothesis, we have a few excuses we can hand them. First of all, if his movement were doing what modern far-right people do on social media and probing the line as far as what they could get away with, then they could be slipping in things like the attack on the temple as their true mask off while then effectively saying “I disavow! I disavow!” I don’t think this is that plausible because the pacifism of Jesus in the Gospels is really extreme and a movement that wanted to retain a violent political wing at all wouldn’t be able to accept that messaging, but it’s something. Second, maybe the Gospel writers had stories of the Zealot Jesus that were so good for their ends that they were willing to use them even if there was some contradiction, but the others didn’t work for their ends. Which still kicks the can down the road for evidence, but it’s at least something .

What I would argue is…

1) Scripting Jesus as a pacifist out of a militant is such an extreme change that anyone willing to do it would be exceedingly careful in how they did it, which I don’t think the zealot hypothesis can reinforce (it’s the classic conspiracy theory problem: “There was a conspiracy to wipe out the facts to the point that everyone bought it, but I saw through it somehow even though the prediction of my theory is that I shouldn’t”)

2) What Richard will argue, which is that these stories were not treated as inviolable or even treated as oral lore you could pick and choose from but were all deeply ideological, so there’s no reason to ever expect any Gospel author had any loyalty to a Zealot movement that would have metamorphosed out

3) The structures of the Gospels are all so detailed and complex that it’s really hard to argue (especially for Mark) that there’s not some really careful choices going on – this is where the sheer degree of mythical content and the contamination principle just hoses any individual historicity theory

Also… whatever Bermejo-Rubio can argue for why there was a pre-existent zealot Jesus that stuck around, there’s a parallel for mythicism. Maybe the early mythical cult had zealot-type members and so they constructed a messy compromise by having a few violent passages. Maybe they knew that they had to recruit away the violent ones and so had a big badass rabbi who would overthrow the moneychangers in the temple but would also demand that the meek inherit the Earth. Whatever marketing reason they would want to keep around a real zealot Jesus would be a reason to invent a fictive zealot Jesus story. The Gospel Jesus is already such a deeply complex if not outright internally contradictory character even within each Gospel let alone between them that the text by necessity supports a ton of interpretations.

Hi Dr. Carrier,
if of interest, there would be another mythicist book (in Spanish) that would have just passed peer-review.

https://www.academia.edu/92179332/A_radical_critique_of_the_origins_of_Christianity_according_to_Eliseo_Ferrer

He agrees with you about the outer space theory:

In Paul of Tarsus, the resulting figure of these different traditions (the cosmic
Christ) died and was resurrected in the timeless realms of metaphysics, in the same way that the deities of the mystery religions died and were resurrected.

I am curious about the differences, since Ferrer appears to identify the cosmic cross in Paul with the same Limit/Horos/Stauros of the late Valentinian tradition. The corollary would be, I think (I haven’t read at the moment the book, but I will do), to give up to the ‘anthropomorfic’ features of the crucifixion in heaven (nails, tree, etc) in the original Pauline epistles, in favor of a more Platonic idea of crucifixion (the X placed by the Plato’s Timaeus at the intersection between the ecliptic and the equator) of which the late invented earthly Gospel crucifixion would be — platonically — only a mere imperfect copy (for outsiders) of the former.
Giuseppe

Added one word to the main line and this sentence, which clarifies what I meant:

Even if they produce something incoherent, contradictory, or illogical, it will still be a result of pursuing their purposes—each part they wanted to be there, they chose to include it, even if they didn’t think through the consequences.