That’s a profoundly weak argument. The dispute over some of those issues already existed in Paul’s letters, and Paul himself echoes some of those ideas. So forty years later, that the resolved compromise would be put in the mouth of Jesus would be expected.

But more problematically, actual contradictions with Paul only exist in Matthew (and redactors of Matthew). Who is deliberately creating them, because Matthew was written by an anti-Pauline, pro-Torah sect (the original sect of Peter and James, though they’d have been long dead by then). This sect’s teachings derive from Peter et al. We therefore need no Jesus to explain where they came from.

Paul, remember, is a latecomer and reformer. He didn’t create the religion. Peter et al. did, and they originated the atonement theology Paul says they confirmed to him. Paul is the first to riff on that into abandoning Torah. That was never a part of the cult as preached by Peter and his team.

When you look only at Mark (the inventor of the historicizing myth; everything after that is only a redaction of this same myth), you get a fully coherent Pauline doctrine, even to the point of putting Paul’s own teachings into the mouth of Jesus. See Mark’s Use of Paul’s Epistles.

If you don’t get any of this yet, please outline here the specific passages in Mark that you think go against Paul’s teachings. And we’ll see what happens.

But anything you find in Matthew that does, will go back to the Apostles before Paul. You can’t demonstrate any further link back to Jesus. The buck stops with the first revelators. “Maybe” it goes further back. But no evidence survives to tell us it does.

Hi Dr. Carrier. I don’t think you refuted me. But, let me try this approach to persuade you and your readers: This may be of interest regarding mythicism …

I just finished Ehrman’s most recent new course on the great divide between the historical Jesus and Paul, and there was some great and thoughtful material there.

It was really cool all around. He comes across as very friendly when he’s teaching. The mythicism connection was interesting too. Mythicists argue Jesus started out as a Jewish example of a celestial dying-rising savior deity that Paul experienced who was later put into stories on earth. Ehrman makes the rather brilliant observation that we have stories of Jesus like the story of the rich man in Mark and the sheep/goats in Matthew where Jesus is not teaching that salvation comes through faith in his death and resurrection, but through caring for others and following the law. In terms of historical reasoning, since these two stories go against the natural bias of the writers to promote the death and resurrection salvation position, they seem historical. And if this very early characterization of Jesus seems to predate the death/resurrection theological salvation theme, then Jesus wasn’t originally a dying/rising savior god!

There were lots of really interesting gold nuggets of insight in the course that really reinforced to me that I’m on the right track in my own view that the moral influence cross of Luke is much more original to Christianity than sin debt payment penal substitution. I had some points of disagreement with Ehrman but that’s true of any class you take with a professor. His big conclusion, which is devastating for Christianity, is the historical Jesus’s religion only has an arbitrary relationship to Paul’s: There was the religion of Jesus, and then there was Paul’s religion about Jesus, and they disagree on most relevant points.

I just did nine blog posts on Secular Frontier, the blog of Internet Infidels, outlining what I learned as the big ideas in Ehrman’s new course, so if you’re interested here is the last post on Ehrman’s course that also links to the previous posts: https://secularfrontier.infidels.org/2023/07/part-9-conclusion-the-philosophy-of-history-professor-bart-ehrmans-new-course-comparing-and-contrasting-the-apostle-paul-with-the-historical-jesus/

Simply repeating what has already been refuted is not a rebuttal. It’s apologetics.

I should note Psalm 19 in the Hebrew Scriptures is 18 in the Septuagint.

For anyone who is interested I weigh the relative merits of the vicarious atonement cross model and the moral influence cross model in my penal substitution essay which was also published by Internet Infidels: https://infidels.org/library/modern/a-critique-of-the-penal-substitution-interpretation-of-the-cross-of-christ/

Yes, I responded below. Sorry I got irritated. I took offence when you called my work “bizarre” in the title, as it did get the okay approval of a PhD New Testament expert through Internet Infidels.

“And it is striking to note that the verses, as familiar as they are, do not represent Luke’s own understanding of the death of Jesus. For it is a striking feature of Luke’s portrayal of Jesus death — this may sound strange at first — that he never, anywhere else, indicates that the death itself is what brings salvation from sin. Nowhere in Luke’s entire two volume work (Luke and Acts), is Jesus’ death said to be “for you.” And in fact, on the two occasions in which Luke’s source Mark indicates that it was by Jesus’ death that salvation came (Mark 10:45; 15:39), Luke changed the wording of the text (or eliminated it). Luke, in other words, has a different understanding of the way Jesus death leads to salvation from Mark (and from Paul, and other early Christian writers).”

“It is easy to see Luke’s own distinctive view by considering what he has to say in the book of Acts, where the apostles give a number of speeches in order to convert others to the faith. What is striking is that in none of these instances (look, e.g., in chapters 3, 4, 13), do the apostles indicate that Jesus’ death brings atonement for sins. It is not that Jesus’ death is unimportant. It’s extremely important for Luke. But not as an atonement. Instead, Jesus death is what makes people realize their guilt before God (since he died even though he was innocent). Once people recognize their guilt, they turn to God in repentance, and then he forgives their sins.”

And so we have the model of Socrates offering a prayer of thanksgiving for the poison that cures him of his body and un-covers (a-letheia) or makes conspicuous the hidden vileness of society who wrongfully condemned him, and hence acts as a catalyst for change. We also have this with Plato’s impaled just man in the Republic.

In this way, we see man is inherently sinful, yet unaware of it. Jesus does not abolish the Law but fulfills it, eg making it stricter (eg adultery is not just the act but a lustful eye). Regarding the Law, the hesed love of God and neighbor (widow, orphan, stranger) becomes the selfless agape Love of God more than self (your will, not mine) and love of enemy more than self. Jesus on the cross is the Law personified.

And so in Psalm 19 we read “The law of the Lord is faultless, turning/converting souls…. Transgressions—who shall detect them? From my hidden ones clear me. (Psalm 19:7-12 LXX). In the NRSVUE of the Hebrew we read 12 “But who can detect one’s own errors? Clear me from hidden faults. (Psalm 19:12)” Psalm 19 seems to be particularly fruitful here since the New Testament writers were creatively re-writing the Old Testament, especially Psalms. Mark’s narrative of the crucifixion rewrites Psalm 22 (and Isaiah 53), for instance. In Psalm 19, verse 7 we get the idea of the law inspiring a change of heart, and in verse 12 we get the idea of a sin nature that is hidden from us and must be un-covered to be repented of: we are blind to ourselves, analogous to a teenager in a toxic romantic relationship who is too close to it to see the forest for the trees.

The wrongful death of Jesus thus changes the heart of the Roman soldier at the cross. This is moral influence theology, not vicarious atonement blood magic. A forgiving God is powerless if you don’t have a contrite heart, which the forgiving God of the Old Testament illustrates because despite forgiveness they still ended up with a wicked Jewish supreme council.

Anyway, thanks for weighing in on my work.

My online stuff is linked to here: https://secularfrontier.infidels.org/2023/05/jesus-philosophically-announcing-the-completion-of-my-scripture-studies-web-project/

Do you have any actual reply to any substantive point in my actual critique?

Or is all you have just a complaint about your emotional dislike of being critiqued?

If the reader would like to form their own opinion of what I’m arguing, see my index of posts here: https://secularfrontier.infidels.org/2023/03/john-macdonald-christian-origins-index/

Of course we can’t know things like “exact years” because we have no pertinent records. We can’t peg any Gospel to “an exact year,” for example. Nor can we be certain there weren’t other lost Gospels before them. And there are whole decades of no records, where we simply don’t know what was happening in the movement. (For more on this see How Did Christianity Switch to a Historical Jesus?)

So, with that caveat, here’s the best we can do:

The first time we ever hear of an earthly narrative for Jesus is the Gospel of Mark; the dominant view (and IMO most probable view) is that Mark was written in the late 70s AD in response to the Jewish War.

Mark appears to be deliberate allegory (Mark 4:9-13), not a real literalist. But literalism starts to creep into subsequent Gospels, culminating in John who is the first explicit historicist on record (see again How Did Christianity Switch to a Historical Jesus?; also, Establishing the Biblical Literalism of Early Christians). And it is around that same time that we see Christians being ordered to shun other Christians still teaching these are myths (Ignatius is by most scholars now dated against tradition c. 130s-140s; likewise 2 Peter).

So, the best answer we have to your specific question (when was a historicizing narrative first invented) is “most likely the late 70s A.D.”

This can be confirmed by 1 Clement and Hebrews (see How We Can Know 1 Clement Was Actually Written in the 60s AD) who don’t yet know any such narrative existed, yet were most likely composed in the 60s A.D. (and of course Paul, writing in the 50s, doesn’t know any such narrative either; he’s still working off revelations and pesher, e.g. 1 Cor. 15:1-8 and Rom. 16:25-26; see also 1 Peter).

The earliest we know of Christians definitely believing these historicized myths is “sometime in the early 2nd century, maybe late 1st” (we can’t get any more precise than that, other than that that had definitely transpired by mid-2nd century).