I offered to publish replies from Fernando Bermejo-Rubio and Franco Tommasi to my article A Thorough Fisk of the Arguments of Fernando Bermejo-Rubio and Franco Tommasi (and these will be linked there). They each provided their own reply. First up and in detail is Bermejo-Rubio. Franco Tommasi then adds his own brief remarks. If I have anything to add it will be in comments.
Remarks by Fernando Bermejo-Rubio
“Think of what you’re saying, You can get it wrong and still you think that it’s alright” [The Beatles, “We Can Work It Out”]
1
Since I have set forth the main arguments of my (and Franco Tommasi’s) position, as well as the main criticisms of the other position, in the co-authored book Jesus: Militant or Non-Existent? (and in other publications: see F. Bermejo-Rubio, “The Jewish Scriptures in the Gospels’ Construction of Jesus: The Extent of a Literary Influence and the Limits of Mythicism”, in M. A. Daise and D. Hartman (eds.), Creative Fidelity, Faithful Creativity. The Reception of Jewish Scripture in Early Judaism and Christianity, UniorPress, Naples, 2022, pp. 123-153: Id., They Suffered under Pontius Pilate. Jewish Anti-Roman Resistance and the Crosses at Golgotha, Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, Lanham-Boulder-London-New York, 2023), I have hardly anything else to add. The following writing is just a set of remarks on Carrier’s lengthy “A Thorough Fisk of the Arguments of Fernando Bermejo-Rubio and Franco Tommasi”. It does not aim at being an answer, just because “answer” entails the existence of a discussion, and the title itself of Carrier’s last writing—in addition to its tone—proves that he has placed himself beyond any discussion worthy of the name.
2
Almost at the beginning of “A Thorough Fisk…”, Richard Carrier describes me as a (noted) “biblical scholar”. Nevertheless, it is a demonstrable fact that I am not at all a biblical scholar, and accordingly that I do not consider myself as such. Richard Carrier must know it, because he has co-authored a book with Franco Tommasi and with me, has access to Internet and is good at social media.
To start with, I am Full Professor at a Department of Ancient History in a State University (UNED, Madrid). The following are some of the courses I am responsible for: Ancient History (Egypt, Ancient Near East, Greece and Rome), Numismatics, Methods and Techniques of Historical Research I, Contemporary Historiographical Trends I…
I am a historian specialized in Greek and Roman History, with a focus on the political and religious history of Hellenistic and Roman Judaea, topics about which I enjoy international academic recognition, as is shown by the projects and publications I have been invited to contribute (including, just to put a few examples, They Suffered under Pontius Pilate, a book written by invitation of a North-American Publishing House, the forthcoming Proceedings of a Colloquium held in 2022 about Judas the Galilean, or the forthcoming Oxford Critical Guide to Josephus).
I am a historian, and a historian of religions (I have a Master’s degree in this discipline). My focus in this field are early Judaism, ancient Christianity and Manichaeism. Just to make some examples, I have published a history of the Jews (from the captivity in Babylon to the arrival of Islam), a monograph on Valentinian Gnosticism, a bilingual edition (Coptic-Spanish) with a commentary of the Gospel of Judas. I took part, by invitation, to the international conferences held on the Gospel of Judas and the Tchacos Codex in Paris and Houston, and a few years ago I was trusted by the editors of Gnosis. Journal of Gnostic Studies to edit a special issue of the journal; I gathered an international team of specialists and the issue was published in 2022. I am the author of a monograph on Manichaeism and the co-editor and co-author of an anthology of Manichaean texts, with translations from Latin, Greek, Coptic, Syriac, Arabic, Middle Persian, Sogdian, Parthian, and Chinese.
I am regularly invited to lecture on the several topics of my different fields of expertise by Universities and other academic institutions in Europe and America. I do not keep track of that kind of stuff, but I guess during my academic career I have been invited by at least twenty Universities. Among the last ones: Université Laval (Québec), Lausanne (Switzerland), Cambridge (UK), Naples (Italy)…
The topics I have chosen so far in the summer courses of which I am director are the following ones: Big epidemics and Pandemics in the ancient world, Intelligence activities in the ancient world, Fictitious material in ancient historiographical sources and Ancient literature as sources of ancient history. All speakers in these courses are University Professors and Lecturers of Ancient History and Classics.
I have conceived and convened the First International Conference on Intelligence Services in the Ancient World (Madrid, 2023), with specialists coming from several countries in Europe and North America. At present I am preparing, as literary editor, the first collective volume integrally devoted to this topic.
In my several fields of expertise I have published almost one hundred works in five different languages, among books, articles in peer-reviewed journals (including, of course, those specialized in Ancient History and History of Religions), and chapters in collective volumes (in publishing houses as Routledge, Brill, Peeters, Brepols, De Gruyter, Fortress Academic…). I have never self-published my work nor raised funds from others to do it.
This is, however, not my whole CV. I hold a PhD in Philosophy (1997), a career in which, among many other subjects, I studied Logic, Epistemology, History of Science, and Philosophy of Science. In fact, at the very beginning of my academic career for a time I was Lecturer at the Department of Philosophy at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Moreover, one of my hobbies is Literary criticism, and I have published seven articles on Franz Kafka’s work, some of them in top peer-reviewed journals in Germany and the USA.
The only reason to explain who I am, from a scholarly and an intellectual standpoint, is of course not showing off my achievements, but to show the distortion of elementary (empirical) facts carried out by Richard Carrier. To say that I am a “biblical scholar”, and not a “properly trained historian” is a false statement. But, as the Latin dictum says, ex falso quodlibet (from a false statement, anything follows).
3
I do not know why Richard Carrier has called me a “biblical scholar”. But given that elsewhere in his last writing he blames me and Franco Tommasi for relying on apologetic devices, just in case he wants to make a kind of ideological reduction of the hypothesis he aims at ridiculing, it will be helpful to say something that Carrier has not told his readers, namely, that the proponents of the hypothesis held by us (most of whom are, despite the importance of their works, simply silenced in the very lengthy bibliography of his book On the historicity of Jesus) come from the most disparate cultural and ideological backgrounds. Among the advocates of the hypothesis are, for instance, Martin Seidel in the sixteenth century (he was not a biblical scholar, but a Latin teacher and a proto-Deist thinker), Hermann Samuel Reimarus in the eighteenth century (not a biblical scholar, but a Professor of Oriental Languages, one of the most outstanding figures of German Enlightenment, and a philosopher admired by Immanuel Kant), Charles Hennell in the nineteenth century (not a biblical scholar, but a liberal professional and independent author), Karl Kautsky (not a biblical scholar, but a Marxist philosopher and historian), Robert Eisler (not a biblical scholar, but a Jewish polymath), Joel Carmichael (not a biblical scholar, but a Jewish American historian and translator), Archibald Robertson (not a biblical scholar, but an atheist writer), Barrows Dunham (not a biblical scholar, but an American philosopher, also known for his courage before the House Un-American Activities Committee), Hyam Maccoby (not a biblical scholar, but a Jewish historian), Marvin Harris (not a biblical scholar, but a renowned anthropologist, proponent of the theory of cultural materialism), and so on. I guess that Carrier—who does not mention the works of these outstanding critical intellectuals—will write that they also were a bunch of ignorant authors, painfully using circular arguments and ignoring Bayes’ theorem…
4
Authors who deny that Jesus of Nazareth (of course, once stripped of his mythical covering) did indeed exist have been traditionally treated in the academic realm with disparagement, even contempt. I disagree with those who deny the historical existence of Jesus, including Richard Carrier, but I (and Franco Tommasi) have always conveyed our disagreement in the most respectful tone. In fact, in several publications F. T. and myself have argued that there is a space of intersection and overlap between the so-called “mythicism” and the so-called “historicism” (see F. Tommasi, Non c’è Cristo che tenga, Manni, Lecce, 2014, pp. 286-287; F. Bermejo-Rubio, La invención de Jesús de Nazaret. Historia, ficción, historiografía, Akal, Madrid, 2023, pp. 61-62; Id., They suffered under Pontius Pilate, pp. 34-35; F. Bermejo-Rubio et alii, Jesus: Militant or Non-Existent?, pp. 52-54), as far as “mythicists” adopt a skeptical approach to the sources, and sometimes we have approvingly cited the work of Carrier and other writers defending similar hypotheses. This sympathetic and constructive approach to the “a-historicist” theses and our obvious good will have not found echo in Richard Carrier, who in his text “A thorough Fisk…” goes on vulnerating the most elementary rules of academic courtesy by repeating false statements and unfairly attributing those who disagree with him sheer ignorance.
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There are not many people in the academic realm who pay attention to the “mythicist” arguments (these arguments have been answered since at latest the 19th century), but in the last years several scholars have done it. Admittedly, some things which have been said against the “mythicist” thesis miss the point and are inadequate, but if one takes the trouble of considering all the arguments used by scholars coming from very different ideological backgrounds (ultimately D.B. Ehrman, Simon Gathercole, Daniel Gullotta or Justin Meggitt), it is easy to see that the “mythicist” solution is not at all the simplest and most convincing one. As one of them (Meggitt) has rightly remarked: “Why would we expect any non-Christian evidence for the specific existence of someone of the socio-economic status of a figure such as Jesus at all? To deny his existence based on the absence of such evidence, even if that were the case, has problematic implications; you may as well deny the existence of pretty much everyone in the ancient world”. Nevertheless, the reaction by Carrier seems to be always the same: people disagreeing with him are painfully incompetent. In these circumstances, any discussion is precluded from the outset.
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As to the so-called “Testimonium Flavianum”, I will not tackle it again. The reason is threefold. First, and most important, in the defence of our hypothesis the Testimonium Flavianum holds a completely secondary and negligible place. Second, I am aware of the extremely problematic nature of this source: extremely learned scholars have discussed it for centuries, and they will go on discussing for centuries, without any assured result (of course, as in so many other respects, Richard Carrier claims he has got “the truth” about the TF, but this is just an opinion which has not settled the question on this text, which remains open to the most disparate assessments). Third, what I had to say on the TF has already been said in two articles published in peer-reviewed journals (incidentally, extremely learned scholars coming from very different ideological backgrounds have detected a negative Vorlage in the TF). Anyway, even if it could be demonstrated that the TF is just a whole creation (by Eusebius or by anyone else), or that the Vorlage (the alleged original text) did not have a negative tone, this would not be a serious problem for us.
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As to the argument related to Paul, I will not tackle it again. In my opinion, the articles written by D.C. Allison (“The Pauline Epistles and the Synoptic Gospels: the Pattern of the Parallels”, NTS 28 (1982), pp. 1-32) and Simon J. Gathercole (“The Historical and Humane Existence of Jesus in Paul’s Letters”, JSHJ 16 (2018) pp. 183-212) are by far more convincing than anything written on this topic by Carrier.
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In his writing, Carrier cites our sentence: “(As the French scholar) Alfred Loisy remarked more than a century ago, ‘one can explain Jesus, but not those who would have invented him’”, and he adds, referring to R. Price and him, “We not only can explain them, we have done”. But Carrier has omitted the paragraph that we wrote immediately after our sentence: “To put it in a more sharp and rigorous form, it is easier to account for the existence of someone like Jesus—that is, the historical being recoverable through a critical reconstruction— than the identity, and the procedures and the reasons, of those who could have invented the figure. Ockham’s razor supports the existence of the character.” Admittedly, Carrier ‒as so many other “mythicists” since the 18th century‒ has offered an explanation of why and how Jesus was invented, but the problem is that, in my opinion ‒and in the opinion of the overwhelming majority of scholars in the know, among whom there are also Jews, agnostics, and atheists‒, the assumption that Jesus of Nazareth existed is by far the simplest and the most convincing one, while the mythicist explanations (there are a lot of them), despite all its fanfare of scientificity, are systematically forced and convoluted.
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The claim by Richard Carrier that our method “derives ultimately from faith-based apologetics” or that it “is a quintessential apologetical device” is, again, demonstrably false. As to “contextual plausibility”, it is a most elementary requirement in any historical assessment. As to the “recurrent/convergent patterns”, its logic has been explained e.g. by D.C. Allison, Constructing Jesus. Memory, Imagination, and History, 2010 pp. 1-30 (an important work which, incidentally, was not cited in the lengthy bibliography of Carrier’s main book); anyway, is obviously untrue that it “simply means selecting what you want to be true and rejecting the rest”: as I have explained in several publications, recurrent patterns should be trusted only if some requirements are fulfilled, and particularly only if the motif detected by the pattern is not reducible to the interests and editorial tendencies of the Gospel writers and/or early Christian communities.
But the most obvious point is that related to the most essential criterion, counter-discursive material. As I have argued in an article written a decade ago (Revue des Études Juives), the core of this criterion is not that it created “embarrassment”, which is a purely subjective matter, but that it allows us to detect material which objectively does not fit (and even contradicts) the tendencies of the authors. This is why, in the last years, I have abandoned the label “criterion of embarrassment” and use the term “counter-discursive material” or “against the grain” (see e.g. F. Bermejo-Rubio, They Suffered under Pontius Pilate, pp. 46-51). This is not an idiosyncratic concept merely dreamed up for Jesus studies, but its logic applies in any field of history in which truth assessment is sought. The existence of this counter-discursive material is an essential point that has been remarked upon as a key method by virtually every author of handbooks of historical method, since the end of the 19th century (see e.g. Ernst Bernheim, Lehrbuch der historischen Methode und der Geschichtsphilosophie, Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1903 (orig. ed. 1889), pp. 523-527; Charles Langlois and Charles Seignobos, Introduction to the Study of History, London, Duckworth, 1912, p. 186; French orig. 1898), among many others. Therefore, to say—as Carrier does—that the method we use is a “broken method” or depends on apologetics has no rhythm nor reason, being an extremely outlandish (and ultimately funny) assertion.
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And here we come to one of the most puzzling and discouraging points we have detected in Carrier’s discourse, both in his responses in the book and in his blog, namely, his claim that everything which is found within a text must be the result of its author’s wish. Put otherwise, he claims once and again that if something is contained in a text is because it corresponds to what the author wants to say (so “counter-discursive” material would be a self-defeating concept). The problem lies in the fact that this claim is extremely naïve and uncritical, as a lot of learned and thoughtful psychologists, literary critics, and philosophers (from Sigmund Freud to Jacques Derrida) have argued. Carrier’s claim not only is refuted by everyday experience and by the complexity of the processes of creation and transmission of a text, but it also contradicts central insights of historical method, as well as the core of sophisticated theories as Psychoanalysis and Deconstruction. Obviously, an author tends to avoid fouling his own nest, and to control what (s)he writes and says, but sometimes (s)he cannot avoid using material which ultimately contradicts their main positions. The reasons for this state of affairs have been already explained since the end of the nineteenth century. As to why counter-discursive material has been preserved by the authors of the Gospels, see e.g. Bermejo-Rubio, They Suffered under Pontius Pilate, pp. 46-51; “On the Self-Styled ‘Refutation’ of the ‘Seditious Jesus Hypothesis’. On Jesse Nickel’s (and others’) Wishful Thinking,” JSHJ 22 (2024), pp. 168-171.
The pointless and unfounded character of the claim that an author has the absolute control on what (s)he says and writes is even more clearly perceptible in the case of the Gospels, written by authors who, despite their skills as narrators, were believers in all kind of supernatural beings and activities, and cannot be taken as paradigms of consistency, and addressed for internal consumption to communities whose members were also Jesus-believers, ready to accept almost everything aimed at enhancing the person they worshipped.
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It is ironic that Carrier wrongly (and unfairly) blames us for relying on apologetic devices, because in the coauthored book (Jesus: Militant or Non-Existent?, pp. 65-66) we have remarked that his position is, in several respects, ultimately very similar to confessional exegesis. Apart from what we have already written there, one could add other aspects. For instance, some of his objections to our hypothesis are identical to those harbored by conservative theologians (see e.g. F. Bermejo-Rubio, “On the Self-Styled ‘Refutation’ of the ‘Seditious Jesus Hypothesis’. On Jesse Nickel’s (and others’) Wishful Thinking,” JSHJ 22 (2024), pp. 163ff.). The statement that máchairai does not designate “swords” or that lestaí does not (often) designate rebels are typical apologetic devices (for the refutation of the first point, see Dale C. Martin, “Jesus in Jerusalem: Armed and Not Dangerous,” JSNT 37 (2014), pp. 3-24; Id., “Response to Downing and Fredriksen,” JSNT 37 (2015), pp. 334-345; for the refutation of the second, see e.g. the specialized works by Brent Shaw, Thomas Grünewald and Nadav Sharon cited in They Suffered under Pontius Pilate, p. 231, note 3). And just as believers have a vested interest in the existence of Jesus, Carrier has a likewise vested interest in his inexistence, since he has built his intellectual credibility on the staunch defense of this idea.
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Carrier blames us for ignoring “half of” his points. Admittedly, given that he has written so much, we cannot claim that we have not omitted some point in our responses, but the discussion during the preparation of the volume was precisely for that, and Carrier has had several opportunities to remark on our alleged oversights. But the ironical thing is that, as we wrote in the book,it is a demonstrable fact that Carrier does not pay attention to what his adversaries really say. A quotation of the book should suffice: “We noted on more than one occasion Carrier’s tendency to use extreme, not to say caricatural, versions of our theses. A glaring example of this is the fact that he ascribes to us the thesis that Jesus was a Zealot. We never affirmed that.” (Jesus: Militant or Non-Existent?, p. 131). This is a good example of how Richard Carrier works with aprioristic assumptions, without caring too much about what their adversaries actually state.
13
Leaving aside that we do not understand very well why, on the one side, Carrier affirms that we “make a very good case for the plausibility” of our hypothesis (“the next most likely after mine”), and on the other side he attacks it as if it were unfounded, the fact is that the procedure used by him to comment on the cluster detected by us is misguided. The reason is that he does not take into account the logic underlying this cluster. We do not claim the historicity of each item, but the historicity of the motif (for the logic, related to the conclusions drawn from the modern study of memory, see e.g. D.C. Allison, Constructing Jesus. Memory, Imagination, and History, 2010 pp. 1-30, an important work which, incidentally, was not cited in the lengthy bibliography of Carrier’s main book). Incidentally, the procedure taken by Carrier (to take each item in the cluster in order to state that its meaning is different and does not support our hypothesis) is exactly the same taken by conservative theologians and exegetes trying to “refute” the hypothesis.
14
In a recent article addressed against a conservative Christian scholar who has blatantly distorted the hypothesis of the Jesus involved in anti-Roman ideology (“On the Self-Styled ‘Refutation’…”, passim), I concluded that, when some minimal requirements are not fulfilled, it is futile to argue. I have come to the conclusion that this is what happens here. Richard Carrier thinks—or, at least, he says and writes—that we are incapable of understanding his thought and are no match for his brilliant mind. And we have come to think that he is a dogmatic mythicist, who does not seem to understand some of our ideas (and, what is more serious and sobering, the ideas of many other thinkers), believes he is in the possession of “the truth”, and does not seem to have the slightest capacity for self-criticism. Be that as it may, both of us (F. B.-R and F.T.) enjoy wide international recognition in academic circles in our respective fields of research, and we both are fully aware of our intellectual and personal worth. This means that the fact that Richard Carrier (or thousands like him) portray us as incompetent does not diminish our self-esteem one bit. But, as the Beatles said, “Life is very short, and there’s no time for fussing and fighting, my friend”. Given the serious flaws detected in Mr. Carrier’s way of reasoning, with this text I definitely end the exchange with him.
⌘
Brief Remark by Franco Tommasi
Much of what I wanted to write is already contained in Bermejo-Rubio’s response (above).
I would only like to recall an aspect of Carriers’s long text that amused me. I don’t need to remind the reader of Carrier’s mantra: “authors only put in what they want to put in.” It was debated in the book to which his page refers and it is repeated if different forms in his “Thorough Fisk.” In that very “fisk”, he quotes us:
“two lēstaí (not “robbers” or “thieves” but “brigands,” in the Roman sense of “political rebels”) were crucified along with Jesus” (point (2): p. 69)
and makes the following comment:
“This is a distortion of the facts in more than one way. I already cover these there (pp. 102–03, 140–41), but in short, no, that word does not entail “political rebels,” and the evidence indicates Mark does not intend you to imagine they were cohorts of Jesus.”
Very well. So, according to Carrier, λῃσταί does not mean “political rebels”.
Just skip 564 words and you will read what Carrier writes:
“Well, Mark tells us why he wrote this: Mark has Jesus declare, “Am I leading a rebellion, that you have come out with swords and clubs to capture me? Every day I was with you, teaching in the temple courts, and you did not arrest me. But the Scriptures must be fulfilled.””
The original greek text whose translation Carrier takes, without a word of caution, from the “New International Version” reads:
καὶ ἀποκριθεὶς ὁ Ἰησοῦς εἶπεν αὐτοῖς· Ὡς ἐπὶ λῃστὴν ἐξήλθατε μετὰ μαχαιρῶν καὶ ξύλων συλλαβεῖν με;
That is, the English translation Carrier uses says exactly the opposite of what he claims: λῃστὴν means indeed “political rebel”.
Carrier will of course retort that it is a confessional translation (by the way: isn’t it nice that Christians usually affirm λῃστής does not mean “political rebel” – just like Mythicists – and then they translate the word exactly as “leader of a rebellion”?) but the fact is he has used it verbatim to make his point.
What does all this teach us? Had Carrier noticed this detail, he would probably have used another translation or, at least, he would have pointed out his dissent. He did neither. So, at least sometimes, authors do not “only put in what they want to put in”.
I believe nothing else needs to be added.
Regarding Tommasi’s note, I am perplexed. I said (as he indeed quotes) λῃστὴν “does not entail” rebels. “Entail,” not “mean.” I did not say it never means that. Rather, its meaning must be taken from context (my also-quoted words: what “the evidence indicates”).
There is no context indicating what kind of λῃστὴν were crucified with Jesus in Mark 15. But there is context indicating how Jesus is using the word a chapter earlier (it’s in the very next verse, Mark 14:49).
The lesson we were supposed to learn here is not to take words out of context but pay attention to what the author is saying (and not invent them saying something they didn’t). One of us is not learning this lesson. And that is the most general point of my article.
Regarding Bermejo-Rubio’s response:
A third of it seems to assume “biblical scholar” is a slander.
I do not know why he thinks that. The point of that appellation was to assure readers he is qualified in this field (and not some amateur or outsider), and I linked to my description of his formal qualifications in the very first paragraph. I welcome his laying out of those qualifications further here, but I do not see that it corrects anything. His training and publications are consistently in that field, by his own admission.
I thus do not understand what point is being made here. Is this a kind of Argument from Prestige, where evidence and method don’t matter, only how “prestigiously published” someone is? I didn’t even deny that, yet it’s still fallacious to affirm it. Evidence and logic trump cv’s every day of the week and twice on Sunday. So, let’s get back to what we are supposed to be discussing. Which is: that historians in that field tend to have inherited bad methods from their peers, tutors, and exemplars. Which I then documented.
The irony is that Bermejo-Rubio himself argues this: that the reason his theory is not more widely granted plausibility is that historians in that field are clinging to faulty methodologies, and, even when secular, still mired in confessional training or models. He is right about that. As indeed I noted in my article: his theory (or some variant of it he would grant) is actually more plausible than the pacifist models that incorrectly retain far greater popularity in scholarly opinion.
Part of the reason for that is that scholars in this field are incapable of handling criticism well and take everything personally and thus dismiss his work as denigrating theirs. It does not. Nor does mine denigrate his. It calls out errors. The errors objectively exist. So there is no way to avoid doing that, other than to play the same game as the same historians who won’t grant his conclusions plausibility. Which is precisely the game we are supposed to be getting rid of here.
We cannot correct our errors if no one calls them out. Neither they, nor he, nor me.
This must be a discussion about facts and logic. Not personal offense. And until historians learn that lesson, no progress will ever be made, other than by popularity games that we should not be playing.
As for the thing we should be doing—discussing which facts are true and which methods sound, and which not—Bermejo-Rubio’s remarks do not add anything not already answered in my original article or the associated book, or the sources cited to the point therein.
For example:
One need merely read the studies I cite on the Testimonium Flavianum to understand who is doing this correctly and where the facts actually lead. Being angry that that is the case does not change it being the case. It’s just one more bad method on display, emotion over reason.
Or notice that he keeps attributing to me the “statement that máchairai does not designate ‘swords’” (something I have never argued), which illustrates this kind of strange apologetical approach that disregards factual reality in making a point.
Likewise his continued insistence that I claimed authors have “absolute control” over their text and never make the kinds of mistakes he lists is a straw man (literally a false description of what I said), but this is already pointed out in the work he is supposed to be responding to (p. 135 in the book; and the conclusion of Fisk).
Likewise his emotional reaction to my use of the word zealot, which I explain in the book did not mean what they take it to mean (p. 133), yet he ignores that now and repeats the claim I already answered as if I never answered it. Emotion is replacing facts. Again.
When the article or book you are replying to already refutes you, you should know you are at a methodological dead end. And that’s happening here in every case. Not coming to this recognition is a problem. And it can only be overcome by the very people who are avoiding it. There isn’t anything more I can do or say than I already have to show the way.
Well counter-argued, Dr Carrier – as ever. Frankly I was appalled that this academic wasted so much space on his credentials whilst providing almost nothing in the way of specific examples or arguments from sources. Instead it’s just very crude and unedifying ‘shock and awe’; a diktat from prestige.
That’s so true Jonathan.
This is the actual and common response of believers.
They can’t seperate logic/Evidence from their romanticism and sentimentality that’s invested in their belief.
They ALWAYS throw their credentials and also all references from those who are in their flock
To be fair to Bermejo-Rubio, I have often read your arguments about the intent of authors and had the same thought, that you sometimes seem to be assuming that the author has absolute control over the text and never makes weird errors and what not. You, of course, don’t do this in practice, so I think it violates the rule of charity to bring it up without a specific pertinent example on this topic. For example, Bermejo-Rubio should watch your discussing how badly Luke cocks up the transition between Luke and Acts because he seems to not recognize that his own work is contradicting himself and how you actually conclude somewhat uniquely that there must be some kind of previous tradition or source(s) or story pattern that Luke is having to operate within and he didn’t notice that his story in his first book makes lots of events in the second book seem really weird.
I think it may help to more consistently do what you do in many other cases and say, “I am not saying authors have absolute control or unlimited skill. I am saying that, if a detail is in a work, the author clearly wanted it there, and you actually need to argue to the conclusion with specific evidence that the author has it in there despite it embarrassing to them and their intended audience or whatever else your argument is rather than other alternatives, and you haven’t done so”. Again, to be fair, you always then clarify an alternative and provide evidence for that alternative or at least indicate that the alternative is equally explanatory of the existing evidence.
That having been said, every time you point it out, I always find it insightful. Because it really is actually really important to remember about artists. It’s incredibly easy to look at something and think it feels weird, or looks like a mistake, and not understand something that the artist is doing, and you actually need to check and see if there’s something you missed, because even bad writers are usually trying to be deliberate. My favorite example is Odysseus and Telemachus slaughtering the suitors with Athena’s divine help and sanction. It feels odd to modern audiences as much as the suitors seem like dicks, but it was wholly natural to Greek audiences because the suitors had so badly violated xenia which justified the response.
And, of course, the problem with the zealot hypothesis in specific is precisely that it depends on authors hiding evidence but somehow including it, and your point (which is the same point made much more strongly to conspiracy theorists) is “If they got rid of all the details that you need for your hypothesis, why didn’t they get rid of the other clues too? You need specific evidence that they couldn’t have”.
And indeed I explicitly say this in the book (p. 135, recovering the point begun on p. 99).
In particular, my argument has always been that authors always need a reason to include something. Even if they include something by mistake, there was some reason they nevertheless included it.
So it is missing the point to think I mean that statements against interest don’t exist. My point, rather, is that if you are proposing something is a statement against interest, you still need to propose a reason that that happened to this author. Why did they include it? “It’s a statement against interest” does not answer that question. It can be a consequence of your answer. But you still need to answer that question.
And then, of course, you can’t stop there: you also need to present evidence (something other than your theory) that your theory about the author’s reasons for including something against their interest is true (or at least more—not as, but more—probable than alternative reasons they may have had). The disregard of the need for evidence, and the circular reliance on their theorizing as a substitute for that evidence, is the problem I repeatedly call out, and that they repeatedly ignore (literally: notice not a single point in their reply even mentions, much less answers, any of my examples of this).
And neither responded to almost any substantive point I made in the article. My analysis of defects of method? Never critiqued. My identification of overlooked data and how it changes conclusions? Never answered. Instead all we get is a grievance list, much of which impertinent or not even true (examples above). This is why this field is not capable of discerning the truth: it is stuck in this mindset and can’t get out.
Not just this field – it seems a general human behaviour that I would call “Animal Farm” mentality – in lack of any better term known to me.
Unrelated to those points, there is now an interesting review of Jesus: Militant or Nonexistent by Nicholas Covington (of Hume’s Apprentice) that illustrates why even when wrong it remains the only serious debate of the subject in print and well worth reading and engaging with.
Wow, I learnt a new word today. Well, an old word, last in print in the 1700s, but a new word to me.
Professor Bermejo-Rubio chides Dr Carrier for “vulnerating the most elementary rules of academic courtesy”.
https://www.oed.com/dictionary/vulnerate_v
Indeed. Because pointing out the field is awash in bad methods that are also being used here (and proving it with examples) is “wounding” the field. This is an example of placing emotions and social status above being right. Catching out the field’s errors is “doing harm.” That’s an abandonment of the entire point of scholarship as an objective discipline. Yet this is the mindset that has captured that field. On full display here.
And, of course, I would point out that it feels pretty hypocritical for Bermejo-Rubio to say exactly that when he’s made the same accusation against his colleagues. I like the dude but he seems to be falling afoul of what people in glass houses shouldn’t do.
This happens a lot with people stuck on fringe theories they have to stretch the logic to argue and can’t countenance the falsity of. In contrast, I readily admit historicity is 1 in 3. I’m not obsessed with insisting Jesus cannot exist; whereas their rhetoric is absolutist: everyone else is wrong; other interpretations are impossible (they only grant mythicism is more likely than alternatives). I also had to reject a lot of bad arguments for my position before honing its case down to what survives critique. I argue against mythicists openly and often.
They don’t follow any of these standards.
The result is that they get emotional and angry when things like this are pointed out. This happened in my (unrelated) debate with Alvaro, for example.
But note that they were always insulting and snarky (it’s all throughout the book). I just ignore that because I am not emotionally triggered by it and don’t care how they frame their rhetoric, only what the substantive argument is. So readers might get the impression I think their discourse is perfectly cordial and rational. But that’s an artifact of my stripping all of that out before finding anything to respond to, and only responding to that.
If I employ emotionalisms, it is discursive, not epistemic. I believe hiding pertinent emotions is misleading and thus not what scholars should be doing. But though I might state an argument emotionally, I never use an emotional reaction as a premise in an argument. “You insulted me, therefore you are wrong” is simply not an argument—even if the premise were true, and as we’ve seen, often it’s not.
So, really, what I think you may be observing is them not doing what I do, but the opposite. It’s all the same methodological palate: emotion before reason.
An interesting read.
On response from Fernando Bermejo-Rubio
1) I do have to agree with Fernando somewhat. Carrier often is incredibly harsh with his critics, and leaves little room for further dispute. As someone who reads his articles more regularly, this is a slight misinterpretation. Carrier went relatively soft in his disagreements. This is probably difficult to see if one is only reading one response, and would be more widely informed by reading his take on true apologist rhetoric. Though again, Carrier does come off pretty harsh in his replies to those with dissenting interpretations of the historical data.
2) I’m not an academic, so I can’t truly understand the nuance of this concern. In the original article, I took “biblical scholar” as a positive. Apologists often have degrees in tangential fields to the bible, and try to sidestep non-expertise in the relevant area. I accept that Fernando has good reason to make this distinction, and feel thoroughly justified by this portion that he is well-equipped to parse the data and draw academically reasonable conclusions from that data.
3) A confusing addition to me (again, as a non-academic who admittedly knows very little of the people cited). That smart people also believed a particular hypothesis is interesting, but not entirely useful. This isn’t to say their contributions aren’t important, only that the arguments stand or fall on their evidence rather than the employer of said arguments.
4) I’ve mentioned above that yes, Carrier can be downright vicious in his responses. I often find myself skipping over the hot frustration he expresses in many of his articles. It’s perfectly reasonable to feel slighted.
5) I think every reader here is aware that mythicism is not the consensus or even mainstream view of historians. Carrier himself has addressed the “you may as well deny the existence of pretty much everyone in the ancient world” response often. There are numerous responses to Christian apologists making that claim, citing exactly WHY Jesus is so different from other ancient people (and indeed why some ancient people SHOULD be considered less firmly established as historical).
6) Accepted. The Testimonium Flavianum is not a core point in your case even if some true passage is embedded under the surface.
7) I simply accept that both sides are satisfied with their data on this point. Carrier does not delve into the evidence itself in his response, and neither does Fernando. This is a base question of whether the argument from silence is fallacious or not.
8) This is basically the same contention as #5. Mythicism is not mainstream. Ockham’s razor states one should not multiply entities unnecessarily in an explanation. Carrier’s whole point is that an historical Jesus is unnecessary at least, and unlikely at best. Use of Ockham’s razor would need to be justified on either side of the debate.
9) I think even Fernando would agree that this form of argument is extremely popular among apologists, and based on other reviews of the literature is far more likely to be found in new testament studies than other areas of history. I highly suspect that he would strongly push back against it’s usage in popular forms (i.e. how embarrassing it would be for women to find be the first to see the resurrected Jesus). Simply saying this is not only used by historical hucksters is not itself a reply to whether or not the argument’s use was appropriate.
10) Is it not also important to point out that all documents we have from the New Testament are not simply personal recordings of history? Ignoring those written by committee, we directly see gospels changing the stories of their source material to suit a particular message. I’m not going to pretend that absolutely nothing counter-discursive made it in, but isn’t the evidence far more in favor of the the idea that the writers were very pointedly including/redacting information to suit their preferences?
11) In fairness to both sides, the arguments rely upon the evidence, not who made them. To say an objection is false because some or all of it comes from a verifiably biased source does not evince it’s falsehood. It’s fair to point out Carrier does have a dog in this fight, but it also feels like poisoning the well.
12) Having not read the book itself, only seeing the outcomes here, I can’t say either way. Fernando may be right. And there is perhaps a more robust historical definition for zealot that clearly delineates one from a militant. In common use, it is difficult to understand a religious militant that is not also a zealot.
13) Fernando and Carrier are both philosophers beyond my level. At a more modest level of understanding, this DOES make sense to me. Consider an argument based on 10 particular data points. If one does not find the argument convincing, it seems reasonable to point out where 1 point is false and 5 are ambiguous. And it may be equally reasonable to point out that even without the false data point, the overall conclusion is far more well substantiated than similar arguments where half the points are false or the vast majority are ambiguous.
14) Going back to points #1 and #4. Carrier has made sweeping statements before about the complete incompetency of his interlocutors before. Sometimes this seems warranted (see most apologists), other times it feels hyperbolic. I don’t think it unreasonable to feel like Carrier is taking an unwarranted high ground in all of this. Indeed, I think both sides would need to feel that way to argue with any conviction.
On response from Franco Tommasi
A fair reply, I guess. If that word exclusively means political rebels, then it’s a great point. I’m no scholar, so I can only look it up in freely available greek dictionaries. It does not seem to exclusively have that meaning, which case I would assume (as a non-scholar) that then the meaning is context dependent.
1) To care about wording rather than substance is to replace reason with emotion. That is precisely not what scholars pursuing an objective methodology should be doing. And yet my discourse is not that different from theirs. Their insults and disdain are just more florid and couched. All I am doing is speaking more plainly. Which ought to be the virtue we all strive for, not complain about.
2) What I think happened I suspect is less obvious to people who mistakenly assume the discourse here is rational. But what I did was point out the entire field is awash in defective methods, and proved it. Instead of listening to that critique and revising that broken methodology (or even proving me wrong), Bermejo-Rubio (like so many of his peers) took personal offense and assumed I was attacking him as an individual. Then he ignored everything we are supposed to be talking about to drunk-walk a hundreds-word chest-pump. Emotion before reason. Getting nowhere.
…
6) The issue I am bringing to the fore here is not that this is relevant. The TF has no logical weight as evidence for Jesus, and no scholar should still be clinging to such an idea by now. Rather, the issue I am foregrounding is that, whether a trivial side point or not, their methods here are not logical and need to be purged from all historical fields. They do not see it that way, because they emotionally “need” a militant Jesus, and so they “must” see one in the TF; for them it’s less about historicity and more about clinging to their pet theory. Emotion keeps blinding them to literally everything I say, and everything said in every peer reviewed study I cite against them. It’s talking to a wall at this point. And there just isn’t anything more I can do than just call it at this point.
7) The reality here is as nuanced as I explain in the book. The problem is that they ignore the nuanced reality, and replace it with black-and-white hyperbole. The argument from embarrassment (which I formally reclassify more broadly in Proving History as statement against interest, because that is what it is called in federal rules of evidence) is not out of court; rather, it must meet a number of evidential conditions to apply. They ignore all this and just “declare” things embarrassing and then “assert” that’s why something is in the text (this is what everyone in their field does, as every critic of this criterion has said in every peer reviewed study of it, as I cite in PH). But that’s illogical. You need to prove your theory (whatever it is) explains the evidence better (better, not as well as—better) than alternatives. Instead of doung that they just use their theory to circularly decide what is embarrassing (or “against interest” in whatever manner), and then use that result to prove their theory. This circular mode of argument simply has to stop. Every Jesus historian is doing it. And they are all wrong. They won’t listen. So I get louder. Then they complain about the noise. Emotion replaces reason. Getting nowhere.
…
12) Yes, you need to read the book. Their mistaking my (lower case) zealot (as in, “a zealous” or “militant” person) for what they mean by (upper case) Zealot (as in, an actual armed member of the Zealot sect) is the same kind of thing as mistaking my statement of their competence (“noted biblical scholar”) as a slander: they are seeing negative things in what I say that don’t exist and are in fact the opposite of what I said. Thus emotionally triggered, they see red, and rage-screed for hundreds of words. When if they realized they misread me, they’d realize they should have calmed down and spent their time (and word count) actually addressing my arguments. I simply never said what they aver here. I never used zealot as a slander, but as a synonym for militant. But they are triggered by code words in some fashion I have no code book for so I could not know what bizarre loops they’d throw themselves in over a nonexistent sleight. And this is all a waste of time. It has fuck all to do with what we are supposed to be discussing. Emotion overrides reason. Getting nowhere.
…
14) Note that I think this is a conflation other people are making, and then imputing to me. I have never once ever called Bermejo-Rubio (or even Tommasi!) incompetent. I documented that they use methods embraced by the entire field that are illogical. And I don’t just assert this. I prove it (as have others; this isn’t just me they are ignoring). They then “hear” this as calling them incompetent. But that’s a doom loop. If every critique of their methods is a slander on their competence, when will they ever correct their methods? They have locked their field out of any possible progress this way. Its errors can never be admitted, and thus never corrected, and so it goes on this way, being illogical. All because of taking a critique of a method as a personal attack. This is unacceptable. But I can only lead a horse to water. I can’t make it drink. On this point see the other exchange here.
By contrast, there are people I have called incompetent—but only when I can document that as actually being the case. I also make distinctions between incompetence generally (having no credentials) and incompetence selectively (laziness). But documenting that scholars all use, because they are all encouraged or taught to use, bad methods is the opposite of accusing someone of incompetence. A fully competent person can be expected to use bad methods endorsed by an entire field. The problem in that case is the field, not any individual’s competence.
Hence, acting emotionally and ignoring arguments and reason and evidence does not mean you can’t reason or argue or research or critique competently; it means, for whatever reason, you aren’t (in this particular case). I have diagnosed the reason in this case as that they have been misled by their field. They are victims. Not perpetrators. If they then replace reason with emotion so as never to realize that this has happened, that’s on them; but it still isn’t a product of their having a bogus PhD or being “unable” to do things well because they lack field-accepted training or experience.
So the folly is in conflating “the methods your field taught you are wrong” as “you are incompetent.” If scholars keep acting like that, they can never discover any flaws in their methods and can never correct them and make progress. But the very stubbornness here, of being emotionally triggered and thus blanking on the lesson, is also something taught to them by their field (directly and by examples). This is a field-wide flaw.
The only further clarification I feel the need to add here is in my comments about how you (Dr. Carrier) can be antagonistic towards those you disagree with. For one point, I don’t think you called either man here incompetent. You’ve done so to others, but I’d say even then you’ll differentiate someone who is actively employing incompetence (most apologists) vs someone who is caught up in poor methodology (which is still a form of incompetence). As I mentioned initially, your article was actually quite soft compared to others, so Fernando dragging back to that rhetoric multiple times wasn’t making much of a case.
Second, when I say that it’s reasonable to feel slighted or attacked, that’s more an acceptance of human nature. Nobody likes getting called out, even if that call out is correct. I get why Fernando feels so upset about all of this. I’m NOT saying it’s rational (and I see now how using the word “reasonable” was unhelpful). I’m pointing more to the fact that a visceral reaction is predictable and understandable. To your (Dr. Carrier) point, we should strive to be bigger than that.
I don’t think this whole response from Fernando held much substance. You can see my own comments on each section. There’s little to dig into, and I disagree with much that gave enough to chew on. This felt more like an airing of grievances, which is still interesting in its own way.
I pretty much concur.
In general, a charge like “incompetent” has to be proved, with evidence. But also, it’s situational. A person can be competent generally but act incompetently in a specific case.
Think of a famous Christian biolochemist who is competent at biochemistry but then makes weirdly incompetent arguments for God from biochemistry—e.g. Michael Behe.
People often “drop” their skills in a particular case and hose it. Bart Ehrman is a perfect example: his peer reviewed studies are very competent, indeed even essential reading in the field; yet his half-assed book on mythicism dropped all his skills and methods to produce a travesty of incompetence, but not because he is incompetent, but because he chose to be when triggered, and phoned it in. This likewise happened to M. David Litwa, who is an entirely competent historian, until he chooses not to be, and applies none of his skills and knowledge to an issue, and just phones it in instead, as if he were an amateur.
But those situations aren’t what I have described here.
Someone who is using bad methods because those are the methods their academic field teaches and embraces as “what a competent academic does” are neither of these kinds of people. They are victims, not perps. The fault is with the field as a whole and how it encourages, pressures, exemplifies, and vets. Hence that is what I criticized, and documented with evidence: I made it about the field, not Bermejo-Rubio.
Taking an attack on your field of study personally is part of the problem because that’s what the field indeed encourages, even teaches by example; yet that behavior is obviously designed to prevent progress and learning—and hence change. That’s the point of it. This is a core defect of biblical studies as an academic field.
Bermejo-Rubio claims he is immune to this because he is an outsider. But he’s not. All his studies, all his papers, all his training are in biblical studies, even if it’s not in each case “called” that. He is not like me, who studied ancient Roman history under an outsider and then turned that skillset on Christian history. His entire background, degrees and cv, are in the history of Christianity. Who do you think has captured that field and controls it? Outsiders? Obviously not.
And until insiders realize this, they will remain trapped in this hall of mirrors—a hall of mirrors specifically built to trap them.
But in this case all I can do is document that it has happened. Bermejo-Rubio chose to ignore all that documentation and simply complain of the comparison. But claiming to be immune to a thing because you are an outsider, even were the premise true, can’t work when it was just demonstrated you are using defective insider methods. If you want to claim you didn’t do that, you have to actually address the evidence you did that. Bermejo-Rubio chose to ignore all that evidence, and never respond to it. Instead, he tiraded about personal grievance. Which is itself a methodological error typical of the very field that has captured him.
Note that Tommasi’s remark makes more sense after you read the book. You seem confused, justifiably, because this is like an inside joke.
The actual word means, just, “brigand.” It is a generic word for anyone lawlessly effecting ends by violence. It does not distinguish between brigands serving a rebellion and mere bandits robbing people for money. Both are called “brigands.”
I discuss issues of translation methodology in From Homer to Frontinus: Biased Translation Is Not Unique to Biblical Studies but this adds an example:
Like most words, the actual intent of the word depends on context. If I tell you a story about “brigands” contracted by the King of England to subvert the French government, and you translate it to a friend who speaks, say, Spanish, you might colloquially say (albeit in Spanish) “the king paid men to start a rebellion,” and he might then turn to his friend and say, “the king hired rebels.” None of these statements is incorrect, per se. Conversely, if I tell you a story about “brigands” who decided to haunt the hills and loot caravans for a living, it would never occur to you to describe them to anyone as “rebels.” Because I have given you a different context.
Hence I do personally think a literal translation would avoid translational inference and just translate both occasions as “brigand,” and let the reader understand in what sense from the context. Since brigand can mean either robber or rebel. But I can’t object to the NIV translators putting the obvious context into their chosen word in translation, either. But then, I can read the Greek, so I am not misled by that. And it is a correct capture of the contextual sense.
To illustrate my point, note that even the Berean Literal Bible fails to do this right, when it has Jesus say “Are you come out with swords and clubs as against a robber…? Every day I was with you in the temple teaching, and you did not seize Me.” Here “robber” mis-presumes (against context) what Jesus means. There is no coherence between his next sentence and that. Why would Jesus say “robber” here when clearly he means “rebel”? He is not talking about them thinking he’s looking for loot. He is talking about them thinking he is leading a rebellion.
It would be different if Mark had him say, “Are you come out with swords and clubs as against a robber…? I didn’t take any of the coins I overturned in the temple!” Then the context would be right.
But in the NIV, it has “They crucified two rebels with him, one on his right and one on his left,” which commits the same mistake as the BLB: no context establishes that is the intended sense there. The BLB keeps the sense as “robbers,” which is just as presumptuous.
“Brigands” would be better in both cases. But whatever. In the book I glossed this as “thieves or wrongdoers” leaving the sense open (as some did, e.g. Luke literally puts “wrongdoers” in place of “brigands” at the cross; whereas none, not even Mark, uses known words for rebels or subversives: Jesus: Militant, p. 140).
Note that I used the NIV in my fisk because it would not contend with their position about this word, so they would not be distracted by that (irrelevant point) and miss my (actual) point that Jesus explains why an armed mob comes to get him: scripture said they had to; which rules out “because Mark wanted to conceal Jesus was a militant and just forgot to leave out the army advancing on him, therefore this all really happened.” Tommasi ironically missed my actual point and got distracted by my conceding the irrelevant one. Which demonstrates how obsession with his thesis is blinding him to everything I actually said.
Thank you for that breakdown, btw. I assumed I was missing something as Franco’s response seemed trivially true at best. Why translate a word one way in a certain passage, and another way in a different passage? Well, I’d guess because there’s different context for each. I appreciate the more thorough explanation.
A rather trivial point, but Bermejo-Rubio’s quote of Meggitt in his section 5 demonstrates an abject failure of reason on both their parts:
“To deny his existence based on the absence of such [non-Christian] evidence, even if that were the case, has problematic implications; you may as well deny the existence of pretty much everyone in the ancient world.”
That either of these people – and especially FB-R – think that you make this argument is simply flabbergasting.
Indeed. That is among the things I note that are already refuted in the material they are responding to.
I never make that argument. Not in our debate. Not in my fisk. Not in my study. Indeed in my study I repudiate that argument (OHJ, Ch. 8, conclusion).
So this is how it always goes.
They ignore the arguments I actually make. They claim I made different arguments instead. They rebut only those. And then claim I am the one being ridiculous.
How many times can scholars keep doing this and not realize their methodology is bankrupt?
How long until the general public realizes that?
Then everyone will see the entire industry as a joke.
But then the industry’s response will be “How dare you. We have massive cv’s.”
This is a doom spiral. I do not see how they can escape their own folly here. But I have told them how they could, more times than I can count.
What can I do but drink and laugh-slash-cry at this point?
The following is excerpted from https://livelovefruit.com/milk-and-mucus-production/
I have no intention to discuss dairy products and their nutritive properties. But the comments on bias in research are relevant to the question raised as to whether professors have vested interests in historicity and whether Dr. Carrier has the opposite.
I remember that he said he began his research at the request of others, while himself at that time had the view that Jesus was not divine but at least a very good man. So he felt he was not biased against historicity. But since then he has written many books and debated historicity.
Both sides to the debate may have vested interests which themselves they would find difficult to evaluate as sources of possible bias in their beliefs.
[ Web article excerpts start below]
Indeed, that’s why I am obsessed with controlling for any biases, rather than pretending they don’t exist (my methodology uses wide margins of error and comes to a conclusion of a fairly decent probability against myself). This is one of my central points here: that we cannot just cite intuitions, nor use our theories as circular arguments; we need to ground what we conclude in identifiable objective facts.
Though to be clear, my biases are not that great here (I have no particular interest in Jesus not existing, and would have been happy to go on defending that as I used to, if the evidence had held up), I am on this point the same as Bermejo-Rubio, as he has no particular interest either, except in his pet theory (e.g. he is not a Christian nor jockeying to maintain a consensus to please his peers or keep his job).
So the question becomes not who has what bias, but who is using a logically reliable method, and who is relying on a fallacious one (and, of course, whose premises are factually true or not). So you always have to go back to that.
Yes. One can do one’s best to work around questions of bias by logic and fact-checking, while allowing that one’s own biases may influence the result of one’s investigation. One could form what one hopes is a somewhat unbiased judgement that a “fact” could be true to an estimated approximate level of confidence. Do I read you correctly?
Yes.
Bias channels through feelings and intuitions. It can be checked against objective reality and logical formulae because those are immune to feelings and intuitions. That is in fact why the Greeks invented them: precisely as a check against “opinions, feelings, and assertions.”
Logic vetting works because when an argument is logical (as in, “not fallacious,” hence the point of identifying fallacies so as to purge them), its conclusion cannot be false, if its premises are true. So your attention can then turn to the premises. This is what makes logic useful.
Then you need to anchor the resulting premises in objective empirical facts (and again, without fallacy). Because, again, that cannot have happened (or not frequently happen) unless there is something objectively true to the premise, and so then (and only then) you have confirmed that your “feelings, intuitions, opinions” are in that case correct: you have backed them with an objective anchor.
This is why historians need to be able to explain (and thus check) the logic of their argument, and ground each resulting premise in evidence, and not just assertions or personal feelings. And this is also why historians more interested in defending a belief rather than finding out if it is true or false will abuse this process; and their field may even have trained them to do this, because the field as a whole is more interested in defending beliefs than finding the truth.
A historian’s intuition, for example, can be right more often than a non-historian because intuition is an experience-based skill: it gets things right the more empirically informed it is, and historians spend years absorbing entire ranges of data about the world, literature, and so on. But it is not entirely reliable even in the hands of the greatest expert (countless examples prove this). So it always has to be checked and thus vindicated by evidence independent of the intuition or any other assumptions. Intuition is thus a heuristic (an abductive procedure), not a method (a deductive or inductive procedure; deduction must be logical, not intuitive, and induction must be probabilistic and thus mathematico-empirical, not, again, “intuitive”).
Hence we get methodologies of error (like “we need evidence for our premises; so we will cherry-pick evidence supporting it, and leave out evidence that undermines it”) which can only be caught out by fallacy detection, hence logics (e.g. that method has been catalogued by the science of logics as “cherry picking” which activates “confirmation bias”; so to control for the latter, you have to control for the former), and objective empiricism, hence fact-checking (e.g. we know, objectively, that that method can be refuted and thus cancelled by searching for any pertinent omitted evidence and using an objective, i.e. logical, procedure to calculate its effect on the previously-biased conclusion).
The better you do this (and the better you can confirm you did it, hence the need of making logics and evidence collection transparent), the lower the probability that you will be wrong. Conversely, the less you do it, the higher the probability that you will be wrong.
For more see The Scary Truth about Critical Thinking and its breadcrumbs.
Hi Dr Carrier, what are your thoughts on Dr Gad Barnea’s claims that “Gnosticism” was Yahwism (not Christianity nor Judaism) and Yahwism was a very popular religion in the Roman Empire?
I am not familiar with that.
But, in general, (1) Gnosticism didn’t exist and (2) there may have been Yahwist Canaanites still around (it won’t have been so-called, so this would have to be a theoretical interpretation of something else, e.g. of “God Most High” cult) but that can have nothing to do with Jesus cults (which explicitly identify themselves as recent Jesus-revelation crucifixionists).
Dr Barnea says that amulets, curse texts and magical paraphernalia in the name of YHWH occur all over the Roman empire. He claims that this implies that Yahwism was more popular than Christianity and Judaism in the Roman Empire. See this video featuring Dr Barnea: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Aveat8qU7z0&pp=ygUKR2FkIGJhcm5lYQ%3D%3D from time 50:44 to 55:04 where he talks about this.
I hope they have more of an argument than that. That wizards “co-opt” existing deities in their art is well-established. It does not mean they are referencing an existing cult separate from Judaism when they do that.
For example, Jesus also starts showing up in magic. Does that mean wizards were worshiping Jesus or that Jesus must have had a cult around him other than Christianity? No. It means Jesus was a popular god people were talking about, and wizards chase the popular market and thus include popular gods in their spells.
This is textbook appropriation (indeed, for money); not evidence of a lost religion.
I would have sooner thought his evidence was the kind of reverent inscriptions (not commercial market spellcasting) as document the Hypsistarians, around which there is indeed debate who those people are, and one theory is, a lost Yahwist cult (although there are also arguments against that; and I have not surveyed every argument so as to have any definite opinion here).
I especially like his myopic criticism of you that Nonexistent Jesus isn’t valid because it isn’t supported by scholarly consensus when their Militant Jesus is even less supported by scholarly consensus. Is he that self-absorbed?
Still, I have a question about why Jesus needs swords in the Gospels. This seems to be their strongest argument. Why does Jesus say to sell your cloak and buy a sword in Luke 22:36 or that he has come to bring a sword in Matt.10:34? I have heard arguments, probably from apologists, that Jesus is using the swords as a metaphor. That doesn’t seem to ring true. Jesus is usually thought of as the Prince of Peace as in blessed are the peacemakers of Matt. 5:9 and the peace of Christ in other places. What is with the swords?
A point I made, too. But, yeah. It’s an odd rock to throw in his glass house.
And oh, the swords! Indeed, in my fisk I linked to my article on this (and I have a more detailed, scholarly treatment in my forthcoming book):
Like, Can You Rebel Against Rome with Only Two Swords?
Jesus of Nazareth is not an historical figure but an historical composite.
The clear-eyed, unsentimental analysis by scholars such as Dr. Carrier is to show that “Jesus Christ” was originally a purely spiritual figure worshipped by a splinter cult, one probably begun by “Peter” and enlraged somewhat by “Paul” (as the apostle to the gentiles).
This cult was so tiny and so obscure that Flavius Josephus never noticed them, despite cataloguing all sorts of minor figures in his comprehensive Hebrew histories. Nor did Suetonius or Tacitus come across them in their acounts (albeit later Christian propagandists altered their texts so that a Jewish militant faction, called “Chrestians”, could be recast as ersatz Christian martyrs).
Where I disagree with Dr Carrier – for what my opinion is worth as a non-scholar, whose lone ‘credential’ is to have read a load of scholastic works for 40 years – is that I think Josephus created a polemical caricature out of Jesus Ben Ananias, who was crushed by the boulder launched by a Roman catapult. That behind this cartoonish, pesty prophet as portrayed by an author who also exaggerated the mass martyrdom of Masada, is, broadly speaking, Albert Schweitzer’s “Apocalypse Now” Jesus.
The Janus-Jesus of “Mark’s” Gospel I believe was composed out of the ashes of Generalissimo Bar Kokhba’s failed rebellion in the mid-Second Century A.D. One half is the Jesus who was freed by the Roman governor (Albinus) and later chose to die in the Roman siege of Jerusalem, circa 70 A.D., in order to bring about the cosmic end-times (Jehova’s Temple being systematically razed into fiery rubble certainly must have looked like the end of the world). What Josephus leaves out is that this Jesus also taught through parables, was responsible for [psychosomatic] healings, travelled platonically and pacifically with women, and preached the imminent coming of the “Kingdom of God”. The other half of “Mark” was the metaphysical “Lord” who had been martyred below the Moon, defeated Satan and conquered death in the heavenly regions to forever free us from the wages of sin.
In the 130’s, “Mark” fused together the sky-messiah of Peter/Paul, founded in the 30’s, with the earthly Jesus from the 60’s – who likely was an inspiring, loving, heroic if tragically mistaken figure. As Dennis MacDonald has incisively shown via a myriad of examples; the glue applied to fuse and intertwine the two movements was Homer. This explains how any Jewish people could possibly have accepted a pagan, anthropomorphic blaspheme: God walking around as a man? Answer: they didn’t. Instead the “Jesus Christ” of the Second Century was created by Christian, ex-pagan gentiles who cherry-picked what they wanted from Judaism.
That’s my amateur, two-cents anyway….
I agree Josephus is often constructing tales rather than reporting them (his “cannibal Mary” is a classic case, though he even admits so by calling it a “myth,” a more on-point example is that modern scholars doubt his citation of witnesses to Masada and Gamala and thus suspect those entire accounts as fabricated; and other examples). But the evidence for Jesus ben Ananias is not from Mark to Josephus but from Josephus to Mark (Mark has all the distinctive features of the Josephus tale, while Josephus has none of the distinctive features of Mark’s tale, which signals direction of borrowing).
I also can’t believe Mark is responding to Bar Kochba (which would rule out Josephus responding to Mark anyway), because Mark then contains no relevant expectancies. Mark has many passages explaining why the world didn’t end despite the destruction of the temple (Mark 13; the fig tree; etc.), a concern that only existed in the first century. It was old news sixty years later (then more than an entire average human lifetime), and thus not something Mark would feel a need to desperately respond to then; he would instead need to explain why it remained a ruin for sixty years and what Bar Kochba would succeed or fail to do about it.
And Mark solves the temple problem by having Jesus move the apocalypse to the “end” of his generation, a move that could not work mid-second century (and thus would not even be contemplated, as it would immediately be a failed prophecy). We see this in John, whose final redactor “fixed” this, when it was then clear (indeed now by mid-second century) that Mark’s retcon also failed to come true, by having Jesus imply he could keep that last member of his generation alive however long he wanted (in John 21). So John is writing then. Not Mark. He is fixing Mark’s first-century fix. Mark also predates Luke and thus Marcion and thus the Second War. And Mark knows the Wars of Josephus but not the Antiquities (unlike Luke, which knows the Antiquities). And so on.
There basically is no way to get Mark to be writing at the time of the Second War. All evidence indicates he is a late first century writer, still expecting the world to end before the second century, yet needing to explain a fairly recent problem created by the destruction of the temple in the First War not launching that apocalypse.
Nevertheless, there is a vanguard of mainstream scholars arguing something close to your position now. I just don’t see any logical or evidential basis for it.
Dear Dr Carrier
Thank-you so much for taking the time to anaylse my amateur theory, and your counter-argument is compelling, no surprise. It is such a thrill that you have engaged with me – well for me, anyhow, from your point of view I can appreciate how tiresome are the enthusiasms of the non-scholastic.
Therefore, I promise to launch one more salvo from the other side of the planet (Australia) and leave it at that.
I counter-counter-argue that the Gospels, starting with Mark, were composed in the 2nd Century. Perhaps an indication of this later dating is the reference to the “abomination” befouling the Temple Mt, which did not happen in the First Century (because Caligula was assassinated) but it did happen after the Second Revolt.
The length of time being so much greater makes sense – at least to me, for what that is worth – for gentile, ex-pagans influenced by a tiny Jewish sect who were morphing into a post-Hebrew religion. “Mathew” and “Luke” are just around the corner to amplify Jesus-Odysseus as a miraculously born Hercules/Romulus, and so on.
Furthermore, Mark’s focus on the Destruction of the Temple in the late 1st Century does make sense in the mid-2nd century if half the Jesus story he was rewriting was known to have been about a brave martyr-prophet who was killed in that earlier conflagration.
Comparably the mythical substrata about “James the Just” being killed and the Temple falling as a direct consequence and comeuppance for the Sadducess who supposedly executed “Christ’s brother” is, I think, a scrambled egg version of Jesus Ben Annaias and his heroic demise in the ruins of Jerusalem.
Yet I can see why a modern scholar could still argue that Mark’s patchwork quilt of myth and propaganda – to neutralise the antipathy towards Jews felt by gentile Romans in the aftermath of Bar Kochba’s horrorshow – is, nonetheless, simply lifted from Josephus; e.g. even if it is composed in the 2nd Century, Mark could have just plagarised the trial of the oddball Jesus Ben Ananias and refashioned it according to his Christology.
Nontheless, I remain enamoured of the notion that Mark’s Jesus – the parables; mixing with women, the poor, the sick; preaching impending doom – are what Josephus left out about Jesus Ben Annias (the elements conspiculously absent from the Epistles). That this is the Historical Jesus, specifically the kernel of Schweitzer’s Ubermensch.
And as I wrote before, Mark (or the Marcan community) was a “Christian” who followed the celestial Lord of Peter and Paul. But perhaps due to an overlap between this faction and another faction/church, one that revered the teachings of Jesus Ben Annias, these two quite seprate messianic strains – but finding common cause over being predominantly gentiles harbouring apocalyptic hopes? – were fused together by Mark (with Homer as the bridge).
Why do I persist? For the non-scholastic reason that Albinus acquitted Jesus, yet the latter was killed by the Romans, broadly speaking, later on. In another chapter, Jospehus claims that Albinus was notoriously venal; he may have let off this Jesus because wealthy (gentile?) patrons stepped forward and paid off the procurator, e.g. business as usual.
Thanks again, it means a lot to me.
As I cited some experts also do (so you are not out in left field here). I’m just explaining why I don’t buy it.
Read the context (and the verse it cites: Dan 9:27 and 11:31): Mark means the temple is still standing when that happens, so he can’t be talking about a time when no temple existed.
Mark 13 says the temple will be destroyed; that will be a time of distress to flee to the mountains in; and only some “unknown” time “after” that will the end come (sometime at the end of his generation). So the abomination is the Roman defiling of the inner sanctum (Talmudic legend said it was Titus having intercourse with a harlot on top of an open Torah scroll in the inner sanctum; and looting it—Josephus’s tale that the loot was reverently taken out of the sanctum by a priest on an embassy deal to Titus is almost certainly an apologetic contrivance).
In any event, whatever is meant, the abomination has to immediately arise when the temple sacrifices ceased. That means it has to occur in 70 AD. Because that is what Mark’s cited prophecy said, and he says to pay attention to what the prophecy said.
Paul indicates pagans had been flooding the church across three continents for an entire average adult lifetime before the Gospels were written. So no “extra” time was needed for this.
Indeed that’s why the first Gospel written is by a pagan-educated Pauline, to try and capitalize on the fall of Judea (right when the Jewish-Christian market was taking a hit for ignominy).
The Jewish Christians who tried to fix that by Judaizing Mark into Matthew actually removed or downplayed its pagan literary elements (although they are still Hellenized Jews, writing in educated Greek and thus fully aware of pagan literary tropes and forms).
Luke-Acts then comes early second century to try and resolve that dispute with a “perfected” text that allows both sects but prioritizes the Gentiles. And that’s when Jewish Christians almost don’t even exist anymore, e.g. Pliny the Younger didn’t even meet one in his account, and thus isn’t even aware the religion was Jewish.
John (our final redaction at least) is early-mid second century.
I don’t think you understand my point then. Mark’s principal problem is dealing with the lost temple (the fig tree narrative is entirely an apologetic for why God let that happen; the apocalypse chapter is entirely about fitting that event into the prophecy that the end was supposed to come in Paul’s day but didn’t).
That wasn’t a problem any more by 140 AD as everyone then alive was dead by then. The problem had been long forgotten by then. So there was no temple destruction to refer people to as starting the apocalyptic clock. Mark can only do that if he is writing when he could still expect the end to come within a decade or two of the temple’s destruction, not a whole generation or two later. His solve then doesn’t work. That is why he can’t be proposing this solve in the 2nd century. He can only be proposing it in the 1st.
Morreover, not only is Mark trying yo fit the temple destruction into a same-generation clock that rescues Jesus from being a false prophet, and thus solve a recent new theological problem that that destruction created, but he doesn’t bring in anything pertaining to the situation of Bar Kochba. Mark doesn’t know the temple would remain a ruin for three generations, not one, or anything about the circumstances causing Bar Kochba’s rise or his goals or predicting anything about its success or failure. There is no placement of the apocalyptic clock around that. Only the temple’s fall. That squarely puts Mark in the 1st century.
That’s not in the Gospels. That appears in Hegesippus (c. 200 AD), who is probably quoting a lost Acts of James, which we cannot date, but since its content betrays a complete ignorance of actual temple and legal policy in the time of Jesus or Paul, it was clearly written by a late fantasist with no knowledge pertinent to what we are talking about here (probably of the same generation as Hegesippus, so, a generation after the Bar Kochba revolt).
And I don’t see any parallels to the Ben Ananias story; compare the case made by Weeden and Evans (OHJ, 249) for what actual evidence of mimesis there looks like. But even if it were somehow built out of that, Josephus existed to do that with then, so that wouldn’t help here. By analogy, the Western redactor of Acts knew Acts used the Antiquities and added material based on it later. So people went on using Josephus for stuff like this for quite a while.
The War meanwhile was written c. 76. So Mark could have used it before even 80.
Note there are no teachings of ben Ananias. The entire point of his story is that he taught nothing. He simply repeated the same mad phrase over and over.
So we have no basis to tie any such teachings in anywhere else. We cannot use as premises facts that don’t exist.
By contrast, Mark is pretty much entirely explicable as reifying the Epistles of Paul, and inventing literary chreai to meet the moment (of the aftermath of the war and how that changed the needs and market dynamics of Christian communities).
And we can know that because we actually have the teachings to show it by.
It makes perfect sense that someone in the generation after Paul would create a mythology to market Paul’s teachings by, so as to capitalize on a recent catastrophic scramble of religious politics in the Western world that advanced Paul’s ulterior agenda to de-Judaize the church.
Thank-you Dr Carrier for engaging in this debate. Any disinterested person reading my ‘theory’ and your counters would – no surprise – award the bout to you, sir. My only residue of a position (more of a dreg) is that “Catapult Jesus”, as opposed to the celestial “Crucified Jesus”, is the only mention – outside of the New Testament – of a semi-famous historical figure who could possibly have been mythologised into becoming “Jesus of Nazareth” (and the judicious Albinus merged with the thuggish Pilate). And, that are significant differences between Paul and Mark, especially about women, to suggest the intrusion of an earthly figure who was merged with the Sky-Christ (even if Mark was composed, as you persuasively argue, at the end of the 1st Century).
Per my other query, I have no idea what you mean by “differences between Paul and Mark, especially about women.”
One caveat, Dr. Carrier;
In my fusion supposition “Mark” is combining the stories of Jesus Ben Ananias and Jesus-crucified-in-the-sky and then backdating/telescoping all of those events into the 30’s of the 1st Century. Ergo, Mark can only allude to the future destruction of the Temple as he is aligning the origins of his new, hybrid story with when Peter and Paul launched their “Messiah in Outer Space”. Hence the gospel writer cannot make reference to the Second Revolt – instead his composite Heavenly-Jesus-on-earth interact with figures from that earlier era: Pontius Pilate, The Baptist, Herod Antipas, Caiphais, et al. Hence the need for the fig tree motif.
Also, when you stop and think about it the story of Jesus Ben Ananias as told by Josephus really makes no sense.
A manic pest who repeats the same prophecy for several years is clearly addled in his mind, which would take all of five minutes for a child to recognise. Were the High Priests really so fanatical and stupid as not to know a harmless madman when they encountered one in need of care and compassion? Why does Albinus need to bring such a character to trial, when he is clearly deranged and, what’s more, is acquitted on that very basis (after the poor man has been brutally flogged)?
That is why I think that, as with other known examples, Josephus has streamlined the data about Jesus Ben Ananias to make it more like Jeremiah; he exaggerates how mad was this madman. The resulting polemic is the homeless wretch interminably spouting his single prophecy, yet events proving him to be laser-beam accurate – and thus the loser who should have been heeded by an elite too blinkered by their own riches and prestige.
Behind the polemic is, I think, the teachings about the coming Kingdom (plus parables and ‘miracles’); the imminent arrival of the cosmic apocalypse which Jesus Ben Ananias plans to trigger by having himself executed by the Roman state (a plan that failed in real life but succeeds in Mark’s fiction, at least the execution part). Consider how much details like that – about a charismatic fantasist with, if not disciples then certainly a free-floating entourage – would totally ruin the moral of Josephus’ “gotcha” story. Because of course nobody, Hebrew or Gentile, would or should pay heed to such an embarrassing figure who thinks the entire world is about to end next Thursday – a figure obviously consumed by delusions of grandiosity if he really thinks he is Daniel’s “Son of Man” – and so Josephus aurbrushed all of that out leavin us with his rather implausible caricature.
Much neater and simpler from Josephus’ point of view to boil it down to just a prophecy about the Temple’s destruction by a fixated transient, one without teachings or followers – a voice crying in an [urban] wilderness (interestingly, Josephus foreshadows his account of the Fall of Jerusalem by mentioning various rustics allegedly experiencing apocalyptic visions of great armies and forces ominously clashing in the sky. Was this a bit of data the writer has carefully detached from the Jesus of the 60’s?)
Otherwise, I cannot see Mark just transposing the Epistles into the sayings and actions of a human[oid] character for his Gospel-According-to-Homer, as so much of what “Jesus of Nazareth” (like the “Son of Man” self-identification) goes right against the grain of Paul’s ideology, especially concerning women. I think it came from a real figure, and this Death-by-Catapult-Jesus is, well, all we have…
I still think you aren’t understanding my point. The point is not that Mark needs to unify sects under the Gentile wing. The point is that he is addressing a recent problem (therefore the temple’s destruction must be recent), not the problems of Bar Kochba’s time (nothing in Mark fits those circumstances or shows any awareness of them al all); and Mark cannot kick the can of the apocalypse down the road the way he does if he is writing in the 2nd century, as then he’d have to come up with a completely different solution. In other words, Mark doesn’t even know the world will still exist half a century later. So he can’t be writing half a century later.
It makes sense as both history and allegory and is exactly on point for Josephus’s narrative, which is why he bothers to tell the story at all.
Yes. Their brutality and paranoia is legendary. Indeed, that’s a recurring theme Josephus specifically is making throughout his accounts. It’s one of the reasons, he argues, God had to kill them. They had abandoned his ways. Indeed the Gospels capture this in many parables and tales too. It is precisely the broken and callous system they are arguing against.
In Josephus’s account, it is rich people who are bothered by his being a nuisance and disturbing them as a bad omen so they are the ones who pressure the authorities to get rid of him. The authorities, being the same people, thus try rough justice. Because that’s what kind of people ancient elites were. The Roman court system being (mildly) more civilized and unconcerned with mere nuisances to the Jews kicks him back to the street, where people proceed to either feed him charitably or beat him up to shut him up. That’s ancient society.
So, think today of the callous villainy of Christian Republicans toward “the annoying homeless” and you are exactly in the right place; think of the Christians who beat up homeless people, a day after a different Christian feeds them; think of how a leading Christian book today argues against “empathy”; think of how Christian administrations and courts have argued against letting homeless people have a place to sleep and for running them out of town to be “someone else’s problem.” What Josephus is describing is not honestly very different from the religious elite and their control of the authorities today. And yet we know in antiquity these same people were far more callous and brutal than even now (and even now it’s pretty bad). Which is what makes his story actually quite believable.
He doesn’t. The rich moved their shills in power to get rid of him, and everything they tried failed, so they tried kangarooing him in Roman court (hoping a brutal Roman would want to shut up someone threatening to destroy the city, no matter how crazy they seemed). Their gambit failed, because the Romans didn’t actually care about thus stuff. Josephus makes a point of noting the ones hoping for an outcome here were superstitious, i.e. they believe a demon was involved and thus he should be treated as “a witch,” but couldn’t get a conviction in their own courts, so venue shopped in the hopes Romans might see a “threat” in the man.
We see the same thing happen to Apuleius who recounts a trial at which he was accused of the same thing and had to defend himself, and prevailed, because Roman courts were not superstitious and rather looked down on woo rabble who believe in that shit—though black magic was illegal, in practice it was only when courts believed real shenanigans were involved, not mere curses dropped to the bottom of a well. So the belief that Romans would kill witches was misplaced but not implausible, since on a limb, the adjacency of his behavior to calling for insurrection was close enough that had Albinus been Pilate, he might actually have killed the guy.
This is very similar to the trial under Pliny, where he tortures some accused Christians until he discovers they weren’t guilty of anything. Hence, Albinus’s judgment of madness was probably because scourging didn’t pacify the man. And he probably only bothered with scourging for the same reason as Pliny: the guy was making a disturbance and might have been promoting violence, but after “interrogation” proved the latter unlikely and the former unfixable, he gave up.
This is all entirely believable.
And there is no other data to build any alternative story on anyway.
I see nothing in Mark that goes against the grain of Paul, including in regards women. And that Mark is reifying Paul is provably the case (not just conjecture; the evidence is extensive). But what teachings about women are you talking about? And how does anything in Mark go against anything else in Paul?
(Note the designation Nazorian comes from scripture, as Matthew reveals; Mark is reifying Paul using scripture, Gentile and Jewish, and literary models, e.g. the Wars of Josephus and other adventure novels, Gentile and Jewish.)
Thanks so much Dr Carrier for a robust, specific and devastating rebuttal – and that you are prepared to keep up this debate. I also appreciate, however, that you are busy and won’t waste any more of your time on my non-sholastic sentimentality (e.g. I vainly hoped Jesus Ben Ananias provided, broadly speaking, historical backing for Schweitzer’s heroic/tragic Jesus, as outlined in his “The Mystery of the Kingdom of God”, to which I remain emotionally wedded).
For background though, remember, I was where you are once, wondering if Mark could be that late. It took a lot of investigation and analysis to find out it wasn’t.
Once I devoured your comprehensive and judicious “On the Historicity of Jesus” I realised that no [extant] sources prior to “Mark” – not one – mention a human/earthly Redeemer. This omission includes all the early Church pieces and, most critically, the Letter of Pliny in about 115 (he discovers no data that this is a cult inspired several decades before by a Hebrew who was executed for sedition by the Roman state). That is why the literary creation of Jesus-on-earth must date from some time post-Pliny in the early-to-mid 2nd Century.
Because “Mark” shoehorns his Odysseus/Jesus into the 30’s, inevitably the propagandist has to include material like apoclyptic prophecy professed by the first apostles that was long redundant, whether the gospel was composed in 100 or 140. Since all the gospels bend over backwards to exonerate gentile-Romans and the Roman state this suggests to me that it is to detach “Jesus of Nazareth” from the Second Revolt. Not just detach, it expresses the desperate need to create the anti-Bar Kochba: a gentle, harmless pacifist/teacher whose mortal enemy is also “The Jews”.
Why then does “Mark” not do it like “John” did a bit later? As in, open with the celestial and thus keep it about Jehova as Hercules wandering around in the flesh. Apocalyptic elements are almost removed altogether. Instead “Mark” feels the need to refashion Albinus as Pilate, and Jesus Ben Ananias as The Nazarene. And, to keep the super-redundant “Son of Man/Kingdom of God” (and parables of the Kingdom) and the Messianic Secret motif. Why? I think because it is not just literary fiction but contains an oral tradition about an historical figure who was entirely separate from Peter’s and Paul’s celestial Lord. A tradition “John” disagreed with and dropped, albeit keeping the first gospel’s mythological innovation of having Christ crucified down on earth by a reluctant Pilate.
All your arguments apply more urgently to the first revolt: that was the time Christians most needed to distance themselves (not only because now “Jew” meant “rebel,” but also because now they had to avoid the Roman-imposed temple tax; an issue that was demonized by Jewish Christians in Revelation with the Mark of the Beast narrative).
All these concerns would be generations old by the second revolt.
As for why Mark didn’t act like a second century writer: making up tales about how that might have happened only illustrates how improbable it is (as now you have to make up stories to get it to work). That’s when you’ve lost the argument. Ockham’s Razor leaves us with a far simpler conclusion.
Fair enough, Dr Carrier. But one thing I have learned over several decades is that if you want to undercut an historical argument then apply the Occam’s Razor cliche. Unfortunately human history is far more messy and illogical and infuriating.
To illustrate rate my point I will briefly use a different historical subject. Both the Bolsheviks and Kerensky agreed later that General Kornilov was attempting a coup just before the October Revolution. It’s about the one thing these implacable opponents agreed upon; e.g. together we stopped a rightist military coup. Occam’s Razor says – case closed.
But a closer examination of the primary sources reveals a much more complex – and far less heroic – tale. Kerensky fired Kornilov by telegram and the general, wrongly thinking the PM was a prisoner of the Reds in Petrograd, hastened with his army to defend the Provisional Government, not at first to overthrow it. Met by Trotsky’s Red Guards, who were also defending the regime, the two confused armies – finding themselves on the same side – never fired a shot. It was in both parties interest to pretend later that during this nonviolent misunderstanding they had acted with honour and courage. At least that’s one interpretation of incomplete, self-serving and contradictory data.
Then you don’t understand Ockham’s Razor. Such misunderstanding is common.
Ockham’s Razor does not say the simplest narrative is more likely true. That’s pop nonsense and anyone who uses it that way is bad at this.
Ockham’s Razor says that the simplest explanation of all the existing evidence is more likely true than a (thereby unnecessarily) more elaborate one.
And that’s an inviolable mathematical truth. So it cannot be gainsaid.
It is simply always the case that if I can explain the facts with no assumptions and you need 3 assumptions, my theory is always going to be epistemically more likely, because your assumptions, not being evidenced facts, are all improbable relative to evidenced facts, and improbabilities compound.
So we can never have any reason to believe your theory, when mine already explains everything.
But does it explain everything? There are elements of Mark that are inexplicable, unless he was faced with a set of data about an earthly Jesus which he judged could not be denied. An earthly Jesus who had identified himself and his mission with Daniel’s Son of Man. To fuse him with Celestial Jesus who was crucified in the sky, Mark had this happen on earth. By the time of John’s gospel he discards all that material. Why did Mark include it at all? The razor cuts both ways; the simplest explanation is that Mark felt he had to because it was true – he had to live with his gospel as an awkwardly stitched quilt.
There is nothing that needs explaining by this in Mark that isn’t explained by it.
Everything else is not relevant to what we are discussing, which is the evidence signaling the decade of composition; not evidence that has no bearing on that.
If you want to “change the subject” to why Mark chose to euhemerize the story, that’s a completely different answer that doesn’t affect the date of composition. Likewise if you want to know why Mark used the Son of Man material (which actually comes from Enoch, i.e. Mark is using the Enochian tradition, which evolved from the Danielic invention of the idea); the answer won’t relate to when he composed. And so on.
And meanwhile, I see your attempt to move the Goal Posts and Change the Subject, and I raise you a pickup of your drop:
You still haven’t explained what supposedly in Mark contradicts Paul about women.
I wasn’t changing the subject; the dating of Mark has to be later due to the arguments I tried to clarify before. There is no reason for Mark to introduce the “Son of Man” core and the three Gospel re-writers – especially John – can be seen as ‘getting it right’. But why did Mark make this initial ‘awkward’ error? I think because this vital element comes from the original historical figure and he judged it had to be included.
Since we can see that Albinus becomes Pilate, and Jesus Ben Ananias becomes Jesus-on-trial, then why can’t the “Son of Man” be from the latter figure too. You argue that Occam’s Razor is about the likeliest interpretations derived from the actual evidence before us. On that basis, the blade cuts my way as Jesus Ben Ananias is the only (probable) historical figure we believe Mark is exploiting.
Is not the simplest explanation then that the apocalyptic parables and ‘miracles’ come from this figure too, and not an unknown prophet we have to construct from speculative scratch?
The Pauline Epistles are anti-women, anti-sex and anti-gay. Despite this apostle’s pivot to the gentiles, and the influence of pagan mythology on his apocalyptic Judaism, none of that extended to the modernism of Greco-Roman culture when it came to the opposite gender. Whereas Mark (and bits of Matthew) point towards an historical Jesus who has followers among women, the poor and the ill – and, like Josephus’ Jesus, there are no disciples. As depicted by Mark, the women are treated by Jesus with empathy, (platonic) intimacy and equanimity, e.g. without the usual misogynistic scolding and denunciations so rife in all monotheistic religions. They might as well be different cults – but then the simplest explanation is that , originally, they were rivals.
As for Peter and the other ten being in Jerusalem acting like cowards, with Judas as a double agent, et al, was entirely invented by Mark. The splinter cult of the 30’s has been merged with the trial of a Jewish prophet from the 60’s. I think since Pliny knows only about the first phase, the second phase of fusion with an earthly apocalyptic figure must have happened a few years after that in the early-to-mid 2nd Century.
Your explanations are illogical and epicyclic. They are therefore “needless angels on a pin.” The evidence is directly explained by my dating, no epicycles or dancing angels. That means my explanation is epistemically more probable. “Making excuses” to get the evidence to be exactly the opposite of what it says is apologetics. That’s exactly the same thing Christians do. I can’t help it if you don’t see this.
And as for Paul, I suspected this. You are unaware that Paul’s authentic text is not anti-woman (and no more anti-sex than Mark’s Jesus, in fact they are pretty much in agreement about that; Mark’s Jesus never covers homosexuality as a subject so it can’t contradict Paul’s view). You are referring to passages in 1 Timothy, a late forgery (that letter didn’t exist when Mark wrote), and an interpolation in 1 Corinthians 14 (which is contradicted by the authentic text earlier in that same chapter and in other passages in Paul). All the “anti-woman” stuff is second-century forgery.
The real Paul is actually the most egalitarian author of the NT and accepts women as important and respectable missionaries (e.g. Junia) and patrons (Phoebe).
This is what we mean when we say Mark is reifying Paul: the real Paul is exactly replicated in Mark, and in such particular detail as to prove Mark is using the authentic letters even down to their exact internal structure (see my link earlier, it contains a bibliography and summary of examples). Mark is unaware of any of the forgeries (except possibly Colossians, though the direction of link there is unclear).
Meanwhile, Pliny does not give us any of the information you are claiming. And apocalyptic Jesus is already in Paul (e.g. 1 Thess 4) so cannot be a late feature of Jesus. You just aren’t doing your homework here, and you’ve been seduced by some crank theory instead. Please don’t do that. It’s difficult enough correcting all the Christian crankery. I would really like there to not be atheist crankery to deal with as well.
You’re right Dr. Carrier; I have done my homework and realise that, yes, I was way too hard on the historical “Paul” and his attitude towards women – assuming all the theologians with whose contra-interpretation you disagree with are wrong.
And I’m happy to think they are wrong, as this egalitarian approach to the genders by this apostle of the Christ-in-the-sky during the mid-1st Century arguably backs up my revisionist interpretation of Jesus Ben Ananias. That in the 60’s, the latter saw himself as fulfilling the tenets – at least as he understood them – of this tiny, obscure messianic/apocalyptic sect, one so obscure Josephus seems never to have come across it.
Thus this Jesus, though he had no disciples or apostles – at least not whilst alive – surrounded himself with women, the poor and the sick as proof he was this sect’s celestial Lord in human form. Not the later, non-Jewish notion of Jehova wandering around in the flesh, but of having been appointed by God to warn, to suffer and to detonate the apocalypse. No wonder Josephus edited all that stuff out about such a grandiose ‘fool’ as such ludicrous behaviour and claims were useless for his polemical purposes in recasting (carciaturing?) Ben Ananias as the new Jeremiah.
I respectfully reject your interpretation that I am “making excuses” and perversely twisting the data into a tastier pretzel, like some graduate of the University of Please Yourself.
I think I am applying both the Razor and standard historical methodology; Pliny seems not to have discovered any beliefs about an earthly Jesus, circa 110ish, let alone that this cult was originated by a criminal executed by the Roman state. They pray to Christ “as to a god”. Therefore, it is not unreasonable to infer that the earthly Jesus had yet to be merged with the celestial Christ. That this was done by Mark in the early to mid-2nd Century, yet his gosepl was considered unsatisfactory by various factions. Other gospel writers had to do a rewrite – later three were judged to be canonical. John in particular drops the apocalyptic elements perhaps because they make “Jesus of Nazareth” look hopelessly mistaken in his doomsday timing.
Since the “Son of Man” self-designation, and the parables, are not part of the Epistles it is also not “cranky” to theorise that they derive from an historical figure in the First Century. We already agree that Mark is lifting material about Jesus Ben Ananias from Josephus; a Jewish oddball/prophet who faced a trial before an ambivalent gentile governor and who – eventually – died at the hands of the Romans as, at least technically a rebel. Why then cannot “Mark” also be incorporating material about the same figure derived from a different source/oral tradition? Material not explicitly found in the Epistles.
Perhaps you are too rigidly reductionist in your approach: e.g. “Q” does not exist; the Gnostics never existed; and there are no extant records, whatsoever, of a Jesus on earth who matches the Homeric/allegorical Jesus of the synoptic Gospels.
On the other hand, Mark creating an entirely fictional Jesus-on-earth to appease the lumpen congregations whilst handily codifing sect beliefs/practices for church leaders is too big a leap – like Evel Knieval failing to rocket across Snake River Canyon. Such a momentous shift in this cult had to come from a figure who really had been on earth, and who had inspired a community which still revered his memory, teachings and martyrdom.
That is why I counter that I am simply making inferences from limited, incomplete, biased and contradictory sources – not excuses.
That’s all speculation.
As a historian, I really am only interested in what we can know.
The rest is historical fiction.
What you can … know?
Dear oh dear… So much of history cannot be known, at least not in the absolutist way you mean, and therefore judgements can only be provisional in a moving debate
Rather than your misguided reliance on statistical probabilities, historical methodology is more akin to inferring from a few fossils the whole of an extinct creature. Informed speculation is thus an indispensable tool – the next question is how persuasive such reconstructions are, or are not.
I see you ignored – or moved the goal posts – regarding Pliny, because it is the weakest part of your interpretation.
That’s my point, Jonathan.
If we can’t know something, we ought not pretend to know.
Hence speculation is idle. It’s just writing historical fiction.
As for Pliny, you didn’t say anything relevant to address. Nothing you point out there relates in any way to dating Mark. Whereas what we do learn is that the Jewish church was all but extinct already by 110 AD, such that the only Christians Pliny ever met were Gentiles, and he’d never heard of any other kind. That proves the success and dominance of Paul’s sect, which Mark euhemerized a generation after Paul and a generation before Pliny, and thus marketed to greater success on the opportunity afforded by the Jewish War.
But if that were so then those Christians which Pliny investigated/tortured in about 110 would have given up their ‘seditious’ writings (the gospels, at least Mark) from whose content the Roman governor would have learned that the [alleged] founder of this sect was a Jewish criminal executed by the Roman state way out east.
You often use the Roswell Crashed Saucer myth as an example of how quickly, even in the modern era, a story can evolve from something a little bit unusual but essentially mundane into an entire fictional universe with aretfacts and witnesses and official files, all rubbish but which too many people believe is all true. For example, there is nothing whatsoever in the 1947 primary sources about the recovery of aliens bodies, and this omission remains true even by the incompetent Army intelligence officer in his dotage when, in the 1970’s, he was appearing on and in tabloids to parrot his schtick about unbreakable metal – which was nonetheless in pieces – and heiroglyphic writings. To beef up his rather lame story about retrieving a few sticks and tinfoil in a desert, Charles Berlitz, who popularized the the Bermuda Triangle nonsense, ‘found’ people in 1979 prepared to claim that a – conveniently deceased – prospector had stumbled upon alien bodies being removed by a covert army unit. Even then the so-called “Roswell Incident” did not become the lodestar of UFO mythology until 1987 with the “Majestic-12” hoax documents (including the lovely “Looney Toones” detail of a coyote making away with a dead alien in its jaws).
I think we agree so far, Dr. Carrier?
However, what some skeptics/debunkers miss about the evolution of this myth is that the notion of a military recovery of alien corpses amidst their crashed spaceship – from Venus no less – first appeared circa 1949/1950 in the credulous Frank Scully’s wideyed columns for “Variety” followed by his best seller, “Behind the Flying Saucers”. Scully had been bamboozled by a trio of confidence tricksters seeking to hustle a bogus mining technology. The location of the crash site was moved to Aztex, New Mexico, whilst the crashed weather balloon that had dispersed closer to Roswell was entirely forgotten. U.F.O. experts never found it until 1977 when Stanton Friedman (hey, now there was a bombastic crank) was casually told at a TV station in Louisiana about an ex-Army geezer with a favourite yarn about supposedly having handled extra-terrestrial debris (Jess Marcel).
My point is this: sensible people think that it was just Berlitz and his 1980 book, consolidated later by the “MJ-12” hoaxer, who expanded this minor myth out of whole cloth. Not so; the blueprint of the tall tale had been sketched already back in the late 40’s by real people telling an unreal story and having it publicly disseminated. Without working up a sweat, another reporter debunked the story in 1952 – but crucially he never realised the hoax had been inspired by a genuine headline story: “ROSWELL RAAF CAPTURES FLYING DISK”.
To me “The Roswell Incident” is comparable to the mayrtyrdom of Jesus Ben Ananias and the creation of Mark’s Gospel According to Homer.
There had to be a figure who was Jewish, charismatic and who preached both univeral love and the imminent apoclaypse. Not just a literary lift from Josephus, but a figure who provided Mark with other aspects of a memorable ministry as well. Like the garbled and exaggerated accounts of Roswell – which began within two years not forty after the Project Mogul balloon crash – I perceive just such glimpses in the classical sources; including for example in the “Letter of Mara Bar Serapion”. There was a compelling Jewish leader, which the Hebrew establishment at least tried to have executed, whose demise coincides with the Fall of Jerusalem – and whose followers connected God’s wrath and the Temple’s destruction with this remarkable martyr.
That’s your only pertinent point here, and it doesn’t follow.
First, it doesn’t follow every community had written texts (and most of those Pliny interrogated were ex-Christians, and he only tortured two slaves, deaconesses, i.e. door-girls, not any leadership). Books were expensive. And Pliny is hunting Christians in the backwaters of Bithynia and struggled to find any.
Second, nothing in Mark would concern Pliny; just as nothing about Jesus ben Ananias concerned Albinus. There is nothing subversive in it. To the contrary, it deliberately appeals to Roman elite audiences as an apologetic for the harmlessness of Christianity (and the non-fault of Romans for Jewish machinations in pressuring the execution of an innocent pacifist who is consistently depicted arguing for obedience to Rome).
Third, Pliny wouldn’t care about idle mythologies. He’d roll his eyes at the mere suggestion he should waste any time reading a whole scroll of “depraved, excessive superstition” (superstitionem pravam et immodicam, his words). What he got from the deaconnesses he explicitly says was all he cared to hear—he literally stopped his investigation that instant, because he realized this was dumb shit wasting his time.
Fourth, we don’t know which Christians these are. If they are originalists who didn’t use the Gospels—or didn’t regard them as histories but allegories—continuing the Pauline belief that this was all really celestial, then they won’t have even mentioned Pilate, for example, or they would have said that that story wasn’t real but symbolic, or have muddled which it was to the point that Pliny didn’t care anymore.
So there isn’t any way to get your conclusion here.
Really? So now we “don’t know” certain things but this absence is perfectly hunky dory for your interpretation. Who’s “making excuses” now?
Your own big book, Dr Carrier, by expressing your understandable exasperation over the dodgy dating of early Christian sources, points to no reference to an earthly Jesus prior to the mid 2nd Century. Pliny in 110 supports this straightforward observation: for about 100 years these Christian splinter sects were only propagating a celestial Lord. Then came Mark’s innovation, or as I argue fusion….
We know all the things I described as evincing when Mark wrote.
We don’t know any of the things you described as evincing when Mark wrote.
That’s the difference between knowing something and not knowing something.
Which is what makes the difference between history and historical fiction.
You are writing historical fiction. I am doing history.
I repeat: According to your own [brilliant] book there is no definite reference to an earthly Jesus before the mid-2nd Century. Right?
If you mean outside the Bible, yes.
It would be a circular argument to presume Mark and Matthew aren’t examples of pre-2nd century references.
Or even Revelation (which was written in the 90s, as again we know because it thinks the known world would end before Domitian’s reign ended, which didn’t happen), though one can argue whether it acknowledges an earthly Jesus (it seems to, and is either based on Matthew and thus post-dates Matthew, or Matthew is based on Revelation, which is an unresolved debate).
And this isn’t me. This is a mainstream view.
How about this angle: “Mark” is utilising either a written or oral tradition that comes from just after the Temple’s Fall, and because his gospel is a hybrid he backdates “Jesus of Nazareth” into the 30’s whilst leaving the apocalyptic expectation of the 60’s in place. Because that is how it has come to him. Whereas “Matthew” and “Luke” (and “John”) clean those aspects up to avoid a Mssiah who can’t tell the time?
So, you are describing a hypothesis. To assess the probability of the hypothesis we then need to examine evidence (facts that would affect the probability of the hypothesis, which are facts more probable on that hypothesis than on any other, or less probable than on any other).
But first you need to specify the hypothesis more clearly. For example, what do you mean by “Matthew and Luke and John” can’t tell the time?
Mark is not assigning the apocalypse to the 60s. He is trying to get rid of that (that would fit Paul, but by Mark’s time, it was false). That’s why he “kicks the can” with “well, at least one person alive in 30 will still be around” which allows anytime late first century (and at a stretch, early second). The author of Revelation agrees with this and tries to fix the date to the late 90s (not knowing how the reign of Domitian was actually going to end).
Like Revelation, Matthew keeps Mark’s timeline (being written right after Mark to “fix” its Gentility back to Judaism), but like Mark, stays vague. Matthew likely wrote in the 80s (Mark, late 70s).
Luke keeps it too, and he is the first now to be pushing the window. Writing 90s-120s, he is counting on the 120 myth (Genesis 6:3): that the maximum human age is 120, so all adults in 30 AD would be dead by the early 130s.
That no longer worked by the time of John (writing probably, at least our final redaction, in the 140s or 150s), so he drops Mark’s apocalyptic target (late first century) by “fixing” it to an indefinite clock (he says Jesus can keep the last member of the first generation alive however long he wants). It’s possible John wrote earlier and saw the writing on the wall and thus didn’t find Luke’s 120 assumption plausible. But either way, John’s final redactors realized the time was past, so Mark’s tactic had to be abandoned or “fixed.”
And those writers are of the time of Bar Kochba or just before. Proving the point.
So what does your hypothesis propose differently than this?
I am proposing that “Mark” is juggling and melding together two apocalyptic prophetic movements which were distinct but comparable in their beliefs and teachings; the celestial Christ of the first apostles in the 30’s and the earthly prophet Jesus Ben Ananias in the 60’s.
So, as far as a ‘Biblical’ lifespan of 120 years litmust test goes the second, later date easily accomodates a fusion/composition in the 130’s.
I see nothing in any source, including Revelation, that dates the Gospels, which for the first time fused together sky-and-earth to create and propagate “Jesus of Nazareth”. That is why it was composed in the aftermath of the Second Revolt – perhaps somewhat desperately. After all, there was also the pressure of Marcion’s efforts to detach his “Jesus Christ” from any Judiac roots. Obviously that would suit certain Gentile followers who were appalled and embarrassed by the latest Hebrew rebellion, one which had been a helluva lot more successful and threatening than the First Revolt, at least for a while.
Thus “Mark” is a rear-guard action to fend off Marcion’s ‘heresy’; the first gospel backdates/shoehorns an earthly, Hebrew Jesus, one about whom there was some kind of surviving memory/tradition/veneration by one of the multitudinous Christian factions vying for supremacy by the nd Century, back into the 30’s. In “Mark” the Romans/Gentiles are either benign bystanders or they actively admire and try and help Jesus, whilst too many of “The Jews” are stock villains.
I know you regard my theory as D.O.A. because the proportional relationship between sources and conjecture, to put it politely, is too weighted in favour of the latter. That’s why I really appeciate your stamina and patience. I had hoped Dr. Carrier that my ‘theory’ could be my next book: “Apocalypse Zero”; which would have argued that whilst the Historical Jesus was a man of love and peace, the religion he helped inspire has, tragically for Western Civilization, been one of almost uninterrupted totalitarian/sectarian repression, prejudice and violence.
Yes, mate, I am also an author, though I hasten to add I certainly make no claims about being an historian as I am not an academic. Nonetheless my wife’s, Christine (she is also an Australian), and my next book debuting on June 15 (Amberley, U.K.) might be of interest to you, e.g. in terms of your eclectic interests regarding History:
“The Shakespeare Ladies Club – The Forgotten Women Who Rescued the Bawdy Bard”
https://www.amazon.com/-/he/Christine-Jonathan-Hainsworth/dp/1398127442
This is a lot of epicycles. And they don’t work logically.
I think you are so emotionally committed to this conclusion that you are constructing any Frankenstein’s monster of unevidenced suppositions that you can to get a mere vague resemblance of a plausible explanation.
That’s not how professional and reliable history gets done. The bottom line is everything you are imagining is improbable. And it is not a good explanation (as in, it does not make likely the actual evidence we have). If Mark wrote when John did, Mark would look like John. That Mark doesn’t know he needs a solve like John’s is precisely what rules that out. Fabricating a bunch of bizarre motives to behave exactly the opposite of how he would likely behave is apologetics, not reason.
It’s also off the rails of reality. Mark’s entire narrative elevates the Gentile mission over the Jewish (with his double scenes across the lake, for example, where the Gentile side always reacts better than the Jewish side), to sell Paul’s idea that God is leaving the hard-hearted Jews behind for the more receptive Gentiles. Matthew fixes that by posing the frame as the Christians producing a better Judaism for Jews that only the Jewish elite reject. Mark then makes the disciples look like failures and losers (a common mythic theme, but one especially suited to the Pauline mission), and the Romans as ignorant and unjust brutes (they torture and kill an innocent man and obey the whims of crowds).
So Mark isn’t building the narrative you describe but quite the opposite. And that narrative exactly fits the 70s AD. Indeed, it exactly describes that moment in history. The disciples are gone and their promised apocalypse didn’t happen and the Jews were hard-hearted and punished for it and the Romans were brutes and rewarded for it. This all needed to be explained, and precisely then, as that’s when the need arose (with the destruction of the temple and yet still no apocalypse and the heathens as strong as ever). There is no reason Christians would wait fifty years to address that need. And there is no way Mark in particular is addressing it fifty years later, as he clearly does not know the world would even still exist then (much less the details of its particular political moment).
“Bride of Frankenstein” (1935) is one of my favourite movies, and has been since childhood. Read into that what you will…
You missed my point, so I will put it again more clearly. “Mark” in the 130’s has access to material originating from the 30’s AND a separate strand originating from the 60’s. The latter strand, climaxing with the Fall of Jerusalem (and the martyrdom of Jesus Ben Ananias) he utilised to show that the Second Revolt had no chance of success – and did not deserve to succeed. This latter strand was saturated in apocalyptic expectations which “Mark” decided to backdate into the 30’s thus fusing it with the same end-time expectations of the first apostles of the celestial Christ.
Don’t you see Dr. Carrier? The synoptic authors move the earthly Jesus and his apocalyptic prophesies backwards – which is even more redundant than setting the story around 70 A.D.
You are also quite off-track to imply that the Pilate of “Mark” and the subsequent gospels – John is decades later – shows the Roman overlord and his people as cruel and villainous. Nothing could be further from the historical truth. Pilate is depicted as bending over backwards to spare the life of Jesus. It is the “Jews” in the crowd who insist on the procurator releasing the zealot. An implausible and vile anti-Semitic fiction (worse in Matthew) but one that served to depict the highest ranking Roman as convinced that Jesus was no enemy of the empire. As you know the Ebonite faction made the dithering, ineffectual Pilate of the gospels into a saint. There is also the later Pilate forgeries which consolidate this propaganda. Josephus shows us that not only is Pilate standing in for Albinus, the latter DID release the prophet Jesus. A fact which “Mark” exploits and reshapes by having the rebel named the “son of the father”, e.g. a double for Jesus.
Your theory makes no sense. It does not explain the actual evidence. And it relies on numerous assumptions for which there is no evidence, tanking its probability further.
I just see no point in continuing to defend this theory.
That’s your weakest and least convincing response. That “Jesus of Nazareth” is a composite – e.g. the celestial Christ, Homeric tales, bits from Josephus – is probable, and your book concedes that it is possible that there was an historical figure who also inspired that literary composite. Albeit he must have been so obscure that nobody outside his cult noticed him.
Where we differ is I think that the historical figure is not quite that obscure if half of “Mark” is made up of Jesus Ben Ananias.
That’s arguably easy to follow and not an unreasonable – as opposed to unproven – theory.
But hey, you’ve given me a good go and I appreciate the debate.
If I am ever able to publish what you dismiss as my “historical fiction”, I will make it clear to readers – in the body of the text – that Dr Carrier rejects this interpretation as being nothing more than a suppositional mirage.
Your thesis was not “Jesus is a composite of the celestial Christ, Homeric tales, bits from Josephus.” That’s my thesis.
Now you are changing what we were talking about. That is not a good sign that you are taking this seriously.
No, you’ve misunderstood what I wrote; your thesis is not so far removed from my own for the latter to be called unreasonable or incomprehensible.
I presented evidence it is improbable (not “unreasonable or incomprehensible”).
Indeed I even linked to scholars who (in the core point) agree with you. So you are now continuing to hyperbolically misdescribe our entire conversation. That does not signal someone who is being rational. It looks like someone who is being emotional and thus resorting to apologetic tactics rather than competent argument.
That you answer my empirical arguments with long lists of suppositions you declare as if factual premises from which to derive your conclusion in the face of all evidence against it only confirms this observation.
Consider the late Arthur M Schlesinger Jr, a very accomplished historian. He was not close to JFK, but he worked in the latter’s White House. After the assassination he wrote the best seller “A Thousand Days”; his account of the President’s three years from both the inside and the outside. It remains a good read. But it is from beginning to end “historical fiction”. The author’s agenda was to turn the man he had served and adored into a superhero, a contemporary Lincoln, and an idealistic progressive. This embarrassing hagiography does not make it worthless, though it is far from accurate – let alone definitive.
Yet Schlesinger’s essential portrait, that of Kennedy as a Cold War sceptic and cautious centrist, remains both valid and validated by the release of subsequent sources and memoirs.
A completely irrelevant point.
This is getting tedious.
I’m going to give you some good advice, but you won’t like it. As Gore Vidal once wrote; historical writing is a branch not of science but of literature. Your reliance on statistical probabilities is hopelessly misguided. Emotion is an unavoidable element of human analysis, so it might as well be embraced, even cherished. But it must also yield to what can be inferred – not known – from incomplete and contradictory sources.
Schweitzer’s tragic/heroic Jesus who yet remains a moral inspiration, can be revived in Jesus Ben Ananias. That’s a perfectly reasonable theory, not an empty supposition or anything to do with apologetics. It even has the backing of you-know-who’s razor, if you care about that dodgy, cliched measurement.
Emotional attachment to a theory is folly.
Disregard of the logic of probability is fatal.
You are committed to both. Which means you can never really do history.
Thanks for the debate, it has been most instructive. My final advice is get rid of the stats or else your historical analyses will remain sterile and offtrack.
I don’t use “stats” to get rid of.
That you don’t know the difference between statistics and statements of probability is why you can never do competent history.
It’s just all the worse that you don’t know that you yourself are always using statements of probability. Just because you hide what you mean behind fuzzy words (like probable or very improbable or somewhat likely or more likely) does not mean you are not referring to numbers. You always are. The difference between me and you is that I admit this, and make clear what I mean when I say such things—and why.
Because then I can do another thing you can’t: I can vet the logic of my own inferences (and thus demonstrate whether my conclusions actually do follow from my premises), because I am actually stating checkable premises, and correctly deriving the conclusions from them (which can only be done with probabilistic logic, because history is not subject to deductive logic).
I do not get the impression you actually care about being logical or admitting the mathematical content of your sentences or anything else, so I hardly see a point in speaking further on this, but in the extremely unlikely chance you actually do care (or someone else reading this does), see:
Bayesian Statistics vs. Bayesian Epistemology
We Are All Bayesians Now: Some Bayes for Beginners
Advice on Probabilistic Reasoning