Professorships are shit jobs. So, no.

I soured on the idea of getting one in 2008 when the market collapsed, after several years of being “on the inside” and seeing how awful that career was (I used to romanticize it). Since then it’s become dominated by below-minimum-wage adjunct positions while plum tenure-track positions shrink or dissolve. But even the good positions are pretty terrible, exhausting so much time on teaching and committee work there is hardly any left for research and public communication. And the internal politics of academic departments are insufferable.

But on top of all that (which is already enough to get out of that industry):

Academic freedom is not really a thing. It’s all rat-race publish-or-perish we-punish-controversy-so-you-better-avoid-it pipelining now. The best reason an academic should never hold a professorship is that avoiding one removes all the levers of coercion special interests can use to silence or control what you publish or say or do. You are beyond their reach. And so you can say whatever you want, and pursue any research you want.

Case in point is even your stated reason for getting one: that’s precisely one of those levers of coercion, by promoting the Fallacy of Prestige—that holding a professorship adds clout. Which is literally false, as that has nothing to do with the quality or merit of a scholar’s work, because that really should always stand on its own, but is perceptionally true as people falsely “believe” it has something to do with that.

That is how special interests can control you: by leading the public to believe that, in order to force you into a position that you are then dependent on for income, which they can then control you with by abusing the system internally to coerce your compliance (by threatening to make your life difficult or panopticonning threats to your job or promotions and thus income, and just generally being a headache).

It’s really a fucked-up system the public should have no respect for anymore. It’s both economically and ideologically abusive. My own alma mater’s recent capitulation to fascist control of content is just an unusually public example. Usually you never see any of the real corruption and injustice in the academic industrial complex. But it’s soaked with it.

That’s stupendous news. Dr Carrier, have you recently lookt at Faculty positions, if not America then elsewhere perhaps? Wouldn’t that get your scholarship more clout?

Yes.

First, I’ll be publishing an exposé of the whole book this week.

Then I’ll do an article on that appendix either this or next month.

Appendix 2 James the Brother of Jesus: Antiquities 20.200
T C Schmidt
https://doi.org/10.1093/9780191957697.005.0002
Pages 231–248
Published: May 2025

Will a response be publisht here?

And back to the original question:

any reference to the Demiurge could have been edited out

Except we have extensive notes from, e.g., Tertullian on what was and wasn’t in Marcion’s versions. So we can tell that nothing about the Demiurge was in there. And lots of things anti-Demiurge were. So the “it was all edited out” thesis is refuted and has to be discarded. I am already accounting for this in my analysis (there are two detailed studies on this that I cited in comments earlier that are the standard ones to use now).

if Jesus [did] not exist, then neither did his followers, disciples, the twelve etc.

Insofar as you mean, literally, “disciples” (students who sat at his feet before he died).

Which is why it is peculiar no such people are mentioned in Paul. Only apostles (there is no higher category). And Paul describes those as people who received visions of the Lord. He never once mentions anyone seeing Jesus before that. This is one of the clues that Jesus started out as a revelatory being, and was inserted into history (and his first “apostles” converted into “disciples”) decades later.

So my question to you: who started the movement? Paul?

Paul himself says no. He describes how it started in 1 Cor. 15: with Peter and some body of “twelve” (they are not called disciples and it is not clear Peter was one of them or their leader: similar sects had these quorums of twelve, like Qumran), and admits to them preceding him in Gal. 1. Paul only added a new interpretation of the gospel, he did not originate it. He himself says he was a “persecutor” of the cult before he joined it (both in 1 Cor. 15 and Gal. 1 and elsewhere). Note that there is some cultic detail here (Peter/Cephas was not an Aramaic/Hebrew name but a word and thus is likely an adopted cultic title: e.g. Peter is the “Rock” symbolically from which the water of the gospel flowed and thus was Christ’s representative on Earth, as in 1 Cor. 10).

Or is ‘Jesus’ a name that stands for a number of similar prophets, characteristic of the age, that somehow got coagulated in a single ‘person’, a single movement?

These things are all covered in my peer reviewed study, which details what can be known, what can’t be known, what’s possible or impossible, what’s likely or unlikely, and so on.

The tl;dr is no. Jesus at the start was a purely revelatory being born of “hidden messages” in scripture (a pesher) interpreted under influence from neighboring savior/mystery cults. Only a lifetime later, when the Gospels were written, was material borrowed from mythical people (Moses, Elijah, Odysseus, Romulus, Aesop) and historical people (Jesus ben Ananias, Socrates, Paul) to fabricate a historical narrative. None had anything to do with Christianity (e.g. Jesus ben Ananias was a real person whose story was borrowed as a skeletal structure for the passion narrative, but he existed decades after the religion began and was in not a Christian or connected in any way to Christianity) except Paul (and all that happened there were Paul’s teachings got converted into stories about Jesus).

‘Jesus’ could hot have been 100% invented out of the imagination of some impressionable people.

Indeed. In my study I show that model too improbable to even consider. The only plausible model is the same as happened for all other fictional earthly gods and heroes (from Hercules to Osiris): they begin as celestials or woodland spirits or the like, communicated with only by revelation (dreams, waking or sleeping), and only later (typically at least forty years judging by known rates of development, e.g. Roswell, Cargo Cults, Ned Ludd, etc.) are they converted into Earth-walking people with family and genealogy and adventures and teachings. And that is done at first to allegorize the secret truth (Plutarch explicitly describes this process for Osiris). Taking the allegories literally (and indeed insisting on that and condemning and shunning anyone who says otherwise, as we find in 2 Peter and Ignatius) happens a generation or lifetime after that. So the timeline is about 80-120 years from “first revelation” to “literalist historicism” and involves transitional species (allegorical biographies, which are then hybridized as historical-allegorical or two-truths mythologies, which are then dogmatically coerced into being regarded as primarily literal histories).

That’s worth pointing out. Not all the disputes between the Marcionites and anti-Marcionites consisted of the peculiarly Marcionite ideas (like the whole Demiurge theory).

For example (and I discuss this in my new book) Marcion was a pneumatist (like Paul, and later Origen, for which Origen was declared a heretic): he agreed with Paul’s metaphysics of resurrection, that we do not inherit our flesh, it gets destroyed and we rise in new, alien superbodies more akin to stars than animals.

But the anti-Marcionites who composed our surviving canon were sarcicists: they condemned that reading of Paul, insisting we rise in the bodies of flesh we died in (Tertullian even says the quiet part out loud that this was necessary to undo Paul’s celestial egalitarianism and maintain distinctions of gender by social status: e.g., in the afterlife, men need their penises to prove they are superior to women; this is documented and argued by Bynum, as I cite in my discussions of this in Not the Impossible Faith).

A good example of what a forgery looks like is, thus, 3 Corinthians, which was invented to have Paul “clarify” that he was a sarcicist all along.

So the anti-Marcionites didn’t cut or “fix” the pneumatist text of 1 Cor. 15.

Why?

If Marcion invented it and their edition was supposed to fix that, why didn’t it?

This is evidence that both sides are using an existing set of letters that both know are out there, limiting what they can get away with as far as revision.

This also creates an interesting question for Marcion’s edition of Luke. It has a (supposedly) sarcicist resurrection mod. And scholars disagree on what Marcion’s edition said there (some imply “flesh” was not there and thus either cut by Marcion or added by later anti-Marcionites, and other disputes about what was there and what wasn’t). But even the most conservative solution entails Marcion kept some account of Jesus proving he was not a mere phantom. Was he therefore struggling to get a text against him to fit his narrative rather than cut or change it altogether?

Marcion could spin a “not a bodiless demon” and hence “not a mere phantom” story (as paraphrased in Ignatius) his way because he also was not arguing for “bodilessness” but a body of glory and also wanted to argue against pagans claiming it was just a hallucination or ghost (a la, famously, Patroclus) and not a risen body. But Marcion would not want the word “flesh” here, though, as that would be harder to spin. He could spin “bones” as that had a vague enough meaning to include any endoskeleton (even for a stellar spacebody) and would work to dispel the “mere ghost” argument which he also wanted to dispatch.

So this dispute remains unresolved. But the mixed evidence does suggest the text was a little awkward for Marcion, just not as awkward as modern theorists claim, and that would evince Marcion using a text he inherited rather than one he got to freely compose as he wished.

Moreover, that then invites the following question: why is what is in the letters not convenient to either Marcion or the anti-Marcionites? Paul’s probably closer to the anti-Marcionites, but he’s definitely not the same as the 2nd and later centuries context. The fact that Paul is so idiosyncratic compared even to the Gospels let alone compared to everything else really makes clear that the letters were viewed as at least somewhat inviolable (so you could maybe edit some fluff or some less relevant stuff but we have plenty left). Which points to their author preceding these discussions and having some cache in the movement. Which points to them being authentic.

Alas, we know that didn’t happen because we have extensive discussions (e.g. from Tertullian) of what was and wasn’t in Marcion’s edition of those letters (I cite the relevant studies in my original comment on this). So we know they didn’t insert any such material.