Actually my links to his review (in two parts) are still good. I think you mean the link I put near the top to his article explaining his religious beliefs (that has since disappeared, and I now note that; thanks for calling my attention to it). The other links still all work.

But also thanks for letting me know about his new post. It doesn’t really say anything requiring a response. In classic form, this is another case where the article (and book) he is responding to already refutes his rebuttal to it. That’s almost an own goal.

It all got a little tl;dr for me so this is just a note in case you haven’t dealt with it elsewhere.

That is actually what I was getting at.

All we have goodish evidence for is that the fire was blamed on a cult and that this happened just before the Judean revolt and the first Jewish war.

We are looking at the events with 2000 years of separation. But the confusion back in 64AD would have been considerable too. We know how facts get twisted out of shape in modern times with all the benefits of modern media and there are political interests looking to misrepresent and distort. It can’t have been any better back then.

We have evidence of barbaric and cruel reprisals against the ‘Chrestus’ cult in 64AD

In 66AD Judea is in revolt against the Romans

In 68AD the Romans have had enough of Nero and murder him

In 70AD the Romans lay siege to and essentially destroy Jerusalem, an action that is unusually harsh even by Roman standards. The Romans think this is so important that they decline several attempts at a negotiated peace deal despite the fact that they are in the middle of a civil war at the time.

By 73AD the Zelots are routed and the surviving Jewish religion is being led by a guy who escaped the siege of Jerusalem in a coffin and went over to the Romans.

I don’t think we will ever have proof that the events are related. But looking at it from a political perspective it does have a logical flow. Could make a movie or a novel out of it all. Nero’s reprisals spark the revolt losing an important province. Two years later he has failed to win it back and the elites dispose of Nero before he loses any more.

Sacking Jerusalem is sufficient to make Vespasian and then his son emperor. Titus declines the victor’s wreath. They build the colosseum to remind Rome of the triumph instead. Sure sounds like there was a major grudge match.

I quite agree that we can’t trust the sources. I am pretty sure that the Romans are going to strictly censor them and strictly control the religion from then on.

Now imagine you are the proud owner of a franchise in the Pauline branch of the Peter/James Jesus cult. You paid good money for the franchise and now you are risking being nailed to a stick for guilt by association. Better have a really good explanation as to why you are different. No, we have nothing to do with those Chrestos scum, they killed our guy! Its Christ, people make that mistake all the time. Honest guv.

Hmm, when I say ‘hypothesis’ I mean ‘hypothesis’, not (as many seem to do) conclusion. Of course it would have to be tested.

My sentiment exactly.

…the Fire of Rome as a completely unrelated event that was blamed on Christians.

If that’s even true. There is evidence it isn’t. I have a paper coming out this year in Vigiliae Christianae documenting that. I think it’s more likely than not the Christians were never blamed for that fire. Certainly, as far as we can tell, no Christian had ever heard of that accusation until the forged letters of Seneca to Paul in the 4th century (and then it was Christians and Jews together who were blamed for it). This entails the passage in Tacitus we have has been meddled with. More likely, it originally said the followers of Chrestus, a Jewish rebel group (not Christian), were blamed (and even confessed to doing it). Note that Suetonius, for example, does not seem to be aware that the Christians were blamed for that fire–even though he knew Nero persecuted Christians (Suetonius has no evident knowledge the two were ever connected; although he also doesn’t know anything about Jews being pegged for it, either).

I don’t note that as an argument against your hypothesis specifically, but as a caution against being over trusting of the evidence we have. This is my point that we probably can never prove any such hypothesis reliably, even if it’s true.

It is also possible that Tacitus is referring to Jews who were members of the Christ sub-cult in which the outrage in Judea would be even greater.

An idea that gets impaled on Axiom 5 (pp. 26-29).

But again, plausible, sure. Probable? Probably can never know.

Hmm, when I say ‘hypothesis’ I mean ‘hypothesis’, not (as many seem to do) conclusion. Of course it would have to be tested.

What I am trying to get at is that traditionally the destruction of the temple is seen as being an event that happened in Judaism and the Fire of Rome as a completely unrelated event that was blamed on Christians.

Let us imagine for a moment that the ‘Christian’s’ Tacitus mentions being persecuted in the aftermath of the fire of Rome are Paul’s gentile Christians. In modern terms that would be similar to a group of Sunni Muslims watching persecution of Sh’ia by Christians. They might have a long history of theological differences but they are still considered to be a part of the family. That is just the sort of thing that would add fuel to the growing revolt in Judea.

It is also possible that Tacitus is referring to Jews who were members of the Christ sub-cult in which the outrage in Judea would be even greater.

Traditional accounts of the birth of Christianity focus on 30AD. Which is of course natural if you accept the hypothesis that Christ was an actual person. But if the Christ myth hypothesis is accepted then the key formative events a the fire of Rome (first persecution), the fall of the temple (cut off from the mother cult) and the deaths of Peter and Paul (loss of the founders). All of which occur within a six year period.

Oh and talk of destruction of the temple as a bad thing would be very risky. Revelation is an allegory of the destruction of the temple. Why not the gospels as well?

I think your case on the Judas issue is not very solid. Yes 50% is a much higher probability than 6% (1 in 16). But the evidentiary burden is greater if a conclusion is being drawn from facts than otherwise.

50% is better than 6% if we are combining that with other pieces of evidence though, which is the case I think you intend to make.

Your second statement here is correct. But I’m not sure I understand the first. Presumably you mean the prior probability that the narrative is not allegorical is low. But that would depend on past cases. If we find case after case in the Gospels to be more likely allegorical than not, then the prior probability in this case would be high, not low. Which is a key point I make in Proving History (p. 193).

On the Q thing, one feature of the Greek and Roman mystery cults was that it was utterly forbidden to write stuff down. So looking for a written source for Q is quite likely a wild goose chase.

That’s actually not true. Lots of stuff about mystery cults was written down, even by their very adherents and proponents. Only certain things were forbidden to utter (not just write down, but even communicate orally, except to those of sufficient rank), and even those could be communicated (even in writing) through coded allegory (essentially the model adopted in Mark 4:10-12). Moreover, even if it were forbidden to write such things down altogether, that has no bearing on whether Q could be demonstrated to exist, since Q was obviously a written Gospel just like the ones we have (whose writing obviously was not forbidden), and thus Q can in theory be shown to probably exist the same way we show the existence of shared but lost sources in many other cases. It’s just that we don’t have sufficient evidence in this case (despite what Q advocates say).

As to the rest of what you suggest, that’s all a hypothesis one would have to test against other competing hypotheses. But a defect there is that your hypothesis contains too many specific assumptions, and the evidence is simply insufficient to bear the weight of proving so specific a hypothesis as that. It can be one among a large set of hypotheses rendered probable by the evidence, but without the ability to know if your hypothesis specifically is the one among them that is correct.

What if instead the phrase ‘James vicar of Jesus’ or ‘Mary wife of Jesus’ had been used? Both phrases are very common honorifics of the Catholic church. The Pope claims to be vicar of Christ and nuns the Bride of Christ. Monks use the term brothers IN Christ.

So it seems to me that the claim is a very thin reed.

The gospel of Thomas strongly suggests that the leader of the early church in Judea was James, not Peter. It would not be surprising for Peter to take the title ‘Brother of Jesus’ as an honorific. So Paul’s use of the term in Gallatians would be an acknowledgement of his authority. Which is not too surprising given that he is trying to paper over the fact that James and Peter both have serious issues with his teaching to gentiles.

The key variable we don’t really know is how dominant the temple cult was in Judea before the destruction of the temple. It was the religion of the ruling class but it was rather obviously a product of the Babylonian exile that the returnees brought back with them. It beggars belief that such a sect would be able to push aside the pre-Babylonian religion entirely in such a short time and with the ruling elite being dependent on the patronage of foreign powers for much of that.

Rather than Christianity being an offshoot from Judaism as is normally thought, they seem to both occur as consequences of the siege of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple. That is the historical event that rips everything apart. The temple cult and the central source of doctrine is gone. Unlike other syncretic cults that have to pay lip service to their parent religions, the Christian link to the temple cult is broken entirely. So it becomes an orphan and has much more scope for independent action.

I couldn’t get more then five paragraphs in. She dismisses half a dozen opponents as ‘incompetent’ without bothering to give grounds for any up to that point. She might justify her case later on but I suspect she doesn’t.

Rather more suspect is her appeal to the alleged consensus amongst top tier universities. Which is effectively a resort to the authority of the establishment. She does not bother to cite specific scholars she claims to be in agreement. But let us imagine for a moment that the consensus of top universities is as she claims, is that significant?

I don’t think so. The universities were originally formed to train novices for the priesthood. Lay education began much later. Until rather recently the faculty at Oxford and Cambridge had to be ordained priests. The main reason that students take religious studies at those universities today is to become priests themselves. It is thus unimaginable that someone with views similar to Dr Carrier would be appointed to the faculty of such universities. Dr Carrier is as likely to be elected Pope.

The only openings where such views would be permissible is in history but the number of historians who focus on that period of history and place is very small. A few percent of the field in total. And many of those ‘historians’ are really religion pushers in disguise. So it really wouldn’t be very surprising to find that a consensus supported the establishment view.

50% is better than 6% if we are combining that with other pieces of evidence though, which is the case I think you intend to make.

On the Q thing, one feature of the Greek and Roman mystery cults was that it was utterly forbidden to write stuff down. So looking for a written source for Q is quite likely a wild goose chase.

A plausible hypothesis for how the gospels came into being is the following:

1) Peter begins preaching an apocalyptic gospel based on the mythical Christ.

2) Paul joins the cult and decides to start his own Greek franchise.

3) Peter is put on trial leading to the trial testimonies of Acts.

4) Paul’s Greek franchise is successful leading to the need to write the epistles. The messenger delivering them would have been given a portion of the takings to return to Paul.

5) Paul brought to Rome under arrest

6) Messianic preaching of ‘Christ’ rapture in Rome, during which a fire breaks out leading to belief they were fulfilling their own prophecy. It is blamed on ‘Christians’ but these could have been gentile or Jewish at that point. By the end of this Paul is dead, whether his death was a consequence or a cause or completely incidental is unknown.

7) More apocalyptic rapture leads to the sieges of Jerusalem and the last redoubt at Masada

8) Christianity being a syncretic Jewish sect risks being tainted by association putting Christ on earth and having the Jews persecute him is thus a twoffer: play on anti-Roman resentment and present him as the victim of the Jewish temple cult.

9) John writing in exile writes Revelation from the opposite perspective. It is not prediction, it is an allegory of the destruction of the Temple. A key message is that the Jewish faith is being polluted by the gentile Christians.

10) The messianic Christ followers split on Jewish/Gentile lines into Jews and Christians. The Christians struggle to forge an identity independent of the Jewish parent religion. Oral tradition within the church is codified and written down. Chuches that preach Christ on earth do better business than those preaching celestial Christ.

11) ~330 AD Constantine is looking for a way to hold together an empire that is fragmenting. Adopting Christianity as the state religion co-opts a sect that had previously been the vessel for opposition to the empire. The quid pro quo for this arrangement is that the Church has to agree on a single doctrine.

12) Bishops refusing to toe the new line are executed, scriptures that are inconsistent burned.

Yes. It’s ridiculous. I’ve slated to discuss it on my blog as soon as I find time (I assign low priority to childish and out-of-touch posts like hers).