But you haven’t actually. You didn’t present any of the case I presented in the book. You basically invented a bunch of things and then refuted strawmen.

So, for example, if the probability that Mark has been edited to replace James as betrayer with Judas is 10%, then Price’s theory has to be less than 10% likely. If the probability that Mark has also been edited to replace John encountering the devil with Jesus is also 10%, the combined probability of both is 1%, and Price’s theory of the Parable of the Sower must be less than 1% likely.

This is just complete and total invention. You’ve said nothing about any of the arguments I presented in favor of various points. You’re just making up numbers.

The pronoun “him” is in the Greek, as a masculine accusative, and must take the most recent subject or object noun, and that’s Jesus, not John.

All well and good, but if someone is editing the scene, they can change the grammar however they want, so this seems to be an entirely useless point.

I provided multiple arguments in support of the reconstruction I provided and you presented none of them.

Refutation of the argument I actually put forward actually requires dismissing roughly a dozen points that I make as coincidences.

Its a coincidence that Mark 6:13 happens to read directly into Mark 6:30. Its a coincidence that swapping the baptism of Jesus and John results in a scene that now is perfectly aligned with the Parable of the Sower. Its a coincidence that the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd characters introduced in the story just happen to have scenes that align with the Parable of the Sower in perfect order. It’s a coincidence that replacing “some people” in the anointing scene with “James and John Zebedee” and replacing Judas with James shortly after happens to unite the complainer and betrayer just as the complainer and betrayer are united in the Gospel of John. And on and on, these only scratch the surface.

And its a super coincidence that all of these things just happen to the true together.

We could certainly argue about Paul. Sure, maybe the last figure mentioned in the Parable isn’t Paul. Who else would it be? I show throughout the book that the Gospel of Mark is a Pauline work, designed to further a Pauline message. I identify multiple allusions to Paul in the story. You acknowledge that the Seven Loaves is a “hidden message” about Paul. The ending is clearly abrupt and cutoff. The Pauline letters (which you acknowledge are referenced in Mark) repeatedly talk about Paul and his gospel bearing fruit.

So, who do you think the one “bearing fruit” might be?

I guess Paul is an entirely unfounded conjecture…

And its not as if this is coming out of nowhere. The church fathers alleged that multiple “heretics” claimed that The Twelve were false apostles that Paul was the only legitimate apostle. I wonder where they got that idea?

I didn’t necessarily expect you or any other scholar to hail this as a great breakthrough (someone without a PhD cannot possibly be right about anything), but I did at least expect constructive criticism instead of mocking.

Like, “Hmm, this is challenging, but X might strengthen the case” or “Interesting idea, but you didn’t account for this grammatical issue here…”

All the best.

What you are saying is that if any changes were made to the text there would never be any way to detect them, other than finding a copy of the text that said something else.

The point of the analysis is that it uses the Parable of the Sower to confirm the proposed changes.

What has to be argued is that with just these very small proposed changed it just happens to be a coincidence that the narrative is now perfectly aligned with the Parable of the Sower.

The case against this has to be that the fact that simply swapping the baptism of Jesus and John the Baptist (which requires like 2-4 word changes) results in a scene that is now perfectly described by part 1 of the Parable of the Sower is “just chance”.

So, here is Carrier’s case:
1) The fact that swapping the baptism of Jesus and John (the 1st character in the story) results in a scene that is perfectly described by the Parable of the Sower is just chance.
2) The fact that the 2nd figure in the story (Peter/Rock) is also perfectly described by the 2nd figure in the Parable of the Sower is just chance.
3) The fact that changing the name Judas to James in Mark 14 results in the fact that the 3rd figure of the parable now perfectly describes James and John Zebedee (the 3rd characters) is just chance.

And the fact that all three of these things happen to be true together is also, just chance!

I mean, I guess I need to bust out some Bayesian calculations here, because these are some incredible odds…

I certainly don’t consider your work to be a bunch of nonsense. To me, as an interested amateur, what you’ve laid out is a fascinating thought experiment that shows incredible literary imagination and a lot of effort to find hidden patterns in the text.
However, I can see the validity of Richard Carrier’s critique: as a scientific hypothesis about how Mark was originally written, it just can’t be methodologically defended. Once a theory requires, e.g., replacing Judas with James, erasing John the Baptist’s execution, or assuming a lost Pauline ending without any evidence, it feels less like historical reconstruction and more like writing a new text to fit the theory.

In some cases more so. But what is being proposed here is that modification of the original story has taken place. So, in some sense, whether this or that change is required doesn’t really matter. If someone changed 1 word they could just as easily have changed 5 words or 100. The point is the evidence for alignment with the Parable of the Sower. We can see from what is currently in the canonical text that there is a high degree of correlation between the parable and the scenes in question.

And motivations behind the proposed editing is also very clear. We know that various so-called heretics, Marcion among them, claimed that John the Baptist was a representative of the Creator and was thus an invalid figure who represented the invalid Law and Prophets that Jesus was sent to overthrow.

Thus, anyone intent or refuting such claims would have a motivation to revise the story as I have reconstructed it to show that JtB was not “invalid”.

So potential motivations behind the proposed modification are clear and well established in the literature. We can see why someone seeking to disprove such a heretical view would modify the narrative away from what I have reconstructed to what the canonical version says.

2) Historicity was invented for a different reason: to combat the mystics. It had nothing to do with the Marcionite controversy. I explain this with tons of evidence in chapter seven of Paradigm. But typical examples of the point are 2 Peter and Ignatius, who both are stumping hard for historicity against opponents denying it—so their reasons were not Marcion, but some other threat. Marcion was just in on their same game and trying to beat them at it and it didn’t work (they outspent him). But they were already “all hands on deck” against mythicists. Marcion was an entirely different threat, and would appear to be a new threat, which is why historicity more likely precedes him. It is almost impossible that it was adopted from him by his enemies to fight those other separate enemies. That would be discrediting and undermine their polemic against Marcion. So their commitment to historicity to combat these other unrelated factions must precede him.

In a sense this means you also know this is true. You cannot think of why they would borrow an idea from their enemy exactly when that would be the worst decision they could make. That’s because that would never happen. Therefore MP must be false.

There is only one “eye of the needle” here to slither through. And that’s if somehow we could link Marcion to the mystics. That would require Marcion to have been openly preaching that the Gospel was allegory and not supportive of historicity, so their opponents the anti-historicists in 2 Peter and Ignatius are the Marcionites. There is just no evidence of this. And what evidence we have renders it quite unlikely. So it’s not likely your camel can get through there. But if it did, that would give you the answer to why his enemies went all-in on historicity to combat Marcion, not because Marcion invented it. On that model of events, he didn’t. He was against it.

That is, pretty tight logic. I also agree with the “eye of the needle” argument you proposed. I will have to read a lot more to be able to answer these objections, if they have answers at all.

I did read the Paradigm chapter on docetism, and in fact the discussion there is what inspired me to think about the process of historicization and how it might’ve happened.

Because of course, just like “suspension executions” and a handful of other conveniently specific things, anointings for some reason “can’t” happen in outer space, I guess.

Moreover, cosmic anointing does not even have to be a physical event. Kipp knows that “anointed” can just be a figurative reference to election; it does not require actual oil touching a head or something. “I anoint you for this role” simply can mean “I choose you for this role.” So God choosing Melchizedek to be the agent of celestial vengeance in the Dead Sea Scrolls is an anointing of him for the purpose. It does not require God to have first put some space oil on Melchizedek’s head, as if God were limited by material ingredients in effecting his magic.

Of course there was space oil (explicit references to fruit, trees, and processed commodities in space abound in Jewish literature—and you list examples even of actual oil). So God could indeed have done that. But the larger point is that he doesn’t have to. The word “anointed” does not require so literal a reading. And you can bet every honest expert will tell you that.

I should also note that while you have aptly honed in on Kipp’s derangement trigger here (he is so terrified of mythicism turning out to be true he has to spread a campaign of lies and slander to make it go away: as I have documented extensively), my article has nothing to do with that. Nor did the element in my original study that it proves. The elements in chapters four and five of Historicity (where all this began) are all, as there explained, true regardless of historicity—none of them make historicity less likely or mythicism more likely, they are all equally expected on either theory.

So for Kipp to make this “about” cosmic messiahs replacing earthly ones is him projecting his terrors and fears onto an innocuous fact: that nearly all experts who have looked at this agree Christianity already had ideas of dying messiahs to work with. I even show how that can explain a historical Jesus (see my Rapture Day talk; there’s also a MythVision video on this somewhere).

And cosmic messiahs also don’t threaten historicity. Qumran has one: Melchizedek flies down from outer space with an army of extraterrestrials to ravage human enemies, just as Jesus promises to do in the Gospels. That does not entail there wasn’t an earthly historical messiah as well (the one who dies in 11Q13 as it claims predicted by Daniel 9, for example, could well have been imagined, for them, to be an ordinary historical human).

Hebrews 1:9 arguably speaks of Jesus’s anointing occurring in heaven upon his exaltation (see Craig Koester, Anchor Bible Commentary on Hebrews, 195). Several experts on Hebrews concur…

Good point. And that’s what you have to keep doing. Cite long lists (as long as you can muster) of experts disagreeing with Kipp and agreeing with me. The more people do that the less people will believe his lies.

Are there other texts that suggest an anointing in heaven that I’m forgetting?

Possibly. Since it isn’t necessary to have a literal oil involved or a text mentioning it, I haven’t exhausted time trying to find every possible mention. But I welcome anyone else gathering as many as they can find and posting them here, for example. I can make use of long lists of examples in future, even though I don’t want to give respect that is not due to an argument that anointings “must” be physically literal or that they “must” be already mentioned somewhere to have been readily imagined anywhere.

For an example, I did try to find cosmic crucifixions, but missed one: Ixion; and readers sent me the reference and I was able to run it down and use it in my following study (see the index to Paradigm). So this is always useful. Even though it is never logically necessary. It is only needed to shut down people committed to being illogical.

A lot of ministry does that (Jordon Peterson is the horrid cancerous metastasization of that): any explanation your brain thinks fits and that suits some point you want to sell is thereby “true” or true enough to claim. This differs from historians who, unlike such postmodern approaches (ironically the anti-postmodern churches are the most postmodern societies on earth), need to make logically sound evidence-based arguments to conclusions. That’s what generates knowledge rather than just-so stories.

Not really. But I understand some need to believe that has happened. That is the psychological function of apologetics: to assuage rather than solve.

Indeed.

The “would it matter” question is different than what I am addressing, be aware.

It matters in two ways:

(1) We, as historians, are obligated to do what we can to figure out the intended meanings of authors in passages like this. Just for history’s sake. This is what we are: the memory cells of society; if false memories have formed, it is our job to fix them. Just for the sake of having an accurate memory (and here that means an accurate memory of what these authors meant and thus what all this signifies about the development of an entire cultural institution still plaguing us today).

(2) Price is arguing that it is more probable that Jesus didn’t exist if we can reduce the Gospels entirely to missionary-political allegory. So he endeavors to do that. Whether he does that well is not relevant to whether it’s what he should be trying to do. His generic argument is sound. It’s only his particular arguments that are not.

I handled this differently. I sought to empirically ascertain the frequency of such texts being produced for mythical vs. historical people, which did not require the specifics Price uses, and gets ultimately the same result his would: a below middling odds this happens to historical people. I used the Rank-Raglan class because it is distinctive and countable. But that’s just a proxy for the purpose. The reference class is “heavily mythologized heroes” and Price’s missionary-political allegory model is a proper subset of that—just a different one than I used to count by.

I don’t think his gets us a countable class, which is why I didn’t use it—I only pursue his approach to remove evidence rather than stack it. For example, by explaining the mythic origin of every text in the Gospels we can show there is no evidence for historicity. Which is not the same thing as proving ahistoricity. Amateurs do confuse those a lot. But I’m not crediting Price with that confusion here. But mythicists do need to do both (add evidence for mythicism and remove evidence for historicity) but they need to do it soundly (e.g. the evidence removed does have to provably not exist and not be merely explained away; and evidence for mythicism has to be in some way more substantive than merely a lack of evidence, e.g. we need a positive model of Christian origins that makes the evidence, even its absence, more probable than otherwise, e.g. compare Historicity chapter eight and chapter nine).