Richard Carrier versus Trent Horn on the Historicity of Jesus

A recent debate between Richard Carrier and Trent Horn on the historicity of Jesus, and the mysticist thesis of Carrier most recently developed at length in his book On the Historicity of Jesus: Why we might have reason for doubt (Sheffield Phoenix Press, Sheffield, 2014).

Richard Carrier on Did Jesus Even Exist?

Richard Carrier discusses his mythicist theory of early Christianity in the video below. I do not find it persuasive myself, but the talk is interesting.

Critique of Carrier on Bayesian Probability and History

These provide a good critique of Richard Carrier’s views on Bayes’s theorem and Bayesian probability theory as applied to historical probabilities and historical argument:

“A Mathematical Review of ‘Proving History’ by Richard Carrier,” Irreducible Complexity, September 8, 2012.

“Error in Bayes’s Theorem,” October 11, 2012.

“An Introduction to Probability Theory and Why Bayes’s Theorem is Unhelpful in History,” September 12, 2012.

Richard Carrier has a response here:

Richard Carrier, “Understanding Bayesian History,” Richard Carrier Blogs, October 9, 2012.

Richard Carrier on Acts as Fiction

Richard Carrier analyses Acts and shows why it is historically unreliable and clearly contains fictions.



For a good bibliography on Acts, see the books below:

On Acts:
Pervo, Richard I. 2008. The Mystery of Acts: Unraveling its Story. Polebridge Press, Santa Rosa, Calif.

MacDonald, Dennis Ronald. 2003. Does the New Testament Imitate Homer?: Four Cases from the Acts of the Apostles. Yale University Press, New Haven.

Crossan, John Dominic. 2012. The Power of Parable: How Fiction by Jesus became Fiction about Jesus. SPCK, London.

Conzelmann, Hans. 1987. Acts of the Apostles (trans. James Limburg, A. Thomas Kraabel, and Donald H. Juel), Fortress Press, Philadelphia.

On the author of the Gospel of Luke and Acts and Q:
Goulder, Michael D. 1989. Luke: A New Paradigm. JSOT Press, Sheffield.

Goodacre, Mark S. 2002. The Case against Q: Studies in Markan Priority and Synoptic Problem. Trinity Press International, Harrisburg, Pa.

Shellard, Barbara. 2004. New Light on Luke: Its Purpose, Sources and Literary Context. T&T Clark Int., London.

Richard Carrier on the Finely Tuned Universe

A nice interview with Richard Carrier here on the fallacy of the argument from design based on the finely tuned universe.

Richard Carrier on Bayes Theorem

Richard Carrier gives a talk here on Bayes theorem and Bayesian probability theory.

William Lane Craig versus Richard Carrier on the Resurrection of Jesus

This is a video of a debate between William Lane Craig and Richard Carrier, held at Northwest Missouri State University (March 18, 2009), on the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus.

Needless to say, I find the position of Craig utterly unconvincing. What is most strange is the lazy assumption that Craig takes from the beginning that the Judeo-Christian god exists! If this does not give his ridiculous apologetic game away, then nothing will.





I provide my own critique of Craig here:

(1) Craig’s first “fact” is the burial of Jesus by Joseph of Arimathea. This is not a “fact” at all: it is merely assertion in the gospel of Mark, and there is no necessary reason why it must be true. The Christians might have invented this to give Jesus an “honourable,” rather than a shameful, burial. Furthermore, Craig commits a gross non sequitur: even if it were true that Joseph of Arimathea buried Jesus in a tomb, it simply does not follow that the location of the tomb was known by his disciples. One astonishing datum is that there was no known veneration of Jesus’s tomb in early Christianity: it is most probable that they had no idea where he was buried.

There is good reason to think that the gospel of Mark (the earliest gospel) is already filled with legends and fictions, and that the empty tomb story is one fiction of Mark (Collins 1989; Collins 1993; Lüdemann 1994). Moreover, it is quite likely that the author of Mark composed his empty tomb story as part of his literary mimesis or midrashic rewriting of certain Old Testament texts like Daniel 6:6–23 (Goulder 1976; Helms 1988: 135–136).

Despite Craig, even Jesus’s alleged rising on the third day in 1 Corinthians 15:3–6 is said to be in accordance with the scriptures, not with any eyewitness accounts, which suggests that the belief that Jesus rose on the third day could have come from nothing more than exegesis of an Old Testament passage in Hosea 6.2 (as Gerd Lüdemann 1994: 47 argues).

(2) Craig’s attempt to claim that Matthew and John are independent attestations of the empty tomb story is unconvincing. They are no such thing, but secondary and redactional stories from Mark. Nor does Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:3–6 require an empty tomb story at all. There is no direct evidence for any empty tomb in Paul. There are no multiple, independent sources for the empty tomb story: it is all dependent on Mark, and there is a good case he invented it (Collins 1989).

Contrary to Craig, the presence of women in the gospel of Mark as eyewitnesses to the empty tomb makes perfect sense if this was an invention of the author of that gospel. For the earliest tradition suggests that the male disciples had fled Jerusalem and returned to Galilee (so the women were plausible people to use in the empty tomb fiction), and the ending of the gospel of Mark tells us that the women told nobody of their discovery (Mark 16.8), which is exactly in accord with the more misogynist attitudes to women in the ancient world.

Moreover, it is a bad error to assert that women were never trusted as witnesses in the ancient Greek and Roman world. The gospel of Mark was clearly a work of Pauline Christianity and had its natural home in Gentile Greek and Roman Christian communities. While it was considered disreputable for high status women to appear in public in roles usually reserved for men in Greece and Rome, Richard Carrier has shown that women were perfectly able to give testimony in court: Cicero used women as witnesses against the corrupt Roman governor Verres (Cicero, Against Verres 2.1.94; 4.99), and an Oxyrhynchus Papyrus (P.Oxy. 1.37) preserves the testimony of a woman in court from Roman Egypt.

When early Christians heard the ending of the gospel of Mark, with the empty tomb, they will have asked: “Why have I never heard this before?” Michael Goulder has explained how some misogynist Christian men would have understood Mark 16.8:

“You know what women are like, brethren: they were seized with panic and hysteria, and kept the whole thing quiet. That is why people have not heard all this before.” (Goulder 1996: 58).

Thus it is not that the testimony of women would have been rejected per se, but their reliability in transmitting what they had seen and heard. Despite Craig and apologists like Craig, that is a very convincing explanation of why Mark used women.

(3) Despite Craig, the earliest tradition in Mark and taken over by Matthew is that the earliest resurrection “appearances”/hallucinations of Jesus were in Galilee, not in Jerusalem. This may well be true, and it suggests that the disciples fled back to Galilee after the death of Jesus. That is precisely why Mark has women go to an empty tomb in his ending, because in the tradition Mark received the disciples had fled. The stories of resurrection “appearances” at Jerusalem in Luke and John are therefore fictions. If these gospel writers could write fiction (such as the absurd fantasies one reads in the gospel of Matthew 28:1-3), then why not Mark in the empty tomb story?

(4) Craig asserts that there was no belief in a dying and rising Messiah in first century Judaism. That may well be true, but provides no serious evidence for the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus. As Robert M. Price has argued, when Sabbatai Zevi (1626–1676), a Jewish rabbi who claimed to be the Jewish Messiah in the 17th century, apostatized, his movement did not collapse and there were Jewish believers in Sabbatai Zevi as the Messiah for at least two centuries following his apostasy! Even Nathan of Gaza, his leading disciple, continued to think Sabbatai was the Messiah.

Anyway, it is clear that Christianity - before it became a Gentile religion as developed by the apostle Paul - remained a minority sect within Judaism.

Is that not precisely what one would expect if early Christian ideas about a crucified Messiah were peculiar and an innovation?


BIBLIOGRAPHY

Collins, Adela Yarbro. 1989. The Beginning of the Gospel: Probings of Mark in Context, Fortress Press, Minneapolis.

Collins, Adela. 1993. “The Empty Tomb in the Gospel According to Mark,” in Eleonore Stump and Thomas P. Flint (eds.), Hermes and Athena: Biblical Exegesis and Philosophical Theology, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, In. 107–140.

Collins, Adela Yarbro. 2009. “Ancient Notions of Transferal and Apotheosis in Relation to the Empty Tomb Story in Mark,” in T. K. Seim and J. Okland (eds.), Metamorphoses. Resurrection, Body and Transformative Practices in Early Christianity, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin and New York. 41–58.

Goulder, Michael. 1976. “The Empty Tomb,” Theology 79: 206–214.

Goulder, Michael. 1996. “The Baseless Fabric of a Vision,” in Gavin D’Costa (ed.), Resurrection Reconsidered, Oneworld, Oxford. 48–61.

Helms, Randel. 1988. Gospel Fictions. Prometheus Books, Buffalo, N.Y.

Lüdemann, G. 1994. The Resurrection of Jesus: History, Experience, Theology (trans. John Bowden), SCM Press, London.

Richard Carrier on Jesus Mythicism

Richard Carrier gives a talk here on Jesus mythicism: the theory that there never was an historical person called Jesus of Nazareth, and that Christianity arose from belief in a purely “heavenly” Jesus, who was crucified in the lower spheres of heaven (what was called the second heaven in Jewish cosmology) at the hands of evil spirits and demons. Now I do not agree with this thesis myself, but Carrier presents an interesting summary of it.