‘Deciphering the Gospels’, by R. G. Price, argues the case for Jesus mythicism, which is the view that Jesus never existed on earth in any real form but was an entirely mythical figure in the same way as Hercules or Dionysus. (The author is not the same person as Robert Price, also a Jesus mythicist author.) I’m an atheist who holds the opposing (and mainstream) view that Jesus was originally a human being of the 1st century about whom a later mythology grew up. I’m therefore reviewing Price’s book to discuss his arguments and my reasons for disagreeing.
The first post in this book review is here. All subsequent posts will be linked at the end of that post as they go up.
Chapter 9: Finding Jesus In Paul’s Letters
We’ve seen Price’s arguments about Paul’s writings supporting mythicism, and I’ve discussed why they don’t hold up. Time to look at the other side. Are there passages in Paul’s letters that would point to him believing in an earthly Jesus?
A slight but relevant digression from the specifics of Price’s book:
Some years ago, having been impressed by Carrier’s mythicism polemic ‘On the Historicity of Jesus’, I decided I should go back and read the authentic Pauline letters with the mythicist argument in mind. After all, the book seemed convincing and well researched, and Carrier seemed very sure that Paul’s letters indicated a mythical Jesus, so probably I’d been reading them wrong. I reread them in light of mythicist theory, expecting it to be rather like the experience of rereading a book once you know the plot twist at the end; I’d see things falling into place, would read passages in a new light that made far more sense of them.
Here’s what I actually found.
- Romans 1:3. Paul refers to Jesus as ‘descended from David according to the flesh’.
- Romans 5:12-18. This is a lengthy passage in which Paul repeatedly compares Jesus to Adam (who, remember, Paul would have believed to be a human being who had lived on earth). In particular, from some work with the GreekBible.com site I found that in verse 15 Paul uses the word ‘anthropou’, meaning ‘human’, to describe Jesus.
- Romans 8:3. Paul refers to God sending Jesus ‘in the likeness of sinful flesh’. While mythicists have a habit of interpreting passages like this as meaning that Jesus wasn’t really a being of flesh, this is missing a key point; Paul clearly thought Jesus had showed up in what at least appeared to be a normal human body. And, unless you want to argue for the Docetist viewpoint that Jesus only appeared to be flesh and blood but was in fact a cunningly divinely-designed simulacrum, the obvious reason why someone would appear to have a normal human body is that they actually had a normal human body.
- Romans 9:4-5. Paul describes Jesus as coming from the Jewish race ‘according to the flesh’.
- 1 Corinthians 9:5: Paul mentions brothers of the Lord (‘the Lord’ being one of Paul’s terms for Jesus) whose wives were supported by the church.
- 1 Corinthians 11:23-25: Paul describes Jesus instituting the Eucharist. This is, it should be noted, considerably less helpful than Jesus-historicists often think; although it would be too much of a digression to discuss now, there are plausible reasons to suspect that this was in fact one of Paul’s ‘revelations’ about Jesus rather than an actual historical event that Paul had learned about from existing group members. However, it’s still noteworthy that Paul describes Jesus as taking a loaf of bread, breaking it, giving thanks for it (which would have been, and still is to this day, a standard thing for a practicing Jew to do when about to eat bread), and taking a cup of wine ‘after supper’, implying that he also ate a meal between the bread-breaking and the wine. It’s not impossible that Paul could have believed in someone doing all these things in heaven, but it seems unusually physical and prosaic for a concept of heaven. Therefore, although it’s weaker than most of the others on the list, I think this one is nevertheless worth counting in the list of passages indicating Paul’s belief in a historical Jesus.
- 1 Corinthians 15:4. Like the previous one, this is a detail within a passage that is overall easy for skeptics to disregard, as it’s about Jesus being raised from the dead and appearing to people in visions; I think one point on which Price and I can certainly agree is that these things did not actually happen, and thus this passage is not particularly helpful to the history-vs-mythicism debate overall. However, I bring it up here because Paul specifically mentions Jesus as being buried, which, again, is quite a physical detail to mention about someone that you think has only existed in heaven. Paul might potentially have believed that burial could happen in a heavenly dimension, but that seems at the very least less likely than that he believed it happened on earth. Again, I certainly wouldn’t hang the case for historicity on this one detail, but it’s yet another thing to tip the scales at least slightly more towards historicity, so I’m including it in the list.
- 1 Corinthians 15:12-22. This is a lengthy passage in which Paul cites Jesus’s resurrection as evidence for the resurrection of the dead. It culminates in Paul specifically referring to Jesus as a human being (v21). Even before that, though, Paul’s making an argument that wouldn’t make sense if he wasn’t teaching his followers that Jesus had been a human. ‘Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead?’ Paul asks rhetorically. This would be rather a strange example for him to use if he knew that the answer would be ‘Because Christ was a heavenly being and we’re talking about what happens to human dead!’.
- 2 Corinthians 5:16. This is a rather odd verse in which Paul says that they now don’t regard anyone ‘according to the flesh’, which one translation that I found interprets as ‘from a worldly point of view’, which probably makes more sense. However, from our point of view the important point here is that Paul says that they did at one point regard Christ as being ‘according to the flesh’; i.e. having a genuine flesh-and-blood body.
- Galatians 1:19. Refers to a brother of the Lord (Paul’s term for Jesus) whom Paul had briefly met.
- Galatians 3:16. Refers to Christ as an offspring (in the sense of ‘descendant’) of Abraham.
- Galatians 4:4. Refers to God’s son as having been ‘born of a woman, born under the Law’.
- Philippians 2:7. Refers to Jesus as being ‘born in human likeness’ and ‘found in human form’.
I was trying to be as fair as possible in weighing up the evidence, and thus ended up leaving one potential item off the list; 1 Thessalonians 2:14 – 16. This refers to Jesus being killed by the Jews in the same way as the prophets were, but also has an antisemitic slant to it that isn’t typical of Paul, as well as seeming to hint about the destruction of the Temple, which would have post-dated this letter; many scholars therefore believe this to be a later interpolation rather than words of Paul. So, while whoever wrote those verses certainly seems to have believed in a physical earthly Jesus, there is enough uncertainty over whether that person was Paul that I decided that that line was unhelpful for ascertaining what Paul believed.
Which left the above list. Carrier’s book did address a few of those lines (‘born of a woman’, ‘descended from David’, and the ‘brother’ quotes) by explaining them away with mythicist-consistent excuses and calculating that they were still fully compatible with a likelihood that Jesus was mythical. However, reading all of Paul’s letters with mythicism in mind and instead coming across all of the above lines or passages in turn was quite a different experience from reading mythicist claims about how Paul only wrote ‘a few’ things that seemed to ‘hint’ at an earthly Jesus.
And that was how, by the time I finished the read-through that I had expected to give me a new appreciation of Paul’s supposed mythicist views, I found it undeniably clear that Paul had believed Jesus lived a human life on earth. It was, of course, very debatable how much credence to give this view, given Paul’s penchant for getting his beliefs about Jesus from ‘revelation’ in preference to what existing church members told him; I felt it only fair to consider the possibility that this belief in Jesus’s earthly life might in itself have been one of Paul’s ‘revelations’ rather than anything we’d consider reliable information, and so I didn’t find it that much help in the mythicism-vs-historicity argument. But, for whatever it’s worth, it’s clear that Paul did at least believe in what we would now call a historical Jesus.
Back to Price. Since Price believes that Paul didn’t believe Jesus to be a real person, what does he say about all of the above? Well, most of them he doesn’t seem to have noticed. Out of all of the above, Price only addresses two issues; the ‘born of a woman’ quote and the issue of Jesus’s brothers. Which would, even if he did successfully refute those issues, still leave more than enough passages to indicate that Paul believed in Jesus’s earthly existence. But since Price did at least address those two and spend quite some time on trying to explain away the obvious problems they cause for his theory, I’ll discuss his arguments.
I’ll look at the ‘born of a woman’ discussion here as it was shorter, and address the ‘brother(s) of the Lord’ discussion in a later post.
‘Born of a woman’: Price’s explanations
First of all, I don’t think it’s particularly important whether or not Paul viewed Jesus as purely heavenly or not
I tend to agree with this sentiment, for reasons explained previously, but it strikes me as rather a contradiction for Price to be saying this after pages of using Paul’s quotes as support for mythicism without any such disclaimers. Can’t have it both ways; does he think Paul’s views on the subject are important evidence or not?
but secondly, this is by no means a literal statement by Paul, as he is in the middle of allegorical statements that he himself says are allegorical
It hardly follows from this that all the statements Paul doesn’t label as allegorical are also allegorical. On the contrary; since we can see he was clear about stating which parts of the passage were allegorical, it makes it less likely that this would be so of the ones that aren’t thus labelled. (There’s also, of course, the question of how it would make sense to say that a real being – as Paul believed Jesus to have been, regardless of whether he believed him to have been a heavenly or an earthly being – was allegorically born of a woman.)
and thirdly this is part of a special pleading to a group of people who clearly have had problems with Paul’s teachings where he is trying to appeal to them on a new and different level that he feels is more acceptable to them.
There’s nothing in this letter to indicate that Paul’s trying to change anything about his teaching to make it more acceptable to the Galatians. He’s explaining it in different ways to try to get his point across, but he isn’t changing anything about it. Quite the contrary; he’s angry with the Galatians and can’t understand why they don’t just get with the programme here.
But on top of that… even if Paul was trying to take the approach of making his teachings more acceptable, why would saying that Jesus was ‘born of a woman’ do this? Why would the Galatians – from a culture who believed in heavenly beings and their importance – find a Jesus who was created in heaven unacceptable and need him to have had a human birth before they would accept Paul’s theology? And why, if this was indeed a point of contention, do we not see any hint of Paul trying to discuss this issue or persuade them? He throws in ‘born of a woman’ parenthetically in passing as a descriptor of Jesus and gets on with his argument about the law no longer being binding. There is nothing anywhere in the letter to indicate that Paul had had any sort of disagreement with the Galatians on this particular point or felt any sort of need to appease them about it.
Paul goes on to tell a story about two women who give birth to children, and Paul says that these women represent covenants, and the woman of the promise “corresponds to the Jerusalem above; she is free, and she is our mother.”
Price is correct on this point. Paul is citing the scriptural story of Hagar and Sarah, which he says is an allegory in which the two women represent covenants. (For context, this is part of a larger allegory Paul is using in this chapter, about slaves vs. heirs; in Paul’s allegory, Jews who still hold to the Jewish law are slaves while the ones redeemed by Jesus’s sacrifice are now heirs to the kingdom of God. The Hagar and Sarah story is used as a specific illustration, as they had sons fathered by the same man but Hagar was a slave whose son was cast out and Sarah a free woman whose freeborn son inherited, all of which made them a good example of Paul’s point for his Jewish readers who would have known the story well.)
However, Price then makes his leap of logic:
The woman that Paul is talking about in Galatians 4.4 is an allegorical woman, not a real woman,
I haven’t omitted anything between this sentence and the previous one I quoted; Price really has leaped straight from the observation that Paul referred to the story of Hagar and Sarah as allegorical to an assumption that a different woman he referred to eighteen verses earlier was somehow also allegorical. Nice try, but doesn’t work in context.
and in fact this passage provides further evidence that Paul’s Jesus was not a historical person.
How? Well, here’s what Price says:
Paul says that the Son of God was born under the law, but the law is in heaven; he is talking about the heavenly covenant and a heavenly birth!
This conclusion baffled me for a while, since Paul says nothing whatsoever about the law being in heaven, a claim which would in any case hardly fit with Paul’s main claim that the law is an intolerable burden from which Jesus’s followers have now been freed. The only way I can make any sense of this is to theorise that Price has incorrectly assumed that ‘covenant’ is another word for ‘law’ and thus, having followed Paul’s train of thought here to the logical conclusion that the covenant to which Paul is referring exists in heaven, interpreted this as the law being in heaven and Jesus’s birth under the law therefore being likewise in heaven. Unfortunately, if this is the explanation, it doesn’t work, because ‘covenant’ doesn’t mean ‘law’; it means ‘promise’. So, if this was Price’s reasoning, it’s fatally flawed. If this wasn’t Price’s reasoning, then he’s going to have to explain his actual reasoning if he wants it to make any sense.
If Paul were talking about a real women here, and Jesus’s earthly birth, then why does he give no details about the matter? Why not say that he was born to Mary or that he was born in Bethlehem, or anything else?
Because he’s writing a theological polemic, not a biography.
He clearly isn’t giving a historical account of anything, but his lack of detail, here and throughout his writings, works against the claim that Paul had knowledge of a historical Jesus.
The ambiguity of this phrasing has the potential to get a bit confusing, so let’s clarify. In terms of whether Paul ‘had knowledge of’ Jesus in terms of either knowing him personally or knowing details about his life, we’ve already established that he didn’t and that he preferred it that way. So, in that sense, I completely agree that ‘the claim that Paul had knowledge of a historical Jesus’ is provably false.
However, of course, that isn’t what Price is trying to say. He’s trying to say that Paul didn’t know of a ‘historical Jesus’ in the sense of our debate; that Paul’s lack of any details about Jesus means that he didn’t know of Jesus having existed on earth, and that this is because Jesus hadn’t existed on earth but only in the imaginations of his followers. And that one doesn’t stand up, for the reasons already given at the post linked to in the previous paragraph. We know that Paul, for his own reasons, deliberately chose to avoid learning details about Jesus from people who claimed to have known him, probably so that he could continue holding on to his own theology. So, what we actually have is someone who never knew Jesus, who avoided learning anything about Jesus, who was interested in Jesus the magical sin-eraser and not Jesus the person, and who, moreover, isn’t even trying to write biography; he’s writing theological polemics addressing particular issues for his readers. And, given that context, there is nothing in the least surprising about the fact that Paul doesn’t give us any biographical details about Jesus. Price keeps trying to paint this as some kind of inexplicable mystery that needs a mythical Jesus theory to explain it, but, in fact, it’s explained perfectly well by what Paul’s own writings tell us about him and his purpose.
I think Price could have got a lot further with trying to explain away ‘born of a woman’ (and most of the other phrases) if he’d pointed out that Paul was going by what he believed he’d learned about Jesus by revelation in preference to anything he actually did learn about Jesus from Jesus’s previous followers, and that this makes Paul’s views unreliable. But, of course, Price had reason not to want to look too closely at how unreliable Paul is; that would have meant blowing a hole in his own arguments.
Because he’s writing a theological polemic, not a biography.
This nails your whole current sequence of posts here, very neatly.
… Jesus hadn’t existed on earth but only in the imaginations of his followers.
Paul would’ve had to sign up with the Gnostics (of later generations) to hold that view – and to advanced-self-defeating courses (at or beyond the level of DeSantis today) to have promoted it publicly. Whatever his time-traveling capabilities, his successes as a church organizer indicate he did not sabotage his own ecclesiastical mission.
Dr Sarah,
I have some questions and concerns about what would constitute evidence in the historicist vs. mythicist discussion. In particular, I was struck by your reference above to 1 Corinthians 15:4, as “a detail within a passage that is overall easy for skeptics to disregard, as it’s about Jesus being raised from the dead and appearing to people in visions; I think one point on which Price and I can certainly agree is that these things did not actually happen, and thus this passage is not particularly helpful to the history-vs-mythicism debate overall.”
I have no means of asserting with confidence that those things DID happen, but what concerns me is that 1 Corinthians 15 seems to be treated presumptively by you (and, I would imagine, by Price) as an appendage to the larger debate, and an inconsequential one at that, for two reasons. First (which I will not contest) is the contention of skeptics and others that Jesus was not raised to life, and second (which is my primary concern, and which you state above) is the presumption that (the “abnormal” Paul instance aside, I will grant) what are being described after the Resurrection are “visions.” However, in the terms of the text itself they are not “visions,” but rather interactions among persons all having flesh and blood. And as you stated aptly above, “the obvious reason why someone would appear to have a normal human body is that they actually had a normal human body.”
Admittedly, a polemicist like Paul describing a sighting of a flesh-and-blood Jesus by, say, the “five hundred brethren at once” is something that would be taken with a lump of salt, but I find it concerning that the reference to the “five hundred” would be dismissed out of hand. What is being asserted, after all, is merely that the corporeal presence of Jesus was witnessed by a crowd at such a late date as would make it subsequent to any attested crucifixion. Weak evidence it may be, but it is a statement that is not in itself particularly unbelievable: a crowd of five hundred people who would be expected to recognize Jesus saw him alive–according to Paul.
I do realize that I am seizing on one particular point of evidence (and a flimsy and perhaps partial one at that): the purported, late-in-the-narrative sighting of Jesus by the five hundred, and I am attempting (if only in a moment of reflection) to see how it might, if taken seriously, affect the entire debate, but isn’t that what systematic analysis is about? This is an instance, however slight, of evidence that Jesus was alive at what might have been the latest possible time of his being so, and (as I noted above) though it is a prosaic piece of evidence in itself, it has not often survived the skeptics’ presumption (despite the larger text) that what was involved was some sort of “vision.”
And why, in the context of this debate, is the crowd-sighting (in itself) considered a “vision?” Because some sort of “weight of evidence” makes it more likely than not that Jesus was crucified, and that therefore the final sightings of Jesus in the accounts are to be considered hallucinations or some such, subsequent to his demise at the hands of his executioners?
What demise? What executioners? I would not think it impertinent here to contend that the weight of scholarly assessment of nearly every detail of legal jeopardy, trial record, or execution account of Jesus of Nazareth finds it comparable in outlandishness to any fictional concoction. It is well that debates about historicity include conjectures about what might have happened in the case of an execution, but if evidence is weighted by its likelihood and entertained by its likelihood (“likelihood” being such as considered by historians, as I imagine), then would not the most-discussed scenario-type of the life of Jesus have him with an intact, un-executed body at about the time of the purported sighting by the five hundred?
Jesus being alive, according to the “five hundred,” and with a normal human body at the time of the sighting, might be a piece of evidence that is judged insubstantial or minor, but it is at least not nonsense. On the other hand, the historians seem, with good cause, to have deemed nearly every aspect of the narratives of Jesus’ quasi-legal doom to be fanciful or implausible. It is understandable that both the faithful and the skeptical are drawn to the powerful stories of the Crucifixion, but it would seem to me that the Crucifixion as an assumed basic element of the life of an historical Jesus would be not a plausibility in itself, but rather a critical mass of individually-assessable implausibilities.
In another post of yours, you give a definition of this debate that is probably the best I’ve heard. Though, as I stated above, I find the “vision” treatment of 1 Corinthians 15 to be presumptuous (presuming, that is, the execution of Jesus), I see that your definition of the overall debate is not similarly presumptuous. As you wrote, “The historicist vs. mythicist discussion is a discussion between two different non-Christian views of Jesus (the belief that he was a human being with a following who was later mythologised, and the belief that he was entirely a mythical figure, like Hercules).
To cite: https://freethoughtblogs.com/geekyhumanist/2020/11/07/another-jesus-mythicism-discussion/
Such a definition of the debate is infinitely to be preferred over any that hinges on the historicity or not of a preacher (or perhaps just a person) who got himself executed by somebody (or perhaps was just said to be executed) as if the biography or pseudo-biography of Jesus were determinative of “Jesus’” cultural import. Similar (though similarly idiosyncratic) exercises can be worked up for any other purported figure (and, indeed, why not?) The power of the historicity debate about Jesus, as it informs the life of collective humanity, has to do with the import of his teachings. SOMEONE was that Jesus, or perhaps “Jesus” is just an amalgamation of sentiments and therefore the notion of a body of Jesus-thought is a chimera. In either event, the conceptual integrity of the notion of Jesus as a person is in scant fashion addressed by whether or not, in an historical sense, anyone was executed (or said to be so.)
(Neither, of course, is “the conceptual integrity of the notion of Jesus as a person” addressed by any Christian belief that will call him “Savior” without confronting the question—rather implicit in the idea of the Incarnation—of whether or not Jesus has been embraced by any given theology as a “person” first. Such a question, I would think, is of little concern to the non-Christian debate.)
To draw from your definition above, the crucial question for our culture is whether a person (and therefore possibly an espouser of a body of thought) was mythologized, or whether one or more mythologizers concocted a person as a character in a narrative. In the latter case, if the impulse to create a narrative was overriding as against a body of Jesus-thought, then there might really be no “Jesus” to be at issue at all. The question of whether Jesus as a person or Jesus as a concoction was in trouble or not with the authorities (rather than, say, a lively debater with other “rabbis”) is at best tangential. What matters (or, to be more fair, what makes the matter pivotal to humanity) is what ALL those rabbis could have been saying to each other. It would matter very much if Rabbi Jesus was real.
stephensherrier@2,
I for one have not the slightest idea what you are trying to say. But I will note that it is a consensus view among relevant experts that Jesus was executed by crucifixion (this is frequently included in the short list of statements about him that are reasonably certain); and that we don’t have statements from the alleged 500 witnesses to whom Paul claims Jesus appeared simultaneously after his execution – we only have the claim from Paul that this appearance before such a crowd took place. Paul doesn’t even claim to have spoken to any of the 500, or give any other evidence for their existence – it’s bare assertion.
KG@3,
I’m not really sure if I know what I’m trying to say. Thank you for your time and effort in responding to me.
The “questions and concerns” that I have arose when I seemed to have been confronted by the “five hundred brethren” business in a new and unsettling way. It occurred to me that the repeated New Testament insistences on an actual, flesh-and-blood Jesus at the end of his recorded ministry comported only with either a conventionally-Christian resurrected Jesus (which I will not suggest here) or with a Jesus who was not executed (at least not in the time frame generally accorded him on earth.) The only other option, apparently, would be a crucified Jesus whose shattered followers merely imagined they saw him again. Of course, the “shattered followers” notion is that which is usually offered by non-Christian historicists, and the flesh-and-blood interactions described in the text are written off as “visions” at best, or “hallucinations” at worst.
What really bothered me in all this was the question (especially in light of the stubborn dearth of information we have outside of the Christian scriptures) of the evidentiary value of the “five hundred brethren” assertion by Paul. Is its value zero? Some Christian apologists, of course, will point to the idea that most of the “five hundred” would still have been alive when Paul wrote (that is, if they ever existed in the first place) and the slimmest of scenarios might be conceived by which Paul could be ratified or refuted in this by someone, somehow (or at least he imagined such might happen.) I suspect, however, that most skeptics of today would say that this latter consideration makes the evidentiary value of the “five hundred brethren” assertion zero plus zero.
If I might be indulged with the notion that there is at least a “non-zero” evidentiary value to the “five hundred” assertion, then I might at least imagine that it could take its place with myriad other evidences in the historicist-vs-mythicist galaxy that (as I am told by relevant experts) are near-zero value (or perhaps valued less-than-zero.) One consistent experience I have as a lay person near the historicism debate is that there is seemingly no end to the experts’ arresting observations or conclusions to the effect that conventionally unquestioned statements from the gospels dissolve in the light of careful examination.
If I might quote myself from above, “the historians seem, with good cause, to have deemed nearly every aspect of the narratives of Jesus’ quasi-legal doom to be fanciful or implausible. It is understandable that both the faithful and the skeptical are drawn to the powerful stories of the Crucifixion, but it would seem to me that the Crucifixion as an assumed basic element of the life of an historical Jesus would be not a plausibility in itself, but rather a critical mass of individually-assessable implausibilities.”
There was a time when I would have wanted to be reassured that “the Gospel story holds together.” I don’t think I’m going to get that reassurance now, and I have no inkling that I’m going to get it in the midst of the historicism debate, wherein the assurance (if one might call it that) that Jesus was indeed crucified seems to be drawn not from evidences themselves, but from conjectures about why this or that person would do this or that. Good questions, I will admit, why this or that person would do this or that, but when such conjectures are being tossed about, it does not seem (or at least seem to me) that it is really so very silly to wonder if there is not some point to wondering why Paul would list “visions” which (excepting his own, special ones) were interactions with a person who “rose again,” not who lingered in the ether.
Maybe the reason behind Paul’s assertions (and others’ assertions) that Jesus is seen at the end of the story as a flesh-and-blood person is that nobody had killed Jesus yet. Maybe the best approach to historicism-vs-mythicism is to take Dr. Sarah’s question about a person who was mythologized, rather than a question (as I have heard elsewhere) about a person-necessarily-said-to-be-executed who was mythologized. Or at least that’s as far as I got in my stumbling comment above.
stephensherrier@4,
Thanks, that does give me a better idea of your thinking. The belief that Jesus survived the crucifixion, or that it was some form of phantasm that the Romans crucified, are I think more common than your suggestion that it didn’t happen at all. Certainly many of the details are widely judged implausible by experts, but it should be remembered that even the earliest of the Gospels, generally held to be gMark, date from some decades after Jesus’s reported crucifixion. That’s plenty of time for elaboration and mythologizing to occur. Indeed that process can be followed in the succession of Gospels, with (for example) the accounts of Jesus’s burial becoming more and more elaborate as you move from gMark to gMatthew and gLuke, and then to gJohn. As to “post-mortem” appearances, gMark is thought by most experts to have originally ended at 16:8, without any such appearances (the three women who go to anoint his body are told by a young man that he is risen, but do not see him). In the verses most experts think are a later addition, he first appears to Mary Magdelene “out of whom he had cast seven devils” (16:9, KJV), but she’s not believed, then “he appeared in another form” (16:12, KJV) to two unnamed disciples, who again are not believed, then to the 11, when he tells them believers can drink poison and handle snakes without being harmed*. In gMatthew, Jesus appears to the women (just two of them, Mary Magdalen and “the other Mary”) who have come to the tomb, and there’s a vague reference to him later appearing to the 11. In gLuke 24:13-35 there’s a similar scene at the tomb, but involving two men in shining garments, and very significantly, the story of the appearance on the road to Emmaus, in which two disciples meet Jesus on the road but do not recognise him until some time later. Why not, if he’s the living Jesus? Similarly, in gJohn (by which time the two men in shining garments have become angels), Mary Magdalene does not recognise Jesus when he speaks to her outside the tomb; but we do get by far the most elaborate appearance stories, with Jesus appearing to a group of disciples (but Thomas is absent), and showing them the wounds in his hands and side, then returning when Thomas is there, and Thomas is said to have touched the wounds. So to me, admittedly as a complete unbeliever, all this looks like a process of elaboration of initial post-mortem hallucinations of the dead (which are by no means uncommmon) and in gJohn (which most experts think was written no earlier than 90 CE), a deliberate attempt to convince readers that yes, this was indeed the real, physical Jesus. There’s no mention of Paul’s 500 in any of the gospels. I’m just not seeing any convincing evidence that Jesus really appeared to anyone post-crucifixion in bodily form.
*Don’t try this at home!
I should perhaps clarify what I meant by “complete unbeliever” @5! I meant I’m an atheist, and so don’t believe Jesus was anything more than a human being, with two human parents, who could not perform miracles, and when he was executed, stayed dead. But I consider mythicism a load of ridiculous tosh.
Curious as to how you concluded this? It doesn’t seem to specify anything about Jesus being flesh and blood at the time of the sightings, and my understanding is that Paul uses the same term for the other post-mortem appearances of Jesus as he does for his own, which isn’t claimed to have been of a flesh-and-blood person.
What, that Jesus showed up alive after having been crucified and buried? I disagree on that front.
I think it’s worth differentiating between the trial story and the execution story.
Trial story: massive improbabilities in the way the Sanhedrin and Pilate are depicted as behaving, with a plausible motive for misrepresentation on the part of the writers (wanting to avoid speaking ill of a powerful Roman while at the same time, in a somewhat anti-Semitic society, wanting to put more blame on the Jews).
Execution story: still some heavily improbable detail, but we do have one very plausible fact; a man supposedly in trouble for sedition against the Romans (for accepting a title that indicated kingship and was associated with Jewish troublemaking) was executed by crucifixion, a known Roman punishment. We also don’t have a plausible motive as to why a group would invent the claim that their leader had been killed (it could have been for a martyrdom story, but it’s not really been played that way). In other words, we have the reverse situation from what we have with the trial stories; the claim that Jesus was crucified is actually much more likely to be true than invented.
So, while it’s a reasonable conclusion that the trial stories are fictitious, I find it equally reasonable to conclude that Jesus was in fact executed by crucifixion.
We aren’t told that he had a normal human body. We’re told this supposedly happened after his death and burial. To top it all, this claim comes from someone who’s admitted himself that he’s fine with a wee bit of, ahem, creative representation if it serves the purpose of bringing people to Jesus. I think we’re looking at worse than ‘insubstantial’ or ‘minor’ here.
Surely the most discussed scenarios of Jesus’s life are the Christian ones in which he’s actually risen from the dead? I’m not quite sure of what you’re trying to say. If you’re talking about what’s most probable, then I would say ‘would-be Messiah actually was executed and his followers then imagined he was risen and still with them’ is vastly more probable than ‘would-be Messiah’s followers imagined he was humiliatingly executed, but actually he just randomly disappeared one day’.
Huh. Interesting viewpoint, but a pretty unusual one. In general, the power of the historicity debate for Christians is their belief that Jesus actually died for everyone’s sins, the power of the historicity debate for mythicists is that they like metaphorically sticking two fingers up at Christianity with ‘hey, we don’t even believe Jesus existed, THAT is how wrong we think you are’, and the power of the historicity debate for non-Christian historicists is that we like metaphorically sticking two fingers up at mythicists with ‘dude, just because you’re an atheist doesn’t mean you get away with bad logic and evidence, behold as I destroy your feeble arguments’. Or something.
Anyway… if the important bit to you is Jesus’s teaching, surely the historicity vs. mythicism debate is irrelevant? If the teachings are important, they’re important whether they came from an actual rabbi or were attributed to a mythical divine being. (Reminds me of a comparison between Christianity and Buddhism I read once; that if it could be proved that Jesus never existed then Christianity would fall apart, but if it could be proved that the Buddha never existed then Buddhists would go right on following the teachings and not care, since the teachings are the important part of Buddhism regardless of who taught them. I can’t comment on whether or not this is a correct representation of Buddhism, but it does seem to be the logical outcome of the premise ‘the teachings are the important bit’.)
If that’s what interests you, then sounds like what you’re after is a study of Second Temple Pharisaic Judaism, much of which is preserved in the Talmud.
Close enough to make no practical difference. There’s a point of weakness in evidence when any negligible value you would get from using it is more than outweighed by the degree to which resorting to such weak evidence reflects badly on the strength of your case.
Yes – but I think it’s also an “athier than thou” move in relation to historicist atheists: “You don’t believe God exists? Huh – well I don’t even believe Jesus existed!”.
@KG, #8: Yeah, you’re not wrong there. And there’s a huge element of ‘well, obviously Christians are wrong, whatever they believe the opposite must be true…’
KG and Dr Sarah,
I thank you both for your responses. I’ve spent years typing things off into the ether, and I’m afraid I forget occasionally that people might give painstaking answers to me.
Dr Sarah, as far as the 500 in 1 Corinthians 15 is concerned, I gather from the passage that the episode supposedly happened after Jesus’ death and burial and rising from the dead (v. 4). If we were to work through it painstakingly here, I don’t suppose we could escape stating that the supposed episode happened after Jesus’ supposed death and supposed burial and supposed rising from the dead. Also, I would contend that the notion that Paul means anything other than “Jesus looked like a person who was no longer dead” is supposition itself. “Rising from the dead” was scarcely unheard-of in that milieu, and one might as well contend that the supposedly risen Lazarus was conceptualized as a purulent monstrosity as contend that the supposedly risen Jesus looked like anything other than a flesh-and-blood person.
“Looked like” is the operative notion here. The most straightforward meaning of Paul’s reference to the 500 is that 500 people saw Jesus alive at once when he was supposed to be dead. Perhaps they were mistaken. Perhaps they were lying. Perhaps Paul invented it.
Considering that the reference to the 500 was meant to be understood as a recounting of an actual event with an actual sighting, its existence (if we are to think of Paul as neither a deluded zealot nor a pathological liar) is evidence–albeit second-hand at best and admittedly insubstantial–that Jesus was alive after he was supposedly dead. That’s all–Jesus was supposedly seen alive after every reported time-frame for his supposed execution. In almost any other historical scenario, a similar contention would be taken as evidence that so-and-so had never been executed. History in its pristine sense would not take up the notion that someone rose again after being executed, of course, but neither would history contend that conclusions might be drawn from a situation in which the veracity or the sanity of every witness was presumably lacking–and in which testimony was the only evidence.
And yet that is what we have here. Paul said some people saw something. That’s all of the substance of the “500” passage. It would appear that Paul’s agenda will necessarily preclude the notion, however, that he is simply telling the truth for its own sake. What has been difficult for me is coming to grips with the realization that there is no evidence framework of greater reliability against which to see Paul’s contentions. In that regard, I appreciate the time you both have taken with me.
But we don’t have anything from those alleged 500 witnesses. We only have a claim by Paul (who does not provide a source for the claim) that these 500 existed. He doesn’t give a single name, he doesn’t tell us where the event happened. They don’t appear in any other text, other than those citing Paul. “History” contends nothing; but historians do. And when a claim as vague as this is not corroborated anywhere, and in particular, not in the texts where you would expect it to appear if there was any substance to it (in this case, the Gospels), an unbiased historian would simply dismiss it, unless and until some corroboration appears.
KG, I am interested, in light of #11 above, to know whether Paul’s “seen of Cephas” of 1 Corinthians 15 is understood by you to be corroborated by Luke’s “hath appeared to Simon” or John’s extended, supposedly post-Resurrection treatment of Jesus’ dealings with Peter. And is Paul’s reference to the 500 to be given more credence in that it is linked with other–presumably gospel-attested–sightings?
stephensherrier@12,
1) I don’t know, but as I’ve said already, I take all the post-mortem appearances to be misinterpretations of andor elaborations on hallucinations of the recently dead, which are common among those close to them.
2) No. Why should it be, since the alleged sighting by 500 is not “gospel-attested”?
Look, you’re obviously desperate that there should be evidence Jesus was never executed and that 500 unnamed people saw him at once after his supposed death. But really, there’s nothing to support these ideas. Nor, as far as I know, does the idea that there was no crucifixion appear anywhere in early Christian or anti-Christian writings.
@KG, #13: If appearance in the Gospels is something lacking from Paul’s mention of the 500, then Paul’s mention of Cephas/Peter/Simon ought to have at least remedied that lack in its own instance. Of course, if this is simply an example of zero (evidentiary value) plus zero, then I can square myself with a sum of zero. (I seized upon “expected to appear” from your #11.)
It is the notion of evidentiary value that has claimed my focus (if I may use such a sedate term of myself.) I find that the Gospels tell me what “Jesus” thought, but I suppose I cannot hope to have the Gospels tell me who Jesus was. That is why I am drawn more to the notion that “there must have been a Jesus” than to any contention about how it is likely (or not) that there was a Jesus who was understood to have claimed kingship and was crucified for it.
As I said somewhere above, somebody had to be Jesus. Somebody had to produce, for example, the teachings about rejecting conventional family life that the churches have struggled so feverishly to ignore. While elements of caution about family life are present in the Old Testament (and are not altogether foreign to the generalized experience of humanity), it is undeniable that a person known to us as “Jesus” stated some original and striking things.
I have said that there must have been a Jesus, while I realize that my attaching the name “Jesus” to whoever produced the teachings of Jesus is essentially circular. It is, however, quite possible that our understanding of this existing Jesus—researched and considered in the context of that milieu—will be fruitful. What I have come to question, on the other hand, is the propriety of much of the discussion of Jesus as an ostensibly existing person—as viewed by the historian—who fits the generalized description of “the man who was crucified” as a criterion of historicity or not.
The main reason I have this concern is because of the contention I have heard that a monumental cause to believe in a crucified Jesus is the contention that no one would invent a messiah who was subjected to the humiliation of crucifixion.
Emphasis on the humiliation of crucifixion gives evidence of having been seized upon by Christianity—as it developed—in a manner that would distort our perceptions of Jesus’ (indeed, of anyone’s) experience of Roman crucifixion in a first-century Jewish context. I submit that this process of distortion can be sensed even from the beginning. Paul, notably, tells his readers a very strange thing in Galatians, straining the sense of Deuteronomy to apply the prohibition against hanging a corpse (usually executed by some other manner) to apply to Jesus’ death by what might be only in general called “hanging.”
Paul’s looseness in description is not so telling as is his apparent desire to emphasize that humiliation in the imagery of a curse. This seems to be tailored to the sensibilities of the world at large. By contrast, in Jesus’ world a horror of humiliation was sexual violation. In Jesus’ world as well, a horror of humiliation was to burst from the inside as a loathsome, putrid yet living corpse.
A way for Jesus to have been humiliated, in his environment and among his fellows, was for someone to engineer an accusation of homosexual conduct. (Yes, we all know about the naked young man in Gethsemane.) A way for Jesus to have been humiliated was for him to have been violated. In Mark, the “whole band” of the soldiers engage in what we would often call an “orgy” of violence. They “clothed him in purple”–what about that would necessitate them subsequently to “put his own clothes on him”?
And then Jesus is led out to be crucified. How many of those intended for crucifixion would never have made it there? A Jesus whose humiliation was too great for the Gospel authors to lie about might have leaked or expelled his bodily contents, perhaps unto death, on the floor of his torture or upon the street.
That very same described phenomenon of dying as basically being a living corpse was, in Jesus’ environment, the epitome of humiliation. Herod in Acts must be eaten by worms before he dies. Judas cannot escape this world except, as in Acts, it is accompanied by, “falling headlong, he burst asunder in the midst, and all his bowels gushed out.” In 2 Chronicles Jehoram experiences humiliation at its most acute: “his bowels fell out by reason of his sickness: so he died of sore diseases. And his people made no burning for him . , . .”
Jesus’ religion was the faith of the Suffering Servant, a conceptuality that includes an ideation of incredible brutality and its expected disfigurement, such that—within the Judaism of Judaea and Galilee—the brutalization of Jesus in terms of straightforward beating and crucifixion would bear at most a balance of humiliation and sympathy. His “humiliation” might have had to be rationalized for a Gentile audience, but if we are talking about the mental state of Jesus’ immediate survivors, then we must look to a context in Judaism, not in the world at large.
Jesus in the Gospels is beaten and mocked, but he is ill-treated so in the presence of a people whose scriptures are filled with stories of the favored of God being ill-treated. Jesus in the Gospels is fully-clothed on the way, allowed to walk much of the distance while Simon of Cyrene bore the cross, capable of coherent speech, attended by the company at least of a few followers, and he dies in relatively short order while yet even the approach of the festival will occasion the death of all three condemned.
Jesus’ agonies—in which a person is free to believe, independently of any historian’s conceit—were unimaginable. It would be perhaps a good thing to wonder whether or not a person is similarly free to experience humiliation or not.
The idea that “no one would make up such a humiliating demise of Jesus” is easily overdone, and scarcely serves as a capstone argument. Whether Jesus experienced such humiliation as would presumably paralyze his chroniclers beyond invention will never be known to us. Whether Jesus’ experiences occasioned presumably paralyzing humiliation in his chroniclers will never be known to us.
stephensherrier@14,
Sorry – I really have no idea what all that was intended to convey.
KG@15,
Thanks for reading it.
stephensherrier@16,
Could you explain any other grounds you have for thinking (or hoping) Jesus was not executed, other than the reports of appearances after the supposed date of his death? Surely if both Paul and the gospel writers say he was, and no early Christian or anti-Christian sources say otherwise, that’s the default assumption? It’s not intrinsically unlikely – it wasn’t dificult to get on the wrong side of the Roman authorities and if you did, unless you were a citizen, crucifixion was a common outcome.
KG@17,
I don’t think that Jesus was not executed. As for what I hope–I hold my affinity for Jesus’ ministry to stand apart from argument, so I’ll trouble neither of us with that here.
I should apologize for my lack of skill in relating my thoughts. And maybe I should reckon (as I hope you will not find off-putting) that frequent visitors to this site might collect to themselves types of in-group shorthand. These factors (and maybe, I wonder, you giving me more credit than is my due to start with) might explain the miscommunication.
As I said, I don’t think that Jesus was not executed. My concern about this whole matter began with Dr. Sarah’s statement above referencing 1 Corinthians 15:4: “it’s about Jesus being raised from the dead and appearing to people in visions.” I can understand that the common parlance in a rationalist discussion might take as read that the described post-resurrection appearances are best termed “visions,” but I will note that biblical writings enough can be found describing visions (dreams being the most typical) as distinct from other appearances. And still I have no problem with the notion held by any commentator that the post-resurrection appearances are visions.
What does concern me, however, is wording about 1 Corinithians 15:4 that goes, “it’s about Jesus . . . appearing to people in visions.” In my estimation, since Paul describes his own experiences as abnormal, and since the most likely parallel of the other appearances listed by Paul are those in the gospels post-resurrection (which are represented painstakingly as material and fleshly), then the best interpretation of that list is as a recounting (whether believable or otherwise) not of visions, but of manifestations in the flesh. The bulk of the list in 1 Corinthians 15:4 is about Jesus appearing to people in the flesh–that is what the text indicates. The reader, of course, is free to call them “visions,” and perhaps to discount them altogether.
This might seem a small matter, but it got me to wondering whether “somebody is reported to be in this or that place and this or that time in what appeared to be a real body” is something to be looked at as historical evidence. Here my thinking might have gone off the rails and involved me wasting other people’s time. I suddenly thought (as I tried to relate at first) what body of evidence existed that would argue (not for Jesus as executed and resurrected from the dead, which has huge intrinsic problems in ever being “evidence-based”) but would argue rather for the straightforward notion that “the 500” were reported as seeing the kind of thing that all of us see every day: a live human being.
If you told me that so-and-so was seen alive at such-and-such time, my default assumption would be that any described death-and-resurrection (or even any described highly improbable cheating of death) supposedly happening prior to that sighting was to be discounted. I would require evidence to the effect that any unusual event had really happened to the person subsequently reported alive in that case.
And then I asked myself how I could think that Paul’s reference to “the 500” (merely stated in a single clause with other appearances more-or-less supported by gospel references, which all might be examined in themselves as being simple statements of fact) could possibly stand against the body of historicist evidence that I understood to be drawn from the gospels. Did not the gospels testify to Jesus’ crucifixion? Here I will betray my amateur status, because I realized that I could not think of the gospel accounts of the crucifixion as historically substantive–by this late time in my life, it seems to me that every verse dealing with Jesus’ mortal fate has been shown to be either incorrect or insupportable. As far as history goes, what is described in the gospels as the end of Jesus’ life seems to be a phantasmagoria.
And so i found myself writing about “the 500” and whether that reference might be taken as a piece of evidence–a miniscule and insubstantial piece, as I tried repeatedly to relate–but a piece of evidence nonetheless. And if Paul’s reference to “the 500” was lacking many things, including gospel mention, then I would wonder if other references in that same clause were presumptively of greater stature in that they were apparently mentioned in the gospels. All of this was against a background, I will admit, of growing suspicion that I needed to come to understand that (as opposed to many religionists’ regard for the texts) the going notion in rationalist circles is that the sectarian orientations of the biblical texts make those texts objects of study, and only incidentally sources of information.
In my wonderings, all this collided with the assertions I got from this site that the most likely conceptualization of an historical Jesus was as a person who fell afoul of the Romans and was crucified. Moreover, there is the assertion (which, forgive me, I don’t know of as being attributable to any “school of thought” other than Dr. Sarah) that the most likely scenario of the demise of Jesus is crucifixion by the Romans–and moreover that this likelihood is found in the improbability of anyone inventing such a death of Jesus, in that crucifixion can be seen as the most humiliating end for a messiah.
Thinking that I needed to approach the scriptures with the most unsparing view I could muster, I recalled that I have long been struck by what, to me, is the sudden appearance of the “humiliation” aspect of the crucifixion in Paul. In the gospels, the greatest of stature is attached to seeking the lowest place. In the gospels, Jesus is to be “lifted up.” Humiliation seems to first become a described element of Jesus’ death in Paul, and, while I realize that the bulk of scholarship is such that Paul’s writings are considered quite early, nonetheless they seem to reflect a second wave of propagation of early Christianity. It would not be surprising if the first wave of Christianity, in which the believers were largely practicing and intellectually affiliated Jews, held more closely to the Old Testament ideas of righteous suffering than would believers reaching out to the diverse outside world.
And so, I became quite determined–at least in terms of the historical question–to ask if crucifixion as a likely cause of Jesus’ mortal end was really as immune to invention as the “nobody would invent the humiliation of crucifixion” contention would have it. The humiliation of crucifixion does, as I understand, align with the purported aims of the Roman state. I have heard many times that crucifixion was seized upon by the Romans not merely as an instrument of terror, but as the most humiliating end they could devise.
Of course, people being who they are, and behaving as they can behave, that is not the end of the story. As I understand it, Roman soldiers after the fall of Jerusalem attempted to increase the humiliation aspect of crucifixion by hanging persons up in ever more horrid and ridiculous positions–when they weren’t disemboweling them alive in pursuit of swallowed valuables. Incredible as it may be to consider, the death of Jesus of Nazareth as portrayed in the gospels is a matter of relative dignity. I will not revisit the possibilities that I wrote about earlier, but I hope it can suffice to say that no amount of wonderings in front of a keyboard can exceed the inventiveness and extent of cruelty that might have befallen anyone who got on the wrong side of the Romans.
The denominations will often describe Jesus’ crucifixion as the most horrible thing that ever happened, but given the extremes to which subsequent martyrs have been willing to go, the extent of Jesus’ unequalled torments for those denominations have had to arise from surmisings about tortures for Jesus on many planes that are not described in the gospels. It is ironic, then, that an unsparing non-religious analysis of the crucifixion accounts must include wonderings about, first, just how horrid might have been what occurred to the accused in Jesus’ day and, second, just how some of those possibilities (either real or imaginable to Jesus’ disciples) might have constituted a baseline of horror and humiliation (particularly in light of first-century Jewish sensibilities) against which the canonical accounts of Jesus’ execution might have been preferred alternatives.
Thanks for your patience.
Sorry, you’ve completely lost me again. I don’t think there’s any point taking this conversation any further.
@stephensherrier, #10:
The problem with that framing is that it implies that only at those extremes can people be inaccurate sources of information. And that just isn’t the case. It is perfectly possible for people who are not deluded zealots to be biased or otherwise inaccurate in how they interpret information, or for people who are not pathological liars to tell minor lies in service of what they consider a sufficiently good cause.
It’s also ignoring what I believe to be the most likely explanation for the ‘500’ claim; simply enough, that criteria for what counted as an appearance were so loose that having any kind of spiritual-type experience would be counted, and hence that what Paul was actually referring to was the scene described in Acts 2 in which Peter’s public preaching apparently drew the interest of a large crowd and led to a number of conversions.
#14:
I actually see this somewhat differently. We now know that the words reported as being those of Jesus (especially in the Synoptic Gospels) were actually very much in line with the thinking of Second Temple Pharisaism as later recorded in the Talmud, not unique trains of thought that no-one had ever had before. I do agree that ‘somebody had to be Jesus’, but more in the sense that somebody almost certainly had to be the one charismatic figure who inspired a particular cult following that survived his execution. I wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised to find that one or more of the sayings quoted as being from Jesus actually originated with some other rabbi of the time. (Of course, it’s highly likely that Jesus said most of what was attributed to him; he must have spoken in a way that sounded impressive for people to want to follow him. I just think there’s room for misattribution there as well.)
Agree.
In the first place, I’ve seen enough of the human imagination that I would no longer feel confident in stating of any idea that no-one could make it up.
In the second place I don’t think the issue is humiliation so much as the fact that it’s very hard to see how an invented crucifixion could fit with the narrative of either the historical-Jesus or mythical-Jesus story. If Jesus was a real person who inspired a group of followers to believe he was the Messiah, then he would have had some kind of end, and it’s hard to see why his followers would have invented crucifixion in place of whatever his actual end was. If Jesus was the invention of a fringe group imagining some sort of heavenly sacrifice, then it’s even harder to see why people from a culture who specifically used throat-cutting of physically perfect creatures would settle on crucifixion as the imagined method of sacrifice. Either way, Ockham’s razor points us at ‘actual person who was crucified’ as the simplest explanation.
@Dr Sarah, #20:
I understand and appreciate your observation that inaccurate information can very often be attributed to people who are neither deluded zealots nor pathological liars. Moreover, I will admit (as you’ve no doubt noticed) that the question of this thing or that thing being of “evidentiary value” is one that bedevils me. I think that’s why I have attachments to the idea of gospel “stories” rather than the drier term “accounts,” and probably no small amount of envy for the Buddhist conception of disembodied wisdom you described in #7 above (both of us being admittedly outsiders to Buddhism.)
Unfortunately, the charitable approach you have alluded to regarding the sources of inaccurate information is an approach bound to have rough going if it is to be applied to the historicity debate–or indeed to any debate involving elements of scriptural content. For example, I will admit that there is much to be said in support of your statement in #7:
“. . . massive improbabilities in the way the Sanhedrin and Pilate are depicted as behaving, with a plausible motive for misrepresentation on the part of the writers (wanting to avoid speaking ill of a powerful Roman while at the same time, in a somewhat anti-Semitic society, wanting to put more blame on the Jews).”
However, I’m sure you will agree that this is not exactly someone tweaking the history to fit some political or theological agenda.
I would reckon it’s the sort of thing for which one reserves adjectives like “blood-curdling.” Moreover, “little” things like differing days of the crucifixion or like describing leg-breaking and spear-thrusting (if indeed such things–scarcely to be misremembered–were manipulated for theological ends) are recounted precisely because they were thought to be of significant gravity.
None of this, I will agree, lifts from us the burden of considering that inaccurate information might well come from people who are neither deluded zealots nor pathological liars. The materials pertinent to the historicism debate doubtless include either innocent errors or “pious frauds” that we would view neither with contempt nor with pity. Unfortunately, the packaging and promulgation of these bodies of religious contentions were invariably performed by scriptural compilers who (assuming they were not religiously correct, which question of course I will not contend here) were compilers who pursued their tasks with unsettling vigor.
My fascination with gospel “stories” is something that seems to me to stand apart from the “account” emphasis of the denominations–who are the inheritors of the packaging and promulgating functions. In conventional Christianity, individual gospels or “the gospels” collectively are usually presented as accounts seen against overarching themes of salvation, and accounts of particular instances are seen as separated among themselves by their respective ostensible lessons. I have arrogated to myself the term “stories” because I think that much biblical commentary misses the humane quality of viewing the gospels as being, indeed, “story-like,” and often possessed of an organic flow.
I mention this “story” business here because I think part of it bears on the whole crucifixion-and-its-aftermath debate. The story of the crucifixion can be thought to begin at many points, including perhaps Jesus’ first mention of his fate, or perhaps the triumphal entry into Jerusalem. In terms of the disciples’ experiential relationship to the overall arc of events, however, the proper beginning would seem to me to be in Mark 10:32: “And they were in the way going up to Jerusalem; and Jesus went before them: and they were amazed . . . ” (KJV). Other translations use “astounded” or even “in a daze.”
In regard to those poor disciples, I would agree that your caution is to be well taken. According to the Bible, anyway, Jesus’ disciples were in scarcely any state to be reliable witnesses, and this is before Passion Week even started.
Dr Sarah,
You set out where in Paul’s authentic letters Paul implies that Jesus lived on earth. You mention 1 Cor 15:12-22, and I wondered if Paul’s discussion of physical and spiritual bodies later in chapter 15 would support the idea that Jesus had to have a physical body before his resurrection and getting a spiritual one. However, I don’t think it does.
I tried to find on the internet what Richard Carrier says about verses 12-22. I could find what he says about verses 3-8 https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/11069. His conclusion seems strange for someone arguing Jesus never lived on earth. – “1 Corinthians 15:3-5 is almost certainly a pre-Pauline text composed within a few years of when Jesus was believed to have died.”
I could find out what he said about verses 35-58 in an article by Andrew W Pitts https://www.academia.edu/5856050/_Pauls_Concept_of_the_Resurrection_Body_in_1_Corinthians_15_35_58_In_Stanley_E_Porter_and_David_Yoon_eds_Paul_and_Gnosis_PAST_9_Leiden_Brill_2016_44_58 where Pitts sets out what Carrier says (from page 50 onwards).
Richard Carrier mentions 1 Cor 15:12-22 https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/18223 but doesn’t address why these verses do not refer to a human Jesus.
Please can someone provide a link to where Richard Carrier discusses that 1 Cor 15:12-22 do not refer to a human Jesus?
Hypothetically:
IF Paul understood that humans could live, breed, die, etc. on Mars as on Earth THEN any human reference made by Paul—sans planetary context or the current/previous/future planetary location of said human—may be a reference to a human who is on Mars or it may be a reference to a human who is on Earth. In this hypothetical scenario there is no way to determine the planet that the human is on per Paul.
Fact:
Paul understood that humans could live, breed, die, etc. on the sub-lunar sphere called “Firmament” as on Earth. ALL Paul’s references to Jesus’s death location are indeterminate between the location being o the Earth or on the Firmament.
@MichaelBG, #22:
No idea myself, but db just posted this on the Early Writing forum. (No, I have no idea why he didn’t just post it on here where it could have actually answered your question.) Anyway, the short version is that apparently Carrier thinks Paul thought Jesus had a body up in heaven and did physical things there. (Carrier also now seems to think that Paul/early Christians might have believed in a Jesus that came down briefly to earth but wasn’t actually born there.)
@db, #23:
If you’re going to claim that that’s a fact, try providing some evidence for it.
@db #23
I don’t understand why you didn’t post your reply quoting Richard Carrier here.
I agree with you Dr Sarah, it would have made more sense for db to have posted what he thinks Richard Carrier has to say on 1 Cor 15:12-22 here.
It seems that db is stating:
“Everybody agrees that Paul attributed a human body to Jesus. The debate is how, where, and when did Paul and the early apostles understand the how, where, and when!”
And quotes Richard Carrier as writing,
“[Per the fact that Paul calls Jesus a man] This entails Paul believed Jesus was (briefly) human—but we already agree on that. That’s already entailed by mythicism. The question is not whether Paul thought Jesus wore a human body. It’s whether he wore it on earth. And Paul never says he did. Plain and simple” (eighth paragraph after the heading Paul’s Celestial Jesus).
https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/13573
This whole section is about Paul’s Celestial Jesus but I couldn’t see any discussion of 1 Cor 15:12-22. This seems to be because Carrier writes: “the dozens of pages in OHJ where I painstakingly explain that mythicism also entails Jesus was briefly a man. Indeed a Jewish man” (ninth paragraph under the heading “Paul’s Celestial Jesus”).
Therefore it seems likely that Carrier has never discussed 1 Cor 15:12-22. Paul states that humans know that resurrection is possible because Jesus Christ was the first human to be resurrected. The logic of this is that he was resurrected from earth as Paul’s readers will be. Carrier writes, “Key to Paul’s entire argument is that Jesus had to be brought into the world of flesh, just as we are” (second paragraph under the heading “Paul’s Celestial Jesus”). This seems to be an argument against his position that Paul doesn’t believe Jesus Christ arrived on earth as I would argue that the world of flesh is the earth.
Carrier writing about Rom 1:3 (‘descended from David according to the flesh’) and Gal 4:4 (‘born of a woman, born under the Law’) says, “I actually count these passages as evidence for historicity! That’s right. I weigh them as increasing the odds of historicity fourfold. In other words, these passages about a potential mother and father I deem to be four times more likely if historicity is true, than if mythicism is true” (last paragraph under the heading “Paul’s Celestial Jesus”).
“I weigh them as increasing the odds of historicity fourfold.”
Carrier’s methodology used in OHJ is presented in Proving History:
In the context of Carrier, Richard (2012). Proving History: Bayes’s Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus. Prometheus Books. ISBN 978-1-61614-560-6.
What “Carrier teaches” in OHJ :
The probability of H.1 = 1:3
The probability of H.2 = 2:3
db@28,
Who were these professors and where can we read their reviews? Because the only review of Carrier’s use of Bayesian statistics I’ve read, available on Scribd here* says he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
*You’ll need a subscription to Scribd to read and download it, but there’s a free 30-day trial.
BTW, the claim that the book was reviewed by a “professor of mathematics” is not impressive without further information: mathematics is a big field. I have a friend who’s a professor of mathematics, but his area of expertise is topology, more precisely chromatic homotopy theory. I very much doubt he’d claim to know much about Bayesian statistics, let alone their application to ancient history.
@#25 Dr Sarah says, “…try providing some evidence for it”
John Gleason presents the cosmology likely understood by Paul.
“Proof THIS Scholar Doesn’t Even Know His FIELD!”. @time:00:03:00 Youtube. Godless Engineer. Dec 5, 2023.
db@31,
I’m not impressed by the stream-of-consciousness type presentation on this video, and am wondering why I should take the analysis of an engineer over that of a professor of New Testament studies (I can’t find a link to the McGrath video “Godless Engineer” is critiquing). Does “Godless Engineer” know Koine Greek, for example? Is he trained in dating and comparing ancient texts? McGrath, BTW, identifies as a Christian, but is far from theologically orthodox, e.g. he doesn’t believe in the Resurrection.
“…a professor of New Testament studies”
You mean the ones so fond of plumping for a false dichotomy—on the question of the historicity of Jesus?
As Lataster notes on the willful ignorance of the agnostic position for Gullotta and his New Testament studies collaborators at 7:48 per:
“Dr. Kipp Davis Endorses THE WORST Review Of On The Historicity Of Jesus”. @time:00:07:48 YouTube. Godless Engineer. 7 December 2023.
I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about; like most relevant experts, McGrath thinks the evidence indicates there was a historical Jesus, but that accounts of him in the Gospels are heavily mythologised. Where’s the “false dichotomy”? And I note you have nothing to say about “Godless Engineer’s” relevant expertise, or lack of it.
@#32 KG says, “I’m not impressed by the stream-of-consciousness type presentation on this video…”
Then perhaps the presentation of Gleason (an engineer) and Carrier (a historian and author of professional historian grade material on “the question of the historicity of Jesus”) on why Carrier asserts that clearly Paul understood Jesus was human at 1:04:04.
“Did Dapper Dinosaur And Kipp Davis Prove Jesus Existed??? ft. Richard Carrier”. @time:01:04:04. Godless Engineer. Dec 8, 2023.
Well, that’s by no means generally agreed!
As for the citation you give, Carrier has invented this notion that early Christians believed Jesus was born, lived and was crucified in some heavenly realm, and here simply attributes it to Paul. But there’s no reason at all to take Carrier’s initial claim seriously.
db@35,
I’ve no intention of subjecting myself to any more of “Godless Engineer” Gleason, who seems to think that SWEARING IN ALL CAPS is a convincing form of argument, but I have as it happens now watched the video with Kipp Davis and Dapper Dinosaur to which the video you refer to @35 is presumably a response. But Davis and “Dapper” didn’t claim to prove Jesus existed (in fact, Davis says it’s possible he didn’t, you just need a lot of far-fetched speculations to account for the available evidence if that’s so), so the very title of the Gleason/Carrier video is misleading.