‘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 Christianity started with a human Jesus. In other words, the Jesus referred to as the founder of Christianity was originally a 1st-century human being, about whom a later mythology grew up, whose followers became the original group that would mutate over time into Christianity. 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. Links to the posts on all subsequent chapters can be found at the end of that post.
Chapter 10: Non-Christian Accounts Of Jesus
So far, we’ve discussed why we wouldn’t expect Jesus to show up in any accounts by his contemporaries regardless of whether or not he existed, and why some of the apparent mentions of Jesus in slightly later works are also not much help in establishing whether he existed. That leaves two passages that need addressing; the mention in Tacitus’s ‘Annals’ (44:28 at that link, as part of a short passage about Christians themselves being persecuted), and Josephus’s mention of ‘the brother of Jesus called Christ’ in Antiquities 20. Both of these, although brief, do provide good evidence for Jesus’s existence, and both are, of course, dismissed by Price.
Price discusses the Tacitus passage first of the two, so I will also go for that order and will discuss Tacitus’s mention in this post and the Josephus line in a separate post.
Background
First, a disclaimer: I haven’t read Tacitus or studied the classics for myself, unless you count my Latin O-level. (Don’t. It really isn’t worth counting in this context. Or in almost any context, for that matter.) My information on this comes primarily from this post on the History for Atheists blog, which is written by Tim O’Neill, a skeptical blogger with a history degree and a relevant Master’s degree, according to his ‘About’ page. I’ve checked the references in the post for myself and also read what other online information I could find about Tacitus’s writing. If anyone with better background knowledge of Tacitus than me (which, by the way, I would bet actual money does not include Price) wants to put forward an argument for disputing any of the points made here, I’m willing to take it on board.
Anyway, here’s what I have learned:
Tacitus was a Roman politician who wrote several very well-known and well-respected historical works, and who apparently had a useful commitment to letting his readers know when the information he was passing on was something he’d effectively heard only through rumour and couldn’t validate; he would qualify these claims with a phrase such as ‘it is said’ or ‘in popular report’. Tim O’Neill, as well as giving several references himself to examples of this, also cites Mendell’s book ‘Tacitus: The Man And His Work’ here:
Mendell goes on to note 30 separate instances in the Annals where Tacitus is careful to substantiate a statement or distance himself from a claim or report about which he was less than certain (Mendell, p. 205).
O’Neill, Jesus Mythicism 1: The Tacitus Reference To Jesus (link as above)
However, Tacitus – as was normal for historians of his time – usually didn’t give us references for where he got other pieces of information. There are some exceptions; for example, in 15.74 he mentions having found a particular point ‘in the records of the Senate’, and in 3.3 he mentions checking ‘the historians and the government journals’ regarding the question of whether Germanicus’s mother attended his funeral (which apparently he could find no record of her doing even though he found records of Germanicus’s other relatives being there, so it’s an interesting example of giving evidence for a negative). In 11.27, acknowledging that the story he has just told seems unbelievable, he takes pains to assure us that he has not embroidered the story and that ‘all that I record shall be the oral or written evidence of my seniors’. We also have a surviving letter from Pliny the Younger that states up front that it was written in reply to Tacitus’s request of him for information on the death of his uncle Pliny the Elder, so this is an external example of Tacitus checking with a reliable source. We don’t, however, get references for the vast majority of points he makes (which, once again, was normal for historians of the time).
What all this seems to add up to – and, again, I’m quite happy for anyone with better knowledge of Tacitus’s works to chime in if they feel they can support a different viewpoint – is a picture of a writer who aimed for scrupulosity both in checking his facts with sources that he considered to be reliable and in alerting his readers when he was instead reporting points he couldn’t verify, but who for the most part didn’t tell us what his sources were whenever he did consider them reliable. From that, it seems fair to conclude that, where Tacitus gives us information that he doesn’t qualify with any version of ‘it is said’ or ‘in popular report’, it is likely that he got it from a source that he himself considered trustworthy.
With all this in mind, here is the passage in question:
But neither human help, nor imperial munificence, nor all the modes of placating Heaven, could stifle scandal or dispel the belief that the fire had taken place by order. Therefore, to scotch the rumour, Nero substituted as culprits, and punished with the utmost refinements of cruelty, a class of men, loathed for their vices, whom the crowd styled Christians. Christus, the founder of the name, had undergone the death penalty in the reign of Tiberius, by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilatus, and the pernicious superstition was checked for a moment, only to break out once more, not merely in Judaea, the home of the disease, but in the capital itself, where all things horrible or shameful in the world collect and find a vogue.
So, what do we learn here? As of some point around 115 – 120 CE (it’s not clear exactly when the Annals were written or published, but that’s the estimate I found), Tacitus believed that someone known as Christus had been sentenced by Pontius Pilate during Tiberius’s reign and executed, having first founded a very unpopular group in Judea, known as Christians, whose beliefs then spread to Rome. And, since he doesn’t add any qualifiers about this being ‘said’ or ‘reported’, he probably got this information from a source that he thought to be reliable.
(As to what that source might have been, Tim O’Neill hypothesises that Tacitus spoke to a Hellenised Jew, quite possibly Josephus. From what I can see, this is plausible, though of course unprovable. Either way, we still have the important point that Tacitus apparently felt his source for this information, whoever or whatever it was, to be reliable.)
Price’s view
Price first gets into a brief digression querying why Nero would have been persecuting Christians in the first place or whether this group of Christians was ‘even the same group of Christians as those who were believers in Jesus Christ’ (as opposed to… some other group also following someone called Christ who was crucified by Pilate?). Having done that, he tells us that the passage is ‘not an independent witness to the existence of Jesus’.
Indeed, Tacitus is clearly relaying information that originally came from Christians themselves…. New Testament scholar John P. Meier acknowledges that here Tacitus is only passing on information gleaned from Christians
Now, going back to O’Neill’s post for a minute, O’Neill makes a really good point about this common mythicist dismissal of the Tacitean passage; it is clear from the passage that Tacitus despised Christians. O’Neill brings this up to point out that they would, therefore, hardly have fitted Tacitus’s idea of a source reliable enough that he didn’t feel the need to qualify it, but the point made me realise something else: Tacitus wouldn’t have been having conversations with Christians about their beliefs in the first place. It would be the equivalent of you or me deliberately striking up a conversation with a Jehovah’s Witness or a Mormon about their teachings. So we can quite reasonably dismiss any idea that Tacitus got his information directly from Christians.
However, Price is more likely to have meant that Tacitus’s information came indirectly from Christians (as in, snippets of information about Christian belief could by then have percolated through society to the point where they were also widely known amongst non-Christians).
The information that he is passing on would have been common knowledge by 109 CE
And it’s very interesting that Price thinks this, because it causes yet more problems for his theory.
One obvious problem here is that this, again, wouldn’t fit with Tacitus’s penchant for clarifying when the information he passed on was just what was ‘said’ or ‘reported’; since he doesn’t add that clarification here, it seems unlikely that this is something he absorbed in a general ‘everyone knows that’ sense. It doesn’t quite rule it out – after all, even skeptics can slip up on skepticism sometimes – but it does make it unlikely. But there’s another big problem, and that’s the timeline Price has just given himself.
Price’s theory, to recap, is that the original Christians (proto-Christians?) believed that the Messiah had already lived, been executed, and been resurrected in heaven only, where he could be uncorrupted by the material world. At some point after the Jewish-Roman War, Mark wrote a fictional story, intended only as an allegorical message, about this Jesus living an earthly life as a preacher and being crucified on earth rather than in heaven. This fictional story – somehow – convinced so many people that multiple other people wrote expanded versions of the story without noticing that the person they were writing about had never existed. Eventually things reached a point where the entire group believed so completely in this earthly Jesus who’d never lived that the original belief in a heavenly Jesus was completely obliterated.
Now, Price has never explained just how a single allegorical story could not only so drastically mislead so many people but reach the point of ultimately overriding the group’s existing beliefs about Jesus so thoroughly that the original beliefs vanished without trace. He’s never explained why the supposed belief in a completely heavenly Jesus of the original church leaders could be so thoroughly suppressed that it didn’t survive in our literature even as a heresy to be refuted. He’s never explained why so many people in a group who were supposedly being taught by their leaders that their Jesus existed only in heaven would read one story and believe that this was the truth and that their own leaders were wrong. He’s never explained how the subsequent gospel authors – including Luke, the one who Price agrees was trying to at least do some kind of historical research into his writing – never noticed that they were writing about a man who never lived on earth. So that’s already a gaping hole in his theory.
But he also, now, has his problem compounded by the timeline by which all this would have had to happen. He’s set up a hypothesis in which the story of this fictitious person’s fictitious earthly execution under Pilate is, less than fifty years later, so widely believed by even non-Christians that the skeptical Tacitus passed the information on absolutely unquestioned. That would mean this sea change would have to have happened over less than a human lifetime. There would have still been people alive in the Christian church who remembered being taught a completely different version of Jesus’s story as children. How, exactly, does Price think the new belief would have taken over the group so completely that the previous one vanished like that and, instead, even widespread numbers of non-Christians had heard about this execution under Pilate that in fact never happened?
Of course, there’s a much simpler theory for how Tacitus could have come to believe that Jesus was executed under Pilate: Jesus actually was a person whose execution was ordered by Pilate, this information was passed on when people had disapproving conversatoins about those troublemaking Christians, the Christians themselves couldn’t refute this as it had in fact actually happened, and thus it was that at some time by or before the early second century this information was widely known enough that someone Tacitus trusted as a reliable source could have been aware of it and passed it on to Tacitus at some point. So, yet again, we have a situation where Jesus-historicity explains the evidence much better than Jesus-mythicism. If Price still wants to argue that the claim about Jesus being executed under Pilate could have become public ‘knowledge’ by the early second century despite never (under his theory) having happened, then it’s on him to come up with a plausible explanation.
This fictional story – somehow – convinced so many people that multiple other people wrote expanded versions of the story without noticing that the person they were writing about had never existed.
Hardly the only plausible scenario. We can infer from Paul, among others, that a varied folklore existed around a Jerusalem “savior” and his martyrdom, condensed into multiple “gospels” (later accepted at Nicaea, or not). “Mark”, and possibly “Q”, set the standard template for such writings, but all of them seemingly date from over a generation after the alleged events described, putting them clearly into the urban-legend category (to which I doubt the admirably conscientious Tacitus, >70 years later, had immunity).
The core question here remains the source(s) & content of the oral traditions: the written versions, while interesting to track, constitute a basket of red herrings.
Pierce R. Butler said:
“ multiple “gospels” (later accepted at Nicaea, or not”
Pardon? You think the Council of Nicaea had something to do with selecting gospels?
It strikes me that the simplest theory for how Tacitus could have come to believe that Jesus was executed under Pilate is that Christians at the time believed it, and Tacitus found the basic idea fine. So it tells us that Christians at the time believed that Jesus existed, but it doesn’t tell us that he did exist
As you point out the timing does make Price’s theory very dubious
And given timing of all this in relation to the writings about Christianity I think it does support a historical Jesus, but I’m not sure it’s as strong support as you imply there
We can also infer from Paul that he met Jesus’s brother, because he says so (Galatians 1:18-9 and 1Corinthians 9:5). Of course there are ways this inference could be wrong: these letters could be (contrary to expert consensus) forgeries in whole or in part, or James might have somehow been given the special status of “brother” to someone who had never existed and was not believed to have existed on earth (the claim that “brother of the Lord” applied to many members of the movement relies on doing horrible violence to the plain meaning of the text that this James was in a special fraternal-type relationship to Jesus). But the evidence that Paul met Jesus’s brother, and hence that Jesus existed, could only rationally be discarded if there were other strong grounds for believing that he didn’t. And there aren’t.
Yes. I’ve not read extensively in mythicist works, but this is such a key point that you wouldn’t expect to need to in order to come across a mythicist explanation of when and how Jesus’s existence came to be generally believed in, apparently by both Christians and anti-Christians. And for no obvious trace of belief in a purely heavenly Jesus to have survived – when evidence of other “heresies” such as the gnostic belief that he did come to earth but didn’t have an ordinary flesh-and-blood body, and gossip such as that his father was a Roman soldier, did survive.
Tim O @ #2: You think the Council of Nicaea had something to do with selecting gospels?
I sit corrected – too much Voltaire!
KG @ # 4: We can also infer from Paul that he met Jesus’s brother…
In this case, I allude primarily to Galatians 1:7,
Jimmy or no Jimmy, this indicates a pre-existing range of Jesusery.
… the claim about Jesus being executed under Pilate could have become public ‘knowledge’ by the early second century …
Ask people on the American street who killed Kennedy, King, or that other Kennedy – within less time after the event than in the JC case – and tell us how reliable we should consider stories about deaths. Rinse & repeat with Elvis, Malcolm X, or Rich Seth; or, closer to the time in question, Alexander or Pompey. Poor ol’ Pontius had a bloody rep, and made a plausible villain all around.
Ftr: I do not claim any of this establishes JC mythicism, just that it highlights various weaknesses of JC historicity.
@Pierce R. Butler #5, See Irenaeus the 37th Doctor of the Church at time t=2898 seconds selecting his preferred gospels from among those on the open market of true christian thought/dogma (ortho-hetro-homo-dox).
@ https://youtu.be/dFPPGgYzhH0?t=2898
Pierce R. Butler@5,
Yes, it’s a widespread view among historicists that Paul disagreed with the Jerusalemites, about whether Gentiles had to follow Jewish law in order to be accepted as part of the Jesus movement. I don’t know what point you’re making here.
Come off it. In all the cases you mention*, the conspiracists are alleging that some hidden hand murdered the person concerned. In the case of Jesus, we’re talking about a public execution occurring when Pilate was the top Roman official in the area, and so the execution ipso facto took place under him. The (canonical) gospels try to exonerate him morally as far as possible, blaming “the Jews” for forcing him to go through with it or hand Jesus over, but they all agree that it took place under him.
*Except Pompey. AFAIK, there’s no mystery or conspiracy narrative about who killed him.
I always thought Carrier made a few good points, but that the historicist side was stronger. Unfortunately, Carrier is his own worst enemy when it comes to defending his arguments. Anyway, this series of posts reminded me that I had hoped many years ago that the newer scholar, Raphael Lataster, might take it up, and possibly be less… difficult. Since I’m not particularly invested in the debate, I haven’t checked in much for several years. I decided to see what what Lataster has been up to. Apparently, he gave up Jesus studies, got MAGA-pilled, became a COVID conspiracy theorist, and loves RFK now. So I suppose we’re back to Carrier and Price!
DrVanNostrand@8,
I’m not surprised by Lataster’s trajectory as you report it. The phenomenon of crank magnetism is well-known, but Lataster appears to exemplify a somewhat unusual variant – attraction to crank individuals (Carrier, RFKJr) as much as to crank ideas!
• Carrier (10 July 2023). “An Ongoing List of Updates to the Arguments and Evidence in On the Historicity of Jesus”. Richard Carrier Blogs. Retrieved 8 April 2025. “[Per]…questioning the authenticity of the material in Tacitus (. . . I do not take that position in my study).”
KG @ # 7: I don’t know what point you’re making here.
See my # 1: … a varied folklore existed around a Jerusalem “savior” and his martyrdom…
IOW, I contradicted our esteemed host’s apparent supposition that the written record drove the oral accounts, rather than vice-versa.
As for Pompey, sfaik we can only say for sure somebody knifed him immediately on arrival in Egypt. Most histories point the finger at Ptolemy, but nobody seems to have set up an Official Commission so we could know For Sure.
DrVanNostrand @ # 8: … Lataster … gave up Jesus studies, got MAGA-pilled…
Whereas Robert M. Price seems to have come to Jesus studies pre-pilled. In some ways the strongest case against J mythicism consists of the ad hominem that its primary advocates
leanleap towards nuttiness. (Does anybody know much about the politics/lifestyle of G.A. Wells, and whether they changed when he switched to historicism?)I didn’t mean to imply that made mythicism wrong. I had just barely heard of him about the time I quit paying attention, so I didn’t know anything about him, but wondered if maybe he would take up the fight better than Carrier. So I thought it was funny that not only did he quit the field altogether, but that he’s even more arrogant and obnoxious than Carrier.
https://okaythennews.substack.com/
Pierce R. Butler@11,
But Galatians 1:7, to which you refer @5, doesn’t say anything about “folklore” – it just shows there was some (there unspecified) disagreement between Paul and some (there unspecified) others. Which is a common view which I’m sure Dr. Sarah would agree with, as I do. So I still don’t see your point.
According to wikipedia on Pompey:
The doubt is about who, if anyone, told Lucius Septimus to do it. But again, it’s not an officially sanctioned public execution, like that reported of Jesus in the gospels. How would that come to be the only oral account going around if it wasn’t actually true? And if it wasn’t the only account, why would the gospel writers have chosen that account, when they all try to exculpate Pilate – despite not being able to deny his official responsibility – and put as much blame as possible on “the Jews”? Why would they choose an account of crucifixion (which was a specifically Roman punishment, and specifically intended to be maximally humiliating as well as agonising) at all?
KG @ # 13: But Galatians 1:7… doesn’t say anything about “folklore” – it just shows there was some (there unspecified) disagreement between Paul and some (there unspecified) others.
That verse indicates quite clearly that multiple versions of the Jesus story went into circulation by or before Paul’s evangelizing, and thus contradicts Dr Sarah’s summary of RG Price’s scenario:
Oops – apologies to all for omitting the “/” needed to end-blockquote the single line cited from Dr Sarah’s original post!
Pierce R. Butler@14,
No, it doesn’t. Here’s the whole of the verse in various translations:
KJV: Which is not another; but there be some that trouble you, and would pervert the gospel of Christ.
NIV: which is really no gospel at all. Evidently some people are throwing you into confusion and are trying to pervert the gospel of Christ.
NKJV: which is not another; but there are some who trouble you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ.
World English Bible: and there isn’t another “good news.” Only there are some who trouble you, and want to pervert the Good News of Christ.
It says nothing at all about the “Jesus story”. – the narrative of his life and death – only about his supposed message – which, as appears elsewhere, Paul thought he had received directly from Jesus, so anyone who disagreed with him must be “perverting the gospel”.
The earliest surviving source for Alexander’s life dates from nearly 3 centuries after his death, so a comparison is ridiculous. Besides, there are obvious motivations both for putting in a personal swordfight with Darius and (as you note yourself) inventing a visit to Jerusalem. There’s no such motivation for inventing a crucifixion (see below).
But this doesn’t fit with the gospels’ attempts to put the blame on “the Jews” (whose rebellion was crushed) rather than the Romans (the crushers). If the aim was to “link the Empire with brutal oppression and cruelty”, why minimise the guilt of the Roman authority (Pilate)? And “Follow our glorious leader and saviour – he got crucified” doesn’t seem like a message a new cult would adopt unless they had no choice because that’s what had actually happened to Jesus.
It was in the context of 1st century Judaea.
KG @ # 16: …It says nothing at all about the “Jesus story”. – … – only about his supposed message …
A pretty fine distinction, particularly since many interpreted “the good news” as the overcoming of death. In a wider context, the different emphases of each purported gospel in themselves reveal the range of viewpoints riding on Jesusism.
The earliest surviving source for Alexander’s life dates from nearly 3 centuries after his death, so a comparison is ridiculous.
From what I’ve read, it seems Alex had spin doctors embellishing his own legend even as he built it, so some comparisons surely apply. Or we might consider closer to our day: “Marxism” and “Trotskyism” evolved so rapidly, even with undisputed original texts widely available, that their namesakes repudiated them contemporaneously.
… the gospels’ attempts to put the blame on “the Jews” … rather than the Romans …
Both factors operated simultaneously: the cult rejecting its roots as it spread, the empire allowing some critique of its agents while demanding respect of other components. The baroque intertwining of politics and religion in the Middle East goes back at least as far as the Hebrews’ concoction of their own origin myths, with any attempt to simplify or streamline such narratives undergoing rapid rejection (e.g., Mani).
As for the crucifixion part of the story, allow me to (however reluctantly) cite the Robert M. Price thesis that “Jesus” is a compound character accreted from a mashup of actual and mythic persons according to the inclinations of varied narrators (somewhat like his purported father, perhaps). A martyr here, a miracle-monger there, a pithy preacher up on a hill, an embodiment of a philosophy pulled from a wine jug – we might more accurately dub this the multiple-historical-Jesuses hypothesis, rather than merely mythicism.
Pierce R. Butler@17
It’s a fundamental distinction. There is no evidence at all, AFAIK, that Paul disagreed with other Jesusists* about the narrative of Jesus’s life and death (he doesn’t actually show much interest in it, a point which mythicists often emphasise) – or about the core claim that Jesus was resurrected (although maybe about what this meant); there is clear evidence he disagreed about Jesus’s message, specifically about whether Gentiles had to follow Jewish Law to become Jesusists. And absolutely no-one outside the most purblind of fundamentalists disagrees that the gospels reveal a range of viewpoints among Jesusists.
As I’ve already noted, the gospels specifically do their utmost not to criticise Pilate – but can’t escape the fact of his legal responsibility for any sentence carried out while he was in charge of Jerusalem! In the wake of the Jewish uprising of AD70, the gospel writers were very anxious to show that the cult was not anti-Roman or subversive, and pissed off that the vast majority of Jews had rejected Jesus as Messiah.
The mythicist fallback position, for which there’s not a particle of evidence. Tim O’Neill takes it apart here.
*Since it’s disputed whether the term “Christian” is appropriate this early – it’s unlikely they used it themselves – and since it’s nice and short, i’ll happily adopt this term!
KG @ # 17: It’s a fundamental distinction.
Depending on the point at issue. Mine is: a welter of “rescuer” (approximate literal meaning of “Yeshua” bubbled around in the eastern end of the Roman Empire circa the 30s CE, producing scattered groups of mostly-Jewish followers sort-of organized by Paul but with significant variance in their stories. (Their primary commonality seems to have involved predictions of the world ending soon at the hands of a divine avenger of their many grievances – not the sort of people anyone should take as reliable witnesses or recounters of anything.) The second (post-Paul) generation of this cult made some attempts to sort out and make consistent their shared lore, and arguably did a better job than did the priests (et alia) who tried to reconcile the mythologies of Judah and Israel after many refugees from the latter moved to the former, but still prioritized factionalism over factuality (as evidenced by the plethora of gospels, the pseudo-Pauline epistles, etc).
… the gospels specifically do their utmost not to criticise Pilate…
At least “utmost” enough to avoid having centurions knocking at the door – that washing-of-hands bit, f’rinstance, strikes me as a tidy bit of “he who hath ears, let him hear” winking and nudging.
… pissed off that the vast majority of Jews had rejected Jesus as Messiah.
Much as, over here, many Greens and Libertarians spew particular venom at the Dems and Repubs they have respectively left behind. Note the frequent slapdowns of Pharisees, apparently the strongest post-rebellion (thus, post-Temple) faction of what remained of Jewish leadership (at least among the diaspora). Such preoccupations do not seem likely to have resulted in historical reliability.
The mythicist fallback position, for which there’s not a particle of evidence. Tim O’Neill takes it apart here.
A quick reading shows O’Neill kicking at numerous particles of evidence even as he chases an array of wild geese. He mostly flings mud at Aron Ra (whom I will heartlessly leave to defend himself), while demanding consistency from the sources AR cites explicitly to point out the inconsistencies of various J-historicist arguments. He also tries to debunk Richard Carrier’s 2014 list of parallels (or should we say “particles”?) between JC and Josephus’s story of Yeshua ben Ananias’s martyrdom without noticing that Carrier apparently cribbed same from Robert M. Price’s The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man (2003). I remain much less impressed with O’Neill than is O’Neill.
Please recall, as I’ve commented here before, that I try to present Jesus-historicity-hard-agnosticism here rather than straight-up mythicism. Even alpha-historicist Bart Ehrman concedes that we can hardly discern anything – words, events, associations – of the “actual” Jesus once we peel off all the tendentious tales told in later decades.
Correction to 1st line of my #19:
Pierce R. Butler@19,
I don’t think you present anything here that makes the “multiple Jesuses” position any more credible. I’ll leave people to read O’Neill’s piece, and the targets of his criticism, and make up their own minds. I think he shows quite clearly that Aron Ra simply doesn’t know the basic facts of the issue, and that Carrier’s “parallels” are as absurd as practically everything Carrier says on any subjct (sure, O’Neill has a high opinion of himself, but it’s nothing to Carrier’s fervent belief in his own unparalleled polymathic genius). BTW, the “literal meaning” of “Yeshua” is entirely irrelevant, although I think you’re trying to suggest otherwise without actually saying so – it was a very common Jewish name.
KG @ # @ 21: I don’t think you present anything here that makes the “multiple Jesuses” position any more credible.
Nor have you shown anything that undermines it.
I suspect we all agree that a great deal of the Jesus story includes, ah, embellishments, so the “composite character” argument turns into merely a matter of degree for all but strict fundamentalists (who then must confront a confusion of contradictions).
If we move to discredit arguments on ad hominem grounds, we won’t have much left on any side (so maybe my agnosticism wins?). Carrier & RM Price & Ehrman, et alia, at least can claim reasonable fluency in the languages necessary for this debate, which leaves practically all the rest of us out in the cold.
And I have to disagree about the “literal meaning” of “Yeshua” – if it meant something neutral like “rock” or “flower”, that would make it irrelevant, but a name meaning “savior” would add a lot of punch to a (mostly illiterate and uncritical) population hungry for metaphorical succor. Even the current US president has surely gained just that little crucial edge by having a name synonymous with “overcome” or “prevail” in our supposedly more semantically sophisticated times.
The fact that there’s simply no evidence for it would be sufficient under Occam’s razor, which IIRC was originally propounded in the form: “do not multiply entities unnecessarily”. If anyone could identify two or more distinct individuals who could have contributed to the composite character it would be worth taking seriously, but no-one has done so credibly. And one of these individuals would have to be the one whose brother Paul recounts meeting, and who had become the object of veneration by that brother, and by Peter, who knew him – so whatever narrative elements from elsewhere might have adhered to him, it would make little sense to deny that he was the historical Jesus. If you’re going to deny the significance of that evidence, it makes more sense to go for straight mythicism, but first, you have to provide good reasons to dismiss it. As it is, O’Neill is right to say multi-Jesusism it is “not so much a coherent argument and more of an emotional defence mechanism.”
Well at least you’ve now come out and made the argument explicit, but it’s a remarkably weak one, when everyone would have known multiple Yeshuas.
BTW, Kipp Davis, who’s an (atheist) expert on the Dead Sea Scrolls, thinks Carrier doesn’t understand Hebrew or Aramaic to any adequate level.
KG @ # 23: … there’s simply no evidence for it …
Oh? Find a simpler explanation for, e.g., the divergent genealogies for Jesus in Matthew & Luke. Re-read the Price/Carrier list of parallels between JC & J son o’ Ananias. Try to refute Burton Mack’s attribution of words placed in Jesus’s mouth to contemporary popular philosophies.
The necessity of multiplying entities already exists, and the assertion that having multiple narrators accounts for all the anomalies, with none of them having brought in other stories while compiling second-hand tales (at the very best), in itself makes heavy demands on our credulity.
… everyone would have known multiple Yeshuas.
Everyone “in the context of 1st century Judaea”, I s’poze. Many then considered names magical, and magical thinking can cherry-pick downright miraculously.
Hadn’t heard about Kipp Davis or his opinions on Carrier (and prefer to eschew YouTube). Can’t recall RC hanging a mythicist argument on anything but the Greek of the NT, but I concur that claim, if true, weakens his cred significantly. My point remains: us amateurs can’t settle any of these arguments.
Pierce R. Butler@24
Oh come on. No-one outside fundamentalists takes either seriously – they are both made up, probably deriving from a common source as they do overlap quite a bit. It’s extremely unlikely ordinary Jews of that time kept long genealogies any more than most people do today. There were doctrinal reasons for insisting Jesus was a descendant of David, and if you claim that, skeptics are going to demand a genealogy.
Srsly? Reread O’Neill’s deconstruction of the list of supposed parallels.
Again, srsly? Consider how many fake quotations have been put in the mouths of Einstein and Churchill. Are they evidence for multiple Einsteins or Churchills?
Well that is the context in which the Jesusists began spreading their claims about him, and the only one that makes any sense in the context of your #23.
Yeah, but any scholar who doesn’t know Aramaic or Hebrew is severely handcapped in understanding the Greek of the NT, because so much of it refers back to stuff originally written in those languages. Davis gives actual examples of Carrier’s misinterpretations, when I have time I’ll go back and find them.
Indeed, and in such cases it makes sense to provisionally accept the view of the great majority of relevant experts, in this case including atheists, agnostics and observant Jews as well as Christians who one might reasonably discount – which is that there was a specific individual it makes sense to identify as the historical Jesus, and about whom there are at least some things it can reasonably be said we know: came from Nazareth in Galilee, baptised by John the Baptist, went around preaching, tellling parables and faith-healing, came to Jerusalem with some followers for Passover, made some sort of disturbance, got on the wrong side of the Roman authorities, got crucified.
KG @ # 25 – we’ve started repeating ourselves here, a clue that wrapping-up time has arrived.
… they are both made up…
Not, I have to say, a strong argument for historicism in general. If we were to play Thomas Jefferson and cut out the “made up” sections from the Jesus story, we’d have very little left.
Reread O’Neill’s deconstruction …
Suddenly O’Neill demands exactitude – the two Jesuses came to town for different festivals, one gotten beaten up while the other got whipped, etc.This disproves oral &/or literary borrowings?
Fake quotations don’t mean much, but what little weight they have does not lean towards historicism.
… the context in which the Jesusists began spreading their claims …
1st century CE, of course. Jews, yes, to some degree – but how much? Paul set himself to recruiting Gentiles to the cult, and created a lot of the surviving literature from the first generation thereof; he probably didn’t run across a lot of Yeshuas (Yeshuaim?) in that demographic. How much a name meaning “rescuer” meant in that time & place, we can’t say with much certainty, but I place it at non-zero in the context of a salvation cult.
… any scholar who doesn’t know Aramaic or Hebrew is severely handcapped in understanding the Greek of the NT…
Agreed entirely. How much that applies to R. Carrier remains unproven, but if the non-historicist argument depended entirely on him, we’d have to debate about something else. Does it apply to RM Price or GA Wells? I truly dunno.
… it makes sense to provisionally accept the view of the great majority of relevant experts…
It also makes sense to discount a significant share of arguments from institutional pressure/inertia, though I couldn’t begin to put a number on it. Perhaps as a USAnian who has lived through successful, fact-based revisionism of the histories of Cristobal Colon, John Smith & Pocahontas, the “winning” of the West, the “Lost Cause”, Watson & Crick’s “breakthrough”, the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, etc, etc, I have too strong a taste for debunking official narratives, but I consider distrust of “established” legends convenient to major authorities/short on actual evidence often worthwhile.
Pierce R. Butler@26
This suggests you have no idea how historians – particularly historians of the ancient world – treat source texts. What they don’t do is say: “Oh, this bit’s obviously made up – chuck the thing away”, or even: “Most of this is probably made up – chuck the thing away”. They try to work out. by attending to the language, the historical context, other sources, what is actually phyically possible, etc., what is probably true, what may be true, what is unlikely to be true, what just can’t be true. That’s what those studying the sources concerning Jesus have done, and the great majority of them, including as I’ve said atheists, agnostics and observant Jews – none of whom have any ideological reason to believe there was a historical Jesus – have concluded that it’s very probable that there was a single person who can be so identified, and a relatively small but important set of biographical items concerning him that are also very probably true.
Your “etc.” is doing a fantastic amount of work there – I hope you’re paying it extra!
Why on earth would Gentiles place any importance in the “literal meaning” of a Jewish name? You’re really reaching here! In the context where the “literal meaning” of the name was known, there would have been lots of Yeshuas, in the context where where weren’t lots of Yeshuas, no-one would be likely to care what the name’s “literal meaning” was.
As to Wells and Price – Wells has actually changed his position and accepts there was a historical Jesus. R. M. Price I think does have the relevant knowledge. Don’t know about R.G. Price. (One imagines future historians debating whether “Robert Price” had a real earthly existence, or was a mythical or composite figure!)
Says every climate change denialist and anti-vaxxer. Academics with any ambition want to advance original/minority positions as long as there’s something going for them.
KG @ # 27: … historians of the ancient world … don’t … say: “Oh, this bit’s obviously made up – chuck the thing away”…
Nor do they misread others’ arguments so clumsily.
… none of whom have any ideological reason to believe there was a historical Jesus …
Ideological reasons, not so much. Institutional, however …
… “etc.” is doing a fantastic amount of work there – I hope you’re paying it extra!
Nice quip; poor evasion of my examples of how O’Neill’s analysis would apply much better to courtroom evidence than to literary construction.
Why on earth would Gentiles place any importance in the “literal meaning” of a Jewish name?
If the evangelists spreading the story used a literal translation, their spiels would include the word “savior” (& its synonyms) a lot.
… Wells has actually changed his position and accepts there was a historical Jesus.
Which I acknowledged @ # 11 above. Alas, I haven’t read that one of his books yet. While on the topic of Wells, I’d like to remind you that his mythicism apparently has roots in pre-christian legends of an embodiment of Truth (Goodness, Innocence, more) suffering martyrdom in the unworthy human world, made more gripping by description as a specific, nitty-gritty case. Mythicism has since focused more on detective work about those details, leaving to Wells* the themes he saw as motivating the overall lessons and appeal of said myth (and it is quite a deep fable – Philip K. Dick did wonders with it in Valis, f’rinstance).
… future historians debating whether “Robert Price” had a real earthly existence, or was a mythical or composite figure!)
Would you feel the slightest surprise at running across a rant somewhere in which someone less erudite than those of us here did conflate the mythicist Prices?
Says every climate change denialist and anti-vaxxer.
And fact-checker debunking an urban legend, and folklorist, and poll-taker facing an issue not specifically covered by a survey, and anyone else considering an observed but not-explicitly-measured phenomenon. While you’re at it, don’t forget to fault me for commenting in English, a language used by innumerable hucksters and hustlers.
Academics with any ambition want to advance original/minority positions …
The ambitious ones want to advance positions that will bring them recognition without embarrassment; association with R. Carrier and denunciation by established leaders in their field(s) won’t help much with career-building (in the absence of Tel Dan Stele-level major new evidence, and this issue in particular demands painstaking, unglamorous detail, with damn little in the way of zingers). Agnosticism in general fails to provide the emotionally satisfactory drama and conclusiveness that a clear positive or negative answer delivers, and the “originality” of Jesus-mythicism has had the juice sucked out of it long ago.
*And his less-scholarly followers such as Freke & Gandy.
Apologies for having once again been absent from the comments for so long. I’m going to focus here on replying to points made by Pierce R. Butler, as most of the points to which I want to reply have been raised by him.
#1:
‘[me] This fictional story – somehow – convinced so many people that multiple other people wrote expanded versions of the story without noticing that the person they were writing about had never existed.
[PRB] Hardly the only plausible scenario.’
It’s not a plausible scenario at all. That’s precisely my point.
‘[…] all of them seemingly date from over a generation after the alleged events described, putting them clearly into the urban-legend category’
In fact, there’s a key difference between the style of the gospels and the style of urban legends: Urban legends are typically isolated, single-point stories with no backstory whatsoever, not even the names of the characters involved. The gospels’ pattern of ‘[Name] came from [place], went to [places] and did [long list of specific sayings and deeds forming their own mini-stories]’ isn’t at all similar to urban legends.
#5:
‘Jimmy or no Jimmy, this indicates a pre-existing range of Jesusery.’
It certainly indicates some form of pre-existing Jesusery. I don’t see that we can deduce ‘range’ from it. (We can probably deduce it from human nature, in that any controversial belief that’s been around for any length of time is going to have a range of different interpretations amongst its followers, but from subsequent comments ‘variations on initial theme’ doesn’t seem to be what you were getting at anyway.)
‘[me]… the claim about Jesus being executed under Pilate could have become public ‘knowledge’ by the early second century …
[PRB] Ask people on the American street who killed Kennedy, King, or that other Kennedy – within less time after the event than in the JC case – and tell us how reliable we should consider stories about deaths.’
From the point of view of the question we’re discussing here – namely ‘did the person killed in the story actually exist on earth or were they only imagined to have existed and been killed in a heavenly dimension’ – I’d say pretty darned reliable. I mean, we’re three for three on the ones you listed there, eight for eight counting the ones you listed in your next sentence. Yes, there are weird rumours about how or why these people died, but those only happen because they existed to get killed in the first place.
For Price’s theory to be correct, on the other hand, we’d have to have a situation where the people originally believing in Jesus all firmly believed in him as a heavenly being uncorrupted by life on earth, yet where this somehow, within the timespan of mere decades, turned into it being generally and widely believed that this Jesus had been a real person whose execution was ordered by a known other person.
‘Poor ol’ Pontius had a bloody rep, and made a plausible villain all around.’
Except that, as KG has pointed out, he’s not utilised as a villain in the gospel stories, but as a benevolent person whose hand is forced by those demanding Jews. The gospel authors go to considerable lengths to excuse his involvement. And that’s still on top of the question of why multiple authors would be writing an earthly execution for Jesus in the first place if he was really believed to be a heavenly being.
#11:
‘IOW, I contradicted our esteemed host’s apparent supposition that the written record drove the oral accounts, rather than vice-versa.’
Wait, are you referring to me? If so… well, thanks for the esteem, which I definitely appreciate, but I’m truly stymied by you referring to this as my supposition. I was pointing out that this was what was required by Price’s theory and that it doesn’t hold up to practical examination. In other words, I was disagreeing with the theory. I’m not sure how I could have made that any clearer.
@Pierce R. Butler (continued), #17:
‘As for the crucifixion part of the story, allow me to (however reluctantly) cite the Robert M. Price thesis that “Jesus” is a compound character accreted from a mashup of actual and mythic persons according to the inclinations of varied narrators (somewhat like his purported father, perhaps). A martyr here, a miracle-monger there, a pithy preacher up on a hill, an embodiment of a philosophy pulled from a wine jug – we might more accurately dub this the multiple-historical-Jesuses hypothesis, rather than merely mythicism.’
The problem with talking about the composite-Jesus hypothesis is that discussions tend to confuse two different theories which – despite what you say in #22 – actually do differ in kind and not just in degree.
Firstly, there’s the theory that stories of sayings and/or deeds that actually originated with other preachers ended up getting attributed to the original Jesus, not to mention various subsequent preachers from the growing band of Jesus-followers deliberately putting words into their leader’s mouth when they retold the story. In this version, we have an original historical Jesus, but various stories of other people accreting onto the original core. This strikes me as extremely plausible; I think it’s more likely than not that this happened to at least some extent. As KG pointed out above, we know that similar things have happened with famous figures nearer our own times, and so I can’t see why this wouldn’t have happened with Jesus.
However, given Robert Price’s commitment to mythicism, I’m going to hazard a guess that he believes that’s all there is to the story. In other words, I suspect what he wants to peddle is a version in which there’s no original Jesus at all, just a collection of stories all… vaguely coalescing of their own accord. And that, unfortunately, fails the ‘would people really act that way?’ sniff test.
We know that at some point in time a group of people started to believe passionately in a crucified Messiah, Yeshua of Nazareth, who had supposedly lived, preached, and died on earth fairly recently. Now, it’s not hard to imagine that people who actually had followed a sufficiently charismatic preacher would come to believe him the Messiah with a faith unshaken by his ignominious death; in fact, we’ve seen this happen with other supposed Messiahs. What is hard to imagine is a group of people all spontaneously deciding, purely on the basis of several stories floating around about miracle workers, that one particular named and identifiable miracle worker had recently lived on earth and been the Messiah and that they had to follow him and wait for him to come back. That sort of passion and belief isn’t typically inspired without an actual charismatic individual to start things off.
@Pierce R. Butler, further continued:
#19/20:
‘“rescuer” (approximate literal meaning of “Yeshua”)’
No, it isn’t. The actual meaning is ‘Yahweh saves’; the ‘Ye’ syllable refers to Yahweh. IOW, it’s one of many Jewish names that praised the supposed attributes of their god rather than describing the person named.
@PRB, #26:
‘If we were to play Thomas Jefferson and cut out the “made up” sections from the Jesus story, we’d have very little left.’
Depends how you pick something as being ‘made up’. As per my review of the first two chapters, RGP seems to be defining it as anything that shows even the most passing and superficial similarity to anything in the Jewish scriptures or Paul’s letters, which he considers sufficient to decide that that part of the story must have been derived from whichever passage to which he thinks he’s found a similarity. Not surprisingly, this approach does leave very little… though, even then, there’s the occasional item which Price can’t explain and just needs to handwave away.
However, if we take the more circumspect of discarding only those bits of the story that obviously seem to have been invented and leaving in the bits that are at least reasonably plausible, we actually end up with a reasonably coherent story about a named preacher, with a village of origin and family members, who went about teaching things that accord with our knowledge of typical Second Temple Judaism teachings, was eventually arrested by the Romans and hauled before a known Roman procurator of the time, and was executed. Even assuming that at least some of the specifics of this (and increasing amounts as the gospels got later) was either invented or added on from other preacher’s stories as per above, that’s still not ‘very little’; it’s a straightforward and plausible story that’s a heck of a lot simpler than any ideas mythicists have come up with as to how so many people by the late first/early second century apparently believed this Yeshua had existed in some form on earth.
‘Perhaps as a USAnian who has lived through successful, fact-based revisionism of the histories of Cristobal Colon, John Smith & Pocahontas’
… IOW, people who, despite their lives having been extensively retconned, are nonetheless known to have existed and not simply originated in the imaginations of others? I think you’re making my point for me.
Pierce R. Butler@28,
Why on earth would you quote just the last clause of your own sentence ending “number on it”, instead of the whole thing? I’m not sure how you could possibly misunderstand my point, which was nothing to do with a lack of quantification, but rather that the claim that institutional pressure/inertia is responsible for an expert consensus is one of the main things mythicists have in common with anti-vaxxers and climate change denialists (and creationists). That, indeed, is one of the main reasons I class mythicism as a form of ideologically-driven denialism, along with the personal grandiosity of many of its proponents, the constant predictions that the consensus is on the verge of collapse, and the failure to produce anything in the way of a plausible alternative hypothesis. And it won’t do to blame expert reluctance to entertain mythicism on reluctance to be associated with Carrier, however understandable the latter is – mythicism dates from the 19th century and was almost universally rejected by relevant experts long before Carrier entered the scene (even while longstanding Christian beliefs about Jesus – e.g. that he claimed to be God, that he intended to found a new religion, that he predicted his own execution… were being evaluated with increasing scepticism).
I think Dr. Sarah has satisfactorily disposed of the “literal meaning of Yeshua” line of argument – thanks Dr. Sarah, I should have checked that claim myself! As for the parallels between the “two Jesuses”, I’ll just refer readers once again to O’Neill’s article, and they can judge for themselves whether these “parallels” are convincing enough to be of any significance.
Dr Sarah @ #s 29-31 – Thanks for the detailed critique.
I have a busy day or two to deal with, but hope to reply after same.
Dr Sarah @ # 29: It’s not a plausible scenario at all. That’s precisely my point.
Definitely a verbal mindfart on my part – apologies. Still, I think the pre-existent oral lore had the most to do with the later literature.
The gospels’ pattern … isn’t at all similar to urban legends.
Not modern urban legends, but the older, less rushed versions accumulated a lot of ancillary stories – e.g., King Arthur.
… some form of pre-existing Jesusery. I don’t see that we can deduce ‘range’ from it.
Paul, at least in the translations, speaks of “some … who would pervert the Gospel” – a plural form.
…namely ‘did the person killed in the story actually exist on earth or were they only imagined to have existed and been killed in a heavenly dimension’…
The Gnostic version of the story may or may not have influenced other versions, but pertains only to the composite-character hypothesis as an example of just that.
For Price’s theory to be correct…
If you mean Robert G Price, quite so. Robert M Price’s scenario has more plausible sources.
… Pontius … as KG has pointed out, he’s not utilised as a villain in the gospel stories, but as a benevolent person whose hand is forced by those demanding Jews.
As a mustache-twirling evildoer, no – as an easily-believable plot-necessary executioner, he serves well enough.
… the question of why multiple authors would be writing an earthly execution for Jesus …
In the aftermath of the CE 70 rebellion, with martyrdom in the air and no room for a happy ending (from the non-Roman perspective), an “earthly execution” would be the whole point.
… I’m truly stymied by you referring to this as my supposition.
Definitely my error, due to starting my reply from a portion of your argument without re-reading its entirety – my apologies.
Dr Sarah @ # 30: … composite-Jesus hypothesis … discussions tend to confuse two different theories which … actually do differ in kind and not just in degree.
You spell out one of those theories clearly (“.. an original historical Jesus, but various stories of other people accreting onto the original core.”), and one more vaguely (“… a group of people all spontaneously deciding, purely on the basis of several stories floating around about miracle workers, that one particular named and identifiable miracle worker had recently lived on earth and been the Messiah and that they had to follow him”). I have to challenge that “purely” part, in light of known Messiah-mania, Roman violence, resentment of and disappearance of the Sadducees respectively before and after the Rebellion, etc. Jesus stories clearly met a social need at that time and place, a need I suspect evidently shaped the settled-upon version much more than did the un(der)documented facts of the case(s).
That sort of passion and belief isn’t typically inspired without an actual charismatic individual to start things off.
Prester John? The Mahdi? Arthur? William Tell? From here and now, it looks like Paul did most of the organizing work that kept a minor and otherwise soon-forgotten mini-cult going long enough to have an impact. That no more validates the second-hand stories he and later generations told than the historicity of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young proves the stories in the Book of Mormon.
Dr Sarah @ # 31: The actual meaning is ‘Yahweh saves’; the ‘Ye’ syllable refers to Yahweh.
Etymonline agrees with that. Wikipedia sayeth
Surely Jewish audiences would have connected the name with that of the purported successor of Moses; how the gentiles heard it would depend on how their preachers interpreted it. Given the fluidity of names historically (“Abram” -> “Abraham”; “Sara” -> “Sarah”; “Simon” -> “Peter”; “Saul” -> “Paul”) and more recently (“Tenskwatawa” -> “The Prophet”, “Dzhugashvili” -> “Stalin”; “John Ellis Bush” -> “Jeb!”; street nicknames that stick), we can’t assume this clearly identifies a specific individual either.
We’ve already had a round-and-round about possible alternative meanings to phrases now usually translated as “of Nazareth”.
Depends how you pick something as being ‘made up’. … RGP seems to be defining it as anything that shows even the most passing and superficial similarity to anything in the Jewish scriptures or Paul’s letters…
Does he anywhere cite Hugh Schonfield (author of The Passover Plot), who (sfaik) introduced the hypothesis that Jesus deliberately staged events to match known messiah-prophecies?
Jefferson strove to omit miracles and to extract moral/philosophical teachings, a much less rigorous approach than culling for historicity. Pulling out the “reasonably coherent story about a named preacher” you cite does produce a fuzzy core narrative – but the same applies to the poems of Homer and the epic of Gilgamesh, along with multiple OT stories. We all seem to agree the Jesus story grew in the telling, but distinguishing that from “composite” has so far eluded us.
… a heck of a lot simpler than any ideas mythicists have come up with as to how so many people by the late first/early second century apparently believed this Yeshua had existed…
These same people also believed their Messiah was returning from an afterlife to overturn everything and give them their hearts’ desires: how much weight should we give third-(or more)hand stories from the clearly-credulous? The evidence just doesn’t provide anything strong enough to take a stand on.
IOW, people who, despite their lives having been extensively retconned, are nonetheless known to have existed …? I think you’re making my point for me.
The point I intended to make simply involved the abundance of well-debunked “history”. Insisting on exact parallels falls into the same error as O’Neill claiming that the story of Jesus ben Ananias could not have contributed to the story of Jesus ben Yusuf because one made different prophecies and suffered different punishments than the other.
KG @ # 32: … my point, which was nothing to do with a lack of quantification, but rather that the claim that institutional pressure/inertia is responsible for an expert consensus is one of the main things mythicists have in common with anti-vaxxers and climate change denialists (and creationists).
In matters of religion, institutional authority holds a lot more sway than in matters of science; the former, after all, has nothing to measure or test. Have you never advocated atheism or agnosticism with believers?
… anything in the way of a plausible alternative hypothesis.
What does “plausibility” have to do with acceptance of stories based on psycho/social needs of movements within cultures we mostly don’t understand? We do know that people have consistently based their understandings on what we understand as literally incredible, and we see lots of the same every day now. We have less basis for attributing factuality to anything about an individual “Jesus” than for describing a person whom we know only by a chalk outline on the street, since we can have fair confidence the chalk-wielder included only one body in their sketch, which they probably drew while an actual body lay there.
Pierce R. Butler@34
I’d say that collection of examples illustrates just how weak your position is. Prester John was supposed to exist in a distant land (which land differed between sources), not in the place where stories of his life were set. The Mahdi is a supposed future figure. It’s possible there was an original for Arthur, but in any case the well-known stories about him date from centuries after his supposed lifetime. The story of William Tell is set in 1307, but the first written account dates from 1474. None of them have a brother and immediate followers who someone else recounts meeting a couple of decades after his death.
The known stories of Arthur are literary creations written at least 300 years after his supposed lifetime. They are not in any sense whatever, urban legends.
I simply don’t understand what you’re getting at here. By 70 CE, it’s fairly clear many if not most of the Jesusists were Gentiles, and the Gospels indicate they were keen to dissociate themselves from the Jewish uprising, and Jewish resistance to the Romans generally. Hence, blaming the crucifixion on “the Jews” and as far as possible exonerating Pilate. Your interpretation just doesn’t make sense.
It means “of Nazareth”, a real village known to have existed at the time, despite the obfuscations of mythicists.
As I’ve already pointed out, this sort of thing shows complete ignorance of how historians of the ancient world use sources. If they were to dismiss everything third-hand or from credulous sources (with regard to the supernatural and prophecy), there would simply be no ancient history.
But since these debunkings differ precisely in the crucial point from the attempted mythicist/multi-Jesusist debunking of Jesus, Dr. Sarah’s point stands. I think to find examples where historical debunking has actually disproved the existence of a person previously believed by professional historians to be real, you’d have to go a lot further back.
And behaved in a different way in a different location over a completely different timespan and was released by the authorities instead of not being released and died by accident rather than execution. O’Neill cites the “parallels” between Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, I’ve seen it similarly pointed out that the story of Eisenhower (“iron-hewer”) invading Normandy from England is obviously derived from that of Taillefer (“iron-hewer”) the Jongleur invading England from Normandy (along with William the Conqueror).
As I’ve pointed out numerous time, the great majority of relevant non-Christian experts agree that there was a historical Jesus. And this is not a religous question at all, it’s a historical one, and history has its own set of methods, tested and refined over centuries alongside those of science. It is those methods, applied as normal, that indicate there was almost certainly a historical Jesus.
What on earth has this to do with what I said? You are confusing – deliberately or not – questions at completely different levels of discourse. I’m pointing out sociological similarities, in our own culture, between mythicism, and other belief systems I assumed you would recognise as irrational, ideologically based nonsense. One of which is that neither outright mythicists, nor “multi-Jesusists” has produced anything like a plausible sequence of events by which no historical Jesus/multiple historical Jesuses could have led to a belief in one historical Jesus within a few decades, and furthermore, without leaving the slightest trace of people of the time raising this objection against the Jesusists – just as no anthropogenic climate change denialists have produced any plausible mechanism other than increased greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere due to human activity to account for recent climate change.
KG @ # 35: The Mahdi is a supposed future figure.
So are messiahim (if that’s a word).
PRB: … an “earthly execution” would be the whole point.
KG: I simply don’t understand what you’re getting at here. By 70 CE, it’s fairly clear many if not most of the Jesusists were Gentiles…
Who saw, from their own intermittent persecution and what happened to the Jews and anybody else who talked back to Caesar’s troops, the case for keeping heads down. An overtly rebellious cult would not have lasted another generation, and scattered as they were, Church leaders who lasted figured out ways to squelch defiance (and defiants) from their flocks. It worked, at least long enough for a takeover.
… “of Nazareth”, a real village known to have existed at the time…
I don’t have time or access to my own library to rassle with that one, but the Wikipffft sayeth (among other interesting etymological points) —
…this sort of thing shows complete ignorance of how historians of the ancient world use sources.
A history professor friend of mine advised me that it wasn’t until the 1950s that academic historians started really questioning their sources. Tacitus, as noted above, may have done the best of any disciple of Clio for centuries before and after himself. When all that’s left of a story is the winner’s side, institutionally enforced*, that’s the text that text-analyzers will analyze.
I think to find examples where historical debunking has actually disproved the existence of a person previously believed by professional historians to be real…
As with arguments about (a)theism, conclusively disproving non-existence poses inherent problems, well beyond Occam’s Razor. I can’t think of any such instances, but again don’t have time to look.
And behaved in a different way in a different location over a completely different timespan …
As the British Prime Minister in The Ghost acted in a different way than the historical Tony Blair, but few would claim Robert Harris didn’t base the former on the latter. Religious activists feel even less limited in their literary license than do novelists, having to answer only to their audiences – why expect them to hold to modern journalistic standards (not quite an oxymoron these days, but getting there)?
… the great majority of relevant non-Christian experts agree that there was a historical Jesus.
By which they seem to mean an executed Jewish preacher whose followers built a cult around their inconsistent versions of him, stumbling into a formula that has worked for them for more than 19 centuries now. They’ve only changed the name a couple of times that we know of, but the rest has been carved and molded much more, even in the generations before surviving texts got locked down. Historicists remind me of people watching a shadow-play on the wall saying that yes, there really exist animals called rabbits.
I’m pointing out sociological similarities, in our own culture, between mythicism, and other belief systems I assumed you would recognise as irrational, ideologically based nonsense.
Yet you continue to use, without demurral, a language we seem to agree has lent itself to countless crimes. Sociological similarities only go so far: turns out the Maoists had it right that John Birch was an American spy; Woodrow Wilson lied about the Lusitania‘s purely civilian status; and Martin Luther King Jr took training from communist-aligned “race traitors”, even though those who made such claims echoed the standard conspiracist tropes. Margaret Sanger and Marie Stopes got it right about the benefits of voluntary birth control, even while using deplorable classist/racist social frameworks to express it. Substance, not style, establishes veracity.
*Off the immediate topic: Last weekend, when a book called The Search for Jesus: Modern Scholarship Looks at the Gospels came my way, I knew I had to make that my next read. It’s mostly lectures by Stephen Patterson, Marcus Borg, & John D Crossan, printed in ’94, and I’ve barely begun it, but one thing I’ve learned:
I think the institutional deference to religious thou-shalt-nots which persisted through the “Renaissance” and the “Enlightenment” has not evaporated yet, and seems now in reconsolidation.
Pierce R. Butler@36
But Jesus wasn’t. Which was the whole point at issue in Dr. Sarah’s last sentence @30.
You seem to have wandered from the point at issue here. Why would an earthly execution be “the whole point”, as you claimed @34?
But that isn’t all that’s left, by any means. Numerous Christian “heresies” have survived, some in the original as far as we can tell, others in works arguing against them. These include the Gnostic belief that Jesus didn’t have a real human body. So has, for example, the rumour/trufact that Jesus’s father was a Roman soldier named Tiberius Julius Abdes Pantera. Aside from all the stuff related to Jesus or Christianity, effectively all the pagan classical literature we have (much of it implicitly or explicitly contradicting Christian beliefs and values) survives because it was copied and recopied by Christian (or in a few cases Muslim or Jewish) scribes. But not a peep about Jesus not having an earthly existence at all, or being a compound of two or more originals. Obviously that doesn’t prove no-one said those things – but it’s a notable absence of evidence.
Yes, asking for conclusive disproof is a bit much. Having looked into the matter, I admit I’m surprised at how recently the consensus was that the stories of Moses and even Abraham at least contained elements based on real people. But in those case, we can specify the grounds on which expert opinion has changed: as well as the timelag of centuries between their supposed lives and the earliest sources for them, clear anachronisms in the case of Abraham (names, places, camels…), and in the case of Moses, complete absence of archeological evidence and of confirmation from Egyptian sources that the Jews were ever in Egypt at all, let alone escaping slavery there.
This is an odd rhetorical move, but one I’ve seen before from mythicists – in effect claiming that historicists don’t exist. It comes out when they realise they’ve lost the argument! The historicist claim is a simple one:
That there was a single individual, a Jewish preacher and faith-healer called Yeshua, from Galilee, very probably baptised by John the Baptist, who came to Jerusalem for Passover with some followers, very probably made a disturbance in the Temple, annoyed the Roman authorities and was crucified by them around 30 CE. And some of the direct followers of this person, along with at least one of his brothers, started a cult around his supposed resurrection from the dead, claiming he was the Jewish Messiah. This cult grew into Christianity, largely under the aegis of Saul/Paul of Tarsus.
Now you can accept this historical hypothesis, or reject it, or be on the fence about it, or add or subtract certain elements. But to pretend it’s not a real, meaningful hypothesis, whose acceptance is different from its rejection, is just silly.
But style can certainly give a useful lead. And in the mythicist case, there is precious little substance, just as there is in the climate-denial and anti-vaxx cases. What would you say are the strongest elements of the mythicist (or multi-Jesusist) case? When and how, if one of these hypotheses is correct, did it come about that the truth completely disappeared, when many other alternatives to Christian proto-orthodoxy did not?
Resistance to such reconsolidation will be hindered not helped by nonsense such as mythicism. It makes a lot of atheists look like fools, guided by egotism andor ideology rather than evidence, and indeed, that’s by far my main objection to it.
KG @ # 37: xBut Jesus wasn’t.
He wasn’t a messiah? Well, not per the general idea of a messiah at the time, but lots of people wanted to redefine that.
Why would an earthly execution be “the whole point”…?
To remind members of a small and defenseless cult not to poke the Roman lion, and to milk J’s martyrdom for all the martyr-emotions.
Numerous Christian “heresies” have survived…
Some even from the first generations of the movement, though not from lack of efforts to squelch same. Note the Gnostic movement, sfawct, started moving well after the “Gospels” were finalized.
… not a peep about Jesus not having an earthly existence at all, or being a compound of two or more originals.
Not much in the way of skepticism at all, unless you count advocacy for differing unsubstantiated claims. You seem to expect a lot of anachronisms from early Xians.
… effectively all the pagan classical literature we have (much of it implicitly or explicitly contradicting Christian beliefs and values) survives because it was copied and recopied by Christian (or in a few cases Muslim or Jewish) scribes.
Do you really expect monastic scribes to have treated (what they saw as) nonsense and heresy as equivalent to recognized classics?
… I’m surprised at how recently the consensus was that the stories of Moses and even Abraham at least contained elements based on real people.
I’ve been trying for a couple of days to remember the word used for gods derived from legendary humans, and coming up blank. If only I had time to re-read The Golden Bough and the critiques thereof…
… complete absence of archeological evidence and of confirmation from Egyptian sources that the Jews were ever in Egypt at all…
I think they’ve found a few coins, but only enough to suggest the occasional merchant or mercenary.
… in effect claiming that historicists don’t exist.
??? Simply claiming that they have a threadbare case once the questionable elements evaporate under a strong light.
… to pretend it’s not a real, meaningful hypothesis… is just silly.
“God” is a real hypothesis too. Getting such ideas over the hurdles to “fact” or “theory” status requires evidence – less so, admittedly, for Jesus than for his purported papa. Given all the efforts taken to see outlines through the fog, it seems reasonable to step back and acknowledge the presence and thickness of that fog.
… in the mythicist case, there is precious little substance…
As I thought we just agreed, proving a negative requires more than the opposite. Pointing out the weakness of an assertion does not disprove that assertion, but it does mandate considering it as conditional. Case in point: Bart Ehrman’s Did Jesus Exist? relies heavily on “Q”, itself a debated hypothesis. Thus my lean towards agnosticism in this case – we don’t have much substance either way.
What would you say are the strongest elements of the mythicist (or multi-Jesusist) case?
I’ve tried to lay those out in this and previous threads: the contradictions, the overlays from other stories and movements, the unreliability of available documents and of the “witnesses” (for lack of a better term for those who don’t even claim presence or acquaintance with those allegedly present).
When and how, if one of these hypotheses is correct, did it come about that the truth completely disappeared…?
Did a “truth” exist to disappear? We have enduring accounts of Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, et alia, and most accept that intergenerational repetition and psychological resonance suffice to explain them even without tracking down their actual origins.
… mythicism… makes a lot of atheists look like fools, guided by egotism andor ideology rather than evidence…
Much of atheism (along with a myriad other movements) has already succumbed to such foolishnesses. I’d feel more comfortable defending Earl Doherty than Sam Harris, even though ED seems way over his scholarly skis. Have you renounced Green Party ideas or goals because of David Icke or Jill Stein?
Pierce R. Butler@38,
He wasn’t a supposed future figure. Come on, make some effort to keep track.
Weak sauce. As if they’d have needed such a reminder after the destruction of the Temple, Nero’s persecution of 68 CE, the execution of Paul (and reportedly other cult leaders)! And the ambiguous role of Pilate in the Gospels still makes absolutely no sense under your hypothesis. If the point had been to warn, there would be no sense in making him reluctant to order the execution, if the point had just been a martyr’s death, why involve him at all – just have him lynched by “the Jews”. It makes perfect sense if in historical fact, Jesus was in fact crucified by order of Pilate (which would then have been known throughout the cult), but the Jesusists wanted to minimise his guilt to direct hostility at their Jewish rivals rather than at the Romans.
Well since they survived well over a millennium of Christians being in charge of copying texts (setting aside Muslim and Jewish writings about Jesus, all of which, IIRC come from centuries after his death) the “efforts to squelch same” don’t seem to have been systematic. Which is my point: if other “heresies” and alternative narratives survived, why not “Jesus never had an earthly existence” nor “There were multiple Jususes”?
But what other form of scepticism could there have been. It’s you who are expecting anachronisms!
No, but as I’ve already pointed out, much of what they woould have regarded as “nonsense and heresy” was copied.
/tbc
contd/
…for example, that Jesus did not have an ordinary physical body, or that he was the son of a Roman soldier. Also that some of his disciples stole his body (this claim is attributed to the Jewish priesthood in gMatthew – it might even have been true, if indeed Jesus was buried at all, contrary to the usual fate of victims of crucifixion).
That’s not the question, as I thought I’d made clear: it’s that mythicists have provided no remotely plausible sequence of events that could have led, in a relatively short period, from the knowledge that there had never been an earthly Jesus, to the apparently universal acceptance (among Jesusists and those who knew of them) that there had been.
So, purely negative. And all of them apply to practically everything in ancient history.
In all those cases, there are gaps of many centuries between their supposed existence, and the first written sources mentioning them. In Jesus’s case, the gap is at most a few decades, less than 30 years if the consensus dating of the writings of Paul of Tarsus is correct, and those writings recount meetings with people who had known Jesus. The very fact that these are the alleged parallels you have to rely on shows how weak mythicism is.
No – but I accept that they have done enormous damage to the Green movement, and readily denounce them for doing so. I’m not suggesting anyone should renounce atheism, as you surely know – just that mythicists should drop the nonsense of mythicism – both simply because it is nonsense, and because it brings discredit on atheism.
Pierce R. Butler, #34:
[me] The gospels’ pattern … isn’t at all similar to urban legends.
[PRB] Not modern urban legends, but the older, less rushed versions accumulated a lot of ancillary stories – e.g., King Arthur.
The stories from hundreds of years ago accumulated those extra details and components, yes. That’s not something you typically see in urban legend-type stories that sprang up only a few decades ago.
Every time I see a Jesus-mythicist give an example of a fictitious figure that they say is comparable, it follows one of three patterns: detailed stories about someone in a dim and distant mythical past centuries ago (such as King Arthur), a more contemporary story in which we get only a bare outline or specific anecdote, or a deliberately fictitious story (such as Harry Potter or Spiderman) that’s universally understood as being intended as fiction. I’ve yet to see a mythicist give an example that combines ‘detailed story’, ‘recent time’, and ‘believed to have been true’. In every case I’ve seen, that combination points towards a real figure.
[me]… some form of pre-existing Jesusery. I don’t see that we can deduce ‘range’ from it.
[PRB] Paul, at least in the translations, speaks of “some … who would pervert the Gospel” – a plural form.
A plural number of people involved, but nothing there about a range of different beliefs.
[me]…namely ‘did the person killed in the story actually exist on earth or were they only imagined to have existed and been killed in a heavenly dimension’…
[PRB] The Gnostic version of the story may or may not have influenced other versions, but pertains only to the composite-character hypothesis as an example of just that.
I can’t follow your meaning here at all, I’m afraid.
[me] For Price’s theory to be correct…
[PRB] If you mean Robert G Price, quite so. Robert M Price’s scenario has more plausible sources.
Small note: I don’t think RG Price has revealed his first name anywhere on the internet, or at least not that I’ve seen, so I don’t know whether or not it’s Robert. You might have knowledge that I don’t. Anyway, how does Robert M Price think we got to the situation of early Christians and their non-Christian contemporaries believing in a Jesus who’d had an earthly existence?
[me] … Pontius … as KG has pointed out, he’s not utilised as a villain in the gospel stories, but as a benevolent person whose hand is forced by those demanding Jews.
[PRB] As a mustache-twirling evildoer, no – as an easily-believable plot-necessary executioner, he serves well enough.
So why do you think naming a specific executioner would be plot-necessary under a mythicist origin of Christianity?
[me] … the question of why multiple authors would be writing an earthly execution for Jesus …
[PRB] In the aftermath of the CE 70 rebellion, with martyrdom in the air and no room for a happy ending (from the non-Roman perspective), an “earthly execution” would be the whole point.
You think that in the immediate aftermath of a crushed rebellion and bloody war, people would have not only been so short of genuine martyr stories that they would have had to invent one, but that, having done so, they’d set it forty years earlier with an executioner who’d long since been deposed and sent back to Rome anyway?
Pierce R. Butler, #34, cont:
Dr Sarah @ # 30: … composite-Jesus hypothesis … discussions tend to confuse two different theories which … actually do differ in kind and not just in degree.
[PRB] You spell out one of those theories clearly (“.. an original historical Jesus, but various stories of other people accreting onto the original core.”), and one more vaguely (“… a group of people all spontaneously deciding, purely on the basis of several stories floating around about miracle workers, that one particular named and identifiable miracle worker had recently lived on earth and been the Messiah and that they had to follow him”).
I do indeed describe that more vaguely, because I haven’t yet heard a version of it that gets any more specific. If you know of one, by all means share it.
[PRB] I have to challenge that “purely” part, in light of known Messiah-mania, Roman violence, resentment of and disappearance of the Sadducees respectively before and after the Rebellion, etc. Jesus stories clearly met a social need at that time and place, a need I suspect evidently shaped the settled-upon version much more than did the un(der)documented facts of the case(s).
Yup. People wanted to believe in a Messiah who would imminently turn up. How did they get from that to a collective belief that the Messiah had just turned up and done some fairly detailed things before being ignominiously executed?
Again: Under Jesus historicity, it’s because an actual person was doing at least some of those things and was charismatic and convincing enough for people to latch onto him as the Messiah and, for a few of his inner circle, to keep on believing this even after he’d been killed. Jesus mythicists, however, aren’t very good at coming up with a convincing route to this point. The composite theorists don’t seem to be an exception here.
[me] That sort of passion and belief isn’t typically inspired without an actual charismatic individual to start things off.
[PRB] Prester John? The Mahdi? Arthur? William Tell?
…..all seem to be examples of fictional characters whose stories did not, in fact, inspire the formation of groups of followers who passionately believed the person in question to have lived recently and directly founded their group.
Prester John, according to https://www.historytoday.com/miscellanies/search-prester-john, does seem to have been a composite of two figures, combined by the wishful thinking of a Syrian bishop and fueled later on by a forged letter. Very minimal biographical details. No groups of people claiming he was the recent founder of their own group. Just a vague myth about a person somewhere out there who was fighting the good fight with teaching Christianity.
The Mahdi seems to be the Moslem equivalent of the Messiah; a hypothetical future figure who will be sent to bring about a wondrous future for everyone. Do you know of any cases in which a group of people became convinced that a few vaguely relevant stories floating around must refer to the Mahdi having recently lived on earth and founded their group? I’m going to go out on a limb and guess not, but let me know if I’m wrong.
King Arthur and William Tell are, respectively, good examples of the first two different patterns of mythical figures I described back at the beginning of this comment: Arthur fits ‘detailed stories about someone in a dim and distant mythical past centuries ago’, Tell fits ‘more contemporary claim consisting of one specific anecdote’. They’ve both, in their different ways, inspired people, but we don’t seem to get groups of people springing up claiming that either of these were the recent in-person founder of their group.
[PRB] From here and now, it looks like Paul did most of the organizing work that kept a minor and otherwise soon-forgotten mini-cult going long enough to have an impact.
Yes, and I’d go even further and say that he was very likely to have been the person who reworked the existing set of beliefs into the universal salvation religion that Christianity became. However, we know Paul wasn’t the person responsible for originating the first level of Jesus-belief, because he tells us in Galatians 1 that the Jesus-followers existed before him.
Pierce R. Butler, #34, further continued:
Dr Sarah @ # 31: The actual meaning[of Yeshua] is ‘Yahweh saves’; the ‘Ye’ syllable refers to Yahweh.
[PRB] Etymonline agrees with that. Wikipedia sayeth
Yeshua in Hebrew is a verbal derivative from “to rescue”, “to deliver”. …
Yes, a name that has the word ‘saves’ in it is indeed derived from a word meaning ‘to save’, aka ‘to rescue’ or ‘to deliver’. The point is, it also has the ‘Ye’ syllable, which refers to Yahweh as being the one doing the saving. From some actual Jewish sources:
https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/3825225/jewish/Popular-Jewish-Hebrew-Boy-Names.htm: ‘Yehoshua (Joshua): “God will save”… Moses added the Hebrew letter “yud” to [Joshua’s] original name, Hosea. His new name, Joshua, means “G d will save.”’
https://aish.com/hebrew-and-jewish-names-for-boys/: ‘Yehoshua means “God is salvation.”’
So, no, Yeshua doesn’t mean ‘saviour’, because that term refers to the person doing the saving; it’s a name that, like many Hebrew names, makes a statement about one of Yahweh’s attributes.
[PRB] Given the fluidity of names historically (“Abram” -> “Abraham”; “Sara” -> “Sarah”; “Simon” -> “Peter”; “Saul” -> “Paul”) and more recently (“Tenskwatawa” -> “The Prophet”, “Dzhugashvili” -> “Stalin”; “John Ellis Bush” -> “Jeb!”; street nicknames that stick), we can’t assume this clearly identifies a specific individual either.
I’m a bit baffled by the logic that gets you from ‘many individuals change their names’ to ‘this name that in this context supposedly refers to one individual actually refers to many’. Regardless of whether the second claim is correct, I can’t see why it would be implied by the first claim.
[PRB] Does [Price] anywhere cite Hugh Schonfield (author of The Passover Plot), who (sfaik) introduced the hypothesis that Jesus deliberately staged events to match known messiah-prophecies?
Nope. Or at any rate not in his book. Any reason why he would have?
[PRB] We all seem to agree the Jesus story grew in the telling, but distinguishing that from “composite” has so far eluded us.
I refer you back to the two versions of ‘composite’ that I gave in comment 30. If you’re arguing for the second version, then on what grounds, and how do you feel that the initial group of followers convinced of the recent existence of a specific earthly person called Yeshua came to that conclusion?
[me] … a heck of a lot simpler than any ideas mythicists have come up with as to how so many people by the late first/early second century apparently believed this Yeshua had existed…
[PRB] These same people also believed their Messiah was returning from an afterlife to overturn everything and give them their hearts’ desires: how much weight should we give third-(or more)hand stories from the clearly-credulous?
Firstly, as per the point I made in the very post on which we’re commenting, Tacitus’s reference to Jesus shows that by the early second century there were people who did not believe those things about Jesus yet still believed he’d had an earthly existence. And from the fact that this convinced Tacitus, we can conclude that this was more widely or reliably held than just the occasional eccentric with a weird fringe belief.
As for the Jesus-followers who believed this; yes, there are always going to be individuals who believe all sorts of bizarre things for all sorts of bizarre reasons. How did this turn into a group of people with multiple detailed stories about a recent earthly Jesus? I think we can take it that they wouldn’t all have spontaneously and coincidentally come up with the same sort of string of entirely unfounded beliefs. If you believe that the Jesus-story originated totally from combinations of other stories with no initial specific Jesus-figure, then how might that plausibly have happened? If you have some other theory as to how it came about, then what’s that theory?
Pierce R. Butler, #38:
[KG] Why would an earthly execution be “the whole point”…?
[PRB] To remind members of a small and defenseless cult not to poke the Roman lion, and to milk J’s martyrdom for all the martyr-emotions.
I know KG’s already answered this, but I do just want to point out that you’ve given two reasons that completely contradict each other. The whole point of milking a martyrdom for the associated emotions was to stir people up into action. That’s directly opposed to the first potential motivation you gave. I don’t think either potential motive stands up individually either, but at least pick one.
Dr. Sarah@41,
Interesting note about R.G. Price’s first name. Looking around, I find that there are at least two authors called Robert G. Price: one who has written on Chinese science fiction, while the other has written multiple books on weight training (which I can’t help suspecting share considerable content with each other). But I’d assume neither is the author of Deciphering the Gospels: Proves Jesus Never Existed!
Dr Sarah @ #s 41-44 – Quite a block of responses, there – pls give me a little while to work up replies.
Ftr: I posted a reply to KG a day or so after his # 40 (a couple of times, since the previous “held for moderation” auto-reply didn’t show up), then quit trying on the assumption you’d had enough of my blathering, and/or felt his # 40 made a suitable coda for a thread nobody was reading anyhow. Did that make it through the cyber-gauntlet to your eyes and get deservedly squashed, or did the gremlins eat it before then?
Looking around to support/correct my apparent error about R.G. Price’s name, I stumbled across his or her elaboration of his/her book at http://www.decipheringthegospels.com, reading which may add a bit to my reply time. (Couldn’t find anything so far about the full name, alas.) (Did find another rgp site, rationalrevolution.net, with sane/progressive [at 1st glance] essays on our contemporary crisis, the most recent from Oct 2020.)
Ye gawds – I also found https://earlywritings.com/, a still-active forum (deciphering…com seems to have dribbled into a coma years ago) with detailed debates about early christianism beyond what any of us here has mustered, amateur-accessible but without flame wars (that I found, anyway). Lots of homework waiting for serious attention.
Thanks for your patience and thoroughness!
Dr Sarah ! @ 41: I’ve yet to see a mythicist give an example that combines ‘detailed story’, ‘recent time’, and ‘believed to have been true’.
Consider the purported raped Belgian nuns of 1914 or the Kuwaiti babies allegedly dumped from incubators in 1990. Or accusations of a supposedly-stollen election in 2020.
… nothing there about a range of different beliefs.
The surviving documents from that time and place are a mishmash:
[PRB] The Gnostic version of the story may or may not have influenced other versions, but pertains only to the composite-character hypothesis as an example of just that.
I can’t follow your meaning here at all, I’m afraid.
The Gnostics, in proposing an alternate-Jesus scenario, simply followed a midrashic tradition of propounding a messianic vision and slapping the name “Jesus” on it.
… how does Robert M Price think we got to the situation of early Christians and their non-Christian contemporaries believing in a Jesus who’d had an earthly existence?
I don’t have any of RMP’s works to hand, but he endorsed RGP’s approach to the extend of writing a foreword to RGP’s book (parts of which we can read at RGP’s Deciphering… website). RGP posits the text of Mark gaining traction due to its close adherence to OT prophecies, the tradition of scolding Israel for its failure to obey Divine Orders and its linkage of Jesus’s fate to Jerusalem’s destruction. That last factor entails a lot of social disruption; how Mark’s version became authoritative in that environment, with a 95% illiterate population, I doubt we’ll ever know for sure.
… why do you think naming a specific executioner would be plot-necessary under a mythicist origin of Christianity?
How could a story-teller, historian or fictionalist, not name a name (and keep their audience)?
You think that in the immediate aftermath of a crushed rebellion and bloody war, people would have not only been so short of genuine martyr stories that they would have had to invent one…
They would have felt a strong need to express their trauma in a single narrative to represent the whole 4 years, or at least they would have responded strongly when such a narrative appeared.
… having done so, they’d set it forty years earlier …
Per the Prices (and quite a few others), “Mark” et al built on Paul’s accounts – which Price & Price consider allegories of a heavenly drama, deeply lacking the concrete details “Mark” provided.
Dr Sara @ # 42: … I haven’t yet heard a version of it that gets any more specific. If you know of one, by all means share it.
Most mythicist accounts attempt to do just that – limitedly, of course, in the shadow of the many unanswered questions about the time & place at issue. Historicists have a parallel problem in accounting for the survival/triumph of a minor movement which, as you point out, ended in failure and ignominy.
Do you know of any cases in which a group of people became convinced that a few vaguely relevant stories floating around must refer to the Mahdi having recently lived on earth and founded their group?
Wikipffft’s List of Mahdi claimants” lists 23 persons who declared their own Mahdi-hood and another 13 dubbed such by their supporters, plus several others who say they represent or serve as heralds for same (at least two have Facebook pages).
[Paul] was very likely to have been the person who reworked the existing set of beliefs into the universal salvation religion that Christianity became.
No argument here – I find it hard to imagine how anyone could have sold Jesus-the-Jewish-savior stories to a Gentile audience without such a retcon.
Dr Sarah ! @ 43: … [Joshua’s] original name, Hosea.
Hadn’t heard of that before. My Merriam-Webster puts “the” Joshua in the 13th century BCE and Hosea in the 8th; the KJV doesn’t mention any “Hosea” but the latter. If the older one’s name means “God Saves”, does the younger one’s Yud-less version mean just “saves”?
I still think the fluidity of names Way Back When adds to, rather than subtracts from, the difficulty of identifying specific individuals.
As for my mention of Schonfield’s The Passover Plot, it postulates a historical Jesus who sets out to make himself a messiah figure by staging events (e.g., entry into Jerusalem) to match OT prophecies, only to have things go terribly wrong during the crucifixion when the Roman soldier jabs him with a spear and messes up the resurrection part. I never found it all that convincing, but it does, in a way, combine historicist & mythicist motifs.
… Tacitus’s reference to Jesus shows that by the early second century there were people who did not believe those things about Jesus yet still believed he’d had an earthly existence.
Tacitus also recounted Germanic origin myths and embraced some of the earliest forms of racialism; we should not accept his acceptance of stories as a product of modern-like hard skeptical vetting. That said, I don’t doubt many/most Christians of his time held a historicist view – or that most of them felt the same about Homer’s epics. Euhumerus’s ~300 BCE notion that stories of gods derived from deeds of men, had it gained more support among philosophers, might have saved humanity a great deal of trouble (Wikipedia observes, without irony, that “Early Christian writers, such as Lactantius, used Euhemerus’s belief that the ancient gods were originally human to confirm their inferiority regarding the Christian God.”).
If you believe that the Jesus-story originated totally from combinations of other stories with no initial specific Jesus-figure, then how might that plausibly have happened?
RG Price attributes it to “Mark”’s literary skills; I lean more towards emotional desperation following the rampages of Titus Vespasianus. (I would like to reiterate that the composite-Jesus theory does not require any “no initial specific Jesus-figure” scenario, just that it leaves only the (possibly questionable) name sticking out from under an avalanche of dubious attributions.)
Dr Sarah @ # 44: … you’ve given two reasons that completely contradict each other. The whole point of milking a martyrdom for the associated emotions was to stir people up into action.
That depends entirely on what you mean by “action” – I haven’t seen anyone, including myself, claim the early Xians wanted to go all Simon bar Kokhba. They did want to push emotional buttons, but for purposes of proselytization, not rebellion.
Pierce R. Butler@47, 48
Damnit, Pierce, you keep doing this – quoting a tiny part of a point Dr. Sarah or I have made, leaving out all the relevant context, and hence making it appear you have an adequate response. Here’s what Dr. Sarah actually said @41:
So clearly, what’s asked for is an example of a fictitious figure combining ” ‘detailed story’, ‘recent time’, and ‘believed to have been true’.” not just an example of some event combining those features. It’s surely obvious that an event taking place over a short timespan is easier to fabricate or imagine than an entire person.
Again from #47:
Dr. Sarah’s comment “nothing there about a range of different beliefs.” refers to Paul’s Letter to the Galatians, which you introduced @5. Here is what Dr. Sarah said @41:
and then you switch to talking about the range of beliefs in the mid-2nd century!
To continue from your #47:
gMark was written in Greek, probably in Rome, for a Gentile audience so the “social disruption” in Judea is irrelevant. Do try to keep up!
Paul does not give much of an account of Jesus’s career either on earth or in heaven, but he does say he was born of a woman, and was descended from David, and also says he (Paul) met Jesus’s brother. So the Prices (and quite a few others) are simply spewing risible nonsense.
Once more with the absurdly truncated quote from someone you’re supposedly arguing against. It’s getting difficult to believe you’re arguing in good faith. Here’s the context, from Dr. Sarah’s #42:
So, what Dr. Sarah is saying is that no mythicists are specific about how an original belief in a purely heavenly drama turned into a belief in a historical character so quickly. This is absolutely not parallel to the “problem in accounting for the survival/triumph of a minor movement which, as you point out, ended in failure and ignominy.” – because the steps by which this is claimed to have occurred are clear. Even if these steps were implausible (I would say they are not, see below), that would make the case entirely different from the mythicist one, in which such steps are not spelled out at all.
Steps in the historicist acount:
1) A small group of Jesus’s followers, who had expected events along the lines of Jewish messianic prophecy, became convinced after his execution that he had survived death. Christians, of course, explain this by a miracle (he had survived death), but there’s no need for that at all. It’s well documented that members of apocalyptic cults often respond to the failure of their hopes and prophecies by rejigging them so they can go on believing (see the “Great Disappointment”, Jehovah’s witnesses’ multiple re-datings of the end of the world, etc.).
2) Paul of Tarsus became convinced Jesus had inded been resurrected, probably through some kind of hallucination (authentic heavenly vision according to Christians, of course), and had given him the mission of taking that message to the Gentiles, which he proceeded to do quite successfully, notably by dropping the requirment that followers of Jesus must also follow Jewish law – at a time when multiple saviour and mystery cults were emerging. Crucially for the historicist account, he recounts meeting (and disagreeing) with Jesus’s brother and some of his closest associates.
3) The gospels were then written, based on circulating oral accounts of Jesus’s life, words and actions (and on each other and possibly alos lost writings), to strengthen the hold the cult had on its followers and aid in proselytising. Crucially for the historicist account, they contain aspects which are difficult to fit into what the cult would want to say about Jesus (e.g. his origin in Galilee not Bethlehem, his baptism by John the B.) – why are they there if it was all invented? At the same time (the process can be followed in successive gospels), Jesus’s status was boosted until he was seen as near-equal to the creator-god. (The final promotion to equality/identity came later.)
4) The “triumph” of the cult took around 3 centuries. Important contributions to this were probably its encouragment to mutual aid between cult members, the high status it gave to women (relative to that in Roman and even more so Greek culture, one of the most misogynist on record), and the effective administrative and proselytising structures and methods it adopted. (One of particular interest to me is its use of the codex form for its writings. It’s both more portable and more searchable than the scroll. The codex largely replaced the scroll in the first 4 centuries CE and while they didn’t invent it, the Christians seem to have played a big part in this.)
5) It was adopted by Constantine, whether out of sincere conviction, for political advantage, or both.
tbc/
/contd
PRB@48:
This one’s just weird. For once you do give enough context to make it clear your “answer” simply isn’t an answer to the point raised. Of all those Wikipedia lists (BTW, your link rather oddly leads to a page saying the page requested doesn’t exist, and two further links must be followed to get to that page), the existence of only one, Muhammad ibn Abd Allah al-Aftah ibn Ja’far al-Sadiq is contested, so all the rest are completely irrelevant (and you don’t bother to single out the one who could possibly be considered relevant – did you even notice him?). His existence was asserted by the members of a now-extinct branch of Shia Islam, who believed his father had been the Imam, the Imamate could only descend from father to son, and couldn’t die out, so the father must have had a secret son. So he was claimed to exist while he was still supposedly alive. The article isn’t clear – perhaps because it’s not known – whether his “followers” picked an actual living person and just convinced themselves his father was who they wanted it to be, or whether they thought he was in hiding somewhere, unaware of his own identity, or whatever. I leave it to others to judge whether this is a good parallel to a figure who according to the mythicists, was originally known not to have had an earthly existence.
More irrelevancies. First, Dr. Sarah specifies non-Christians who nonetheless believed in a historical Jesus, so your reference to “many/most Christians of the time” believing that is beside the point (and of course there’s no evidence of any Christians of that time who didn’t believe Jesus had an earthly existence, so the “many/most” is also misleading). Second, no ancient historian comes close to modern standards of rigour, but the particular facts about Tacitus you give don’t appear to in any way discredit his accuracy with regard to what he says about Jesus. Third, once again you elide the huge differences in the length of time between Jesus’s reported lifetime and people believing he was a historical individual, and those of legendary figures from the far more distant past – in this case the characters in Homer (who were already characters from centuries past when the Iliad and Odyssey were written) rather than the Tanakh.
But there is evidence of a historical Jesus from before the Jewish War – from the writings of Paul and specifically, his reports of meeting with Jesus’s brother and close associates. I keep coming back to this because it’s so crucial to the mythicist case to discredit this evidence either by the sort of absurdities of interpretation Carrier goes in for, or by claiming that Paul’s generally accepted “genuine” letters are not genuine at all – but you do neither. You just ignore the evidence. And BTW, you give no reason why “emotional desperation following the rampages of Titus Vespasianus” should affect the Gentile Jesusists (from whom Christianity is descended) at all. It’s difficult not to conclude that you simply don’t know the basic facts about early Christianity.
But that proselytization could, and in some case did, get them killed – because they didn’t just try to spread their message verbally, they refused to conform as expected by offering sacrifices for the emperor’s well-being – which was regarded as sedition.
KG @ # 49: … you keep doing this – quoting a tiny part of a point … what’s asked for is an example of a fictitious figure combining ” ‘detailed story’, ‘recent time’, and ‘believed to have been true’.”
And you keep trying to glue me to hardcore mythicism when I keep sticking to what I guess I have to call compositism. I could point to false accusations of crimes – see Jussie Smollett, Tawana Brawley, the Duke University lacrosse team – but suspect that would lead to another twist of the goalposts. (I particularly object to describing the decades between Paul and Mark as “recent time”.)
…Dr. Sarah’s comment “nothing there about a range of different beliefs.” refers to Paul’s Letter to the Galatians…
Okay, Paul did not use the word “range”, he only said Jesus-followers had to sort out more than one version. Given the time, place, and topic, a neat binary seems much less plausible than a gabble.
… you switch to talking about the range of beliefs in the mid-2nd century!
I refer to the use of a key term used for the documents in question apparently arising well after the likely dates of the deaths of the authors of same. Again: y’all point to moving shadows within the fog, while I point to the fog itself.
gMark was written in Greek, probably in Rome, for a Gentile audience …
Looking that up, I note that the first several references tend to agree with you – but conflict on other major points ( probably composed in Rome shortly after the death of Emperor Claudius (died AD 54).; No doubt Mark was with Paul in Rome at the time.; Because of the reference to the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE (Mark 13:2), most scholars believe that the Gospel of Mark was written sometime during the war between Rome and the Jews (66-74). Pea soup – from modern scholars!
… the “social disruption” in Judea is irrelevant.
Addressing an audience which wants a clear account of what happened during that disruption, an audience (at least partly) converted to belief in some version of the story in question, “Mark” had to have in mind the context of a slew of oral rumors. (I confess I had thought of him as I think of Paul, writing for one literate to read aloud to a congregation of illiterates, and that was probably in error.)
… the Prices (and quite a few others) are simply spewing risible nonsense.
My opinion of all religions, and the Judeo-Christo-Islamic set in particular. You seem to assume a clear-headed, fact-based coterie at the core of all this; I assume the opposite.
… no mythicists are specific about how an original belief in a purely heavenly drama turned into a belief in a historical character so quickly.
You want specifics?!? I can only refer you to the study of rumors and urban legends, and the accounts of those who have tried to track down the origins of particular stories. Do you think this widely-observed phenomenon did not or could not have occurred 19 1/2 centuries ago “at a time when multiple saviour and mystery cults were emerging”?
You do sum up the historicist case quite clearly. I won’t try to refute all of it, because I think much of it is correct, but want to answer a few points:
• The composite hypothesis agrees with the “small group of followers” scenario, it just stipulates that the ensuing accumulation of anecdotes and propaganda created a “Jesus” they might not even recognize.
• The gospels … contain aspects which are difficult to fit into what the cult would want to say about Jesus (e.g. his origin in Galilee not Bethlehem, his baptism by John the B.)… – the Galilean component may reflect an inconvenient historicity of a root sect which formed a tributary of the Jesus-story river. RG Price addresses the John the Baptist narrative by a fairly convincing parallelism with the Elijah & Elisha “history” in 1 & 2 Kings: go to his decipheringthegospels.com and click the “Preview” link for (part of) that case.
• I would add to your 4) that the Antonine plagues (started in Rome ~165 CE) may have marked the turning point for acceptance of Christianism. Apparently the believers actually followed through on their commitment to doing good and nursed many of the afflicted, at considerable sacrifice to their own numbers, and earned a reputation for benevolence – arguably the Christians’ finest hour.
• … Greek culture, one of the most misogynist on record… Except, ironically in modern eyes, the Spartans. Since the men spent so much time drilling and fighting, their wives ran most of the economy, and the widows in particular gained much wealth, status, and autonomy. Nothing to do with our present debate, but one of my favorite historical oddities.
(I posted another comment a minute ago, “held for moderation” possibly because of multiple links – so if this one gets through linklessly, please don’t say I dodged all your earlier points.)
KG @ # 50 – I just tried to illustrate that Mahdi-mythology mushroomed madly, not that it proffers precise parallels to particular prophets and prophecies at present point. Do I really need to belabor the relevance of that to this?
… non-Christians who nonetheless believed in a historical Jesus…
Even Euhemures & Co did their debunking with acceptance of historicity of each king (or whoever) they descried at the roots of god-legends. I doubt Tacitus or his readers would have seen any advantage in beating a mythicist horse regarding any of the “multiple saviour and mystery cults” at the time.
… there is evidence of a historical Jesus from before the Jewish War – from the writings of Paul and specifically, his reports of meeting with Jesus’s brother and close associates.
We also have good evidence of a historical Christopher Columbus and a historical George Washington, but we have to peel away the “everybody thought the Earth was flat” and the “cherry tree” stories to get to them. Compositism argues only that we have a lot more Washington Irving and Parson Weems to shovel off in the Jesus case, and a LOT less authentic material once that chore is finished.
I do not attempt to defend Carrier’s overreach with the Bayesian theorem, nor to disagree with the (apparently still contentious) sorting-out of Pauline and pseudo-Pauline writings (though I will point to the latter as further evidence of classical-era fog).
… you give no reason why “emotional desperation following the rampages of Titus Vespasianus” should affect the Gentile Jesusists …
Do you think the Jesus-cult followers of Rome (or of Antioch, Corinth, Thessalonica…), piecing together a somewhat-novel cosmology from Paul and other wandering/refugee [after 66 CE] preachers, were not influenced in conceiving of their Savior by the messiah-mania of said mystics? Though mostly un-Jewish, they did all subscribe to Jerusalem-centric doomsday-cult thinking with precious little room for Apollonian-Aristotlean rationality.
… that proselytization could, and in some case did, get them killed – because they didn’t just try to spread their message verbally, they refused to conform as expected by offering sacrifices for the emperor’s well-being…
The first reported Xian martyr, Stephen, apparently died at the hands of Jewish high priests. Dunno when the first refusal to worship “Caesar” started. but I suspect the tenets and writings of the cult(s) had been mostly settled by that time.
OP: “…a writer who aimed for scrupulosity both in checking his facts with sources that he considered to be reliable and in alerting his readers when he was instead reporting points he couldn’t verify, but who for the most part didn’t tell us what his sources were whenever he did consider them reliable.”
Alter, Michael J. 2024. “Chapter.6 Problems with Tacitus”, The Resurrection and Its Apologetics: Jesus’ Death and Burial, Volume One. Resource Publications.
https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Resurrection_and_Its_Apologetics/JaX-EAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA86&printsec=frontcover
Firstly, apologies again for taking so long to get back to this. I’ve got a bit more time this week as I’m on annual leave, so I’m hoping to be a bit more available for comments.
Secondly:
@Pierce R. Butler:
#51: ‘And you keep trying to glue me to hardcore mythicism when I keep sticking to what I guess I have to call compositism.’
Oh, for goodness’ sake.
I repeat: Back in comment #30 on here I distinguished between two types of compositism:
1. Stories of other potential events/sayings added to a core story of a historical Jesus who did indeed found the movement that would come to be Christianity
2. A story produced entirely from other stories of other rabbis, with no historical core.
I pointed out to you that the term could have either of these two different meanings. I clarified that I agreed that the situation described in the first definition was almost certainly what had happened. I pointed out that the person you’d cited as an example of a compositist almost certainly believed in the second definition. You responded by picking at something I’d said about the second definition. I went on to ask you in a later comment (#43) which of the two definitions you favoured, and you didn’t reply.
So, that’s two opportunities you passed up for clarifying that the first definition better represented your beliefs. At the same time, you keep picking at points I’m making even though I’ve already pointed out in the post intro that I believe that the Jesus story was embroidered and told you in comment #30 that I actually agree with the first definition of compositism. You’ve also again cited the views of both Prices, who are both hardcore mythicists.
Given all that, can you really not see why you’re coming across as more sympathetic to the more mythicist type of compositism? I mean, it now seems it’s not what you believe, so fine. But KG isn’t ‘trying to glue’ you to this; you’re coming across that way yourself. If you want your beliefs to be clearer, try making them clearer.
Hi Dr. Sarah,
I’ve tried to post the comment that will follow this one (a response to Pierce’s #52) twice – please let me know if it’s been received and rejected (and if the latter, if possible, why).
Thanks.
Pierce R. Butler@51,52,
I notice you don’t deny the accusation you quote, but rather change the subject. “Compositism” allows you to present a conveniently vague and moving target, particularly since no-one outside fundamentalism denies that Jesus’s life was subject to a process of mythologisation, which can be followed through the successive gospels. But the question remains: was there or was there not a single individual, with something close to the outline biography I gave @25:
– and some of whose followers became convinced he had been resurrected, starting a cult around that belief; which Paul of Tarsus, who met Jesus’s brother and close associates, then adapted for Gentiles. If you deny much of that, you’re a mythicist, whatever alternative title you like to award yourself. If you accept most of it, you’re a historicist. What possible relevance would false accusations of crimes have to Dr. Sarah’s request for “an example of a fictitious figure combining ” ‘detailed story’, ‘recent time’, and ‘believed to have been true’.”? Her reference to “recent time” was clearly in contrast to all the figures you’ve brought up; Paul’s letters (those considered authentic) are generally dated to the 50s CE, and it’s clear (despite Carrier’s nonsense) that he (a) considered Jesus a real earthly person and (b) met his brother and close associates. Are you claiming the shift from unearthly to earthly, or from composite to single, came before or after that time?
There’s nothing to say what the disagreement was about, or whether it was binary or “a gabble” (that’s pure supposition on your part), Paul just says that some (among the Galatians) “would pervert the Gospel of Christ”.
I suppose you mean “Gospel” – but the consensus view is that that originally meant Jesus’s message (here, as interpreted by Paul). The term “gospels” was applied to the writings now called by that name later. The anachronism is yours alone.
Who all agree (among those you refer to) that it was written in Greek for a Gentile audience, and probably in Rome! Your move here is a typical denialist one – point out that relevant experts disagree on some point, and try to use that to discredit their consensus on the point at issue.
How do you think you know that? The audience were primarily Gentiles, not Jews, and not living in Judea. And saying they wanted “a clear account” is at odds with your insistence everywhere else that they were a bunch of fruitloops ready to believe anything!
I do no such thing of course. I simply understand something about the methods of historians of the classical world, who always have to deal with documents (Jewish, Christian or pagan) which include a mixture of fact, possible fact, implausibilities, propaganda, and supernatural woo-woo.
And it’s already been pointed out to you several times, by both Dr. Sarah and me, why this won’t wash.
Had that “small group of followers” been following a real person? In which case the “composite hypothesis” is difficult to distinguish from a non-fundamentalist historicist account. For example, by the time you get to what’s considered the latest of the canonical gospels, gJohn, Jesus is claiming divine status, which it’s as certain as anything can be in ancient history, he would never have done. Even before that, his early followers, if any were still around, would surely have known that the birth narratives in gMatthew and gLuke were a load of hooey. What actually seems to be the case is that the “composite hypothesis” can be whatever suits your argument at a given point in time.
I don’t see any mention of the baptism (which is surely the key part of the narrative). As far as I can see from an admittedly cursory check, Elijah didn’t baptise Elisha, but threw his cloak around him. The historicist point is that the baptism is odd – why should Jesus require baptism by his inferior predecessor? In gMark, Jesus’s status seems to be enhanced at the point of the baptism. In the later gospels, this disappears, and indeed in gJohn, the baptism is not described at all.
No, because there simply isn’t any. Lots of people have claimed to be the Mahdi. Lots of people have claimed to be the Jewish Messiah. Lots of people have claimed to be Jesus returned. What does any of this have to do with whether Jesus was a real earthly individual?
Not as you’ve presented it earlier, @17:
So “compositism” can be a form of either historicism or mythicism, as suits your argument at a given point. What it’s lacking is any worthwhile, clearly articulated content of its own.
Again with the typical denialist move. But there’s a fair degree of consensus about 7 of the letters (Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, Philemon) being authentic, although not necessarily untouched by later hands, and 4 of them (Ephesians, 1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus) forgeries, while Hebrews is anonymous i.e. doesn”t claim to have been written by Paul.
With reference to rationality, the Sybil of Cumae was supposedly inspired by Apollo. But I ask again: why should the Gentile Jesusists of Rome (Jewish Jesusists, along with other Jews, appear to have been banished from Rome by Claudius, although of course that would not have been completely effective) most of whom would never have seen Judea or the Temple, and who would not be following Jewish law, have suffered “emotional desperation following the rampages of Titus Vespasianus”?
Pliny the Younger, as governor of Bithynia and Pontus, had Christians executed very early in the second century CE, although persecution does not appear to have been more than local. In his letter to the Emperor Trajan about this, he seems to regard them as inherently seditious, although no specific crime is mentioned. At any rate, this is long before “the tenets and writings of the cult(s) had been mostly settled”.
@KG: Huh. Sorry about that; for some reason both versions had gone straight to the spam trap and so I never saw them. Glad you drew my attention to it or I assume they’d have disappeared without trace after a set period of time. As it is, I’ve retrieved the 2nd attempt. Thanks!
Dear Dr. Sarah,
I think you’ve once again defended your point of view very well. However, I want to say something critical about Tim O’Neill’s post, which you refer to. I think O’Neill’s fundamental perspective is quite distorted because he doesn’t include any literary criticism of Tacitus.
Reading O’Neill’s post, one might get the impression that Tacitus wrote “about” Jesus, which Tacitus certainly didn’t. Tacitus’s subject was Nero, and Tacitus told a story about the so-called Neronian persecution of Christians, primarily to further characterize Nero. Christ is then mentioned only to further characterize the victims, namely the Christians. Tacitus’s subjective point of view becomes very clear. While he may consider the Christians rather innocent in this specific case, Tacitus otherwise dislikes Christians, who he sees as nothing more than fanatical troublemakers. He then mentions Christ only to point out that the founder of this movement was already a troublemaker.
Tacitus reveals a very partisan perspective here; he is obviously critical not only of Nero, but above all of the Christians. Personally, I therefore find it inappropriate for O’Neill to emphasize the image of Tacitus as an impartial and serious historian. Tacitus may certainly have been that as a rule, but in my opinion, he certainly was not in this specific case. It therefore seems rather inappropriate to speculate in this specific case about supposed sources that Tacitus would have evaluated.
Greetings, Kunigunde
Thanks Dr. Sarah@57. Might your spam trap include a length filter? I didn’t try splitting the rather long post.
Kunigunde Kreuzerin@58,
I’m not sure I understand your point. IIRC correctly, O’Neill argues that Tacitus’s dislike for Christians makes it unlikely he’s simply repeating what Christians have told him, hence it’s likely there was a general acceptance (among possible sources) that Jesus was a real individual, who lived at a specific time and place, and was executed for sedition.