Does anyone have On the Historicity of Jesus yet?

[neilgodfrey]

A decisive argument against mythicism has been made by a scholar whose competence certainly can’t be questioned. This scholar is Richard Carrier. In his essay “The Spiritual Body of Christ and the Legend of the Empty Tomb”

Read more: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/exploringo ... z36P5A1vOk

Is Carrier backtracking? No one knows but him. Was just curious as to the reference to Carrier as a mythicists or am I reading more into it than whats there?

McGrath would award you top marks for ignoring Carrier's argument and relying on specious excerpts from it to create a straw man case.

[pakeha]

[ . . . ]Hello, I have been following this thread and have noticed some implying Carrier's position as "Mythicists" I really do not think so as attested to here:

A decisive argument against mythicism has been made by a scholar whose competence certainly can’t be questioned. This scholar is Richard Carrier. In his essay “The Spiritual Body of Christ and the Legend of the Empty Tomb”

Read more: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/exploringo ... z36P5A1vOk

Is Carrier backtracking? No one knows but him. Was just curious as to the reference to Carrier as a mythicists or am I reading more into it than whats there?

No one's surprised when a fresh archeological discovery sparks new ways of seeing the past.
Why should a fresh take on a historical question be called backtracking?

[maryhelena]

[ . . . ]Hello, I have been following this thread and have noticed some implying Carrier's position as "Mythicists" I really do not think so as attested to here:

A decisive argument against mythicism has been made by a scholar whose competence certainly can’t be questioned. This scholar is Richard Carrier. In his essay “The Spiritual Body of Christ and the Legend of the Empty Tomb”

Read more: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/exploringo ... z36P5A1vOk

Is Carrier backtracking? No one knows but him. Was just curious as to the reference to Carrier as a mythicists or am I reading more into it than whats there?

No one's surprised when a fresh archeological discovery sparks new ways of seeing the past.
Why should a fresh take on a historical question be called backtracking?

I think perhaps Carrier has found the Doherty mythicist theory to be, for him, the best on offer - but is keeping an open mind. Interesting quote from the book below. I've yet to receive my copy of the book - it's on it's way....

Though I shall argue it’s likely… that Jesus did not in fact exist, I cannot assume it has been conclusively proved here. In fact, it may yet be proved false in future work, using the very methods I employ (which were proposed and defended in my previous volume, Proving History: Bayes’s Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus).

Hence the point of this book is not to end the debate but to demonstrate that scholars need to take this hypothesis more seriously before dismissing it out of hand, and they need much better arguments against it than they’ve heretofore deployed. A better refutation is needed, and a better theory of historicity, which, actually, credibly explains all the oddities in the evidence. If this book inspires nothing else, I’ll be happy if it’s that. But this book may do more. It might inspire more experts to agree with the possibility at least that Jesus Christ was born in myth, not history. And their continuing examination of the case may yet result in a growing consensus against the grain of current assumptions.

Either outcome would satisfy me. For my biases are such as to make no difference what the result should be. I only want the truth to be settled… because this volume can’t address every single item of evidence (it merely addresses the best evidence there is), its conclusion may yet be brought down, even with its own method, simply by introducing something it omits. If so, I welcome it.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/hallq/2014 ... qus_thread

Nice - the scholar in him knows full well that nothing will be settled re the historicist verse mythicist debate by the arguments in his book. Mythicist should not be expecting any death blow to the historicist position just yet....

[ghost]

On one thing you are correct - there is no basis for any discussion on the gospel Jesus story once one does not put Hasmonean/Jewish history on the table. Imaginative interpretations of the NT story, interpretations that fail to consider the reality of Hasmonean/Jewish history are futile. All such discussions accomplish is the same any door-step preacher accomplishes any Sunday morning. My interpretation is better than your interpretation. Oh, well, lets see how far Carrier gets with his celestial god, pseudo-human Jesus, celestial god circular mythicist theory.

Because you are relying on Josephus as the provider of the historical background, and he happens to be Hasmonean. If you see it through Hasmonean glasses then it's no wonder it's Hasmonean to you. But that doesn't make it objectively Hasmonean.

[The Crow]

[ . . . ]Hello, I have been following this thread and have noticed some implying Carrier's position as "Mythicists" I really do not think so as attested to here:

A decisive argument against mythicism has been made by a scholar whose competence certainly can’t be questioned. This scholar is Richard Carrier. In his essay “The Spiritual Body of Christ and the Legend of the Empty Tomb”

Read more: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/exploringo ... z36P5A1vOk

Is Carrier backtracking? No one knows but him. Was just curious as to the reference to Carrier as a mythicists or am I reading more into it than whats there?

No one's surprised when a fresh archeological discovery sparks new ways of seeing the past.
Why should a fresh take on a historical question be called backtracking?

Was not claiming that Carrier was backtracking. My point being that he has been referred to as a Mythicists here I was simply pointing out that his article contradicts that claim.

[The Crow]

A decisive argument against mythicism has been made by a scholar whose competence certainly can’t be questioned. This scholar is Richard Carrier. In his essay “The Spiritual Body of Christ and the Legend of the Empty Tomb”

Read more: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/exploringo ... z36P5A1vOk

Is Carrier backtracking? No one knows but him. Was just curious as to the reference to Carrier as a mythicists or am I reading more into it than whats there?

McGrath would award you top marks for ignoring Carrier's argument and relying on specious excerpts from it to create a straw man case.

Neil you also missed my point. My point was as I explained in the post above this one was Carrier has been referred to as a Myhicist and that the article I pointed to contradicts that claim. I for one have never been a big Carrier fan as he strikes me as arrogant and full of himself but that is neither here nor there. And I only have one of his books, the Bayes Theorem now thats a book you have to have a big head for! And please point out how I created a straw man? Was just pointing a contradiction. Carrier is one smart cookie but he is not a god and for what its worth his words are not etched in stone.

[Stephan Huller]

Can anyone explain to me how the empty tomb is supposed to prove that Jesus had a physical body? I don't get it (but then again I haven't bothered to read the details of the debate either). An early echo certainly of the Christian interest in the empty tomb is that associated with the Samaritan figure Dositheus in Abu't Fath's chronicle where it is written:

He hid in a cave, where he died of hunger, and the dogs entered (it) and devoured him. This is the story of Dusis.

The same tradition is known to Epiphanius it seems. Epiphanius says that Dositheus retired to a cave, and there, under a show of piety, practised such abstinence from food and drink as to bring his life to a voluntary end. But the dogs eating the physical body of Jesus can be taken a number of different ways. It implies to me at least that the Christians said that Jesus voluntarily allowed himself to be buried in order to demonstrate that he had no physical body which was ridiculed (or parodied) by the orthodox Samaritans who invented the dog eating story (i.e. that the empty tomb may have been used that way by the Dositheans but a better explanation was dogs just managed to get into the tomb).

If you look carefully at the Abu'l Fath narrative it is clear that Dositheus (Dusis) is the Marcionite phantasm. He moves about with no one being able to catch a sustained glimpse of him.

Dusis After that (events in the age of Baba Rabba) Dusis ibn Fufily (f-w-f-1-y) came and committed adultery with the wife of a man who was one of the chiefs of the Jews in one of the villages of the Jews, and the Jewish leaders sought to kill him. He said, "Do not kill me, and I will go to Nablus and innovate a (new) rite (madhab) in the House of Efraim (Iiayt Ifraym; i.e., the Samaritans) and make it into a sect, and I will make up to you for everything that they (the Samaritans) had to you before in the way of bloodshed. So they spared him for this reason, and this is written among the Jews, namely, that they released him from the ban (herem) in consideration of what he was to do in Nablus. Dusis stemmed from the 'arabrab ("mixed multitude") who came out with the children of Israel from the land of Egypt to Nablus . And Dusls went to the village of Askar , and there was there a person called Yahdu a very learned man, who was unique in his time in learning and piety. Dusis joined him and became close friends with him. One day he came to him and found him eating (the flesh of) a bikkur ("firstling"), so Dusis said to him, "How is it permissible for you to eat of a bikkur when its blood has not yet been sprinkled on the altar, as He (God) has said, (Num. 18.17) ("But the firstling of an ox or the firstling of a sheep, or the firstling of a goat, you shall not redeem ; they are holy ; you shall dash their blood against the altar." Yahdu replied, "(You are right), it is like bread; God has said, (Lev. 23.14) "And you shall not eat bread or parched corn ... (until you have brought the offering of your God.)" So they agreed that they would eat neither bread nor bikkur for a period of two years.

When they were released from their vow after two years, they entered Nablus and ate and drank and got drunk, and Yahdu, too, became intoxicated and went to sleep right where he was. Dusis then took Yahdu's mantle» and went and gave it to a harlot, saying to her, "Take this mantle, and the day after tomorrow go up onto the mountain. All the Samaritans will be there. Take hold of the elder — his name is Yahdu — who will be standing by the side of the chief, and say that he had committed adultery with you and had left his mantle with you as a pledge for your fee. Fear not (that you will be accused of adultery), for you are known as a harlot. And here are six dinars for your wages."

When Yahdu awoke, he looked for his mantle but could not find it, so he went to the people of the house and asked them about it. They swore to him that they had not taken it. He then looked for Dusis, but could not find him. On the third day, which was the Day of Atonement, the harlot went up to the mountain and found the elder whom Dusis had described to her, standing next to the chief. She rushed up crying for help, and saying, "My lord Chief, seize my fee from this elder who is standing next to you." He asked, "What does he owe you ?" And she answered, "He had me spend a night at his house and left this mantle with me as a pledge, but has not redeemed it to this day". They asked Yahdu, "Is this your mantle?" And he answered, "Yes, this mantle belongs to me." So the chief said, "Seize him, so that he may be burned." Yahdu replied, "Do not be too hasty about my case, for the people at whose house I and Dusis were drinking know it ; I had already had them swear to it. As for Dusis, until now I have not seen him again. If you believe neither me nor them, burn both me and this whore."

The chief Aqibun ('-q-b-w-n) then shouted at the harlot, "Tell me the truth, or else I will burn you, and I will burn this man with you." So she confessed the truth, saying. "My lord, Dusis gave me six dinars and this mantle, Oh my Lord, Dusis gave me six dinars and this mantle and said to me: 'Do this deed.'" And the High Priest 'Aqibon searched for Dusis but could not find him. For Dusis, because of his fear of the High Priest had fled to Shuwaykah (Sh-w-y-k-h) and stopped with a woman whose name was the widow Amanto ('-m-n-t-w) and said to her, "I am the chief's son." So she served him and he stayed with her for many days, writing. When he finished his work, he learned that the chief Aqibun was not unmindful of him and was still after him ; so he arose to head from this place to another, and instructed the woman, saying, "I know that someone is after me who wants to kill me. By virtue of the fact that I have entered your house (that is, that I am your guest), I want you to tell him who will come looking for me : 'He stayed at my house for a short while writing on these sheets of paper, and then he went out and left, and I do not know which direction he took. But he instructed me not to let anyone come near these sheets of paper until after he has entered this pool and has been immersed in it. Once you have cleansed yourself from the traces of the road, nothing (in these sheets of paper) will harm you.'"

Dusis travelled to Anbata ('-n-b-t-') and went up to the mountain. He hid in a cave, where he died of hunger, and the dogs entered (it) and devoured him. This is the story of Dusis — cursed be his name ! As for the priest Aqibun, he continued until he heard that he had come to Shuwaykah and that he had spent a long time with Amanto the widow. So he sent Levi ibn Finhas (= Levi son of Phineas)c, his nephew, who was a courageous and God-fearing man, and sent along with him seven men to bring back Dusis and kill him, just as he had intended to do to Yahdu. Levi and the men accompanying him travelled on until they came to Shuwaykah. They entered the house of Amanto the widow and said to her, "Why have you concealed Dusis with you, notwithstanding that he deserves to be killed?" She replied, "I did not realize that he deserved to be killed. In fact I was most hospitable to him after he had said to me, 'I am the chief's son,' and I found him to be assiduously engaged in writing on these sheets of paper. And when he was about to leave, he said to me, 'Do not let anyone come near them until he has immersed himself in this pool.' Then he left my house, and I do not know where he went." Thereupon Levi said to the group, "What harm can it do us if we immerse ourselves in this pool and cleanse ourselves from the traces of the road, before we venture to read (anything containing) the names of God Most High ?" So one of the men in Levi's company went down into the pool and was immersed, but as he came out he said, "My faith is in Thee, Yahweh, and in Dusis Thy servant, and in his prophecy." Whereupon Levi shouted at him and struck him, and then said to another one, "You go down." He too went down and was immersed, and then said the same thing as the one before him had said. They thus continued immersing themselves until none of them was left, and they all repeated the same words attesting the prophethood of Dusis. At this Levi was perplexed, saying, "By God, now I will immerse myself and see what devilish trick this is of these men and of their unbelief, and I will confront them (with it), if so be the will of God Most High !" So Levi went down and immersed himself, and when he came up he said, "My faith is in Thee, Yahweh, and in Dusis Thy Prophet. Woe unto us ! We have been pursuing the prophet of God, Dusis !" They then took the writings of Dusis and found that he had altered many things in the Torah, like Ezra, and even more. All of them kept what he had written even more. All of them kept what he had written and altered, and then returned to Nablus and told the chief that they had not found him, and that he had departed from the woman's house, and that she did not know where he was headed.

On the holiday, the first of the feast of Passover, the Samaritans gathered to- together, and the priest Aqibun said to his nephew Levi ibn Finhas, "Rise and read : (Ex. 12.21f.) 'And Moses called to all the elders of Israel...'." And Levi rose and read until he came to "and you shall take a bunch of hyssop ('ezob)" where instead of 'ezob he read sa'tar, in accordance with the change made by Dusis. When the Samaritans contradicted him, Levi rejoined, "No, the correct reading is what God has said through Dusis — peace be upon him — : sa'tar; and you are all impudent rascals when you deny the prophethood of Dusis and change the holidays and use a substitute for the great name YHWH, and send men in pursuit of the Second Prophet, whom God had sent forth from Mount Sinai. Woe unto you from God !" At this point the people said, "He is become an unbeliever," and his uncle the chief shouted saying, "Kill him !" So Levi ran off and the Samaritans chased him to the border of Joseph's field. They pelted him thickly with stones until he died, and they piled a mound of stones over him, which to this day is known as "Miisawiyyah (= Mosaic) Levi".

When the men who were with Levi saw what had happened to him, they kept their matter secret, and misled a group to join them in believing in Dusis, and when they became great in number, they went to a town near Jerusalem out of fear of the Samaritans.

After Levi was stoned, these men took palm branches' and dipped them in Levi's blood, saying, "This is the one of whom God has said, (Dt. 19.10) 'And you shall not spill innocent blood in the midst of your land." What was Levi's sin that he should have been stoned ? Yet when he testified that Dusis was a prophet, he was killed.' And they took faulty Scrolls of Scripture (asfar, pi. of sifr) and put palm branches inside them and resolved among themselves that anyone who desired to look at Levi's palm branches and read the manuscript of Dusis would have to fast for seven days and nights before he looked at them. They said that the dead would rise soon, or else Dusis was not a prophet, because he died (prematurely) at the age of twenty-eight years of starvation and thirst, and the dogs ate him after his death, and Levi, his first martyr, was stoned (also prematurely) in Joseph's field.

They cropped their hair and performed all their prayers in water. Because of their veneration of (the cleansing properties of) water, they would cover their bodies (with clothing) before entering it.« They did not travel from house to house on the on the Sabbath day, and would celebrate a feast only on the Sabbath day, even if this involved moving it from its proper time to another. They did not take their hands out of their sleeves. When one of died, they girdled him with a sturdy belt, and put a staff in his hand and sandals on his feet, for they said, "When we arise from the tomb, we will arise in haste." And it is said that they believed that as soon as a dead man is buried, he arises from the grave and goes to Paradise. All these rules were established by Dusis — may God curse him ! [Nemoy translation of Abu'l Fath in Arabic in Isser's Dositheus p. 77 - 79]

[Stephan Huller]

Notice at once that this is the second of two places that Dositheus appears in Abu'l Fath. He is placed after the time of Baba (c. 4th century CE!) Something is wrong with the chronology but the information is ancient and parts of the same report were known to Origen and Epiphanius. Clearly this is a hostile account. But we get the basics of a narrative where Dusis (Jesus) first appears at Askar (Sychar = John 4). Dusis is never actually seen by the hostile agents of orthodoxy. They encounter instead only his followers most of whom seem to be women. Notice the declaration to the widow of Amento - ""I am the chief's son." This seems to be a parallel of the 'Son of the Father' understanding. Notice also how the doctrine of Dusis penetrated Samaritanism at its highest levels.

[Bernard Muller]

Carrier says:
“So the earliest Christians would have believed that Christ had really been raised, and raised bodily, even as his earthly body continued to rot in the tomb.”

The whole declaration is a straw man.
Wrong assumption: Paul and 'Hebrews' never wrote that Jesus was raised physically bodily. And the empty tomb story of gMark (that nobody knew before the gospel), which started the whole bodily resurrection business, was at best an afterthought, more likely an early interpolation: http://historical-jesus.sosblogs.com/Hi ... b1-p84.htm
Who claimed the body of Jesus was rotting in a tomb? Another unevidenced assumption.
Cordially, Bernard
OOPS!!! WARNING: Carrier's above statement was made in 2005 and is not representative of Carrier's mythicist views.

[DCHindley]

Amen!

I have formed the exact same opinion of Carrier as you seem to.

I do not like his use of "loaded" language to describe the evidence he is interpreting (e.g., Ascension of Isaiah and Daniel being "forgeries"), essentially using it to create formally unstated premises (e.g., "consider the source," which is, FWIW, a logical fallacy) that he can use to knock down the hypotheses he criticizes.

On use of "considering the source" type arguments to disqualify the significance of a source of information, we all use it all the time to reduce the volume of things we feel obligated to pay attention to. In my case, I have intentionally refused to buy books by Carrier or even Ehrman, not to mention any popular "Apologist" for any side of any debate, simply because of their contentious nature. They are out to "prove" something or in reverse, "refute" falsehoods. That doesn't mean they cannot make valid observations, though. Does anyone here rush out to read new Josh McDowell books or books by self-professed fundamentalist writers, unless they make a plausible claim about a specific piece of evidence?

I did make an exception for Stephen C. Carlson's The Gospel Hoax: Morton Smith's Invention of Secret Mark, but that was to allow me to demonstrate on Crosstalk and other lists how he used loaded language and logical fallacies and really overreached (exaggerated) his conclusions strictly for rhetorical effect. His intent was to prove his already formed opinions that Morton Smith must have been a bald homosexual swindler to suggest that Jesus used homosexual sex as an initiation ritual.

In actual fact Smith never said this, although the letter does present Clement of Alexandria as suggesting that in the "adultered" the version of Secret Mark used by a Gnostic faction, Jesus' ritual initiation of the youth involved mutual nakedness. Jumping from this to all sorts of conclusions, Carlson, a "reasonable" Christian, felt that he must refute any suggestion of Jesus might have possibly been a "homo". Despite Carlson once using the term "agnostic" to describe his own religious beliefs, based on his writings I would place his POV as fitting that of a better than average informed member of the evangelical wing of a mainline denomination here in the USA (perhaps Lutheran, Presbyterian or Episcopalian).

That doesn't mean that my opinion about Smith is that he was a saint, or that I buy 100% his description of the feelings of euphoric inspiration he said he experienced when he realized he may have stumbled upon a genuine fragment of a lost and otherwise unknown letter of Clement that described another lost or otherwise unknown apocryphal gospel. If critics would have confined their criticism of his two works on the subject (one scholarly and one popular) to the implausibility of this letter fragment being genuinely one of Clement of Alexandria, or discounted the relative value of the fragment as a source (handwritten in the end pages of a tattered printed book published far from where the majority of the printed books in the library came from, rather than preserved as an excerpt in the works of a later church father or a cantina), I would have been fine. When I was permitted to see a pre-publication version I called it for what it was, a "hatchet job." This made me no friends among the "critical crowd" who lurked on Crosstalk2, as virtually all of them had jumped on the "burn the bald swindler Smith" bandwagon.

I do not want to have to deconstruct the motivations of Carrier (or Ehrman, etc) like I had to do with Carlson. To be honest, it was not a pleasant experience.

DCH

McGrath would award you [The Crow] top marks for ignoring Carrier's argument and relying on specious excerpts from it to create a straw man case.

Neil you also missed my point. My point was as I explained in the post above this one was Carrier has been referred to as a Myhicist and that the article I pointed to contradicts that claim. I for one have never been a big Carrier fan as he strikes me as arrogant and full of himself but that is neither here nor there. And I only have one of his books, the Bayes Theorem now thats a book you have to have a big head for! And please point out how I created a straw man? Was just pointing a contradiction. Carrier is one smart cookie but he is not a god and for what its worth his words are not etched in stone.