Resource for Mythicist and Response Documentation

Discussion about the New Testament, apocrypha, gnostics, church fathers, Christian origins, historical Jesus or otherwise, etc.
Giuseppe
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Re: Resource for Mythicist and Response Documentation

Post by Giuseppe »

Chris Hansen wrote: Sun Jun 28, 2020 10:19 amThat is completely distinct from a Christian conception of resurrection: bodily.
not for Paul (1 Cor 15:50).

Regardless, even if I granted the dying-rising god, it is irrelevant to Jesus' historicity because parallels cannot determine history. It is epistemic fallaciousness.
ok but for me the dying and rising theme being hellenistic is not parallelomania.

Chris Hansen wrote: Sun Jun 28, 2020 10:19 am Also, I'm not sure how you are using the term paradigm here. Could you define it as you are using it here?
paradigm is to fix in minimal terms the reconstruction of Origins, removing any possible suggestions even if interesting. You are correct that the first authors to recover that paradigm were Smith, Couchoud, Drews, Alfaric. But to my knowledge, Carrier has really put any his effort to describe the paradigm per se, removing any ballast (even if, I repeat, the ballast removed by him is not really ballast but serious possibilities worthy of further inquiry). Also Couchoud was very close to fix the paradigm as and better than Carrier, but Couchoud had Marcion as first euhemerizer and not "Mark" (author) as Carrier thinks. Hence, in terms of who has to be considered the best author to fix explicitly the minimal paradigm, there is no doubt about his identity: he is Richard Carrier.
Chris Hansen wrote: Sun Jun 28, 2020 10:19 am In fairness, that article by Couchoud/Stahl is not particularly well known at all, and I'm sure he'd adopt more of that if given the chance. Also, why hold that against Price? Carrier doesn't know 99% of the history of mythicism.

And Carrier doesn't even know that Jean Magne exists either. All of your criticisms there apply to Carrier. Carrier doesn't know the first thing about past mythicist theories except for Price, Doherty, Murdock, and Zindler.
I have mentioned the Stahl's article on Barabbas as not mentioned by Price as an example of the fact that Price is not so perfect even in his preferred methodology (resumed as: consider any possibility and follow where it leads). By the finding of that article, Jean Magne has been able to give a serious radical new interpretation of the texts.

But then again: as to erudition, Carrier is obviously not the first, but he has fixed the paradigm more than any other.
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
Chrissy Hansen
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Re: Resource for Mythicist and Response Documentation

Post by Chrissy Hansen »

That the kingdom of God is inherited by the not-imperishable does not mean it is not inherited by a physical body... Paul envisioned resurrected bodies as being transformed.

I don't care what it is for you, just as I don't care what it is to me. Personal preferences don't matter. What matters is if it is logically coherent. And it isn't. You can't claim that Tammuz switching between the underworld and the living realm, is the same thing as what Osiris goes through, dying and staying in the underworld, where his "resurrection" is an eternal afterlife, not a return to a living state. That is the height of parallelomania.

Tryggve Mettinger, the only figure with a peer reviewed defense of the dying-rising god thesis, has specifically argued that there is no dying-rising god type, contra Price and Carrier. He is the leading expert and has far more knowledge of it than either of them.
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Drews' paradigm is not even related to Kryvelev or Carrier that much. Drews was in the astrotheological school, which Carrier and Kryvelev ardently reject.

And there is no singular paradigm by your metric. There are numerous paradigms. Carrier's is just one of many, and I find it wholly incompetent, myself. Anyone who thinks that "cosmic sperm banks" are a credible interpretation of Rom. 1:3 are in desperate need of a lesson on interpretation.
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It is not mentioned by Carrier either. He has not fixed "the paradigm." Mythicism is just as variant as ever. He has "fixed" nothing. He has just revised the theory of Doherty to his own fitting.

Carrier makes no use of Couchoud, Magne, Stahl, or any others. He is infinitely less educated on the subject that Price.
Giuseppe
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Re: Resource for Mythicist and Response Documentation

Post by Giuseppe »

Chris Hansen wrote: Sun Jun 28, 2020 10:45 am That the kingdom of God is inherited by the not-imperishable does not mean it is not inherited by a physical body... Paul envisioned resurrected bodies as being transformed.
I don't think that Marcion, a Paulinist, would agree.
I don't care what it is for you, just as I don't care what it is to me. Personal preferences don't matter. What matters is if it is logically coherent. And it isn't. You can't claim that Tammuz switching between the underworld and the living realm, is the same thing as what Osiris goes through, dying and staying in the underworld, where his "resurrection" is an eternal afterlife, not a return to a living state. That is the height of parallelomania.

Tryggve Mettinger, the only figure with a peer reviewed defense of the dying-rising god thesis, has specifically argued that there is no dying-rising god type, contra Price and Carrier. He is the leading expert and has far more knowledge of it than either of them.
I think that even a blind realizes that the differences don't hold here. It would be equivalent to say that since the human DNA is only 95% similar to DNA of chimpanzees, then they don't share a common ancestor, contra factum that it is the best explanation of the evidence.
Drews' paradigm is not even related to Kryvelev or Carrier that much. Drews was in the astrotheological school, which Carrier and Kryvelev ardently reject.
Drews's error was to interpret the first gospel as based on OT scriptures + astrotheology and only from this POV Kryvelev criticized Drews, while, about Paul, Kryvelev agreed 99% with Drews and with Carrier.
And there is no singular paradigm by your metric. There are numerous paradigms. Carrier's is just one of many, and I find it wholly incompetent, myself. Anyone who thinks that "cosmic sperm banks" are a credible interpretation of Rom. 1:3 are in desperate need of a lesson on interpretation.
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It is not mentioned by Carrier either. He has not fixed "the paradigm." Mythicism is just as variant as ever. He has "fixed" nothing. He has just revised the theory of Doherty to his own fitting.

Carrier makes no use of Couchoud, Magne, Stahl, or any others. He is infinitely less educated on the subject that Price.
I fear that you are still not able to distinguish between a paradigm and a mere instance of the paradigm. Carrier's paradigm, for how it is defined, captures Price's case. But the viceversa doesn't hold.
Carrier's paradigm, for how it is defined, captures Couchoud's case. But the viceversa doesn't hold. Carrier's paradigm, for how it is defined, captures Kryvelev's case. But the viceversa doesn't hold. And so on.

Do you like the qualitative difference?
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
Giuseppe
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Re: Resource for Mythicist and Response Documentation

Post by Giuseppe »

Post Scriptum: It is a serious error to claim that Drews was a mere astrotheologist à la Acharya.
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
Chrissy Hansen
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Re: Resource for Mythicist and Response Documentation

Post by Chrissy Hansen »

I don't think Marcion is relevant to interpreting what Paul meant. That is called retroactive reading, and is fallacious.
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Except that with humans and chimps we can genetically show they are the same. As Mettinger demonstrated, the dying-rising gods did not originate from the same origins, so to argue they are the same is nonsense. Many of them sprung up independently. And the similarities are largely terminological, not in meaning. Again, Egyptian resurrection is not the same as when other gods resurrect, meaning they are distinct concepts.
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Carrier agrees with Kryvelev and Drews, not the other way around. You are being anachronistic.
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Which means that Kryvelev's paradigm is not Carrier's lol. The qualitative difference indicates these are separate paradigms. Carrier's is genetically descendant of those, therefore, Kryvelev's *cannot* be genetically "Carrier's paradigm." This is basic historiographical ruling. This would be like me saying that Jesus was a Marxist. It is absurd because Marxism didn't exist until the 1800's lol. You can't place a paradigm that didn't exist yet, and say a previous member belonged to it.
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I was not saying Drews was an astrotheologist a la Murdock. I consider the German astrotheologists to actually be quite distinct from the English-American brands.
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Ben C. Smith
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Re: Resource for Mythicist and Response Documentation

Post by Ben C. Smith »

Chris Hansen wrote: Sun Jun 28, 2020 10:45 amTryggve Mettinger, the only figure with a peer reviewed defense of the dying-rising god thesis, has specifically argued that there is no dying-rising god type, contra Price and Carrier. He is the leading expert and has far more knowledge of it than either of them.
Whether there is a "type" or not is of only peripheral interest to me, but I wonder what you make of the parallels between Jesus and Ba'al:

Descent

Ba'al and Môt: "Ba'al must enter [Môt's] maw and must descend into his mouth."

Ephesians 4.9: 9 Now this expression, "He ascended," what does it mean except that He also had descended into the lower parts of the earth?

Slavery

Ba'al and Môt: "Message of Ba'al the Powerful, the word of the Mightiest of Warriors: 'Hail, Divine Môt, El's son Death! I am your slave, I am your bondsman forever.'"

Philippians 2.5-7: 5 Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, 6 who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, 7 but emptied Himself, taking the form of a slave, and being made in the likeness of men.

Obedience unto Death

Ba'al and Môt: "And go down to the house of freedom in the depth of the earth, and be counted among them those who go down into the earth, and you will know nothingness, like mortals, for you will have become as one who has died!" Obeys does Mightiest Ba'al. .... "Ba'al is dead!" .... "We came upon Ba'al, sunk into the earth. Dead is Ba'al the Powerful! Perished is the Prince, Master of the Earth!" .... "For surely perished has he."

Philippians 2.8: 8 Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.

Life Again

Ba'al and Môt: "But if Mighty Ba'al lives, if the Prince, the Master of the Earth, exists, then in a dream of Kindly El the Compassionate, in a vision of the Creator of All Creatures, let the heavens rain oil, let the wadis run with honey; then I will know that alive is Mighty Ba'al, revived has the Prince, Master of the Earth."

1 Peter 3.18-20: 18 For Christ also died for sins once for all, the just for the unjust, in order that He might bring us to God, having been put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit.

Conquest of Death

Ba'al and Môt: "Why do you [Môt] battle with Mighty Ba'al? How of a truth shall the bull El your father hear you? Surely he will undermine the foundations of your throne; surely he will overturn the throne of your kingship, indeed will break the scepter of your rule."

1 Corinthians 15.26: 26 The last enemy that will be abolished is death.

Some kind of template seems to be in play here.
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Giuseppe
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Re: Resource for Mythicist and Response Documentation

Post by Giuseppe »

Chris Hansen wrote: Sun Jun 28, 2020 11:19 am I don't think Marcion is relevant to interpreting what Paul meant. That is called retroactive reading, and is fallacious.
a retroactive reading that is sufficient to raise the serious possibility that Paul agreed with Marcion about that point.
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Except that with humans and chimps we can genetically show they are the same.
we can't genetically show it to Darwin, but even so Darwin was right.

Carrier agrees with Kryvelev and Drews, not the other way around. You are being anachronistic.
I talk about their respective cases, obviously.
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Which means that Kryvelev's paradigm is not Carrier's lol. The qualitative difference indicates these are separate paradigms. Carrier's is genetically descendant of those, therefore, Kryvelev's *cannot* be genetically "Carrier's paradigm." This is basic historiographical ruling. This would be like me saying that Jesus was a Marxist. It is absurd because Marxism didn't exist until the 1800's lol. You can't place a paradigm that didn't exist yet, and say a previous member belonged to it.
I fear that you are still unable to realize the meaning of paradigm. For correct definition, read Stevan Davies on Doherty:

Earl’s paradigm is a paradigm. It’s not simply a reworking of the usual materials in the usual way to come up with a different
way of understanding them. It’s not an awful lot different than the claim “there is no such thing as phlogiston*, fire comes about through an entirely different mechanism.”

New paradigms are very very rare. I thought that my J the H gave a new paradigm rather than just another view on the subject, but no. Earl’s is what a new paradigm looks like.
(And if he’s not the first to advance it, what the hell.)
A new paradigm asserts not that much of what you know is wrong but that everything you know is wrong… more or less. Your whole perspective is wrong.

https://vridar.org/2010/03/25/another-p ... al-christ/

Now, clearly not even Doherty was the first to describe the paradigm. Probably the first was J.M.Robertson (I limit myself here to the paradigm from a previous god to a late legendary hero). But the point is that Carrier has cleared in extreme analytical terms the minimal paradigm. His great merit in saecula saeculorum. Even if he comes after Couchoud, Doherty, etc.
I was not saying Drews was an astrotheologist a la Murdock. I consider the German astrotheologists to actually be quite distinct from the English-American brands.
Kyrelev was a follower of Drews as to Paul. He (and Soviet authors with him) rejected Drews's view on the first gospel as only that view was affected by astrotheology.
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
Chrissy Hansen
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Re: Resource for Mythicist and Response Documentation

Post by Chrissy Hansen »

Retroactive reading is *always* fallacious.
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Darwin was able to demonstrably show how morphological changes would lead to this. We cannot do the same with the dying-rising god, because we don't, unlike with Darwin, have numerous finches. We instead have badgers and lizards.
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I don't think that Earl Doherty's can be characterized as a new paradigm. It can be characterized as an innovation, even by that definition.
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And I don't particularly care if Carrier "clarified" anything. This still does not change the fact that his work is unforgivably sloppy and uneducated at times. Any fault you can find with Price, Carrier exacerbates 10 fold.
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Could you provide a reference for how Kryvelev agreed with Drews on Paul?
Chrissy Hansen
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Re: Resource for Mythicist and Response Documentation

Post by Chrissy Hansen »

Ben C. Smith wrote: Sun Jun 28, 2020 11:22 am
Chris Hansen wrote: Sun Jun 28, 2020 10:45 amTryggve Mettinger, the only figure with a peer reviewed defense of the dying-rising god thesis, has specifically argued that there is no dying-rising god type, contra Price and Carrier. He is the leading expert and has far more knowledge of it than either of them.
Whether there is a "type" or not is of only peripheral interest to me, but I wonder what you make of the parallels between Jesus and Ba'al:

Descent

Ba'al and Môt: "Ba'al must enter [Môt's] maw and must descend into his mouth."

Ephesians 4.9: 9 Now this expression, "He ascended," what does it mean except that He also had descended into the lower parts of the earth?

Slavery

Ba'al and Môt: "Message of Ba'al the Powerful, the word of the Mightiest of Warriors: 'Hail, Divine Môt, El's son Death! I am your slave, I am your bondsman forever.'"

Philippians 2.5-7: 5 Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, 6 who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, 7 but emptied Himself, taking the form of a slave, and being made in the likeness of men.

Obedience unto Death

Ba'al and Môt: "And go down to the house of freedom in the depth of the earth, and be counted among them those who go down into the earth, and you will know nothingness, like mortals, for you will have become as one who has died!" Obeys does Mightiest Ba'al. .... "Ba'al is dead!" .... "We came upon Ba'al, sunk into the earth. Dead is Ba'al the Powerful! Perished is the Prince, Master of the Earth!" .... "For surely perished has he."

Philippians 2.8: 8 Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.

Life Again

Ba'al and Môt: "But if Mighty Ba'al lives, if the Prince, the Master of the Earth, exists, then in a dream of Kindly El the Compassionate, in a vision of the Creator of All Creatures, let the heavens rain oil, let the wadis run with honey; then I will know that alive is Mighty Ba'al, revived has the Prince, Master of the Earth."

1 Peter 3.18-20: 18 For Christ also died for sins once for all, the just for the unjust, in order that He might bring us to God, having been put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit.

Conquest of Death

Ba'al and Môt: "Why do you [Môt] battle with Mighty Ba'al? How of a truth shall the bull El your father hear you? Surely he will undermine the foundations of your throne; surely he will overturn the throne of your kingship, indeed will break the scepter of your rule."

1 Corinthians 15.26: 26 The last enemy that will be abolished is death.

Some kind of template seems to be in play here.
I do not think the parallels actually hold up, especially as N. Wyatt (in 2017) has shown that Ba'al's "death" and "resurrection" are likely to be (as Mark S. Smith argued) related to kingship ascension. As such, interpreting Ba'al as a dying-rising god is misinformed from the start. Interestingly enough, in 2004 Mettinger also gave up the position that Osiris was a dying-rising god.
Giuseppe
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Re: Resource for Mythicist and Response Documentation

Post by Giuseppe »

Chris Hansen wrote: Sun Jun 28, 2020 12:10 pm And I don't particularly care if Carrier "clarified" anything. This still does not change the fact that his work is unforgivably sloppy and uneducated at times. Any fault you can find with Price, Carrier exacerbates 10 fold.
Carrier's merit is clarity in definition of the minimal nucleus of ideas in which quasi any other mythicist author can recognize easily himself/herself. A clarity in the matter was simply necessary and Carrier will be remembered forever for this. He can be wrong in details but his definition of the paradigm is the more precise and minimal.
Could you provide a reference for how Kryvelev agreed with Drews on Paul?
note that in his last (not translated in English) works Drews followed the dutch radicals. And so also Kryvelev. Even so, reading p. 165-166 of the Kryvelev's book, you realize easily how both are captured by Carrier's paradigm:

Of the two possible variants why do I consider more likely the one according to which the Evangelical legend does not have a historical kernel in the form of a real person?
The other variant has too many weak points; there is too much in it that cannot be explained. It is not merely a question of the "silence of the century", although this of course is of considerable importance. No less significant is the fact that the history of the image of Jesus reveals a fairly clear picture of an evolution not of God from a man, but of a man from God.
The earlier the date of the composition of a New Testament book or document, the more clearly Jesus Christ appears in it as a god, as the sacrificial lamb brought to the slaughter to take away our sins forever, as Logos, as a supernatural abstract principle, and not as a man of flesh and blood with an historically concrete biography. And reversely, the later the date of the composition of the New Testament book or document, the more elements of an earthly biography of Jesus it contains. Obviously, later generations could not recall what preceding generations did not know. From what depository of memories could they draw this information? The only
source of such information was the people's religious imagination which was constantly stimulated by the historical situation and by the social conditions of those social and national groups among whom the beliefs and
myths of primitive Christianity took shape.
One of the most prominent theorists of the mythological school, Arthur Drews, has written: "The non-historicity of Jesus is as firmly established scientifically as the non-historicity of Lucurgus [An early Spartan
hero--I.K.], Romulus and Remus, the seven Roman kings, Horatius Cocles and William Tell. " One could agree with this, but with one reservation, notably, given available sources today, and this is all the more so since there is serious doubt among scholars that some of the personages named by Drews were mythical. One should not discount the possibility that some time in the future
new materials and documents might be discovered which would call for a fresh look at the question about Christ.
True, the possibility is small, for the picture we now have is sufficiently clear.

Here Kryvelev talks about Jesus as an "angel": clerarly he has in mind the Jesus of the epistles.

With time, however, the figure of the Messiah came to acquire more and more supernatural features in the religious imagination of the Jews. His image increasingly resembled that of a heavenly being whom God had sent to earth and who in terms of rank was similar to an angel or came close to being God himself

(p. 141, my bold)
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
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