GakuseiDon wrote: ↑Thu Apr 20, 2023 2:00 am
Carrier seems to believe that "eye witness" accounts trump Scripture as the convincing element in arguments. For example, on 1 Clement, Carrier writes on OHJ, page 310:
He [Clement] also says 'the Holy Spirit' tells us that Christ 'did not come in the pomp of pride or arrogance . . . but in a lowly condition' (16.2), but as evidence all he cites is Isaiah 53. Not any actual story about or witness to Jesus. Clement thus doesn't appear to have any 'evidence' that Christ came humbly, except that the OT said so (16.17) and that the Holy Spirit told them so (either directly, as in 8.1, or through the scriptures, as in 45.2).
That to me misreads every early Christian writer's use of Hebrew Scriptures from Paul up to Justin Martyr at least. The
convincing element that Jesus was Christ was that he was 'found' in the Scriptures, at least for Jews and Christians. Eye witness accounts would have been pointless unless they conformed to Scriptures. So the authors used the Scriptures liberally to 'prove' their points. But I guess Carrier can't drop the idea that Jesus had to have been something like a Gospel Jesus, someone whose proof he was Christ had to have come from eye witness accounts. But that's not the view of Jesus we get in Paul and the other early letters. It's what I call "the newspaper reporter's Jesus" fallacy. Though I should probably give it a better name!
OK, that's a good answer. I don't know if you've been following any of the Alexander and Rufus discussion, but maybe you have some thoughts about in light of your answer above. (I also appreciate that this probably is peripheral to the task before you of criticizing Carrier's book.)
The narrator of Mark's Passion positions two potentially well-informed sources (the two sons of an eyewitness-participant in the Passion, all three identified by name) for the narrator's implicit claim of knowledge about what happened at Golgotha a generation earlier. The narrator's claim is extraordinary since his account clearly accords with the LXX Psalm 22.
Peter's (implicit) point is well-enough taken. A mortal narrator character can maintain credibility with the reader without citing sources for every thing they mention. There is no obvious source for the Markan narrator's version of Washer John's death, for instance. Nevertheless, I doubt any reader would worry too much about the claim that a drunken orgy of privileged degenerates resulted in a gruesome display of fatal violence. Or, as is probably more relevant than whether it "really" happened that way or not, the audience member can maintain faith that the narrator (at least) believes in the truth of their report.
OK, but at Golgotha the narrator is claiming that what happened to Jesus was literally, as a matter of fact, and in real life "found in the scriptures." This is the very core of the now-orthodox Christian confession, also very much in keeping with a Pauline perspective on faith, even though very few 1st Century crucifxions would seem to be foretold in scripture (just my personal estimate). Mark works a lot of scriptural references into his story; it seems he expects somebody in the audience recognizes such things for what they are.
But this world-changing fulfillment of God's promise happened in then-recent real life just the way God's anointed king foresaw? As Wiki so often notes, citation needed. But in a popular work, not so much a citation as a reassurance that a source might exist. Cue Alexander and Rufus.
Application to your post: If Clement thinks Jesus's life was found in the scriptures, then I agree he will probably point that out. But if Clement thinks Jesus's life conformed to the scriptures, then arguably it is remarkable if he has some source for those facts which conform but then fails to append some mention of it to his scriptural reference.
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