Dr. Sarah's Friendly Refutation of all Mythicism

[dbz]

Now, Dr. Sarah doesn't "buy" anything I'm selling.

I have somehow the impression that you are dissatisfied with Sarah's review of your book. I haven't read all the posts and discussions on Sarah's blog, but it seems to me that there is no basis for your dissatisfaction.

• The existence of a sub-textual narrative in gMark—if true. It will be demonstrable with absolute certainty by future pattern matching computer programs and other such tools.

The scriptural references in Mark aren't just asthenic or attempts to show Jesus fulfilling prophecy, like the birth narrative in Matthew.

The references in Mark form a pattern, essentially a subtextual narrative. That subtextual narrative has its own very clear purpose and meaning.
[...]
Mark was writing an allegory in which the scriptural references imparted another layer of meaning to the story. It's far more sophisticated than what Matthew did.

IMO, presenting the intertextual argument as simply as possibly—as an introduction—is a necessity as most people do judge a book by its cover

• For example: present how Mark's use of the Old Testament is unique.

Mark . . . is building scenes from narratives and passages that are about how the Israelites displeased God, leading God to reject or punish them by sending foreign armies against them to destroy their cities, hunt them down, and destroy their temple. That is a persistent theme in the scriptural references used by Mark

• First ask them if they concur with the following small sub-set of total X available examples.

Isaiah chapter : Intertextual interpretive usage by the Markan author
56 : Suffering servant
64 : God punishes
65 : Ignorance of savior's identity
66 : God's punishment explained

• Secondly ask them if they concur with the following:

Matthew and Luke use the Old Testament within a promise-fulfilment scheme. But Mark's use of the Old Testament is totally different. The idiomatic intertextuality of Mark is obvious with Hebrew scripture viz. the compiled OT. And possibly—errata scriptures available to the Markan author—that were never promoted as canon or were lost and are no longer extant.

• Third, point out that composite references may exist and contain intertextual elements that may not necessarily be part of the subtextual narrative per se.

[rgprice]

I have somehow the impression that you are dissatisfied with Sarah's review of your book. I haven't read all the posts and discussions on Sarah's blog, but it seems to me that there is no basis for your dissatisfaction.

No. She's spent a lot of time and effort doing an in depth review. I just disagree with many of her positions.

Sarah's first post already made it clear that she herself has a strong opinion on the question. It was therefore clear from the outset that she would only check your arguments for their validity and also look for better counterarguments. Against this background, your book has moved her a lot and also brought her new insights. That's more than one could realistically wish for. Perhaps Sarah's discussions should also give you the opportunity to rethink and sharpen your own arguments.

Absolutely. I actually get a lot more out of opposing arguments. I'm actually very grateful for the reviews she's done.

I think your approach is generally very good. However, one should not overlook the fact that the method has certain limitations. The limits lie in the fact that some details of the Gospels cannot be traced back to the Hebrew Bible, or at least not clearly. Sarah's discussion on Nazareth, for example, showed that it is not that easy to argue convincingly here. At first glance, the argument of HJ-scholars (Bethlehem, Nazareth) is brief, catchy and convincing. It's ultimately your method turned against you. You have to face it. Anyone who goes into long-winded explanations and perhaps brings Rene Salm into play has imho actually already lost.

I'll be the first to admit that DtG is very, very far from perfect and in fact has a lot of shortcomings. It was the first book I ever wrote, it was cobbled together from my prior blog posts, I didn't do nearly enough research into other scholarship (I relied almost entirely on my own readings of the material). I could go on. This is also (one of many reasons) why the new book I'm working on is taking so long. I've made many, many changes, in part based on feedback from reviews and commentaries like Dr. Sarah's.

However, in the course of working on my new book, I now think that the basic thesis of DtG is even stronger than I initially realized and a much stronger case can be made than what was put forward in DtG.

[O]ne big question that’s relevant to gMark:
• Why did Mark give the Romans in general, and Pilate in particular, the role he gave them in his gospel?
In gMark (as in the other three canonical gospels), the Romans are the people who ultimately put Jesus to death, with Pilate – an important, powerful historical figure – playing the key role of pronouncing sentence on him. And Mark clearly isn’t happy with having to portray them that way. He plays it down, plays up the role of the Jews, writes it to show the Jews insisting on the death sentence and Pilate/the other Romans reluctantly going along with this. It’s not at all surprising that he’d feel this way about minimising the role of the Romans in Jesus’s death; they were the powerful ruling class, so it’s understandable that Mark wouldn’t have liked the idea of casting them as the bad guys who killed his protagonist.
• So… why has he put them in that role at all?

The issue above is quite easy to address actually. The Romans are playing the role of the Babylonians from Kings.

2 Kings 25: 2 He sent against him bands of the Chaldeans, bands of the Arameans, bands of the Moabites, and bands of the Ammonites; he sent them against Judah to destroy it, according to the word of the Lord that he spoke by his servants the prophets. 3 Surely this came upon Judah at the command of the Lord, to remove them out of his sight, for the sins of Manasseh, for all that he had committed, 4 and also for the innocent blood that he had shed, for he filled Jerusalem with innocent blood, and the Lord was not willing to pardon.
...
13 He carried off all the treasures of the house of the Lord and the treasures of the king’s house; he cut in pieces all the vessels of gold in the temple of the Lord that King Solomon of Israel had made, all this as the Lord had foretold. 14 He carried away all Jerusalem, all the officials, all the warriors, ten thousand captives, all the artisans and the smiths; no one remained except the poorest people of the land.

Like Babylonians, the Romans are agents of God, sent to punish the Jews. They were reluctant instruments of God, whose hand was forced by the Jews. This is what is being shown in the Crucifixion scene. The Romans had to reluctantly execute the Lord, JUST AS they were forced reluctantly by the Jews to destroy the House of the Lord.

Sarah first asks for a historically plausible scenario, then she assumes this historically plausible scenario as historical truth and compares it with Mark's account. The result ("minimising") serves her in turn as an argument that her assumption is true.

Indeed. I think my answer above explains my reading in line with Mark's use of the King's narrative as a major theme running throughout his story. The story Mark tells is one that follows the Kings narrative, which narrates a series of events that to any student of "Jewish history" must have looked extremely familiar to what had just taken place in the events of the First Jewish-Roman War.

But Mark is clever, obviously too clever for the audience that ended up being the primary consumers of his story. And, just like Mark's hidden scriptural references that eluded many a reader, Mark also hides the ultimate ending from the reader as well, which the reader to intended to infer on their own.

Again I have to say that The Gospel of Mark is my favorite literary work of all time. I think it was written by an absolute genius and master. I find the story full of wit and it's many puzzles immensely enriching. But it is a work of pure literary invention, conjured in the mind of a literary genius, not a record of real events. It is a work to go alongside The Wizard of Oz, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Alice in Wonderland and the like (BTW I got an A on my high school paper about the symbolism and meaning of Alice in Wonderland).

As I said in DtG (paraphrasing myself), the Gospel of Mark must be considered the single most influential fictional story of all time.

[dbz]

I am one of the (many?) readers of gMark who do not consider it an allegory.

• Do you see only one level of meaning in the Markan text?

[T]aking the Markan Jesus as a prefiguration of Paul could explain why Mark was written in a Scriptural style and, like Scripture, with an authoritative voice yet without identifying its author. Scriptural texts were acknowledged by believers to be prophetic. They pointed to things beyond what their immediate context indicated. Thus they had more than one level of meaning. This is why they could be mined so easily for allegorical arguments. One sees this, for example, in Galatians where Paul builds an allegorical argument on a passage from Genesis (16:1-16 and 17:15-22). First he says that the two women in the story, one a slave, one free, are two covenants: “Now this is an allegory: these women are two covenants” (Gal. 4:24). He then extends this further so that the women are also two Jerusalems: The slave woman “corresponds to the present Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children,” while the free woman “corresponds to the Jerusalem above” (Gal. 4:25-25). The whole three-level interpretation is held together very flimsily, resting just on “slavery and freedom” as the common elements. And yet, because those elements are taken from Scripture, Paul could feel satisfied that he had made a case his flock would take seriously.

So I would suggest that one reason Mark infused his gospel with Scriptural flavor was because he wanted his readers to use it in Scriptural fashion as a text that has more than one level of meaning.

---

--Parvus, Roger (5 May 2016). "A Simonian Origin for Christianity, Part 16: Mark as Allegory". Vridar.

It is possible that an author originally wrote a text without any allegorical intent and then for later readers to claim that the text does contain allegory and even to redact the text in support of the claim.

[dbz]

Mark is structing his story around the narrative of Elijah and Elisha from Kings because Elijah and Elisha were persecuted and their ministries were a harbinger of the destruction of Israel that followed them. The writer of Mark is creating a story that shows the Jews prior to the First Jewish-Roman War following the same pattern as their forebearers in the Kings narrative. That's the point. Its not that, as so many people think, Mark was just randomly choosing passages. What many have tried to argue is that there was some real set of events, and that Mark then just looked for passages that he could relate to the real events.

But this is clearly nonsense. Mark isn't randomly picking scriptures, he's picking scriptures that, when looked at in the order he has arranged them, tell a specific story. The story those scriptures tell is of the Jews repeating the cycle of history, again displeasing their God, again not recognizing true prophets, and God again punishing them by sending foreign armies to destroy them and their temple. It's actually a very easy narrative to understand and fits perfectly in the context of the late first or early second century. It makes perfect sense that someone would write such a story at this time in light of the events that had just transpired.

The intertextuality of the Gospel of Mark—and its embellished variants Matthew, Luke, John—with Old Testament scripture has been recognized by scholars such as Thomas L. Brodie, who writes, "Since around 1970 an alternative explanation of the New Testament and related texts has been emerging. Researchers are recognizing precise ways in which New Testament texts are explained as depending not on oral tradition but on older literature, especially older scripture."[6][7][8][9] Neil Godfrey writes,[10]

Following Thomas L. Thompson’s overview of the way the Jewish Scriptures were written I tend to see the Gospel of Mark as yet one more story in the same tradition as other (OT) biblical narratives.
[...]
The same story of being lost, then called, then obeying, then falling away, then punishment, then restoration is told over and over. Each story warns the “new Israel” not to fall into the errors of the “old Israel”.
The Gospel of Mark (and its [embellished] variants, Matthew, John, Luke) continue that same tradition of literature and theology.. . .The same story of the displacement of the natural order or privileged generation in favour of the younger and chosen is repeated in the Exodus (the old generation must die and the new enter the land of promise), in the stories of the prophets and their promises for a new generation, in the selection of the younger/initially disposessed over the older, right through to the New Testament.
The motifs for new beginnings are also repeated — the splitting of the waters at the initial creation is repeated again with the renewal after the Flood, and then again in the Exodus and Red Sea crossing, and then the crossing of Jordan as those waters also divided, then with Elijah and Elisha at the Jordan, then again at the baptism of Jesus.
The stories are retold, recycled, in their different mutations, and they are re-written for new generations who may have come through some crisis or are desirous of a new start as a “new” people of God who are now learning the lessons of the old generation, both in their real experience and in the stories themselves.

---

"Gospels". RationalWiki. Retrieved 6 September 2023.

[dbz]

If Jesus was a myth from the start . . . explain how two of the three canonical evangelists [viz. Matthew and Luke following after the earliest: Mark] . . . “corrected” his account [as given by Mark] and made him and his followers a little more realistically human.

---

--Godfrey, Neil (26 November 2018). "A Response to Dr Sarah, Geeky Humanist, on the Jesus Question". Vridar.

Per the hypothesis that Mark only had access to a reduced set of the Pauline letters. This resulted in the Markan Jesus' humanity being less realistically human when compared to Luke's Jesus. Having access to Laodiceans and Colossians resulted in Luke's Jesus being a little more realistically human than Mark's original account of Jesus.

• "Marcan Priority and the Pauline Collection - R.G. Price". YouTube. History Valley. 15FEB2023

[lclapshaw]

@MrMacSon Yes. And whatever the case, I think the key point is this. Most people work from a "traditional" starting perspective, even if they question the validity of the traditional narrative. From this I mean they start from the basic story of the Gospels and Acts, and thus envision a scenario where first there was some ministry of Jesus, which garnered some following of people and from this began a movement involving hundreds of people, and then thousands of people established small community churches that spread throughout Asia Minor, Greece and Italy, all passing on the story of this Jesus person who had a ministry and was unjustly executed, and these communities then wrote down their stories and these writings then got passed around and collected together and became the scriptures we know today.

This narrative is essentially the story told by the writings themselves, particularly Acts.

But once we recognize that these stories have zero historical validity, this whole scenario goes out the window. Now, Dr. Sarah doesn't "buy" anything I'm selling. As far as she's concerned the Gospels are accurate historical records of real events. She sees no relationship between the Gospel of Mark and either the Pauline letters or the Jewish scriptures. She thinks my explanation of how the Gospel of Mark was written, through the use of literary allusions to Jewish scriptures around the destruction of the Temple is entirely malarky and totally baseless. She thinks that the writer of Mark had no knowledge of Paul and that the similarities between Mark and Paul are either coincidence or are product of common oral traditions. So, for Dr. Sarah, the historical validity of the Gospels is not in question, she sees them as valid historical documents of fact.

But, for people who do recognize that the Gospel of Mark is an allegorical story in which the narrative is crafted from literary references to Jewish scriptures about the downfall of Israel and the destruction of the Temple, it becomes clear that the story is not a historical account, nor is it even a record of "oral traditions" or anecdotes. It is the product of the creative mind of a single individual.

Once we recognize that this story is a creative literary invention, then we also need to recognize that there need not have been any large movement behind its creation whatsoever. The "worshipers of Jesus" could have numbered three people at the time the story was written. Furthermore, since no document known from prior to the writing of this story describes a Jesus figure anything like the one described in this story, there is no reason to think that there were any groups engaged in the worship of a figure anything like the one described by the Gospels or later readers of the Gospels. We cannot impart onto pre-Gospels writings, of which we have very few, the ideas of the Gospels.

I is entirely possible that at the time the Pauline letters were originally written, whenever that was (I'll assume prior to the First Jewish-Roman War), there were no communities exclusively worshiping "Jesus" at all. The writer of the original Pauline letters appears to be advocating for a tolerant form of Judaism that was inclusive of Gentiles, regardless of whether or not they were circumcised or followed Jewish law. It appears that Paul was in conflict with other Jews who demanded that converts must be circumcised and follow the law. It does not appear that Paul was trying to crate any kind of separate movement, merely to claim that proselytes could be considered member of the assembly of God without having to follow Jewish law. According to Paul, one could be a member of the assembly of God merely by having faith God's promise of salvation. Paul claims his knowledge of God's plan and requirements has come to him through God's revelation of his son to him, The Lord Jesus Christ. However, it would appear that Paul may never have actually stated the "name" of the Lord, as it appears that all early Christian manuscripts (including non-canonical ones), follow a single or narrow set of exemplars in referring to the worshiped figure as ΚΣ ΙΣ ΧΣ son of ΘΣ.

And we should keep in mind that there are two piece of evidence which indicate that all of this material comes from a single very narrow source.
#1 the nomina sacra. The fact that every single Christian writing prior to the 4th century uses nomina scara indicates that everything has derived from a single set of exemplars. These writings did not derive from a diverse movement or independently produced documents. Some narrow community or single set of documents at the root of the movement used the peculiar sacred "abbreviations" and everyone else follow suit.
#2 Every narrative about Jesus is essentially the same. There is really only a single narrative about this figure's ministry.

So these things really reinforce the fact that all of this come back to a single very narrow small origin point. Some individual wrote a story and that story got passed around and copied and took-on a life of its own. The story was the real driver of the movement. Prior to the story there was no meaningful movement.

Just as you reject a historical IC (as do I) as a model for the Gospel stories, so do I reject a historical Paul preceding the Gospels. IMO a post Gospels Paul makes more sense, otherwise I concur with your post.

[dbz]

I am one of the (many?) readers of gMark who do not consider it an allegory.

• Metaphor perhaps?

This post advances another reason to think that the author of the Gospel of Mark depicted the final days of Jesus as a metaphor for the fall of Jerusalem. If so, it follows that the resurrection of Jesus symbolized the emergence of a new “body of Christ” and “Temple of God” in the “ekklesia” or assemblies of Christians (what we think of as the “church”).

---

--Godfrey, Neil (18 April 2014). "Jesus' Crucifixion As Symbol of Destruction of Temple and Judgment on the Jews". Vridar.

[StephenGoranson]

imo, no.

[dbz]

Is Carrier assuming that this is what Paul did, or is Carrier making an argument on plausibly and itemizing the available valid evidence for two contra hypotheses?

[M]any readers will think that she often or sometimes has the better arguments on her side. This includes imho, for example, Sarah's last post on the "Brothers of the Lord". Of course, I myself would never take this position with such self-confidence. Or as Joe put it, there are good reasons to be more skeptical.

@Dr Sarah says, “Where?” per Paul that all his cult’s brothers and sisters are fictive kin of his fictive second-god.

db says September 21, 2023 at 8:18 pm
Paul says the Lord was “the firstborn of many brethren,” that all baptized Christians call God “Abba, father,” and thus become co-heirs to God’s kingdom with Christ because they are the adopted sons of God and thus his brothers, is a fact, a fact completely unaffected by how many other Christians Paul might have met and isn’t admitting to here. That Paul never mentions Jesus having biological brothers, nor ever distinguishes any as biological rather than fictive, the only kind of brothers of Jesus Paul does repeatedly describe, is a fact, a fact completely unaffected by how many other Christians Paul might have met and isn’t admitting to here.
_____
–Carrier (25 March 2023). “John MacDonald’s Bizarre Defense of a Historical Jesus”. Richard Carrier Blogs.

Dr Sarah says September 28, 2023 at 5:29 pm
Carrier is actually correct with the ‘first of many brethren’ quote (it’s Romans 8:29, in the context of saying that the people God called to him would not only be adopted as children of God but also made in the image of Jesus).

His claim that ‘fictive brothers’ are ‘the only kind of brothers of Jesus Paul does repeatedly describe’ stands up rather less well, unfortunately. Breaking this down:
• Paul, on one occasion as cited above, describes Jesus as ‘the first among many brethren’, implying that all Christians are brothers or sisters of Jesus.
• Paul also repeatedly uses the word ‘brother’ in a symbolic sense (or fictive, if you like that word better), to describe the relationship of other Christians to one another/himself; i.e., all Christians are metaphorically brothers (or sisters) of one another.
• Paul, on two occasions, refers to ‘the Lord’s brother(s)’ (singular in Galatians 1:19, plural in 1 Corinthians 9:5). In neither of those cases is it clear from context whether the term is meant metaphorically or literally.

So, when Carrier claims that the brothers of Jesus ‘repeatedly’ described by Paul are ‘fictive’, he is, I’m afraid, question-begging. We simply have no information either way from those two quotes or their context as to whether ‘brother’ is meant biologically or metaphorically in those cases.
However, before heading further off into that rabbit hole, it’s worth remembering that that isn’t the issue here.

As I pointed out in #50, there are many ways in which metaphorical brotherhood would still imply a historical Jesus. So the question isn’t ‘Did Paul mean that the brothers in question were biologically Jesus’s brothers?’, but ‘Were they Jesus’s brothers in some way that would apply to a mythical Jesus?’

Now, because Carrier’s found one possible way in which this could technically be so – Paul might, theoretically, have been describing these people as brothers of Jesus in the sense of them all being metaphorically sons of God – he is, as far as I can tell from that quote, assuming that this is what Paul did.

And there are a few reasons why that doesn’t stand up.
Firstly, Carrier seems to be missing the point of describing Christians metaphorically as children of God. It’s not so that we can draw up a family tree and say ‘aha, look, logically this means you must also be brothers of Jesus’. It’s to symbolise a particular relationship with God which is both close and hierarchical. Not only was this relationship far more important than any relationship with Jesus, but the hierarchy was also important; church members were family members of God, but in a junior sense, with God still ruling over them. ‘Brother’, on the other hand, implies a close relationship between equals or near-equals.

Is it likely that Paul would have described the symbolic relationship between a heavenly being and his followers that way? (It’s noteworthy that the one time in which we do see Paul using the ‘brethren’ description with Jesus, it’s in the context of Jesus being first among the brethren.) And is it likely that Paul’s normal focus would have been on describing Christians as the brothers of Jesus rather than as the children of God? For an analogy, imagine mentioning Ashley Biden and referring to her as as Hunter Biden’s sister rather than as Joe Biden’s daughter; sure, it’s factually correct and there are even contexts where it would make complete sense, but in most cases she’s going to be referred to as Joe Biden’s daughter because, from most people’s POV, that’s the important relationship.

And, finally, there is a key point which is getting ignored here: in both of those phrases, contextually Paul is using ‘the Lord’s brother(s)’ to distinguish the person or people from other people in the church. In Galatians he uses it to specify a particular James, and in 1 Corinthians he uses it to specify a group of people who get particular financial privileges that not everyone in the church gets. And that makes no sense at all if Paul were using the term as a general one for any church member. It only makes sense if Paul thought of a specific subgroup of church members as the Lord’s brothers.

Which means that, regardless of whether he was meaning ‘brother’ in a biological or a symbolic sense, he can’t have been meaning it as a term for every male cult member. He thought of a particular group of people as having some kind of fraternal-type relationship with Jesus, in a way that doesn’t make sense if Jesus hadn’t lived as a human on earth.

(Quick note: I know the words ‘church’ and ‘Christian’ are anachronistic for Paul’s time. I’m using them as a quick way of referring to this group and the members of it, and hope that will be clear.)

[Paul the Uncertain]

And, finally, there is a key point which is getting ignored here: in both of those phrases, contextually Paul is using ‘the Lord’s brother(s)’ to distinguish the person or people from other people in the church. In Galatians he uses it to specify a particular James, and in 1 Corinthians he uses it to specify a group of people who get particular financial privileges that not everyone in the church gets. And that makes no sense at all if Paul were using the term as a general one for any church member. It only makes sense if Paul thought of a specific subgroup of church members as the Lord’s brothers.

Paul's pleading in 1 Corinthians plainly seeks recognition of his eligibility for some kind of subsidy payment which all apostles, "brothers of the Lord," and Cephas are eligible to receive. Carrier needs the pleading to be about something else, but it isn't, and that's fatal to "brothers of the Lord" being all male Christians. Not everybody gets paid. Or, to put that differently:

Which means that, regardless of whether he was meaning ‘brother’ in a biological or a symbolic sense, he can’t have been meaning it as a term for every male cult member.

But this is a bridge too far:

He thought of a particular group of people as having some kind of fraternal-type relationship with Jesus, in a way that doesn’t make sense if Jesus hadn’t lived as a human on earth.

Tautologically, an undefined relationship (e.g. a "fraternal-type" relationship, say no more) doesn't make sense, full stop, and cannot make sense until it is defined. Paul is too loose with fraternal language for us to say what types of amicable relationships with Jesus, whether in natural life or after being resurrected, Paul wouldn't use fraternal language for.

We do have a hint, however, that Paul's argument in 1 Corinthians most readily makes sense just when the subsidy recipients he mentions are all people "like" him. The other (loipoi) apostles (a subtle reminder that Paul is an apostle) and Cephas whose authority derives from a post-resurrection commission similar with Paul's (Galatians 2:7-8) are like Paul, at least in Paul's teaching.

Is Paul biological kin of Jesus? Did he and Jesus grow up in the same household? Was Paul one of Jesus's disciples? Not that we know of, not that Paul ever says. Biological kin, housemates, or disciples of the natural Jesus receving subsidies has no relevance to whether or not Paul should. Whatever distinction the "brothers of the Lord" enjoy, it is likely that Paul enjoys that distinction, too. Paul's only acknowledged distinctions within the Jesus movement derive from his relationship with the risen Jesus, not Jesus living as a human on earth.