Thanks for your thoughts, Manetho. I keep saying I won't get bogged down trying to defend Carrier, but I can't help but wonder what you mean by saying his explanation of Josephus not really ever mentioning Jesus to be convoluted?Manetho wrote: ↑Fri Feb 19, 2021 6:10 pmThere was a time when I was somewhat open to the idea that Jesus did not exist, but the more I looked into it, the more I realized it fails Occam's Razor. In addition to the evidence of Paul, we have Josephus, who wasn't even a Christian. And while one of the two mentions of Jesus in his works is contaminated by blatant and clumsy Christian interpolation, the other isn't, and it's the one that mentions the execution of James, "the brother of Jesus who was called Messiah", in the course of political events that Josephus, as a member of the Jewish priestly class, personally witnessed. Carrier has a convoluted explanation for why this passage exists, in addition to his convoluted explanations for the passages of Paul that treat Jesus as a human being, but the simpler explanation is that the Josephus passage is genuine and Paul means what he seems to mean.
Moreover, the mythical aspects of the Jesus story are equally explicable using the much more widely accepted explanation, that Jesus was a real person who was mythologized after his death. Kishkumen has made that point quite clearly, in my opinion, regarding the miracle stories. Some elements of the gospels are actually more convincingly explained by the conventional explanation than by the mythicist one, because the gospels show signs that they're struggling to adapt a genuine story that doesn't fit the preexisting messianic prophecies. To quote from a page that all advocates of mythicism should read:
Finally, as I've looked deeper into it I've realized that Christianity and mythicism are rather like mirror images of each other, in ways that are unflattering to both. In all the bizarre varieties and offshoots that Christianity has produced over the centuries, the one thing that remains consistent is the idea that Jesus was special. Mythicists obviously doesn't believe he was special in the sense that Christians do, but they still give him special treatment by applying to him a standard of proof that, if applied consistently, would erase a lot of other people from the historical record.Tim O'Neill wrote:The idea of a Messiah who dies was totally unheard of and utterly alien to any Jewish tradition prior to the beginning of Christianity, but the idea of a Messiah who was crucified was not only bizarre, it was absurd. According to Jewish tradition, anyone who was “hanged on a tree” was to be considered accursed by Yahweh and this was one of the reasons crucifixion was considered particularly abhorrent to Jews. The concept of a crucified Messiah, therefore, was totally bizarre and absurd... Paul acknowledges how absurd the idea of a crucified Messiah was in 1Cor 1:23, where he says it “is a stumbling block to the Jews and an absurdity to the gentiles”.
The accounts of Jesus’ crucifixion in the gospels also show how awkward the nature of their Messiah’s death was for the earliest Christians. They are all full of references to texts in the Old Testament as ways of demonstrating that, far from being an absurdity, this was what was supposed to happen to the Messiah. But none of the texts used were considered prophecies of the Messiah before Christianity came along and some of them are highly forced. The “suffering servant” passages in Isaiah 53 are pressed into service as “prophecies” of the crucifixion, since they depict a figure being falsely accused, rejected and given up to be “pierced …. as a guilt offering”. But the gospels don’t reference other parts of the same passage which don’t fit their story at all, such as where it is said this figure will “prolong his days and look upon his offspring”.
Admittedly feeling the Tim O'Neill quote is a bit of a stretch, to say the least.
