Analytics wrote:Carrier spends about 200 pages describing 46 discrete “elements” of background knowledge that he thinks are required in order to understand the context of the times and nature of the evidence. He set it up this way so that each element can be discussed and evaluated on its own merits. Since you think he drastically misunderstands the data, it would be helpful if you gave a couple examples by number of elements he is wrong about, or other elements that are required to understand but that he disregards.
I’m not trying to be snarky here. I just don’t see any correlation between how you think Carrier allegedly misunderstands the data and what he says in his book.
I appreciate that this is not snark, and I take your point that I'm not going directly at something he says in the book, and that therefore it seems that I'm not really addressing the issues (which may or may not be true). Before I address one of them, though, I hope you appreciate where I'm coming from, and I also mean no snark and no offense when I say that what you're asking is basically akin to what apologists demand of Egyptologists who don't spend the time refuting John Gee or Hugh Nibley point by point. Someone who is an expert in Egyptology doesn't need to spend much time with either Gee or Nibley to see that 1) they are driven more by ideological concerns than scholarship and 2) they treat the evidence accordingly. As a result, one can either read on and slog away against the strong likelihood that the rest will be like that, or one can do other, more productive things. Most people who or more interested in understanding (scholarship) than promoting their ideology or attacking someone else's will go on to those other things.
I'm getting my sense of what Carrier says from the posts that Philo has made several times and from Carrier's blog. From that, I see that he has #1 in common with Gee and Nibley: this is someone who is making a living as basically an an activist for atheism, styling himself "a defender of scientific and moral realism." I don't know any scholar interested in understanding the ancient world rather than using it to prove a point who would define themselves in those terms, so right away I smell an ideological bias. Maybe there's nothing to it, but what I can find on his blog doesn't make me think his book is free of that.
I suspect that the elements you refer to are either selected (and why only 46?) or constructed to reflect that bias. For example, the only one of his 46 elements I can find on his blog is
Euhemerism (element 45), which Carrier describes as "doing what Euhemerus did." That is just a glib tautology, but in using it he makes understanding what Euhemerus did a very important issue and then shows just what it is that he thinks Euhemerism is supposed to be.
But one doesn't get a sense of how difficult it is to recover what "Euhemerus was doing" from what Carrier writes here. For one thing, we know very little about what Euhemerus actually said because we don't have anything but testimonia about what his
Sacred History contained (some of these testimonia are tendentious and by much later writers who may not even have had access to the source) and some fragments translated into Latin. So we don't even have an original text, but somehow he feels justified in making a statement about Euhemerus's personal beliefs and attitudes, statements like "Euhemerus himself of course did not believe what he claimed. He pretended that that’s how the gods Zeus and Uranus began. He well knew that. Because he completely made up their history himself." What he thought he was doing is totally unknowable with the evidence we have, and it's not clear that he was even doing history in the traditional sense, let alone making it up.
He first sums up Euhemerism as: "making a fake history out of a supernatural story." That is a sleight of hand that he then uses Plutarch to justify. Plutarch was a wealthy, highly-educated, elite advocate for traditional Greek culture and a committed Platonist at a time when there was practically a traditionalist revival going on in the upper strata of society. His biases matter in if we're going to use him as a source for understanding what Euhemerus was doing (which for Carrier is the same thing as what Euhemerism is).
Here's what Plutarch says:
I hesitate, lest this be the moving of things immovable and not only "warring against the long years of time," as Simonides has it, but warring, too, against "many a nation and race of men" who are possessed by a feeling of piety towards these gods, and thus we should not stop short of transplanting such names from the heavens to the earth,and eliminating and dissipating the reverence and faith implanted in nearly all mankind at birth, opening wide the great doors to the godless throng, degrading things divine to the human level, and giving a splendid licence to the deceitful utterances of Euhemerus of Messenê, who of himself drew up copies of an incredible and non-existent mythology, and spread atheism over the whole inhabited earth by obliterating the gods of our belief and converting them all alike into names of generals, admirals, and kings, who, forsooth, lived in very ancient times and are recorded in inscriptions written in golden letters at Panchon, which no foreigner and no Greek had ever happened to meet with, save only Euhemerus. He, it seems, made a voyage to the Panchoans and Triphyllians, who never existed anywhere on earth and do not exist!
On the surface, this looks indeed like Euhemerus was indulging in pure fantasy and that Carrier is right. But is that what Plutarch is really suggesting and is Plutarch accurate? To read this as evidence that Euhemerus was the supernatural with "fake history," though, is to assume the thesis that has yet to be proved.
Earlier writers like Cicero and before him Ennius did not see Euhemerus's "history" as fake (nor, unsurprisingly, did Christian writers like Lactantius). Even if we're going to be the superficial kind of historian who thinks historical documents speak for themselves and don't require much interpretation, why should we discount earlier writers and privilege a much later source? And indeed a very biased source! Plutarch was a devout traditionalist and a devoted Platonist, which means he was intellectually hostile to any idea that there could be an evolution from human to god (i.e. that gods are not eternal), to any attempt to de-allegorize gods, and especially to any description of gods that would situate them in the crude materiality of the human world. That's the reason he is dismissing Euhemerus in this passage. So, why should we privilege a writer who is four centuries after Euhemerus and ideologically opposed to his materialism in deciding whether Euhemerus made up a fake history? Did Euhemerus even claim that his Panchon was real and that other Greeks or foreigners could visit it, or was Plutarch making a sarcastic point?
Answering these is not really as simple as letting a historical source speak for itself without interpretation. Carrier is interpreting Plutarch in a very literal, decontextualized fashion as evidence for what Euhemerus was doing and then by extension what we mean by "Euhemerism." But I think most ancient historians would read this within the wider context: history is not really the main issue for Plutarch, philosophy is. The "history" is fake to him not because Plutarch has examined the evidence inductively like a post-Enlightenment historian would or because corroborating accounts of Panchon do not exist (which is basically how Carrier is reading this) but because he reasoned deductively from his Platonist presuppositions. The only reason Euhemerus's account is "made up" for Plutarch is because Euhemerism won't fit inside of Plutarch's Platonist framework. Instead, though, Carrier reads these simplistically as an accurate account of what Euhemerus was doing—making up fake human history about gods.
But is that what Euhemerus was doing? Actually, no, so what was he doing? It's a tough question, but he wasn't making up history, wasn't a bullshitter trying to dupe people (the terms Carrier uses)—at least not according to the most authoritative study of Euhemerus's
Sacred History by Marek Winiarczyk. Euhemerus's work was probably a travel novel describing a journey to a fabulous island. On that island he finds an inscription of Jupiter, to which he then applies a (then) common interpretation among intellectuals that already had a long history (at least two centuries before Euhemerus), namely that gods were nothing more than people whose deeds over time took on the status of myth, and who were often divinized in the sense that they received cultic honors. That is something that happened in Euhemerus's own Hellenistic environment and which was an aspect of Mediterranean religious life for hundreds of years after Euhemerus. It was sort of like a personality cult for the dead (obviously that's a simplification but time and space are limited). Euhemerus seems simply to have applied it to the all gods and especially the Olympian gods (as opposed to notables who died in battle or dead kings or city benefactors) and then used that as a theme in part of his travel novel (again, we don't even have it). Euhemerism is not simply "what Euhemerus did: making a fake history out of a supernatural story." Carrier seems to be assuming that because this is a novel, it is pure fiction and BS, and that therefore "euhemerizing is always fiction." No, what Euhemerus did was to make use of a certain philosophical idea about the origin of religion that already had a wide currency among elite people who had the leisure and means to think about such things. Euhemerus got his name attached to it, but it really doesn't matter what we call it, so all his business about Euhemerus and "what Euhemerus did" is actually a red herring.
Euhemerism is just an intellectual shorthand to describe a philosophical view of religion that is materialist and that seems to have been a part of Euhemerus's travel novel but in fact already had other precedents (Prodicus, Xenophanes, e.g.). Contrary to Carrier, it is about the process by which humans are divinized, not the other way around. This is how Cicero (earlier than Plutarch) read it and before him Ennius, who was much closer in time to Euhemerus than Plutarch and certainly had his text available and wasn't a Platonist or religious traditionalist. The lengthiest fragments we have are from Ennius, and in fact according Winiarczyk, Ennius probably translated the
Sacred History in order to make palatable to Romans the divinization of Scipio Africanus, since granting divine honors to humans, though widespread in the Greek east, had not been part of Roman religious practice (and would not be until Julius Caesar at the end of the century after Ennius). Not everyone agrees that that is what Ennius is doing, but I doubt anyone who works on this problem thinks that Euhemerism means the process by which divine figures are given a fictional human history. Whatever we call it and whatever was in Euhemerus's travel novel, it's clear that even ancients who actually had the text (we don't have it!) thought it was about the opposite, and that Euhemerism (our term) meant the process by which humans were divinized over time.
This isn't a question of history, then, but of philosophical positions and it doesn't really matter what you call it or how Euhemerus used it in his novel. Saying that "Euhemerus is always fiction" is like saying that "existentialism is always fiction" because, hey, Camus was a novelist and as well know those stories didn't really happen. After all, Sisyphus is just a myth!
In sum, he's reading Plutarch on a surface level, something that I would expect from an eager undergraduate more interested in proving some point about atheism than in understanding either Plutarch or Euhemerus. Maybe Carrier is much better about it in the book, but I would be surprised if he uses "Euhemerism" in any way different from what he says here, since this blogpost is in answer to a question from some reader about "element 45" in his book.
Since I assume he uses Euhemerism as a way to understand what the gospel writers were doing (if not, why does he bring it up in the book?), let's ask: are gospel writers doing that? In what way at all are the gospel writers rationalizing a divine being by providing him with a human origin? If these were Euhemeristic texts, I would expect there to be no divine parentage, no miracles, no resurrection. Even the earliest critic we have of Christianity (Celsus) thought it was more like the traditional "Euhemeristic" process: Jesus was just some lowlife whose mother stuck to her story.
While it's true that ancient people tied elements of their own physical environment to their gods (e.g. Apollo was born on Delos), are there any examples of this in the very immediate past and with such specificity? I mean, it's not like Apollo's birth on Delos was witnessed by a Roman official in a census during Augustus's reign, and that that official is attested by other evidence (like an inscription). There is no analog to what Carrier is proposing happened with Christianity. Even if we read Plutarch superficially, does his description of Euhemerus sound at all like what the Gospels are doing? I don't think so.
Analytics wrote:If I made 46 posts at a rate of, say, 3 a week, each dedicated to one of his numbered “elements,” would you read them and offer some indication of the extent to which you agree or disagree with the claim?
Probably not. It's a lot of time and there's no payoff for me. Why should I think any of the other 45 are going to be any better than his simplistic reading of Plutarch, his bias-feeding and evidence-absent assumptions about a work of Euhemerus's text that we don't even have (not to mention Euhemerus's thoughts about his own work!), and his perversion of the philosophical position that we just call "Euhemerism" out of convenience and no other reason? What am I going to learn from this exercise? And why, by the way, does he limit himself to 46 elements? Why not 4,600?
Analytics wrote:Yes, of course that is a red flag. But if Carrier were wrong, it would be nice for somebody to create a compelling rebuttal. The fact that nobody seems willing or able to do so is another flag in its own right.
Replace "Carrier" with "Gee" or "Nibley" and you have a sense of how that sentence reads to me. Professional academics with the competency to make that rebuttal will have no professional pay-off for doing so and little personal payoff if their goal is understanding rather than ideology. It's a lot of effort for a crank theory. People like Ehrman have already looked at this and see it as quackery, and based on what I've seen of Carrier, I don't know why I should assume Ehrman must be off his rocker but this guy who makes a living giving lectures to promote his version of atheism and has almost zero presence in the academic field must be right so I should invest the time to examine every one of his 46 elements.
Let me ask you, if John Gee did a Bayesian analysis that showed that Joseph Smith's explanation for the Book of Abraham's origins were the one that best fit the evidence with the highest degree of certainty relative to other hypotheses, would you accept it as a divine translation until you get an Egyptologist to comb through each one of his 46 elements (or however many he picks) showing you that he is misreading or misunderstanding the sources? If not 46, how many would do it for you and call into question the reliability of Gee's application of Bayesian probability?
I think Carrier's misreading (which I hope is not deliberate, but then he does have a clear bias and possibly a financial motivation) of Euhemerus is enough for me, because if just one of his elements is off, then more probably are, and even if it is only one, then he has seriously compromised the integrity of his data and the integrity of the equation and the integrity of his results.
(edited for grammar and clarity)
"As to any slivers of light or any particles of darkness of the past, we forget about them."
—B. Redd McConkie