Very nice overview of Bayes Theorem and Historical Jesus

[_Symmachus]

Hi Analytics,

My thanks for your explication of his argument. I don't mean to be dismissive, but I think you missed some of my basic points.

The example I gave was about Matthew, so the date of 70 for Mark is not relevant to what I was discussing. And it is not really important whether they were made up by cynical opportunists (admittedly, my characterization was glib but not exaggerative; my next sentence shows why) or by sincere believers unwinding a celestial deity through allegory and humanization. My point was about how difficult it would be—practically impossible—for someone in the mid second century who was not a Jew to recover the cultural details that we have in Matthew 5-7 and that only work in the first century (maybe very early second). And also that there would be no real reason for those details to be included in allegory or anything else, and so there would have been no motivation for whoever wrote Matthew to go out of his way to recover those details.

And I cannot emphasize enough it seems that the process you've just outlined for the gospels (with all of their historical detail) have no precedent in the ancient Mediterranean. I mean, the kind of process you're talking about, when it is applied to other deities, is a process we can only know about from written sources that survive (besides the historians, that means writers like Strabo, Pliny the Elder, Plutarch, etc.). They will consist of maybe a few sentences, at most a few paragraphs, not four rather long and novelistic biographies. We have many examples of ancient allegories; none of them are like the gospels. If there was an intermediate, more allegorical instantiation of the Jesus myth that preexisted the gospels, what is Carrier's evidence for it? I can see why he'd opt to go the math route, because there is no evidence for such a version.

Dick Carrier (hereafter referred to simply as “the Dick”) says he thinks Mark was written around the year 70 c.e. Most of the arguments you made pertain to when Mark was written, not whether it was originally intended to be read as an accurate story about a real person. On that basis, much of it doesn’t refute or contradict the Dick’s theory.

Actually it does because the dating works in tandem with modus operandi of story-invention in antiquity to affect the plausibility of Carrier's argument. Firstly, I'm talking about Matthew, not Mark (which is certainly earlier), and secondly, if this is supposedly invented in the mid second century (especially after the 130s), then it becomes almost impossible for a non-Jew to import those details and extremely unlikely for a Jew to do so, and no one would have any motivation to do that in the first place. So if Carrier's theory for Matthew is mid second century, then it makes it quite implausible. I would say it refutes it, in fact. (By the way, the example of Justin Martyr shows us that Christians were already in conflict with Jews in the mid second century, which makes a Judaizing allegory patently ridiculous). Maybe Carrier should opt for 70 for Matthew, as he does with Mark.

So here is a question. Was there really a custom where the Roman Prefect would ask a mob of Jews every festival which prisoner to release, and if the mob chose a insurrectionist and a murder as the prisoner to release, he’d say okay, and set the murderer free?

I’ve heard there is absolutely no historical basis for this—it’s a totally false representation of what Roman Prefects would do and did do. So if Mark wrote his gospel in the year 70, wouldn’t all Romans see this was a patently false custom?

There is no historical basis (which is not the same as saying that it is false, by the way), and with respect, that's a very superficial way to read it and misses a key subtlety. First, a wrong detail or episode means that the detail or episode was made up (or embellished), not necessarily the story as a whole. Applying it generally means that you can say there was no William Wallace because in Mel Gibson's movie his wife is raped by the local magnate under the protection of Primae Noctis, but there is no evidence that there ever was such a law or a custom.

Second, what do you mean "all Romans"? The majority population of the Roman empire were not actually Romans or Roman citizens (until 212) or people who worked in Roman government, and I'm not sure any Romans actually read the Gospel of Mark until much later (although there may have been Greek-speaking Christians in Rome). Keep in mind also that the machinery of Roman government across the entire empire (not including soldiers) was astonishingly small by our standards, maybe a few a thousand people at most actually administered the empire until the third century, and most were connected to the senatorial and equestrian classes or to the emperor's own household. And Roman government had no written constitution and had all sorts of irregularities, and different areas of the empire had different sorts of arrangements with the imperial government with different rights. There was really no single and uniform standard; it was coming into being in the early empire. First century Judea was itself a very special case (and the synoptic gospels perfectly capture the ambiguity of Roman authority, since it wasn't technically a Roman province and the Herodian dynasty ruled most of the area). I'm not arguing that this is a believable story or that we should accept it as historical, but I am saying that I don't think this detail would have made a blip on the radar of non-elite people. As an invented custom, it would have been "patently false" only to a small segment of the population, and that the segment was the one least likely to read the Gospel of Mark. As an invented event, it would have been patently false only to people who had witnessed it. To us, there is simply no evidence that this ever happened before or after in Judea (thus undermining the custom part) and or anywhere else in the empire at all. It's implausible by our standards.

So even though we are in agreement that capturing the mechanics of judicial procedure in Judea was not a major concern of the writer of Mark, I don't see how this really helps Carrier's case. You don't seem troubled by the fact that there are accurate details in this account, too. There really was a Pilate and he really was prefect. If this was originally meant to be just an allegory, we have to explain why writer felt the need to include this kind of detail. It wouldn't have made it more plausible, because, as I've emphasized, contextual and historical accuracy were not standards of plausibility. The degree of specificity means that whoever wrote this knew about Pilate and thus would have been in a position to know whether there really was a Jesus or not. If they didn't know first hand, they must have done some research and got it either from other people or did some research. Why wouldn't he apply that same kind of empirical impulse to Jesus?

You'll notice that in my reply to you here about Mark and my reply above about Matthew that I'm thinking in terms of actual human beings and trying to see how this could really work in antiquity. These are not insignificant questions. Notice that your #1-#4 use the passive voice all but once ("was thought to be...was originally claimed...was then composed"). Somebody did that thinking, claiming, and composing. Someone at some point had to write this gospel down in Mark's Greek. The text didn't just happen. If this is an invented-story, Carrier has to work out the mechanics of how this actually happened. New Testament scholars have been doing for a 150 years, and I don't see why that meticulous and deeply learned tradition should be jettisoned in favor of Carrier's conclusions resulting from applying Bayesian probability to some rather vague hypotheses. The hypotheses as you set them out here should be a lot more specific, because I hope you can see the kinds of questions that they leave unanswered.

But ignoring that, just show me one example of a similar process at work in any other ancient text involving any other god, and point out this specificity of detail—getting the right names and titles independently attested people, as well as cultural details, with a minimum of anachronisms—sustained over dozens of pages, and you might have something.

The closest parallel you will find is saint's lives, which have all kinds of errors about imperial government and judicial process but also are about real people, many of whose existences are attested in independent sources. Were early Christian martyr stories the allegorizations of celestial deities? Was Polycarp, for instance, a celestial deity? Hell, look at his name: it means "abundant harvest." Are we sure he wasn't originally a fertility god in Asia minor before he was allegorized and then misunderstood to be a real person in the Martyrdom of Polycarp (composed no later than 160; and by the way, we have a letter of Polycarp, who was born in 69, from the early second century which shows a belief that Jesus was a real person)? After all, when Polycarp was burnt, his body is said to have smelled like bread baking in the oven (think Ceres, the grain goddess). The details about Roman judicial practice are also wrong, just as in the Gospel of Mark. And people are healed at his martyrdom. I anticipate the objection that Polycarp was not claimed to be a god—but then neither do the synoptics claim that about Jesus.

Dick expresses an incredible amount of respect for the Gospel of Mark as literature. He claims that its literary qualities proves that it is obviously intended to be an extended allegory to teach the gospel and is not intended to describe actual events. He explains in great detail that this alleged event has rich symbolic meaning, and was obviously invented to teach religious truths—not describe how the Roman penal system worked around the festivals.

I'm sure that's a simplification, so I won't push it, but if it is not a simplification, that underlined part is pure nonsense. There is also a completely misleading dichotomy here: the fact that these are literary productions does not mean they were not also believed to have been real. That is a totally modern assumption. I just want to go sleep, so forgive me for giving it to in simplified formulation: rhetoric/literature was not the antithesis of reality but rather the essential means by which reality was constructed and expressed. In order for anything to be plausible and believable—whether a story about a god or a general, an argument in a law court (!) or even the claims of an emperor inscribed in stone—it had to be expressed rhetorically (which is to say, in literature). There was not really a concept in ancient biography or ancient historiography (to say nothing of poetry) of the "unvarnished truth" because for them, all truth had a varnish. You knew that something was true because of the quality of the varnish (to end my metaphor). Decades of scholarship have established this beyond all doubt, and it is such an accepted fact of working in ancient history and antiquity more broadly that whoever misses this basic but all-pervasive fact of ancient life will necessarily and deeply misunderstand the texts they're working with. The results of that work will be seriously flawed.

[_Kishkumen]

Like some other celestial deities, this Jesus was originally believed to have endured an ordeal of incarnation, death, burial and resurrection in a supernatural realm.
As for many other celestial deities, an allegorical story of this same Jesus was then composed and told within the sacred community, which placed him on earth, in history, as a divine man, with an earthly family, companions, and enemies, complete with deeds and sayings, and an earthly depiction of his ordeals.

Out of curiosity, who are these celestial deities and what makes them celestial? Is this some kind of astrological theory of myth such as the one presented in Hamlet's Mill? I am trying to figure out why it is being taken for grant that there is a cross-cultural phenomenon of "celestial deities" that follow a pattern into which Jesus also fits. The popular skeptics' lazy syncretism in which Osiris, Heracles, Adonis, etc., have all of these incredible parallels is bunk, so I am skeptical of this skeptics' notion. It's like Joseph Campbell for the shallow and illiterate.

[_Analytics]

Hi Analytics,

My thanks for your explication of his argument. I don't mean to be dismissive, but I think you missed some of my basic points.

Hi Symmachus,

Thanks for another thoughtful reply. I want you to know that I've been doing my best to read your messages as carefully as you write them. My last reply was responding to some general ideas with one specific example. I may have missed less than you think I did--I'll reply to this message line-by-line.

The example I gave was about Matthew, so the date of 70 for Mark is not relevant to what I was discussing. And it is not really important whether they were made up by cynical opportunists (admittedly, my characterization was glib but not exaggerative; my next sentence shows why) or by sincere believers unwinding a celestial deity through allegory and humanization. My point was about how difficult it would be—practically impossible—for someone in the mid second century who was not a Jew to recover the cultural details that we have in Matthew 5-7 and that only work in the first century (maybe very early second). And also that there would be no real reason for those details to be included in allegory or anything else, and so there would have been no motivation for whoever wrote Matthew to go out of his way to recover those details.

Understood. After carefully reading your message, I read several more pages of Carrier, with your insights and perspective in the top of my mind. I happened to been reading his analysis of Mark, and it seems the same basic point applies. Carrier dates both Luke and Matthew to be written within 20 years of Mark--both in the first century. The theory is that they are written as allegories about the mystical Jesus, using a very recent historical context. They included some details that were historically true, but felt free to change other details and make things up in order to convey the higher truths, which was the purpose of the story in the first place.

And I cannot emphasize enough it seems that the process you've just outlined for the gospels (with all of their historical detail) have no precedent in the ancient Mediterranean. I mean, the kind of process you're talking about, when it is applied to other deities, is a process we can only know about from written sources that survive (besides the historians, that means writers like Strabo, Pliny the Elder, Plutarch, etc.). They will consist of maybe a few sentences, at most a few paragraphs, not four rather long and novelistic biographies.

You might be imagining I’m talking about something both a little different and a little more specific than I’m imagining. For example, the gospels aren’t that unlike The Illiad. They are both myths where the respective authors took creative liberties in order to convey deeper and more important messages.

We have many examples of ancient allegories; none of them are like the gospels. If there was an intermediate, more allegorical instantiation of the Jesus myth that preexisted the gospels, what is Carrier's evidence for it? I can see why he'd opt to go the math route, because there is no evidence for such a version.

Let me see if I follow your reasoning here. If a story of somebody’s life from 40 years ago pops up out of nowhere, and while it has a few historically correct details, nevertheless from beginning to end the story reads like an allegory and is full of details that have deeply symbolic meaning but in reality are implausible, then professional historians will assume it is a based upon the life of a real individual, because fictional stories don’t pop up out of nowhere, only biographies of real historical figures do.

It sounds like that is what you are arguing.

Actually it does [refute Carrier’s theory] because the dating works in tandem with modus operandi of story-invention in antiquity to affect the plausibility of Carrier's argument. Firstly, I'm talking about Matthew, not Mark (which is certainly earlier), and secondly, if this is supposedly invented in the mid second century (especially after the 130s), then it becomes almost impossible for a non-Jew to import those details and extremely unlikely for a Jew to do so, and no one would have any motivation to do that in the first place. So if Carrier's theory for Matthew is mid second century, then it makes it quite implausible.

His theory is that Mark was written around the year 70, and Matthew was written around the year 80. Given that, your points on this seem quite irrelevant to Carrier’s theory.

There is no historical basis (which is not the same as saying that it is false, by the way), and with respect, that's a very superficial way to read it and misses a key subtlety. First, a wrong detail or episode means that the detail or episode was made up (or embellished), not necessarily the story as a whole.

Of course. The point is that the gospel authors felt quite free to make things up and embellish in order to teach the higher truths they were trying to convey. That’s why it’s hard to tell what elements are historical and which ones aren’t without outside corroboration.

Just so you can better understand where Carrier is going with this, he says that if a story is primarily myth, then it can’t be relied upon to give us historically accurate information. He claims that the gospels were written with the intent of teaching life’s greatest truths about the gospel and how people react to it, and that the authors liberally invented stories to help them make their point. That being the case, the gospels are equally plausible with the “historical Jesus” hypothesis and the “mystical Jesus” hypothesis. The gospels simply don’t lend any evidence one way or the other.

Second, what do you mean "all Romans"? The majority population of the Roman empire were not actually Romans or Roman citizens (until 212) or people who worked in Roman government, and I'm not sure any Romans actually read the Gospel of Mark until much later…

“All Romans” was a poor choice of words on my part. My point was just that if the government had a custom of letting murderers and insurrectionists go free on the festivals based upon popular vote, then it would seem to me the people would have known about it. This is a detail that Mark (or somebody) made up. If their goal was to provide an accurate biography to a 1st century audience of 1st century events, shouldn’t they have kept it plausible?

The reason I brought this up is that in your prior message, you were talking about historical details that a 2nd century author wouldn’t have known were true. When I read that the Barabbas story was in all likelihood made up, it pointed to a counter-example—a historical detail that was not true. Since Mark (like Matthew) was written in the first century, I wondered if a 1st century audience would have recognized that this custom did not exist.

To be clear, I don't think they would have cared, because if they recognized that custom didn't exist, they would still see how it told the truth about Jesus.

So even though we are in agreement that capturing the mechanics of judicial procedure in Judea was not a major concern of the writer of Mark, I don't see how this really helps Carrier's case. You don't seem troubled by the fact that there are accurate details in this account, too.

I’m guessing that Carrier’s point with this is different than what you imagine it to be. His argument is that there are so many details in the gospels that are obviously made up, there is no way to know whether anything it says is made up or historically true without independent corroboration. He makes a very interesting and extensive case that from beginning to end, the events and details that Mark describes were included, modified, or made-up with the intention of teaching the reader life’s most important truths with regards to Jesus Christ, the gospel, and how people respond to the message. He calls it a work of literary genius. But he claims that because of that, it offers no evidence one way or the other regarding what details are historical and which are not, and thus doesn’t give any evidence one way or the other regarding whether Jesus really existed.

There really was a Pilate and he really was prefect. If this was originally meant to be just an allegory, we have to explain why writer felt the need to include this kind of detail. It wouldn't have made it more plausible, because, as I've emphasized, contextual and historical accuracy were not standards of plausibility. The degree of specificity means that whoever wrote this knew about Pilate and thus would have been in a position to know whether there really was a Jesus or not. If they didn't know first hand, they must have done some research and got it either from other people or did some research. Why wouldn't he apply that same kind of empirical impulse to Jesus?

I don’t buy this line of reasoning. For example, if in 2,000 years an archeologist were to come across the movie Forrest Gump, he would recognize that the movie depicts presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. Using your reasoning, that would be proof that Forrest Gump really existed.

Mark was a master storyteller—right up there with Shakespeare and Homer. His audience would have known that Pilate existed, they also probably would have had some feelings about him. Including references that your audience already knows and has feelings about is a great literary tool.

You'll notice that in my reply to you here about Mark and my reply above about Matthew that I'm thinking in terms of actual human beings and trying to see how this could really work in antiquity. These are not insignificant questions. Notice that your #1-#4 use the passive voice all but once ("was thought to be...was originally claimed...was then composed"). Somebody did that thinking, claiming, and composing. Someone at some point had to write this gospel down in Mark's Greek. The text didn't just happen. If this is an invented-story, Carrier has to work out the mechanics of how this actually happened.

I could just as easily make up the arbitrary requirement that before I believe Jesus was historical, historicists must make out the mechanics and come to an agreement of exactly how the gospels were created and what happened.

But you don’t need to answer all significant questions in order to answer some of them.

New Testament scholars have been doing for a 150 years, and I don't see why that meticulous and deeply learned tradition should be jettisoned in favor of Carrier's conclusions resulting from applying Bayesian probability to some rather vague hypotheses. The hypotheses as you set them out here should be a lot more specific, because I hope you can see the kinds of questions that they leave unanswered.

Nobody is asking for a “meticulous and deeply learned tradition” to be jettisoned. All he is saying is that on this specific issue, they need to take a step back, reexamine their assumptions and evidence, and see what the evidence really implies.

But ignoring that, just show me one example of a similar process at work in any other ancient text involving any other god, and point out this specificity of detail—getting the right names and titles independently attested people, as well as cultural details, with a minimum of anachronisms—sustained over dozens of pages, and you might have something.

I’m going to assume this question (and the subsequent points) is based upon your now-corrected assumption that Carrier was arguing that Matthew was written in the mid second century. Surely you agree that writing fiction that takes place in your own time (or a few decades prior) with details that accurately reflect that time is not a strictly modern phenomenon.

Dick expresses an incredible amount of respect for the Gospel of Mark as literature. He claims that its literary qualities proves that it is obviously intended to be an extended allegory to teach the gospel and is not intended to describe actual events. He explains in great detail that this alleged event has rich symbolic meaning, and was obviously invented to teach religious truths—not describe how the Roman penal system worked around the festivals.

I'm sure that's a simplification, so I won't push it, but if it is not a simplification, that underlined part is pure nonsense. There is also a completely misleading dichotomy here: the fact that these are literary productions does not mean they were not also believed to have been real. That is a totally modern assumption. I just want to go sleep, so forgive me for giving it to in simplified formulation: rhetoric/literature was not the antithesis of reality but rather the essential means by which reality was constructed and expressed. In order for anything to be plausible and believable—whether a story about a god or a general, an argument in a law court (!) or even the claims of an emperor inscribed in stone—it had to be expressed rhetorically (which is to say, in literature). There was not really a concept in ancient biography or ancient historiography (to say nothing of poetry) of the "unvarnished truth" because for them, all truth had a varnish. You knew that something was true because of the quality of the varnish (to end my metaphor). Decades of scholarship have established this beyond all doubt, and it is such an accepted fact of working in ancient history and antiquity more broadly that whoever misses this basic but all-pervasive fact of ancient life will necessarily and deeply misunderstand the texts they're working with. The results of that work will be seriously flawed.

I think we must be talking past each other, because I can’t see anything that you said in this last paragraph that contradicts what Carrier says or my personal understanding. In fact, what you just said seems to support my point. The gospels are absolutely full of things that historically could not have happened or were very unlikely to have happened. That doesn’t mean they weren’t “real” or weren’t “telling the truth.” But it does mean that we can’t rely upon them to know what we would consider to be “the unvarnished truth.” That’s the argument at least.

An example of my point is Barabbas. Was he a real historical figure? (I don’t think there is any evidence of him existing outside the gospels. Correct me if I’m wrong of course—the example is assuming there isn’t, but it doesn’t change the point either way.) Is the story of Barabbas “true”? Was Barabbas an actual historical person? The answers to those two questions might not be the same.

[_Kishkumen]

If a story of somebody’s life from 40 years ago pops up out of nowhere, and while it has a few historically correct details, nevertheless from beginning to end the story reads like an allegory and is full of details that have deeply symbolic meaning but in reality are implausible, then professional historians will assume it is a based upon the life of a real individual, because fictional stories don’t pop up out of nowhere, only biographies of real historical figures do.

I would recommend that you study ancient literary history, if you really want to understand the lay of the land here. In antiquity, literature conformed to different types or genres, and while people did write fanciful biographies of real individuals, filled with fictional embellishments--see Xenophon's Education of Cyrus or the Alexander Romance, they generally did not make up biographies of people who were not thought to exist.

It is true that there were Hellenistic novels with fictional characters, but these are striking for their lack of connection with reality, not their mix of historical and fictional details. We might bring up Joseph and Aseneth as an exception, but they were also famous figures already written about in Genesis, not some guy of little consequence who out of the blue has one guy writing letters about him (Paul) and another guy writing an account of his life ("Mark").

If you think that there were no constraints on how people wrote, and that there is some unfettered choice between making things up and writing a factual account, without any consideration of genre, then you're just not understanding how ancient literature works.

The Gospels present us with an interesting problem in that they don't neatly fit into any generic category. The best fit, however, is probably biography, and the proposal that Jesus is a cosmic god whom some author crammed into an earthly context in order to create an allegory of some kind does not in any way conform to the traditions of ancient biography. That does actually matter. However implausible the life of Jesus is in a number of respects, generic expectations would dictate that he is more likely a real person whose biographical details have been embellished than some guy who was made up in order to place in a pseudo-biographical allegory.

[_Jersey Girl]

What a great thread! I've learned so much. Thank you to all who have taken the time and care to post such well-informed opinions and arguments. And thank you for doing it in such a way that it's accessible to those of us without the otherwise prerequisite background.




edit:

The same goes for the thread 'Doherty's Mythicism.' Again, thanks.

I agree. This is the board at its best.

I strongly agree. I've been following it the entire time as it's been ongoing. A shame that Philo Sofee, the thread starter, has not seen fit to attend. This thread is gold to those of us reading it.

[_Philo Sofee]

Oh my contribution to the thread was beginning it and getting it going and seeing what everyone had to say. I've learned a lot in this thread. Its been a fascinating discussion and I am glad we've had it. It's been a beginning not an end as Carrier noted in his materials.

[_Analytics]

I would recommend that you study ancient literary history, if you really want to understand the lay of the land here.

Excellent idea. Do you have any specific books or audio courses you’d recommend? I have good access to “The Great Courses”, so if there is a course there that you’d recommend, I’ll give it a listen.

Having said that, I wonder if its best to approach the gospel stories as myth rather than literature. My thinking on this has been greatly influenced by a Great Course entitled “Life Lessons from the Great Myths” (http://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/ ... myths.html) by J. Rufus Fears. The stories of Jesus nicely fit into Fears’s definition of myth. According to Fears, all cultures in all times tell myths in order to convey their highest truths, and that myths are often based upon a historical kernel of truth. He emphasizes that last point continuously over the 18 hours of lecture in the course, and gives examples of myth from The Iliad (which he believes is based upon real history) to Ronald Reagan.

With the gospels, there isn’t a single piece of “literature” attributable to a specific author. Rather, there are multiple related stories that were continuously being embellished as different versions of the myth. To emphasize what Professor Fears taught, embellishing in this way isn’t done to lie; it is done to convey the culture’s highest values and truths.

The gospels clearly fit into that pattern, from my perspective. That’s where I’m coming from for the “lay of the land” on this.

In antiquity, literature conformed to different types or genres, and while people did write fanciful biographies of real individuals, filled with fictional embellishments--see Xenophon's Education of Cyrus or the Alexander Romance, they generally did not make up biographies of people who were not thought to exist.

It is true that there were Hellenistic novels with fictional characters, but these are striking for their lack of connection with reality, not their mix of historical and fictional details. We might bring up Joseph and Aseneth as an exception, but they were also famous figures already written about in Genesis, not some guy of little consequence who out of the blue has one guy writing letters about him (Paul) and another guy writing an account of his life ("Mark").

Paul wrote about what Christ revealed to him directly—that is the basis and content for what he wrote. I don’t know the basis or relevance of this theory of yours that Paul was writing about somebody of little consequence out of the blue, nor the theory that the gospel myth is based upon somebody that was not thought to have existed. Surely Paul thought that the Jesus that appeared to him was real and of superlatively high consequence.

The Gospels present us with an interesting problem in that they don't neatly fit into any generic category. The best fit, however, is probably biography, and the proposal that Jesus is a cosmic god whom some author crammed into an earthly context in order to create an allegory of some kind does not in any way conform to the traditions of ancient biography. That does actually matter. However implausible the life of Jesus is in a number of respects, generic expectations would dictate that he is more likely a real person whose biographical details have been embellished than some guy who was made up in order to place in a pseudo-biographical allegory.

Again, nobody is proposing a theory that Jesus was some guy that was “made up.” According to the mysticist theory, the Christians thought that Jesus was very real. They thought that this real Christ was sent to a real plane of existence to perform real deeds, which he really did. They thought all of this was real.

So here is the question: is it conceivable that the geography of where the crucifixion happened could have been one of the details that was embellished? Or is embellishing that specific detail a gross violation of the parameters of ancient biography?

[_Philo Sofee]

Now that I'm getting back to looking at this thread after a few days your idea is interesting Analytics. Everybody has contributed really well to this thread for which I'm appreciative. The idea that the gospels are myths is surely within the realm of probability. The Greco-Roman mythological background of Heroes who died is clearly one of those mythical types that is stamped on to Jesus and several events in his life as David Litwa demonstrates in his book "Iesus Saves the Making of a Mediterranean God from Greco-Roman Background." The early Christians couldn't escape that mythological cultural background any more than we can from ours. The ideas of myths carrying the reality is described very well in Mercea Eliade'so book "The Myth of the Eternal Return." Many many ancient peoples mythologized their history. From the Greeks to the Romans to the Christians to the Christians in the Medieval ages. And that's not to mention the Sumerians Babylonians Assyrians or ancient Arabians either. Myths are the stories not necessarily a direct recounting of what happened in history. As Burton Mack demonstrated with the gospel of Mark in his book "A Myth of Innocence" the entire Gospel of Mark is based on the ancient myths he had access to. And he reshaped those myths as well as we wrote an enormous amount of the Old Testament myths such as the Elijah Elisha narrative in first and second Kings in his own way, with his own emphasis. And that's just one of the many Old Testament characters and stories that he put into use creating his own characters and stories. It is a created gospel, not history as it was remembered. We truly don't know if any of it actually happened. It's a fascinating topic all of this isn't it.

[_sock puppet]

Now that I'm getting back to looking at this thread after a few days your idea is interesting Analytics. Everybody has contributed really well to this thread for which I'm appreciative. The idea that the gospels are myths is surely within the realm of probability. The Greco-Roman mythological background of Heroes who died is clearly one of those mythical types that is stamped on to Jesus and several events in his life as David Litwa demonstrates in his book "Iesus Saves the Making of a Mediterranean God from Greco-Roman Background." The early Christians couldn't escape that mythological cultural background any more than we can from ours. The ideas of myths carrying the reality is described very well in Mercea Eliade'so book "The Myth of the Eternal Return." Many many ancient peoples mythologized their history. From the Greeks to the Romans to the Christians to the Christians in the Medieval ages. And that's not to mention the Sumerians Babylonians Assyrians or ancient Arabians either. Myths are the stories not necessarily a direct recounting of what happened in history. As Burton Mack demonstrated with the gospel of Mark in his book "A Myth of Innocence" the entire Gospel of Mark is based on the ancient myths he had access to. And he reshaped those myths as well as we wrote an enormous amount of the Old Testament myths such as the Elijah Elisha narrative in first and second Kings in his own way, with his own emphasis. And that's just one of the many Old Testament characters and stories that he put into use creating his own characters and stories. It is a created gospel, not history as it was remembered. We truly don't know if any of it actually happened. It's a fascinating topic all of this isn't it.

It is.

[_Kishkumen]

Excellent idea. Do you have any specific books or audio courses you’d recommend? I have good access to “The Great Courses”, so if there is a course there that you’d recommend, I’ll give it a listen.

http://www.amazon.com/Ancient-Literature-PCHL-Polity-Cultural-History/dp/0745627927/ref=sr_1_33?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1461023355&sr=1-33&keywords=history+of+greek+literature

Tim Whitmarsh's book would be a decent place to start. I don't know that I would recommend a "Great Courses" audio lecture, since that is not at the requisite depth.

Having said that, I wonder if its best to approach the gospel stories as myth rather than literature. My thinking on this has been greatly influenced by a Great Course entitled “Life Lessons from the Great Myths” (http://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/ ... myths.html) by J. Rufus Fears. The stories of Jesus nicely fit into Fears’s definition of myth. According to Fears, all cultures in all times tell myths in order to convey their highest truths, and that myths are often based upon a historical kernel of truth. He emphasizes that last point continuously over the 18 hours of lecture in the course, and gives examples of myth from The Iliad (which he believes is based upon real history) to Ronald Reagan.

First of all, Rufus is the last person I would send you to in order to learn about myth. Try reading some Bruce Lincoln, Jonathan Z. Smith, and Peter Berger. Again, those are much better places to start. Your description of his course is sufficient for me to dismiss this as an adequate starting point.

With the gospels, there isn’t a single piece of “literature” attributable to a specific author. Rather, there are multiple related stories that were continuously being embellished as different versions of the myth. To emphasize what Professor Fears taught, embellishing in this way isn’t done to lie; it is done to convey the culture’s highest values and truths.

Maybe you should also add Bart Ehrman's Orthodox Corruption of Scripture. Look, seriously, someone could take Rufus' definition of "myth" and apply it to practically any piece of literature. We could say that Herodotus brought together the traditions of different sources and placed them together to "convey the Greeks' highest values and truths."

The only difference here, as far as Rufus' definition of myth is concerned, is that we have a better idea of who Herodotus was than we do Mark. One doesn't generally assume that Mark is a scribe who is committing an oral performance of God Jesus' greatest hits (for one thing, he doesn't even portray Jesus as God) from a centuries-old tradition. Also, I am a little puzzled as to why you believe that we need to treat Gospel literature differently than we would treat, say, Greek literature that contains myths.

Is that, in your mind, just a wildly inappropriate thing to do?

Paul wrote about what Christ revealed to him directly—that is the basis and content for what he wrote. I don’t know the basis or relevance of this theory of yours that Paul was writing about somebody of little consequence out of the blue, nor the theory that the gospel myth is based upon somebody that was not thought to have existed. Surely Paul thought that the Jesus that appeared to him was real and of superlatively high consequence.

Actually, he was writing about someone others had told him about too. He was quoting earlier Christian material. So, no, he wasn't just conveying what Jesus revealed to him personally. He wasn't writing in a vacuum. Paul is not the first follower of Jesus.

Again, nobody is proposing a theory that Jesus was some guy that was “made up.” According to the mysticist theory, the Christians thought that Jesus was very real. They thought that this real Christ was sent to a real plane of existence to perform real deeds, which he really did. They thought all of this was real.

So, which tradition did this mythical Christ come from? If Paul is our earliest extant source about Jesus, and he is quoting material that tells us Jesus was born of a woman, and the seed of David, then where is the earlier material in which he is neither human nor the seed of David? Where do we find evidence of this earlier stratum of myth that gets turned into the Jesus of the Gospels? And what is the evidence supporting Jesus' connection to this earlier myth? Is this earlier Jesus Heracles, or Osiris, or Enoch?