dastardly stem wrote: ↑Wed Feb 24, 2021 11:48 pm
All I"m saying is, let's evaluate the evidence for this one.
One more time, we have:
- An author who personally knew the people who knew Jesus, who wrote about Jesus several times
- An author who lived through the controversy surrounding the execution of Jesus' brother, who wrote about that
- Multiple detailed and embellished accounts of Jesus' life that all place his death in a very specific window of time, the earliest of which was written about 40 years after that time
All those sources treat Jesus as a human. Most of them are from Christians, but one is not. To eliminate the evidence of the first one, Paul, Carrier has to assert that the multiple references to Jesus that refer to him being born to a human woman, being a direct descendant of King David, and having a brother whom Paul had met, actually mean something different than what they seem to mean. To eliminate the evidence of the second, Josephus, Carrier asserts that there's actually a multiple-step scribal error in the transmission of Josephus' text, in which a reference to somebody else becomes a reference to the same brother whom Paul met. To eliminate the evidence of the third, the gospels, Carrier has to assert that an originally mythical figure named Jesus has been inserted into this very specific window of time, for reasons that I still haven't seen explained.
The pieces of evidence are different enough from one another that Carrier has to construct three independent explanations for why they don't mean what they seem to mean. That is the opposite of parsimonious.
The parsimonious explanation would be that the point that all those sources agree on — that Jesus-who-was-called-Messiah lived in the early first century — is correct. The first and third sources treat Jesus as a miraculous figure, but we don't need to agree with them there, not only because miracles are improbable but because we can see miracle stories attaching to other figures in the same time period who definitely did exist.
In fact, it gets worse for Carrier, because there is not a single source from the ancient world that treats Jesus as a mythical figure. As Christianity grew, all kinds of perspectives on him sprang up, from insulting stories (Celsus claims he was a bastard) to weird mystical constructs about the nature of the cosmos (the "Gnostic" sects of Christianity claims Jesus revealed all kinds of esoteric wisdom on that topic), but
they all agree that he was on earth in Judea in that same timeframe, even the docetic Christian sects, which claim he was a spirit who temporarily appeared to be a human in order to visit Judea in that timeframe. Jesus mythicists have chosen to assert the one thing about Jesus that
none of the ancient sources ever say!
Now, Carrier doesn't have to address those later sources, because assuming the mythicists are right, once the ball got rolling on the idea that Jesus was a human being, everybody in subsequent generations would have been responding to that idea. But what mythicists don't explain is where the original belief in a mythical Jesus went. There were all kinds of odd Christian sects in the first few centuries AD, and proto-orthodox Christians went out of their way to rebut them, because in their eyes these sects were evil heresies. But the heresiologists never mention the idea that Jesus did not exist in the time and place where all the sources agree he did. According to Carrier, the mythical Jesus sect existed just long enough to give rise to the forms of Christianity centered on a first-century preacher, and then disappeared without a trace — except in the letters of Paul, which, according to Carrier, are actually about the mythical Jesus even though they don't actually look like they are. A sect that emerges and then conveniently disappears is also not parsimonious. It's an entirely unnecessary construct, unless you simply
want Jesus to be mythical.