jakejonesiv

What I have proposed is congruent with Dr Mark Goodacre's Case Against Q. Matthew invented Nazareth, and Luke got it from him. It was subsequently interpolated into Mark 1:9.

Jake Jones

S.C.Carlson

A detailed discussion of the reasoning is found in Shawn Carruth and James M. Robinson, Documenta Q - Q:4:1-13, 16 (Leuven: Peeters, 1996): 392-462. The argument accepted by all four editors (Robinson, Carruth, Kloppenborg, and Heil) is that Matthew and Luke agree against Mark both in (a) a very unusual spelling for the town (Nazara) and (b) in the identical Q context, between the Temptations and the Sermon.

Skeptics of Q, including Michael Goulder and Mark Goodacre, note that this striking agreement also occurs in a narrative context and should be viewed as evidence of Luke's knowledge of Matthew. (Goulder also argues that the spelling of Nazareth as Nazara found in some manuscripts of Matt 2:23 was original to Matthew, so the Q spelling of the town is Matthean.)

Stephen

jakejonesiv

Thanks Stephen, this is helpful.

Jake Jones

Richard Carrier

Certainly--and both matter, in different ways and to different degrees. The reason I justify concluding details like Nazareth to be mytho-symbolic is that their only known source (Mark) is almost entirely a mytho-symbolic treatise that never even claims to belong to the genre of history nor follows any of the overt markers of that genre (simply contrast Mark with Luke, for example, esp. their prefaces), and most of Mark's contents are identifiably mytho-symbolic. None of these observations hold for, say, Suetonius' biography of Vespasian. Thus, what I am arguing could not be done "with most historical works."

For those who don't know why I conclude that Mark is dominantly mytho-symbolic, you simply have to read Price, Talbert, Doherty, and Dundes, and my work on both the legendary origin of Mark's empty tomb narrative and Matthew's empty tomb narrative (both in the book The Empty Tomb). Even then you would have in hand barely half the evidence I have that has convinced me--which is why I am planning a future book on this. But as just one tiny example, Mark's crucifixion narrative is so obviously constructed (in part) from Psalm 22 that this cannot possibly be a coincidence, i.e. one would not be able to find such an obvious and blatant construction of a historical narrative in, say, Suetonius' biography of Vespasian, by adapting some ancient religious oracle (like, say, the Aeneid or the Iliad).

Again, please allow me to reiterate that I do not intend anything I've said here to convince anyone. I am merely reporting where I have ended up and, in outline, why. As to whether anyone should agree with me, that would require a survey of evidence that would comprise a multi-volume book. As a result, I shall not be haranguing historicists to convert with me, until I have actually published the better part of my evidence and reasons, which will not be for some years (since other obligations intervene). For now, my change in position can be taken as merely news of one more expert to add to those who looked at the evidence with a competent eye and came to this conclusion. Nothing more. At most, I hope this news will inspire a few more people to take mythicism seriously than perhaps they once did, and to start out on the same journey of evidence-examination that I did, but even that result I have no expectation of.



Which is why I do not assign a huge difference in value here. As I specifically said, the fact that Paul would never name the father or mother of God Incarnate is "slightly more" expected on mythicism than historicism, not significantly more, nor even "unexpected" on historicism. Remember, you are not quoting the part where I conclude that P(E/~H&B) is low, but the part where I conclude that P(E/H&B) is high. It is very crucial to recognize the difference, which is why careful Bayesian reasoning is so important here--to keep us from making the same error as you do here: over-estimating the importance of certain facts (like that Paul never used patronymics). In other words, what I am arguing here is not that Paul's silence on the father of Jesus makes P(E/~H&B) low, but that because of this silence, Paul's mentioning the father anyway does not make P(E/H&B) low. If you don't know what I am talking about, please study what I have said more carefully and the Bayesian logic behind it--for it is absolutely crucial that the difference here be understood.

Maybe this will help: I do not conclude that P(E/~H&B) is low because Paul never mentions the name of his Lord's Davidic father. You seem to mistake me for thinking this or arguing this, but neither is the case. Instead, we agree: if this one silence were all that was peculiar in E on ~H, then obviously P(~H) would be far higher than P(H) and I would not be a mythicist now.

Or maybe some background in Bayesian reasoning will help: it is already unusual for Paul to mention no one's patronymic, therefore in Bayesian terms that he would not do so for anyone is not expected to a probability of 100%, even if it is expected to a very high probability (say, 95%) since there are other writers who are as informal. This is a fact, yet clearly does not permit concluding that Paul is fabricating or that, say, Apollos is a mythic person, thus Paul's informality, though less probable than 100%, still confirms historicity--taken by itself. But in contrast, that Paul would not name the father of a cosmic being who had no literal human father is expected almost 100% of the time (I'd say, 99%). Thus, it is "slightly more probable" on H that Paul would not name the father of Jesus than that he would not do so on ~H. But that alone is not enough to make H probable at all. It is only the collective improbability of all of Paul's silences, as documented by Doherty and others, that weighs against ~H and thus helps the case for H. And, indeed, even that vast valley of silence is not the only peculiar fact in E that is unexpected on ~H, and hence is not the only thing I have in mind when I assign a low value to P(E/~H&B).



Correct--but again you are on the wrong track, and taking what I said in favor of keeping P(E/H) high as if it was what I said in favor of keeping P(E/~H) low. That is not the case. I did not argue from the silence of historians to a low value for P(E/~H). Rather, I argued from this silence that P(E/H) is not low. Big difference.

Though the silence of historians taken as a collective fact does weigh against ~H, and only adds to a larger collective pool of facts in E that are unexpected on ~H, I did not specifically argue for any of this above--indeed, I presented no specific list of my reasons for that at all, but referred to an unstated collection of evidence presented by the other authors I named, as a generic "catch all" reference to the sum total of all the peculiarities in E that have convinced me.

But if I were to articulate all of these peculiarities, the issue would be one of diminishing probabilities--e.g. suppose it was 99% probable that any one writer would not mention Jesus or the origins of Xianity, and suppose we can identify 100 writers (at least, historians and observers of religion and social phenomena, etc.) who would have only (but at least) a 1% probability of discussing Jesus or the origins of Xianity (and I think we might--not extant writers, but writers whose texts Xians surely could and probably would have preserved or quoted). If that were the case, then the probability that all 100 writers would fail to mention anything becomes 0.99^100 = 0.36, in other words, improbable indeed. I am not here arguing for either of these values (the 99% or the 100), but merely illustrating why the evidence has to be taken collectively: it is the collective weight of all the peculiarities that overpowers ~H, not the strength of any particular peculiarity. And those peculiarities range beyond just silences (in Paul and outside the NT). I will leave Doherty and Price and their defenders to present that list.



Even if that were true (i.e. even if Platoon evinced enormous mytho-symbolic content and portrayed an overtly salvific godman as the central thesis of a religious movement--and Platoon does not, so the analogy fails on that grounds alone), your analogy would make my point: for the central Christ-figure in that film, played by Willem Dafoe, was not a historical person. That is exactly what mythicists are saying about Jesus.



Though neither was a salvific godman, so again the analogy fails. You are committing a category fallacy here. Nevertheless, the point you want to make could be made from a correct analogy, e.g. Alexander the Great, who was portrayed as something the equivalent of a salvific godman, in highly bogus fictional tales subsequent to his death. And the existence of such cases is precisely why the prior probability I assigned was 0.7 to mythicism--thus, I already allowed that 30% of all salvific godmen portrayed in mytho-symbolic treatises were based on historical persons.

Note that even if we make the ratio nearly 50% (i.e. I ran the numbers with 49%), such that half of all the salvific godmen portrayed in mytho-symbolic treatises throughout antiquity were based on historical persons (I seriously doubt such a claim could be maintained, so it is certainly overstating the case), plus even the best estimates for P(E/~H) and so on, the Bayesian conclusion is still 52% for mythicism, and historicity is only 48% likely to be true (which is roughly where I had been up until now).

In other words: I already took your point into account. The numbers still come out against historicity.



Exactly, which is why my very next sentence reads:

"That line of reasoning has certain limitations (I am leaving out a lot that a historicist would argue for his case, for example), which is why it was never completely convincing to me until I formalized it."

In other words, what makes it improbable in the case of Jesus is not the prior probability (e.g. examples like Hezekiah would fall in the 30% real persons--if Hezekiah was a salvific godman, and he was not, so he would not count for our analysis anyway), but the overall Bayesian case, which includes the probabilities of E (not here addressed at all) as well as the relative prior probabilities which already include the hypothetical salvific divine Hezekiahs of history.



First of all, Joan of Arc was not a godman (much less a godwoman). Moreover, she must also be excluded because the cultural context eliminates her relevance. A period under absolute Christian domination that suppressed the invention of salvific godmen, for example, is not sufficiently like the pre-Christian period to warrant any analogy. Also, the analogy I later articulated is with men who were salvific godmen and who score high on Otto Rank's table (for those who don't know what that means, see In Quest of the Hero). Though Caesar and Alexander score above average, they do not score particularly high--nevertheless I might include them in the frequency analysis and thus they would fall in the 30% who were real and not the other 70% who were not (e.g. Orpheus, Romulus, Theseus, Osiris, Oedipus, etc.). But after Caesar and Alexander, no real emperor or king from their time scores high enough to be included (not even Augustus).



Not true. Most heroes do not score highly, and few are also salvific godmen.

But otherwise it is true that there are historical persons who were "mythicized" which is exactly what kept me an agnostic for so long. But the scale of evidence I have witnessed to date is so huge, that I now realize my previous agnosticism was based on (1) a mistaken idea of the category "salvific godman" and of the number of examples that score high on the hero scale (e.g. as it happens, the higher you go in the rank, the fewer historical persons appear there--Jesus scores 3rd!--thus the prior probability of historicity for a character in that category who scores so high must be lower than 50%) and (2) profound ignorance of all the evidence that belongs in E, which as I have studied has done and continues to mount up more peculiarities for ~H and fewer for H, to the point now that the divergence is huge in my view. But no one will agree with me who has not seen all that I have, and there is simply no way to list it all here--indeed, I doubt I shall be able to list all of it in an entire book, but it will be some years yet before I know whether I can or not.

Perhaps I should warn those here: unlike Doherty, I do not consider this to be the most important thing in my life, since whether Jesus existed in some obscure sense or not is pretty trivial in the grand scheme of things. It can't matter for deciding whether to be a Christian, for example, since most objective scholars already admit that a historical Jesus could not, on present evidence, be the divine Christian Jesus. And once we've already conceded that, what difference would it make whether he existed or not? Thus, to me, this is an interesting but largely trivial historical problem. I have a lot of other work that takes priority for me. So please, don't constantly ask me to weigh in on this issue. I will, but in my own good time.

Indeed, maybe to put things in perspective, I would place the historical facts about the beliefs of the Founding Fathers to be a far more pressing and important historical problem today, since the answer will and already does have a real and serious effect on public policy--yet being outside my field, this problem does not much enter my compass. Far more competent scholars have a good bead on the matter. But even a historicist like you, who agrees that even if historical, the real historical facts about Jesus do not justify Believing on Christ--or indeed someone who is a Christian but agrees no historical facts about Jesus can be sufficient to warrant belief, but only direct contact with the Holy Spirit can do so--even if I convinced such people that Jesus didn't exist at all...how will that affect anything of importance today? Beats me. We already have an adequate and sufficient critique of Christianity in hand, in terms of both philosophy and policy, without any need of mythicism.



I shall certainly have to revisit that question some time later. For now, I have no confirmed opinion on the matter.

The source situation for Origen is very problematic--not least because he may have been an accommodationist. For example, I am now aware that he argued that people should be persuaded to become Christians for their own good and the good of society, without giving them the reasons, since few would ever have time to examine them all adequately, and he believed it was acceptable to give multiple interpretations of the same verse without committing to one over others, and (though I am less certain of this) he may have endorsed the secret-doctrine view (i.e. that there were things that should only be revealed to high-ranking initiates, while the rank-and-file would be told something different). If all that is true, it is much harder to say whether anything Origen says is intended to convey what he really believed, or what he merely wanted certain people to believe (those outside the Church and those lower ranking within the Church). I am not here saying that I think Origen thought or wrote this way, but that this question has to be resolved before one can go any further on what anything he said really meant. And I have not conducted the necessary examination here, so the jury is still out.

Although it is worth noting: the prevalence of this accommodationist thinking in ancient religion is so pervasive (more than I ever thought--I am presently, though slowly, collecting the evidence) that it was something I had added to my reassessment of B in the Bayesian analysis above. You will already find hints of my heading this way in my discussion of the secret-doctrine view in "Spiritual Body" in The Empty Tomb and in my massive rebuttal to James Holding's "Impossible Faith" (which fans know has been available online for months already, though it is soon to appear here on the Secular Web).


Note that this pertains to what the author (or rather, forger) of Daniel meant, which is irrelevant to what I was arguing, whether Muller is right or not. The evidence is clear that regardless of what the author of Daniel meant, his words had already been taken to predict a messiah arriving sometime mid-1st century AD by later Jews. This is of course not uncommon. When a prophet's mysterious narrative fails to clearly match up with recent history, later admirers try to "re-interpret" the prophecy to match either another later event or a future event yet to be fulfilled--millenarians have been doing this for millennia (pun intended). And indeed, as Josephus, Tacitus, and Suetonius document, in a sense, this effort to make the prophecy fit the future actually caused the very destruction of the temple it predicted.

neilgodfrey

Exactly. If many Jews today can get by without a literal historical Abraham . . . . .

TedM

Richard, thank you for helping me understand better what has gone into your decision-making.

I'm curious how you assign weight (if any) to the 1st and 2nd hand eyewitness claims to a historical Jesus we find in 1&2 Peter, 1 John, Luke and perhaps Hebrews.. Does it fall back on a judgement as to the authenticity of the authorship only, or do you look for clues for how historical the other content within their writings is? Anyone of course can claim things, but IF for a moment we could conclude that there is little reason to conclude that 1 Peter was not by the claimed author (not using the gospels to color our expectations of how Peter would write), would the eyewitness claim of that author be of any value for helping determine probability?

Another thought: It seems pretty clear to me that Paul at least believed Jesus had been a man on earth at some point. Do you agree and if so do you find that to be of any value in your thinking about this issue, and how it affects the interpretation of some of the commonly debated issues: 'rulers of this age","James the Lords' brother",--the words during the Lord's supper, etc.?

I understand if you need to move on, but thought I'd ask.

ted

Rick Sumner

You note that you are not trying to convince anyone, so fair enough, I won't pursue much of this much beyond my initial comments. One thing, however, bears furthur qualification, as it isn't directly pertinent to your overall claim of mythicism, but is nonetheless, in my opinion, quite incorrect.

It was under Octavian that the "Golden Age" truly dawned. It was under Octavian that dreams of the eschatological, universal Roman peace began to dawn, and it was under Octavian that Rome was "saved," bringing peace to the entire empire, he boasts, no less than three times. His "Heroes tale" can be seen in Roman art to such a degree that Persian art of Alexander was plagiarized, with Augustus and Rome now playing the role of conqueror. The Emperor cult expanded to a degree his father would scarcely have dreamed of, again, under Augustus. Much art depicts Augustus in the role of Zeus, Pax to his right, and not the other way around.

Julius was a hero because he crossed the Rubicon. Most myth about him didn't begin until after his death and deification by the senate. A fortuitous shooting star. Octavian was a hero because he was unstoppable, and surely only a son of a god could exhibit such might. Myths about him were sung while he lived, and only grew greater with the telling.

Octavian was more mythologized and "more deified" (for wont of a better term) than his father ever was.

Regards,
Rick Sumner

spin

This is also Goulder's mistake. They do not agree. You simply have to diverse references to Nazara, a presumed back-formation from nazarhnos, otherwise unexplainable. This has nothing to do with Q, unless you can explain why the contexts have nothing to do with each other....


spin

Rick Sumner

An additional question for Richard Carrier:

How are you defining "salvific godman?" It seems (by your inclusion of Jesus, Romulus, and Alexander, for but three very different examples) that you are defining it broadly as one who saves, with little regard for the rather pronounced soteriological differences between them. If this is the case, I must confess my distaste for the entire category--I think it's tautological (one who saves is salvific), rather than a useful categorization.

Regards,
Rick Sumner

S.C.Carlson

To the extent I understand the objection, I think it was addressed here.