lpetrich

Richard Carrier has written a long review, "Was Christianity Too Improbable to be False?", of J.P. Holding's The Impossible Faith: Or, How Not to Start an Ancient Religion:

01. Who Would Buy One Crucified?

Richard Carrier suggests that what is undignified is relative, and gives the example of self-castration, looked down upon by elite Romans, yet enthusiastically practiced by the more zealous male followers of Cybele and Attis.

He also noted that being degraded with crucifixion would make resurrection seem like a greater triumph than otherwise.

02. Who Would Follow a Man from Galilee?

RC suggests that the lower-class aspect of Xianity's origins was part of its appeal; it mainly got converts among the lower classes, rather than the educated elite.

03. Was Resurrection Deemed Impossible?


RC notes that resurrections were far from unknown; consider the resurrection of Osiris.

04. Was the New Always Bad?

RC notes Romans were able to follow numerous other religious novelties, like worship of Mithras and Attis and Isis.

05. Who Would Join a Moral Order?

RC notes that many pagans were moralistic, and even strict and suspicious of sex.

LP: for instance, though the Epicureans were often slandered as shameless hedonists, they were suspicious of sexuality and romantic love as needlessly dangerous.

06. Who Would Join an Intolerant Cult?

RC notes that lots of pagans were sympathetic to Judaism, which was equally intolerant.

07. Was Christianity Highly Vulnerable to Inspection and Disproof?

RC notes that it originated long before printing (LP: or the Internet, for that matter), meaning that it would be difficult to do the necessary "fact checking".

He also notes that despite Luke's claim to have done a lot of research, that Luke does not follow up on that claim -- he never mentioned his sources on the life of JC, let alone analyzed them, as his historian colleagues were known to do (LP: or as RC himself does).

08. Who Would Want to be Persecuted?

RC notes that the early Xians considered being persecuted a badge of honor, something like what their founder had gone through.

09. Was the Idea of an Incarnate God Really Repugnant?

RC notes that that was a common belief about pagan deities.

10. Would Groupthinkers Never Switch Groups?

RC notes that Xians had not isolated themselves from the rest of society, that they were commanded to continue to obey Jewish and pagan masters and leaders.

11. Did No One Trust Women?

RC notes that both pagans and Jews would have taken women's testimony seriously. And he also has an interesting argument anout the three women who watched JC's resurrection in Mark, that they were symbolic.

12. Did No One Respect the Opinions of Uneducated Laymen?

RC argues that neducated laymen would.

13. Would the Facts Be Checked?

RC argues that fact-checking was not a typical thing to do, and notes that Acts does not record any fact-checking on the part of Xian converts.

And early apologists like Justin Martyr, Athenagoras, Aristides, and Tatian were also not big on fact checking.

Justin's almost-exclusive argument was that various scriptures say so. He disliked most philosophical schools, because they either devalued faith in God, or asked for money, or demanded that one study the sciences, which he regarded with anti-intellectual scorn; he liked Platonism's non-empirical approach to knowledge. Xianity was free from (to him) these deficiencies; it also had the plus of (to him) having the world's oldest scriptures; to him, Judaism is the only competition worth mentioning.

The closest he comes to "evidence" was the (claimed) ability to drive out demons and stuff like that, and of having ordinary human strength, talent, zeal, and inspiration.

LP: it's interesting that Pharaonic Egypt was little-known in ancient Rome; I'm sure that the priests of Isis and Serapis (Osiris-Apis) might have enjoyed pointing to the long history of worship of their deities.

Turning to Athenagoras, RC summarizes his argument as "Screw you, all you academic lunkheads, and screw all your logic and science and scholarship. We have the Law and the Prophets. Everything else is obvious. End of argument."

And Aristides argues only from bare logic and how moral Xians are.

Tatian goes into more detail, and RC summarizes his arguments by saying that he "converted simply because he found other religions morally repugnant and illogical, was impressed by the antiquity of the Bible, found the Christians to be the most moral followers of that most ancient text, and therefore concluded that they had the right interpretation of the most authoritative book--authoritative for no other reason than 'our philosophy is older than the systems of the Greeks' and is the most morally attractive." He also "spent a lot of ink arguing that philosophy and scholarship are a stupid waste of time."

RC notes that none of these gentlemen did what Holding imagined them doing, saying "You know, I looked into these crazy Christian claims--asked around, checked documents and such--and to my surprise their stories are all true!" And he notes that hardly any of the educated elite had become Xians.

LP: that was the tendency of some other early Xians, like Lactantius, who attacked "the false wisdom of philosophers" (Book 3), which included the belief that the Earth is shaped like a ball (chapter 24), about which he comments:
Of course, in later centuries, some Xians would turn around and brag about how super-rational their religion is.

14. Was the Apparent Ignorance of Jesus a Problem?

RC suggests that conceptions of Jesus Christ had changed over time, from "suffering servant" to superman, suggesting that that was not a real difficulty.

15. Who Would Follow an Executed Criminal?

RC mentions that only briefly, noting that he had discussed the question elsewhere in his analysis.

16. Were Christian Teachings Too Radical for Anyone to Buy?

RC notes that they were not as radical as Holding seems to think they were.

17. Did the Earliest Christians Encourage Critical Inquiry?

Here again, RC notes the early Xians' lack of interest in critical inquiry.

As he notes, Paul fit the pattern perfectly, scorning "the wisdom of the wise" and instead using scripture, personal revelation, miracle-working, and his own behavior and "suffering". Anything contrary to his teaches he asserts is just plain wrong, and as RC notes, Paul essentially declaries fact-checking anathema, and that seemingly contrary evidence is nothing but evil lies.

An early critic of Xianity, Celsus, noted that Xians would say "do not question, just believe!" And Origen, who reported on Celsus, was actually proud of it, though he did offer one bit of "evidence": Xians' allegedly superior virtue. By comparison, Celsus tells us that we ought to "follow reason and a rational guide, since he who assents to opinions without following this course is very liable to be deceived."

18. How Successful Was Christianity?

RC now tackles the question of how many followers Xianity had gotten in its early centuries; he concludes that it had gotten very few, though even approximate numbers are difficult to find. The Roman Church is estimated as having a population of something like 14,000 in the year 251 -- out of a total city population of around 700,000. And that the total Xian population at 100 CE was at most 100,000 and probably less, maybe 38,000 or even 2,300 -- out of a total Empire population of 60 to 120 million.

RC has a very interesting thesis about the rise of Xianity, that it was pushed forward by a crisis of confidence in other social institutions which had been ravaged by civil war and economic depression in the 3rd century. Endowments for schools went bankrupt, artisans would get drafted and killed, the aristocracy became demoralized, and the military essentially took over, not only deciding who would rule, but often supplying the leaders. The Empire eventually split in two, with the western half being destroyed in the next few centuries, and with the eastern half dying a slow death over the next millennium.

By comparison, Xianity was relatively untouched -- it had its own social infrastructure, and its god seemed to be delivering, as opposed to the pagan ones.

RC compares the fate of Mithraism; it was all-male, and it was largely in the army -- which was devastated by those civil wars. It went downhill, and the army started become Xian.

RC speculates that it the Empire had succeeded in avoiding the civil war and economic slump in the 3rd cy., that if it had continued the peace and prosperity of its first two centuries, then Xianity would have remained marginal, and the Empire would continue to seem to be favored by its gods. Xianity itself might have ended up transformed by having to coexist with the rest of Roman society into something different.

As it was, Xianity did not finally "win" by honest argument and evidence, but with the use of force and political and social pressure, and even that involved some changes in it to co-opt parts of paganism, like pagan festivals. As RC notes, Paul would have been appalled by the cult of saints, with its reverence for statues and artifacts, and with its praying to specific "deities" for this or that.

19. Responses to Critics

RC states in it that he has made only a few revisions on account of the criticisms he has received; he finds most of Holding's comments to be either misunderstandings, groundless assertions, or even false claims.

All in all, it is a very interesting article in its own right, apart from RC's original purpose of rebutting J.P. Holding.

And finally, I note that RC refers to Holding in a much more respectful fashion than Holding refers to him ("Broken Vector").

Vinnie

Can we split the tangent to a separate thread?

I'm glad Carrier did this. I've ben wanting to refute that for a long while. I think this will save me a lot of time (didn't read it yet but I most certainly will in full). Thanks for the heads up on the link :thumbs: :thumbs:

John Kesler

Before Carrier, there were Holtz and Price.

lpetrich

Toto has reviewed Rodney Stark's "The Rise of Christianity" in this thread; he has a mixed review of it. He extrapolates from the spread of the likes of Moonism, and makes a case for the spread of Xianity requiring no miracles; however, he tries to make Xianity act too much like Moonism, ignoring important differences. Xianity was originally a lower-middle-class movement, with very little involvement of the educated elite, contrary to what Stark argues.

But I have a hard time having much respect for someone who makes his sort of dumb arguments against evolution. Especially someone whose career depends on knowing what one is talking about and researching some subject before pontificating on it. Rodney Stark himself would laugh away anyone who claimed to be an expert on Xianity while claiming things about it like the Xian Trinity being the Father, the Mother, and the Son, but he makes errors about evolution that are at least as bad.

Rodney Stark was either poorly informed or else he was an odd sort of "agnostic". I've found some other pages skewering his comments about evolution; Fact, Fable, and Darwin, Stark Raving Mad, More Anti-evolution Absurdity.

Much more to the point, however, are some criticisms of Rodney Stark and his "supply-side" thesis of religion in society, that free markets in religion make for greater religiosity than official religious monopolies. Steve Bruce, author of God is Dead: Secularization in the West, has convincingly argued just the opposite, that the most religious areas tend to have monopoly religions. Seeming exceptions, like the United States, he argues, are not really exceptions, because subsets of it have had de facto monopoly religions, like Protestant fundamentalism in the South, and because the US has been big enough to support a whole subculture of "Christian" this, that, and the other thing. The UK and other European countries, Bruce argues, are a bit small for that sort of thing.

And Bruce strongly criticizes Stark about secularization in Britain, poking holes in various other arguments that Stark has offered against the secularization hypothesis. In particular, he ridicules Stark's thesis of medieval-Britain irreligion by stating that it implies "The people who allowed very large proportions of the national wealth to be given to religious activities believed them to be pointless", "Most people took Mass at Easter just because most other people did and nobody actually believed in it", etc.

Rodney Stark is also the author of "For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery - Book Review", which Daniel L. Pais has reviewed here; he states that
This makes me wonder how objective he really is, wanting conservative Xianity to somehow have the credit for something that he gets angry about when someone goes very far with it. At least Lactantius was more honest; he ridiculed the roundness of the Earth is an especially absurd example of "the false wisdom of philosophers."

And while he approvingly notes Xian opponents of slavery, I wonder how much glossing over he does of Xian proponents of slavery.

Johnny Skeptic

People back then were only able to choose from the world views that were available to them at that time, and mostly the only competition that Christianity had came from Judaism and pagan religions. All that Christianity had to do was be more desirable compared to the competition. Today, atheists and agnostics have, largely due to advances in science and education, developed much improved arguments against Christianity than previously existed, especially against fundamentalist Christianity. A Gallup Poll showed that in the age group category 18-29, 61% approve of same sex marriage. In 1850 the percentage would probably have been less than 2%.

It is no accident that today, claims of risen saviors have mostly disappeared, and claims of miracles are much more difficult to defend. Any claim that a man rose from the dead and was seen by 500 people would be immediately discredited. That might very well have been exactly what happened in the 1st century. If there were no 500 eyewitnesses, then obviously it would have been much easier for people to push Christianity in the 2nd century when there wouldn't have been any surviving eyewitneses to call upon.

andrewcriddle

As a comment on the original post about Richard Carrier's article.

Many pagans did find Christianity problematic for reasons similar to (some) of those that Holding lists.

See the objections to Christianity made by Celsus to which Origen replies in 'Contra Celsus'.

In terms of the positive appeal of Christianity one has to distinguish the special circumstances of the 3rd century particularly the late 3rd century (where to some extent I would agree with Richard Carrier) and the earlier period. Stark has 200,000 Christians by 200 CE which is IMO too low by at least a factor of two.

The really interesting question is what, despite the disadvantages, attracted these several hundred thousand followers to Christianity before the favourable conditions of the 3rd century had developed.

Andrew Criddle

Diogenes the Cynic

Yes.

The Stark/Baylor digression has been split off here.

DtC, moderator, BC&H

Richard Carrier

To add perspective to all the good stuff that has been said in this thread (esp. about Baylor, on both sides) I can add this:

Stark's conversion is very, very recent. He was an agnostic believer (and had been apparently his whole life) as of early 2004:

http://www.jknirp.com/stark.htm

And then becomes a confessed Christian by the end of that same year:

http://www.baylormag.com/story.php?story=004921

Yet in both, you will see his views have always been conservative, not at all liberal, but neither is he a fundamentalist. He is clearly more in line with Augustine's take on Christianity, and I imagine he would side with those among even very conservative Christians who are actually disgusted with fundamentalism (e.g. I personally know at least one, and have read the articles of several other very conservative Christians who find Bush's neglect of the poor to be unconscionable).

Note that, FYI, there are many historians who have bones to pick with Stark and in fact my faculty advisor is currently involved in organizing what is essentially an anti-Stark conference of historians of religion. My own personal opinion is that Stark is about 90% right but gets the rest wrong, either because his historical picture is wrong or badly exaggerated (he is a brilliant sociologist, but not the best historian of antiquity), and he has a woeful tendency toward black-and-white thinking (e.g. a lot of his arguments amount to the assertion that "all" pagans thought X while "all" Christians thought Y, neither of which was hardly ever true).

Finally, please note that as Andrew Criddle says, "Many pagans did find Christianity problematic for reasons similar to (some) of those that Holding lists," I make that very same point several times in my critique of Holding. Likewise, I also explain at several times throughout "what, despite the disadvantages, attracted these several hundred thousand followers to Christianity before the favourable conditions of the 3rd century had developed." Indeed, that is essentially what every chapter in my rebuttal does: I distinguish the "interested" from the "disgusted" and then identify what the "interested" probably liked about Christianity or otherwise didn't dislike about it.

lpetrich

First, I appreciate Richard Carrier's discussion of early-Xian anti-intellectualism; it was only some of their later successors who started bragging about how rational and super-scientific they are.

And it would be interesting to examine early Xianity and women more closely; the early Xians seem to have varied in how sexist they were (women preaching vs. women being told to shut up about religion). They might have made women feel more cared for, however.

I checked on Brian Holtz and Robert Price's rebuttals to TIF; they cover much of the territory that Richard Carrier had covered.

As Robert Price notes, imposture is not a barrier to success; consider the success of Mormonism, despite it being well-known that Joseph Smith was a faker. And consider the long history of fake relics of saints -- and of making up saint biographies. That continues even to the present day, with the St. Cassie urban legend about the Columbine massacre.

Brian Holtz notes that Holding could have mentioned some additional difficulties with Xianity, such as inconsistencies in the Gospels on

Genealogy: Matthew vs. Luke
Birthplace: Bethlehem vs. Nazareth
Birth date: Herod vs. Quirinius
Chronology: How many years? When was that Temple temper tantrum?
Second Coming: Some of his listeners would live to see it
Appearances after his resurrection: Jerusalem vs. Galilee

And he points out that some circumstances would have made it harder for Xianity to get started:
And there are ways of dying even more gory than crucifixion, like "scaphismus" or "the boats" or "boating", as described by Plutarch in his Life of Artaxerxes:

The victim is spread-eagled and sandwiched between two boats, facing upwards. The top boat gets a hole cut in it for supplying him with food, including milk and honey poured on his face. He ends up attracting flies, whose maggots then proceed to feast on him. Mithridates, executed in this fashion, took 17 days to die.

A resurrection after that sort of death would be a big miracle.

lpetrich

The antiquity of the Bible seems like an interesting selling point, but what could Xianity's competition have done? To consider the best candidate, could the priests of the various Egyptian-inspired cults have been willing to use ancient Egyptian history to demonstrate the great antiquity of their rites? There's a hint of that in Apuleius's The Golden Ass, where Isis brags about how long she's been worshipped in Egypt, but it could be made more concrete.

In particular, Manetho's Aegyptiaca might have been a good place to start; however, it is now lost, and what comes down to us from it is what other authors have preserved of it.

But I'm not sure that Aegyptiaca would be very good as a sacred history.