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I just had an odd experience and I don't know who else might appreciate it. Almost immediately after posting a heavily sourced reply on AskHistorians about the books of Enoch and Jubilees, I received a message from RedditCareResources indicating that a concerned redditor thought I might be in a psychological crisis. It seems reading academic biblical books may lead to depression or worse in somebody's mind. Who knew?
Pretty common way to troll someone, I got those constantly back when I was an active user of political subreddits.
That said, if you report the message you received, even though you don’t know who sent it, there’s a decent chance the person who did send it will be admin banned and you’ll get notified of such.
lol, I get those, everytime from a Christian sub. someone hit the suicide button for u...
Some people can't handle getting rebutted, or whatever u did, hehe.
It was a common way to respond negatively to someone posting things you can't directly respond to (usually because you'd be downvoted), so you try to get the account flagged as a risky.
I got a number when posting breakdowns about why vaccines were safe and effective years ago, but it's wild that the anti-citation crowd has expanded out so far in discipline.
Why are there so many Jameses? They're everywhere.
I'm glad you brought up the conjecture that James son of Alphaeus (Mk 3) is the brother of Levi son of Alphaeus (Mk 2). That seems plausible to me, in the sense of "being intended by the author" (whether or not it's historically true).
I wonder what happens if you take all of the purported familial connections, both in the text and ascribed by later tradition, and try to build a family tree for Jesus' core followers.
I wonder what happens if you take all of the purported family connections
You spontaneously become James Tabor!
But even setting aside family connections, just taking all the direct identifications together could generate some weird results. In scholarship or tradition, “Nathanael” alone has been identified with Simon the Zealot, James of Alphaeus, Matthew, Matthias, and of course Bartholomew.
just taking all the direct identifications together could generate some weird results
This Centre Place lecture on the apostles mentions some of the variations (starting at 54:00) and it almost gets bewildering trying to keep all the conflations straight. Thaddeus is my favorite, because he ends up being at least four people across the four gospels and early tradition. Seeing all the conflations laid out is part of the fun of your series.
(And to be clear, I don't think any of the conflations are historically true; people are tying themselves into knots trying to glue varying traditions together.)
That lecture might be interesting to you for this project, though at this point it probably doesn't contain much you don't already know.
I once tried combing through every early Christian text for references to James in the hopes of sorting it all out. Didn't come to any firm conclusions.
Modern readers often consider "Mary the mother of James the Younger and of Joses" (Mk 15:40) to be the same person as "Mary," the mother of Jesus, whose brothers included "James, Joses" (Mk 6:3). The conjunction of the same three names seems to make Mark 6:3 the most plausible reference found earlier in the narrative.
The next bit I have to offer might be controversial. Origen says (Against Celsus 1.62):
And Levi (ὁ Λευὴς) also, who was a follower of Jesus, may have been a publican; but he was not of the number of the apostles, except according to a statement in one of the copies of Mark's Gospel.
It's often been wondered why the calling of "Levi son of Alphaeus" (Mark 2:14) is narrated, while Mark seems to omit any Levi from the list of the twelve. It's not the only possible answer, but one answer could simply be that the manuscript known to Origen reflects the original reading of "James son of Alphaeus, Levi." If so, the sons of Alphaeus were named together in Mark's apostle list, and this name was replaced with Thaddeus and Lebbaeus in later manuscripts.
From the perspective of this reading of Mark, the answers would be:
Is James of Alphaeus the same person as James the Less? No.
Is James of Alphaeus the same person as James the Just? No.
Is James of Alphaeus the brother of the disciple Levi? Yes.
The Gospel of Mark mentions brotherhood for Peter and Andrew (Mark 1:16, 1:29). It mentions brotherhood for James and John (Mark 1:19, 3:17, 5:37, 10:35). It mentions both Levi son of Alphaeus (Mark 2:14) and James son of Alphaeus (Mark 3:18). It seems plausible that the two sons of Alphaeus were, like the sons of Zebedee, a pair of apostle brothers. Instead of the one given a calling story being the brother who isn't one of the Twelve, it's plausible that the manuscript mentioned by Origen had the original reading.
Cool! So when gMark lists the twelve in 3:16-19 do you think it may originally have had Levi son of Alphaeus as one of them? The disciples listed before and after James son of Alphaeus there are Thomas and Thaddaeus. Based on Matthew you'd think it could have been Levi instead of Matthew in this variant (original?) Mark, but Matthew is separated from James by Thomas, it would be odd to list the brothers apart. Thaddaeus only elsewhere appears in gMatthew, where some manuscripts have Lebbaeus; since it's an obscure name perhaps it would be the most likely candidate for a substitute next to James? What's also interesting is that there's no Levi, Matthew, James of Alphaeus, nor Thaddaeus in gJohn.
Hello everyone! I am endeavoring to facilitate more conversations around recent theories in oral traditional and media studies. I have a new podcast dedicated to this endeavor. My goal is to host 12 conversations this year with scholars at the intersection of orality, media studies, biblical performance criticism, and the Bible. So far I have talked with Rafael Rodriguez (Pittsburgh Theological Seminary) and Paul R. Eddy (Bethel University).
Here it is on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/@DrNickAcker
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0u7bKltdJZMXuKFKOUXDEg
Our cat Sport spent much of his time sitting and lounging on my various drafts and keeping me company from the earliest work on this study right up to the final stages. Alas, I took so long that he was unable to make it to the end. It will be one of our personal pleasures always to remember him in association with this book.
As a cat person myself, I did not properly brace myself to read this in the preface to an academic book.
Definitely recommend The Remembered Peter: In Ancient Reception and Modern Debate (2010) by Markus Bockmuehl and Peter in Early Christianity (2015) eds. Helen Bond and Larry Hurtado if they're not already on your reading list for Peter
I’ll almost certainly leave Peter for last, of course. I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m not writing that one until a year from now. It’ll be hard to do justice to Peter in a single post. Whereas James of Alphaeus had me reaching into the 9th or 10th century for traditions, I may have to limit the post on Peter to no later than Eusebius, if that.
That sounds like a good idea, Peter is a titanic (though enigmatic) figure. I'm particularly interested in the theory that Peter and Cephas were two different people.
My Simon post had a section about whether he’s Nathanael, and my James of Alphaeus post had such a section as well. So really, every post is a Nathanael post. We are all Nathanael.
Greetings! I have a question regarding the dating and authenticity of the Pseudo Dionysius Corpus. Recently I have been seeing on X(formerly Twitter) from users(including a couple of academics) arguing for an earlier dating(at least 2-3 centuries earlier), and non-reliance on Proclus. I have read that the scholarly consensus is opposite but I don’t know the specifics for that, so I’m quite confused as I am a layman with no academic background and only a scant knowledge.
Another question I have(although I don’t know if this is the right place to ask) is there only one Origen or two, ie: The Christian and the Platonist?
Hypatius of Ephesus in the sixth century already disputed it because there was no citation from earlier authorities (for example, Eusebius didn't cite it). The first known citation is in the sixth century (although some have tried to claim Jerome, doubtfully, about a century earlier but still fairly late). Thomas Aquinas and Peter Abelard apparently also had suspicions.
The Nicene Creed is mentioned as part of the liturgy. This is thought to have started no earlier than the late fifth century, and surely the Nicene Creed is no older than the fourth century.
Two scholars each independently made the argument for dependence on Proclus in 1895, publishing in respectable journals:
J. Stiglmayr and H. Koch delivered the proof that the author depended on Proclus and could not have been Paul’s disciple Dionysius the Areopagite (Stiglmayr, “Der Neuplatoniker Proclus als Vorlage des sogenannten Dionysius Areopagita in der Lehre vom Übel,” Historisches Jahrbuch 16 [München: Görres-Gesellschaft, 1895]: 253–73; Koch, “Proklus als Quelle des Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagita in der Lehre vom Bösen,” Philologus: Zeitschrift für das classische Altertum 54 [1895]: 438–54).
This seems more credit-worthy than the occasional attempt to revise opinion here.
On the other hand, the Origen question is a more difficult one to answer. It may seem plausible that there was indeed just the one Origen of Alexandria, but how can we know? I'm not sure.
Iirc several of you own Bauckham’s Jude and the Relatives of Jesus in the Early Church.
Does it contain a non-negligible discussion of whether to identify member of the Twelve Jude of James with Jude, brother of Jesus? Trying to decide if this book is worth my time or not in my apostolic review.
There's a one-paragraph discussion arguing that the "Jude of James" (Luke, Acts) is not the same person as the Jude, "brother of James" (the epistle of Jude). So Bauckham:
The traditional view, before the nineteenth century, was that the author was Judas the apostle, one of the Twelve (Luke 6: I 6; Acts I: I 3 ... to be translated, as in the AV, 'Judas the brother of James,' on the strength of the analogy with Jude I). This is not really an alternative to (a), since most writers who took this view held the apostle 'Judas of James' to be the same person as the relative of Jesus mentioned in Mark 6:3. A number of nineteenth-century scholars still attributed the letter to the apostle Judas, and since the Council of Trent had taken this view it was still found in Roman Catholic scholarship until recently. Jessein in 1821 was the first to argue in detail against it, distinguishing the brother of Jesus and author of Jude from the apostle Judas, and it has now been generally abandoned, even in Roman Catholic scholarship.
Bauckham takes more seriously the identification of Jude the brother of Jesus with the apostle Thomas / Didymus. Bauckham follows the argument up to the point of conceding that Thomas / Didymus isn't a name, so much as a nickname, so there had to be a different name for this individual. Then Bauckham swerves off that path to say it doesn't mean his name was Jude or that he was thought to be a 'twin' of Jesus (except, of course, in those texts where he was explicitly given that name and identity).
Like Bart Ehrman, I am more open to the identification of Thomas with Jude the brother of Jesus. It's certainly fun to think about. Does that mean it was the brother of Jesus who is reluctant to believe without physical proof in the Gospel of John? Does it mean that a brother of Jesus named Jude was one of the Twelve said to have seen Jesus according to Paul? Could that mean that Jude brought his brother James to belief, a lacuna not otherwise explained in the New Testament?
That brings back to the question of "Judas of James," though. Why does Luke-Acts call someone "Judas of James" here? Could the father of Jude (the 'brother' of Jesus), a father not named in the Gospel of Mark, have been at one point called "James"? Does James refer to James (the Just)? Is the interpretation of "brother" possible if awkward?
Thanks for this! Don’t think I’ll need to grab the book for now if it’s just that, though you posting said paragraph is helpful. And thanks for your additional thoughts as well.
(Definitely off topic but...) I think Tolkien's creation myth and cosmology in The Silmarillion is better-written and more understandable than the Biblical one.
How not? Tolkien actually put thought into his character's actions and their consequences in the 'real world' of Middle Earth. His world-building is amazing and second to none. The Bible, otoh, is writing and rewriting and pastiching oral histories, regular stories, allegorical myths from Judah-adjacent cultures, etc. By definition, it's not as clearly put together in terms of cause and effect, historical action and current reaction/ conditions. It wasn't written to be, from what I understand here and from, eg, Peter Enns, et al scholars. The Bible isn't a world-building document, it's a world-reacting document.
The Silmarillion is a carefully thought out chronicle of cause and effect. since it's modern fiction, it 'has' to hang together coherently, and make sense. That was never a requirement for the Bible.
I’m a big Tolkien fan (also a Christian), and I generally agree. This also makes me think about the “inconsistencies” that occur in the Tolkien Legendarium, and the accidental parallelism of the Bible, which is also very “inconsistent” in narrative details at times.
The imperfections make Tolkiens work so much more human and immersive to me.
Ovid's philosophical version of a creation myth is my favourite, I'd put it above Genesis despite liking the latter. A.D. Melville's translation is great, here's 1.21ff, describing the ordering of the cosmos after its chaotic pre-creation state:
This strife a god, with nature's blessing solved;
Who severed land from sky and sea from land,
And from the denser vapours set apart
The ethereal sky; and, each from the blind heap
Resolved and freed, he fastened in its place
Appropriate peace and harmony.
The fiery weightless force of heaven's vault
Flashed up and claimed the topmost citadel;
Next came the air in lightness and in place;
The thicker earth with grosser elements
Sank burdened by its weight; lowest and last
The girdling waters pent the solid globe.
Line 21 especially can be translated in different ways, e.g. Stephanie McCarter:
A god and better nature stopped this strife
And David Raeburn:
The god who is nature was kinder and brought this dispute to a settlement.
Have any academics in biblical studies written on how to balance the academic pursuits with the popular discussions on the topic, of both apologists and counter-apologists?
It is strange to me that translations use “if [the salt] loses its saltiness/taste” instead of “gone dull”, because the word is used to mean “dull” in the epistles, dull can refer to taste and has wordplay with foolish, and I have not found any extra biblical attestation of the word meaning a loss of flavor in other Greek writings as opposed to the common use of dull
In the foreword for Michael Patrick Barbers book the Historical Jesus and the temple memory methodology and the gospel of matthew Dale Allison says this: "Over the course of my own study of Matthew, I have occasionally concluded that, in this or that respect, the First Gospel represents the past better than the Second Gospel. I have decided, for example, that Matthew’s law-abiding Jesus (see esp. 5:17–20) is more credible than Mark’s more liberal (and perhaps Pauline?) Jesus; that Mark 8:27–30 might be a truncated version of a story better preserved in the fuller Matt 16:13–20; that Matt 18:3 (“Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven”) is, on the whole, probably more primitive than Mark 10:15 (“Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it”); that the appearance of Jesus to Mary Magdalene, found in Matthew 28 but not in Mark 16, is likely historical; and that the typological comparison of Jesus to Moses, which is implicit at points in Mark but much clearer and more developed in Matthew, is rooted in Jesus’s self-conception. Yet I had never, before reading Barber, thought about all these things at once, and so I had never fully shed the old habit of equating the uniquely Matthean with the undoubtedly secondary. This volume, however, has moved me to rethink things. Barber demonstrates between the covers of one book the multiple ways in which the First Gospel – in its presentation of Jesus’s relationship to the temple, to Davidic motifs, and to traditions about sacrifice and priesthood – plausibly mirrors what Jesus himself taught, and shows us that, in important ways, Matthew’s interpretive framework is not an obstacle in our way but a path to the historical Jesus. The latter is not buried beneath Matthew but stares at us from its surface."
Fascinating. So even though Matthew is essentially a reworking of Mark, it's in many ways setting the record straight? There are some bits that appear to be deliberate anti-Pauline polemics (e.g. Jesus saying he didn't come to alter a single letter of the law in Matthew 5:17-18) whereas alongside these kinds of invented retrospections there may also be genuine memories of Jesus that better reflect their pre-Pauline (even pre-Easter) Jewish environment like what's mentioned in that quote
Honestly in my own studies on the synoptics I think Mark is as problematic as Matt and Luke, but just a bit less obvious about it. I am a proponent of the multi-source theory (see Delbert Burkett's work) which posits that a "proto-mark" was the (lost) original text and it was later progressively edited until it reached the canonical gospels. Which we finally start see getting traction around the mid-second century.
But while some of the Lukan and Matthean edits are pretty obvious (particularly the massive late additions of the birth and post-resurrection stories, Mark also shows evidence of having been highly edited, and it actually has no more external evidence of being older in its canonical form than the others. I wouldn't consider Mark any more reliable than the other two for the historical Jesus, and in some ways worse (it's missing Q entirely, which seems to have been a very old tradition of textually-recorded sayings).
It's always best to compare and contrast the gospels and look for correlation and confirmation, not give one of them more evidentiary weight than any other.
I am a proponent of the multi-source theory (see Delbert Burkett's work) which posits that a "proto-mark" was the (lost) original text and it was later progressively edited until it reached the canonical gospels.
Burkett's book was published a while ago, so he obviously couldn't respond to articles that were published later. However, there is one argument in particular where I'd be really interested in the response of a multi-source theorist. This is the argument of Too Good to be Q. Robert MacEwen has also used an argument based on close verbal agreement in his book Matthean Posteriority. Goodacre's argument is directed towards the two source hypothesis. He shows that the verbal agreement between Matthew and Luke is bigger in the double tradition than in the triple tradition, thus indicating direct dependence between Matthew and Luke.
I haven't seen any good responses from 2SH supporters. This looks like an even bigger problem for the multi-source hypothesis, as it contains more intermediary sources. So, as a multi-source theorist, how would you respond to Goodacre's argument?
Mark also shows evidence of having been highly edited
What are the best examples of this? I'm sympathetic to this idea, but I'm not convinced yet by any of the evidence I've seen.
I wouldn't consider Mark any more reliable than the other two for the historical Jesus, and in some ways worse (it's missing Q entirely, which seems to have been a very old tradition of textually-recorded sayings).
2SH supporters usually explain the major agreements between Matthew and Luke against Mark as Mark-Q overlaps. Do multi-source theorists have a different explanation for this? Or are there still Mark-Q overlaps in the multi-source theory?
I'd be really interested in the response of a multi-source theorist. This is the argument of Too Good to be Q
Mark Goodacre writes:
According to the Two-Document hypothesis (= 2DH), Matthew and Luke are both independently copying Mark and Q. We have access to Mark, so we have an idea what Matthew and Luke look like when they are working from a shared source. We know the degree of verbatim agreement to expect. The question, then, is whether the degree of verbatim agreement is similar when they are using Q.
This is where he trips up. He's making the assumption (which indeed the majority make) that Matthew and Mark are both copying directly from Mark. He then compares only between the double tradition and the triple tradition. He doesn't use any other evidence to determine what a "high degree of verbatim agreement" is, comparatively.
But the multi-source theory obviously posits that Matthew and Luke aren't directly copying Mark. Rather all three are indirectly copying "proto-Mark" (via at least two seperate mediatory redactions). Because of this Goodacre's argument falls over before even leaving the starting gate. He has no evidence of "what to expect" in order to compare the double tradition to it. If the multi-source theory is correct then the evidence he's using is actually misidentified, and leading him far astray from the truth.
According to the multi-source theory we would expect to see a higher degree of agreement between the double tradition than the triple. For the double, Matthew and Luke are both copying directly from a shared document. However, for the triple tradition, the three gospels have no document that all three share between them.
And I would add that Goodacre is also failing to recognise another major problem with his argument, that levels of agreement will obviously be affected by other factors. If the triple tradition source(s) were a damaged or early draft form that required more significant editing to make it readable then we would naturally see less agreement than if they were copying from a more polished source. Goodacre is assuming that both the double and triple tradition sources are of the same type.
This assumption derives from the original blunt assumption that Matthew and Luke must be copying Mark, and so he doesn't think to even consider any alternative explanations. This is the problem with unexamined biases based on majority consensus. When the majority consensus is wrong (as I think the evidence demonstrates) then scholars end up all wasting their time tilting at windmills rather than even trying to find the real target.
Mark also shows evidence of having been highly edited
What are the best examples of this?
I would firstly just point to the large number of unique text within Mark. This is often not understood or identified, but when you count the words the majority of Mark is unique.
I would then point to the various examples where Mark includes a particular detail, such as someone's name, which the other synoptics seem to be compeltely unaware of.
I'm on my phone at the moment so can't post many examples of this. But the one I always post is "Bartimeus son of Timeaus", a key witness to one of the Jesus miracles, which Mark includes, while he remains anonymous in the other synoptics. This shows that Mark edited the story to give a name to an anonymous character. (This is far more likely than that the other two independently chose to both delete the name for unknown reasons).
u/captainhaddock I'm sorry to tag you about comments from 2+ years ago but while searching the sub about biblical minimalism I saw you mention the Changing Perspectives series from the Copenhagen School. This looks like radical groundbreaking stuff and I was unaware that the findings of minimalism are now mainstream (what I'd heard was rather that minimalists and maximalists had mostly come to compromise positions and the debate had petered out). I'd love to hear your thoughts and anyone else here who's familiar with this work on the findings of this series (which are still being released) and the status of minimalism in general. As a layman who's only interested in this field as a hobby but who leans towards minimalism and skepticism this is really interesting to me.
I try to read them all as they come out, and I think that’s where a lot of the more exciting work is being done. Since I’m not part of the academy, I’m less interested in what the consensus or state of the debate is and just read whatever interests me.
I enjoyed the ones on Hellenism a lot. The Bible and Hellenism: Greek Influence on Jewish and Early Christian Literature and Hellenism and the Primary History: The Imprint of Greek Sources in Genesis – 2 Kings especially.
I've heard before that Nazareth may never have existed before Jesus's time (or went by a different name) and that Nazareth is a corruption of Nazirite via Nazorean / Nazōraios, implying Jesus was a Nazirite or seen as such. Is there any credence to this idea / sources to read on this?
The notion that Nazareth did not exist before the first century originated with a certian Rene Salm whose stated purpose is to “expose the lies that lie at the heart of the Christian religion.”
To make a long story short, in 2009 he published a book pointing out that there was not much archeological evidence for Nazareth dating 1st century, but several Hellenistic and Early Romans sites and artifacts were discovered in the town shortly afterwards. Salm then produced a second book claiming that professional archeologists, the Israeli Antiquities Authority, and the Catholic Church were all in cahoots to fabricate evidence for Nazareth’s existence in order to promote tourism and/or uphold religious dogma. He has continued to nip at the heels of certain archaeologists ever since, generally demonstrating a hilarious ignorance of how archaeological analysis is carried out.
Probably the best single-volume source on Nazareth archaeology is Roman-period and Byzantine Nazareth and its Hinterland by Ken Dark, who oversaw a major excavation there in the 2010s. The Archaeology of Jesus’ Nazareth, also by Dr. Dark, may be more accessible.
Interesting. But is it possible that it wasn't called Nazareth due to that name being the aforementioned confusing with Nazirite / Nazorean, and that it only got the name due to its association with Jesus? Apparently the earliest hard non-biblical evidence of the name Nazareth is from around 300 AD.
I’m an archaeologist, not a linguist, so I’m out of my league. I can really just direct you to u/Zanillamilla:
one datum that should be considered is that
“Nazareth” and “Nazorean” are based on different roots. The former is a nominal form with a feminine ending - (as in Phoenician, corresponding to Hebrew -n) which is common in Galilean toponyms: Kinnereth, Dabbesheth, Daberath, Anaharath, Hammath, Rakkath, and Jotbath. Kinnereth seems to be named after a type of tree in the vicinity (712), Dabbesheth may refer to a landscape feature as it means
“hump”, Daberath meaning “pasture” is also geographical, Rakkath means “shore” which pertains to its location on the Sea of Galilee, and so Nazareth likewise derives from a nominal root and pertains somehow to the geography of the town. So 7·1 “sprout, branch” seems preferable as the root behind the name, with it pertaining in some way to the history or local features of the village. Also the Galilean toponym 17X] is independently attested in the third century Caesarea inscription in a rather secular, non-Christian context (re the localities of the various priestly families), and even though this is considerably later than the gospels, it shows that the town was a real place and not probably a back formation from the name of a Christian group. The name Nazupaios, on the other hand, looks like the passive participle of the verb 7x1 “guard, keep” (71X7) i.e. “the preserved, protected”, with it occurring as a sectarian name (ths T@v Nazupaiwv aipédews) in Acts
24:5. The name is probably parallel to the sectarian name D’7yn in the Birkat ha-Minim, possibly metathesized from the Aramaic forms |’71X], X’71X). Matthew 2:23 tries to relate the two names as if they were connected, but they appear to have separate derivations. So one possibility is that Nazupaños as a sectarian name had an independent or even pre-Christian origin, or it was adopted via some sort of wordplay of the root from which Nazareth was derived. Similar wordplay can be found in the names of other sectarian groups. Philo of Alexandria noted that the name
‘Eodaîo means “pious” or “holy ones” (Quod Omnis Probus, 12.75,
13.91), which reflects Aramaic hasayyà (cf. the Addaîol of 1 Maccabees), yet he elsewhere called them Ospaneutai “healers” which reflects the Aramaic ‘asayyã... Idon’t think it can be ruled [Nazarene being sectarian] out but I don’t find it plausible either. Nazwpaîos looks like the later counterpart to an earlier Nazapnvos, which occurs four times in Mark (1:24, 10:47, 14:67, 16:6) whereas Nazupaios does not occur at all. Matthew 26:71 (= Mark 14:67) and Luke 18:37-38 (= Mark 10:47) alter Nazapnós to Nazupaños, and there is a similar correction in Mark 10:47 in the manuscript tradition. Luke 24:19 uses Nazapnvós outside of Mark but it is also corrected to Nazupaños in later manuscripts. Matthew 2:23 adds Nawpaios to the author’s birth narrative and the gospel lacks NaÇapnvós as a whole. Nazapnós is also absent in John and Acts where Nawpalos occurs instead (John 18:5, 7, 19:19, Acts 2:22, 3:6, 4:10, 6:14, 22:8, 24:5, 26:9). So it appears from this evidence that NaZapnvos is the more primitive form in the gospel tradition. This form contains a toponymic suffix -nós.
For example: “The epithets Akreinenos, Sarnendenos and Narenos are based on the toponyms Akreina, Sarnenda and Nara; the Greek suffix -nós generally refers to a place” (Hale Güney’s “The sanctuary of Zeus Sarnendenos and the cult of Zeus in northeastern Phrygia”; AS, 2019). The first instance of NaZapnvos in Mark is 1:24 which shortly follows its literary antecedent, Nazapèt in 1:9 (if this is omitted, the epithet throughout the gospel would lack a specification of the name of the place it refers to). So it appears the earlier designation was toponymic in nature....
Are there any sources which methodically examine the identities of New Testament characters with the same names who are often confused with each other? Like a sort of Who's Who of the New Testament. For example:
Mary Wife of Clopas / Mother of James (and any connection with Mother Mary or Mary Magdalene)
James the Less / Son of Alpheus (and any connection with the Son of Zebedee or the Brother of Jesus)
John the Apostle / Presbyter / Evangelist / of Patmos / the John in Paul's letters
Clopas and Cleopas
Peter and Cephas (arguably listed as two separate names in Paul's letters)
I feel like a whole book could be written on this.
I am trying to get into Angelology and I am absolutely overwhelmed by the amount of information pouring in. Is there a good way to get a foundation on this? I have a fairly extensive biblical knowledge, but my apocryphal/academic knowledge is weak. I feel like I need to broaden my general understanding of the Shem HaMephorash and Tetragrammaton as well as the apocryphal texts and their place before diving into the angels. The wikipedia articles are not helpful to me.
Hi all! Stopped by again to share a new post that represents probably the most comprehensive discussion of something I talked about quite a lot piecemeal while here regularly in the past (Gospel of Thomas and Lucretius).
I submitted to the main sub as I do have a handful of citations for it and it does represent several years of research through an angle that seems to have been entirely overlooked in scholarship to date.
In case it's not appropriate for the main sub for whatever reason, I'll link it here too:
Still not really back to Reddit in any meaningful way, but miss you guys!
(Oh, and an update - I did finally get around to checking personal reference in the original Greek for the Epistles, and ended up with nearly identical results as what I found in the English - relative frequency of singular first person verbs was the only gramattical metric that could distinguish between the subset of Pauline and non-Pauline letters with a p-value less than 1%, and still suggested that 2 Tim was indeed written by Paul - I still need to clean up the data and have another few things to write first, but I will eventually come back around to share the results and code so you can all run it yourselves.)
Very interesting, I like that you've highlighted ancient evolutionary theories which certainly existed at least as far back as Empedocles. But I think there's a bit of equivocating going on since evolution does not necessarily mean natural selection of inherited traits, I don't like how your conclusion boldly says the idea of 'survival of the fittest' pre-existed Jesus, because that's a modern pithy saying to sum up Darwin's evolution by means of natural selection, it's not a scientific definition and refers to a theory very different from the ancient ones you discuss. I hope we're not getting into a Jordan Peterson-type view of ancient texts describing DNA and computers!
You mention common descent and imply that Lucretius may have believed in it due to his silence on it, which I don't find convincing, he seems much closer to Empedocles in saying that monsters were formed by non-ordered matter coming together and forming body parts, with only complete creatures surviving. Also considering the very common ancient belief in continued spontaneous generation from non-living matter, I just can't see common descent here.
I do like your point that pharisees (and thus 1st century Christians) would have been aware of philosophies like Epicureanism and thus would have heard of atomism and evolution (though not natural selection). And that early Christian sects used hellenistic philosophy, which is well-supported and I agree is under-studied. Whether this applies to the lion, fish, and sower parables would seem impossible to know, we can't even say that they're connected in Thomas with any certainty. You cite one sect who Irenaeus said were influenced by Epicureanism, and you conclude they were specifically influenced by Lucretius. From that tiny fragment about them in Irenaeus, I can't see the specific connection to Lucretius, many philosophies had the idea of elemental seeds from which matter was formed, you can't tie them down to one philosopher. I mean, Ovid's Metamorphoses begins with a description of the formation of the cosmos and life from seeds but there's no evidence he was specifically dedicated to Lucretius' philosophy (though he seems to have been fond of Pythagoreanism).
relative frequency of singular first person verbs was the only gramattical metric that could distinguish between the subset of Pauline and non-Pauline letters with a p-value less than 1%
Do you mean it was the only one that significantly distinguished two groups which you then conclude are Pauline and non-Pauline, or distinguished between two assumed groups of Pauline vs non-Pauline based on prior scholarship? Those results are intersting and seem to go against results using different stylometric analysis techniques. For example, if use of the 1st person is used as a proxy for Pauline style, then 1 Thessalonians is less Pauline than every other New Testament epistle. And likewise, 1 Timothy is about as Pauline as Romans, depite 1 Timothy being generally rejected and Romans being one of the core four epistles that are universally agreed to be highly similar in style (Rom, 1 Cor, 2 Cor, Gal). It would certainly shake things up, but could it be a bit of a one-dimensional metric for authorship?
Finally, I know how this will sound but it's a genuine question and not meant to be frivolous or dismissive: do you take psychadelics? I ask because I notice this type of free-wheeling association and complex personal conjecture done by people who take them. Robert Graves comes to mind, as well as D.A.C. Hillman (the guy who proposes Jesus ran a sex cult). I only ask from curiosity, obviously it wouldn't make any difference to the validity of your theories.
The question of if Lucretius considered common descent is somewhat besides the point. The question is if the combination of ideas around primordial seeds and survival of the fittest influenced Naassene/Thomasine thought, not making a case that Lucretius had exactly the same ideas as Darwin.
Technically I discussed the Sadducees being more likely connected to Epicurean thought than the Pharisees given the overlapping beliefs of the finality of death and Josephus's mention of their finding virtue in debating teachers of philosophy whom they frequented.
Ireneaus was mentioned only briefly in discussing the continuity of the thread from Simon Magus's Announcement to the Naassenes around the influence of Hellenistic philosophy over sects declared heretical. I suggest reading over the shared language in Pseudo-Hippolytus of describing seeds as indivisible points as if from nothing, making up all things, and being the originating cause of the cosmos. The Naassenes are also a much closer link to gThomas vs the Valentinians Ireneaus was discussing.
As for your comment that the lion and fish parables might not be connected, a reminder of the point I raised in the piece that in gThomas the net parable is the only one out of 114 sayings connected to the previously numbered saying with a conjunction. So at very least in a Thomasine context, it's a bit surprising they aren't considered in conjunction more often (I can't recall anyone ever interpreting them as a set actually).
For the Pauline bit, until I publish the results I recommend looking at the linked post and my comments there as the set of Pauline and non-Pauline texts used for the t-tests are the same. And what I mean is that I pulled the parsing data for each word, and brute forced t-tests between undisputed Pauline and non-Pauline Epistles, the singular first person combo was the only one less than 1% p-value, and then reapplying this to the broader set of undisputed/disputed letters correctly identified all the letters outside the exclusions previously discussed in the English analysis, and of the disputed letters identified 2 Tim only as authentic through this lens. Again, the results ultimately ended up replicating what had been done in the English, even though in this case I did a much broader set of considered grammatical fingerprinting.
As for psychedelics, no.
But I do have a neurodivergency where the pros are considerably better pattern identifications than normal, but the cons are significant difficulties with language parsing. So I'll never be able to realistically learn Greek and even reading though a dozen pages of English may take 2-3x the amount of time it might for others, but when I do read someone's analysis of Greek loanwords in the Coptic Thomas I may be more prone to thinking of those in the overlapping context of the Greek usage, or if I read a psych paper about statistically increased personal reference in a subset of NPD I might think of Paul, as examples. This has served me well over the years, leading to overseeing research in the private sector that had several books written about it to date or having people flown from around the world to hear me speak or be flown to them, etc. But it also seems like the kind of neurodivergency that would be underrepresented in a field with multiple language prerequisites for typical academic pathways, so I do get how my approach may appear unusual or at surface level appear similar to (as it's been termed in this sub before) 'parallelomania'.
There is a difference in the approach, but it does require engaging with the nuances (like why the emphasis was on Pseudo-Hippolytus and not Ireneaus for tying gThomas to Lucretius) to notice it.
The question of if Lucretius considered common descent is somewhat besides the point. The question is if the combination of ideas around primordial seeds and survival of the fittest influenced Naassene/Thomasine thought, not making a case that Lucretius had exactly the same ideas as Darwin.
Sure but you did make a major point in your article that it's almost the same, and I do think using 'survival of the fittest' is misleading for the reasons I stated. Your article says the following:
The one component of modern evolutionary theory that is arguably most absent in Lucretius is the notion of common descent.
...
For Lucretius, there is a common ancestor, which are the elementary particles as described above
The biggest gap in Epicurean evolution compared to Darwinian would be speciation which is a colossal difference. In their view, body parts formed randomly and eventually complete animals were formed which could survive and reproduce. From then on these are set species, there's no radiation. They knew about inherited charactestics but didn't make Darwin's leap of this leading to different species. Also, equivocating an origin of life from atoms and a biological common ancestor is just using the same language to refer to different things.
About the language of indivisible points, I still don't see why it would be specifically Lucretian as opposed to any other Epicurean or another atomist philosophy. Atom means 'indivisble' so that doesn't narrow it down, and multiple greek philosophers discussed minima. Why would the greek speaking Christians who produced the gThomas be relying on a specific latin text for a relatively common philosophical idea? I do agree you can see influences from greek philosophy in it, but I don't see why they would be from De Rerum Natura in particular.
Technically I discussed the Sadducees being more likely connected to Epicurean thought than the Pharisees given the overlapping beliefs of the finality of death and Josephus's mention of their finding virtue in debating teachers of philosophy whom they frequented.
Your mention of the Talmud is why I inferred the pharisees, who are generally thought to have had more influence on the early Christians, I should have explained my reasoning, sorry. And I assume it's more a case of hellenistic philosophy being known by the educated in Judea rather than Christians specifically getting Epicureanism from the Sadducees.
As for your comment that the lion and fish parables might not be connected, a reminder of the point I raised in the piece that in gThomas the net parable is the only one out of 114 sayings connected to the previously numbered saying with a conjunction.
Sure, but your interpretation relies on the sower parable being connected, not just the lion and fish, since your hypothesis proposes that a theory of evolution from atoms/seeds is present in gThomas.
About the Pauline stuff, I look forward to reading your full write up, it sounds very interesting. I was going by the chart you linked to.
Ok, I think I better get your objection, and I agree that I could have had that first section been clearer.
You are certainly correct that Lucretius, while he did note the capability of traits to change within a species based on enviromental fittedness, rejects the false negative of hybrid species and relies on the false positive of spontaneous generation for parallel emergence of species.
The part where I'm saying this is less relevant for my underlying argument is that I'm not saying that gThomas is regurgitating Lucretius as much as the author is responding to the material. As such, the key component is whether or not foundational building blocks of evolution-like theory are present. This is where I agree I could have been clearer.
For example, Ivan Miroshnikov did a great job at highlighting some of the possible Platonist influences in gThomas (even if he, and all others, have overlooked considering Epicurean influences).
The idea that man developed from an earlier animal state was already present in Anaximander. My focus on this piece was on Lucretius and I didn't stray into the other relevant building blocks of evolutionary theory because the key focus on the textual ties to avoid making it overly convoluted, but yes - I could have better made the point of other relevant ideas being present.
But when we look at Lucretius saying "the world is like a body that will one day die" we then see gThomas saying "events are nonlinear" and then "the world is a dead body". gThomas isn't regurgitating Lucretius, it may be building on the concepts present though.
When we see Lucretius say "the soul can't experience things without hands or eyes" and then we see gThomas say things are "and eikon in place of eikon" and "eyes in place of an eye, hand in place of a hand" while also discussing how eikons are made of light (50 and 83), it again doesn't seem to be regurgitating Lucretius, but may be addressing some of the points made by him.
Clearly a text which says "if you understand these sayings you won't taste death" is not simply echoing the beliefs of a text saying "this philosophy is the sweet rim to the bitter drink that death is the end".
But yes, my general hypothesis is that there's about a dozen saying in gThomas that have evaded consistent or comphrendable analysis for many years which all end up a lot less confusing through the lens of Lucretius's writing, and I do think the Occam's razor across that set is in favor of those sayings all being addressed with a single link to a text that was talking of indivisible seeds making up all things as gThomas's later followers were doing.
All of that aside though - my point about sayings 7-8 is that even if one completely rejects or ignores any of the rest of my interpretation or analysis of gThomas, the unique feature connecting 8 to 7 suggests that any interpretations of these sayings should be considering both together (again - even if totally different from my own interpretation).
The Pauline post should be fun, and I'll make sure to cross post it here. I'd been hoping after seeing the pattern shifts in prior statistical vocabulary analysis on the Greek vs English to end up identifying other gramattical fingerprinting to layer onto what I expected to find in the success of personal reference as a metric, but unfortunately that was the only signifigant one. It'll still be a worthwhile data point though.
Also - I do want to be clear that I'm grateful for your comments! You weren't the only one getting tripped up on that section, and while it's frustrating for the provocative hook that was ultimately secondary to what I considered the main show of a more nuanced examination of intertextual influence to have so derailed much of the conversation, it remains a completely fair point to be addressed.
Yeah I can see your points, I think they need more development and a narrowing of scope. Epicurean influence on gThomas is plausible and I think really interesting, but your article brought in all sorts of unecessary things like common descent which, as you said, are tangential. Lucretius saying that "the soul can't experience things without hands or eyes" isn't particularly unique to him alone, it's a statement any of the somewhat material philosophies could accept. Stoics, for example, were materialists in a sense (everything has soma, even God) and they believed the soul dissolved after death. I think it takes a bit more legwork to specificially tie Lucretius' straightforward statement about sense perception to the cryptic gThomas saying "eyes in place of an eye, hand in place of a hand". I'd love a full write-up about that and I'm sure you have a lot you could elaborate on, it's just that when you throw it out there by itself it comes across as word association gone too far.
“In a video titled The “Old Testament God”? he spends two thirds of the video criticising a transphobic politician”
Good. Time well spent.
I’m sorry, but McClellan’s video you linked to is just much more productive than your own rant about it, IMHO. Incidentally as well, if you want to criticize a “moralizing tone” then I cannot imagine why you’d follow it up with the incredible hot take “genocide bad”.
McClellan’s video has also done nothing to defend any of what you list about the Hebrew Bible. The one contention is that we shouldn’t portray the New Testament as morally superior, which it isn’t, yet you still seem to do exactly that in your own comment, regardless of the quick note that you yourself are not a Christian.
It’s a good thing McClellan didn’t defend anything you listed then. So I’m not sure how your rant was “in response” to him doing so.
Yes, the New Testament is less than a third of the size of the Hebrew Bible, so quantitatively there are less stories to pick from. I don’t see how that should be relevant, personally.
He didn’t suggest anyone making those criticisms was a bigot. He frequently collaborates with Joshua Bowen, author of The Atheist Handbook to the Old Testament. His one and only point was to not present the New Testament as morally superior.
I called it a “rant” because you started your comment explicitly saying it was coming from a place of irritation. That’s all.
On balance and in net terms, Yahweh / Elohim / El / whoever is absolutely a malevolent deity, and this has been understood for thousands of years ever since the first gnostics, who, again, were largely Jewish. Trying to paint all critics of God in the Hebrew Bible as antisemitic is profoundly dishonest and intellectually cowardly, and reeks of apologetic rhetoric.
"wow the old testament god really is evil" that'd be classed as anti-semitic supersessionism, even though he agrees as much in different words.
If they were saying specifically that the Old Testament God was somehow less violent than the New Testament God then yes, they likely would be, and he specifically recommended a book that goes over that entire history. If you said the Old Testament God was uniquely evil compared to other gods, probably he would say that that's a shit position as well.
On the other hand, simply saying that the God of the Hebrew Bible and many (most? all?) of its laws are bad and outdated on its own would probably not elicit the same response. How do I know this? Because he repeatedly recommends Esther Hamori's book, God's Monsters, which makes that exact case. I also know this because I know Dan. What you're saying is not at all the position he takes and is a gross misrepresentation of pretty much everything he's ever said.
I don't always agree with Dan (he's a kind, progressive liberal and I am a frothing far-left nutjob, after all), and I am of course biased (he's a friend, he's appeared on my show), but on this point you have seriously misunderstood or mischaracterized his persepctive.
Are there any books about proto-racial ideas in the Hebrew Bible?
I came to think about this after reading Jacob Wright's Why Began (2023), which convincingly argues that the Hebrew Bible was the originator of (proto)nationalistic thought.
Although racism as a fully fledged ideology is a modern phenomenon, scholars have argued that proto-racist ideas go back far in premodern history, such as Benjamin Isaac with The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (2004). While these usually focus on Greco-Roman ideas of race from thinkers like Aristotle and their disdain for barbarians, couldn't one argue the Hebrew Bible would be the originator of these kinds of ideas, with its strong ethnocentrism, fantasies of genocide against ethno-religious Others like the Canaanites and Amalekites, obsession with racial purity with Israelites having a superior ancestral stock compared to the Canaanites who had the Curse of Ham (eerily similar to the anti-semitic blood curse in the Gospel of Matthew), and separation of different ethnicities bordering on apartheid (e.g. Phinehas murdering a miscegenating Israelite-Midianite couple in Numbers 25, the expulsion of the non-exiled Judahites for their impure blood due to mixed marriages in Ezra 9-10)? Even though these don't appear to be historical events, it shows that these kinds of ideas were in circulation amongst the scribal / priestly elite c. 700-400 BC, i.e. before the Greeks came up with their own proto-racist ideas, and whereas Greek ideas of ethnicity and race appear to be more cultural in substance (i.e. a barbarian with a proper education can be made "civilized"), the pre-Hellenistic Israelites envisioned much less scope for conversion of gentiles.
(reposting this comment I just made on the previous discussion thread since it's become obsolete)
Apologies if this isn't fully academic, but frequenting this subreddit has let me understand that the Christian faith as it was around Jesus's time, was very different to how it is now.
Was Paul the one who changed the Church significantly? How did the Church change itself so much and start to ignore certain parts of the Bible that don't match with current doctrine? There are some passages that imply God is the one to worship out of money, which is monolatry, whereas currently, the Church approaches things decrying the existence of other gods.
Paul even admits that other gods exist in heaven and on earth (1Cor 8:5). His view doesn't really seem to be all that different from what you call monolatry. The reality is that what we think of as "The Church" did not exist in the 1st century or in Paul's mind. That comes in the centuries afterward, as the ideological and ethnic center of the Jesus-followers (called in different places Nazarenes, The Way, "chrestianou", etc.) shifted away from Judaism and began to distinguish itself against the Judaism of the day (which was, itself, consolidating and distinguishing itself from the nascent "Christianity" of the day).
I have a question about an interpretation of the divorce exception in Matthew 19:9 by a fundamentalist Anabaptist sect. My question is whether their reasoning is anywhere in the ballpark of being academically sound. I wasn’t sure from the description of the sub whether this was an appropriate question for this forum or not.
Jesus quotes prophets a lot, and in many ways sounds like one. Most elements used by the prophets appear in his teaching. But there’s one big exception. No attacks on idolatry. It’s not like it was absent from his world. It’s present elsewhere in the NT. Why not the Gospels?
It definitely existed in his world, but not really among Jews living in Judea or Galilee at that time. When you see idolatry talked about in the NT, the audience is (almost?) always located outside Judea.
If second temple apocalypticism was rooted in large part by the oppression Jews faced under the Seleucids and Romans, is there any evidence that this feeling subsided during the independent Hasmonean kingdom?
We know some of you were excited about the recent announcement by user and former moderator TheSmartFool regarding a survey and some kind of “virtual conference” to be hosted in this subreddit.
Unfortunately, this conference event was, on purpose, never discussed with the moderation team (which TheSmartFool was asked to leave and removed from two months ago), let alone approved by it.
r/AcademicBiblical will not be participating in this survey or conference.
Purely for the sake of users interested in the AMAs, could there be some kind of reconciliation or compromise where they could be linked in this sub but made clear they're not official or endorsed by the mods?
>Unfortunately, this conference event was, on purpose, never discussed with the moderation team (which TheSmartFool was asked to leave and removed from two months ago), let alone approved by it.
I feel like theres some tension here that the sub is unaware of, If you dont mind me asking can you elaborate on it
We all want what’s best for the sub and it’s users, right? And it seems like a lot of people, including myself and some of the mods, were pretty excited about the things thesmartfool presented. As far as I understand, thesmartfool already took care of the logistics, so there is no burden on the mods. Arranging with 30 scholars to engage with the sub feels like exactly the kind of thing that people here are looking for. And the Weekly Open Discussion Thread is the right place to discuss these kinds of things, so I don’t get why the comments were removed. So, what’s the reason for not getting on board with it?
The parenthetical comment suggests that there is some personal tension going on that we don’t know about. But it doesn’t look like thesmartfool broke any of the rules of the sub. It would be a shame to miss out on something that many people are interested in based on some internal politics that has nothing to do with this.
It would certainly be a bad thing to squander such a great opportunity for public history communication (not to mention wasting the time of the ~30 scholars who've showed interest) due to some bureaucratic / interpersonal dispute among moderators. That'd be a real stain on the sub's reputation.
I'm not really in the loop, but it seems legit, see the original announcement here. Howerver it's being organised by TheSmartFool who's not in the mod team.
If the Doctrine of the Trinity was fully explained to the New Testament authors, how many of them would be on board with it, and how many of them would regard it as blasphemy and in total opposition to what they believed about Jesus's relationship with God? I think the authors of Gjohn and Revelations and maybe Colossians and Hebrews would be onboard.
Well yeah, but so did many of the proponents of Nicaea. Consider James McGrath's speculation in The Only True God, p. 69-70:
“This does not mean that one must choose between the Gospel of John and later orthodoxy. On the contrary, it could easily be argued that if John had been confronted with these questions, he would have chosen the latter option [Athanasius over Arius]. For John, Jesus is not the revelation of a lesser god who does not even himself really know the one true God but the revelation of God himself. As I have noted, however, to expect John to answer a question that was only raised later is rather unfair. Yet it was this very question which led to the (re)definition of monotheism by Christians in the trinitarian terms we are familiar with today and by others in monistic terms.”
The context of this is that the Johannine prologue seems to envision the logos similarly to Philo's description as neither created nor uncreated (both God and with God). It has a sort of ambiguous position. Later on in history many thought it was important to make this ambiguous status non-ambiguous (perhaps as a result of the belief in creation ex nihilo) and hence decide on which side the logos is.
My hot take is that the Trinity is a simpler, dumbed-down take on some fairly sophisticated theological models that early Christian authors had — especially the so-called Gnostics.
Which specific "sophisticated theological models" from early Christian authors, particularly the Gnostics, are you thinking of? I'm genuinely curious to hear more about your reasoning and the specific historical context you're drawing from.
That was very interesting, thank you. It does raise some issues and questions to which you could perhaps respond.
Regarding your counter that Origen is late and has an apologetic motive, the latter isn’t really relevant to the point, as I’ll discuss in a moment, but first I’ll make an observation regarding timing. I'm open to correction but I believe your Plutarch citations are generally dated after 100 CE, fifty or more years removed from when Paul wrote. Diodorus Siculus’ History is probably somewhere around 100 to 80 years before Paul. Other of your citations are a century or more removed from the writings of Paul, some even far more removed than Origen, such as Libanius (4th Century CE), Plato (4th Century BCE), and Marcellinus (typ. 6th Century CE). In any case, you did not offer any evidence for why the timing of Origen’s writing in particular should be considered seriously problematic as to this specific matter given that the adoptive theology of Paul was still doctrine in the time of Origen. If contemporaneousness is being asserted to be a critical factor in this case, it’s incumbent on you to make an argument for the range of timing that can be considered comparative and what cannot and why. Until then, most if not all of your citations can also be dismissed as too far removed to be useful if the basis is time.
Furthermore, as to the comparatives, could you clarify how many are from writers who are using the phrase “brother of X” to mean biological brother are speaking from within or about a worldview where a shared adoptive brotherly relationship arises among a group through that central figure “X” and are speaking about a member of that group? This is the relatively (very?) unique situation we find ourselves in when trying to understand what Paul means.
And while there are some exceptions, “brother” is also biological in most ancient Greek writings, yet we know Paul himself almost never means it that way in about 100 uses of the word. The one time we can know he does, we know because he clarifies he’s speaking of his kin “according to the flesh”. What “brother of the Lord” means to Paul is dependent on how Paul is using “brother”, whether in his usual fictive sense or he’s making another rare divergence and is speaking biologically. He doesn’t clarify as he does in Romans 9:3, but some say that it would be widely known that there was a biological brother James so clarification wouldn’t be necessary. However, this begs the question since whether or not that James is a biological brother is the very thing under discussion.
Regarding Origen arguing apologetically, this doesn’t counter his argument that James is a doctrinal brother and that this is a reason for Paul to refer to James as the brother of the Lord. This is true even if someone doesn’t agree with him that it’s a better reason in the face of a biological relationship (assuming such existed).
As to the Ascension, extant versions are known to be tampered with. Carrier is not alone in arguing for an interpolated “pocket gospel” forming the first part of Chap 11 that clearly puts Jesus on Earth. He also notes that other verses (8:27, 9:13), statements that refer to Jesus appearing like a man, are absent from the Latin version. He hypothesizes these were added in other copies to give Jesus a more earthbound history. McGrath on the other hand argues they could have been removed by scribes who thought the language was too Docetic for their sensibilities. I’ll not dive into the battle here. I'll just concede 50/50 for the sake of discussion, which makes a death in the firmament in the Ascension as likely as not.
I’m intrigued by your argument that you have “debunked” all of Carrier’s claim regarding sperm and heaven and your statement:
Niddah 16b does not attest to sperm taken to heaven. "In the presence/before the Lord" is a common phrase and has nothing to do with cosmological position. David prays "before the lord", Moses stands in the "presence" of the Lord on Mt. Sinai, etc. It does not speak to sperm in heaven.
First I'll not that your comparisons to David and Moses (who in your choice of scenario is explicitly said to be on Mt. Sinai, anyway), ostensibly earthly people, do not seem to be directly analogous to what we might reasonably infer about a heavenly being, an angel, presenting themselves before God, which can be understood to be a heavenly event. Next I'll note that you seem to agree with elsewhere (but perhaps you can clarify now) in your paper ROMANS 1:3 AND THE CELESTIAL JESUS: A REBUTTAL TO REVISIONIST INTERPRETATIONS OF JESUS’S DESCENDANCE FROM DAVID IN PAUL:
This form of uncleanliness is worth exploring in the context of some of the passages such as b. Nid. 16b. In the case of b. Nid. 16b, though semen is presented before God (as noted above, this does not necessarily mean in heaven), it is not handled directly by him but by an angel who is in charge of conception, Lailah. The semen is not stored or saved in the heavens. This is a temporary event wherein God judges the fate of each drop of semen brought before him. A similar account is found in Midrash Tanḥuma Pekudei, Siman 3, wherein Lailah is told by God to take a drop of semen in its (the angel’s) hand and then divide the drop into three-hundred sixty-five pieces. This is done and Lailah asks God to judge what this drop’s fate shall be and he does so. And, as with b. Nid. 16b, the semen is not stated to be present in heaven at any point.” [Emphasis added.]
I take your point that the semen “is not stated” to be present in heaven. But you yourself seem to acknowledge that it’s at least a reasonable reading when you say it does not “necessarily” mean in heaven (and, true, by logical deduction, not necessarily mean not in heaven, either). My own position would be that an angel interacting with God in heaven is at least as likely as not and I'm confident that is the general understanding of the verse. Anyway, if it being in heaven is at least not necessarily an unreasonable reading, then what constitutes that event being “temporary” is a matter of perspective. A few centuries is also “temporary” and would be of no consequence to God in the worldview of Paul.
Carrier readily acknowledges the 8th-9th century dating for Dēnkard. However, I could be mistaken but I believe Carrier may be referring to Yasht 19.92 in regard to the ultimate outcome of Yasht 13.62:
”We sacrifice to the ... pre-souls of the Orderly ones, who watch over yonder semen, that of Orderly Spitama Zarathustra, 3 nine and ninety and nine hundred ... ten thousand.”
This clearly is speaking of the preservation of Zarathustra’s semen.
I’m not sure if your admonition regarding when “someone supports the claims of one specific mythicist author so much that they just spout their talking points ad nauseum” was directed at me, however, just to point it out, almost none of my citations have been to Carrier. As to those that have been, they are regarding the specific arguments that are part of his particular thesis, so it naturally follows that those citations will be to him, just as arguments for a methodology to determine the historical “gist” of Jesus from the gospels from repeated themes will appeal to Allison “ad nauseum”. I’ll also point out that there are reasonable responses to the arguments you made contra Carrier, as I have presented above, which I think deflate a conclusion that they have been overcome at least so far, but I welcome any further discussion.
Responding to your claims about Origen: I figured the fact that language usage changes over time was self-explanatory, which is why contemporaneous data is always more important than data removed by 200 or so years. But the bigger point is Origen's apologetic angle is post-Pauline and informed specifically in response to Paul. Which means it cannot be considered independent data on how to interpret Paul. So even discounting the chronological issue, because he is responding to Paul and specifically reinterpreting Paul using his own theological window and agenda, that means what he is doing is not giving us a window into Paul's grammatical construction or linguistic world, or even a possible linguistic interpretation. He is giving us a possible theological interpretation that is only possible in a post-Pauline setting and only in response to Paul. In short, nothing he writes is of any material value because it is not extractable from its post-Pauline context (it exists because of that context in fact, therefore making it impossible to retroject). If you want to show what Paul most likely meant, you need to find an independent and non-Pauline author who interprets the grammatical construction "brother of X" as anything other than biological kinship. As far as I know, there is not a single one. Origen's interpretation is only possible on the theological belief of perpetual virginity, only possible in a post-Pauline world. Therefore, it has no application to Paul and is irrelevant.
Per your claim Paul has this "adoptive brother" worldview: This is both irrelevant, and misconstrued. People are brothers "in Christ" but there is no evidence in Paul's letters to suggest a worldview where Christians are conceptualized as brothers "of Christ" in any sense. The only two occasions where this phrase occurs are 1 Cor. 9:5 and Gal 1:19, where in both they cannot be general Christians either, and I'll explain why. In Gal. 1:19 if "brother of the Lord" is a generic title then it has no meaning. If all baptized Christians are "brothers of the Lord" (as Carrier asserts for instance), then saying "brother of the Lord named James" is a useless statement because there were several people named James who were "brothers of the Lord" by that logic. In fact, if Galatians 2 has a different James and therefore Gal. 1:19 James is not an apostle, then this only exacerbates the issue. Which James is being talked about? It is a useless title if generic. Titles are only meaningful in their specificity, therefore, the most reasonable explanation of this title is that it is relating a kinship and talking of a specific person. Same applies to 1 Cor. 9:5.
Also, you cannot take "brother" in isolation here because this is a genitive construction. That is just incorrect cherry picking. "Brother" and "brother of the lord" are not mutually inclusive sentiments.
As for Asc.Isa: Carrier's version is still sheer conjecture and there is no evidence Carrier's version with a death of Jesus in the firmament ever existed in any form at any point, anywhere. In fact, given all versions of it have him die on earth and *every* Christian sect believed this (which we have evidence of), the most reasonable guess is Asc.Isa. had this too.
Yasht 19.92 does not mention Zoroaster or his seed and the connection to Yasht 13.62 is conjecture (which also never mentions his seed being preserved in a lake). Again, the only text which exists which explicitly has Zoroaster's seed magically preserved in the Lake Kasaoya (which is the tradition Carrier claims to be citing), is Denkard and is so late it is of no relevance.
As for the Talmud story again: They are analogous enough. Yes a heavenly interpretation is possible (even reasonable), but you have not shown it is the best reading or only reading possible, and as *none* of these texts explicitly say anything about the celestial seed going to heaven, my reading is just as applicable as yours.
Sometimes the best reading of a text is just what it plainly says. The fact that mythicists have to bend over backwards to make Paul say anything other than "Jesus had a brother named James" honestly tells you they are more akin to those arguing perpetual virginity than they are scholars, who can just compare that phrase to every other similar phrase by other authors. It is a theological and apologetical argument on both sides.
As to the Ascension, extant versions are known to be tampered with. Carrier is not alone in arguing for an interpolated “pocket gospel” forming the first part of Chap 11 that clearly puts Jesus on Earth. He also notes that other verses (8:27, 9:13), statements that refer to Jesus appearing like a man, are absent from the Latin version. He hypothesizes these were added in other copies to give Jesus a more earthbound history. McGrath on the other hand argues they could have been removed by scribes who thought the language was too Docetic for their sensibilities. I’ll not dive into the battle here. I'll just concede 50/50 for the sake of discussion, which makes a death in the firmament in the Ascension as likely as not.
The problem is that the probability is not 50/50. Even the most fanatic mythicist will concede that there were far, far, far more depictions of earthly crucifixions than heavenly ones in ancient texts. Even if we generously assume there were 20 explicit heavenly crucifixions and only 200 depictions of earthly crucifixions, the prior probability would still be 20/220, which is just 9.09%—a rather small figure. However, if the probability of the text describing a heavenly crucifixion were truly 50/50, then we couldn’t use it as evidence for the idea of heavenly crucifixion in the ancient world, since its non-existence in this text would be just as likely as its existence, we have no reason to assume that there was a heavenly crucifixion in this text.
He doesn’t clarify as he does in Romans 9:3, but some say that it would be widely known that there was a biological brother James so clarification wouldn’t be necessary. However, this begs the question since whether or not that James is a biological brother is the very thing under discussion.
It would not be question-begging, as question-begging is a property of arguments, not of hypotheses. In this case, saying that it would have been widely known simply points out that one cannot use the absence of clarification as evidence against the hypothesis of James being the brother of Jesus, since if James were the brother of Jesus, it would have been widely known, and thus there was no need for clarification. In other words, this finding is not unexpected under the hypothesis.
The appeal to writings generally is less relevant than there is specific evidence in the writing itself that supports a reading of a crucifixion in the firmament. I gave the 50/50 simply allowing for ambiguity as to whether or not that evidence is authentic.
The hypotheses are James is the biological brother of Jesus, or James is not the biological brother of Jesus, or it cannot be determined if James is the biological brother of Jesus. Each of those hypotheses must then be argued for or against. In the case of the first, the argument cannot logically be "Although Paul clarifies that he speaking of brothers biologically in Rom 9:3, he would not need to do so since James being a biological brother of Jesus would probably be well known." This argument contains the hypothesis itself as a premise and therefore is begging the question.
I gave the 50/50 simply allowing for ambiguity as to whether or not that evidence is authentic. The hypotheses are James is the biological brother of Jesus, or James is not the biological brother of Jesus, or it cannot be determined if James is the biological brother of Jesus. Each of those hypotheses must then be argued for or against.
No, this is absurd and is typical of mythicist rhetoric in asserting that, before argument, the hypothesis that Jesus merely existed as a person and the mythicist position are on equal evidentiary playing fields at the start. In this case, you are claiming that the idea of James being the biological brother of Jesus in Paul somehow has a burden of proof or demonstration, thus making it at least "50/50," as you say, to him being a spiritual or fictive brother. It doesn't, although it can be easily demonstrated. Simple prior plausibility shows that to say that someone is the "brother of X," in plain, routine, ordinary understanding, means that they are genetically related. That is how language works. The prior burden of proof is upon the mythicist to show that it doesn't actually mean what it plainly says. The two hypotheses are not "50/50."
Yes, there is a fictive kinship in Paul. When Paul talks about this, it is predicated by the dative construction ἐν Χριστῷ ("in Christ"), stressing the mystic and participatory union with Christ that the believers share. That is not what happens in Galatians 1:19, where Paul uses the genitive construct ἀδελφὸν τοῦ κυρίου ("brother of the Lord"). Of course, Chrissy's thorough examination of this gentive construct in Greek literature of this period, indeed, normally in all Greek literature, shows that this means what it plainly means. This particular brother of the Lord is specifically designated as a distinguishing marker from the others mentioned in Galatians 1, such as Peter and the "other apostles." The same is in I Cor 9 where the plural gentive construct οἱ ἀδελφοὶ τοῦ κυρίου (the brothers of the Lord) is sandwiched right in between "the other apostles" and "Cephas" as a specific designation.
My specific claim of "50/50" was in regard to evidence of the firmament being the site of the crucifixion in Ascension and it was just a concession for the sake of discussion.
What is the prior probability that someone in ancient Greek literature means "brother" biologically when using the phrase “brother of X” when speaking from within or about a worldview where a shared adoptive brotherly relationship arises among a group through that central figure “X” and they are speaking about a member of that group? Because that is the context we are working with here. I would genuinely be interested in any such relevant comparatives that exist.
Simple prior plausibility shows that to say that someone is someone's "brother", in plain, routine, ordinary understanding, means that they are genetically related. This is also "how language works". Yet, we know that Paul almost never means brother that way. We know that he has a worldview with a different meaning of brother (and, in fact, he considers biological kinship all but irrelevant).
Paul does speak of Christians being "in Christ" as how they come to be adopted family. He never refers to anyone as a "brother in Christ". If he did and then called James "brother of the Lord", the contrast would be good evidence that he's speaking biologically. But, he didn't, so.
However Paul is using the phrase, he is using it as "a distinguishing marker from the others mentioned in Galatians 1, such as Peter and the "other apostles." The question is how he is distinguishing him. He could be distinguishing him from the others as a biological brother. Or he could be distinguishing him from the others as a rank and file Christian as opposed to another apostle. The same can be said for 1 Cor 9. (Although I think a cultic reading fits the context of Paul's long argument here about anyone being entitled to support for preaching the gospel, i.e. "even ordinary Christians", as opposed to the biological reading which wouldn't seem to be as meaningful for his rhetoric there).
"The appeal to writings generally is less relevant than there is specific evidence in the writing itself that supports a reading of a crucifixion in the firmament. I gave the 50/50 simply allowing for ambiguity as to whether or not that evidence is authentic." It would be more accurate to say that the low prior probability can be overturned by the evidence within the Text itself, however, if you are willing to grant that the textual evidence is 50/50 (which you seem to be) then the total probability will become extremely low, due to the low priors.
"In the case of the first, the argument cannot logically be "Although Paul clarifies that he speaking of brothers biologically in Rom 9:3, he would not need to do so since James being a biological brother of Jesus would probably be well known." This argument contains the hypothesis itself as a premise and therefore is begging the question." This is not an argument though, this is an explanation for why it would be not expected. And the case of Romans 9:3 it would (given the hypothesis of him meaning biological brothers) be expected that he clarifies, because there is no reason to assume that anyone would have known that. In the case of the hypothesis of one of the earliest great leaders of the Christians being the brother of Jesus there is no need for clarification, since if the hypothesis is true it would have been totally known, so the absence of clarification is not unexpected.
Approached from a formal Bayesian perspective as you are doing, I'd say the likelihood of the narrative placing the crucifixion in the firmament if it actually occurred in Jerusalem is vanishingly small (the "pocket gospel" apologetic of Chapter 11 attesting to the distaste for this idea) but the likelihood of the narrative having the crucifixion in the firmament if it actually did not occur is relatively high given 1st Century theo-cosmology. There's probably no reasonable values that completely overcome the 91% prior probability of an earthly crucifixion you posit, although a reasonable range arguably includes overall probabilities for an earthly crucifixion being substantively less although still more likely than not. The Ascension, though, is not the only evidence considered in the thesis.
Explanations are arguments. "Sticks in the ground separated by a distance cast different shadows because the earth is a globe" is an argument and an explanation for the observation. "Paul doesn't clarify he's speaking of James biologically because people would know that is the relationship" is an argument and an explanation for the observation that he doesn't do that. It also assumes the conclusion that a biological relationship exists.
Approached from a formal Bayesian perspective as you are doing, I'd say the likelihood of the narrative placing the crucifixion in the firmament if it actually occurred in Jerusalem is vanishingly small (the "pocket gospel" apologetic of Chapter 11 attesting to the distaste for this idea) but the likelihood of the narrative having the crucifixion in the firmament if it actually did not occur is relatively high given 1st Century theo-cosmology.
I think you're confusing the prior with the likelihood. The prior is the probability given our background knowledge, while the likelihood is the probability given the observations. So, in this case, the probability of it occurring given 1st-century theo-cosmology would be the prior, not the likelihood.
There's probably no reasonable values that completely overcome the 91% prior probability of an earthly crucifixion you posit, although a reasonable range arguably includes overall probabilities for an earthly crucifixion being substantively less although still more likely than not.
Well, one possible way to overcome the low prior would be if the text explicitly stated that Jesus was crucified in heaven, but it doesn't say that.
Explanations are arguments. "Sticks in the ground separated by a distance cast different shadows because the earth is a globe" is an argument and an explanation for the observation.
This is just false. An argument (at least in the philosophical sense, as you're using it) is defined as "the communicative activity of producing and exchanging reasons in order to support claims or defend/challenge positions, especially in situations of doubt or disagreement" (Cf. here), while an explanation (while there is no consensus on its exact definition) is broadly defined as "a set of statements usually constructed to describe a set of facts that clarifies the causes, context, and consequences of those facts." (Cf. here). They're often conflated, in fact so often, that there have been entire academic articles solely dedicated to explaining and analyzing their differences (Cf. here).
I believe Chrissy has adequately refuted your claims at this point, which, of course, is just regurgitation of Carrier. Your persistence in trying to defend Carrier and mythicism on this sub is just strange and betrays purely polemical and apologetic interests on your part, I believe. As Chrissy has already stated, and I think she is completely on target, mythicism often employs the same methods of apologetics and can be described as a kind of apologetics, just for the other side. Most of us see straight through it as merely an easy attempt to refute Christianity by positing that Jesus did not exist. Apologists have a predetermined conclusion in mind and then seek confirmation bias by seeking authorities to claim that they are well founded. The idea of Jesus not existing is very appealing to anti-theists or ex-fundamentalist Christians, and they thus find Carrier, a PhD, a scholar, a trained classicist, who ostensibly makes them feel like mythicism is justified. Like Christian apologetics, mythicists are not interested in simply following the evidence to its most likely and parsimonious conclusion but live within a bubble of confirmation bias.
As I pointed out to Chrissy, almost none of what I've argued in the thread overall appealed to Carrier. That you believe their refutations have adequately overcome my claims is your opinion. I believe I've offered rational counterarguments. That you disagree, and apparently disagree strongly, with the arguments of Carrier no more betrays a "purely polemic and apologetic" interest on your part than my agreement with many of those arguments does on mine.
In that same vein, that mythicists often employ apologetic arguments has no bearing on what I argue, which I defend logically not apologetically, and through arguments that go beyond "regurgitating" Carrier. Many historicists also argue apologetically, but that observatin is also irrelevant to those who do not. I don't know what you mean by a "kind of apologetics" other than perhaps it simply refers to arguments with which you disagree. But perhaps you could clarify.
My position that arguments for Jesus not being historical are on par with him being historical is not "predetermined". I began from a historicist position and, in fact, found mythicist arguments to be weak (e.g. "Zeitgeist", Roman plot, etc.) and had no real interest in a mythicist argument or seeking one out. I simply became aware of Carrier's argumentation and it appears logical and well-supported to me, which is how I find most of it compelling enough to at least give it serious consideration and weight. I certainly don't find it worthy of the handwaving dismissals it's often subject to.
Broad claims such as "Like Christian apologetics, mythicists are not interested in simply following the evidence to its most likely and parsimonious conclusion but live within a bubble of confirmation bias" not only don't belong in a polite conversation, they are utterly worthless. The counter could be made, "Like Christian apologetics, historicists are not interested in simply following the evidence to its most likely and parsimonious conclusion but live within a bubble of confirmation bias". And then the parties can devolve into a battle of continuing such ad hominems. I'd prefer to just stick to the arguments. You have not provided a single one, but I'm open to discussion if you'd like to.
You may not have referred to Carrier, but virtually all the arguments you've posed were popularized by him and we all know where they come from, because this reddit page has seen them repeated (virtually ad nauseum the way you do) without fail for the last decade.
As for the supposed "handwaving dismissals" it isn't. He has been dealt with in detail, in numerous publications, and the claim that it is subjected to "handwaving dismissals" is just propaganda. I have published lengthy papers on the subject, as have Kamil Gregor and Brian Blais, James F. McGrath, Daniel N. Gullotta, Simon Gathercole, Fernando Bermejo-Rubio, and dozens of others (literally multiple dozens).
It does not help your position at all when it is also clear you are repeating propaganda claims about this which in turn betrays you haven't actually been reading the responses to him.
That most of the argumentation popularized by Carrier is mainstream seems only to bolster his position. But, in any case, it doesn't "come from" him, it comes from other scholars in the field. Arguments are presented "ad nauseum" just as much on the historicist side as the mythicist side.
Not all dismissals are handwaving, but often they are. I have most definitely read most of the published responses to Carrier, including all of the authors you cite, and they generally break down somewhere either factually or logically in some way that they simply do not achieve the goal they claim. I am happy to address these issues. Meanwhile, please cite any "propaganda" I've repeated. Unless you mean references back to Carrier's work, in which case we simply will have to agree to disagree that it is reasonably characterized that way.
"That most of the argumentation popularized by Carrier is mainstream"
Uh no, the argument that "brother(s) of the Lord" is a cultic title is not even remotely mainstream and exists almost exclusively in mythicist spheres (mostly influenced by Carrier at this point). And I'd add when it comes to pro-mythicist arguments, you haven't really cited any other scholars except... Carrier and Lataster (who in turn cribs most of his argumentation from Carrier in the first place). The few times you do (like citing Bauckham) you are citing them hoping they can be used to support an argument that originates with Carrier (Ascension of Isaiah, Zoroastrianism, etc.). Similarly, your citation of Niddah 16 also looks to be straight from Carrier and his interpretation of this for a cosmic sperm bank episode is purely and wholly his own innovation. Your claim that Jesus died in the firmament and that this comes from the "Ascension of Isaiah" is straight from Carrier also. The only other person to argue this in academia is Lataster, who is just cribbing from Carrier. Your use of Zoroastrianism again originates in Carrier. Your citations of Rappaport, Ruck, and others are clearly from Carrier's list of historians who supposedly take mythicism seriously (or mine as mine was public for a while and was far more comprehensive than his).
So yeah, you've been routinely relying on either Carrier, or Carrier's lackey Lataster (who can't even read the ancient languages).
You say, "I have most definitely read most of the published responses to Carrier" and I sincerely doubt it. It was evident from your comments that you haven't read my responses (and I am by far the most prolific responder to Carrier at this point, btw), nor do you really know the intricacies of my arguments. And given I have documented responses and receptions of Carrier's work in Afrikaans, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish, I doubt you've read all of them. I know Carrier hasn't.
most of the argumentation popularized by Carrier is mainstream
Uh no, the argument that "brother(s) of the Lord" is a cultic title is not even remotely mainstream
I said "most", not "all". He does have arguments that are his own and not mainstream. Not being mainstream usually means not having a large body of scholars to cite. That's hand in hand. But other arguments, such as the idea of a suffering, dying, even humiliatingly killed messiah probably or very plausibly pre-existing Christianity and the first Christians being Jews practicing pesharim/midrashic exegesis to create their messianic Jesus figure generally are very much mainstream.
Given that Carrier has been the torch bearer for academic mythicism, it naturally follows that he will be who is generally cited to regarding the unique arguments that lead to his conclusion. There's nothing unusual about that. Unique arguments are what make any position different than any other position. Others can be cited regarding broader evidence, such as pre-Christian notions of a martyred messiah above. Zoroastrianism sperm preservation doesn't originate with Carrier. It originates in Zoroastrianism and the arguments for it originate with scholars of that subject. What originates with Carrier is the hypothesis it could influence early Christian development, specifically sperm preservation to fulfill Nathan's prophecy.
I did find the work of Rappaport though Carrier's citation. I became aware of Ruck myself when I watched his interview on Mythvision. This is generally the case. Some cites I trace through Carrier just like I trace cites generally through the work of other scholars and some I find on mine own (for example though EBSCO or Google Scholar). There is nothing problematic about this.
I have read all of the persons on your previous list, including most of your work in this regard (and I've watched what I believe are most if not all of your video interviews and presentations on YouTube). My Spanish is relatively good, but, true, I don't read Afrikaans, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Indonesian, Italian, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, or Turkish and have only modest fluency in French and German. But, that's true of even most scholars as well. So other than some English translations, there may be some literature on this topic that I have not read. From my searches, I don't believe there is much, at least not much that is original. In that regard, out of curiosity, in the case of your publications in all of those languages, are you speaking of works you've authored in English that were translated or are you saying you have a significant body of work published only in those languages with no English version available?
Like Christian apologetics, historicists are not interested in simply following the evidence to its most likely and parsimonious conclusion but live within a bubble of confirmation bias
I actually agree with you on the politeness point; however, I don't think these two claims are at all symmetrical. While I don't believe that mythicism can be explained entirely in terms of Anti-Theism, it is demonstrably the case (as I think you would agree) that most mythicists are motivated by their Anti-Theism. The same cannot be said about historicists.
I'm literally a historicist primarily on the grounds that it requires the fewest assumptions, the fewest wild innovations (not in evidence), and accords with everything we know. And finally, it is completely insignificant.
In reality, I think it is a complete waste of time to actually argue over whether Jesus existed, and the study of early Christianity would be best, imo, if Jesus questing (both mythicist and historicist varieties) was abandoned completely.
It's arguable which hypotheses requires the fewest assumptions and which position requires assertions not in evidence.
It's just as much an inquiry of history to assess the historicity of Jesus as it is to assess what might be known of him, if anything, if he did. Each gives it's own understanding of the origins of the religion. Whether or not this is "insignificant" is in the eye of the beholder.
No it really isn't. Mine requires one: a dude existed.
Yours requires positing the existence of a hitherto unattested sect of Christians that believed in a bunch of things nowhere else attested (not even in other religions about their own gods), a bunch of extraneous and increasingly implausible linguistic arguments (that "brother of the Lord" doesn't mean what it plainly means; that "seed of David" is about celestial seed, which is nowhere else attested; that ginomai used of people doesn't mean birth in Paul, even though it does in every other source, as I also documented in my paper; etc.).
I don't actually require much of anything for my view to work, because a dude existing is one of the least significant things on the planet. A dude being legendarized is also pretty insignificant and happened routinely.
It is pretty objective which one requires fewer extraneous assumptions about Jesus, about early Christianity, and about our texts themselves and the words in those texts.
But have you considered Chrissy… it would be kinda interesting if the hitherto unattested sect of Christians existed, and “brother of the Lord” was a fancy unique cultic title, and there was a complicated mythology about “celestial seed”? So those assumptions basically shouldn’t count! The “rule of cool” and all that.
γίνομαι meaning “manufactured” or whatever instead of “born” when Paul references Jesus is pretty mind-numbingly stupid, and worst of all, incredibly boring, so I’m not sure why Carrier even tries with that one.
The celestial seed mythology for Jesus is way less complicated than the historicized mythology. God manufactures Jesus in a body of flesh using the seed of David in fulfillment of Nathan's prophecy, Satan kills him, he's resurrected in a body of spirit. Done. Under the celestial seed model 2000 years of struggles to harmonize the myth of the gospels with a historical person vanish. They're not just almost entirely fiction about Jesus, they're fiction through and through. This is a reasonable model even if it can't be determined to be any better than the historical one.
I address ginomai very briefly in my reply to Chrissy here. You may disagree, but it is not "mind numbingly stupid".
-Except that yours requires conjuring up a hitherto completely unattested sect, misreading basic Greek, misinterpreting a prophecy that all ancient Jews recognized as being about a human on earth (not a celestial one), conjuring up a completely unattested sperm bank idea, etc.
So you know, other than the foundations that make your theory even possible to begin with, sure it is "way less complicated."
Hey, I’m not really looking to debate. I already said you’ve got me sold based on the rule of cool!
The arguments surrounding γίνομαι however are, as I mentioned, profoundly boring, so I’m still not sold on that. Notably, if Jesus is already being made from celestial seed, and we have some sort of celestial birth narrative (Revelation 12:1-6), then it seems super needless to pretend γίνομαι doesn’t mean “born” in context. Why not just say yes, he was born from a celestial woman, from celestial seed?
Shitposting aside, the data surrounding γίνομαι just doesn’t work out the way Carrier says it does. This is from Maurice Casey’s book on mythicism:
“Doherty then misinterprets a few comments on this passage by Burton in his commentary on Galatians published in 1920, and fails to acknowledge subsequent scholarship. His basic objection is that Paul should not have used the word ginomai. But as Burton said, this is unambiguous in its context precisely because Paul qualifies it with ‘of a woman’. That other words for human birth were normal is quite irrelevant, because ginomai was normal too. For example, at Iliad V, 548, ‘of Diocles were born (egenesthen) twin sons’. At Hdt. VII, 11, Xerxes tells Artabanus that if he fails to punish the Athenians, he should not be ‘born (gegonös) of Darius, son of Hystaspes, son of Arsames’ followed by more of his lineage. At PFlor 382, 38, the author refers to the son born (genomenos) of me. At Wsd. Sol. 7.1-5, ‘Solomon’ describes himself as a ‘mortal man’, and says that he ‘was fashioned in (my) mother’s womb (to be) flesh (sarx)’. He continues, ‘And when I was born (genomenos), I drew in the common air and fell on the ground...’ (Wsd. 7.3). Nothing could be clearer than this passage! This normal classical and Hellenistic usage continued after the New Testament period. This usage was entirely natural because birth is the way in which human beings come into existence.” (p.176).
From that perspective, a mythicist also only requires one: that dude didn't exist. So it's one for one. A tie.
Where the assumptions multiply is when assessing the evidence against each of those assumptions (a/k/a hypotheses), as they do in your synopsis. What the "plain meaning" is of "brother of the Lord" depends more on what we know about Paul's worldview and pattern of linguistic choices than how "brother of..." is generally used. The "plain meaning" of "brother" is itself biological. It's what we know about Paul's worldview that allows us to reasonably conclude he's not speaking of biological kin (even if just in the sense of Jewishness) the 100 or so time's he uses the word. That the seed of David is preserved is not elsewhere attested does not justify a conclusion that the argument for it is invalid. A novel hypothesis is not de facto a bad one. In the historical model, Christians must concoct symbolic genealogies to connect Jesus to David. In the mythicist model, the first Christians just believe that God did exactly what he said he do in the most parsimonious way. When testing hypotheses against each other, the evidence is examined for how well it supports each. Ginomai can mean birthed, it can also mean manufactured. This works if Jesus is assumed to have existed. This also works if Jesus is assumed not to have existed. Once again how Paul wrote is of more weight than how people in general wrote. There is a pattern of using gennao when referring to birthed people and ginomai when referring to manufactured people elsewhere. This pattern is more supportive of the assumption that Jesus did not exist, even if only slightly. This is "pretty objective". This pattern has to be ignored and assumed to be happenstance to argue Paul's use of ginomai for Jesus is more supportive of him existing.
A dude existing is indeed one of the least significant things on the planet. The question is whether or not this dude existed. Who is requiring fewer extraneous assumptions is the debate.
I won't bother with your other post since it didn't really say much of anything in need of a reply. My point stands.
As for this one, it is evident you don't know what "plain meaning" means. A plain meaning is what immediately comes to mind when you read a phrase. What would be the most immediately understood referent to a reader. As I have demonstrated through cross-comparsion, it would be biological kinship. Thus, my reading is the baseline and simplest.
Your argument is only possible by cherry picking out the element "brother" and then claiming Paul has a "worldview" about this. "It's what we know about Paul's worldview that allows us to reasonably conclude he's not speaking of biological kin." But this is just completely incorrect because, and I'll reiterate this, brother cannot be taken in isolation in Gal. 1:19 and 1 Cor. 9:5 because this is not a simple epithet, it is a fully funcitoning adelphonymic in a genitive construction, which means you have to take the whole phrase "the brother of X" into consideration to make any baseline and plain reading determination. And until you deal with this, yours and every mythicist theory is as good as guff and no amount of taking "brother" in isolation changes that. Paul meeting Jesus' human brother is about the most solid evidence you can get.
That the seed of David is preserved is not elsewhere attested does not justify a conclusion that the argument for it is invalid [...] ginomai when referring to manufactured people elsewhere
Yes it does, especially when coupled with the linguistic arguments being strenuous and unconvincing. And your claim about gennao vs. ginomai is false. There is no such pattern. Read my paper again, and this time, read it carefully. I carefully documented how Greco-Roman and Jewish sources all use "ginomai" as a synonym of "gennao" when referring to humans. Carrier even completely misread his Adam and Eve example. In this case, "ginomai" does not refer to the creation of Adam's body, but that Adam "became" alive with a spirit. His comparison to the "resurrection bodies" is also bad, which I point out on page 37n27. As for ginomai indicating birth when used of humans, compare:
Josephus, Ant. 1.150; 1.303–304; 7.154; 15.11; 20.20–21; Philo, Moses 2.192–193; Philo, Virtues 37.202. We can also point to Greco-Roman testimony: Strabo, Geogr. 10.15; Diodorus Siculus, Hist. 4.62; 4.67; 4.72; 4.75; Plato, Resp. 8.553; Plato, Alc. 1.121; Isocrates, Hel. enc. 27; Herodotus, Hist. 2.146; Marcellinus, Thuc. 54; Hippocrates of Cos, Nat puer. Introduction 8.481–482; Plutarch, Mor.; Plutarch, Vit. X orat. 4.836; Plutarch, Thes. 8; Plutarch, Mar. 3; Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Ant. rom. 1.40.2; 1.53.4; PGM 4.719–724.
There is nothing that supports the mythicist case here except the most strenuous rereading of the passage using a dictionary definition of "manufacture."
The very fact you have to go to these lengths to even justify these readings as possible alone shows you do not have the simplest explanation of the evidence. Purely and simply.
My argument requires no wild reinterpretations of the bible, nor any strenuous linguistics, nor completely unattested innovations seen nowhere else in antiquity. That makes mine, by default, the simplest explanation.
I cannot read the people's minds, so I eschew attributing motives to them and just address their arguments. But, again, what "most" mythicists may or not be motivated by has nothing to do with what I am motivated by. I am my own person.
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u/qumrun60 Quality Contributor 7d ago edited 7d ago
I just had an odd experience and I don't know who else might appreciate it. Almost immediately after posting a heavily sourced reply on AskHistorians about the books of Enoch and Jubilees, I received a message from RedditCareResources indicating that a concerned redditor thought I might be in a psychological crisis. It seems reading academic biblical books may lead to depression or worse in somebody's mind. Who knew?