Dr. Richard Carrier on the Mythical Jesus

all right uh did Jesus exist my conclusion is probably not um this what I'm going to talk about today is the result of a six-year research project um way back in the long days ago in days of your uh I actually just assumed that the consensus view on the historicity of Jesus was true and then people would try to argue that he didn't exist i' say look no it's the mainstream consensus you really can't argue against it uh and then people kept insisting that I read Earl Doherty's book uh the Jesus puzzle and so I kept resisting because you know everybody wants me to read some book or other I can't read them all uh but there these are people whose opinions I respected and there were a lot of them so I said well okay so I'll I'll read it I'll do a review at least I can then from now on just point people to the review that's that's all my writings are like that it's just I answer a question one time and I just point everybody there and I don't have to keep answering the same question over and over so uh that's uh like everything I've written practically is the result of doing that uh so I did that but I was actually quite impressed by the book uh he had a he had really good arguments I was surprised now I didn't wasn't in the position then to really like vet at all to actually check it all to see if it actually stood up um that would be a major research project but when I finished my PhD in 2008 uh and then the recession hit and Humanities departments were basically not hiring for a while or even eliminating positions uh I couldn't get hired because there wasn't anything in certainly not near in California where I had to work so I asked my fans like well if I can get my student debt canceled that would be great I'll do any project you want I'm a free freelance scholar now with a newly minted PhD from Columbia University in ancient history and uh I raised $20,000 which canceled all the student debt that I had uh and in exchange for that I treated it like a research Grant uh I asked them what do you want me to do and it was unanimous historicity of Jesus everybody wanted that everybody all my funders wanted that uh so I that's what I did and so for the last six years I've been trying to fulfill the obligation of doing you know justifying this this generous amount of money that they gave me to do it uh it resulted in two books proving history and on the historicity of Jesus I have a few copies of on the historicity of Jesus for sale here today um and what I'm going to talk about here is sort of the summary of that last book uh the first book had to solve the problem of how do you even answer a question like this uh how do you test whether someone existed or not existed and um so I'll have a little bit about that in this but this is mostly going to be about the final result when I finally did all the research really in realize that there's an even better argument than I mean the case is even more solid than doerty suggested so here's uh what I argue and first we have to do some first things and I me I mentioned before that I was saying that you should just follow the mainstream consensus but one of the things that I found in my research is it isn't trustworthy um first of all there the consensus views within Jesus studies are not based on logically valid methods uh I I show this in proving history but I'm not the first one to do this every single expert in the field of Jesus studies who has written studies of the validity of the methods they're using have all concluded they're invalid so even they at least the ones who were reading their their own literature agree uh that they don't have valid methods they don't work uh so that means you have to go back to the drawing board with a method that does work and there's also I find uh there's ignorance of key facts and I point this out on the historicity of Jesus I have a couple chapters where I document all of the basic background facts that should not be controversial that should be taken for granted and I found in my Journeys talking to Scholars and biblical Scholars all over uh the world um everyone that I meet doesn't know at least one of those facts in there uh and we'll make an argument based on the assumption that that fact isn't true so I was actually quite surprised by this so that I think the consensus in this sense is sort of it's got institutional inertia it's not really a consensus it's just everybody just assumes historicity is established and so they keep citing the consensus and the and the consensus cites the consensus and this just big circular argument so we need to go back to the drawing board um however I also need to point out that most of the mythicism that you find online uh and I'm sorry to say even in Religulous uh is terrible uh so I'm not going to be endorsing that or defending those kinds of things many of these mythicist arguments get the facts wrong uh or also have their own logical problems um so I'm not here endorsing any mythicist view any view that Jesus didn't exist I'm only going to be talking about the specific view specific kind of explanation that I'll be describing to you [Music] [Music] he not know that and I think it's because these guys are are being trained in uh biblical schools biblical study schools these Faith assumptions things that that Christians were teaching were in the Bible but aren't just sort of in infiltrated into uh even secular studies and they're just taught this they're just told this and they just assume it's true they don't check um so even secular Scholars are often basing their arguments on what they unknowingly or what they don't know are actually Christian faith assumptions and not actual facts so what do we what's the alternative so let's say if Jesus didn't exist then the alternative we have to have some other explanation for how Christianity began right um and that's how you test this thing you test two theories of the origins of Christianity one theory has a Jesus who charismatic leader who got it started the other theory has what well that's what I'm going to talk about here now I'm not defending the theory here I'll defend it as I go along but I'm just describing it it'll sound weird but trust me it makes sense once you see the background uh so alternative theory is that Jesus actually began as a Celestial being he was essentially an archangel and within the Theology of the Christians uh and within the Theology of the Jews as well he began as began as a Celestial being revealing truths to followers through Revelations and hidden messages in scripture that's where the gospel originally came from not a guy walking around Galilee Christianity itself began when this being quote unquote revealed that he had tricked the Devil by becoming incarnate and being crucified by the devil in the region of the Heavens ruled by the devil all of this going on in a mythical realm Celestial realm not on Earth thereby atoning for all of Humanity's sins so the end of the world could begin the early Christian Movement was an apocalyptic cult all of this was about bringing about the end of the world now why did they conclude this they concluded this because they saw it promised in the scriptures and and I have some listed here Daniel 9 Jeremiah 23 and 25 Isaiah 53 Zechariah 3 and 6 uh the Jews before the Christians came along uh were looking in the scriptures for hidden messages they thought God had put some sort of Bible code into the scriptures and they were looking for them trying to stitch passages together to come up with some sort of what God's true message was well the Christians were doing the same thing and when you do that when you use the What's called the peser technique that the Dead Sea scrolled Jews were doing and other Jews at the time when you use that technique on these passages what you end up with is essentially the Christian Gospel so to give you an idea of what I'm talking about I'm use some analogies here the first is Islam now think about Islam in fact according to Islamic teachings Muhammad had a vision of or he was actually met by the angel Gabriel and the Quran in fact records the spoken teachings of Gabriel not Muhammad the Quran is not something that is taught as what Muhammad wrote down it's what he transcribed but they are actually the words of the angel Gabriel who didn't exist right this is a Celestial being being who revealed the Quran to Muhammad another example is Mormonism Joseph Smith had conversations with another Angel the angel Moroni and seeing words on magical plates and the Book of Mormon records what the latter two said right so the actual source is a non-historical person the angel Moroni I'm saying that Jesus is like these uh these beings Jesus in fact is just like the angel Gabriel just like the angel Moroni and taught his followers originally in the same way through Revelations or at least claimed Revelations that were written down and then what happened is he was emzed and I this is a word for uh that comes with with respect to ancient religion uh uemis was a 4th Century BC uh Greek author who decided that the celestial Gods Zeus and Uranus uh were he he thought he would create a story where they were actually began life as historical persons they were Kings and he put them in history and wrote a biography about them uh and and then says they they were later deified um but he made that all up in fact they began as Celestial deities and the idea of turning them into historical persons came later and this process became so popular in the ancient world that it actually we have a word for it called uiz where the celestial deities are brought down to earth and given normal Earthly biographies um not always Celestial deities sometimes they're like tree spirits and things like that but they begin as uh Supernatural realm beings and then they're put into history they're given a biography after the fact this was happening a lot Romulus and various other gods Osiris these things all happened to these Gods so I'm saying that this trend affected Christianity they they also started with a supernatural realm being that was later put into history but then of course the Christians started believing or selling those histories as true the stories they made up um and that's the version of Christianity that eventually decided all the documents that would survive the Middle Ages right so we have this giant filter that's controlling what information we get to see now why would you think this I mean the first reason is like I said emor was common uh but also uh it made it easier to control Doctrine uh one of the key things about this and there's Kurt null who's a professor of religion religious studies uh has written an article on this it's really good uh and I cited it in my book on the historicity of Jesus the idea is if you have a revelatory based religion you can have new new guys coming along claiming New Revelations say oh yeah Jesus spoke to me in my and he said all of these things uh it can become difficult to try and control these Revelations and control Doctrine but if you say that there was a historical Jesus and our guys can trace uh you know historical hand down uh oral knowledge to actual disciples then you can actually shut all that down you say well you don't have a pedigree we do we can trace our stuff back to Jesus but of course that those are made up pedigrees but because they're made up there isn't really any way to challenge them and so it became easier to control Doctrine in that way and that's one reason why religions do this so why believe all of that um first it's because it's what typically happens uh consider the Jewish Patriarchs Moses uh Abraham and so on they're all fictional people too and yet they're put in history they're given biographies they interact with historical people uh like the Pharaohs um they have family with names they have hometowns and the whole deal all made up uh we also have this happening to Pagan savior gods and there's this other thing called the modern cargo Cults which have a similar phenomenon uh where uh these are religions uh in the early 20th century that rose up in melanesia and uh Polynesia um where uh the natives started in creating a new syncretistic religion of their own local Cults with a sort of Christianity of sorts and came up with their own apocalypticism where these in in the future the uh the white man would be overthrown and these you know fabulous ships and planes would show up with all this miraculous cargo including uh the resurrected dead of their ancestors and this is the part of the teaching of it but all of these Cults claim to have originated from some sort of leader who introduced them to the gave them all this information uh but the leaders are non-historical and yet are believed to be historical uh they have names like John FR and Tom Navy Tom Navy mean Tom from the Navy John from isn't John from the Army uh these are fictional names but these saviors these are their jesuses uh have stories and the they think they they tell stories about how they actually came to the island and taught gave them all these teach teachings but we can't verify that any of that existed in fact one of these Cults we had anthropologists on the island at the time the cult arose so we actually have firsthand eyewitness documentation of the actual origins of the cult and its development and they can confirm that it it didn't happen with an actual John from coming to the island it actually started with visions uh and that's what we're talking about uh for the origins of Christianity the other reason to believe that this is the explanation for Christianity is that that's what the sequence of evidence corresponds to and that's what I'm going to talk about next the Epistles the the authentic Epistles uh many of you might already know that not all of the Epistles in the New Testament are authentic uh it's the mainstream view that many of them are forgeries that were written later they were not written by the people they claim to have been written by but the general consensus is that seven of the letters written by Paul were actually written by Paul and that they were written in the 50s ad and that's the earliest documentation for Christianity that we have those Epistles they only speak of a pre-existent Celestial being and a revealed gospel when you just look at those seven Epistles without Christian faith assumptions that's all you find in there Paul's only ever talking about a Jesus in outer space that he has conversations with the gospels come later decades later uh and they're wildly deliberately fictional I'll give some examples later yet all subsequent historicity claims all of them are based on the gospels in one fashion or another so we have no independent corroboration it wasn't an exception it was actually making [ __ ] up is what Christians were doing almost all the time so another thing to take into account is the context now this is where um oftentimes online uh you see a lot of misinformation about this uh about the different facts of the different supposedly there are all these parallel previous crucified christs before Jesus um that's not strictly true but there are relevant parallels and they do break down like this there's there're actually was a big fad at the time uh to actually take local Cults and merge it with the helenistic uh movement of the mystery Cults which was the Conquering peoples brought in by the Conquering peoples the Greeks and the Romans but to take your local National cult merge it with that and create a new cult that was unlike both but had shared similarities to all of them so like mithraism for example is where Persians within the Roman Empire took Persian zarrian cult merged it with the mystery Cults and came up with a new religion called mithraism uh the Isis and Osiris cult the Egyptians did the same thing they took the Egyptian cult merged it with helenistic with Greek mystery cult created a new religion uh and and there are various other examples of this all throughout the the area in fact that the you'd almost expect the Jews to eventually done have eventually done this and if you were to look at this trend as it hit National National cult National cult National cult if you were to see this in let's say 100 BC and you to say okay the Jews are next let's write down what that religion will look like based on what we can track from that this trend what you would have written down would have predicted Christianity almost in deta almost in detail but here here are the things that are similar to all of them uh this is what they all share and these are all personal savior deities uh they're all savior gods in other words uh by some means or other they give you personal salvation in the afterlife and it's not a communal thing it's a thing where you merge with the god or or commune with the God and he personally will select you and make sure you get an eternal Paradise after your death that was the Trend it was it was that was the fashion these mystery Cults were all doing this Christianity isn't novel for coming up with that idea now these savior gods in all of these Cults they're all the Son of God uh except some are Daughters of God uh there are a few women among these deities uh but they're all the son or daughter of God just like Jesus is they all undergo a passion literally the same word in Greek Patheon uh you can see this in mithraism and Osiris cult bakus cult uh they all actually the actual word is used so there is a passion of mithros there is a passion of bakus and so on um so The Passion of the Christ that's not even a novel thing that's that's just one more uh the Jews just came up with an idea that they would have their own have their own savior deity and have their own passion cult now they all all of these deities obtained victory over death which they share with their followers uh how they obtain victory over death varies sometimes they actually do die and Rise Again from the grave and that's how they obain obtain victory over death there were several Cults Romulus and zalmoxis and so on that predate Christianity uh that actually do have dying and Rising Gods uh you'll often hear people deny that but no the evidence is very clear that there were some Cults that did that but not all did that U mythra's cult there's no evidence that Mithra is a dying and Rising God in fact um but he does engage in some sort of suffering which is his passion some sort of suffering or struggle by which he gains victory over death uh so that's the parallel it's there are many other examples of this in mystery Cults of some sort of suffering that and struggle that the god under goes to gain this victory over death and they all have stories about them set in human history on earth right yet none of them ever actually existed so when you see this trend and you see Jesus and Christianity fits exactly into this trend it's basically the Jewish version of this uh this P this fad Jesus if Jesus existed he would be the exception he would be unusual uh in fact he'd be the lone exception as far as we know so that's cause uh for doubt I mentioned some of the dying and Rising Gods these are the ones that we have definite clear pre-christian evidence of so we can absolutely establish that they were dying and Rising Gods um Romulus was a Roman State God his death and Resurrection was actually celebrated in annual passion plays there was actually The Passion of the Romulus uh ramul is called so that actually um you can see that and there are actually parallels that you could find more directly in the Christian documents where they're actually borrowing ideas from it Osiris uh that's an Egyptian God those baptized literally baptized into his death and Resurrection are saved in the afterlife does that sound familiar zalmoxis uh that's a thracian god possibly related to Celtic gods uh his death and Resurrection also assures followers of eternal life and that predates Christianity by 400 years and there are others those are just three of several but the more interesting thing is not just the uh helenistic the Greek and Roman background the the religious importations of the conquerors also relevant and interesting is the part of Christianity that comes from Judaism and this is one of the things you might not have heard of uh and I was surprised to Discover It Pho of Alexandria he wrote in the 20s to 40s ad so roughly shortly before Paul shortly before Christianity or co-terminus with it uh he was a Jewish Theologian uh in fact one of the most respected of his era he attests in his writings that and I cite all of the passages in my book on the historicity of Jesus he attests that in fact there was a pre-christian Jewish belief in the Celestial being actually named Jesus uh he he actually finds the the character named Jesus in Zechariah 6 and he says that this uh this being uh actually is a Celestial being not a man in history unlike the verse as was originally intended so he tells us this that there was a pre-christian Jewish belief in a Celestial being named Jesus who was and he says this is these are all the attributes of this this pre-christian Jesus in outer space he was the firstborn son of God he was the celestial image of God he was God's agent of Creation in other words God just gave him marching orders and Jesus did the actual creating and he was God's Celestial high priest now the Curious Thing is in our earliest writings for Christians this is exactly the Jesus they're talking about all of these attributes are assigned to their Jesus that's incredibly unlikely The Coincidence is impossible I think virtually impossible unless in fact they're talking about the same theological figure from Judaism so the Christians just took this existing theological figure and just gave him a story of being crucified and resurrecting uh the earliest known Christians that we can see in uh Philippians uh Philippians 2 there are variety of arguments I won't go into them where Scholars agree that the the gospel that's cited here by Paul predates predates Paul he's using some material from before him he didn't invent it himself so he attests that the earliest known Christians believed that this pre-existent being descended became incarnate died rose again and then appeared to select people to tell them all of this one of the most plausible mythis theories on the most plausible myth this Theory this Incarnation death and burial took place in outer space just below the moon now you might wonder why on Earth would you believe that well the same was taught of Osiris in fact public stories and we know this from plutar plutar tells us in the late 1 Century that there were the public stories that you told everybody which put Osiris on Earth as a historical King who was lat later deified but he says that the private Stories the stories that were told to initiates and known among the priests were that in fact that's not true those are just allegories the truth was that he uh his death and Resurrection occur in outer space just below the moon uh so that's actually a thing I'll give you more evidence of that later and but there are precedents for this in the Jewish belief system we know that there were Jewish writings that claimed that Adam was believed to have been buried in outer space uh and somewhere in the vicinity of Venus or Mars I think um but so there were Jews that believed in fact most Jews of the time who had theological beliefs about the about the heavens believed that there were actual places in the heavens there were there was dirt there was Gardens there were tombs there were castles and all kinds of things so the idea of being crucified and buried in heaven in the lower Heavens made actual sense that fit their actual context but one of the more interesting examples is one of the sort of heretical you might say gospels uh one of the Lost gospels in a sense of early Christianity is the Ascension of Isaiah this is a text written by Christians sometime in the late 1st or early 2nd Century and it's basically a gospel in which uh the prophet Isaiah has a vision of what's going to happen to originate Christianity and we can look at and we can know that when we um in this prophet Isaiah receive a vision but when we look at it uh we can tell that there are things that have been added to it because of stylistic and manuscript evidence we know that there are interpolations and when we take the interpolations out we end up with the earliest redaction which lacks a visit to Earth in in fact it's explicit in saying that Jesus just descends to the realm just below the moon and is actually crucified by Satan and his demons in outer space in the realm of that was controlled by Satan below the moon so here we have an actual Christian text that actually articulates the theory that I'm talking about and it dates to roughly the same time as the gospels that we know another example is two Peter uh two Peter is a forgery uh someone pretending to be Peter but in this he says we did not follow cleverly devised myths no we were eyewitnesses of his majesty and then they immediately Forge an eyewitness account of meeting Jesus on Earth the significance of this is that they're answering some unknown Christians and this is interesting because we get no more information about these other Christians none of their documents survived there's no account of them uh but they exist because this letter was written to respond to them so there's this whole other sect of Christians that they're responding to that we know nothing else about except for this they're answering these unknown Christians who were claiming that this Jesus was a cleverly devised myth such that you had to invent an eyewitness account attesting that he yes he actually historically existed the fact that you had to write this argument to rebut other Christians means there were at this time Christians who did not believe in a historical Jesus so the other side of this is how Jesus communicated uh when we look at the letters I mentioned that uh it appears that he only communicates through Revelation there um is this the same slide no yes uh the idea that he's um communicates through Revelations and hidden messages in scripture because Jesus is an eternal being right throughout history he's been whispering in the ears of the prophets and coding what he whispered to them so that it would have double meaning it would have meaning for the prophet's own age but it would also have meaning for the final age right and this is the hidden the idea of hidden messages that they're looking for in scripture now H how do we know this this is stated several times in the Epistles and in fact in these Epistles the seven Epistles the authentic Epistles no references in them uh there are no references in them to Jesus preaching other than from heaven or being a preacher having a Ministry or choosing or having disciples the word disciple is never used in there or communicating by any other means than Revelation in scripture and this is completely reversed in the gospels decades later where we don't have a Celestial being communicating by revelations from Heaven instead we have this historical Jesus who's talking to people in a normal way selecting disciples and so on that all appears later some examples of this Romans 16 has a passage that says the preaching of Jesus Christ is according to revelation of the mystery kept silent for all ages but now manifested through the scriptures notice what's missing here there's no reference to it being manifested through the ministry of Jesus in Galilee it's only coming from Revelation and scriptures another example is uh talking about the Jews how shall they call on him if they haven't believed in him and how shall they believe in him if they have haven't heard him and how shall they hear him without a preacher and how shall they preach unless they are sent and that's the word for sent as Apostles well think about this he's talking about Jews if they never heard him then he clearly wasn't preaching in Galilee and Judea the only way you could ever hear what Jesus taught is to listen to an apostle explaining it to you which means what this is giving away is that Jesus communicated by revelations to the chosen ones the apostles and then they go around preaching what he taught uh and Paul also says you know am I not an apostle have I not seen Jesus the Lord Paul of course is famous for uh joining the cult after Jesus is supposedly dead um so he never met Jesus and here he says he's seen him so he's talking about Revelations there are other examples uh like that um in 2 Corinthians 12 um Paul speaks of having many Revelations from the celestial Jesus and even relays In this passage a two-way conversation he had with Jesus so this is this is the kind of uh communication that we're talking about so scripture and Revelation are the only sources of information Paul ever mentions anyone having the Jesus he knows and refers to and speaks to is always an outer space he never clearly places him on Earth or connects him to human history so when we don't look at those letters with biased Christian faith assumptions they look like they corroborate this theory that I was talking about earlier and he says things like this you know the gospel I preach does not come from man neither did I receive it from man nor was I taught it but it came to me through a revelation of Jesus Christ now notice when we get then using the exact same word so he's talking about the exact same thing in one Corinthians Brothers The Gospel I preached is also what I received meaning by Revelation as he says in Galatians that according to the scriptures Christ died for our sins and that he was buried and that according to the scriptures he was raised on the third day and that he appeared to keus and at least he appeared at last he appeared to me as well now one thing to notice notice what happens here Jesus is not said to have appeared before his death people only get to see him after his death the sequence of events scripture tells us all these things happen to him that he he was crucified died buried and all this stuff but only then after his death does he appear to anyone there's no reference to him appearing in Galilee and conducting a Ministry it's not even part of the Gospel that Paul was preaching another aspect of that he says when he talks about the Eucharist he says the Lord broke bread and and gave us this ritual for communing with him he says he received it from the Lord meaning Revelation so that means that Paul hallucinated the the original so-called Last Supper which he never calls the Last Supper by the way the last for it to be a Last Supper requires a narrative of History that's not what it is it's just the Lord's Supper to Paul so that's the evidence now there are attempts to rebut this um the evidence to the other side of the argument is extraordinarily weak and problematic and I'm going to go over some of the the best attempts that historicists people who want to still defend the historicity of Jesus what they try to do um one of them is they say that well twice Paul refers to Brothers of the Lord and if he had Brothers then he must have existed the problem is that Brothers of the Lord means baptized Christians Paul actually says that uh when you were baptized you were actually adopted by God you actually became a Son of God and he says that Jesus was the firstborn of many Brethren so the idea of being a baptized Christian was the idea of being the Son of God if you're the Son of God then you're the brother of Jesus right so this idea of the brothers of the lord we can't tell just from the way Paul talks about it whether he's talking about biological brothers or spiritual brothers and the mere fact that he doesn't even it doesn't even occur to him that he has to make that distinction means that the distinction didn't exist yet which means there were no biological Brothers yet that you had to distinguish from the spiritual Brothers there are other arguments I advance in the book uh to conclude that he's only referring to baptized Christians he's not talking about biological Brothers of the Lord Brothers of Jesus you'll often hear uh well usually I've written uh born of the sperm of David but you'll even see biblical translations of one passage in Paul that says descended from David that's an English uh that's English Liberty uh the Greek actually says made of the sperm of David it actually uses a word for manufacturer which I'll talk about shortly but um what's it's talking about is divine manufacturer it's the same word that was used to talk about Adam when when God made Adam it uses the same word Adam wasn't born right he was he didn't descend from anything he was manufactured by God so the passage itself is ambiguous as to what it's referring to it doesn't say anything about descending from David and there's another passage uh says where he says born of a woman using the exact same word made of a woman uh and Paul actually says that is an allegory um and that there's contention around that but you can see my presentation of in the argument in the book it's allegorical he's not talking about a biological mother so these passages are either ambiguous or inconclusive the uh born or made I mentioned the word uh gomos it means to happen become or be made notably Paul never uses that word of a human birth uh this is for both the born of a woman and born of a David he uses this other word not the one that he uses of her human birth despite using this word hundreds of times he typically uses it to mean being or becoming coming into existence his preferred word for being born is G and he uses it a few times uh elsewhere but he does not use it for these passages here and that's telling the significant thing is it's it's was so telling and so problematic that later Christian scribes they also realized this was a problem so they tried doctoring both of these passages to convert the one verb to the other uh and we know this because we actually caught them because we actually have the manuscripts showing the original reading and then we have the manuscripts that were doctored uh so even the Christians themselves that were trying to make Jesus more historical were bothered by the fact that Paul's actual language was problematic for them and I mentioned yeah Paul says Adam was born or was made using the exact same word um also in one Corinthians Paul uses the same word of the made from he uses it of our future Resurrection body which is also not born but directly manufactured by God so I'm telling you I'm suggesting that he is using the word in the exact same sense in Romans 1 and Galatians 4 so let's get to the gospels that's where then people okay so the Epistles don't get us anything surely we can extract some history from the gospels well the gospels come decades after the fact and are actually the first we hear of an Earthly story for Jesus the gospels and I don't I don't this is preaching to the choir so I probably don't need to sell this but the gospels are wildly fictitious uh in their content and structure and I document this extensively in my book in case there's any naysayers left over um they are literary Works serving allegorical purposes every story in them has discernable allegorical or propagandistic intent uh so that you don't need history to explain why it's there the first of them in fact Mark looks like an extended meta Parable in fact um Outsiders are told a story while insiders are told what it really means and when that's the first Parable Jesus teaches he takes his disciples aside and explains yeah to Outsiders we're going to tell this little story but to insiders we're going to tell you what it all represents the story isn't really true it's just some sort of symbolic thing that's we call that a tell that's a giveaway Mark is actually instructing the reader how to read his own Gospel when he does that there are a lot of books on this the power of parable by John Dominic crosson is a really good book making the point I just made that the gospels themselves are Parables uh they're not historical writings uh but I also talk about it in proving history and Randall Helm's this short little book called The Gospel fictions has a lot of really good examples in it uh those are the kinds of places to look to see these things the uh the challenge is are there exceptions to this um and I've looked and looked and looked and I've I've listened to the the best arguments to try and come up with exceptions and there really aren't I've not found any um I'll give you an example of what I mean how many of you know about Jesus withering a fig tree that yeah didn't bear fruit out of season so Jesus is really hungry and he he's coming along and he sees this fig tree and it's it's not the season for figs it says in the text it's not the season for figs so so there are no figs on the tree but he gets angry at the tree and then curses it for not burying figs out of season uh and then of course they come back later and it's withered and you know miraculously withered um this look makes Jesus look insane even if he has an X-Men power to wither trees um it it doesn't make any sense why would he wither a curse and wither a tree for not bearing fruit when it wasn't even seasoned for fruit um but of course the first thing when you look at this the first reason you can conclude that this story is made up that it's fiction is that that people can't wither fig trees no one has the X-Men power of fig tree withering um nor would any real person curse one for not bearing figs out of season even if they had the miraculous power to do it no one would do that that's not a realistic Behavior that's the kind of behavior that you see in mythology not the kind of behavior that you see in history in actual fact the entire story is an allegory for God's abandonment of the temple the Fig Tree represents the temple uh the Jewish temple and this is established in the peer-reviewed literature by RJ hammer and Kelly uh sacred violence on the Messiah wrote a really uh groundbreaking article on this um what has Happening Here in Mark and this is the I'm going to teach you a little bit of Classic's literary Theory he's creating what's called an inclusio um some biblical Scholars call them Mark and sandwiches uh the idea is that you H you start a story that's wrapped around another story and when you see that happen the two stories are commenting on each other there's some there's some literary reason for it there's a a purpose of it now the one of the classic examples is you have the dying 12-year-old girl that Jesus resurrects that gets interrupted by a woman who's bleeding for 12 years that Jesus heals and then it ends with the same story it started with so you have these this these a 12-year-old girl and a 12-year-old woman or a 12 a woman with a 12-year-old Hemorrhage cycled around each other this is an allegory for Israel right the the 12 when you see the number 12 you're usually talking about Israel the girl and the woman are different aspects of the uh nation of Israel this is an allegory about how the gospel is going to transform Israel so when we see the same thing here we have Jesus and the cursed fig tree that story starts but then it gets interrupted by Jesus clearing the temple the famous scene of him clearing the temple then they come out and then the Fig Tree story ends around it so it's wrapped around each other the Fig Tree represents the Jewish temple cult now it's hard to Fathom that today because uh Jewish religion is not based on Temple cult back then it was the foundation of Jewish religion and nationalism what they're saying what the author is saying here is that it's no longer the time it's no longer the season for figs meaning it's no longer the season for the Jewish temple cult it's past it it's no longer uh going to um it's no longer relevant and God's going to get rid of it uh and the idea of withering it is what Jesus is going to do he's going to wither it away and it's actually a reference to the destruction of the Jewish temple cult in in 70 AD another piece of evidence that the gospel writer wrote after that time so he's talking about why did God destroy the temple he says well no longer the season for figs I'm here to replace it it's a whole allegory for that so it's not really a historical writing it's not an event that occurred nor is the writer trying to convince you that this really occurred okay so that's the gospels I could go example after example of of things like that in the gospels but um I don't I don't think I need to I have a whole talk that I can give on that and I have many examples in the book but okay so that's the gospels okay they're fiction they're allegorical okay so we can't do much with that what else is there well in fact everything everything else is either not independent meaning they just Echo the gospels or what Christians say the gospels say and if it's not independent it can't corroborate it so it's useless or it's fabricated we have tons of fabricated pieces of evidence the infancy gospels Jesus's letter to abgar yes Jesus wrote a letter if you believe it the forged Epistles in the New Testament and Beyond the infancy gospels by the way are great read uh they read like The like Jesus is like the omen child uh and like he's like one of the most horrific terrifying uh beings in literary history um and the Christians you know reverently pass these around as isn't Jesus awesome he could just kill kids whenever he wanted or when you get to all this evidence it's either not independent or it's fabricated or it doesn't exist often times you'll hear evidence being cited that actually doesn't exist at all um it might be hypothesized to exist but it doesn't actually or uh when you go look at the passage there's no Jesus in it so that that gets rid of all that evidence I've written many articles on these uh in my book Hitler Homer Bible Christ I've collected all my peer reviewed articles that went into peer-reviewed academic journals on this subject um so if you want those easy access to those that's the place to go so you don't have to hunt them down individually two of them um there are actually three or four but two of them are these um the one about phalus you'll often hear this Greek writer in the first century supposedly mentioned uh The Darkness at Christ's death in point of fact he did not um and then the most famous one that you'll always hear that just constantly Josephus you'll hear that constantly Josephus attests to the existence of Jesus no uh I think almost certainly he never mentioned Jesus and both of the passages that now mention Jesus were inserted later uh and my article on this in the Journal of early Christian Studies documents that in details all of the reasons why we can conclude Josephus never mentioned Jesus but even if he did uh the one larger passage what what even you look at both passages he he would just be repeating what Christians were telling him right and he's writing in the 90s ad so if Christians were just basically telling him on what the gospels were saying what we would end up with is exactly what's in the text so even if these were authentic passages they still are not independent of the gospels we can't establish that they're independent of the gospels so I'm going to end with an analogy um we were we're okay with doing a Q&A right yeah uh so I'm going to end with an analogy Roswell um I'm sure you all know about Roswell I'm sure at the zacon of all places you know all about Roswell um what really happened right what really happened yeah we all know a guy found some sticks and tin foil in the desert that's what really happened let's be honest what was said to have happened that it was debris from an alien spacecraft then this was said immediately this wasn't like it didn't take 20 years or 40 years there was no legendary development it was immediate this was the claim uh of what was found what was said to have happened within just 30 years of this event just within 30 years and this is in our era of mass media Universal literacy uh Universal education um newspapers CFI like all of this stuff couldn't prevent this from happening an entire Flying Saucer was recovered complete with alien bodies that were autopsied by the government so th if this could happen in the 20th century America uh it would have been vastly easier for something similar to happen in first century Judea or Rome oh what just happened there oh yes so the tin foil in the desert would be analogous to the revelations of the Archangel named Jesus right according to the theory that I'm proposing here and the Flying Saucer and alien bodies would be analogous to the historical Jesus of Galilee so imagine if we only had the stories now written by Roswell Believers from 30 years later and information derived from those texts and nothing else imagine if that were the case we would not know about the tinfoil right all we would have are multiple Witnesses and sources reporting a flying saucer recovery in Alien B autopsy so what I'm proposing and neither of which ever existed right so what I'm proposing is that that's exactly what happened to Jesus for the origins of Christianity so thanks for listening to my pra C on that

Channel: AronRa

Views: 156,545

Keywords: Richard Carrier, Jesus Christ (Deity), mythicist

Id: 79Lmmy2jfeo

Length: 43min 50sec (2630 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 05 2014