The Gospel According to Carrier

[Music] the earliest story of Jesus that mean that we know for sure was written was the Gospel of Mark [Music] there may have been versions before but we don't really have any concrete evidence of that being the case and we don't have any evidence evidence in mark that mark doesn't seem to be aware of their being prior versions of his story his story seems to be you know his own creation so even when you get like later Gospels they're just they're basically just more and more distant evolutions of the Gospel of Mark so mark seems to be this ground zero of the biography of Jesus and doesn't seem to be evidence of there being a prior version of that so the question comes you know like where did Mark get these ideas and when did he write them down and the mainstream consensus is that mark of course wrote after the Jewish war which means that ended in 70 AD so he's writing you know 20 30 years after Paul he's writing 40 years after the origin of the religion and we have no evidence that there were any eyewitnesses still alive after 70 AD a lot of the stories in mark about Jesus are taken basically they're stories about Moses or stories about Elijah and Elisha that marca is updated you know he's done like a West Side Story to Romeo and Juliet he's changed the historical context the cultural context changed the value meaning of the message and put Jesus as the central character so Jesus is in the role of Moses Jesus is in the role of Elijah but he engages in stories that are very similar and clearly lifted from and rewritten from these Old Testament these these Jewish scriptural ideas mark is doing that in part because they've sort of gotten tired of the old scriptures were written for a lost time or the value message doesn't resonate anymore so mark is trying to sort of create a new scripture assort of new Moses and new Elisha who behaves the way that is meaningful for that particular time mark is also doing this in a sort of Homeric style he's taking ideas from Homer and rewriting them and he's doing the same things you can't remember mark is writing in Greek like its original composition in Greek so he is writing for a Greek audience anyone who could compose like he's doing and certainly anyone who could easily read his book knows Homer inside now Homer is the Bible essentially of the pagans and people often said that that mark writes in a low dialect that like he's like some sort of hick or something that's not true he's he's actually he's actually super skilled super educated author whoever he is but he's choosing to write in a low dialect in the same way that Mark Twain did and he's doing that cuz that's his audience right so he wants to actually that's part of the symbol of the gospel is that this is not a high Flannery style this is a low style because the least shall be first the poor shall be higher than the rich it's all part of the gospel models of reversing the order of society so that's all part of the the allegory itself is just the choice of dialect that he wrote in [Music] at the time that Christianity began you have to understand like the whole Mediterranean was being influenced by hellenism at this time you had Alexander the Great conquered a lot of stuff you have his generals after him continue to try and control things there's a lot of influence of Hellenistic ideas going through all the cultures and a lot of diverse cultures around you have the Syrians you have the you know that the Anatolians you've got the Jews you got the Egyptians so there's influences coming around all over the place every national culture that came under the influence of Hellenism develop their own version of this mystery religion and concept and and every single one is different but it's because it's different because you take the local culture the local religion and put it into this basic shell this basic model and you get a different religion but thus there are these common features that are there in there this package essentially so you get Osiris and Isis cult in Egypt you get Adonis cult in Syria you get the Thracians had zalmoxis cult and you see all of these different religions with these savior gods and they're always the savior son of god occasionally there a daughter of god but they're not the supreme god there's some intermediary child of God so this demigod that is their Savior figure and they undergo some sort of great struggle or suffering sometimes actually in fact a death and resurrection and through that suffering or struggle they gain victory over death that they could share with their followers and then they do that through the followers sharing communion so they have these common meals and through baptism [Music] one of the particular aspects of it is the the mysteries which is idea of these these secret doctrines that insiders were told that Outsiders are not well but you have to you have to join up get initiated and you'll be told the secrets that you need to know to basically get advancement in the afterlife and that these are the common features of the mystery religions and their their broader sociological features that are common to them so they we're all they're very cosmopolitan so they're trying to unite all races and cultures and some most cases genders everyone is when they join they become part of a fictive family a fictive kin group so you call each other brother and sister father and mother and things like this just as you people who are familiar what the Christians doing but this was already the model of the mystery religions going around and syncretism is one of these features where you have this basic core model but then you take the local religion and import it in and you create something new that's common to all of these things and the individualism so the original pagan cults and things at this time are usually communal religions in the sense that you would participate in the cult in order to guarantee the crops or to guarantee the the benefit of the people as a collective it's not an individual salvation thing mystery cults the one of their innovations one of their features is it's all about personal salvation it's about your salvation in the afterlife so how do you get a good place in the afterlife so you have all of these features and one on top of that is this trend towards Hino theism this idea there's one Supreme God and all the other gods are either created by hammer subordinate to him and even Judaism is he no a theistic when you include the fact that angels are really basically just gods they're just not called gods but they have all the same features they're immortal they have these particular domains of power and they're their supernatural abilities they live in heaven you know so and then those demons of course so you have like the the evil gods and so you've got this whole basically this polytheistic system they just don't call it that but the mystery religions were doing the same thing they're carving out this new idea of polytheism where you have the Supreme God and you have this hierarchy of deities and the Supreme God is the most important one and so these features are already going on so when you see this stuff finally it's in spreading to Syria it's spreading to Egypt and so on and finally you see Judea it's kind of like the late comers like the last one said Wow everybody else has done that we should do one too basically this is this group of Jews sort of whether it was deliberately where there's calm they are unconsciously they're being influenced by this model and they basically develop their own version of this mystery religion that is very Jewish but it still conforms to this this trend that's going around in it and the trend elements are things they're not coming from Judaism gentlemen they're things coming from the outside but they make them Jewish they dress them up as tuition of course seven is Jewish there they're not saying like we took these ideas from these other cultures now they're saying like oh this has always been God's plan and God is Jewish so oh we're good right so that's how Christianity starts out as this Hellenized Jewish offshoot when you look at mark 4 when Jesus starts you know the character Jesus in mark when he starts telling his stories about what does the gospel mean instead of just telling people this is what the gospel means you know ABC you know I'm gonna die for you and that'll cancel out the the temple cult thing and get salvation yada yada like the straightforward explanation of the whole doctrine no he doesn't do that he's he he starts teaching these these obscure parables and and the first time he gives one of these parables no one understands him and then his disciples take him aside what is this weird stuff you're talking about we don't understand it and he says oh okay so I'm gonna tell these stories to the public specifically so that they won't understand but you guys because you're insiders I'm gonna tell you the real meaning of these stories the real meaning is not the literal meaning that the literal meaning is a deception the real meaning is what the meaning of the the underlying meaning of the story what moral does it convey what deeper truth does it convey and then he says you know to you that he's calls it these are the mysteries of the kingdom of God that I'm convey to you of mystery religion right so these are the mysteries so this is the model Mark is giving you a clue he's basically if you think about it he's telling you what his gospel is his gospel is an extended parable and only the insiders are going to be told the real meaning of all these passages in the Gospel of Mark and that's the here's that key that clue and there's like that's how he's treating his disciple so if you're reading this and you're imagining yourself as a disciple you know where you fit into this scheme is that oh I need this teaching that this is all facade it's it's meant to point me do something I want to figure out what that that thing is and then only insiders we keep in that and this was a common feature of the mystery religions that made me very popular right so you could be an insider you could feel superior to everyone else cuz you've got the secret knowledge and you know they they won't laugh at you for the stupid things you believe on but you don't really know the truth and it gives you this sort of like this internal cohesion this internal morale makes you even more confident religion [Music] you often run into especially Christian apologists and stuff try to sell this idea that Judaism was monolithic and was resistant to all change and influence there was only one kind of Judaism and they they would not accept anything and it would just stay that way that's not the reality when you go looking at what was actually going on in the first century early 1st century BC and AD Judaism a fragment as there was tons of diversity in terms of different ways of thinking out there Judaism different theologies different philosophies different models of doing it I'll bet if you went too far out this is a Roman historian and intellectual and asked it was like okay you see these mystery religions of growing up a very Egypt Syria and so on what how and you know a little bit about Judaism so what if the Jews came up with a mystery religions described that religion and he would write out this description what that religion would look like and it would be Christianity to a tee [Music] [Music] [Music] the whole crucifixion narrative resembles in 20 points in order this other death narrative of this other Jesus who died decades after Christianity began so he has no connection to Christianity but it's Jesus been an audience and he's killed during the siege of Jerusalem during the Jewish war but it's a very similar story where he's he's you know prophesying the end of the world and the Jews haul him in to the Romans to get him punished and but the Romans see nothing wrong with him and and so that what happens and that stories they released him and he's killed by a siege engine during the war but it's it seems pretty clear that when Mark composed his story of Jesus he's trans valuing the Jesus Benenati a story so he's taking stuff from even from Josephus and rewriting it and turning it into something that he can mark it and it's the same ideas like they want to create a new message if they saw something that worked for them and the Jesus been a nanny a story that I like this message but I'm gonna pop it up a little and put some things in it fixed up so it's really exactly like we want and then we'll just make Jesus than Joseph the character and change the historical decade in which it occurred and the whole thing so this is the kind of thing that mark is doing these are the way they this is the way that mark is using sources and it's not what people who want to defend historicity think using sources means [Music] John Dominic Crossan came out with a book called the power of parable where he says yeah actually all the Gospels are just extended parables they're not supposed to be taken literally they originally and so he tells these stories and you know if you read them literally they they're just totally illogical or they're really implausible they don't make sense as history you know if Jesus walks up to these fishermen and says like two words to them and they drop them quit their jobs and leave their families and follow him you know that that doesn't happen in the real world like that would have been like days of conversation for him to persuade them so so even something as simple as that is not a realistic scenario but it symbolizes that coming to the you know comes up he teaches he says they'll follow me I'll make you fishers of men and that's like that's all symbolic of what it means to join the gospel so it's telling you something about the gospel it's not meant to be taken literally then one of my favorite examples of course the withering of the fig tree where Jesus is hungry and he sees the fig tree and mark even says it goes out of his way to say it's not the season for figs but Jesus want up there anyway and didn't find any things which of course he wouldn't cuz it wasn't the season for figs but he gets angry and curses the tree and says may you never bear fix again and they come back the next day and it's been withered to its very roots and this is makes note of course it can't happen like people can't wear their fig trees so so we know the story is false someone made it up for some reason it also does even make sense even if Jesus had the superpower of withering fig trees why would he wither and curse a fig tree for not bearing fruit when it's not time for it to bear fruit like what's the point of this but mark uses this style of inclusio where he has one story wrapped around another there many stories and marklar like this is one story wrapped around another in this story of the fig tree is wrapped around another story a very famous story which is the clearing of the Temple Square so Jesus comes up you know says maybe never bear free it's no longer the season for figs and may you no longer bear fruit again goes into the temple and it curses all the corruption going on in the temple overturns the tables and stuff like that and says you know this this is we're done with this then they come out and then they see the fig tree is withered and then everybody understands right and then Jesus goes on to explain well now it's all about prayer and direct contact with God it's no longer about the tenth the fig tree is all an allegory for the temple cult it's no longer season it's no longer the season for that cult anymore so God's gonna wither it to its very roots so the whole thing is a parable for why God allowed the heathens to come in and destroy his own temple because it's all a commentary on the Jewish war right so he's saying like and this is a big crisis for the Jews right look how would why would God allow that to happen his own house his own temple he lets these these you know pagans come in and just destroy his holy city destroy its temple and the temple coat which is the central figure the central piece of Jewish salvation why would God let them take that away so the Jews were struggling with how to explain this and the Christians also being in Jewish faction had also explained this - like why would that happen and if you're going around you know selling this religion people don't know well yeah you come from the Jews and look your God clearly doesn't hold it in juice right so they've got to come up with a story for why God would allow this and this is what we get this says it's no longer the season for that temple cold weather it and a curse it we're gonna get rid of it we're gonna replace it with the gospel [Music] as far as our pointed out that when you look at the Gospels for example their portrayal of Jesus and his interaction with the Pharisees his arguments that he has with the Pharisees they actually read exactly like an internal Pharisee argument so you actually have the Pharisees had two sects they have the hillo lights and the Shama ads and the Shama rights were the Conservatives and the Hilla lights where the the Liberals and they argue with each other and those arguments look exactly the same and in fact Jesus just looks like a hill of light Pharisee essentially though the way the character is written in the Gospels so then there are substances suggesting well maybe Jesus was originally a Pharisee you know you can even look at a lot of these different sects and you can see there's pieces of a lot of these sects in early Christianity and we can't really tell necessarily when they got imported that America imported after it started they might have been part of the launch but you also have to think in terms of where did Christianity come from it had to be a sect before they came up with this revelation of oh yes the Christ figure has sacrificed himself now the end times have begun etc before that revelation came to them they were probably already an organized sect in some fashion they probably had some other set of deep teachings and then you make a fuss or Peter as we know him might have actually started this this this revolutionary movement within that seconds and OH guess what I've had a revelation things have changed the end is coming you know the Christ figure has sacrificed himself we no longer need the temple called yada yada so the question then becomes what sect was that [Music] there's a lot of weird similarities based on what we know of the essence which is this one particular sect of Jews and the Christians they have a lot of similar doctrines that people used to think we're unique to Christianity it turns out well guess what the essence had these ideas earlier the Bible doesn't mention the Essenes and there have been scholars who pointed this out and said like that's kind of weird that like you have Josephus for example is this Jewish author who wrote the history of the Jews for pagans to understand the Jews and he talked about his own life he says I went through all the major sects needless than the Essenes the Pharisees and Sadducees and he talks about them in to try and explain to pagans about how Jewish societies organizes it's the essence the Pharisees and Sadducees this is also on the zealot this 4th philosophy the zealots but but the main ones the good ones were the sceen is the pharisees and says it's always the essence in status using the pharisees and then you go into the gospels and suddenly there's pharisees and sadducees but there's no sceen it's like why where did the Essenes go and then there's Scott scholars will point out like well that's Jesus right this is that's the the perspective of these authors is the essence that's where the essays are is that you're watching them in or engage with the statuses and the Pharisees and that's a compelling argument it certainly is an argument for when someone like Mark is writing his gospel it's an argument for him believing that that's the case that he thinks that he is the inheritor of the true sceen doctrine he's writing an essay in gospel and that's where the SE Ansari is it so it's like you know this is he's not gonna explicitly mention the essence cuz because he's the sceen right so Jesus is the SE Nepal the Apostles are the essence I think that that has some merit to it [Music] it was a very Jewish sex so you had to become a Jew to be a Christian which means you had to cut off a piece of your penis if you're a man you had to follow the dietary laws and all this stuff but then you had this one particular apostle who came along with Paul who originally was a persecutor but then sort of like converted and saw the light so this is actually a cool cult that I can actually support and become a bigwig in and so he starts coming up with this idea that this would be way more popular if we just get rid of the Torah requirement so like circumcision and dietary requirements would make it much more people would want to join [Music] when you look at the letters of Paul for example it's clear that he has no access to some sort of biography of Jesus in circulating him all his knowledge of Jesus comes from direct revelation from Jesus or from pre-christian Jewish Scriptures he has no knowledge of these narratives or these ideas that were get formulated into the Gospels [Music] half letters of paul ER forgeries so and that's the mainstream consensus we know people forge documents it has name and put them in the new testament so we have to exclude those but there are about seven six or seven letters that are agreed to be authentic and they've also been meddled with like pieces has have been torn out and other letters he wrote are missing and things like that but we have at least this core collection of texts that come from paul and he's writing in the 50s so he's writing decades before mark first time paul mentions anyone ever seeing him is after his death he has this whole creed like he says you know like in jesus you know was crucified buried a court and he says it crucified according to the scriptures cruz a buried according to the scriptures katha using source that's the exact same structure for the naming of the gospel so he sees paul is saying that his sources of information where he's getting this idea that jesus was crucified and buried he sings getting it from scripture scripture is his source not a witness nominal it was there what didn't Jesus handpick disciples when he was preaching the gospel that were involved the word disciple is nowhere in Paul Paul has no knowledge of their being disciples he only knows apostles and to him an apostle someone who had a revelation of Jesus he has no knowledge of any other kind of way that you get to know Jesus there's no mention of miracles no mention of exorcisms in fact one of the Creed's Paul cites that Jesus abandon all of his powers so the the whole idea of this this cosmic idea is that he couldn't perform miracles because he abandoned all his ability to perform miracles and then it was killed and then a question is who's killing him where is this occurring and that's a whole other debate as to where what that could mean but but in Paul there's no life of Jesus it's just not there the whole thing is just shelled out and the closest thing we have is he mentions you know in the night that he was handed over he broke bread and gave this instruction but Paul says he got that by revelation that Jesus revealed that to him he didn't learn it from witnesses and he doesn't mention anyone being there so when you get to the gospel suddenly now there's people being mentioned being there it's Jesus in life doing this and talking to the disciples but when you read Paul Jesus is speaking to future Christians he's speaking to eternity he's not speaking to us a select limited group that's with him he's talking to all Christians and it seems like a revelation that Jesus did this so even that we can't really place into the gospel history in that kind of concept so what's going on here like why does Paul not know I need the story why is Paul not knowing the parables when call us to teach something he has these revelations and I have a revelation from Jesus this is what he said he doesn't have a collection of sayings doesn't have stories to tell about you remember you should do what Jesus did you remember when he did this thing no that kind of like he doesn't use analogies from Jesus's life you know it's like none of the things that you would expect if someone's trying to push this religion and say you should follow the dictates of this guy you should follow him as a model you'd be talking about his life we talking about things he did and as examples put proving your point and even if you're writing 20,000 words on someone it's exceedingly difficult to avoid ever mentioning anything happening in their life even by accident right so it's like it's very odd and so this is one of the principle basis I think of arguing that maybe there wasn't the Jesus name stuff that all went on as they understood it celestially and it was only known by revelation only known by secret messages in Scripture [Music] [Music] there been other scholars who pointed out that when they look at this huge diversity of theories of who the historical Jesus was is like tons of different versions of Jesus tons of different versions of what he really taught originally and stuff what what someone said is like what what I've noticed is when you look at a scholar and you look at his politics and you look at his what he wants to be true religiously and then you look at the Jesus he's reconstructed it's conveniently the same and so this is what seems to be happening is that people are looking down a well and seeing themselves reflected back at them and then calling it Jesus [Music] so you have this this trend and scholarship to build your historical Jesus to be the one you want for your own politics and for your own moral vision for society and and of course that keeps you anchored to defending historicity because you need historicity to do that I think what you're gonna see is that the new guard is gonna be more free to be open about this and you can see the old guard die off and you're gonna see probably more and more acceptance of this at least the plausibility that Jesus didn't exist not necessarily like adopting the hypothesis that he didn't but at least saying yeah that's as plausible as the zealot hypothesis that's you know also going out in the field whether or the apocalyptic prophet hypothesis with them but Jesus the Magician hypothesis or Jesus Jesus the cynic hypothesis there's all of these different hypotheses about the historical Jesus the non-existent hypothesis this other alternative theory for the origins Christianity is at least as plausible as all those others and so it deserves a equal respect and a place at the table of the debate [Music] what we have now is that we've gone to a high reliance on fiction so we have you know we have a star trip we have star wars we have a lot of them Harry Potter we have Harry Potter is a good example of it even Game of Thrones where we have these these fictional universes that explore moral problems and explore political problems and give us parables that we can use to teach like yeah this is this is what a good person is like this is what a bad person is like this is what makes a good society this is what makes a bad society this is how you deal with this moral problem this is how you not deal with this moral problem we're we are now using fiction as models to do this that's the direction we're going and and I think in terms of like religious like you lose this religious package you lose this worldview lose your anchor in terms of your identity and your sense of where you fit in the world and how the world works and all this you do have to replace it like you've got to put something back in there even to make sense of your life for the world you can interact with the world you have to make assumptions about it and so that requires some replacement and what it should be it should be philosophy we should go back for religion back to philosophy the way the pagans they pagan intellectuals did this like they they moved from these religious doctrines to philosophy if philosophy was kind of like this formalization of we're gonna get rid of like this this tradition and stuff and actually start asking questions about evidence based logic based construction of a worldview that's what philosophy was in antiquity what's happening is people are assembling worldviews unconsciously they're they're you know so you get this political factionalism going on in the world today it's people are building world views based on mythologies like you can took libertarians or Sanders fans or whatever it is pick any side of the political spectrum they have a body of mythology that justifies their political beliefs that mythology is often the false stories or jiggered stories it's just another religion right and but they're falling into it happenstance right they're not thinking it through it's not something that they're reasoning out there just ending up at these world that get car belong to them and I don't think that's healthy or productive I think we need to teach people to skill to like you need to question everything and then figure out what what holds up under questioning then build your worldview out of that in a skilled rational evidence-based way [Music] right in this matter [Music] [Music] we are [Music] yes sir [Music]

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Views: 144,635

Rating: 4.7652678 out of 5

Keywords: Religious history, Ancient Religion, Jewish History, Early Christianity, Historical Jesus, Bart Ehrman, Robert Price, Gospel, Myth, Jesus, Greek Philosophy, Homer, Christian, Atheism, Human Secularism, Reza Aslan, Chrisitian origins, Letters of Paul, Roman Philosophy, Christ, Mystery Religion, Gnositic, Religious Author, Historian, Scripture, Roman Jewish War, Josephus, Hellenism, Harry Potter, Matrix, Biblical Scholarship, Protestant, Crucifixion, Resurrection, Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson

Id: lDpEeHD54Mo

Length: 29min 21sec (1761 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 24 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/thegreatbobo1]

For the last time, Jesus is not a zombie but a lich.