Was Jesus a Real Historical Person? Dr. Richard Carrier Talk

hello thanks for coming this is kind of an auspicious day because I am here to basically formally present the results of the research that atheist United helped me fund six years ago three years ago I presented the first product first fruits of that research product project which was proving history Bayes theorem and the quest for the historical Jesus which was the first part of solving this problem of how we would answer the question whether Jesus existed or not and that book was about methodology figuring out what methods are being used to answer this question what methods should be used to answer this question and I found not only did I find that the methods didn't work that they were either logically fallacious or they're being applied fallaciously every other expert who'd written a dedicated study of the methods in jesus studies had come to the same conclusion and that's what I found out so I actually had document that in proving history and show that the attempts to use these methods to extract historical facts about Jesus from the Gospels don't work and need to be abandoned and then I propose the alternative which is a Bayesian way of talking about it I'm not going to talk about Bayes theorem today but those who are interested in it could pursue it elsewhere or in my books even in on the historicity of Jesus it isn't essential for you to understand it if you're just interested in the argument you can just follow the argument as its presented you don't need to do the math or follow the math at all you could just ignore those parts of the book and there's very little math parts of on the historicity of Jesus anyway they're just there for people who really want to like dig down and use that method so the rest of it though is applying the methods to the facts what are the results the idea of proving history was we need to go back to the drawing board look at the facts all over again anew and then see what results and so well now Here I am to present the final part of that project which is on the historicity of Jesus which are my results to give you an idea of where we're going with this the thing that I set out to test in this research project and in this book is minimal historicity which is the idea that Jesus was just an ordinary guy maybe a charismatic guru or something who inspired people to start a religion kind of what most secular historians think actually happened and that's a plausible theory for the ordinance of Christianity to test that theory against an alternative theory which says that Jesus began life or began his existence as an imagined character basically someone that people believed they were communicating with through revelations and then only later was he transposed into history and turned into a historical man so I'm comparing these two hypotheses now they give you an idea of the analogy of how this makes sense in terms of the history of religions we can look at Islam as a model for example Muhammad claimed to have conversations with the angel Gabriel and the Quran is not the teachings of Muhammad according to the teachings of Islam according to that according to their religion the Quran records the teachings of Gabriel right so the actual quote/unquote historical founder of Islam is the angel Gabriel and Muhammad is just playing the role of the Apostle right he's Nick the Apostle Peter of the Apostle Paul so when you look at the actual claims being made by the origins of the religion their religious founder was a non-existent person because you know the angel Gabriel is not a historical the existent person so similarly we have Joseph Smith from Mormonism did something similar claimed all his teachings came from the angel Moroni so really the actual founder of Mormonism is the angel Moroni another non existent person and Joseph Smith isn't really the founder quote/unquote he's just the apostle now of course from our perspective being this is an atheist united meeting from our perspective as atheists yes Joseph Smith really is the founder and Muhammad really is the founder of those religions they were just claiming to have these teachings from this cosmic being who is communicating with them so the proposal here the the alternative explanation for the origins of Christianity is that this is what the Christians were originally teaching to so in this sense Jesus was originally a celestial being like Gabriel or Moroni and taught his followers in the same way or was said to have done so and then he was what's called you hem Erised this word you Hemmer ization comes from it's named after the Greek author you Hemmer us who wrote in the third or fourth century BC and he started this trend which is why I got named after him where he took Zeus and Uranus these celestial deities and turned them into historical persons put them in history and said that no they were actually past human kings who were deified later now of course that didn't really happen that's not the actual historical sequence of where Zeus and Uranus came from but he invented this idea that they were these past historical persons and you could write biographies about them which he called the Sacred Scripture ironically enough for us but then this caught on so lots of other deities who were celestial deities or gods who existed in supernatural realms or mythic realms were converted into historical persons and given biographies placed in history in a particular place in time interacting with historical people and so this trend is called you Hemmer ization and it was popular within the Mediterranean a lot of gods were undergoing the same process and then the theory would go that certain sects of Christianity started believing or selling those stories as true and of course that's then the sect that became dominant politically dominant in the 4th century and in the Middle Ages and then decided which documents would survive for us to see and what condition they would survive in two reasons they would do this one is like I just know that you hammer ization was common it was fashionable so you would expect it to happen the same way that happen to all these other religions but another one and this is proposed by a religious studies professor Kurt Knoll is that it was easier to control doctrine if he did this when you look at the epistles of Paul what you have are these apostles going around having visions of Jesus giving them instructions and Paul's this outsider who had a vision from Jesus and therefore was appointed as an apostle that way and then goes around saying hey Jesus came to me and he said he changed his mind about some stuff now obviously this starts to become a problem and you can see in the epistles there was tension between him and the other apostles there are certain obvious reasons why they would let him in because he was leading a much more successful Church and there was money involved but that's their argument but the significance here is you really want to shut this down you can't just have any Joe Blow coming in and say hey Jesus came to me and he changed his mind so one way to shut that down or at least to attempt to is to invent a historical character and say that your leaders were taught by people who sat at the feet of this guy that you have a tradition that can be traced back to him and so no one can come along and say hey he came to me in a vision they go you don't have a pedigree visions don't count anymore the significance is is that indeed visions didn't count anymore by the end of the second century you have the example of montón ism one of the Christian sects heresies supposedly was very vision based but it was one of the things that got suppressed and rejected by the Orthodox sect that arose after an herb was developing at the same time and then became dominant so we know the sects that were choosing this path to create a historical character in invented traditions that shut out the Revelator's we know that was the church that succeeded and we know they were competing against churches that were more revelatory based now I believe that I mean it makes sense maybe already but there have to be more reasons to even suspect that it's actually what happened I mean one is that it is typically what happened I mentioned the pagan Savior gods or the other pagan gods but the Savior gods in particular I'm gonna give some examples later this happened to them so why wouldn't it happen to this in this case but also it's what the Jews did with the patriarchs it used to be controversial to suggest that Moses and Abraham and the other patriarchs in the Bible are mythical people they never existed and these stories were invented about them the biographies in which they had teachings and performed miracles and had wanderings and had named family members in the whole deal but it's now the mainstream view outside of fundamentalism within academia that yes in fact Moses and the patriarchs are mythical people they were characters invented to create an authority for the teachings in the Old Testament so if that happened in Judaism before it could happen in Judaism again so it makes sense that Christianity could be the same phenomenon going on now another example that provides an anthropological precedent are the cargo cults and for those who are interested in this by the way my book goes into detail on all of the precedents with scholarships I didn't full bibliography and everything but to give you a quick rundown on that the cargo cults were the this new religious fashion in the early 20th century in Polynesia and Melanesia and it was all the rage at the time where they were taking local native cult merging it with Christianity to create a new religion and the basic idea of these religions was that new ethical teachings were being taught and they were based on this whole idea that if they followed these teachings fabulous cargo would come at the end of the world from in ships magical ships or magical planes including the resurrected dead of their ancestors now a lot of these there a lot of these different cults that many of these these island cultures worshipping Savior figures like John frum and Tom Navy and that's John from America and Tom Navy doesn't just an Eric Navy guy these are not historical people significantly one of the interesting things is that we got really lucky when this religion started on one of these islands there was a team of anthropologists already there studying the culture when the religion began we almost never get this this is a very unusual opportunity so they documented what was going on and we were able to go back thirty years later and see how the religion had changed in that time and the original documentation showed that the religion was begun through revelations people were seeing visions having dreams they were listening to telegraph poles and receiving secret messages and it was diffused there are a variety of different figures participating in the in the origin of it it wasn't a single Savior figure a single charismatic leader running at all and thirty years later now they teach that there was one single Savior figure who came to their Island and gave them all these teachings and as if it was a historical story and that's where you get John from and Tom Navy and that's a significant development because it shows within thirty years you can completely invent a historical figure as the founder of your religion when in reality it started as a revelatory cult so this gives you both anthropological models historical precedents precedents within Judaism itself which Christianity sprung from and within Saviour cults and Christianity is a savior cult establishing that makes sense that this could actually happen but that by itself would just be enough for suspicion you wouldn't you wouldn't be able to say for sure that's what happened the other reason to believe that this is what happened is that the sequence of evidence corresponds to it and this is what I found and was quite surprised I wasn't able to refute this had been claimed a lot many times and I tried my best to find all the evidence against it it just doesn't hold up so in fact this is what the evidence looks like the epistles now these are the authentic epistles only seven of the epistles of Paul are deemed authentic the others are forgeries in the New Testament and those seven authentic pistils epistles were written in the 50s ad about twenty years after the founding of the religion those epistles only speak of a pre-existent celestial being and a revealed gospel the Gospels meanwhile come later decades later and I would contend and many other scholars also that they are wildly deliberately fictional these are not biographies or not recollections these are not collections of memories and yet all subsequent historicity claims in all extra-biblical evidence are based on the Gospels either directly or indirectly they either come from Christians quoting the Gospels or citing the Gospels or they come directly from the Gospels themselves so there's no extra biblical evidence that can independently corroborate the Gospels we have nothing that independently corroborates them at all and significantly on top of that all the Gospels we have certainly the ones in the Canon are really just rewrites of Mark so in fact there's only one gospel and then a bunch of revisions after that so we have the historical Jesus the evidence for it supposedly is really just one gospel that looks completely fictional and comes decades after the epistles which don't mention hardly any of the things that mark talks about another key piece of data that you have to keep in mind is that all other evidence from the first while 80 years at least first half century up to 80 years depending on how you date certain documents of Christianity's development was conveniently not preserved not even in quotation or refutation now I want you to think about this back then 48 was the average life expectancy of someone who survived into adulthood so fifty years is one as an average human lifespan so there's an entire at least 50-year period in Christian history in which all the letters being written all the debates being had all the different leaders arguing with each other whatever they were saying whatever they were writing it's all erased from history we have no idea what was going on that's important because that means we we can't just immediately assume that what's going on in the second century immediately follows what's going on in the epistles of Paul no there's a 50-year gap in the history of Christianity that has been erased and it's a black box that we can't see in it now on top of that the Christians forged other evidence in its place there are at least 40 Gospels or there were 40 Gospels that we know of by name or with other details there at least six different versions of Acts different kinds of Acts tons of fake epistles doctored passages and so on in fact if you if you rule out like commentaries and homilies and things like that and just look at things like Gospels and epistles more most of the stuff Christians were writing in the 2nd to 4th century are forgeries or fakes so in fact it was the normal mode of Christian composition was to make stuff up so that that's a significant fact that you have to take into account when you're interpreting the evidence so let's go a little bit more into the more interesting precedents that very interesting stuff that I found in my research and then publish and document scholarship and evidence in on the historicity of Jesus one of the things that's often denied by defenders of historicity is that there were dying and rising gods before Jesus I found that that that attack is not defensible in fact the evidence is beyond clear that there's definitely absolutely were dying and rising gods before Jesus in fact they were dying and rising personal Savior gods at that now some of the most significant ones the ones I have listed here on the on the slide are the ones for which we have indisputable evidence that they were dying and rising gods before Christianity there were actually more of them but the documentation for them is scant here the first of these Osiris he was well originated in Egypt I mean he's an Egyptian god although of Cyrus cult spread all over the Mediterranean it was known everywhere and his in his cult people who were baptized into his death and resurrection were saved in the afterlife so we have this model already pre-existing Christianity so when you see the Christians now teaching it it looks like what happened is that the Jews saw a similar cult idea like this decided to create a Jewish version of it and marketed it that way it's impossible to suggest and it's just a complete coincidence that you would be baptized into the death and resurrection of Jesus and be saved in the afterlife and that this had no connection to the Osiris cult which is in Egypt and neighboring province to Judea that was existing presets and rising God from Syria Romulus is a significant one Romulus is a Roman state God and his death and resurrection were celebrated an annual passion plays so it actually have the passion of Romulus would be acted out in passion plays every year throughout the Roman Empire so it would be a well-known example of a dying and rising Savior God although in his case not a personal Savior so as far as we can tell but the savior of the whole Roman Empire preserver of the Empire zel Maxis is another one Thracian dying and rising God possibly related to Celtic religions zalmoxis is significant because his cult in which his death and resurrection also assured followers of an eternal life especially those who participated in a common ritual meal his cult and all those details are attested and described in Herodotus and Herodotus was one of the standard school texts in rhetoric schools of the time anyone who learned Greek well enough to be composing stories like we see in the Gospels would have passed through that level of Education and therefore could not have failed to have read Herodotus so they would already be knowing they would already know about the zalmoxis cult and the Xamax is called dates back to the 5th 6th century BC but the oldest example and one of the most interesting because it's the clearest example of an actual crucified God not just a dying one is in Nanna and on a story she's Sumerian her story is told on it's actually inscribed on clay tablets dating back about 1700 BC or so and in her story she descends to hell she's stripped naked she's tried in a kangaroo court stricken stricken dead by death spell and then her naked corpses nailed up basically she's crucified in that fashion and then three days later her minions come down and feed her the food of water in the fruit of life and she resurrects and ascends to glory so that's a really clear-cut case of a dying and rising God and even a crucified God in that sense I do find it interesting that the original one the oldest one we have any record of as a woman and almost all the other iterations after that were men you can make of that what you will all right so I already talked about Romulus Osiris and some Oxus and their significance but also want to caution against trusting too much this stuff on the internet now it is true that there's a lot of false claims made about parallels between Jesus and other gods especially on the Internet there also a lot of bad books on this so I would suggest being very cautious about that I've made sure that in my book any parallels I attribute to Jesus with other gods that I've thoroughly documented in the evidence so I was able to confirm that they were real but there's a lot of ones that aren't real or there there's no facts behind them or they're exaggerated or misrepresenting the evidence one of the examples is Mithras often you'll hear that one of these dying and rising gods was Mithra or Mithras the god of Mithra ISM Mithras is not a dying and rising God we have no evidence that he him himself underwent two death and resurrection but he did undergo some sort of suffering or struggle he had a passion there was a passion of Mithras through which he gained victory over death so there is a parallel there it's his his passion was not a death but it was some other kind of struggle or suffering and all we had there were Gospels of Mithras we don't have them they didn't survive we have snippets of comments about Mithra is Amanda lot of surviving literature and then we have iconography this is one of the best examples or the most thorough examples we have where we have basically the graphic novel of Mithras it's the picture Bible version of the gospel of Mithras on this stone inscription you see shown here the entire gospel has shown scene by scene by scene like a comic book we just don't have the text so it's like having a picture Bible without the words but in it you can tell it doesn't appear that Mithras undergoes a death and resurrection it appears that he undergoes some sort of great battle and suffering and struggle through which that gives him a to heaven but even Mithras fits the same general model of the personal Savior deity phenomenon which was all the rage in the Mediterranean every other national cult or every other national culture was developing or taking this idea of the personal Savior and creating their own version of it the Persian version was Mithras the Egyptian version was Osiris and so on and so forth what do these all have in common they are all Savior gods in other words you worship them you become attached to them and that grants you some sort of eternal happiness after death they are all the Son of God as a couple of their daughters of God the child have got in any case but never the god himself always the the child and subordinate servant of that God they all undergo a passion you the same greek word is used pacion to talk about their passion it was you sometimes it's a death sometimes it's some other suffering or struggle but it's significant that they're all there's a passion of every one of them that was a common phenomenon they all obtained victory over death which they share with their followers that was kind of their religious function they all have stories about them set in human history on earth they're all claimed to be historical persons yet none of them ever actually existed so the significance of this is that Jesus fits into this type exactly so if he existed he would be an extraordinary exception to the rule he would be the most unusual member of this class which is reason for us to need maybe a little bit more evidence for Jesus's existence if these guys can be historic eyes so could he have been and we have some hints that survived that destructive filter of the Middle Ages one is in the Canon the book to Peter everybody agrees except well again when I say everybody I'm talking about serious scholars not fundamentalists but everybody who's an expert and not a fundamentalist agrees that - Peter is a forgery in fact it wasn't even written by the same person who wrote one Peter it was written probably in the second century so it's significant that this is the forgery that we have in it it argues we did not follow cleverly devised myths we were eyewitnesses of his majesty and then immediately forges eyewitness account of meeting Jesus on earth now the significance of this is is that this author is forging this document to represent this as being said by Peter to create an eyewitness account of something not to argue against non Christians or Jews who are rejecting Christianity but to argue against a rival Christian sect he goes on to say that he's responding to otherwise unknown Christians who were claiming that the Jesus he's talking about was a cleverly devised myth now of course the sect he's attacking probably would have said sacred allegory rather than cleverly devised myth but the point is this shows that there was a sect of Christians that were saying that no one met Jesus on earth in person that that these stories about that our allegories are actually some sort of mythical function within the cult and so someone had to forge this document to argue against them and to establish that it was a historical Jesus that they're talking about significantly we know nothing else about the sect this is the only reference to them we have none of their documents we have no other arguments against them we have no description of what they believed their existence and their teachings and their role in the Christian history of Christianity was erased from the historical record another really interesting example is a rival gospel is the Ascension of Isaiah now this is an interesting book it has undergone many redactions has been meddled with over time but it exists in multiple translation traditions each one of which messed with the text in a different way such that we can show which additions were made later so we can know we can eliminate stuff that was added later it's quite clear on the record that they were added later when we eliminate that stuff which also we can be shown on stylistic analysis doesn't belong as well but once that's eliminated what you get is called the earliest redaction that we can reconstruct of the Ascension of Isaiah now there may have been versions before that but we don't know this is the earliest version we can reconstruct which dates by most expert accounts between the 80s and 130 AD which is exactly when the New Testament canonical Gospels were being written so this is a rival sect of Christians writing their own gospel at the same time as the canonical Gospels are being written by their own sect by a different sect that's a significant fact now in this gospel it's not the gospel doesn't have a historical Jesus walking around what it does is it it claims the prophet Isaiah had a vision in which God explained the whole Christian salvation story and in that earliest redaction Jesus does not descend to earth he descends to the atmosphere to outer space just below the moon and is there crucified by Satan and his sky demons so in this story the only way you would know of this event having occurred is through revelation and through hidden messages in Scripture now another this key part of that by the way it shows that there was a sect of Christians teaching such a thing and they were teaching it at the same time as the canonical Gospels were teaching a radically different idea now another important clue comes from Philo of Alexandria Jewish theologian who wrote between the 20s and 40s AD most of his stuff was probably written before Christianity and he attests he says well he tests to the fact that there was a in Jewish angelology of the time there was a pre-christian Jewish belief in a certain Archangel whom he describes and he says that the man named Jesus in the book of zechariah zechariah 6 he claims that guy is this archangel so in fact he's identifying an archangel named jesus who has all of these attributes he's the firstborn son of god he's the celestial image of God he's God's agent of creation and God's celestial high priest now the curious thing here is these are all the attributes of the Jesus in the epistles that's an extraordinarily unlikely coincidence to have all of these very unusual attributes assigned to a Jesus in both Paul and Philo suggests there's some common element that in fact the Jesus and the epistles is this Archangel he was taken from Jewish angelology which means you don't need a historical Jesus to explain where the idea came from so the theory would go that in flip as we see in Philippians 2 the earliest-known Christians what they did with this Archangel unknown to Philo's would have happened after Philo wrote is that they believed or taught that this pre-existent being descended became incarnate and died and rose again and then appeared to select people to tell them this and on the most plausible myth assist these is the most plausible thesis on which Jesus wasn't a historical person this incarnation death and burial took place in outer space just below the moon exactly as this engine of Isaiah portrayed it originally and that does have precedents the same was taught of Osiris Osiris had public stories which put him on earth in Earth history but the private stories had his death and resurrection occur in outer space and explained in outer space just below the moon exact same location and explained that the public stories were just allegories for the cosmic reality and this again is the religion that was being taught in the neighboring province to Judea to see the same thing being taught about Jesus in the ascension of Isaiah suggests again the same concept as being applied and there are precedents in the Jewish belief system there are documents that show that some Jews believed Adam was buried in outer space either on Venus or Mars depending on which cosmological model they were using so anyone who wants to get fundamentalist to support NASA maybe can use this to convince them so those are the interesting precedents some of the interesting presidents I'll get to a few more later but it's starting to look more plausible now even then I started with right let's look again at Paul little more closely look at this evidence the seventh authentic letters of Paul are the earliest documentation we have surviving about Christianity by decades nothing is earlier or even near to it according to Paul scripture and revelation are the only sources of information that he ever mentions anyone having he doesn't mention anyone else having any other sources of information and those are the only sources of information he ever mentions having he doesn't say oh I talked to eyewitnesses no he doesn't mention anything like that scripture in Revelation or how you know things the Jesus he knows and refers to and speaks to is always in outer space and he never clearly places Jesus on earth or connects him to human history there are a couple of ambiguous passages that are not clear on whether he does so but there's no clear reference puts Jesus on earth or in earth history at any time now Paul's Jesus is significant because there are no references anywhere in the twenty thousand words that Paul wrote there are no references to Jesus preaching other than from heaven or being a preacher or having a ministry or choosing or having disciples the word disciple does not occur anywhere in Paul or communicating by any means other than revelation and Scripture there are no references in Paul to Jesus ever working miracles or being a healer or an exorcist or teaching in sermons or parables or to anyone not an apostle that's a key thing there's no evidence in Paul that anyone ever heard Jesus except the Apostles which supports the revelatory hypothesis and then this is completely reversed on the Gospels when you see the Gospel of Mark this cosmic Jesus which predates marked by twenty years and is even coming from Mark's own sect paulien sect is a complete cosmic jesus in paul and yet the cosmic Jesus is completely erased in mark there's no cosmic Jesus at all in mark which looks exactly like you Hemmer is a ssin where you take the cosmic God turn him into an earthly God you erase all the cosmic elements and then have him deified or ascending after the fact so it follows the model of you Hemmer is a ssin the earliest documentation show cosmic Jesus and then the first time we hear about a historical Jesus is decades later and it looks manifestly fictional designed to conceal or allegorize the cosmic truth there's more evidence in Paul's letters that's interesting on this slide I've highlighted some passages where I put in red where the Greek is identical the exact same words are used in English ins 1 Paul says brothers the gospel I preached 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 so when he says in 1 Corinthians 15 brothers the gospel I preached is also what I received those two words are the same words that are in Galatians 1 so we know he's talking about revelation not inherited tradition not oral or or anything like that so what was the gospel that Jesus revealed to him he says that according to the scriptures Christ died for our sins and that he was buried and that according to the scripture he was raised on the third day and that he appeared to chaos and various other people and at last he appeared to me as well know that Jesus is not said to have appeared before his death in here right people only see him after his death a lot of people haven't noticed this about this if you look at Paul's description of the gospel there's no ministry for Jesus Jesus never appears on earth he never preaches he never teaches he never selects disciples the first time anyone sees him as far as Paul knows is after his death and resurrection only then does he appear to people that's a significant fact I think as well that's been overlooked when he says in 1 Corinthians 11 that I received from the Lord again the same word that he uses for Revelation what I also delivered to you that on the night he was handed over the Lord took bread and said various things in other words inaugurating the Eucharist ritual again Paul is talking about a revelation not oral or not something an eyewitness told him he was received this through a vision that was the only way apparently one could know these things and the Eucharist ritual that he describes in there Jesus is not there's no one attending that meal you just has Jesus presenting a ritual to people to the Christians in general as if in a vision but there's no one present so it's not like a historical meal that Paul is describing the idea of having people present having disciples present in interacting with Jesus that only rises later in the Gospels so that's the basic theory in some a summary of some of the best evidence for it so what are some of the challenges how do hiss tourists respond to this what are the arguments that attempt to overcome this idea really there's only one argument that has any or is worth any attention at all in my opinion that all the others are so weak that they can be easily dismissed this one at least is debatable is does Paul mention Jesus having an earthly family because if he did then that would establish there would be sound logic then if Jesus had family than he existed historically and if Paul knew the family of Jesus that would establish Jesus existed but all the passages that are cited as supposedly showing Paul knowing Jesus had family are extraordinarily ambiguous in fact weirdly ambiguous the first hour two passages call where he where Paul says he mentions this people call the Brothers of the Lord the problem with that is that Paul himself says that all baptized Christians become the adopted sons of God and that Jesus was there for the firstborn among many brethren so in other words all baptized Christians were brothers of the Lord so when you're looking at him talking about brothers of the Lord and he doesn't qualify it he doesn't even think like he's supposed to qualify it to mention I mean biological or I mean brothers of the Lord in the flesh or something like that doesn't even occur to him that he has to do that suggests that he's means what he's talking about are baptized Christians in fact it looks like this is what Christians were called before the word Christian was invented many years later so at best though it's ambiguous we don't know whether he means biological kin or whether he means baptized Christians and these two passages so we can't do anything with that it's too weak another one another example is Paul supposedly says that Jesus was born of the sperm of David now some Bibles will say descended from David but the word descended from is not in the Greek the Greek says born but in fact it uses a more ambiguous word Gunawan auswitch means to happen or to become or to be made and Paul in fact when he talks about human births he uses a different word gonadal when he talks about when he uses this word though and uses the B to happen to become to be made and when he was Kannamma nas he uses it of manufacture so for example he uses the exact same word when he talks about God manufacturing the body of Adam he's the exact same word when he talks about God manufacturing our future resurrection body so what it looks like when Paul says he was born of the sperm of David Paul's using the vocabulary that he uses for divine manufacture not for physical birth to a human mother or father for example so again even at best it's ambiguous does Paul mean divine manufacturer does he mean birth he doesn't say the language he uses seems to suggest he means manufacturer so that leaves one other passage where he says born of a woman incidentally using the exact same word that Paul uses for manufacture but in the context of Galatians 4 when you analyze it in terms of the rhetoric the rules of rhetoric and antiquity the way you would make can argument he explicitly says the women he's talking about her allegories that in fact we were born of the same mother Jesus was which is the present World Order the president corrupt world order he's saying that the fleshly body of Jesus that body assumed that it was allowed him to die that body died that that body was born of the present world order he doesn't mean an actual physical human woman nor would it even make sense in the context of his argument to refer to his actual mother in this context and go into a great deal of analysis on that in the book but again at best its ambiguous does he mean allegorical woman or does he mean in the literal woman we don't know so these things are insufficient to establish historicity so that gets us to the Gospels oh and yes by the way that is it there's no other evidence in the epistles establishing the historicity of Jesus that's all the argument they have so that means they have to retreat to the Gospels and here we have a problem I recommend all these books obviously I recommend my book but else recommend John Dominic Crossan z' book the power of parable and Randall Helms his book gospel fictions Crossing's book argues that the Gospels are in fact just parables about the gospel using Jesus as a character that in fact they aren't history they're in attempting to record history at all and he makes a very good case he makes it in terms laypeople can understand it's a short good read I highly recommend it any situates that in literary context of the time as well Randall Helms shows that what the Christians were doing is trying to rewrite the scriptures they didn't like the values message of the Old Testament so they wanted to create their own new test or they want to create their own or the old test notes they wanted to create their own scriptures their own stories that would update the values in them so they basically took stories about characters like Elijah and Elisha and rewrote them and Moses for example and rewrote them with Jesus in the role and updated the historical period and stuff to match the culture that they were living in and consequently that's where the stories of Jesus come from they come from this need to create new myths to guide their accept by rather than from history and so this is an example of why we can't really trust the Gospels as historical sources because it looks like they're just making everything up to serve certain functions within the church I mean the debate falls under the question of are there exceptions so are there any little facts in the Gospels that we can nevertheless despite all the fictionalizing going on we can extract a historical fact about Jesus and that's what my book proving history shows every attempt to extract some fact like that it's fallacious it doesn't stand up on the evidence I'm not gonna go into any examples but I went over a few last time I was here three years ago to present for proving history but if you're interested in that question chapter 5 of that book covers that in detail now to give you a little more of an idea of what I mean by the Gospels being fiction I'm gonna use the example of the fig tree how many people know Jesus hates things yeah so there's the story so mark 11 Jesus is walking along he's hungry he sees a fig tree but and the author makes the point to note it is not the season for figs anyway Jesus goes up to the fig tree and finds there are no figs there as one would expect he gets angry and curses the tree and says you'll never bear figs again and then they go on and then you have the temple clearing scene where he condemns the temple cult then they come out and they find the tree has withered from its very roots now obviously this is fictional story this didn't happen no one saw this not least because you know people can't with their fig trees so we know that part is made up but even if you had the secret X manpower of withering fig trees you wouldn't do it you wouldn't curse a tree like this for not bearing figs out of season the way the story is written if you were to take it as history it makes Jesus look insane why would someone do that it doesn't make any sense that a Christian would deliberately make Jesus look crazy so there's something it's got to be something else going on here now our G Hammerton Kelly has written the best analysis of this and I found in the literature sacred violence in the Messiah and I found other scholars finding similar points for any similar analysis of it but the entire story is an allegory for God's abandonment of the temple the Gospel of Mark was written after the destruction of the Jewish temple in 70 AD the Romans came in destroyed Jerusalem destroyed the temple and banned it and this was a huge existential crisis within Judah because back then Jewish cult was fundamentally based on that temple cult running your personal salvation required that temple cult to run so when the coat was done and not even allowed to be reinvigorated Jews had to re figure out like how do I get salvation now how does my religion work rabbinical Judaism then resulted and developed solutions to this problem but back then it was quite a catastrophic thing and so one of the things that people had to explain is why would God allow this to happen why would God allow these foreign barbarians to come in and destroy his own temple why how does that fit things and so what mark is doing here and we have other examples in his book of where he's clearly responding to the destruction of the temple but in this case he's saying that God decided that the temple wasn't bearing fruit anymore it was no longer the season for figs in other words was no longer time for the temple call to do the salvation stuff that it was doing so he allowed it to wither to its very roots he cursed it and then of course the story goes on with Jesus talking about how now it's through prayer and stuff that you can gain salvation but the significance of this is is that when you understand the literary purpose of it the allegorical purpose of it it's brilliant and it's a really ingenious story for communicating these ideas and it makes sense it doesn't make Jesus look crazy because it's not saying this actually happened at all and when you see stories like this and you realize every single story in mark is just like it that he's inventing it to sell a point and it has nothing to do with memories or anything that was communicated to him you start to realize that mark has an entirely fabricated gospel it's it's all allegorical as Crossland said it's just one big parable and if and all the other Gospels are just caught you know revisions of Mark essentially so that pretty much eliminates the gospel tradition as being evidence of history even if they have history in them we don't know where it is we have no way of extracting it and this particular thing we see many other times in mark if you notice the basic literary model is inclusio it's called inclusio where you have one story wrapped around another and they comment on each other so you see the on the you're right on the slide Jesus and the cursed fig tree that story is wrapped around the Jesus clearing the temple story so in fact that's how Hammerton kelly was able to show that yes their comments on each other these two stories relate to each other and explain each other we have another example which is the dying twelve-year-old girl mark goes out of his way to say that the dying girl is 12 years old always a suspicious number and then in the middle of that story that story is wrapped around Jesus meeting the woman who had been bleeding for 12 years well that's a suspicious coincidence but in fact you can look at this and you can see that it is in fact an allegory for the new Israel and the old Israel and the way salvation will work and the way Jesus is changing things so this isn't a historical event none of these things happened it's all allegorical and symbolic so if that's what the people can't rely on the gospel is what else is there well there really isn't everything else outside the New Testament is either not independent meaning it just echoes the Gospels or what Christian said the Gospels say or it's fabricated tons of forged evidence like the infancy Gospels in which Jesus is this horrible omen child and goes around it does horrible things to people to prove how awesome he is obviously never happened but they were happy to make up these stories because it made Jesus look impressive we have Jesus's letter to Apgar obviously Jesus never really wrote a letter but someone was happy to Forge one for him and various other examples even though in the New Testament there are forged the epistles and so on or the evidence doesn't exist oftentimes evidence that's claimed to exist doesn't for example a document that they might claim references Jesus doesn't or a document that is merely hypothesized to have existed but we don't actually have it and that's it there isn't anything else but the ones that you'll most frequently hear a phallus Josephus and Tacitus those are the three most commonly cited extra-biblical attestations of the historical Jesus solace I proved in the Journal of greco-roman Christianity and Judaism never mentioned Jesus this is certain we actually have the direct quote we can reconstruct from Tallis he didn't mention Jesus at all so you can rule that out Josephus mentions Jesus in two different passages but it can be shown quite convincingly that neither reference was written by Josephus it was actually added later one of them deliberately a deliberate forgery one of them accidental scribal interpolation and I demonstrate that many other scholars have argued the same point but I put it all together in Journal of early Christian studies and even if Josephus did mention Jesus he's mentioned it in a book he wrote in the 90s AD so his most likely source would have been Christians themselves citing the Gospels so he can't prove Josephus is independent of the Gospels in fact the forged passage the big one and Josephus has been shown in the peer-reviewed literature which I cite has been shown actually to follow Luke so whoever wrote it whether it was Josephus or a Christian forger was actually using Luke as a source so it actually comes directly from the Gospels so again it's not an independent corroboration even if it was authentic and I'm fairly certain it wasn't I'm certain Josephus never mentioned Christ or Christianity and then Tacitus the same problem Tacitus would have written if he wrote this passage about Jesus that he has claimed we've written about he wrote it in 116 ad his most likely source was his buddy plenty who had just recently interrogated some Christians and didn't fact check what they said he just said it was ridiculous and he just learned it directly from Christians in 116 ad so we can't show that there's any independence of the Gospels there either however I was surprised to find that there's a really good case to be made that Tacitus never mentioned Christ actually there's a scholar Jean rouget who published a article in French that when I finally did read it I was surprised at how persuasive his argument was and I actually brought that article into anger brought aspects of that article in English and expanded on it and perfected the argument and published that in big Gilead Christian I now all three of these articles plus others for those who might not have access to a university library and what you want to read them I've reproduced them all in my book Hitler home or Bible Christ plus a lot of other stuff that I've published for that's why that book exists mainly is to be able to put all my peer-reviewed history stuff in one place so people who are interested in those can find it there okay so let me conclude with another analogy that will illustrate the point the Roswell UFO case now what really happened let's be honest what really happened is a guy found some sticks and tinfoil in the desert right that's what actually happened what was said to have happened was that it was debris from an alien spacecraft it was said immediately like instantly this wasn't didn't take time to develop the legend the myth was beginning instantaneously but the interesting thing was what was said to have happened within just 30 years of that event was that an entire flying saucer was recovered complete with alien bodies that were autopsy by the government within just 30 years 20th century America Universal literacy newspapers photographs Center for inquiry skeptical Inquirer still succeeded and there's still millions of people who believe it despite it having been thoroughly debunked so if that legend could grow that quickly and survive that well even in that environment imagine in ancient first century Rome no Universal literacy no newspapers no photographs no Center for inquiry it would be much easier in fact not harder so this is how it breaks down the tin foil in the desert would be analogous to the revelations of the Archangel named Jesus the flying saucer an alien bodies would be analogous to the historical Jesus of Galilee now imagine though if we only had the stories written by the Roswell believers imagine that there was another Dark Ages where they got to choose what documents were surviving for us to see them so all we got to see where the story's written by the Roswell believers from thirty years later and information derived from them and nothing else imagine that was the situation we were in we wouldn't know about the tin foil right all we would have are multiple witnesses and sources reporting a flying saucer recovery an alien body autopsy neither of which ever existed so it's could it happened already so it could very easily have happened in the context of ancient Christianity especially when the Middle Ages decided this massive destructive and altering filter of how what how the evidence would get to us so that is my case and if all the facts and details are built up in the book with thorough citations and all of that and I present to you the results of my research thank [Applause] so absolutely in fact you tell me when to stop so yeah keep your eye on when you want things to go yeah Oh disciples not apostles but go ahead continue oh yeah yeah no it's a significant difference that I'll explain yeah but but still yeah the part not an interesting Jesus's family did you talk a little bit about Galatians 1:19 which says but I saw yes that's one of the two passages that I was referring to where he referenced his brothers of the Lord and I found that he says yeah but that's in Greek that's how you say that all the time so yeah that that unfortunately is ambiguous so unlike an English where that would be a more significant thing to say but it's kind of like saying James the Christian or you know or really it would be James the baptized Christian because you didn't get baptized immediately that was something that happened later after a process of initiation so a baptized Christian was it was a higher ranking member of the sect than just Christian nevertheless yes it's ambiguous we don't know what he means and in fact I found in the peer-reviewed literature and I cited and discussed it in the book that scholars and translators have been mistranslating the grammar of that passage that in fact it says I didn't meet anyone or I didn't meet any apostles or I said trying to get the wording right but I didn't meet any apostles it wasn't that I didn't meet any puzzles except James but that in fact I didn't meet any apostles and James is not an apostle it's basically the way it's worded is what in the normal way you would take the grammar is that he's saying James is someone else who isn't an apostle and in that context Paul is trying to insist that he hadn't met anyone in Jerusalem so it would be necessary for him to mention anyone he had to had happened to have met in case word got around so that no one could accuse him of lying and he's very concerned about people accusing him of lying cuz he swears he's not lying in this passage so he what seems to be saying is he met only one Apostle Peter and then he open other baptized Christian Jane a guy named James but that was it and that's that's his argument and the significance is in the next next chapter Galatians 2 he talks about James John and Kev us as the the pillars who are definitely apostles so it's clear there he's not talking about the same James in both chapters anyway that's that's the argument that's pretension in there but back to the other point is that Paul never uses the word disciple never calls anyone a disciple that that concept doesn't exist for him there are only apostles which means messenger and for him and apostles anyone who had a vision of Jesus so when he's saying he's met these other apostles it appears from the way he's writing that he means other people who had visions of Jesus before him so and certainly we have no evidence that he meant anything else by that and that's that's where the evidence is ambiguous and so you can't really establish historicity on that of course there is no trying to imagine what could be there three days later so that's why okay that that's a different claim um I thought the same thing - I thought the everybody who said the arguments are solid it's the consensus everybody agrees until I started researching it and I found scholars like Mark Goodacre who point out well actually no the arguments were poor that in fact the arguments are better that what we mean by Q is just Matthew that everybody's just quoting or rewriting Matthew in various fashions and that there wasn't a queue now I think the case for that is pretty solid the case for Q is way weaker than I thought I do mention that a little bit and talk about reasons why and give some examples in on the historicity of Jesus however even if there was a queue we cannot establish that they preached it predates mark or predates Paul that it's what we can't establish as if there was a queue it was written in Greek and that it couldn't might date the same time as or even after mark we don't actually know so it looks like it would in that case just be another gospel like mark that people are stitching together to make a whole a bigger gospel and it's entirely possible that that's what happened that there might have been for example a Jewish gospel and a Gentile gospel and matthew is trying to stitch them together I mean that's a conceivable thing so there's a lot of different ways that that could happen it doesn't get us anywhere as far as historicity because there's still nothing in it that we can show through any methodology is factually correct even if there are facts in there we can't find them because we don't know which which pieces are made up in which pieces aren't so that that's the main problem with the QED hypothesis it gets worse when you start talking about the other hypothetical sources for which there's even less evidence yeah well you had yes way in the back general human tendency to historic gods yeah I I guess you have to say that because there are you hammer is Asian examples like the Zeus and urine you're in this though that you hem hearses first in instance of it it just seemed to be a popular fashion to do in general it was kind of that you can tie it into the rationalizing tendency as well with in ancient religion you see this in a lot of authors like even Josephus where they'll give that some something miraculous or amazing will happen and they'll give a divine explanation a supernatural explanation and then right next to it give a natural explanation and that's the part of the rationalizing tendency where some people are more comfortable with the rational explanation rather than the supernatural you Hemmer ization allows the same cell in that sense but at the same time it allows us you to create stories that are to people's experiences in terms of what they expect and also that matches more the stories of what's going on in terms of because you Hemmer assisting like the time of Alexander the Great and the great kings eventually the Roman emperors who were all doing the very thing you hemorrhage did to Zeus and Uranus except for real is that they were deifying themselves right so that so you had the actual historical kings then they get subsequently deified so when your kings and emperors are actually doing this it makes sense to start making your God's model the same thing even though they didn't really originally so I think it's it's a wider phenomenon than just the Savior gods it's just particularly evident in the Savior case do you see the same kind of phenomenon having elsewhere Norrell well there there's the viola case the cargo cults but I haven't specifically looked for you Hemmer ization models in other cultures I would not be surprised let's put it that way but I haven't checked one thing I did look for worse the idea of the dying and rising God the dying rising personal Saviour God specifically not in ancient China they don't appear there if you get anything close to it it comes much long longer after Christians got to China so that really shows that it's not a universal phenomenon it's not a coincidence the fashion did not exist in ancient China it did exist in the Mediterranean so when you see the Jews creating their own dying and rising Savior God as all the surrounding cultures were doing influence and diffusion are the only plausible explanations for that yeah yes of material and the Gospels that is so-called embarrassing to the text me like narrative oddities it wouldn't make sense if they weren't tied to some kind of oral tradition yeah folk memory like Jesus baptized by John the Baptist this is correct clumsy if you're trying to tell the story of the ultimate Savior why is he being baptized but someone else so clearly maybe there was some memory that you had to include this part in the story right really good question and I actually covered that three years ago and it did proving history cuz there's 80 pages on that and on the argument from embarrassment in proving history thoroughly analyzed the logic of it in the use of it and so on in the John the Baptist case it actually isn't embarrassing nor would Mark put it in there if it was embarrassing because Mark didn't have to put in anything he didn't want to we have that we have the example of John John just erases it right John could do that mark could have done it and Mark is writing 40 years after the gospel had been preached across three continents if that story had been embarrassing they would have eliminated it already mark wouldn't probably wouldn't even have heard of it in fact that story might have been eliminated before Jesus had even died so so that doesn't really hold up but more significantly and many scholars have published peer-reviewed articles arguing the point that Mark's construction of the Baptist Baptism story makes perfect sense for Mark's intentions because he has the baptism of the Baptist cult John the Baptist declared Jesus his superior and successor so they're essentially co-opting the authority of the Baptist cult and saying even your dude said our religion is better so that's not an embarrassing thing to say that's actually rather convenient thing to have happened and the other thing is is the whole scene is a what's called an etiological myth which means it's a myth that explains the origin of a ritual all religions have these myths where you come up with some sort of story for why you're performing a ritual and what function it serves and those myths are usually not historical they're usually made up and in this case it's the myth for baptism what does it mean and Christian baptism meant cleansing of sins and adoption by God as God's Son and that's what Jesus does in the baptism scene and so you to do that of course if you're gonna create a you hemorrhage story to put Jesus in history you need someone to have baptized Jesus who better to cast in that role than the most famous Baptist of all John the Baptist so there are Lee isn't anything embarrassing in there and in fact Mark shows no embarrassment at it at all it was later Christian authors who started to get embarrassed by the story that Mark invented and then started trying to fix it to suit their sensibilities but but by that when mark was writing it wasn't embarrassing but later it did become so just a scene consists mostly of singing not a narrative yeah but mostly just reported utterances which is often really cryptic yeah it is often but I see often see the argument made that this is the most likely explanation is that if this is the historical information coming from the figure that people were recording it over time yeah why there really isn't any argument that that's the most likely explanation of it I mean it's no more likely to be authentic than the Sermon on the Mount which all non fundamentalist scholars agree Jesus never preached someone made that up later and I show why in the book by the cite the scholarship and so on so there really isn't any reason to believe that that's authentic now mark Goodacre has also I think he just came out with a book showing that in fact the Gospel of Thomas is post canonical in other words he's using the books the canonical Bible as his source and then adding and changing stuff so the independence of Thomas is no longer established and I'll give you another example that will cast doubt on Thomas story we have another instance of this having happened when the NAG Hammadi codices were discovered now the story is that the Orthodox Christians were coming like I remember the date like sixth century something like that seventh and we're gonna wipe out this heretical sect and so the sect basically swept its whole bookshelf of stuff into a pot and buried the pot and left and then this pot was recovered in the early 20th century and we found all these books in there now apparently when they did that they weren't thinking very clearly because they were in the middle of creating a forgery and swept that into the thing as well where we actually see their model and the half-finished forgery right next to it where they were in the process of taking another treatise called you Ignacio sin which this guy named you've NOS dust as pontificates no narrative is just sayings and then the Christian forgery that they were in the process of producing was taking the sayings of you agnosticism surrounding it with a post resurrection NER in which he's interacting with the disciples so we see where Jesus tradition could come from this isn't a classic example of how it gets fabricated they wanted Jesus to have said certain things it serves certain purposes for them to say that so they just invented a narrative in which he did and so if you have examples like that and you look at all the other dozens of Gospels we have the Gospel of Thomas doesn't really hold up any strength of evidence it's it's too ambiguous in terms of its actual origins anything else yes in the middle there yeah do you read it is your work - and various other authors yeah um obviously my book isn't I don't I don't care about apologists in this book so I don't really specifically respond to them however the way the book it's so thorough and well constructed in terms of that that there's tons of stuff in the book that you confuse to rebut that stuff because there are a lot of things because a lot of the assumptions that are even in books like that are still being repeated even by secular scholars in the field unaware of the fact that the it's contrary to the facts so I had to actually establish what the facts were and thoroughly document them and I had 48 fundamental facts that everything everybody should agree on because even though there are things a lot of people don't know about even in the field and those things you'll find very useful there are other parts of the book - you'll find very useful for even if you don't agree with the conclusion of the book the book has tons of material that you can use to rebut ridiculous credit things that Christians are saying about the origins of Christianity and so on so yes it would still be useful for that function yes SB OS society biblical literature yes yeah last weekend right yeah in fact it was inconclusive as I expected they this is the Society of biblical literature Western Regional Conference the SPL is the largest trade association for biblical scholarship in the country so as significant to get to present there and what I did was they had they had me give a presentation basically this a little more detailed in terms of scholarly stuff that the audience expected and without slides to and they had a rebuttal by professor who has you know full credentials but also a Baptist minister who went full apologetics mode and had ly really angry retort essentially we didn't come across as very scholarly and I think the audience kind of got that impression because they had more probing inviting questions to him than to me after the presentation but I think by and large because the we were only I did twenty five minutes he did twenty five minutes and then I was able to do a seven-minute rebuttal and then it was Q&A so there wasn't time to really resolve anything so I think the best that I accomplished was that I made a number of scholars aware that the book exists and that there is a defensible case that they should at least look at and that there's an argument that they should get involved in which is you know isn't that most one could hope for in an environment like that so so I'm happy with the results so far yeah yes no that's that's terrible terrible book that's a book written by Joseph at will there is a I have written a blog about Joseph at will he's a crank in the classic sense it's so at wills cranked up Jesus is the title of my blog post if you want to see why he's a crank I documented there I I personally I'm doubtful about his mental health I don't think I think he's kind of lost it I think maybe he has delusion ality or something like that I don't know what is going on there but he's clearly not being rational about his approach to the evidence and is fervently fanatical in the certainty of his conclusion despite the evidence being so wishy-washy and and or even non-existent in some cases so if you want to see the the treatment of that that's read my blog on that will it's unfortunate because he has a lot of money and so he promotes this and so when scholars see that and they can immediately find all the flaws in it and they think that's what I'm promoting and so it makes it difficult for me to be taken seriously so actually people like him are making my job harder it would be nicer if they would just not do that so that I could actually you know get serious attention within the academic community for much better source arguments yes last question yeah or the butyl Ramage basic kind of almost sounds like it's emphasizing the ludicrousness versus in that period the heavens of the earth wouldn't be a ludicrous idea perhaps no more ludicrous than outer space I actually talked about why I use the word outer space in there because a lot of people assume that biblical writers are still working from an Old Testament model where the earth is flat and there's there's the sky and then there's a dome over the sky and then there's like the heavens above that they weren't because the Greeks had already established the earth is a sphere and then argued that the whole cosmos was a sea I was a system of spheres and they had started getting the distances right or close to right and that this knowledge disseminated and was in being incorporated into religions and theologies so the Jews were aware of this and so Jewish model their cosmology was being reproduced on a scientific basis semi scientific basis we'd say pseudo scientific basis but so they they knew for example that the moon was approximately two hundred thousand miles away and their view was that the atmosphere extended that far but there was that what we would call the atmosphere for them just extended to the clouds then there was a whole other nightmarish hundred ninety thousand or whatever miles of stuff and then above that was the ether in different levels of heaven so they when they when I say outer space and I explained in the book I'm not attributing to them the belief and the vacuum there were some people who argued that it was a vacuum out there but those are usually atheists the religious people thought it was full of stuff and not only full of breathable material but full of animals and places and castles and and gardens and all kinds of stuff were out there Satan and all his minions were living up there in this 200,000 miles fear of stuff below the moon and they had all of these they had all these castles and Thrones and stuff out there up in the sky so I could say sky but I think it's important to say outer space to him emphasize that even they were aware of the vast scale of this that it was it wasn't just like just up there it's like really far and in fact they knew the Earth's diameter was vastly smaller than two hundred thousand miles so they knew that this was a vast as terrifying region of the universe so yeah okay

Channel: Atheist Canada

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Keywords: Richard Carrier, Jesus, Jesus history, Jesus historicity, Atheism, Skeptic, Skepticism, History, Truth about Jesus

Id: NHX8CAdcEng

Length: 69min 44sec (4184 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 17 2018