Why I Think Jesus Didn't Exist: A Historian Explains the Evidence That Changed His Mind

build drum I'm the president of the Ute in his agnostic and skeptics Network profit sponsor dr. Richard carrier he's renowned author and speaker held a PhD from Columbia University in ancient history specializing the intellectual history three Cerrone pavilion ancient philosophy religion and science with an emphasis on the origins of Christianity and the ordinance of science in a Roman Empire by his best known as the author Oh since good without God not the impossible faith why am i Christian and a major contributor to the NT to Christian delusion and the end of Christianity um he's also the editor chief and now the editor emeritus of a secular web and press copious working philosophy online friend in which book is proving history face dear and the Questor historical Jesus he's currently working on his next books a story of only historic history of Christ Jesus Christ man the scientist near Inland Empire as well as science education in the urban environment the utg atheist agnostic some skeptics me every week on Friday usually you see Phillips but this week a meeting will be you see birch without further ado I'd like to welcome dr. all right let's see oh good volume it sounds like excellent so let's begin why do I think Jesus didn't exist so far the only books I have that explicitly or come anywhere near to discussing this are these two not the impossible faith and proving history which I have a few copies of today if you're interested in learning more I'll sever 'el times in this talk but the key book that which I finished so it's just now going through the peer review and production process to become a published book hopefully before the end of this year will be on the historicity of Jesus Christ which will basically take what I'm just going to summarize very briefly and just touch the tip of the iceberg on today in that book I detail every single aspect of this and discuss many of the objections and so on that come up well to begin the story I have to explain why I thought Jesus existed what for a long time I thought this was a crackpot theory that Jesus didn't exist the whole Jesus myth idea I thought was nonsense and I thought I could easily refute it and often it was because people would send me garbage arguments for it that I could easily refute so I thought it was just another like peer immediate kind of scheme or something one of the reasons that I thought that Jesus surely existed is that the argument from Silence is much too weak there are many ancient people for whom we have no contemporary testa f-test station so the mere fact that we have a paucity of sources for Jesus in and of itself doesn't mean he didn't exist another is the idea that consensus should be trusted without a really good reason if the consensus of scholarship is that Jesus existed we should pretty much probably side with that unless we have a really good reason not to and the argument that I was receiving at the time didn't give me a good enough reason to reject the consensus another point that I made was that there was no peer-reviewed case that had been made for it through academic presses or academic journals it was mostly amateurs using bad methods and it was easy to demonstrate that and that made it look unbelievable to me and another was my assumption that there was no plausible explanation for why Christianity began or why a myth of historicity arose usually the Jesus myth theories were built out of implausible conspiracy theories they often had you know elaborate you know truth or type tales as to how Christianity originated which I found intrinsically improbable until I read this book people convinced me that I should really look at this this was the best case they said for the Jesus myth theory that does the most serious scholarship and is the least amateur in its presentation I found out that that was true I wrote a review of this online that you can find by googling I found that it had mistakes it wasn't completely up to snuff in terms of an academic dissertation but it was very close and in fact he does bility in the Jesus puzzle does a pretty good job of making a sound case I wasn't I wasn't convinced at this time but I realized that there was a respectable case that could be made and it was worth investigating further what ultimately changed my mind was that the argument from Silence is still strong when you look at the epistles not just the epistles of Paul but a few others that I'll talk about in this talk that do look very strange if there was a historical Jesus and I'll talk about that a little bit today another is that I discovered and especially this most recently that the consensus is based on fallacious methods and sometimes factually incorrect beliefs I found that a lot of historians who were defending historicity once you start asking them why they believed Jesus existed the evidence and arguments that come from them are very terrible and in some cases as terrible as the arguments coming from myth assists and also a peer-reviewed case I realized could be made if we got rid of all the errors that proponents of this theory the Jesus myth theory were making if we got rid of all the stuff they were doing wrong what we had left over was still a case worth looking into and finally I realized as our elder Ortiz book especially taught me that there are plausible explanations for why Christianity began and why a myth of historicity arose so we can actually explain Christianity with a Jesus myth theory without any conspiracy theory nonsense now the consensus issue I demonstrate in the book proving history which I mentioned before that was kind of part of the main point of that book is one night when I was asked to do this research and a bunch of fans got together to fund a grant for me to do this this book on the historicity of Jesus Christ the first task for any research project like this is to ask well how do we answer a question like this how do we decide how do we determine whether Jesus existed or not what methodology should we use so I immediately went to look at the methodologies that were being used already and found that they're not only multiple fallacious and fallaciously applied but that every single scholar who had published an analysis of the methods argued the same thing that in fact there was unanimous agreement of all the scholars who had done dedicated published analyses of these methods have all concluded that the methods were fallacious and being fallaciously applied so I realized that the method was out so I had to come up with a new method my book talks about what that method is and also analyzes the old methods methods that are currently being used in why they're fallacious citing all the scholars and scholarship who agree with me on that point so once I realize that the consensus was ill founded now I had a good reason to doubt the consensus now we have to go back to the drawing board and look at the evidence all anew with a sound method and see what we get and another thing about the plausible explanations in fact there are many respects in which Doherty's theory for example if we if we strip down some of the excesses of it and get it to its bare minimum it actually made better sense of a lot of the weird data about the origins of Christianity in fact I find that it makes better sense of a lot of things than any theory of historicity that has so far been proposed a lot of the theories of the historical Jesus don't make as much sense of the data as we have as historic sister proponents think it posed now if you want to learn more about this the books to read is that book by Royal Doherty the Jesus puzzle you can read my review for the pros and cons of it he did a sequel Jesus neither God nor man which is kind of like a really extended appendix to their original book it's also worth right at meeting because he responds to a lot of critics there Robert price has a key book the Christ myth theory and its problems where he really surveys the whole thing and also references some of his prior work that you might be interested in Randal Helms does not argue for the non-existence of Jesus but his short little volume gospel fictions is a must read because it will disavow any thought that you had that the Gospels are reliable texts and there's also an interesting article by Stephen laws a philosopher he published an article in the trophy Journal called evidence miracles and the existence of Jesus the bush is available online so you can google it and read it and he makes a very interesting case for how we should doubt the historicity of Jesus given the material in the Gospels he doesn't treat the material in the epistles which is a separate argument and then of course really there hasn't been a really good book that that I think is a thoroughly decisive or a reliable book on the history of Jesus Christ which is why I'm writing one so that that book will become the thing to go to and the thing to argue with if you still want to argue against the theory for now proving history is stage one of this project this is the first fruit of the grant project that I've been working on this talks all about method and deconstructs and shows invalid a lot of the consensus assumptions about how we can prove the historicity of Jesus and eliminates a lot of claims about the historicity of Jesus so let's begin with discussing what theory we're really talking about here there's there's really three different theories competing in the market of ideas right now the first is the Christian notion of historicity of course which is that Jesus as it says here Jesus was an amazingly famous super man who could walk in water and fly and stuff and their idea of the Gospels of the Gospels of straight dope is totally eyewitness accounts are completely reliable now that's not the view of mainstream scholarship of course a secular scholarship mainstream scholarship views historicity in a more nuanced way their view is that Jesus was an ordinary nobody kind of like a not a particularly famous Galilean preacher who no one noticed but a few fanatical followers and that the Gospels they grant are mostly fiction but there are kernels of truth in them that we can extract but they do that using the methods that are invalid which I talked about improving history now the best theory of non historicity is the best Jesus myth theory there is reduces to this that Jesus was the name of a celestial being subordinate to God with whom some people who loosen ated conversations are claimed to have hallucinating conversations and that the gospel the God of written Gospels that we have began as a mythic allegory about this celestial Jesus set on earth as most myths than were that wasn't unusual to do that and so that's the basic theory says these are the theories that were testing against each other to see which one explains the evidence best or not now forget all the other myths mythos theories there's all these kinds of conspiracy theories and different kinds from different authors just throw them right out there they're less different if they're credible in any sense at all they're less defensible than this basic theory that I've talked about here now I'm going to start with an analogy so you understand where I'm going with this and if you think about the origin of Islam according to Islamic tradition Muhammad quote/unquote hallucinate 'add conversations with the angel Gabriel and the Quran records the spoken teachings of Gabriel that's the basic principle of it Mormonism Joseph Smith quote/unquote hallucinate 'add conversations with the angel Moroni and seeing words on magical plates and the Book of Mormon records with the latter two said I put hallucinates in quotes because hallucinate would be what we would say if they were telling the truth but they may have been lying so it's possibility but either way they are pretending to have visions and not actually meeting of what we would call a normal earthly historical person they were having visions of celestial beings and communicating their teachings that way so the analogy holds here that Jesus was also originally a celestial being just like Gabriel and Maloney and taught his followers originally in the same way whether they were lying about it or whether they're really generally having hallucinations is a separate question we don't need to answer and then he was what we call you hem Erised this is the basic principle of stories being created that placed him on earth interacting with historical figures and you Hemmer ization is named after a Greek author by the name of humerus before Christian times who actually historicized Zeus for example in Uranus these gods he claimed that they are originally kings in this this lost distant Kingdom and that they were deified in later ages and so this became a trend what and it was named after him - you hammer eyes celestial Dedes take them put them and pick a historical period put them in their right histories about them that fit them into the historical period as if they were ordinary men that walked or the earth as demigods and were later deified but in reality they started as celestial beings they didn't have earthly myths in the beginning and so this there are a lot of gods that this happened to and then of course in the according to Christian theory or the theory of Doherty for example then people started believing or selling those earthly stories as if they were true and that's the development that Christianity led to and that's the Christianity that we're talking about today is the result of the people believing that these myths were actually true so why is that credible let's survey the evidence on that the first thing to look at it are the trends and Hellenistic religion of the time this is the these are trends that were already evidence across the Roman Empire and including throughout the Middle East just before Christianity arose the best reference on this is Petra Peck Kenan interpreting early Hellenistic religion and she documents that there were four big in religion in the centuries leading up to Christianity and that Christianity conforms to all four she doesn't specifically talk about Christianity this is my analysis but nevertheless she thoroughly demonstrates the trends and their existence and their widespread effect in the actual world now those four trends are first syncretism syncretism is the combining of a foreign cult deity with Hellenistic elements so you take the ideas from one culture and ideas from another culture or ideas from one religion or ideas from another and merge them the results of course is going to be something that's different from both of the original products because it's gonna have pieces from one and pieces from the other and it's going to leave pieces behind from either as well but this is very common this is one of the trends that we're seeing is we're seeing it some local national cults is being combined with Greek ideas the Greek mystery religion model to create a new religion that's a merger combination or hybrid of both the monotheistic trend is another one a lot of times you hear that the Christians and the Jews were they only monotheists against polytheists that's actually not the case the trend in polytheism at the time there's this big trend of transforming polytheism into monotheism via a mid stage called Hino theism now Hino theism is the view that there's one supreme god and all the other gods are subordinate deities in one fashion or another usually they're created by the master deity now if you realize judaism is actually Hino theistic because you have God and he created all these angels and they're all these demons and they're Satan and so on and these things all have the exact same powers as pagan gods so in reality the Jews were just engaging in an Orwellian semantic game they were calling them angels and demons but in reality they're a pagan would look at that system thats just my system I that's the gods I have the same belief system you have one supreme deity and all the subordinate deity some are good and some are bad it's kind of the same thing but this trend was growing at the time and there are many different the mystery cults in particular we're growing in this direction of the idea of a supreme deity with the subordinate deities and and Christianity fits into that myth that section as well and individualism this is very important this was one of the biggest trends of Hellenistic religion that that's importantly overlooked oftentimes and you hear criticism of the Jesus myth theory people who criticizing it aren't aware of this fact and that's the fact that what began as agricultural salvation cults there are a lot of these for example I'll talk about a little bit later dying and rising God cults these cults are began as agricultural metaphors the the God dies and rise with the seasons and with the agricultural stuff and that the religion was involved in ensuring the crops would grow it was basically targeted towards the community and towards fertility of the whole region for example these cults were specifically being transformed during the Hellenistic period into personal salvation cults the exact same gods the exact same stories the exact same metaphors were now being mapped on to personal salvation so instead of agricultural fertility every year in a community event it would be an individual gaining his own personal resurrection or salvation through the metaphor of the Gods death and resurrection and another one is cosmopolitanism this is the fourth trend this was the idea that all races cultures classes could be merged together and be treated as equals that there was no difference between race and nation and so on we can all be one brotherhood and that we were all sharing a contact with or parts of God in ourselves and they were developing fictive kinship groups where all members would call each other brothers and sisters and so on and one of the big changes was from early polytheism you'd have public cults you didn't have to believe you didn't necessarily have to participate they were just there were ceremonies conducted publicly maybe public holidays and so forth it wasn't something that you chose whether to join or believe in one of the big trends of mystery religions is to change that trend so that now you join a religion rather than being born into it you actually pick a religion you engage in an initiation ceremony involuntary become a part of that cult and it becomes something that you believe in and something that you rely upon individually so those are the four trends and you can see how Christianity is kind of looking like it fits right into this system of trends now the trend in action we see here this is a list of several of the mystery religions we know predated Christianity and you can see the trend here the Eleusinian and Dionysian mysteries the bakit mysteries were also very popular and eight hundreds of years before Christianity they combined Hellenistic ideas this Hellenistic mystery cult concept with Phoenician Western Syrian concepts so that basically is this different cult in the Middle East was being merged with Greek ideas to create this new kind of religion the mysteries of axis and kibble a that combined Hellenistic elements with Phrygian which is northern Turkish at the time cult ideas so this this northern Turkish as Phrygian religion was being merged with this Greek history religion model to create a new hybrid a new religions it's unlike both in various respects then we have mysteries of Jupiter Dalek canis which combined Hellenistic with Anatolian which is Western Turkish religion we have the mysteries of Mithras so she brought us Mithra ISM that combines Hellenistic elements with Persian Persian religious ideas and Persian cult ideas then we have the mysteries of Isis and Osiris which combined this Hellenistic mystery religion model with Egyptian religion and created a new religion like that when we look at Christianity what we're seeing is this exact same trend a local national cult the Jewish cult the Palestinian cult being combined with Hellenistic elements this miss mystery model to make a new religion just like all of these others you just as you have Osiris cult as an Egyptian mystery religion just as Mithras cult as the Persian mystery religion Christianity is a Jewish version of a mystery religion and there were this trend of dying and rising gods that I mentioned before that were originally agricultural gods but became gods of individual salvation there are at least three of them there's actually a few more that we can confirm an evidence predate Christianity there are a few were the evidence postdates christianity but there are several other several and plenty that we can confirm predate Christianity because we have evidence definitely predating Christianity of them one is Romulus which is the Roman state God his death and resurrection was actually celebrated in annual passion plays as as part of Roman Imperial cult at the time so it would be very well-known Osiris was the Egyptian god and that was one of the most popular cults Isis and Osiris cult throughout the Amman Empire and that was baptized into his death and resurrection would be saved in the afterlife it was one of the fundamental teachings of Osiris cult and then there was a Marxist cult for example which is a Thracian God his death and resurrection also assured followers of an eternal life so you can see this trend already Christianity is just another version of this same trend and I talked about these and others in not the impossible faith so this is the book if you want to get up to speed on that I'll talk about it more of course in my next book on the history of Jesus Christ but if you can't wait for that this is the book that you want to look for all my books are also available on Kindle of course but I want to clarify here because when I talk about this dying and rising God trend this idea that Christianity is evolved from this prior model I don't want to make you think that I'm endorsing all of the parallels that have been claimed there are a lot of parallels that you'll see on the internet and books often by amateurs claiming that all the attributes of Jesus come from other gods like for example his birth date on December 25th and various things like that no that's not necessarily the case a lot of those attributes like for example Jesus being born on December 25th were added to him much later anyway so they have nothing to do with the origin of Christianity and there are many attributes for example he is having 12 disciples that probably do not come from any prior any prior disciples any prior God who had disciples and all of that so a lot of these claims that are dubious so you have to make sure that you can tell the difference between the dubious claims and the claims that we actually can prove predate Christianity and it's also important you often hear Mithras listed as one of the dying and rising gods this is an example of one of the bad claims that goes around among myth assists myth rods we have no evidence that Mithras was a dying and rising God what we can tell is and what you see here is this is an inscription that's basically a comic book version of the gospel of Mithras no one preserved the text we know texts existed that the Christians didn't preserve it so all we have is this picture Bible version we have to kind of guess what the scenes mean and the best that we can tell is that he undergoes some sort of great difficult struggle some great suffering involved in battling this giant Bowl that somehow gives him the ability to ascend to heaven and gain power over death we're not sure exactly what happened but it had something to do with this great struggle but it wasn't him himself dying as far as we can tell but what all these gods do have in common even the ones that don't like Mithras who don't explicitly die and rise again these are the things that they do have in common and they're probably at least half a dozen up to a dozen of these gods that predate Christianity they're all Savior gods and they're all called the Son of God there are a few occasions of daughters of God who were also these saviour deities they all undergo a passion and it was the exact same greek word was used for their suffering whatever story of their suffering they gave them power of her death it's called a passion in the exact same greek word in all of these cults as far as we know they all obtained victory over death which they share with their followers that was one of the central teachings of these gods myth Ross included and they all have stories they all have stories about them set in human history on earth important yet none of them ever actually existed as far as we know and we have no reason to believe any of them existed so to see Jesus as the sole exception to this trend that he's the only one who actually existed already is looking like an extraordinary claim we're going to need some pretty good evidence to go against that and say that he existed but Mithras didn't for example but again they were they weren't all born on December 25th and neither was Jesus for more than a century etc so let me tell you a little bit of the Jewish background remember we're talking about syncretism they took some of the pagan ideas merge them with some Jewish ideas to create a new hybrid what were some of the Jewish ideas that went into this Philo of Alexandria writes between the 20s and 40s AD shortly before the time of Paul and right around the time of Christ supposedly and if you want more than not being possible faith I have the sources of the things I'm about to talk about but in his writings Philo of Alexandria tells us that there was already a pre-christian Jewish belief in a celestial being who has actually named Jesus so there's already a celestial being named Jesus who was called the firstborn son of God who was the celestial image of God who was God's agent of creation and God's celestial high priest this is important because every single one of these is a Christian belief that we can find in the letters of Paul except for the high priest bit which we find in Hebrews so that which is very early texts I believe so what we're looking at here the earliest books that we have the earliest texts of Christianity that we have all are talking about Jesus as the same Jesus figure that Philo was talking about the celestial deity that was not an incarnate God he was a celestial God from the beginning it's clear that somehow the Christians came into believing that this this celestial Jesus came to earth assumed the form of a man or if he came to earth all they'd all that's the question we're going to ask but he assumed the form of a man and then died and rose back to heaven and so on so whether you're talking about historicity a historical Jesus or non historical Jesus we have to deal with the fact that Christianity began as a belief that that Jesus was this Jesus the stay was already a celestial Jesus even before Christianity came around and to give you an example Philippians the two gives us the earliest example of one of the earliest Christian Creed's and all it basically says there's that the Christians believe that this pre-existent being because it refers to him as a pre-existent being it clearly identifies him as this Jesus having descended becoming incarnate dying and rising again and then we find in other passages that he appeared to select people to tell him all about this on the most plausible missus theory this Ark incarnation death and burial took place in outer space just below the moon rather than on earth there was a celestial event they might think that's crazy in fact it has precedents the exact same thing was taught of Osiris there were public stories for Osiris for the riffraff basically for the outsiders that put him on earth in history that you hem Erised Osiris but the private stories the stories told to initiates and so on had it that his death and resurrection occurred in outer space just below the moon so we have already precedents for this concept of a celestial dying and rising we also have precedents in the Jewish belief system for example Adam in some Jewish texts Adam was believed to have been buried in outer space he's actually in the third heaven which I think is somewhere around the region of Venus or Mars if you're curious to go looking for him so it is posited there were if you look at the descriptions Jewish descriptions of heaven they there's dirt there's trees there's temples there's Thrones there's all kinds of things in all the levels of heaven in fact we find texts that refer to Christian texts and Jewish texts that refer to the fact that there are copies of things in heaven and I'm going to talk about that basically everything on earth has some version some copy of it in the sky and in fact it was believed that the versions on earth were the copies of the true versions in heaven so as if there's cats on earth there's cats in heaven for example anything you could think of there were things there so you could be buried in heaven there was dirt to be buried in there there were tombs to be buried in there so it wasn't an implausible idea in terms of the cosmology of the time then one of the important texts that Clues us in on this you have to remember that the Christian Church that survived is the church that bet everything on the historical Jesus it was depending on the historical Jesus for selling its particular dogma and so it either destroyed or let rot any texts that disagreed with that view so a lot of the heretical Christian texts a lot of the early Christian texts disappeared for one reason or another doesn't didn't require our organized conspiracy it's just that the various churches just had no interest in or at individually against preserving these texts and so the net result was that we don't have them today but some things slipped through just barely the ascension of Isaiah is one that's confited with clues the Ascension of Isaiah is a late 1st or early 2nd century gospel it's a form of gospel it's very different from the Gospels we have because what it is is it's a story of the prophet Isaiah goes into a trance this is this is Isaiah from the Old Testament so this is some sort of secret lost text supposedly obviously it's a forgery this never really happened but the prophet Isaiah received a vision and then the whole text goes on to relate what his vision was and in that vision he's talking about basically says that he was brought up to the seven levels of heaven he's taught that there's the copies there's versions of things in the lower heavens that are copies of the thing just below the Moon for example he's taken up and Satan in the demons control the outer space region below the moon and are battling each other in outer space there and they're their versions of things on earth or also up there and that version of heaven and he gets the angel that's bringing him up through this ascension is bringing him up to other levels of heaven so he goes to the first level the second level and so on all the way to the seventh level of heaven just so you know there's seven levels of heaven and and he brings up that he gets up there gets the tour of these heavens and then is taught at the top that God tells him well here's you're going to meet Jesus Jesus I'm going to send him down he's going to defeat the devil and then come back up and be Lord of the universe and so on and then after the God explains what Jesus is going to do Jesus doesn't as Isaiah is there as if he's like looking into the future seeing Jesus descend and engage in all this activity and ascend and all of app so this is how this text proceeds in the earliest redaction of this which we can reconstruct through literary analysis and from the fact that we have manuscripts that lack key parts of it there was no visit to earth Jesus doesn't make it to earth he appears to die and be killed by the devil in outer space by the devil and his demons and is buried and resurrected there and then rises from there for example in in the main the text we have from the Ethiopian church for example there's a there's a whole earthly ghost attacked in where he gets to earth he's born to marry Pontius Pilate crucify him in the whole deal that that whole pocket gospel doesn't fit the style of the rest of the text so we know it's actually an interpolation someone inserted that text now we have versions of the text in Latin for example and in various other languages like Slavonic that lack this tact in gospel so we know it wasn't there originally and there are various other art meant that you can pose to show this so once you take that out what you have left is the Jesus who descends only to the level of this out of space just below the moon where he's killed by the demons and the devil not by Pontius Pilate and the Jews so Jesus is crucified by Satan in outer space in the earliest redaction of this gospel now the narrative there many aspects of this narrative they're very similar to another narrative that dates back 2,000 years before Christ which is the descent of Inanna Anana also known as a start a and various other names in the Sumerian religion she also but she instead of going through the levels of descending to the levels of heaven she descended to the levels of Hell and was killed by a death spell by the the god of Hell and then her naked body was nailed up so she's basically crucified and then some of her helpers came down to resurrect her it was all part of her plan for this to happen and she's resurrected and she ascends back up through the levels of hell and and the story proceeds from there now this is another example of one of those dying and rising god cults that was originally an agricultural code we have evidence that possibly this culprit survived in other forms but we don't have a lot of evidence of that but the fact that there are so many similarities with this ancient Sumerian tale and the Ascension of Isaiah is enough proof that some version of the story survived and that River wrote the Ascension of Isaiah is actually borrowing elements from this descent of an honest story this other resurrection God's story so let's get to Paul's letters these are the earliest letters we have and you have to remember that the thirteen or so letters of Paul that are in the New Testament only seven of them are agreed to be authentic the others are all forgeries basically all mainstream scholars agree that those other letters are forgeries so we can throw them out one way or another and just refer to the seven that we think are authentic and talk about those now in those letters Paul says things like this in Galatians Brothers the gospel I preached does not come from a 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 notice those words very careful the vocabulary he's using to describe where his gospel comfort comes from it comes from revelation it doesn't come from Jesus it doesn't come from human oral testimony they came from direct revelation he had a vision of Jesus so when we get to 1 Corinthians where he says brothers the gospel I preached is what I also received he's talking about the same thing this is the same vocabulary almost the same phrase word for word about his revelation so he's talking about what was revealed to him by Jesus and what was revealed to him was this that according to the scriptures Christ died for our sins and that he was buried and that according to the Scriptures he was raised on the third day and that he appeared to calf offs and various other early Christian apostles and lat and at last he appeared to me as well now it's important here as I'll point out in a moment is that the appearing part only comes later then we get to 1 Corinthians 11:23 we have again I received from the Lord same vocabulary what I also delivered to you again the same vocabulary that on the night he was handed over the Lord took bread and so on the whole Lord's Supper idea what that's going to tell us very importantly well let's get to that let's talk about the thing just before note that Jesus is not said to appear not said to have appeared before his death people only see him after his death now notice that in 1 Corinthians 15 verses 1 to 8 there's no mention of Jesus being seen or known before his death so there's no mention of disciples going on a mission with him there's no mention of a ministry in Galilee and in fact the only sources he has appeared to be the Scriptures for that stuff the first time there's any mention of Jesus appearing to anyone of anyone ever seeing Jesus is the Risen Jesus the revelatory Jesus the celestial geez is not the earthly Jesus oops let's try that again and when he says according to the scriptures he uses a particular form of the Greek that normally is how you cite sources it could mean for example what the way Christians normally interpreted is these things happened and they happen in fulfillment of the cross scriptures that's usually the way that you hear interpreted but the phrase normally and usually most commonly means that this is his source that means according to the Scriptures as in according to Josephus or according to Isaiah or whatever the case may be that these things happen so what it looks like Paul is actually doing here is he's saying that we learn about Christ's death and that he was buried and there was raised on the third day we learn about those things not from it had anyone having seen it but from the fact that they're written in the scriptures the Scriptures tell us that these things happened and it was would have been the revelation of Jesus that would have explained this to him so when we get to Paul talking about the Lord's Supper and this is the only actual kind of narrative that Paul ever references that have anything of a story about Jesus he says he received it from the Lord that means that Paul we set this exact same vocabulary and once again it means Paul hallucinating the Last Supper that means he received teachings from the dead Jesus and is even quoting things that Jesus said on this occasion it's important to note that when he tells the story of the Lord's Supper there are no disciples present in fact it doesn't appear that Jesus is talking to disciples it appears that Jesus is talking basically to Paul or to future Christians when he engages in the Lord's Supper there's no reference to Judas in particular you'll see certain Bibles will translate the delivered or when the night that he was handed over they'll translated is the night he was betrayed because the word is the same but in fact it's the word handed over and when Paul uses that word throughout the Gospels he means when God Himself handed Jesus over when Jesus handed him over himself over he's talking about basically delivering Jesus to be sacrificed he's not there's no mention there that we can tell about a betrayal by Judas for example so it appears to be some sort of event in outer space that Paul learned about through revelation not through oral transmission throughout paul's letters we find the same pattern scripture and revelation are the only sources of information that Paul ever mentions anyone having he never refers to oral testimony he never refers to anyone any information he has he never refers to an eyewitness having told him or someone passing on to him from an eyewitness that never occurs the only time he ever references sources of information his sources of information are always scripture or personal private revelation and that Jesus he knows and refers to and speaks to is always in outer space that's always a cosmic Jesus is there's never an occasion where we can clearly identify Paul talking about a Jesus on earth and you never connect him to human history never says for example that Jesus was crucified by Pontius Pilate that there's at no point in Paul's letters does he clearly connect Jesus to history in that fashion now there are passages that challenge this theory I would guess the most significant ones there are a lot of minor ones that are easy to dismiss but these are the big ones the ones you might hear about most often that Lords separate passages say well he talks about the Lord's Supper so that must have happened that must be historical but as we saw Paul says Paul himself says he received it from the Lord just like he says he received the gospel itself so he received that information by revelation so we can't actually tie that to a historical event that was actually witnessed by anyone on earth and there's a passage where it says Jesus was crucified by the rulers of this age now actually the root of the phrase rulers of this age in the Greek is a common term for demons actually so there's actually there's a lot of times Paul and other writers use that phrase or similar phrases to refer not to your earthly powers not to the Romans not to the Jews but in fact to the cosmic powers to the forces of Satan and notably in this passage in 1 Corinthians 2 where he talks about Jesus Christ being crucified by the rulers of this age his specific point there is that they killed him but they wouldn't have killed them if they knew it would bring the world salvation and thus his identity was concealed from them so that they would kill him not knowing that this would end death and and their power and so on this is very important because this certainly sounds like the Ascension of Isaiah this is the story that's told in ascension of Isaiah where it's the demons who don't want to lose their power it's the demons who are in control of death and are ruling the sub the sub world and that's a key point because if if Paul was talking about the Romans here it wouldn't make any sense if the Romans knew that killing Jesus would save the universe they wouldn't have any motive to not do it they would oh let's kill Jesus that's a great idea then the Jew is the same way if the Jews knew that Jesus Christ was the genuine Messiah of God and that his death was planned by God and would bring about a great salvation they would go ahead and kill him anyway what he's talking about her peeps people some sort of beings who would not kill Jesus would avoid killing Jesus if they knew that doing so would end death in the world and would give Jesus Christ cosmic victory not just worldly earthly victory so it seems very clear that Paul is talking about spiritual person spiritual powers not powers who who don't want to end their reign over death and in that control of death over people it doesn't sound like he's talking about Romans or Jews there's a passage in 1 Thessalonians however where Paul is made to say that the Jews are the ones who killed Jesus that passage however is an interpolation it was added later now that this can be debated we don't have direct evidence that it was done but I think the argument to be made that it was an interpolation and not written by Paul is very strong if you want to see that case you can google Richard carrier Pauline interpolations that blog that I've written cites the scholarship because a lot of scholars you agree with me on this not and these are not scholars who believe Jesus didn't exist so these are mainstream scholars they also agree that that's passage was interpolated so we can we can rule us out as evidence this is something that later Christian scribes added to the text then there's also another passage where it said that where Paul is made to say that Jesus confessed before Pontius Pilate so here's what we're kind of passage we really want something connecting Jesus to human history but this is in 1 Timothy and pretty much everyone agrees that that letter is a forgery Paul never wrote it so we can rule that out similarly 2 Peter talks about witnessing Jesus during the Transfiguration the 2 Peter everyone agrees is a forgery so that evidence can be thrown out so these these things don't actually support the historicity of Jesus because they're they're falsified the next next and pretty much this the best case that they can come up with the historic cysts can come up with to try and refute mythos theory is to claim that Paul mentions the earthly family of Jesus in there there are a few passages where that that could be the case there are two passages where he refers to brothers of the Lord but the problem is we don't know if this means biological or adoptive brothers because in fact all Christians are let's be more specific all baptized Christians were brothers of the Lord and this is some of the fundamental teachings of Paul if you look at some of my blogs on this you'll find some of the passages referencing it but in fact Paul frequently talks about the fact that when we get baptized we become adopted by God and therefore becomes the Brothers of the Lord become brothers of Jesus that in fact Jesus Paul explicitly says Jesus was the firstborn of many brethren with the many brethren meeting the other brothers menuing the Christians so in fact all Christians are brothers of the Lord so we don't know which censor brothers of the Lord that Paul is using these two passages and a whole debate swirls around what we can infer from the way he uses it as to whether he means biological or adoptive brothers whether he just means Christians or not and there are other ways to interpret this passage it's it's this is probably the weakest pillar that you can rest historicity on and it's really the only evidence that there's only the only thing that they have to maintain the case for the historicity of Jesus I think it's far too weak then there's a passage where he's supposedly born of the sperm of David or born of the seed of David as you'll see the the polite local translation it's actually sperm but in fact the word is not the word that you would view or Paul would normally use for born it's the word from made it's the word for came to be so it's actually a more indirect phrase so it's actually made of the sperm of David rather than literally born from the sperm of David now it could mean born from the sperm of David in a metaphorical sense but the fact that that that thing is there that that strangeness is there is telling and in fact later Christian scribes and Erman for example as one of the scholars has proven this later christian scribes were bothered by the fact that it wasn't the word for born that it was a word for made so they started trying to change it and we have evidence in the manuscripts of Glynn later centuries of them trying to erase this and and revise it to make it the word for born rather than the word for made so we know that they were bothered by this already and it's important to note that scripturally the flesh of the Christ the flesh of the Messiah had to be Jewish and from David this was thoroughly throughout the Old Testament thoroughly throughout Jewish apocalyptic literature of the time so it was something that if you're going to be a mythos if you're going to develop a myth assist theory you had to come up somehow some way to explain how your cosmic Jesus that you believed in was of the flesh of David and the basic idea was that he would as the Ascension of Messiah explains he comes down and just below the moon assumes a human-like body a body of flesh and then that body is what is killed and then he rises again from that but that flesh had to be Jewish and it had to be Davidic and there's lots of good examples like for example 2 Samuel 7 where God appears to say in fact in the plain terms of what he says is he says to David King David himself that I will take sperm from your belly and from that I will basically make a king who a descendant of yours are you she doesn't use the word descended he says I'll make a king who will rule forever now of course if you're reading this and you believe that God would never lie you'd notice that that never happens in fact the the royal wine was cut off and and wasn't even operating at the time that Christianity came about so obviously there was no eternal throne of David and certainly there was no immortal king right because they'd be saying there's there's one guy that he's going to make from the sperm of David who's going to rule forever so what do you do you say well God took this passage says that God took sperm from David's David's belly literally and and then would some it would create an eternal ruler well obviously what you might conclude is that God basically has a cosmic sperm bank that he took the sperm from the belly of David and is holding it in reserve in outer space until the time that he's going to make a messiah out of it a messiah who will rule forever not not just your ordinary temporary living Messiah their temporary living king but a king who would live forever and along the throne forever so there are ways to explain why myth assists or early Jesus cultists who would believe in this cosmic Jesus and his cosmically incarnated Jesus would say that he was born of the sperm of David they had to say it scripturally and they have obvious and easy ways to come up with cosmic explanations for how that could be and then the next passage is uses the same word by the way it's made of a woman not born of a woman so this other passage where he says that Jesus's or the Lord was born of a woman / made of a woman but in context and this is in Galatians 4 this is allegorical in fact Paul goes on to explain very explicitly that we are born from the same woman this what he calls the slave girl who represents the corrupt world subject to Torah law and that thanks to Jesus we will one day be reborn of another woman the free woman who is the the the woman of the celestial world and that is what happens to baptism is that you're reborn to a new mother but it's an allegorical mother it's not an actual literal mother you don't crawl into some woman's womb and get reborn literally but at the same time so that means when he says that Jesus was born of a woman and born under the law he's using the same allegory so he's talking about the same allegorical concept that Jesus was symbolically born of the corrupt flesh the corrupt flesh of the corrupt world order so that the corrupt world order could die with him and that's all part of the Christian cosmology of the time so this in itself does not attest that there was an actual literal historical woman that he was born to another example is the book of Hebrews now this is in the New Testament we know Paul did not write it someone who knew a companion of Paul claims to have written it we don't know its date it doesn't say when it was written but there are parts of it that fundamentally assume and in fact required for its argument to hold that the Jewish temple cult was still in operation which means that it was probably written around 60 AD it probably after Paul had died there roughly 60 80 so probably after around the time Paul had died but before the Jewish War when the temple was destroyed the temple cult was ended in 70 now there are several scholars who would agree with me on that there are several other scholars who want to date it later I think when you look at the evidence I'm not going to go through it here but when you look at the evidence it's pretty strong that it has to predate the year 70 so this would be an early text in this we have no historical Jesus in the ordinary sense again in this it just says that Jesus passed through the heavens and poured his blood out on a celestial altar in outer space and in fact it explicitly repeats the doctrine of copies that there are copies of things in the heavens there are more perfect versions of things on the earth and that Jesus blood had to fall on the perfect copies in order for his magic mojo to work and save the universe now this is curious because this looks a lot like the Ascension of Isaiah this looks like the same story looks like the author of Hebrews knows the Ascension of Isaiah story or something like it and is that's the story that he thinks is true the book of Hebrews mentions only one narrative event in the life of Jesus and that's it talks about him praying to God before before his death praying to God for salvation and the curious thing about this is in the Gospels Jesus prays and anguishes about the possibility of being released from the burden of doing this but then he he prays yes I'll do your will and so on he doesn't pray to be resurrected whereas in the Hebrews this version this story he's praying to be resurrected so it's a different story than we find in the Gospels and again this could be part of the revelatory message that was received there's no definite proof in the way that in the context of this or the way it's talked about that this occurred on earth again that book of Hebrews mentions no sources of information other than revelation or Scripture and that that's important it often will even like quote Jesus and when it's quoting Jesus it's actually just quoting scriptures so it appears to believe that whoever wrote scripture was possessed by Jesus or something and was actually Keyes's was communicating to them through Scripture there's at no point in Hebrews as he referred to eyewitnesses transmitting things that Jesus said it has no knowledge of any gospel narratives even that narrative of him praying before he died doesn't match up exactly what the gospel narratives so the gospel narratives seem completely unknown to the author of Hebrews and more importantly there's a section of it where he says the author of Hebrews says if Jesus were on earth he would not be a priest but his reasoning goes he continues to argue because he was not on earth he was a priest he was the the high priest of God's celestial temple he was the supreme high priest essentially this cosmic high priest now this significant part of this is that this item intone Lee makes sense if you believe that Jesus was never on earth right because if Jesus came to earth then he couldn't be a priest that's his own argument but it needs Jesus to be a priest for his sacrifice to work so therefore Jesus's sacrifice had to have occurred in celestial realms it couldn't have occurred on earth for this author it wouldn't make sense for his argument for that to have been the case so it appears that whoever wrote Hebrews was someone who believed in the celestial outer space dying Jesus and not the earthly Jesus of later Gospels another letter is one Clement traditionally this is dated to 95 ad we have no actual evidence that that's the case and in fact like Hebrews 1 Clement engages in arguments that implicitly ensue assume and require that the Jewish temple cult was still in operation so again it looks like this letter was written before before 70 AD when the Jewish temple cult was concluded but in any case it was certainly written between 60 and 95 AD it was written again after the death of Paul and it refers to the death of Paul is something that had occurred recently in this again there's no clear mention of an earthly Jesus oftentimes you'll see historicity defenders citing one Clement as evidence for or historicity but when you go look at the passages they cite they don't support any such contention there actually is no clear mention of a method Jesus in it it has no knowledge of any gospel narratives that know there's many opportunities in one Clement to use a gospel narrative to make a point or an argument that the author is making but he doesn't he doesn't seem to be aware that he has that rich ways of information to use and again this letter only cites revelation of Scripture as his only sources of information about Jesus in fact in many cases were he explicitly cites East I'm quoting Jesus here basically said something like that and then again quote scripture so apparently his information is coming from Scripture he doesn't seem to have the notion of information passed on now he does refer to apostles they refers to God delivering Jesus to the Apostles and the Apostles transmitting information but he doesn't actually quote that information but again it sounds like what he's talking about our God having Jesus reveal himself to the Apostles and the Apostles being the only ones to have seen and heard him then it was required for the Apostles to spread the gospel around there doesn't seem to be any clear mention of Jesus having an earthly ministry and having met or engaged with other people and this all this despite the fact that one Clement is over 10,000 words long with many occasions of relevance to mention there's a Jesus in clearer ways so this letter looks like it was written by someone who didn't believe in historical Jesus they didn't even have any notion of the idea yet so that leaves the gospel so when we get to the Gospels the gospel comes come decades after the fact and at least 40 years the earliest Gospel of Mark comes at least through at least 40 years after when Jesus is supposed to have died and the Gospels are the first we hear of an earthly story for Jesus the Gospels are wildly fictitious in their content and structure and and and more so than you probably even know yesterday at that University campus at Raleigh I did a whole lecture on this and that will eventually be online which you can watch where I explain why the Gospels are through and through myth they're making everything up I won't go any further into that here but every story in the Gospels has discernible allegorical a propagandistic and intent so it's clear that these are stories that they're making up it looks like they're you Hemmer izing jesus putting them in history and making up stories about him just as was done to every other celestial dede that we know about and the first of these mark in fact looks like an extended meta para bole outsiders are told one story while insiders are told what it really means what the real story is and we have this mark even clued us in on this by having Jesus say and when he was alone with his disciples he said to them unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God but unto them that are without Outsiders all these things are said in parables so that seeing they may see but not perceive and hearing they may hear but not understand lest at any time they should be converted and their sins should be forgiven them this is a clue he's basically saying the whole gospel I'm writing is like this it's a parable to outsiders it's going to look like a story of a historical Jesus to insiders it's full of rich allegorical and symbolic information and if you want more on this the Gospels as parables these are texts to look at gospel fictions again is a great one because it's short and really persuasive and effective does the New Testament imitate homers an example showing how the book of Acts is for example and the power of parable in the power of parable John Dominic Crossan argues very effectively for lay audience that the Gospels are parables about Jesus so that in fact the Gospels are fiction and they're using the concept of a parable but casting Jesus as a central character and they talk more about these things improving history as well we can talk about canonical acts I don't have a lot of time to go into it in more detail but there's actually evidence from Acts in terms of what doesn't happen that doesn't make any sense just as one example the the private history of the church concludes at the end of Acts 1 the public history of the church begins at acts 2 and in acts 1 Jesus's mom and his brothers are with the de site were with the disciples and with the early church beginning with acts 2 and all the way to the end of Acts many many many chapters they disappeared from history they never say anything they never do anything no one ever refers to them it's as if they didn't exist there are no brothers of jesus involved in the church the mother of Jesus just disappears no one even notices that she's vanished it's strange it looks like the book of Acts is embellishing a core early story of the history of the church that lacked any reference for the family of Jesus and there are many other aspects of Acts that are like that that look like clues to the fact that the original story didn't have a historical Jesus in it and one way to if you if you're still being given the rigor model from Christian apologists that X is a really reliable history read the mystery of Acts by Richard pervo it's another short brilliant text that will completely disavow you of the concept that Acts is reliable is it's it's made up thoroughly made up it's important to point out life expectancy often times they'll say well by witnesses would still be around that's not really the case if you were 20 years old when Jesus died in fact you would almost certainly be dead by the year 70 AD you'd have maybe a 1 in 4 chance of still being alive at that time you'd have a 1 in 10 chance of still being alive in the year 80 and a 1 in 200 chance of still being alive in the year one night out of the year 95 so the Gospels were being written exactly when the eyewitnesses are all dying off and in fact by the time the Gospel of Luke comes before the Gospel of John comes the odds are extremely low that there any eyewitness is still alive and then there's no other evidence everything else is either not independent meaning that it's just relying they just echo the Gospels or what Christians said the Gospels say so you can't use that in evidence because they're just they're just aping the Gospels they're getting your information from the Gospels that's not a corroboration of the Gospels or it's fabricated there are tons of fabricated evidence like the infancy Gospels where Jesus is this terrible awful shot you know omen like child who does all these horrible miracles as a as a young kid proving how awesome he is and those other things Jesus we have a letter from Jesus for example I don't bet he didn't know that he wrote a letter to a king that's completely forged obviously and they're very thorough forged epistles in the New Testament self and beyond and various things like that the to two of the many guys you'll hear about is somehow testing to the existence of Jesus our phallus and Josephus I've demonstrated that in fact there were originally no references to Jesus in these texts and if you've written that these are the two articles to look for find a reference librarian somewhere to see if you can get ahold of them through interlibrary loan if you want to read them so I'm not going to go into more detail on that some running out of time but to give you an analogy for how this makes sense what really happened let's look at the Roswell analogy the idea of the Roswell flying saucer what really happened was that a guy found some sticks and tinfoil in the desert what was said to have happened even at that time was that it was debris from an alien spacecraft importantly what was said to have happened within just 30 years just 30 years was that an entire flying saucer was recovered complete with alien that were autopsy by the government now the analogy is this the tinfoil in the desert would be analogous to the revelations of the Archangel named Jesus this this Jewish celestial concept of a celestial Jesus and the flying saucer and alien bodies would be analogous to the historical Jesus of Galilee now imagine if we only have the stories written by the Roswell believers from thirty years later and information derived from those and nothing else suppose that that was the only information we were allowed to see which is the case here we would not know about the tinfoil all we would have are multiple witnesses and sources reporting a flying saucer recovery an alien body autopsy neither of which ever existed so if it's possible in an age of universal literacy of newspapers video cameras and everything if this can happen in our age think about the ancient world where most of the information is destroyed eyewitnesses only live an average of 50 years and so on you can see how much easier it would be for that kind of thing to happen the standard rebuttal is that Christianity is different from those other religions and Jesus is different from those other dying and rising saver sons of God but in fact they're all different from each other all these sons of God all these Savior God's are different from each other the differences are not the issue it's their similarities that identify them as a trend the differences are part of the syncretism the things that Jesus is different the things that make Jesus different all the Jewish elements that are added on and changed so the fact that is different is not relevant to this argument there are elements of Paul and the Gospels that make more sense if there was a real Jesus that's not so much the case in fact in Paul those elements as I showed you some of them are very few very vague and very debatable and all attempts to extract such data from the Gospels fail and either facts or logic and that's my book proving history deals with that part of the argument it pretty much eliminates the Gospels as reliable evidence here and then the argument will be made that lots of real historical people are unattested until generations later or not at all which is true however those people weren't immediately worshipped as demigods about whom our earliest literature says they communicated only by revelations so you have to realize that Jesus is not just anybody he was immediately deified and immediately people were talking about having conversations with him from heaven this is this puts him in a different reference class altogether it makes it more likely that he might not have been historical and then you can't invent a whole man in just one generation of storytelling well in fact if you can invent a whole flying saucer you can invent a whole man in fact mark invented a three-hour eclipse of the Sun that was supposedly witnessed by the entire world that's a lot harder to get away with in inventing an obscure Galilean preacher there are all kinds of wildly public impossible things of the Gospels claim they're obviously false that we don't have any evidence of anyone gainsaying nevertheless we know that they're bogus so if you can invent those things you can invent a whole man that's not a difficulty at all and that idea of the mark inventing the three-hour eclipse of the Sun that I talked about that extensively in my book proving history as an example of how easy it was to make things up and get away with it you

Channel: UNCG SSA

Views: 1,073,067

Rating: 4.1765294 out of 5

Keywords: history, historicity, Jesus, Christ, God, myth, UNCG, Greensboro, Richard Carrier

Id: mwUZOZN-9dc

Length: 60min 4sec (3604 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 28 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/dei2anged]

Richard Carrier kind of blew my mind at the first Skepticon. Growing up in the bible belt, it's not hard to imagine, even as an atheist, growing up with the assumption that Jesus the man existed, and here was this guy, taking down all the arguments for existence and being a fun dude to hang with to boot. I totally recommend everyone check out the videos at youtube.com/HamboneProductions and finding his talks at Skepticon 1-5, we can't wait for him to come back for 6!

[u/[deleted]]

Carrier's mythicist argument is the most compelling one I've heard. I wanna see this thing get peer-reviewed.

[u/goonsack]

That was a really interesting presentation. Seems like he's doing some serious scholarship on the question. I've heard some of the arguments he made expressed by other people before, but he really makes a good case for a Space Jesus versus there being an earthly one. I was very intrigued by his comparison of early Christianity to other contemporaneous syncretic cosmic demigod resurrection cults such as the Sumerian one.

Someone should post this to /r/AskHistorians and see if it gets any traction. I have a feeling it might not, but if anything it might make for good popcorn. Currently anyone who doubts the historicity of Jesus on that subreddit gets flayed and sometimes comments are even removed by mods. Evidently it's been debated many times on there, and so anyone doubting Jesus's historicity just gets referred to previous threads, or is browbeaten by the "consensus of historians" argument.

I personally find the "consensus of historians" argument pretty weak in this instance. For other topics, yeah, consensus of historians is pretty hard to argue with. But for historicity of Jesus, I think we all must recognize that it's likely that the persistence, prevalence, and the degree to which belief in Jesus is ingrained in many of the world's societies may have actually played a huge role in shaping the consensus-- i.e. the consensus may not have arisen objectively and organically.

Kind of insane how the historicity of Jesus is so sacrosanct on an academic subreddit that ought to be open-minded and inclusive of contrasting viewpoints. I know it's been done over and over on /r/AskHistorians, but this seems like some compelling new work that's worth a renewed discussion. Especially after his book comes out, it would be interesting to see some engagement with it from that crowd.

[u/HaiKarate]

I'm only about 20 minutes into it, but the camera guy is driving me bonkers. He's far more concerned with capturing Dr. Carrier's face than his slides. He'll show the slide for a couple of seconds, and then jump right back to Dr. Carrier.

Sounds really good so far... he's talking about the evolution of religion, which is very important for understanding how Jewish thought evolved into Christian thought.

[u/mikeash]

Why is the historicity of Jesus constantly discussed in the context of religion? I get that he's a religious figure, but his historicity doesn't matter in that context. A historical, non-divine Jesus means Christianity is just as wrong as a wholly fictional Jesus.

I get that it's an interesting question, and maybe this is the best place to talk about it, but it so often seems to be in the context of having some bearing on the correctness of Christianity.

[u/mavnorman]

Upvoted although I still believe historicity is the better explanation. But Carrier's a mythicist worth listening to, in my opinion.

His argument still doesn't cut it for me, however.

[u/[deleted]]

I was expecting an old dude with long white hair.

It's a youngish dude with short black hair.

Nice Atheists.

[u/everred]

I can't wait for the book. I don't know if it's the audio quality or his voice, but I just can't listen to the whole thing.

[u/[deleted]]

He mentions that it isn't important to explain whether they were actually hallucinating or lying. Why isn't that important?