Why Invent the Jesus? • Richard Carrier Ph.D.

I guess this evening is dr. Richard carrier he has a PhD in the history of philosophy from Columbia University he's a published philosopher and historian specializing in contemporary philosophy of naturalism and in greco-roman philosophy science religion and the origins of Christianity he bugs regularly lectures for community groups worldwide and teaches courses online he's the author of many books including Sense and goodness without God on the historicity of Jesus why I am NOT a Christian awesome book like that one not the impossible faith because it's short and I have a short attention span and proving history as well as other chapters and anthologies and articles his most recent books include science education in the early Roman Empire and the scientist in the early Roman Empire I'm sensing a theme okay so please welcome dr. Richard carrier yeah so I was asked to talk about the historicity of Jesus and the question i'ma talk about today there are many different angles you could take on this and the one that I'm going to take today is like why would you even invent Jesus let's just assume there wasn't one why did they create one and then I'll talk a little bit about the evidence for their not having been one versus their having been one and of course here when I wrote my book on the historicity of Jesus I'm only comparing two hypotheses the hypothesis that there was never a Jesus and the hypothesis that there was just an ordinary Jesus a guy who wasn't miraculous wasn't super famous but that legends grew up around him in other words the the next most plausible theory if there is no God than Jesus was just an ordinary dude and then the gospel sort of built legends and myths around him and people sort of deified him that's entirely plausible and that's the only hypothesis I take seriously in the book I am in no way in that book dealing with the miraculous fundamentalist Christian Jesus hypothesis I just assume that's already false so the questions we're gonna be talking about today are going to be relating those two different Jesus's the the ordinary Jesus hypothesis and the the non Jesus hypothesis now first let's orient with some evidence or orient with some chronology one thing you should be aware of in the ancient world the average life expectancy for someone who survived childhood was only 48 so back then a lifetime is about half what it is today and that's significant because he means witnesses died off a lot sooner and things can change and get lost in history a lot quicker now the the religion definitely began sometime around 38 D no matter what the case but the first documents we get of any mention of Christianity or Jesus or anything are the epistles of Paul that end up in the New Testament now several of those we know in mainstream consensus is that they're forgeries Paul didn't write them but seven of them it is generally believed he did write those seven even if he wrote them in different forms and stuff originally but those documents are the first documents we have for the Christian Church and they only refer to visions I'm going to talk about that a little more later they'd never talk about Jesus having a ministry or anyone ever having met him in life the first time anyone ever meets him or encounters him is after his death and and there are a variety of different ways to interpret the epistles but there's no direct claim that he was actually a guy walking around on earth in the epistle and the epistles the authentic ones the Gospels come yet another lifetime later by ancient standards about 40 years after the beginning of the religion you start to see Gospels and then they get written over a span of time between 75 and 115 AD maybe and that's the first time we hear of any biography so we go from no ordinary memoirs no ordinary history and just immediately right out of the gate wild religious mythologies about this guy so there's no middle ground present in the historical record and then all other evidence comes later there's you often hear people talking about Josephus being late first century but the evidence is pretty clear that either he didn't mention Jesus or we can't establish that he originally mentioned Jesus other people sort of inserted mentions of Jesus into his text the first like very clear examples of someone not a Christian something outside the New Testament that mentions Jesus were already about 115 AD and later so we're already a really long time after the beginning of the religion and all those references appear to simply refer back to the Gospels or to Christians citing the Gospels so we have no independent corroboration of the Gospels and this produces an unusual sequence of evidence the epistles they only speak of a pre-existent celestial being and a revealed gospel there are a number of places where Paul says gospel is known through revelation and hidden messages in the scriptures like the idea that it's known because Jesus preached it and Galilee is not in Paul at all and the Gospels come a lifetime later and are wildly fictional even the stuff in it that's not miraculous is unrealistic and implausible and I'll give you some examples later and yet all later attestations to the historicity of Jesus are based on the gospel so these they sir these fictional stories come out even if Jesus existed these are fictional stories about him and all later references are referencing these so there's no independent evidence and all other evidence from the first 80 years of Christianity's development was conveniently not preserved not even in quotation or refutation in other words a great deal of other literary activity that would have been happening including tons of other letters don't survive not only do they not survive we don't even have mentions of them so the evidence has been pretty well scrubbed and then all other evidence we have is forged in its place we have dozens of Gospels at least 6 versions of Acts hundreds of fake epistles doctored passages and so on and when you look at Christian literature you take like for example Gospels acts and epistles and you count the number of everyone agrees these are forgeries against the ones that people are think might be authentic the ratio comes to be between 5 to 1 to 10 to 1 forgery to authentic which means that forgery was the normal mode of literary production for Christians in the first twenty centuries so that tells you something how the evidence is kind of messed with it's highly unreliable stuff's been taken away stuffs been faked and messed with and altered so you have to really get up to get at the truth you've got to go through this lens that's been hugely messed up to prevent you from seeing the truth of what how it actually began and you have to look for clues that could sort of escaped that net now what's the alternative explanation let's suppose Jesus didn't exist how then do we explain Christianity there's some unusual yet an indisputable facts that we can first queue you in on one is that some pre-christian Jews had already identified a character in the Old Testament named Jesus as a supreme Archangel and gods firstborn son so that belief already pre-existed Christianity what Christianity did is they taught that their Jesus was that Archangel so they're taking an angel that already existed in Jewish angelology and attributing it to their guy now that could be done for a historical guy they could be saying that there was a historical Jesus he's this angel who came down and and taught us things but either way whether it's that or not they definitely have already borrowed this Jesus figure from Jewish angelology before their time and what they taught that was different from what other Jews were teaching about this angel was that this angel Archangel descended incarnated was killed and resurrected that's the unique part of Christianity as a Jewish sect they have this particular doctrine and they teach this doctrine in parallel to Satan's cosmic story and if you know Satan the story of Satan rebelling in heaven and being cast down he's not cast down to earth he's cast down into Upper heavens or the lower heavens below the moon he sits up in the sky and sky castles a hundred thousand miles away sending his demons down to meddle with us and whatnot that's standard in Jewish demonology of the ancient times but that whole story was read out of Scripture it was found in there or people wrote books about it it's obviously not historical there was no Satan there was no war in heaven it's a myth so Satan is a is a non historical person who the Jews put into history and made a historical character and he's also an archangel so and Jesus his role I'll show you later reverses the role of Satan Satan rebelled Jesus submitted and thereby when Satan rebelled he brought death and all the or horrible things in the world by Jesus submitting he canceled all the evils that Satan caused so Jesus and Satan are mythically designed to be opposition's Jesus was designed to sort of cancel out Satan in Jewish mythology so here's the alternative theory that these events were not revealed by actually happening the the death incarnation death and resurrection of Jesus were not witnessed by anyone they were actually revealed through private visions only to elect persons if they are the apostles and that Jesus was actually killed by Satan and his sky demons in his kingdom above the clouds now you might think that sounds weird why would that be actually we have a Christian texts called the ascension of Isaiah written roughly around the same time as the canonical Gospels that originally once actually said this that Jesus was killed by Satan and his demons in outer space and there's some clues as well as that other sects were teaching this but those sects all disappeared by the mid second century and we don't get to hear anything more about them we have no documents from them the Ascension of Isaiah only survives in doctored copies in different versions where people were trying to erase this part of it but because we have different traditions in different languages we're able to reconstruct something of the original and this again reversed the fall of Satan Satan failed the test being given the opportunity to be equal to God and he tried to seize all power and rebelled Jesus was given the opportunity to be equal to God and he submitted all the way to death and therefore cancelled that out there's another parallel and I'll get to some examples later in the adjacent province so in Judea the adjacent province was Egypt which had a huge flourishing Jewish community there's a lot of pilgrim travel between Judea and Egypt at the time so there's a lot of cultural communication going on the main savior God and Egypt was Osiris and Osiris has the same model where he was placed in history as a pharaoh who lived in a particular historical time lived on earth and was killed and resurrected and ascended to heaven that's the version that was sold to the public but the priests talked among themselves and said that actually wasn't true that that was just an allegory for the real thing that happens which is that Osiris descends just below the moon where he's killed by the equivalent of Satan in Egyptian mythology and resurrects so they had the cosmic version of just like I'm talking about here that was the the real version and then they had these public stories they created and of course in Osiris's case Egyptian history is superbly well documented back thousands of years so we can actually confirm there was Oh Cyrus so we do know he was non-existent person so we have this exact same model to go by and it's going on at the exact same province so it wouldn't be so out of the ordinary for it to occur in Judea now analogous to I say and now I guess Jewish sects notice I say Jewish sects some all these religions I've lifted here are actually just sects of Judaism people try to think of them as distinct no Christianity is just a Jewish sect they changed some things Mormonism is just a version of Christianity therefore it's just a version of Judaism Islam is just a version of Christianity which is just a version of Judaism in fact Islam looks a lot like the original Christian sect which was Torah observant the original Christian sect said no bacon etc circumcised and all that Islam says no bacon and circumcise and all of that so they're actually still retaining a lot of the original Torah observant Christian elements so Islam is a sect of Christianity it just grew up in a particular region and got very successful more successful than other heretical sects but as a sect of Christianity it's really just a sect of Judaism so technically Islam is just Judaism 3.0 or something so but what do they all have in common Mormonism you know thus the story Joseph Smith has conversations with the angel Moroni and seeing words on magical plates and the Book of Mormon records what those things said Islam Muhammad has conversations with the angel Gabriel and the Quran records the spoken teachings of Gabriel as speaking as the voice of God Christianity this theory would say that the Apostle Peter has conversations with the angel Jesus and the New Testament records the hidden deeds and teachings of that angel that would be the analogy for this alternative explanation for the origins of Christianity the one thing that happened differently is that like all other Savior gods in that particular period they got historic eyes even though they didn't exist originally the same thing happened to this angel he got his story that Moroni and Gabriel did not now can we argue against that theory there are a variety of different attempts to try and say that that can't be I wish I had the slide of showing Luke Skywalker saying you know it can't be my father it's impossible but I'll point out some of the best ones this is the the best attempts to argue it and you really can't get it from the Gospels because the Gospels are so dubious and have no sourcing so the Gospels aren't useful you can't get it from extra biblical evidence because they're all based on the Gospels so they're they can't independently corroborate them so it leaves you with epistles those seven authentic epistles of Paul and that's really all we have so we've got to kind of dig in there if you want to prove there was a historical Jesus you've got to find it in there and one of the places that the people who defend historicity find it is that twice Paul refers to this group of people called the Brothers of the Lord and the assumption is oh those are the biological brothers of Jesus therefore he must have really existed the problem is that the only brothers of the Lord Paul ever talks about knowing anything about our cultic brothers of the Lord all baptized Christians our adopted sons of God and therefore brothers of each other and therefore brothers of the Lord Paul says Jesus is the firstborn of many brethren meaning we're all brothers of the Lord so those passages become ambiguous does he mean baptized Christians or does he mean biological brothers of Jesus he never says and you would think if he if he the only version he talks about explicitly are the cultic version if he's gonna refer to a biological version he would have to specify it you have to say like brothers of the Lord and the flesh or something like that really emphasize I don't mean baptized Christians I mean the actual biological brothers of Jesus but he never actually seems aware of the need to make that distinction so it does suggest that actually when he uses that phrase he only means the cultic version but at best it's ambiguous we can't really build anything off of that there are a couple of passages where he's two passages one passage of where it says you'll often see it translated that he descent he's descended from David descended from David is not in the Greek it actually says literally in the Greek it says manufactured from the sperm of David and there's another reference to him being born of a woman it's the exact same word manufactured out of a woman now in the case where you talking about David the suggested that's ambiguous what do you mean manufactured out of the sperm of David do you mean literally or do you mean is that a reference to descent what does that actually mean it's ambiguous the word that Paul uses there and also uses in the case fo the woman passage the word Paul uses there is the word that Paul uses for divine manufacture it's for the when he mentions the creation of Adam uses that word when he mentions the creation of our future resurrection bodies which by the way are waiting for us in heaven like like empty zombie shells for us to go inhabit and I'm not kidding that's that's 2 Corinthians 5 Paul's very explicit those bodies are already there waiting for us Paul uses the same word so he's not talking about birth from like natural birth the way we're talking about when Paul does refer to natural birth he uses a different word in the Greek and this was so disturbing to Christians that we have it examples and Bart Ehrman shows this in his book Orthodox corruption of Scripture we have examples of Christians trying to change the one word to the other because they know Paul's using word for manufacture and using a different word for birth so they tried to switch it over on both of these passages we have manuscripts where there we have the attempts by scribes to screw with it but those are late so we have earlier manuscripts and that can make and establish that no that isn't actually the reading and everybody now agrees the paul used the disturbing word rather than the obvious word another example is when he's talking about the born of a woman actually Paul's argument there is allegorical and he explicitly says I'm talking about allegorical women I don't mean an actual biological woman I mean the world order to which you are born so if you're born into a particular world you have a particular mother but then you know that can get into the debate over the semantics of the rhetoric of Paul and so on I think ultimately it gets ambiguous so once again these are very ambiguous passages they're not predict they're not particularly good evidence for historicity but to get back to that James example I'll give an example of why the mainstream views are often based on long-held Christian faith assumptions and actually don't hold up when you look at the evidence and this is an example everybody assumes Jesus had a brother named James but when you look at the evidence it doesn't really hold that up or Jesus had a brother named James James who was ahead in the church a leader of the church the evidence doesn't hold that up none of the brothers of Jesus not the James Jude or anyone in the New Testament are said to be apostles anywhere in the entire New Testament so we actually don't have an explicit statement saying that any of the Brothers of Jesus were apostles even the book of Acts has no knowledge of this being a case so the one place where we have the origins the history of Christianity from its first public announcement in its first 30 years at no point is there a brother of Jesus leading the church not James not anybody the letters we have in the New Testament by James and Jude neither of those letters say they are the brother of Jesus mark has Jesus disowned his brothers just outright like you aren't my brothers anymore these are my brothers and so he shows no knowledge of any of them ever joining a church Luke alone puts them all in the church in acts 1 but then they vanished from history like I said and so do his mom and dad by the way they they're somehow as soon as you get the actual history of the church all the family of Jesus disappear the first time his brothers appear as apostles is in wildly ridiculous stories written over a century later so you see the legend seems to be growing in that direction the family gets invented over time in just the same way that the family of Moses was invented over time and everybody who's not a fundamentalist now agrees that Moses is a fictional person that he was mythical it didn't exist and yet he has named brothers and sisters and so on so merely having named brothers and sisters does not make you a historical person fictional people have brothers and sisters too and there's other passages in Paul people refer to what Paul says Jesus describes the the Latsis they'll say the Last Supper at his right before he's executed and he says well actually Paul never calls at the Last Supper that would have been a useful thing because that would suggest that there were lots of other suppers before it no he only calls it the Lord's Supper and he says he received it directly from the Lord in other words what he communicates there is from a vision he's hallucinating or dreaming or claiming to hallucinate or dream and claiming he received it that way not from any witnesses and when he describes the eucharist event there's no one else present he doesn't mention anyone being there it's just Jesus communicating it to his community spiritually there's a reference to the rulers of this age crucifying him but who were they Paul never uses it the phrases are cons of this Aion meaning princes of this universe or princes of this this cosmic era he never uses that phrase of human leaders or rulers he uses similar terminology to refer to the demonic forces that rule the world so is he talking about Satan and his demons or is he talking about Romans is he talking about Jews we're not sure there's a people will say well he uh outright says the Jews killed him that's in 1 Thessalonians except pretty much like 80 percent of mainstream experts agree that that's an interpolation the passage where Paul blames the Jews for killing Jesus is not only not only has historical mistakes in it so it's factually impossible that Paul would write it but it's also contains an unpolished emmett ISM the the anti-semitism reflects later Christian thought not Paul's thought itself it contradicts the things he said about the Jews elsewhere so that passage people generally agree with something that someone added to the text that wasn't originally in Paul and then you'll hear someone will say well there Paul says that he confessed before Pontius Pilate in 1 Timothy but all mainstream scholars agree that 1 Timothy is a forgery Paul did not write that ok so the evidence looks dodgy when you start looking at it and so when you actually start picking at each piece of evidence and it dissolves and you start comparing the two different hypotheses as to how well they explain the evidence that remains that's what I do in the book I look at all the evidence - everybody's presented both pro and con that's why it's so huge plus you could give a lot of important background knowledge that you can use to understand and interpret that evidence and I find even being as generous as I can to the historicity hypothesis I still find a 2 and 3 chance that the alternative hypothesis is a better explanation is the one that's true for the origins of Christianity now that still means doesn't 1 in 3 chance that there's a Jesus that he really was an ordinary Jesus and that's how the religion started so that's on the most generous side and then when I look at it in the way that I think in terms of the most most skeptical side I come to twelve thousand to one odds against the historicity of Jesus so those are my margins of error they're very wide because the data is really crappy so why would they do that here's a clue to Peter and there in the gospel there's 1st Peter in 2nd Peter they are written by different people the style authorial style of both of them is so radically different that we know they were not written by the same person and 2 Peter refers to 1 Peter which means it's a dead giveaway that 2 Peter is a forgery so everybody agrees - Peter is a forgery a lot of scholars think that 1 Peter is also a forgery I think they're wrong but that's not relevant because one Peter never actually places Jesus in history is something witnessed so that's a problem but two Peters definitely a forgery everybody agrees now the interesting thing is is why would they Forge it what are they doing in it and if you read to Peter its main messages to say this that we did not follow cleverly devised myths we were eyewitnesses of his majesty and then immediately forges an eyewitness account of meeting Jesus on earth and it does this to answer not critics of Christianity but they're attacking fellow Christians otherwise unknown Christians who were claiming that such a Jesus was a cleverly devised myth not something someone met in person so that's why this this letter is forged to attack that sect of Christians which kind of gives us clue that there was such a sect of Christians to attack now the thing is we're not told anything about else about that sect we have none of their documents we don't know the name of the sect WA we did we know nothing about them everything was purged and destroyed so here we know there was a sec saying this but we're not allowed to see anything about when that sect originated what they were saying what their documents were or anything like this this is an example of a clue that slipped through the lens of the distorted lens that was created now why the allegory the Gospels being originally allegorical why that Eclipse mystery various scholars have proposed different theories note the null thesis is that we see this all the time actually we look at the cargo cults you look at the ancient mystery cults you look at the hadith it's the natural progression to start historic izing and inventing history and inventing persons that did things and said things religions tend to do this so it actually makes sense that they would another example that we have is Origen himself this is a Christian scholar of the third century he actually lets slip in a discourse once that he says that you have to control the masses and to control the illiterate lower ranking pew filling Christians it requires feeding them literal stories and letting them believe that they're literally true because they're not educated enough not advanced enough to understand the allegorical meaning and you need to save them or otherwise they're going to die and then they'll end up in hell so to save them it's better to just let them believe the literal story and then if they move up enough and get enough education and can under then you can let them in and say okay these things are just allegories you got to understand the true story is not the literal part that's a clue to the kind of mindset of the Christian elite of this particular sect the sect that he was and then this exit eventually gained power and decided all documents it would survive that's kind of the mindset so they're actually trending towards let's try outselling the allegory as literal because it's a better way to grow a large Church because that's really hard to pack the pews with people when you're trying to explain this complicated - an allegorical version of Jesus it's better they're much more impressed by the literal Jesus so the trend was to stick to a more literal Jesus another factor is the first century bottleneck we have a letter of Pliny the Younger the first time first time in history that any non-christian we have mentions the existence of Christians in 110 AD he writes a letter about this and what that letter reveals is that there actually were extremely few of Christians like there were so few this got plenty of the younger was one of the most legally experienced person in the Empire like he's you know it's hard to explain there's a whole lot list of all his offices he's held for decades and yet he's never been present at a trial of Christians didn't know what they were guilty of and didn't know what punishments to exhibit and so he has to ask the Emperor and another thing that he points out is that most of the people that he interviewed there was an anonymous list of accusing people of being Christians he interviewed that most of them had quit being Christians like 20 years before or 10 years before so that really he was very few people were actually still Christians and there's so few of them that even Pliny the Younger didn't even know what they were guilty of or what why they were illegal he eventually punished them for being being an illegal assembly in the ancient Roman Empire they didn't have amendment rights that would allow rights of a sent peaceable assembly you have to assemble you actually had to get a license from the state and if you didn't you was automatically assumed that you were organizing and agitating against the state so the opposition to Christians was not religious it was political the fact that they're meeting at night or meeting without the permission of the state simply looked simply looked suspicious to the state and was literally illegal so it had nothing really to do with their being a religion originally that changed in subsequent centuries but the point being is that this shows that there were so few Christians by 110 AD you can understand why it would be easy for the history of the church to radically alter it would just take a few people to start selling a different version and there's not enough people left to gainsay that version of things because the religion who was kind of dying out and then someone reacts clouded it by publishing these books to try and sell Jesus ISM and pushing a literal version so it was actually easy to get one to eclipse the other another factor is historical accident the sect that was most promoting the historical Jesus verses for example in 2 Peter the sect that that letter was forged to attack that letter was forged by the sect that actually eventually gained Constantine's ear the Emperor Constantine the first Christian Emperor who started shifting money around from pagan temples to Christian churches and actually really got Christianity into the empire as a state religion and that turned out to be the most fundamentalist and illiterate literalist sect of them all Constantine for example the tutor he chose for his children was lacked ancius and langt ancius was like the Ken Ham of the ancient world this is a time when I give a whole lecture on this on this connait Canada tour about ancient science that all educated people at that time knew the earth was a sphere they had really good multiple core operatory empirical evidences that the earth was a sphere lacked ancius wasn't having it he said it's entities I just dismiss all that evidence it's impossible for the earth to be a sphere because that means there's upside down people on the other side of it and that's just ridiculous so this is the sect that actually gained political power and then eventually decided what books and stuff just to survive so that's a big factor in determining which version of Christianity ended up prevailing in history and that like I said that sects had absolute power decided all document survival for a thousand years with very few exceptions like the NAG Hammadi find but that comes in early Middle Ages are these few surviving sects stashed some of their documents in pots in the early Middle Ages and they survived for us to find them today but we have nothing we're very little that's earlier than that and certainly nothing earlier than 50 ad so the first hundred years of Christianity are a blank to us all that evidence all the original sects all the evidence of them is gone okay so that's some of that stuff well let's give you some more context that or this will make even more sense now this is the stuff that you might hear on the Internet some of its really terrible so be aware on the internet of claims like this I'm about to go through a lot of that stuff is terrible please don't ever go repeating that Jesus is just like Horace that's not true so there's a lot of false facts about Horace forget Horace just erase Horace from your memory there's better analogies um these are some of the best and I know you probably don't even know maybe three or four of these are all of them possibly but these are the these are the gods for which we have good pre-christian evidence that they were dying and rising gods that had attached salvation cults Osiris Adonis Romulus Zell Maxis and in Nana in fact the first one in history is in Nana so it actually started with a woman and in typical patriarchal style the woman's story gets replaced with a man's story so instead of a woman being crucified and resurrected on the third day now it's suddenly a man being crucified and resurrected on the third day because who needs goddesses right I don't know anyway that story by the way is very interesting it would have been a more interesting religion if we were to have kept that I don't know if any of you studied in Donna she's an interesting person in mythical history but Mithra who's also a savior god of this time is not a dying and rising god you'll often hear the claim that he's one of these dying and rising gods it's not the case it's we don't know exactly his gospel we don't have his written Gospels they existed but we don't have them what we do have our comic books basically the graphic novels this right here is a graphic novel of the gospel of Mithra carved in stone that tells the whole gospel in pictured so it's like having a picture Bible without the text and you're trying to figure out what on earth is going on but what doesn't happen here is his dying he doesn't die in resurrect he undergoes some other great suffering and struggle that gives him power over death so that's still the analogy and that's relevant because there are numerous personal Savior deities personal saviors Mithra was a personal Savior Anana was as well Osiris was as well and there are many different ones not all of them are dying in rising gods some underwent some other kind of suffering but they're all the rage at that time know what they all have in common are these they're all Savior gods so you get personal salvation by attaching yourself to them they are all the Son of God or occasionally the daughter of God they all undergo a passion apotheon in greek the exact same word that the Christians use of Jesus there is a passion of Osiris there is a passion of Inanna and so on The Passion of the Christ is actually the latest is kind of the newest version of them idea and through that passion the stuff with passion meaning suffering or struggle some sort of great suffering or struggle they undergo that by which they have to end through going that through that they obtain victory over death and they share that victory over death with their followers often through baptism and communion the idea of baptism and communion as the means of sharing in the death and resurrection or the conquest of death of your Savior God predates Christianity in multiple cults so it's actually not unique to Christianity it is a it is a lift from another cultural trope and all of these Savior gods have stories about them set in human history on earth just like Jesus yet none of them ever actually existed so in fact if you look at the the the galaxy of people in which Jesus fits to make him the historical would make him extraordinary he would be the weirdo out of all of them oh you can barely see at the bottom of that oh well sorry there is a sentence there but anyway so you need evidence we're gonna say Jesus is the exception to all these guys and then some girls we need evidence for that so the Jewish context now what happened is all of those other Savior gods every national culture had one so the Greeks had one the Egyptians had when the Syrians had one what was now a turkey that that culture had won the Thracians did and they would take their local religion and merge it with this basic model and create a new version of the religion that would be different from all the others but have those same features that I just mentioned and some others so what the Jews appeared to have done there sect a small fringe countercultural sect of the jews did is they took this model and did what all the other surrounding cultures did is basically make a jewish version of it so they created a jewish personal savior and to do that they build off of the most fundamental structure of ancient Judaism at the time as a religion which is all based on atonement sacrifice basically blood magic blood magic that would wage the anger of God and secure the blessings in this life and in the next and it begins with the story of Isaac right Abraham is commanded to sacrifice Isaac his firstborn son to assuage the anger of God and God stops him at the last minute he's gonna do it he's totally obedient and God stops and says no okay I'll let you substitute an animal and that actually is in Jewish lore and legend the beginning of the Yom Kippur principle the Yom Kippur ceremony where you would take a goat as a substitute for people and kill it and that it's atonement would affect us wage the anger of God and atone for the sins of Israel the sins being the things that offend God now that was the basic model but the problem is of course that that animal blood is less powerful less magical than human blood and therefore you have to repeat this every year so every year at the Jewish temple or equivalent there was a ceremony where you would have the goats and I'm gonna talk about the ceremony a little more there's a few more details that are relevant to Christianity but the basic idea is this you sacrifice this animal and all the sins of Israel are canceled but that wears out the magic only lasts a year the spell duration is only one year so you have to keep doing it and this especially became a problem when the temple cult was destroyed by the Romans Oh No now how do we get atonement there's no temple to do the ritual in and that was a crisis for the rabbinical Judaism they have to solve it in other ways Christianity was already on board with solving the problem because they wanted to eliminate the temple even before it was destroyed because they were an anti temple sect like the Qumran sect was that they thought that the temple cult had become so corrupt that it was actually preventing the end of the world they wanted the end of the world they wanted to bring doomsday on and the reason God wouldn't do it is because he the Jews keep sinning I was like well keep sitting I'm not gonna come and save you and so this these countercultural sex saw that the temple is getting in the way well if the temple cult is corrupt will never end sin so what if we just get rid of the temple cults theologically so it's no longer even a component with you were direct to God skip the middleman then we can like appease God and then maybe we'll bring on the end of the world like we want to have happen and so Jesus when you look at the epistles of Paul it's very clear that the really the sole and most important function of Jesus in their in their theology is that he replaces the temple he replaces both the Passover sacrifice and both the Yom Kippur sacrifice if you attach yourself to Jesus you no longer need the temple ritually no longer need the yom kippur because jesus being and you know the archangel the firstborn son of god that's the most powerful magic blood that you can get so if you sacrifice that so if you sacrifice this guy the spell duration is infinity so you no longer need to repeat the ritual year after year therefore you no longer need the temple and you can see this you can read this throughout the letters of pala that really is the role that Jesus performs everything else about terms teachings and moral teachings and stuff was just add-ons to that to court of create the local community that they were trying to construct but the function the actual function of Jesus theologically is to replace the temple as the ultimate sacrifice and so that was the version that they imported into this model of a savior deity so they've sort of created a Jewish version of this Savior DD that has a path Eon has a passion and a death and resurrection and through which he gains victory over death and shares with his followers with through baptism and communion and all of that stuff so that's that but let's get to Jesus in the Gospels I told you earlier faith literature was typically fake there's some 40 Gospels by the way half a dozen Acts dozens of forger pistols or more actually depending on when you count but even Exodus Deuteronomy Kings Daniel s their Maccabees Tobit joseph and aseneth and other Testaments and lives of the patriarchs Jewish literature was typically faked to it really a lot of Jewish literature was really fanfiction off the Bible there would be like one line of the Bible that says something really weird and then someone would write a huge book explaining that one line so it's just like you know Harry Potter fanfiction or something except they took it seriously well the Christians did that to the Christians for example eventually got annoyed that there were no stories of baby Jesus so they invented a toddler Jesus that wanders around town and kills all the local villagers villager kids for annoying him just to show that he's God and you shouldn't offend God it's actually one of the scariest Bible or scariest Gospels that you'll read it's like a script for the omen that was too scary even for the film industry so yes so they're writing a lot of fake stuff so we have to be aware of their fakery one of the most interesting things I told you about nog kamati right so in nach mati we actually have an example of them in the process of faking a document they have the original source document which is this letter written by someone else and someone was creating a narrative of Jesus risen a resurrected Jesus interacting with his disciples borrowing literally the text from that other letter and there were they were halfway done with it and then they apparently they're kind of gonna come and get killed or something cuz they just swept their whole desktop into the pot and then now 2,000 years later we can see their work halfway through so we can see even in process of how stuff got invented about Jesus a lot of books on this John Dominic Crossan this book the power of parable is really excellent demonstration that the Gospels are just it in extended parables that they're not really shouldn't be they shouldn't be taken as history they should be taken as parables in themselves Randal Helms gospel fictions is another example I give examples in proving history and then of course I give tons in chapter 10 of on the historicity of Jesus most of which are drawn from the peer-reviewed literature so it's not even you don't even have to take my word for it a lot of the stuff is actually already in the literature that people just haven't put it together in one place for you to see how widespread this understanding of it is so here's the clue to this mark as soon as in the Gospel of Mark as soon as Jesus starts talking about the gospel almost immediately when he starts doing that he says this this is Martin chapter four then Jesus says whoever has ears to hear let him hear but when he was alone the twelve and the others around him asked him about the parables he told them the secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you but to those on the outside everything is said in parables so that they may be ever seeing but never perceiving and ever hearing but never understanding otherwise they might turn and be forgiven then jesus said to them don't you understand this parable how then will you understand any parable and then he goes on to explain that the story he just told is not literally true it represents something symbolically so mark is really giving the reader a key he's saying my whole gospel this is how you should read my whole gospel and if you don't read my whole gospel this way you're one of those outsiders who's not gonna know how to turn and be forgiven and here's an example of that does how many people know that Jesus hates FIGS yeah it's true he does okay so in mark 11 Jesus is walking along and he's hungry and he sees a fig tree over a distance away and it mark goes out of his way to say it wasn't the season for figs and that Jesus knew it wasn't the season for figs but he walks up to the tree anyway I don't know why to go look and get for gissy figs and get some fake figs to eat he goes up there and there's no figs to eat but obviously there wouldn't be it wasn't the season for the tree to be in fruit but he gets angry at the tree and curses it and say may never bear fruit again and then the next day they come over and has been withered to its very roots now this is obviously a fictional story it never happened I mean people don't have the secret x-man power of withering fig trees so so we know it's a false story so why is it being told what's the point of this story but even if you had the secret x-man power of withering fig trees you still wouldn't curse a fig tree forbearing not bearing fruit out of season so why would mark say that I mean he's making Jesus even if we assume Jesus was a miraculous wizard he's making him what crazy why would he do that it doesn't make any sense if you read it literally but it does make sense if you don't read it literally the entire story actually is an allegory for God's and bandit ment of the temple if this is a story for why the God allowed the Romans to come and raise the temple and destroy the temple called and end it one for all the fig tree actually represents the temple and basically Jesus acting in the world of God curses it and says may you never bear fruit again and it's withered to its very roots and so he's explaining that's why you know God said it's no longer the season for that we're getting rid of it and immediately he says what would you do now is you pray to me and this and yada yada so he's talking about what God has replaced it with so that it's a whole thing as an allegory for that and I didn't make that up that actually comes from the peer-reviewed literature our ji Hammerton Kelly writes an article called the sacred violence and the Messiah so this is in the scholarship so this is things that doesn't get communicated the public very often and one of the clues for that one of the reasons you can interpret it that way is not just because you can think it out but Marc writes by wrapping stories around stories there's a lot of Pat places in mark where you have a story begins and it gets interrupted and then some other story happens and then you go back to the ending of the original story and this is one of them and so that you have the cursing of the fig tree and then the day later they come and find it wither do you know what happens in between those two events does anybody know the clearing of the temple Jesus goes in the temple condemns the temple is something corrupt and and throws everybody out the money changers out and so on so wrap when mark does as he wraps one story around another they're meant to be commentaries on you on each other so that's the this tells you that this is all about the temple so that's what that's how mark is writing he's not writing literal history no he's this isn't a memory this isn't something that was passed on to him through oral Laura this is something he's very carefully crafting he's wrapping a story around another he's using allegory he's actually building all this out to sell a message to actually say this is why God condemned the temple cult this is what we're replacing it with and so it's all about the message it's not about the historical truth of the thing and when you go from story from story from story to story throughout the Gospels especially mark it's all like this every single one is like this it either look it's when you look at it originally it looks stupid and weird like that can't possibly have happened and then you look at it allegorically and then suddenly it makes a great deal of sense so the whole of the Gospels are written in this in this mode there are other examples why John baptizes Jesus I mean Christ in that story is a model for Christians it's what would Jesus do he would submit to baptism it tells you what baptism looks like it tells you what baptism means it's adoption by God and so on it emulates the crucifixion the baptism is a death and rebirth into eternal life and it was so in Osiris cult before the Christians borrowed the idea and it was also in Jewish cults before Christianity or Jewish sects before Christianity adopted the idea and their various other aspects to this you can talk about like Christ submission reverses Satan's rebellion and things like that and that's why for example if you notice as soon as Jesus submits to baptism therefore reversing the rebellious nature of Satan he immediately gets tempted by Satan and survives all the temptations he resists the temptations there's a reason why those two are joined together and then of course see if you have Jesus being baptized by John and John is actually declaring Jesus his successor this is the best story to invent because you actually want to co-opt the fame of the Baptist cult and get rid of some competition another example and I alluded to this earlier you know the story that Pilate according to custom offered them a released prisoner they every time there was a holiday or this particular holiday he would release a prisoner to the Jews and the Jews chose the murderer and rebel leader Barabbas now Roberts I don't know if you know means son of the Father in Aramaic so in some manuscripts in fact he's named Jesus Barabbas so we have two jesus sons of the Father in this story that's kind of suspicious also no such custom existed we know for a fact there Pilate would never did that and never would have done that but also what we notice here is there now we're looking at this it's matching the Yom Kippur ritual I was talking about because the Yom Kippur ritual didn't just involve sacrificing a goat you would get two identical goats one of them you would cast all the sins of Israel on to run it out into the wild and then actually it would chase it and push it off a cliff and the other is the one the pure one would be the one that you would sacrifice and it's blood falling on the altar would atone for the sins of Israel this is an allegory for exactly the Yom Kippur ritual saying that Jesus is the true Yom Kippur Barabbas and his ways of murder and rebellion those are the sins of Israel and if you choose him you are actually choosing the sins you got to choose Jesus he's the true sacrificial goat so the whole story doesn't make sense as history but it makes sense as an allegory for Jesus being the Yom Kippur Barabbas is the scapegoat Jesus is the blood so what was the myth for the gospel serve the function of being new scriptures the Christians didn't like the old scriptures because there were certain things about it that were old-fashioned Jesus is the new Moses in the new Elijah and in fact they take stories from Moses and Elijah and update them so a lot of the stories about Jesus are actually revised versions of stories about Moses and Elijah they are gospel guides for missionary life every little poppy in the Gospels has a little thing that you can use to respond to people who are arguing with you dealing with miracles family doubters enemies and so on so it's useful for missionaries to actually if they get challenged by something is it well let me tell you a story and then they would tell the story and then they could riff off of the story and make themselves look very impressive the Gospels explained ritual these are explaining the origins the myths that explain the origins of rituals baptism Eucharist martyrdom they explained the gospel itself through parables for example as Mark 4 says but later they were used to establish a stable Authority the biggest problem with earliest Christianity is that if it was originated from visions anybody can come along and say Jesus spoke to me in a vision and he changed his mind and now we're gonna do this other thing and we have that Paul does that right so he's an interloper he comes in and says Jesus spoke to me and he says we're gonna do this different thing and he had to struggle really hard and you can see hints in the Gotha and the epistles of him he also had to collect a lot of cash and bring it to Jerusalem to convince the original apostles to go along with his scheme of things and accept his church into theirs but eventually that starts to get annoying you can't constantly have people having visions of Jesus so what's a convenient thing to do say you could say oh you know the allegorical versions of Jesus are actually literally true there actually were disciples he hand-picked them and those disciples pick their successors and you don't have a pedigree that goes back to the historical Jesus and you can't because there wasn't a historical Jesus you can create a sect that you can try and argue that you can't come into this sect and change things by saying you had a vision you have to have a pedigree now of course to do that they invented the pedigrees and then you have this propaganda arms race with different sects all inventing pedigrees claiming you know I come back five I could descend from Peter or whatever so it didn't really work but we have many examples of religions trying to do this all right so I'll end with this that's justice by the way it's just a tip of the iceberg there's some aspects of how this makes sense some aspects of the evidence some aspects of the debate there's many more things that's you notice the book is rather large but I'm gonna end with an analogy so you can kind of see how this all fits the Roswell flying saucer what really happened in 1947 in New Mexico a guy found some sticks and tinfoil in the desert I mean that's like really what happened what was said to have happened it was debris from an alien spacecraft what was said to have happened within just 30 years an entire flying saucer was recovered complete with alien bodies that were autopsy by the government now notice how rapid that legendary development is and yet there are so millions of people who believe it despite vast really solid evidence against it so even in this age of universal literacy universal education photographs newspapers government records all of that stuff the myth still wins out over history now the difference is that the rest of us know it's fake because we have access to all that other documentation why did that and why is that myth become so popular why do so many people believe it how did it get invented it's an example of conspiracy theories a lot of conspiracy theories become really popular this is an example of that conspiracy theories and code worldviews they model fears and assumptions and they explain events and why things are as they are and it's comforting to think that you know the truth and everybody else is an ignorant outsider and how they do that you use culturally familiar symbols in this case space-age technology futurism government experimentation and corruption and cover-ups and the whole thing but what if civilization collapsed let's say today and for hundreds of years Roswell believers controlled and edited all the documents that survived you would not actually know about the original sticks in tin foil you would not know that the story was made up you would be in the same position that you are now with respect to the historical Jesus and that is actually what happened in the Middle Ages so thanks that's my talk [Applause] how confidently can we say that there was a Jewish sect at the turn of the first millennium worshipping an angel hurricane jold named Jesus why I say highly certainty highly certain based on the epistles of Paul now there is I mean I would say like it's above 90% chance that that's the epistles of Paul were written in the 50s as we've figured out from internal evidence and there and they refer to events being 15 to 20 years earlier so that gives us the date range of the origins of the sect and everything there are some attempts to argue that those letters actually date a century later and there's arguments that those letters date a century earlier and they're not impossible I think I think they're improbable but they're not absurd so the confidence level is like if this were instructions for a rocket if the idea that they really did start with a 30s ad like the like the mainstream interpretation of the epistles are if that were instructions for a rocket I wouldn't get on that rocket but I might like buy some cargo on it you know do you have any idea what the origin of the the image of Jesus that we see right now the reason I ask is because if you look at all the other images of the dying and rising course there they probably look less human than the image of Jesus do we know anything about the origin or how it came about yeah I mean there are no images of Jesus that go back to the beginning of their religion the first images we see I believe or third century so already were 200 years 300 years too late and they just depict scenes in the Gospels just like that picture of Mithras right and Mithras looks pretty human there he just looks like a soldier doing soldiery things then and the Christians they saw him as as a as a magic worker as basically a Moses figure or an Elijah figure so he's depicted in the earliest art with a wand actually he accomplishes all his deeds with wands and it just looks like an ordinary rabbi or something going around casting spells with wands and that's the original version of Jesus who looks nothing at all like the later medieval version of Jesus that we all know and that that that then you know Jesus's images it just gets transformed to be what the church wants you to sell and what market they want to appeal to so they just keep reinventing the image of Jesus but when you get back to the original stuff it doesn't look anything like them I have a question so you talked about the historicity of Jesus and you mentioned his the existence or non-existence of his brothers what about all of the other characters that go along like Mary and Joseph and Pontius Pilate and are all of these historical figures fall under the same kind of hypothesis that didn't exist so the way I look at it is that because the evidence is so suspicious because of all this stuff that if you want to argue that anybody in the Gospels is real you need some evidence besides the Gospels and we have that for some so like Pontius Pilate Caiaphas certain other figures we have evidence external to the Bible that establish that they existed and so the Gospels are actually creating a narrative like historical fiction essentially where they're borrowing real people and putting them in there and then having that care main character Jesus interact with them or other characters interact with them some other figures that we know are real or within the Christian tradition are James John and caphis or Peter James and John being the brothers of each other not the Brothers of Jesus James John and Peter were the pillars that Paul refers to as the kind of the originators of the Christian sect in Galatians 1 and 2 and so yeah James John and Peter are all in the Gospels so those are real people that have been put in there and interact made to interact with Jesus to sort of represent things about the missionary journey right the path from doubt to belief and things like that so so yes some of them are historical some of them are probably unhistorical some we don't know and I talked about many of them I like you know this simon of cyrene ii there's joseph of arimathea this Judas so the question is like are these do these people come from any hits Oracle origin or are they completely made up for the purpose in the text and I discuss many examples of that in on the historicity of Jesus I was wondering do you think maybe it's possible that the days of the great debates with William Lane Craig and the lease troubles over the world do you think those are over or do you think it's possible with the internet now and people reading all about counter apologetics that may be apologetics will get more interesting that's have you noticed them starting to shift oh it always happens and you can see the difference if you ever notice Muslim apologetics is really not even terrible and embarrassingly bad but it looks exactly like Christian apologetics of the Scopes Monkey Trial era so it looks like apologetics a hundred years ago and I think one of the main reasons for that is that they've basically been jailing or killing the opposition so they've never had they're an essentially like someone who has no immune system they've never had to react to open discourse the challenges that religion and but in the West of course we have so the Christians can't kill us or jail us even if they might want to or try and so they actually have to answer our arguments and so they get more and more sophisticated over time to try and make their arguments look more impressive and so that you figure you go and see some of the most ridiculous arguments will be couched in the most elegant formal philosophical peer-review prose with complete with footnotes and all of this stuff looks exactly like mainstream scholarship but it's complete bollocks they figured that out because they know it looks prestigious and they know they can get it into peer review or whatever for the particular religious journal or whatever it is so so yes they keep evolving trying to make more sophisticated versions of their religion or their apologetics as they keep getting taken down and where that end point where the end point is on that I don't know I will just keep seeing how they evolve and change and their arguments of course yeah yeah he people have tried to organize a second debate I did a debate with William Lane Craig people tried to organize the second debate he says now I already beat Richard carrier I don't need him again and so yeah that's the big problem there but but yes I would I would debate him on anything that I have expertise in question I would have sort of throughout the presentation you made reference to sort of the mainstream you know scholarly consensus in a variety of items but on the various or presenting that Jesus probably didn't exist you your your your position is decidedly outside the mainstream the vast majority of New Testament scholars and you know historical experts from that you know of that era would disagree with you and believe that Jesus in some form did exist so when you take that your rep mainstream why is it that on this key issue you're outside the mainstream why did the majority of scholars not agree with you on this yeah because they don't know half the things in my book give an example so I engaged with mark good acres a renowned very capable very erudite scholar biblical studies on London radio and we were debating this this Kunduz these two competing theories and one of his arguments was that Paul says in his letters that he learned the that learned about Jesus from those who are in Christ before him that he learned it from the witnesses and I told him like no that's not in Paul in fact Paul says the exact opposite not only to say the exact opposite he swears up and down against it he's like no no I'm sure that lines in there like no it's not and so the commercial was a commercial break and we were looking and he had to admit like wow you're right that verse isn't in there and yet for some reason his whole life even as a PhD scholar in this he thought there was a line in the letters of Paul that said that and the problem is of it that even mainstream even secular experts in this field have been trained and raised up with a body of Christian faith assumptions that are this this lens for which should look at the evidence and selecting which evidence to look at so that they actually are kind of trained to only see it one way and one of the things that I do in my book on the historicity of Jesus is fill out all of the things that when I interacted with experts there would be it's not that every expert lacks us the same piece of information each expert lacks some piece of information and I would have to say they would say something like that and I said that's not true but you'll be a different thing for every seat you stir every single scholar engaged with there'd be like three or four things that they would claim there are actually false and then I could show them that there are false and it's like how did you not know that and when I added up all of the things there's you know about a hundred two hundred things and so that I cover that in the book what I think the consensus now is based on is based on this this infrastructure of Christian faith assumptions that that they're not realizing don't vet if you don't actually examine it so they need to actually go back and skeptically look at their own evidence and and do that in a way that that makes sense and one of the points of my book is to get it through peer review so it's a peer reviewed book published by Sheffield Phoenix which was published off the campus of the University of Sheffield by the by run by Faculty of Sheffield and with the intention of saying okay here's a peer reviewed case because there's a lot of really crappy versions of it you hear a lot of the consensus is based on them reading the internet arguments and saying that's and that's true it is but oh no don't read that read them read your own peer reviewed literature read the latest book on this subject and then engage with that and so the consensus is right now is based on ignorance of this new discovery set of stuff that they really need to relook at and rethink about and they're just not doing it so until we get scholars to really engage with this theory we're not really sure if their consensus position is based on logical or factually correct reasoning and so that's the problem that we're in now there's not really anything we can do about it unless we can encourage scholars to read the book and engage with it honestly as scholars and and and rethink things and then see where they come out with it I would love to see someone come up with a defense of historicity that addresses all and incorporates all the evidence I had gathering on the historicity of Jesus that is the best defense of historicity you can give so that I could have people like you read you say read that book and then read this other book and then you can compare because these are the two best cases there are and you can come to your own conclusion you don't have to rely on the opinions of any consensus a consensus that is largely driven by actual Christians so that you know a secular scholars are not the majority in the field so that's where it has to go but if scholars keep ignoring the book and you can wring their own peer-reviewed literature I don't know what to argue in terms of how to get them to rethink their position so further to this theme I'm curious what what gets you to such a level of certainty isn't it under your own argument still possible that Jesus person existed but what we know about him is just all fanfiction right that there was some person that started at all but everything else just and you did mention that upper bound and the lower bound but I didn't hear something I didn't hear anything that definitively says there wasn't you know a person just everything else could be false right the evidence sucks let's just start there like the evidence is really poor shape most of its gone it's all altered or doctored so this is like one of the hardest questions to get it I think there are harder ones like the historicity of Muhammad is even harder because there's so much more document destruction so in this particular case yes I don't think we can be certain because we don't have the documentation we need if we had the kind of documentation for the first century that we do for like the 18th century and we were dealing with Ned Ludd is another person who was invented he was the hero of the 18th century that started the Luddite movement he didn't exist but we have really good documentation for the 18th centuries we can definitively show that he didn't exist because we have newspapers we have census records and things like that we don't have that for Jesus so we can't be certain that's why the margins of error are huge it's like well that's why I say it's 1 in 3 that there was a Jesus which is you know a respectable chance that there really was a guy instead of this alternative theory so no I don't think we can be certain at all I just think it's a preponderance of evidence standard but yeah it's not beyond a reasonable doubt does anybody you have a question so continuing from that where are you getting that numbers one and three and one in 12,000 yeah how did curiosity yesterday start with a prior so I built the prior out of data and prior probability out of data and then I look at the relative probabilities of the evidence and they're all I use the same thing where I think like the highest probability that this reasonably could have given what we know given what I know and what is the lowest probability that it can have reasonably have given what I know and it commutes so if you say it's the highest and lowest that it could reasonably be the conclusion will be the highest and lowest it can reasonably be as long as you stick to that model all the way through and really all I am doing is is new putting a number to what are usually vague statements that historians make they'll say like oh that's very improbable it's like what do you mean very improbable you don't mean 40% that you wouldn't call 40% very improbable so when you say these probabilities you really got a pic like what's the highest probability that would actually correspond to what you mean when you say that and then that's the number you use is the upper bound for that so it's it's that kind of thinking in terms of how do we actually quantify what we're already saying so that we can actually build a logically valid argument from premise to conclusion if you don't do that you actually don't know that your conclusion logically follows from your premises if you can't say like well this is very improbable therefore the conclusion is very improbable because there's a lot of other factors in there and you can't actually work out the logic unless you're going to be doing some sort of numerical estimate estimation to like figure out what do you mean by very improbable and it's the same all the way through so if you want to see it actually built out and that's what the it happens in the book so every single chapter that deals with the evidence and on the historicity of Jesus I end with this is why these how I come up with a numbers I do and these are the places where you could come up with your own numbers and see what comes out the other end with your own estimates and that that's the the whole model of how to do it in the book yeah well I mean they're subjective in the sense that I am basing them on what I think the evidence suggests it is yeah but it is still it's still an assertion about an objective frequency though so like if I talk about one out of every three people who look just like Jesus didn't exist that's actually an actual frequency from actual examples of people like Jesus but but sometimes the it's vague like you can say so for instance one of the things in there is there's there's a version of Jesus that set seventy-five BC in fact the only version of Jesus known to the Jews who wrote the Babylonian Talmud outside the Roman Empire is that Jesus who lived and died in 75 BC now you have to wonder like how could that be how could there be a sect of Christians it was putting Jesus a hundred years earlier and you say that that looks slightly more likely if there was no originally historical Jesus and he was historically inside the Empire than outside the Empire but the difference in probability is small and so he then you have to represent like what do I mean by small etc and then you go from there so you are you are trying to think of what the objective probabilities would be but often times you don't have hard data and so you just have to look for boundaries of where your subjective knowledge sort of bumps up against objective reality and then understand that that's what you're doing and when you go in I'm glad I got the mic back because that fella over there has a whole page for you so you might be busy later you Richard you'd mentioned earlier on you're talking about you know and Paul's comments on you know the Lord's Supper and such and had you said that that Paul did not call it the Lord's Supper he didn't call the last okay yeah I guess just call he did yeah they called the Lord's Supper I'm just like just the section and here where he he says where I receive from the Lord we also delivered to you with Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread we'd give any thanks and then we it runs very close to how it reads in the gospel and Gospels at people there so but I mean it doesn't really make sense to read this and assume that Jesus is sitting in some room by himself it certainly looks like he's well if he who's he talking to when he's saying so you'll want to read my section on that in there if you read that the theology of that actually doesn't make sense and in fact a lot of scholars agree with this that there's no way that can be really what Jesus said originally because it's actually anticipating a church that didn't exist yet and it's anticipating a theology that's much more sophisticated and doesn't fit actually what you know a Jewish rabbi would actually say of himself okay it makes sense more as though he's like communicating by revelation to the RET to the revelatory of the revell of T right so he's speaking to the Christians of the future and you look at the addresses he's talking about all future Christians he's literally talking to Christians not just the disciples he's not saying only you disciples would get these benefits he's talking to all future Christians so he said this is a vision that's actually directed at the Christian community in the abstract and that's when Paul saying I some received in the vision that's what I see we see from the Lord he's talking about I had a vision of Jesus saying this to us so what's Paul referring to then when he says on the night when he was betrayed he's referring to the actual so this is the part we're talking bout where Jesus is actually killed by Satan and his demons and stuff so there is a narrative in there that's a taking place in another realm not on earth but for Paul it's not something that they're right humans there to see it's something that went on and we only learn about through visions but it isn't actual for him it's an actual historical event it's just not one that took place in Jerusalem for example I'm gonna talk about more in the book of course but is there any other question sir because you again will take a couple more questions than I guess wrap up you had mentioned well I'm just curious how does your standard is it an impossible standard to expect that 2,000 years ago that there were accurate documents for someone existing that had a very small group of people around them and what if you applied this to someone else at that period of time how does your standard compared to doing this to someone else that I've done exist actually use a lot of comparable examples I do Socrates Alexander the Great and various other peoples have done this so I take examples of other people did on my blog because I did several examples in the book Socrates being perhaps the closest parallel that you want to look at because he's someone who didn't write anything and we only know about what he said through his disciples or disciples and disciples and so on so but and that's I show the difference like why it's different between Socrates and Jesus and there's many different reasons why they're different but others have come up with others since then they do like Spartacus I can't think of others out the Pontius Pilate Herod and typists so I've actually written several articles on my blog right talk about low-key how let's look at those like look at the difference there's several differences between them and even if people were to pick someone really obscure like some minor official that only gets mentioned once and Josephus you have the similarity there that the reference class for a minor official in a history written by someone who actually knows what he's talking about and has researched that history they're used they usually do exist whereas when you look at like worship Savior demigods they usually don't exist so your reference class changes your prior probability and then it's a question of it so if you don't have the evidence sometimes all you have is the prior you're if you don't know what is the true in this particular case all you know is the base rate and and that's you have to run with that but if there's cases where there's actual evidence like we have for Pontius Pilate and Herod Antipas it's not just like a one-off mention in Josephus we actually know we have multiple collaboratory pieces of evidence that actually ups the odds that the historical existed such that if we had the evidence for Pontius Pilate or harridan typists that we had four if we had they haven't sweat for them for Jesus I'd be up here arguing for historicity instead so yeah there's many ways you can do that there's a lot of examples I've dealt with on my blog and in the book so do we I was learning some of these safer God's do we have an online source where we can look to see like the pictures of the documentation of the original or we get this information from which thing give me an example I'm like Osiris do we like I think he's written on tablets right well the Osiris story exists in many different places or the fragments of it in different places with different sources but the earliest and most reliable are the stories written on the pyramid walls there's actually they go back thousands of years there's other sources like Plutarch they give us some information Plutarch's writing about 75 AD and he is actually a priest of that cult so he's actually and he's writing to a pre a fellow Priestess of the same religion so he's actually an insider writing to an insider at exactly the time when Christianity arose or we can see parallels and things so we have a variety of different sources of that how we access those things is complicated so like for example how do we know what Plutarch wrote that's a whole other issue that's been dealt with by Plutarch experts for the last 100 200 years in terms of developing critical texts looking at multiple manuscripts etc that's a much wider question and each piece of evidence has that problematic background to it but but everybody deals with that so even the people defending historicity have to deal with the same problem so yeah I couldn't like I could give a whole lecture on just one thing like Plutarch's manuscripts for example and that's just one out of like thousands of pieces of evidence but yeah it's what we that what they teach us to do it's what with a PhD is for so like train you like figure out like this is really complicated how do we get at this stuff how reliable is it and and and so on it's not easily accessible to average people sometimes it is and it's getting more and more the case more stuff is ending up online what's it I mean you could get a PhD but you might not still know what you're doing I've always found what to pedia helpful but everybody goes oh my god we go to the bottom find out what they're referencing and dig around and you know that's the way thieves Wikipedia and not read Wikipedia and say it says it in Wikipedia it's true yeah you have to dig a little bit more ok I have the mic renewed anyone else have another question before we I didn't know people like this still existed but I I come from Starbuck and and I ran to a fellow a couple years ago now who actually believes the earth is flat really yes and he he he earnestly believes it he's actually claims to have written a book kind of his own Bible in and I and he references authors and I actually went online and these people exist online yeah I'm Eeva bull and I mean it's it's amazing what's out there what people will see online and what they will believe and and and the number of references that will support this these crazy nutjob ideas yeah yeah astounding yeah on the internet it's problematic because sometimes you can't tell if it's a poem or an authentic thing so a Poe is when someone writes a attacks pretending to be the actual thing that if you're trying to mock something like the best mockery of a thing looks indistinguishable from the thing itself yeah but I on the internet I don't know sometimes I can't tell when I'm reading something like do they really believe what they're saying or is this just a joke and then of course I meet people like you who've met people and say ya know they really freaking believe it yeah it is so alright thank you everyone for coming out this evening I think it's been really interesting before we end I just wanted to mention thank you to our audio-visual staff who we're not paying because this is a volunteer thing so thank Robert and Paul please [Applause]

Channel: Humanists, Atheists, and Agnostics of Manitoba

Views: 835,559

Rating: 4.3845596 out of 5

Keywords: Humanism, Atheism, HAAM

Id: LTllC7TbM8M

Length: 76min 10sec (4570 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 30 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/MrOz1100]

Whenever I have a discussion with a Christian on the topic of religion, I’ll usually grant that Jesus existed as a type of philosopher but the supernatural stuff was added later and I’ll state examples of similar ‘miracles’ in other mythologies. I find this gives a rapport that denying the existence of Jesus would never be able to replicate. Even if Jesus didn’t exist as stated, someone wrote the Bible and some of The statements attributed to Jesus are incredibly kind and great ways to live, even if others are faulty.

[u/jondavidbrooks]

Btw the Jews spent 1900 years being terrorized, mass murdered, rights chased all around Europe because Europeans thought it was okay to mistreat them because they killed Jesus. They owe them a apology.

Interesting little tidbit here Jews don't actually have to believe in God or they could be even mad at God but still be Jewish as long as he participate in traditions. Also out of all the religions which one is the most philosophical, go talk to a rabbi is more like philosophy class more than feeling like it's like religion. They also really make no mention of an afterlife.

And most of all I don't mind them is because they don't recruit people into their religion. You have to really want to get into their religion I think it takes like 2 years of studies to be able to become a Jew.

[u/dcamp67]

Even if the was an itinerant preacher named Yeshua ben Joseph who worked as a handyman, traveled with 12 friends, and was crucified by the Romans, there’s zero evidence that he did anything supernatural or miraculous. And I guarantee he didn’t crawl out of a cave 3 days later, so what difference does it make. The man portrayed in the Bible wasn’t real, even if the dude really existed.

[u/Raywis]

It's like Vercingetorix, a lot of things about him are unsure and/or fictive. he was "created" by Caesar as an "opponent".

We cannot literally trust old texts, especially with all the inconsistencies in them.

[u/liberalnazi]

Jesus was an allegorical character written by the author of Mark to supplement the beliefs and the church that Paul writes about.

The other gospels detailing the life of Jesus, Matthew, Luke and John, were all copies of Mark with things added to suit their agenda. Matthew added in other "fulfilled prophecies" from the Old Testament (he wrongly translated "born of a young woman" as "born of a virgin"). Luke added in things that made it more similar to other religions around the area so that it was entice other people to convert. John was a Spanish writer that disliked the Jews.

[u/LaurentiusValla]

There were many ignorant religious extremists named Jesus living in the Roman province of Judea.

There were many ignorant religious extremists crucified by the Romans in Judea.

The fables about Jesus in the bible are absurd.

[u/brownpatriot]

Jesus was a mushroom. Aminita muscaria to be exact. Sex and fertility cults turned into Christianity

[u/[deleted]]

Basically it doesn't matter so much. It was the Roman guy Saulus / Paulus who did all the marketing stuff, but still died violently himself. His spiritual heirs managed to survive until they convinced the Roman emperor Konstantin, after centuries of severe prosecution. The stunning thing is that they survived it at all, but so did the Jews at the same time.