by María [1]
The historicity of Jesus is a touchy subject. Talk about it on social media and you’re sure to attract both historicists and mythicists with strong views. New Testament scholars who dissent from the consensus suddenly find they’re unemployable in university religious studies departments, ridiculed online and occasionally by New Testament scholars who hold the line.
I stumbled into this topic during a period of binge-watching YouTube videos featuring New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman, a former fundamentalist Christian whose studies eventually turned him into an agnostic atheist. In one of these, Ehrman referred to a ‘fringe’ view among some that Jesus never existed, and quickly dismissed it.
Like many Christians, my first reaction was amazed disbelief that such a wackadoodle theory could be taken seriously. I watched some videos online and some debates. I occasionally fact-checked the refutations and found that in fact, opponents of Richard Carrier often misrepresented or got their facts wrong.
The Trent Horn debate in particular amazed me because Horn insisted that something was written in a text, but when I checked, it wasn’t. (Horn claimed that the Life of Adam[2] showed Adam being buried on Earth; Carrier said the text has him buried in the third heaven. Both were insistent, because a lot hangs on it, believe it or not. I checked. Carrier was right.)
Wow – what was going on? How could something I had believed all my life to be a historic fact is a myth? Why couldn’t any of these experts demolish Carrier’s argument, as I’d expected them to do?
So—I read it for myself [Carrier’s On the Historicity of Jesus].
Slowly and carefully, often looking up the footnote references. Every serious argument from scriptures (e.g. Acts, Gospels, Epistles) and from the historical record (Josephus, Tacitus etc.) was examined, dissected and evaluated according to Bayes’ theorem, using the following method:
- how likely is it that this text would look like this if Jesus was a historical figure?
against
- how likely is it that this text would look like this if Jesus began as a myth?
The chapter on the evidence from the gospels is particularly fascinating: a summary of recent scholarship that shows the brilliance of the four evangelists as myth-creators and propagandists. In the end I was convinced—on the historicity of Jesus, there is indeed reason to doubt.
__________
[1] Posted on Amazon Books reviews by a United Kingdom reviewer on February 28, 2019.
[2] The Life of Adam and Eve, also known in its Greek version as the Apocalypse of Moses, is a Jewish apocryphal group of writings. While the surviving versions were composed from the early 3rd to the 5th century c.e., there is wide agreement among scholars that the original was composed in the 1st century c.e.
5 replies on “Unhistorical Jesus”
The “applewebdata” links don’t work (from an Amazon reviewer?). Either way, I don’t really understand how the question of Yeshua’s historicity is relevant at all. Does the existence of a Jewish itinerant preacher matter?
Although, truth be told, religion is such a matter where admitting lies would not be too shocking. When dealing with religious claims to the truth, I would use scorn and mockery as my instinctive response – lest I be tricked by this NPC factory.
If machines were invented to see the past, as in an Arthur Clarke novel, the shock of seeing the non-existence of Jesus would radically change the course of the West (as well as showing the images of the Hellstorm Holocaust perpetrated by the Allies).
The shock of seeing Negroes burning their cities and making consensual love to their women does not seem to wake the Western scum up to anything worthwhile – aside from worshipping said Negroes even more.
And in my country, all kids read Shevchenko’s poetry against Jews, and yet grown up have elected a Jew president.
I understand the attraction of a simple solution to the cultural problem. But imo, even child abuse would cover more relevant self-hatred cases. And, I would add, inceldom. Until the possible collapse of the dollar and/or mushroom clouds on the horizon – things that would amount to a potent hit on the skull. (It is not my cup of tea, but the fight over the glasses scene from They Live (1988) comes to mind.)
That’s because of herd instinct. The need to go in line with others.
In a negro or jew worshipping society, most people will just follow whatever they think others are doing, regardless of what their own opinions are.
That’s why democracy is such a stupid idea.
Democracy is the worst of all possible systems, as Savitri saw with the images of the inverted pyramid that I interpolated in translating her memoirs and reflections.