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Category: New Testament

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New Testament Richard Carrier

Richard

Carrier destroys the Resurrection argument

by Derek Lambert

William Lane Craig and Sean McDowell.

In this explosive episode of MythVision, Dr. Richard Carrier systematically dismantles Christian apologetics, exposing the logical flaws and historical distortions in arguments made by William Lane Craig and Sean McDowell.

With razor-sharp precision, Carrier debunks the claim that Jesus ever explicitly declared himself God, showing that only the latest Gospel—John—contains such statements, while Paul, our earliest Christian writer, never speaks of Jesus as divine. He shreds the resurrection argument, revealing how religions like Islam and Mormonism also spread rapidly through visions and reinterpretations of scripture, proving that growth does not equal truth. Carrier exposes the apologists’ double standards, showing how they dismiss Mormonism’s eyewitnesses but cling to Christianity’s unverifiable resurrection accounts. With unparalleled expertise, he reveals how faith-based reasoning distorts historical reality, making this a must-watch for anyone ready to break free from apologetic spin and embrace real historical inquiry.

Check out Dr. Richard Carrier’s website to subscribe to his blog & support him on Patreon.

Grab his books here.

Categories
Bible New Testament

SBL

by Gaedhal

Thanks for responding! [Gaedhal refers to Richard C. Miller’s email]

I think that you once described the field of biblical studies as the last holdover of the dark-ages. The New Testament is obviously Hellenistic Graeco-Roman mythology. However, instead of the SBL [Society of Biblical Literature] studying it as such, it erects barriers to studying it as such. I think that you shared recently that members of the guild tried to censor some of your writings, or the writings of some PhD students that you have influenced. You and your students were simply studying and critiquing “the New Testament”—or as you like to call it: ‘earliest Christian writings’—and the guild tried to censor all of you for “going too far in this direction”.

Biblical studies is still, as Avalos points out, an apologetic enterprise. The teleological ‘end’ of biblical studies is to convince the world at large that religion in general, and Christianity in particular, is a force for good in the world. However, to suggest that Christianity is essentially no different to other Greco-Roman mystery/missing-body cults, is to puncture this entire apologetic empire. And Big Bible is Big Business. I think that the guild has been treating you so rottenly of late that you have suspended your Facebook page.

It is as you said on Mythvision: Christianity is a ladelful of the stew that is Greco-Roman Hellenic mythology. Big Bible takes this ladelful of stew and studies it in splendid isolation from the larger stew of Greco-roman Hellenic mythology that Christianity was drawn from.

You mention that travelogue from Corinth, written in Greek—the language of the New Testament!—and written at about the same time that Paul was writing to the Church at Corinth… and how practically no SBL school instructs its students to read this ancient travelogue.

I have a very short fuse when it comes to obvious cynical con-artists such as Wes Huff. It amazes me that Kipp Davis could call this guy a “budding scholar”. But this is the problem of Old Atheism. The likes of Kipp Davis and Bart Ehrman want to be thought well of by the likes of Huff and Licona for reasons which totally escape me. With Avalos it was not so: he wanted to burn the guild to the ground, and, indeed, you yourself have criticised him for not divorcing himself completely from SBL…

[In another communication Gaedhal informed us:]

This could be why the SBL guild is treating Richard C. Miller so badly. If Christianity is but Hellenistic Greco-Roman mythology—and it is!—then it is bad for Jews if this be found out. If Yahweh be as fictitious as Zeus, and if Jesus is as mythical as Hercules, then the Jews go from being “the Chosen People” and “a great monotheistic Faith” to simply being a gang of religious swindlers and hucksters who have been duping and swindling the Goyim with their religious bullshit for about 3,000 years.

And we cannot have that! (indeed, David Skrbina writes of this in his Jesus Hoax).

Categories
Christendom New Testament

Christianity:

The communism of antiquity, 4

by Alain de Benoist

 
The ancients believed in the unity of the world, in the dialectical intimacy of man with nature. Their natural philosophy was dominated by the ideas of becoming and alternation. The Greeks equated ethics with aesthetics, the kalôn with the agathôn, the good with beauty, and Renan rightly wrote: ‘A system in which the Venus de Milo is only an idol is a false system, or at least a partial one, because beauty is worth almost as much as goodness and truth. With such ideas, a decline in art is inevitable.’ (Les apótres, p. 372). The ‘new man’ of Christianity professed a very different vision of things. He carried within himself a conflict, not the everyday one that forms the fabric of life, but an eschatological, absolute conflict: the divorce from the world.

Early Christianity extends the messianic idea present in Judaism in an exacerbated form, due to a millennial expectation. In the words attributed to Jesus we find literal quotations from the visions of the Book of Enoch. For the first Christians, the world, a mere stage, a vale of tears, a place of unbearable difficulties and tensions, needed compensation, a radiant vision that would justify (morally speaking) the impotence of here below. That is why the earth appears as the field on which the forces of Evil and Good, the prince of this world and the heavenly Father, those possessed by the devil and the sons of God, confront each other: ‘And this is the victory that has overcome the world: our faith’ (I John V, 4). The idea that the world belongs to Evil, later characteristic of certain Gnostics (the Manicheans), appears frequently in the first writings of Christianity. Jesus himself affirmed: ‘I do not pray for the world…, as I am not of the world’ (John XVII, 9-14). St. John insists: ‘Do not love the world, nor the things that are in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father but is of the world.’ (I John II, 15-16.) ‘Do not be surprised if the world hates you.’ (Ibid. III,13). ‘We know that we are of God, and the whole world lies in the power of the evil one.’ (Ibid. V, 19.) Later, the Rule of St. Benedict will state as a precept that monks must ‘make themselves strangers to the things of the world’ (A saeculi actius se facere alienum). In the Imitation of Christ we read: ‘The truly wise man is he who, in order to gain Christ, considers all the things of the earth as rubbish and dung.’ (I, 3, 5).

In the midst of the great artistic and literary renaissance of the first two centuries, Christians, as outsiders who pleased to be so, remained indifferent or, more often, hostile. Biblical aesthetics rejected the representation of forms, the harmony of lines and volumes; consequently, they had only a disdainful look on the statues that adorned squares and monuments. For the rest, everything was an object of hatred. The colonnades of temples and covered walks, the gardens with their fountains and domestic altars where a sacred flame flickered, the rich mansions, the uniforms of the legions, the villas, the ships, the roads, the works, the conquests, the ideas: everywhere the Christian saw the mark of the Beast. The Fathers of the Church condemned not only luxury, but also any profane work of art, colourful clothing, musical instruments, white bread, foreign wines, feather pillows (had not Jacob rested his head on a stone?) and even the custom of cutting one’s beard, in which Tertullian sees ‘a lie against one´s own face’ and an impious attempt to improve the work of the Creator.

The rejection of the world became even more radical among the early Christians because they were convinced that the Parousia (the return of Jesus Christ at the end of time) was going to take place immediately. It was Jesus himself who had promised it to them: ‘Assuredly, I say to you, some who are standing here will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.’ (Matthew XVI, 28). ‘Assuredly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have happened.’ (Matthew XXIV, 34). In view of this, they repeated the good news more and more. But the end of all things is at hand (I Peter IV, 7). ‘It is the last time’ (I John II, 18). Paul returns again and again to this idea. To the Hebrews: ‘Therefore cast not away your confidence, which has great reward… For yet a little while, and He that shall come will come, and will not delay’ (Hebrews X, 35-37). ‘Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together… but exhorting one another, and so much the more as you see the day approaching’ (Ibid., X, 25). To the Thessalonians: ‘Stand firm, for the coming of the Lord is at hand.’ To the Corinthians: ‘Brothers, the time is short; therefore let those who have wives be as though they had none…’ (I Cor. VII, 29). To the Philippians: ‘The Lord is near. Do not be anxious about anything…’ (Phil. IV, 5 and 6).

In his dialogue with Trypho, Justin affirms that Christians will soon be gathered in Jerusalem, and that it will be for a thousand years (LXXX – LXXXII). In the second century, the Phrygian Montanus declares that he foresees the imminence of the end of the world. In Pontus, Christian peasants abandon their fields to await the day of judgment. Tertullian prays pro mora fines, ‘that the end may be delayed.’ But time passed and nothing happened. Generations disappeared, one after another, without having seen the glorious advent; and faced with the continual delay of its eschatological hopes, the Church, giving proof of prudence, ended by resigning itself to placing the Parousia in an undetermined ‘beyond.’ Today only Jehovah’s Witnesses repeat on a fixed date: ‘Next year in the Jerusalem of heaven.’

Categories
New Testament Racial right

Hi Jamie,

Did you mean to post this comment in the other thread (about ‘might is right’)?

What I have been trying to say for years with these New Testament (NT) posts is that white nationalism is too primitive a movement as far as Christianity is concerned.

For example, even a Catholic apologist for resurrection dogma like the British Ian Wilson, with whom I have, by the way, exchanged some correspondence in the past, was able to recognise the analysis of the NT that has been made of it since Reimarus in Enlightenment times.

White nationalists, on the other hand, have ignored that work which is centuries old and which now culminates in scholars who have abandoned the Christian faith such as Dennis MacDonald and Richard Miller (both of whom were fundamentalists in their youth and were educated in Divinity Schools learning ancient Greek, since the original NT is written in that language).

The fact that American white nationalists have been unable to at least acknowledge the existence of a whole field of study—the exegesis of the NT since the Enlightenment—is emblematic of why I am so critical of them. After all, if the Jews wrote the gospel that ought to raise our alarm systems!

To take just one example: MacDonald, who, I reiterate, began his career as a fundamentalist and ended up a rationalist, deduced that the motivation of the evangelist Mark seems to be to put Jesus above the Homeric heroes Hector and Odysseus. He even goes so far as to use the word ‘transvaluation’, which we have used here in the sense of the inversion of values! (I mean how Christianity transvalued the healthy Aryan values of the Greco-Roman world to the subversive Semitic values of the Jews.)

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New Testament Racial right

So fundamental…

Uncle Adolf and his ilk thought that Jesus had been a non-divine Aryan who fought against the Jews in the Temple in Jerusalem—see this recent video interview with Hitler scholar Richard Weikart.

But now, in the darkest hour for the fair race, the only thing that can save them from the extinction facing them is a sort of improved National Socialism: a NS in which, unlike the top Nazis of the Third Reich, those of the 21st century no longer believe in the existence of Jesus.

And as Benjamin said yesterday, the biggest problem we 14-word priests (i.e., ‘improved Nazis’) have is the fact that American white nationalists are acting as gatekeepers to keep any Aryan racialists from moving into the NS camp (and let’s not talk about the improved NS).

Although very brief, on Saturday I posted the entry ‘Literary Theft’ which links to a video demonstrating that the writers of the New Testament plagiarised a story from Homer’s Odyssey. Now I would like to add something. Anyone who has read Gospel Fictions by Randel Helms will find that that was the method the Jews used in many other New Testament stories!

So the conversation between Dennis MacDonald and Richard Miller is so fundamental to understanding the POV of this site, that I can’t resist the temptation to copy and paste some of the first comments of that YouTube video:
 

______ 卐 ______

 
Commenter 1 said: Great to have these two scholars converse and share not only an application of mimetic analysis, but also to reflect on the way the study of religion is conducted in academia. Many thanks for these episodes!

Commenter 2 said: Blasphemy law and tradition against blasphemy is what kept people from saying and talking about the parallels. People are afraid of hell.

Commenter 3 said: And… you’ve unlocked the key to ‘blasphemy of the Holy Spirit’. To say the gospels and Acts were patterned after Greek mythological stories, the tragedians, etc., is to say that they were written by evil plagiarists… instead of by holy and devout men who wrote down the truth as guided by the Holy Ghost.

Commenter 4 said: This is traditionally what happens when New Testament scholars aren’t versed in ancient languages and cultures. Once a biblical and ancient Near Eastern scholar understands these aspects, their entire worldview of the New Testament as well as Homer changes them in a way they can’t unsee.

Categories
Homer New Testament

Literary theft

In another video where MacDonald talks with Miller we see how the Jews wrote the gospel. Anyone who doesn’t want to read these scholars should at least listen to them for a couple of minutes from this point!

Categories
New Testament Racial right

MacDonald & Miller

This dialogue on paradigm shifts between Dennis MacDonald and Richard Miller, two New Testament scholars I respect, can be extrapolated to our topic.

The current paradigm in white nationalism is that Jewry is the cause of Aryan decline.

We, on the other hand, believe that Jewish influence is only possible because of the mortal sins of the Aryans (cf. for example what we have said about Constantine and Charlemagne in Deschner’s books, PDFs of which appear in the featured post).

White nationalists, mostly Christians or Christian sympathisers, ignore the new paradigm: they are stuck in the old one. For the paradigm to change requires the old generation of racialists to perish, and a new generation to be more willing to put the religion of our parents in the dock.

For the moment, the intellectual inertia that gives life to the current paradigm comes from the pundits of the most visited racialist forums, regardless of the fact that that paradigm has already been superseded, at least in the minds of those racialists who are more understanding of what is really going on (e.g., Velasco’s diagnosis of how the West’s dark hour originated: his essay on Judea and Rome).

Categories
New Testament Richard Carrier

Carrier v. Ehrman

Those who still believe that Jesus existed should watch a relatively recent interview, starting here. The mythicist Richard Carrier exposes the logical fallacies of the historicist Bart Ehrman in a very amusing way: a rarity in audiovisual retorts about the non-historicity of Jesus’ crucifixion. Near the end Carrier cites a quotable quote from Thomas Paine, ‘Time makes more converts than reason’, which evokes what Thomas Kuhn and his readers say about what it takes to change paradigms.

The secret of evolution, both biological in the sense of natural selection, and psychogenic in our psychohistorical sense—paradigm shifts—, is time and death.

Those who are completely unfamiliar with Carrier’s work about the non-existence of Jesus shouldn’t start with that interview but, say, with this lecture.

Categories
'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms) New Testament

Hitler, 20

Recently, five people who tweet at X liked a tweet in which a visitor to this site, Ørdnung, quoted some words of mine: ‘It could even be argued, as I do in the featured post, that Hitler and Rosenberg themselves could be bridges to an even more refined NS than the one they promoted’ (I originally said this in ‘Bridges’). The following passage from Simms’ biography of Hitler illustrates it perfectly:

In other ways, Hitler and the NSDAP sat uneasily in the Munich mainstream, which was dominated by Catholicism and the Bavarian People’s Party (BVP). The BVP had complete command of the local parliamentary political scene. All of the sixty-five BVP Landtag deputies were Catholic, six of them clerics; all but one of its twenty Reichstag members were Catholic, two of them clerics. While the party was confessionally homogeneous, it was socially diverse, representing Bavarians from all classes, and was determined not to break away from the Reich but also to resist the Weimar Republic’s vision of a more centralized state. Despite his Austrian—essentially south German—roots Hitler found it very difficult to break into this constituency. It was for this reason he attempted to reach out to the churches through his concept of ‘positive Christianity’. Hitler claimed that Jesus had been ‘slandered’ by the same people who were scourging Germany today—the Jews. ‘We should follow the example of this man,’ Hitler argued on another occasion, ‘who was born poor in a cabin, who pursued high ideals and whom for this reason the Jews later crucified.’ ‘The Christian religion is the only possible ethical basis of the German people,’ he said soon after, adding that it was important to avoid any tension between the confessions, because ‘religious divisions’ had been one of ‘the worst things to happen to the German people’. Though Hitler made some headway with Bavarian Catholics in the early 1920s, it was a demographic with which he struggled to connect until the end of his life.

Emphasis added! Hitler and his people stayed close to the Wall, to follow the metaphor of my featured post. What we now need to do is go much further north; study the New Testament in depth from the POV of scholars like Richard Carrier and Richard Miller, and realise that the ‘positive Christianity’ of the Nazis was a hallucination (as hallucination is the Christianity of today’s White Nationalists).

Once we know that it was the Jews themselves who wrote it and that the figure of Jesus is mythical (here I am closer to Carrier than to Miller), we are finally in a position to reject the Bible in toto. No ‘positive’ Christianity. That’s an impossible chimera.

Salvation for the Aryan is found in the cave of the three-eyed raven, the greenseer who, patiently scanning the career of Pontius Pilate in Judea, realised that not even a very human Jesus existed. It had all been a Jewish invention to invert Roman values. And if the Third Reich failed, it was because, in a West flooded with Christian ethics, the Germans didn’t realise something so elemental. In the same featured post is the link to my short post ‘Old Town’, which explains why once Hitler reached power in Germany it was time for metapolitics rather than politics (invasions, wars, provoking the Anglo-American Christians, etc.).

A more enlightened National Socialism than that of the last century is what we certainly need…

Categories
New Testament Racial right Richard Carrier

Medieval racists

This interview uploaded yesterday is fascinating, and the very fact that none of the mainstream forums of the racial right touch on the subject of textual criticism of the New Testament is symptomatic of a wilful ignorance that is deeply rooted in the movement.

Richard Miller makes a point that is obvious to me. Serious New Testament scholarship is divided into two camps: (1) those who believe that most of the NT narrative is fictional but that there is a residue that could be historical, and (2) those who maintain that it was all literary fiction from the beginning. Miller belongs to the first group and another Richard, Richard Carrier, to the second group. But the dialogue between these two camps is quite cordial, academic and respectful.

On the other hand, there are the pseudo-scholars, the fundamentalist Christians who study the NT but begin their ‘research’ with pre-established conclusions (Jesus was resurrected from the dead, etc.). Their scholarship reminds me of the medieval university in Paris where philosophy was allowed to exist but only as a handmaiden of theology. Miller has said that serious NT scholars no longer pay attention to this apologetic posturing.

The racial right, I said, as well as fundamentalists ignore serious NT scholarship: scholarship that doesn’t start from the catechism we were taught as children but uses the methodologies of contemporary historiography to evaluate New Testament texts. This became clear the last time Kevin MacDonald published an article by a fundamentalist Christian in The Occidental Observer, as I told the author himself.

Taking into account that, concerning the NT, white nationalism is still medieval and that we must ignore not only the scholarly authors (such as the apologist in MacDonald’s webzine) but the Christian commentariat of that webzine and other racialist webzines, it is more interesting to ponder who, of the two Richards, is right: the mythicist or the historicist.

It seems to me that Miller, although I have infinite respect for his work, still suffers from what in a 2012 post on this site we called the ‘Platonic fallacy’.

And incidentally, I see these two camps, represented by the two Richards, from a very different angle to their point of view: the Delphic Oracle maxim. Given that deep autobiography is my forte, and that in my life I have gone through all three stages—from traditional Christian (1960s-1980s) to secular historicist (1990s-2018), and from secular historicist to mythicist (2018 to date)—I venture to conjecture that Miller’s stance, as well as the stance of his interviewer, represent a residue of parental introjects (see my post ‘Slaves of parental introjects’).

It is so disturbing to our egos to conceive of the whole Jesus story as mere literary fiction from the pen of Jews for Aryan consumption that even accomplished rationalists like Miller, and his young interviewer, are unable to take the final step.

But as I said, the issue of which of the two Richards is right isn’t so important. What is important is that Christians on the racial right are, as far as textual criticism of the NT is concerned, in the Middle Ages. And there is little point in trying to rescue them. That’s as fool errand as wanting American evangelicals, the source of the power of the American Jewish lobby, to read Kevin MacDonald’s webzine and stop supporting Israel in the current Palestinian conflict!

The West’s Darkest Hour is not for white nationalists. It is for people honest enough to assimilate the splendid work of Miller, or Carrier. As I said, the distinction between secular historicists and mythicists is not as serious as it is when we encounter the fundamentalists, who abound on the so-called racial right, and still believe that a Jew isn’t only risen but is our Saviour.