Mythicism

[Starlight]

I think the thing always worth bearing in mind about mythicism is that any claims about the reality of history tend to be on a bit of an epistolomologically poor footing to begin with because they essentially involve playing a giant game of detective with surviving artifacts and documents and attempting to reconstruct the past by guesswork and deduction - claims about the past are inherently a matter of sorting through circumstantial evidence. Historical events are not repeatable the way any modern scientific field of inquiry is, nor are they able to be personally experienced by anyone living, so we can't 'know' about them the way we can 'know' about things like lights or cars or people we've met, we can just make guesses on balances of probability and attempt to reconstruct the past as best we can. We can guess that Jesus probably existed, and we can guess that he was probably seen by his immediate followers as a miracle worker. But those are, ultimately, guesses based on surviving evidence.

God might have actually created the world 100 years ago and it just looks like history happened beforehand, or maybe earth is a zoo exhibit for aliens and the aliens have carefully put some faked artifacts and books in our exhibit to see how we respond to them and what historical narrative we construct for ourselves about them, or maybe historians have made some major errors in their reconstruction of ancient history and the entirety of what we know about classical Greece was a creation of the Romans, or maybe there was a successful attempt by a powerful group within the Christian church to rewrite history and certain way and destroy anything that contravened their preferred view of history and create fake documents to support their version of it. Because history as a discipline lacks the repeatability of science or the personal-experience of everyday life, we can never truly prove that none of these sorts of things happened. People who are historians are in the business of trying to play that detective game and separate the more likely from the less likely. They're generally operating within the paradigm of assuming that history is real and hasn't been substantially faked. And their opinion generally seems to be that on the balance of probability, using the kind of levels of evidence historians usually accept for the existence of historical figures, Jesus existed.

But even assuming the general truth of history itself, the nonexistence of Jesus isn't all that hard to hypothesize. Let's imagine Christianity started a cult lead by the 12 disciples. It would have been one of dozens of religious movements in Israel around that time, as the fervently religious Jews sought answers to how their God was allowing them to suffer oppression at the hands of the Romans and they were hoping for divine deliverance. Let's imagine that this group of 12, like many shamans in many cultures around the world, liked to inhale/smoke/eat various substances that allowed them to "see into the spirit world". After their trips into the spirit world they would discuss among themselves what they had seen and the meaning of it. They came to believe that in the spirit world they had met with God's Messiah, Jesus, and that he had taught them many things. As the cult expanded, the 12 began to lose control of its teachings, as more and more of the followers saw Jesus in the spirit world and reported what he taught them, and the group began to clash extensively with the more 'orthodox' Pharisees. The Romans, who irregularly cracked down on Jewish radical groups, moved against the Christians at the behest of the Pharisees, crucifying many of the members and scattering the rest. Perhaps one of the members of the Christian cult who happened to be named Jesus (a very common name among Jews of the time) was selected by the Romans to represent the group's spiritual messiah Jesus and was singled out for particular punishment and crucifixion so as to symbolically slay the spiritual Jesus, or perhaps the surviving scattered remnants of the Christian cult came to believe through further spiritual visions that the spiritual Jesus had been spiritually on a cross alongside their own martyred friends.

As the cult regrouped and recovered from this attack by the Romans, several members and then a bunch saw Jesus again when they entered the spirit world and believed his had returned to life after being slain by the Romans. Shortly afterward, one of the pharisees persecuting the cult, Saul/Paul, had a seizure and dreamed he saw a vision of the spiritual Jesus himself while recovering from it. He became very active in promoting the teachings of this group he had previously opposed. Meanwhile the teachings of Jesus began to circulate among new members of the group. When the teachings were finally written down a generation later some of the sub-sects of Christianity now saw Jesus as a real man who had lived in the real world rather than a spiritual being, although many of the sub-sects of Christianity retained their 'gnostic' heritage of a spiritual Jesus and their versions of the gospels reflect that, and the disagreements between the two types of Christians on this general topic would remain quite bitter for more than a century. The Jesus-was-real version eventually won-out as 'orthodox' and as a result a lot of the gnostic writings were lost, with much of what we know about them coming from 'orthodox' writers who wrote vehemently against the gnostic's teachings and from what few copies of a few versions of gnostic gospels have happened to survive over the millennia.

[psstein]

But even assuming the general truth of history itself, the nonexistence of Jesus isn't all that hard to hypothesize. Let's imagine Christianity started a cult lead by the 12 disciples. It would have been one of dozens of religious movements in Israel around that time, as the fervently religious Jews sought answers to how their God was allowing them to suffer oppression at the hands of the Romans and they were hoping for divine deliverance. Let's imagine that this group of 12, like many shamans in many cultures around the world, liked to inhale/smoke/eat various substances that allowed them to "see into the spirit world". After their trips into the spirit world they would discuss among themselves what they had seen and the meaning of it. They came to believe that in the spirit world they had met with God's Messiah, Jesus, and that he had taught them many things. As the cult expanded, the 12 began to lose control of its teachings, as more and more of the followers saw Jesus in the spirit world and reported what he taught them, and the group began to clash extensively with the more 'orthodox' Pharisees. The Romans, who irregularly cracked down on Jewish radical groups, moved against the Christians at the behest of the Pharisees, crucifying many of the members and scattering the rest. Perhaps one of the members of the Christian cult who happened to be named Jesus (a very common name among Jews of the time) was selected by the Romans to represent the group's spiritual messiah Jesus and was singled out for particular punishment and crucifixion so as to symbolically slay the spiritual Jesus, or perhaps the surviving scattered remnants of the Christian cult came to believe through further spiritual visions that the spiritual Jesus had been spiritually on a cross alongside their own martyred friends.

I've worked in the field of NT and have published with relevant journals. You are absolutely nuts if you think this is even close to a plausible scenario.

You're proposing something that sounds very close to John Allegro's The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, which was ridiculed when it came out in the 1970s.

[psstein]

Can someone kind please fact check this blog post for me? It's too difficult to find errors in my own writing, and I'd rather not be labelled a liar again by clueless mythicists who have a tendency to be incredibly nasty.

It's not bad, but I don't think Avalos' views are all that close to Price's. As far as I can determine, Avalos depends partly on his idiosycratic view of textual criticism (i.e. you date things based on the earliest manuscript) and partly on his own personal disbelief. Carrier has published with Sheffield Phoenix, which is kind of a peer-reviewed press, but not to the extent he wants to make it out to be.

Calling Price a "respected scholar" is kind of a joke, by the way. His works are almost completely ignored by scholars in the field, and whenever he comes up in academic discourse, he's almost always labelled a fringe scholar. He doesn't really take part in the scholarly process, either. That being said, I do enjoy his podcast (the Bible Geek), simply because he has a way better command of early 20th century/19th century material than the vast majority of NT scholars today do.

[Starlight]

I've worked in the field of NT and have published with relevant journals. You are absolutely nuts if you think this is even close to a plausible scenario.

Would you object to either of the following ideas:
1) Dreams, visions, astrology, journeys into the spirit world, being caught up to the 3rd heaven, trances, and the use of substances and rituals to enhance and produce those experiences, have been a fairly common occurrence in various religious groups throughout history and around the world...?

The work of Malina and Pilch in their Social-Science Commentary on the Book of Revelation, comes to mind, where they interpret it as religious vision/interpretation of astronomy/astrology possibly influenced by substances and then subsequently interpreted by the writer with regard to political events current at the time. I personally don't know how anyone can read Ezekiel 1 and not immediately think "drug induced hallucination", especially given the amount of time later in the book that Ezekiel chooses to spend voluntarily lying bound on his side in front of fire that burns from poo...

I looked, and I saw a windstorm coming out of the north—an immense cloud with flashing lightning and surrounded by brilliant light. The center of the fire looked like glowing metal, and in the fire was what looked like four living creatures. In appearance their form was human, but each of them had four faces and four wings. Their legs were straight; their feet were like those of a calf and gleamed like burnished bronze. Under their wings on their four sides they had human hands. All four of them had faces and wings, and the wings of one touched the wings of another. Each one went straight ahead; they did not turn as they moved.

Their faces looked like this: Each of the four had the face of a human being, and on the right side each had the face of a lion, and on the left the face of an ox; each also had the face of an eagle. Such were their faces. They each had two wings spreading out upward, each wing touching that of the creature on either side; and each had two other wings covering its body. Each one went straight ahead. Wherever the spirit would go, they would go, without turning as they went. The appearance of the living creatures was like burning coals of fire or like torches. Fire moved back and forth among the creatures; it was bright, and lightning flashed out of it. The creatures sped back and forth like flashes of lightning.

As I looked at the living creatures, I saw a wheel on the ground beside each creature with its four faces. This was the appearance and structure of the wheels: They sparkled like topaz, and all four looked alike. Each appeared to be made like a wheel intersecting a wheel. As they moved, they would go in any one of the four directions the creatures faced; the wheels did not change direction as the creatures went. Their rims were high and awesome, and all four rims were full of eyes all around.

When the living creatures moved, the wheels beside them moved; and when the living creatures rose from the ground, the wheels also rose. Wherever the spirit would go, they would go, and the wheels would rise along with them, because the spirit of the living creatures was in the wheels. When the creatures moved, they also moved; when the creatures stood still, they also stood still; and when the creatures rose from the ground, the wheels rose along with them, because the spirit of the living creatures was in the wheels.

Spread out above the heads of the living creatures was what looked something like a vault, sparkling like crystal, and awesome. Under the vault their wings were stretched out one toward the other, and each had two wings covering its body. When the creatures moved, I heard the sound of their wings, like the roar of rushing waters, like the voice of the Almighty, like the tumult of an army. When they stood still, they lowered their wings.

Then there came a voice from above the vault over their heads as they stood with lowered wings. Above the vault over their heads was what looked like a throne of lapis lazuli, and high above on the throne was a figure like that of a man. I saw that from what appeared to be his waist up he looked like glowing metal, as if full of fire, and that from there down he looked like fire; and brilliant light surrounded him. Like the appearance of a rainbow in the clouds on a rainy day, so was the radiance around him.

It seems that creative visions of the heavens, possibly induced by drugs and meditation, possibly just hallucinations, were a part of the Jewish religious practice (or in the case of Revelation, Christian practice) in both the Old and New testament times. And from what we know about the Gnostic christian groups of the 2nd century at least, they seemed to be into this sort of thing. And Paul himself mentions in 2 Cor 12:2 that this sort of thing also occurred within his circles on occasion.

2) That there was a long and bitter fight between 'orthodox' Christianity and 'gnostic' versions of Christianity that lasted from approximately the late 1st century to the late 2nd century, and that one of the major teachings of the gnostic groups was that Jesus had been only spiritual and never actually had flesh, and that these controversies between 'orthodox' Christianity and gnostic groups are mentioned by 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, Titus, Jude, Ignatius of Antioch, 2nd Clement, Iraeneus, Tertullian etc and that we have copies or fragments of half a dozen or so of the surviving gnostic sects' writings and gospels...?


The historical question would seem to boil down to: Was 'orthodox' Christianity or 'gnostic' Christianity the original version, and can we really know? Obviously the eventual victory of 'orthodox' Christianity has meant that historical orthodox sources were relatively well-preserved and copied over the centuries whereas gnostic ones were not.

[Aractus]

It's not bad, but I don't think Avalos' views are all that close to Price's. As far as I can determine, Avalos depends partly on his idiosycratic view of textual criticism (i.e. you date things based on the earliest manuscript) and partly on his own personal disbelief.

Has he actually published anything to do with mythicism though?

Calling Price a "respected scholar" is kind of a joke, by the way. His works are almost completely ignored by scholars in the field, and whenever he comes up in academic discourse, he's almost always labelled a fringe scholar. He doesn't really take part in the scholarly process, either. That being said, I do enjoy his podcast (the Bible Geek), simply because he has a way better command of early 20th century/19th century material than the vast majority of NT scholars today do.

Thanks that's exactly the criticism I need. Would it be better to say "respected professor and theologian"?

[Aractus]

Concerning mythology I would go with Joseph Campbell. Why? He knows what myth is and what it does.

So you pick a mythologist who has been dead for 30 years. Was he even a bible scholar?

I think the thing always worth bearing in mind about mythicism is that any claims about the reality of history tend to be on a bit of an epistolomologically poor footing to begin with because they essentially involve playing a giant game of detective with surviving artifacts and documents and attempting to reconstruct the past by guesswork and deduction - claims about the past are inherently a matter of sorting through circumstantial evidence. Historical events are not repeatable the way any modern scientific field of inquiry is, nor are they able to be personally experienced by anyone living, so we can't 'know' about them the way we can 'know' about things like lights or cars or people we've met, we can just make guesses on balances of probability and attempt to reconstruct the past as best we can. We can guess that Jesus probably existed, and we can guess that he was probably seen by his immediate followers as a miracle worker. But those are, ultimately, guesses based on surviving evidence.

You are way out of your depth. The study of history and the sciences are two different disciplines. You can disprove certain alleged historical events scientifically in some cases, but that's not a complete study of history and nor is it the only valid method used by historians in the study of history.

Because history as a discipline lacks the repeatability of science or the personal-experience of everyday life, we can never truly prove that none of these sorts of things happened.

Well you can't "prove" the holocaust happened either, or even that 9/11 happened. Absolute proof doesn't exist.

But even assuming the general truth of history itself, the nonexistence of Jesus isn't all that hard to hypothesize. Let's imagine Christianity started a cult lead by the 12 disciples. It would have been one of dozens of religious movements in Israel around that time, as the fervently religious Jews sought answers to how their God was allowing them to suffer oppression at the hands of the Romans and they were hoping for divine deliverance. Let's imagine that this group of 12, like many shamans in many cultures around the world, liked to inhale/smoke/eat various substances that allowed them to "see into the spirit world". After their trips into the spirit world they would discuss among themselves what they had seen and the meaning of it. They came to believe that in the spirit world they had met with God's Messiah, Jesus, and that he had taught them many things. As the cult expanded, the 12 began to lose control of its teachings, as more and more of the followers saw Jesus in the spirit world and reported what he taught them, and the group began to clash extensively with the more 'orthodox' Pharisees. The Romans, who irregularly cracked down on Jewish radical groups, moved against the Christians at the behest of the Pharisees, crucifying many of the members and scattering the rest. Perhaps one of the members of the Christian cult who happened to be named Jesus (a very common name among Jews of the time) was selected by the Romans to represent the group's spiritual messiah Jesus and was singled out for particular punishment and crucifixion so as to symbolically slay the spiritual Jesus, or perhaps the surviving scattered remnants of the Christian cult came to believe through further spiritual visions that the spiritual Jesus had been spiritually on a cross alongside their own martyred friends.

That hypothesis is not consistent with the historical data. And it ignores academic peer-review evidence such as textual criticism.

The Jesus-was-real version eventually won-out as 'orthodox' and as a result a lot of the gnostic writings were lost, with much of what we know about them coming from 'orthodox' writers who wrote vehemently against the gnostic's teachings and from what few copies of a few versions of gnostic gospels have happened to survive over the millennia.

And you're ignoring the fact that Gnosticism was a second century movement, not a fist century one. You are free to hypothesise that it existed in the first century, however you can't go and draw conclusions from an assumption that you can't show to be plausible much less probable.

[shunyadragon]

Has he actually published anything to do with mythicism though?



Thanks that's exactly the criticism I need. Would it be better to say "respected professor and theologian"?

Virtually all contemporary historians consider Jesus to have existed at about the time the NT describes he existed, and acknowledge certain events of his life to be likely true, especially the fact that he was likely crucified as a Hebrew rebel for treason against Rome.

An excellent secular history NT scholar concerning the historical Jesus is Bart D. Ehrman of Duke University who has written a number of books on this.

[psstein]

Has he actually published anything to do with mythicism though?

I can't think of anything off the top of my head. Maybe something in one of the atheist advocacy publications he's done (see some of John Loftus' stuff, maybe?).

Thanks that's exactly the criticism I need. Would it be better to say "respected professor and theologian"?

No, because he's not a professor at any credentialed institution. I would call him a NT scholar, and that's it.

[psstein]

Would you object to either of the following ideas:
1) Dreams, visions, astrology, journeys into the spirit world, being caught up to the 3rd heaven, trances, and the use of substances and rituals to enhance and produce those experiences, have been a fairly common occurrence in various religious groups throughout history and around the world...?

Being "caught up to the third heaven" likely means having some sort of intense spiritual experience. I would not attribute it to some sort of hallucinogenic usage. But yes, I would agree that some religious groups have used hallucinogenic drugs for certain purposes.

The work of Malina and Pilch in their Social-Science Commentary on the Book of Revelation, comes to mind, where they interpret it as religious vision/interpretation of astronomy/astrology possibly influenced by substances and then subsequently interpreted by the writer with regard to political events current at the time. I personally don't know how anyone can read Ezekiel 1 and not immediately think "drug induced hallucination", especially given the amount of time later in the book that Ezekiel chooses to spend voluntarily lIt seems that creative visions of the heavens, possibly induced by drugs and meditation, possibly just hallucinations, were a part of the Jewish religious practice (or in the case of Revelation, Christian practice) in both the Old and New testament times. And from what we know about the Gnostic christian groups of the 2nd century at least, they seemed to be into this sort of thing. And Paul himself mentions in 2 Cor 12:2 that this sort of thing also occurred within his circles on occasion.

Malina's interpretation of Revelation is interesting, but wanting. There are far better explanations of Revelation than some sort of drug-induced vision or something like that. Our information about the Gnostic groups is at best fragmentary, but again, Paul is probably referring to something more spiritually related rather than pharmacologically induced.

2) That there was a long and bitter fight between 'orthodox' Christianity and 'gnostic' versions of Christianity that lasted from approximately the late 1st century to the late 2nd century, and that one of the major teachings of the gnostic groups was that Jesus had been only spiritual and never actually had flesh, and that these controversies between 'orthodox' Christianity and gnostic groups are mentioned by 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, Titus, Jude, Ignatius of Antioch, 2nd Clement, Iraeneus, Tertullian etc and that we have copies or fragments of half a dozen or so of the surviving gnostic sects' writings and gospels...?

No, that's not true. Some Gnostic groups held to adoptionism, others docetism. Gnosticism was never a majority position in the early churches. From what little we know, it seems to have been an "inner circle" kind of thing.

The historical question would seem to boil down to: Was 'orthodox' Christianity or 'gnostic' Christianity the original version, and can we really know?

Yes, we can know. Some sort of proto-orthodox Christianity was the original belief. That's not to say there weren't divides, there were. They were different from orthodoxy vs. gnosticism. Gnosticism is at earliest from the late first century, and very possibly from the second century. The vast majority of scholars today see gnosticism as a reaction to Christianity, rather than what Christianity reacted to. The definitive book on this remains Edwin Yamuchi's Pre-Christian Gnosticism: A Survey of the Proposed Evidences.

[psstein]

An excellent secular history NT scholar concerning the historical Jesus is Bart D. Ehrman of Duke University who has written a number of books on this.

Do yourself a favor and read Ehrman's popular literature with a critical eye. His work on memory was mediocre at best and misrepresented the sources he cited.

As for the Historical Jesus, better to read the primary academic literature. E.P. Sanders' Jesus and Judaism was a seminal book in Historical Jesus research.

[Doug Shaver]

Can someone kind please fact check this blog post for me? It's too difficult to find errors in my own writing, and I'd rather not be labelled a liar again by clueless mythicists who have a tendency to be incredibly nasty.

I'll fact-check it on one condition: that you convince me that you understand the difference between "You are mistaken" and "You're a liar."

[Starlight]

Let me note for the record that:
(1) I am not a mythicist. I think that Jesus existed and was a MLK Jr / Sathya Sai Baba / Elijah type social-reformer movement-building religious-teacher and that he was viewed as a prophet and his followers thought he'd done miracles like the prophets of old and they expected God to restore the fortunes of Israel though Jesus' movement, and that the gospels likely for the most part record his general teachings (which focus primarily on poverty) fairly accurately.
(2) I have not read any works by mythicists. My participation in this thread is purely out of a passing interest, it is well outside my fields of direct expertise (NT and Church Fathers' theology of salvation, and New Perspective on Paul), and my knowledge of gnostic Christianity is quite limited. Though I have read a half dozen 'Quest for the Historical Jesus' type works by Meier, Crossan, Wright etc, and of course studied a lot of the relevant extra-biblical writings from the Christians in the 2nd century (Irenaeus, Ignatius etc).
(3) My first post in this thread was thrown together in 5 minutes as an off-the-top-of-my-head "what if?" rather than representing any sort of heavily-researched thesis.

The study of history and the sciences are two different disciplines.

That was pretty much my point. The achievements of science can be directly experienced by the average person - you can turn on the lightswitch and get light, you can use a computer, you can drive a car. We can directly experience these things ourselves in ways that are repeatable. None of that can be said for history. We can only try to consensus-build regarding our proposed best-attempts are reconstructing history from surviving texts, artifacts, and oral traditions. This gives us a much lower level of surety than directly experiencing something does.

[shunyadragon]

Do yourself a favor and read Ehrman's popular literature with a critical eye. His work on memory was mediocre at best and misrepresented the sources he cited.

As for the Historical Jesus, better to read the primary academic literature. E.P. Sanders' Jesus and Judaism was a seminal book in Historical Jesus research.

I read all with a critical eye, and yes R,P, Sanders is well worth while particularly on 1st century Judaism. Unfortunately your negative view of Ehrman reflects a religious agenda. You cannot dismiss his works and books as simply 'popular; literature.

[psstein]

I read all with a critical eye, and yes R,P, Sanders is well worth while particularly on 1st century Judaism. Unfortunately your negative view of Ehrman reflects a religious agenda. You cannot dismiss his works and books as simply 'popular; literature.

Not all of his work is popular literature, but he would admit that much of his work is designed for a general, rather than specialist audience.

Didymus the Blind and the Text of the Gospels is certainly not popular literature. Jesus Before the Gospels is.

[tabibito]

Can someone kind please fact check this blog post for me? It's too difficult to find errors in my own writing, and I'd rather not be labelled a liar again by clueless mythicists who have a tendency to be incredibly nasty.

I don't think, personally, that any living mythicist scholar is even worth taking seriously. The two that are actually respected scholars in a relevant field are Brodie and Price. One of the problems I see with this view is that it usually treats Jesus as having less historical evidence than Paul, which is just not true, therefore if you're going to say he was mythical then you really need to come up with a theory that makes Paul mythical too. Price to his credit isn't convinced Paul was historical either, but he fails to present a coherent argument that accounts for his epistles and the account of his ministry given in Acts. In fact, the historical method that is most often denied by both Christian fundamentalists, and by mythicists is that of textual criticism. Denying the validity of textual criticism is a very clear fundamentalist belief, so I don't see how mythicists can claim that they are looking at all the evidence in an objective way - once you reject the best practise techniques used by experts, in my view you lose all credibility. You're just drawing conclusions beyond what the evidence provides for.

I will go where ever the evidence is.

It's a nice piece, but right now I don't have a lot of time available for fact checking. However, form evaluation is quickly achieved: Just a couple of points:

I should point out that believe it or not, there are even chiropractors that call themselves chiropractors but don’t believe the chiropractic theory of disease at all! I think that’s hugely unethical and is akin to psychics that know they aren’t psychic (which is all of them) but tell you they are anyway.

Given the topic, it might be better to steer clear of sweeping generalisations. The "(which is all of them)" doesn't add to the information you provide.

"goes right to the very hart of fundamentalism:" I think you may have meant "heart" there. Or does fundamentalism have a deer? Hmmm... meme material there, I'm sure.

"Also, Egyptologists rejected his assertions that parts of the gospels were based on Egyptian etymology."

etymology
ˌɛtɪˈmɒlədʒi/
noun
noun: etymology

the study of the origin of words and the way in which their meanings have changed throughout history.
"the decline of etymology as a linguistic discipline"
the origin of a word and the historical development of its meaning.