Report from the trenches

 

Why is everyone so angry about this
Jesus Mythicist bizniz, I mean,
what about the Ivory-Billed
Woodpecker Mythicists?

Prominent Jesus Mythicist Richard Carrier on the war path again. Just for your sweet and perhaps sour information. But first, an extended excerpt!

>>>Of course, when we check, the Gospel tales of Jesus’s execution don’t hold up very plausibly, either. Neither the trial procedures nor the calendar date are historically credible, but seem literarily designed to make symbolical points rather than record anything actually having happened. As depicted, there is no intelligible reason why either the Jews or the Romans would have executed Jesus. 

>>>Yes, we can contrive our own modern hypotheses, about some hidden underlying realpolitik or whitewashed insurrection, or some convoluted reason never explicitly articulated—but we are making those up. The stories themselves do not advocate them. And we should not confuse hypotheses with facts. There is no more history in the Gospels than there is an earthly Jesus in Paul. A great many scholars are coming to admit the first point. How long until they realize that walks us right up to the second?

>>>Ironically, the Talmudic tale of the execution of Jesus—by stoning, for sorcery—is more historically plausible than the Gospels. But, a bit of a problem there: they consistently date this event a hundred years earlier, when Romans weren’t even there to look on, much less carry it out (OHJ, Ch. 8.1). Methodologically this puts the historicist in a pickle: what do you do when the only plausible story is clearly fiction? You are forced thereby to admit that plausibility does not prove historicity. Which means the Gospels can prove it even less—being all the less plausible. 

>>>Which, by the by, gets us to another common argument produced by not checking things: the ubiquitous “but even the Jews in the Talmud attest the historicity of Jesus.” Oh, dear. Did you not check? Do you not know the Talmud dates this event to the 70s BC, and has Jesus executed by stoning, at the sole direction of a Jewish court, and in Lydda, not Jerusalem? How do you account for that? It’s a conundrum. 

>>>Because you can’t use an obviously bogus account to attest the event as actual—and yet you must still explain how the century Jesus lived in was so conclusively altered. The Talmud has Jesus interact with famous personages of that century, and his fate reflects the actual political and legal realities distinctive of that century. If all that could be made up there, why are we to assume switching all these details to a different century was any less made up in the Gospels? Things fall apart when you check.

Things fall apart only when you check