Gwern's Reviews > On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt

Sequel to Proving History; Carrier’s smug style continue to grate, and the Bayesian framework, as I expected in my review of the first one, turned out to be useless. Carrier basically makes up numbers because there’s nothing available to work with.

But getting into the meat of it, Carrier presents interesting evidence about early Christianity. I was doubtful of the “mythicist” position, minimal or otherwise, because where does the whole paradigm come from? Religious figures can be made up out of whole cloth, but it’s doubtful. Where does all the stuff about “Jesus” and resurrection and blood sacrifice redemption and celestial victories come from?

Carrier assembles a surprising amount of evidence that a figure like Jesus the Christ could organically emerge out of existing Greco-Roman and Jewish theology and imaginative pesher (as exemplified by groups like Qumran or the various Gnostics or, to be a little cheeky, Scott Alexander’s Unsong), and highlights the striking cosmogony of the “Ascension of Isaiah” which underneath a blatant interpolation features an angelic Jesus descending from the heavens to be martyred by an unsuspecting Satan, which Carrier links to other wacky Jewish theology about celestial victories over the Romans or the multiple heavens and ‘as above so below’ magical thinking in which a heavenly sacrifice is superior to earthly temple sacrifices. (Such contortions of logic and reading into passages in the Psalms and Isaiah strike me as bizarre, but then, I’m not a 1st century Jew, and they had no problem with elaborate pesher.) The “Ascension” probably isn’t earlier than Paul’s letters but it strikingly establishes that something like minimal mythicism could easily emerge from the stew of mystery cults and early Judaism/Christianity without any modern scholar trying to read some alternative theology into Paul’s letters.

Combined with the old observations about the extensive euhemerism of mystery cult figures (along with more documented recent examples of religions emerging & retroactively historicizing their ‘founders’), complete with detailed sober historical biographies of demigods we know never existed in any way, the almost total absence of any mention of Gospel events inside Paul’s (heavily-edited) letters despite extensive opportunities for allusions while instead talking about Jesus and his martyrdom by demonic “archons” in ways highly suspiciously consistent with a celestial Jesus (with the best mention being the very vague “brother of the lord” which would be good if Christianity hadn’t made a fetish of family tropes and titles and used those sorts of terms quite indiscriminately), scraps of early Christian writings admitting to exoteric and esoteric doctrines, the presence of conflicts in the early letters driven by people having different visions of Jesus (driving the need to euhemerize Jesus and “shut the gates of ijtihad”, so to speak), and various anomalies like early traditions which thought Jesus was martyred a century before Pontius Pilate under Alexander Jannaeus, or by Herod, or during the reign of Claudius (bizarre mistakes if they had any access to the Gospels, since the Gospels contradict each other to a much smaller degree about the timings, but the dates here are being calculated by symbolic/theological means like in the Book of Daniel).

Of course, Carrier covers many other familiar points about the “Rank-Raglan heroes”, wholesale falsification & editing & destruction of religious texts, the lack of real historiography, the non-independence of the late external sources like Tacitus and the forgery of Josephus (I still can’t believe that Christian scholars seriously try to argue that “yes, the passage is partially forged by early Christians but underneath the forgery is still a real passage discussing Jesus”), the almost targeted pattern of omissions or losses of ancient texts which would have described Christianity or the esoteric doctrines of contemporary mystery cults, the artificial literary structure & origins of the Gospels and wholesale copying with modification indicative of total disinterest in anything we would recognize as reliable historical texts, the many inconsistencies between the Gospels and Acts and the letters, etc.

I read some of the criticisms listed by Carrier and there don’t seem to be any major flaws in Carrier’s claims, although I still continue to worry about lacking necessary context & expertise to even follow the arguments. I am a little dismayed to note that while I didn’t put too much stock in mythicism before reading it, and I still hate Carrier’s writing style† and totally unnecessary invocations of Bayesian statistics, Carrier answers most of my questions by finding antecedents for the apparently novel & historical aspects of Christianity and many parallels for mythicism along with many oddities which are inconsistent with a simple historicism, so I do now think “we might have reason to doubt”.

On a side note, after reading On the Historicity of Jesus, I began wondering a little about Islam & Muhammed too. After some checking, apparently there is only 1 known probable contemporary reference to Muhammed, and there are otherwise a lot of red flags: the Koran talks very little about Muhammed or his life, and includes many unreadable passages which have to be interpreted by fiat; the hadith literature - supposed contemporary stories about Muhammed, complete with detailed chains of oral transmission - is acknowledged by the even the most orthodox as containing many false stories, showing the ease of making up Muhammed legends and quotes; all Koran variants and dissenting religious texts were famously hunted down and destroyed by a well-organized centralized religious theocracy (unlike Christianity, where many of them survived and are highly informative about the manufacturing of the texts); and textual material about Muhammed only starts emerging around this time, as much as a century or two after his death. Islam has yet to undergo meaningful examination by higher criticism, and in any case, there’s a major void of material to work with, but still, one wonders. There are still a lot of sites in the Middle East and Saudi Arabia which have yet to be even cursorily excavated, so who knows? If a Nag Hammadi library or Dead Seas caves equivalent is ever discovered for Islam, the consequences should be… interesting.

† while it’s otherwise clear and understandable to a lay reader, the tone is infuriating. Seriously, can’t he hire an editor who can tell him “OK, you got it out of your system - now stop being a prat and edit that part out”?