Jesus from Outer Space Quotes

“As Mark has Jesus himself say, “The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you, but to those on the outside everything is said in parables so that they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding, otherwise they might turn and be forgiven” (Mark 4:11–12).”
― Richard C. Carrier, Jesus from Outer Space: What the Earliest Christians Really Believed about Christ

“In fact, in the whole category of Gospels, Acts, and Epistles, forgery was the normal mode of Christian production. So why on earth would we trust any Gospel as our only real source for the historicity of Jesus? Much less an anonymous Gospel, written a lifetime later, in a land and a language quite foreign to Jesus, citing no sources, and corroborated by no one?”
― Richard C. Carrier, Jesus from Outer Space: What the Earliest Christians Really Believed about Christ

“No legitimate conclusion would depend on such a fallacious approach to the evidence.”
― Richard C. Carrier, Jesus from Outer Space: What the Earliest Christians Really Believed about Christ

“Not only do these things suddenly get added to the creed, but they also become essential to the creed: we are told we must condemn any Christians who reject them. Which means … there were Christians who rejected them. And we don’t get to hear from them. Think about that.”
― Richard C. Carrier, Jesus from Outer Space: What the Earliest Christians Really Believed about Christ

“The third-century Christian scholar Origen gave this away, for example, when he let slip the Christian principle of two truths—that literal stories were invented to save the ignorant masses, while educated elites know the real truth lies only within the allegory, and dare not expose this to the rank and file lest they lose faith and become damned.”
― Richard C. Carrier, Jesus from Outer Space: What the Earliest Christians Really Believed about Christ

“Mark does this again with the similarly implausible (and thus obviously made-up) tale of the raising of Jairus’s twelve-year-old daughter, which Mark wrapped around a symbolically related story of a woman who had bled for twelve years. The coincidence of the number twelve is a dead give away: both stories are fable, not fact. They are meant to convey a point, not record history. In both tales, Jesus is explicitly asked to touch the girl (Mark 5:23) and does (5:41), while in between the woman seeks to touch Jesus (5:28) and does (5:27), and by this means both are “saved” (5:23, 28, 34) by “faith” (5:34, 36) in spite of “fear” (5:33, 36). Both the girl and the woman are called “daughter” (5:23, 34). Moreover, the woman has bled for twelve years, which is not only the same age as the girl, but also at which menstruation was thought typically to begin, and thus the point at which a girl becomes a woman. We can see symbolism here of the twelve tribes of Israel and how they shall be saved by evolving from the old Israel to the new, through faith in Jesus Christ. Whereas in no way is either story believable as history.”
― Richard C. Carrier, Jesus from Outer Space: What the Earliest Christians Really Believed about Christ

“Mark is cluing you in to the function of his entire Gospel. If you are reading it as history, you are the outsider; you are the damned. Those who “get it” and will thus turn and be forgiven are those who read these stories as signifying deeper truths about reality—as symbolic, and not as events that “actually” happened; just as Mark’s Jesus instructs that we approach all parables. It was only the later redactors of Mark who increasingly tried to market their rewrite of his Gospel as a history—first Matthew purports it all happened to fulfill prophecy (to make Mark’s fable resemble the Pentateuch); then Luke tries to rewrite it all to look and sound like a rational Greco-Roman history (albeit only with vaguely formulated assertions); and finally John insists it’s all literally true—and implies anyone who doesn’t believe it will be damned (John 20:29–31). Thus, what Mark told his readers, through the voice of Jesus, has by then been completely reversed. This is how the whole Jesus narrative came to be transformed from myth to history.”
― Richard C. Carrier, Jesus from Outer Space: What the Earliest Christians Really Believed about Christ

“Mark even makes the time of his death, “the ninth hour,” identical to that of the slaying of actual Passover lambs the day before. And finally chapter 16 symbolizes the very rescue from death that the Passover represents. On the original Passover, the angel of death “passed over” those who were protected by the lamb’s blood and killed the “firstborn sons” of those who were not; in Mark, the firstborn son is rescued from death, and his blood protects those who share in it. This is all obvious mythic symbolism. It is not remembered history.”
― Richard C. Carrier, Jesus from Outer Space: What the Earliest Christians Really Believed about Christ

“In reality had Jesus been arrested at Passover he would have been held over in jail until Sunday, and could only have been convicted and executed on Monday at the earliest. So as history, Mark’s narrative makes zero sense. But as symbolic myth, every oddity is explained, indeed expected.”
― Richard C. Carrier, Jesus from Outer Space: What the Earliest Christians Really Believed about Christ

“Indeed, since executions would not be performed on holy days, Mark’s narrative has no historical credibility at all. As we learn from the Mishnah tractate on the Sanhedrin, Jewish law also commanded that trials for capital crimes had to be conducted over the course of two days and could not be conducted on or even interrupted by a Sabbath or holy day—nor ever conducted at night. Mark’s account violates every single one of these requirements and is therefore not at all what would actually have happened.”
― Richard C. Carrier, Jesus from Outer Space: What the Earliest Christians Really Believed about Christ

“So Jesus was only passed off as a definitely historical person long after pretty much everyone of his alleged time was dead, by an author writing in a foreign land and language, whose text was probably never seen by anyone in Palestine.”
― Richard C. Carrier, Jesus from Outer Space: What the Earliest Christians Really Believed about Christ

“there are no sources at all that are independent of the Gospel of Mark.”
― Richard C. Carrier, Jesus from Outer Space: What the Earliest Christians Really Believed about Christ

“As we can see from all of the above, Mark appears to be the only real Gospel. None precede Mark. And every subsequent Gospel is just, in one way or another, a rewrite of Mark, naming no sources for anything they add or change.”
― Richard C. Carrier, Jesus from Outer Space: What the Earliest Christians Really Believed about Christ