For Kapyong: Defending a historical Jesus

[vridar]

Carrier's thesis "Matching" or "Consistent With" Ancient Thought?

I previously addressed the problem of inconsistent language when attempting to argue for Carrier's (or any) thesis being "consistent" with ancient thought -- especially if we want to avoid the charge of suggesting "unity" of ideas or "matching" ideas.

Let's see what we learn about ancient thought from the texts and then see if Carrier's thesis is "consistent" with it.

1. We know that sacrifice could occur in the heavenly temple. That is, living things could be killed and their blood shed -- in the celestial temple. Hebrews and Revelation most clearly indicate this point.

2. We know that in the lowest heaven demons can be fighting and committing acts of violence upon one another. Whatever else we think of the Ascension of Isaiah we cannot dispute this detail. We also know from the book of Daniel that heavenly angels or powers do fight one another. And we know they have armies, with weapons.

3. We know from miscellaneous texts that living beings can move between the various heavens, and as they do so they can change their appearance. We also know that the further down they go they can take on more "matter".

4. We know that there were ancients who believed that all the space from the surface of the moon and down to the earth (that is, between the moon and the mountain tops of the earth) was populated by corruptible spirits or demons.

5. We know that different ancient sects etc were rarely troubled by a need for consistent international standards of thought and ideas. So for example, the fact that many ancients thought of the region above the moon as incorruptible does not seem to have affected #1 above, that living things could actually be killed in the presumably highest of heavens.

It follows, I think, that any mythicist thesis that posits a Son of Man or Jesus or whatever heavenly figure appearing in some sort of corruptible form and suffering violence and even death in a non-earthly realm is not inconsistent with ancient thought.

We may, if we follow certain debatable interpretations of certain ancient texts, argue that this thesis finds no "matching" belief, but it is not unreasonable to argue that the thesis is "consistent" with what we do know of ancient thought from the texts.

Hopefully the point I was making in my previous comment about the importance of consistency and clarity of the language we use is clear now. Slipping in and out with words like "unity" and "consistency" and "matching" tends to confuse the argument and potentially leaves us slipping from here to there in a display of smoke and mirrors. Here I have tried to point to what "consistency" with ancient thought might look like.

 

[GDon]

Of course. I've already agreed on this. I've never said that it has to be consistent with ALL ancient texts. And I've never said that ancient texts are all consistent with one another. The consistency I've been talking about is between Carrier's theory and one or more of the beliefs found in the diverse texts of the time.

I know you did. At least in principle, anyway. But it seems to me like you still demand a level of consistency in practice that is IMHO impossible to achieve.

Those texts are too inconsistent with each other, and they're not the product of a consistent doctrine in the first place.

By "consistency", I'm not talking about the consistency within ancient texts. I have NEVER meant that. NEVER. Once again, it is the consistency of Dr Carrier's view with that expressed in one or more of the diverse ancient texts.

We could use the word "match" if that is better. I.e. Carrier's view either matches one or more ancient beliefs or it doesn't. I've broken my own rule here in spending time trying to defend myself on a point that I am not arguing. But for me this is an important point since Carrier does claim consistency. Indeed his Bayes Theorem's calculation is partly based on the background knowledge he gives in his book and how that background knowledge is consistent with his theory.

 

[vridar]

:
We could use the word "match" if that is better.

I can understand why you ignore my comments that address the logic and the facts of your own comments, GDon. But in doing so, you have missed two critical details I have pointed out.

Matching ancient thought does not clearly mean the same as Consistent With ancient thought.

I have quoted the line from Carrier's book that shows that your depiction of Carrier's thesis is false. A straw man.

 

[GDon]

To repeat something I said in much more detail about a page back, it does not matter whether Carrier was right or wrong to call it Euhemerism.

I think it does matter, but as I've written here and also in my review, it is a nitpick. Either his theory is right or it isn't, and calling it "euhemerism" or something else doesn't matter.

The problem comes in when Dr Carrier claims that this is "euhemerism", and this type of euhemerism was common in ancient times. It gives his theory de facto plausibility if his theory is consistent (though I now dread using that word!) with one or more (got to put that in there now!) ancient beliefs or practices. Euhemerism was an ancient practice. IMO what Carrier is describing is not euhemerism. It is worth making that nitpick, because the next step is asking whether Carrier's description of "euhemerism" is consistent with ancient practices.

What he was pointing out is that in biblical times it was commonplace for people (especially religious fanatics) to create untrue stories, ie fiction, saying that their gods, devils, angels, demons, spirits etc., had appeared on Earth, and were witnessed by people to have done all sorts of quite detailed things.

Is he right to say that?

Yep. That's the question.

Well Afaik; almost every "god" that has ever been dreamed-up, is a fictitious figure that was specifically said to have done all sorts of detailed physical things that directly interacted with all sorts of people & events on Earth. And that is a pure fiction - the claimed god never existed, and never had any such interactions with anyone or anything on Earth.

The point of euhemerism is that the gods were actually mortal men, i.e. the men actually existed.

Was there an ancient practice that did as you described above? Not that I know about. I'd like to see evidence for that.

 

[GDon]

I have quoted the line from Carrier's book that shows that your depiction of Carrier's thesis is false. A straw man.

You've raised a good point, and I should update my review. But really the only line I need to change is this:

Perhaps Carrier meant the offerings were presented in the celestial temple? It does seem that Carrier is mixing up where the sacrifice was made and where the sacrificial offerings were presented.​

... to something like this:

Carrier here is mixing up where the sacrifice was made and where the sacrificial offerings were presented.​

Probably some other rewording is necessary as well.

As for it being a strawman: Carrier actually writes that Jesus "performed his sacrifice in the celestial temple". My response was to that. But as you point out, a few pages later he writes that Christ was not killed in the celestial temple. That was something I missed. So you do have a good point there, and one that requires an update to my review.

My overall point in that section though is still the same: Hebrews does not supply evidence for a crucifixion in 'outer space'.

 

[GDon]

Hopefully the point I was making in my previous comment about the importance of consistency and clarity of the language we use is clear now. Slipping in and out with words like "unity" and "consistency" and "matching" tends to confuse the argument and potentially leaves us slipping from here to there in a display of smoke and mirrors. Here I have tried to point to what "consistency" with ancient thought might look like.

Thank you! Excellently explained. I agree completely.

 

[vridar]

My overall point in that section though is still the same: Hebrews does not supply evidence for a crucifixion in 'outer space'.

That is surely a most banal point. I don't even recall Carrier suggesting that it does.*

So we come back now to what is "consistent" with ancient thought as distinct from what "matches" ancient thought. The latter suggests an explicit copy of a particular image. The former suggests ideas that are explained by or predicted by or using the concepts found in ancient texts.

As I pointed out not many comments above, the concept of violence taking place in the heavens, the concept of killing and shedding blood in the heavens -- even in what a modern would interpret as the highest heaven where there was in other ancient thought supposedly no room for such corruptibility -- is all entirely consistent with a Couchoud-Doherty-Carrier thesis of mythicism.

If you are looking for an explicit crucifixion as the means of death, then no, you won't find that in the book of Hebrews as everybody knows (it hardly needs to be set out as if some sort of killer argument) or, I think, other texts. But that's not how "consistency" works, though it might well come under "match-making" or "unity".

* ETA
We can't just say Hebrews doesn't support "crucifixion" in outer space when Carrier's point is in fact to demonstrate that it supports the idea of sacrifice happening in "outer space". Again, this is where words are important.

And speaking of words, Carrier's explanation that the death of Jesus did not occur in the temple is not restricted to the single line I quoted. It is found explained in detail in many sentences in the book. We can't just choose to single out some poorly expressed section in defiance of the whole context of Carrier's argument.

 

[vridar]

One more little detail from a very well-known text. The first appearance of a Son of Man figure in the heavens is that of a metaphor representing the death and resurrection of the (Maccabean) martyr-saints, whose blood we know from elsewhere was believed to have the power of atonement for the sins of Judeans. Even though the image is metaphorical, that same Son of Man figure did evolve in Second Temple thought into a real angelic-type of heavenly figure.

That is, a heavenly representation of human death and resurrection (tied with the power of atonement) became reified as a heavenly being in 2T Judaistic thought.

I suggest that process is not entirely without significance -- especially in the context of Martin Hengel's argument that the Danielic author was drawing upon an interpretation of the Suffering Servant in Isaiah when creating his metaphor.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

By "consistency", I'm not talking about the consistency within ancient texts. I have NEVER meant that. NEVER. Once again, it is the consistency of Dr Carrier's view with that expressed in one or more of the diverse ancient texts.

But my point is that if there isn't much consistency WITHIN those texts, then you can't demand more consistency than that WITH those texts. If one guy says white, and the other guy says black, you can't be consistent with both. The consistency WITHIN your source pool puts a very concrete limit on how consistent you can be WITH the sources in that pool. You can only be consistent with so many of them, before anything more would just result in internal contradictions.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

The problem comes in when Dr Carrier claims that this is "euhemerism", and this type of euhemerism was common in ancient times. It gives his theory de facto plausibility if his theory is consistent (though I now dread using that word!) with one or more (got to put that in there now!) ancient beliefs or practices. Euhemerism was an ancient practice. IMO what Carrier is describing is not euhemerism. It is worth making that nitpick, because the next step is asking whether Carrier's description of "euhemerism" is consistent with ancient practices.

Well, let's call it PX: Proposition X. If nothing else so we don't confuse Craig again

Proposition X being: celestial events and beings at times were given variants or spin-off events and beings on Earth. And the Earth part is really the only big difference. The Earth counterparts of those events may (or may not) have also been miraculous or involved (demi)gods or involved superpowers.

Well, I just gave the example of turning Ninti, a divine being in the Sumerian heavens (ONLY gods could live in heavens in their mythology, anyway) into Eve, some human girl created by the Jews' God in the Garden Of Eden. Now you may or may not agree that they originally believed that garden to be a place on Earth, but Eve gets kicked out of the garden and into the rest of the Earth within days anyway. So we have her on Earth anyway.

Quite a demotion, eh?

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

Ok, one more example: Lilith.

In Akkadian, "lilitu" (and for that matter its root "lil") means literally "spirit". So I guess it's the prime example of something where we KNOW it was originally a spirit. I mean, its name is literally "spirit."

Not only that, but there wasn't just ONE Lilith. They had plenty of spirits to go around. E.g., we have "lil-la-ke", the water spirit in owl form, on tablet XII of a late translation of Gilgamesh. In another story we even have multiple liliths in one place, with every branch of an evil tree being a lilith.

But through the talmudic period, it gets turned into a single entity named Lilith, and eventually even into the first wife of Adam.

I'd say you can hardly find a more blatant example of a spirit turned into a real being on Earth.

 

[Mcreal]

"Euhemerus took celestial (ahistorical) gods (Zeus and Uranus) and then turned them into historical men ... anyone who does that is doing what Euhemerus did. They are therefore euhemerizing a god. Just as Euhemerus “euhemerized” Zeus and Uranus.'

"Euhemerus himself of course did not believe what he claimed. He pretended that that’s how the gods Zeus and Uranus began. He well knew that. Because he completely made up their history himself. Before that, they had no such history (they had always resided in faraway supernatural realms, e.g. above the clouds of Mount Olympus or deep in the caverns of Hades or faraway in outer space)."

"..we must not confuse the “-izer” with the audience. The euhemer-IZER is the one faking a story (obviously: the story isn’t real, and never existed before their creating of it, so they definitely know they are making it up). How people react to that euhemerization is an entirely different story.

'So maybe people have become confused because they turned the attitude of duped recipients of euhemerization into the euhemerizers. That makes no sense. Except insofar as you want to say Euhemerus wasn’t lying. But then that process would be called Deification, not Euhemerization. And it would mean Zeus and Uranus really did exist as historical men. And Euhemerus somehow knew this. And so on. We can tell from his storytelling and the preceding evidence that that is not what happened. Euhemerus was a ********ter. And many scholars like Plutarch knew he was a ********ter [see below].

"But his manner of ******** caught on. Lots of ********ters after Euhemerus did what he did. But to be fair, he didn’t really invent this kind of ********. He was just the most famous and identifiable culprit, and the one who made the trend popular again. So doing what he did came to be named after him. In actual fact what he did had been done before. Most famously Dionysus and Hercules, who began as shrine-celebrated skygods, but later were given historical backgrounds on earth. We see this already in Homer, even though we know from Mycenaean writings that Dionysus began as a worshipped skygod and not a man, and the clues in the astrotheology of Hercules cult and the variances of his worship across the West suggest the same of him (certainly none of the histories of him match archaeological evidence enough to be believed).

"Even sincerely attempting to explain a God by postulating a historical man as origin is still the same thing: making up a historical man. It’s just a more honest process. That I suppose could still be called euhemerization. Yet it’s still a non-existent man being inserted into history. Not a real man who was actually deified."

http://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/8161


'It has been asked, “Didn’t Plutarch discuss the theory of Euhemerus that all such tales are the mythification of past kings into current gods,” and therefore attest that “Euhemerus thought that earthly kings were the basis for mythical gods”? Not exactly. In On Isis and Osiris Plutarch surveys several competing theories as to who Isis and Osiris were or are, and in turn he describes each one and then rejects it, until he gets around to saying he supports the demonological theory (that they were never on earth but always celestial deities who began as lower ranking sky spirits later elevated to full godhood by their deeds).

'One of the theories Plutarch describes and rejects is what we call the euhemerization theory. So context is key here: he is explaining why euhemerization is not believable. His reason? Because anyone who tries to claim celestial gods were once deified historical persons is doing exactly what Euhemerus did: making a fake history out of a supernatural story. Plutarch is not saying that euhemerizers are correct. He is saying they aren’t. So insofar as he would call them euhemerizers, that would mean precisely what Plutarch is saying is wrong with people who try to spin earthly histories for sky gods: euhemerizing is always fiction.

'This is ironic, of course, because Plutarch himself gullibly accepts the euhemerization of Romulus and Hercules. He never realizes that he is doing for them what he condemns in On Isis and Osiris. Because he doesn’t know they were euhemerized (and never says they were; to do so would be to condemn their stories as fake). He thinks they were simply deified. This is because Plutarch didn’t euhemerize them. Someone else did. And Plutarch just gullibly believed them. He saw through what Euhemerus did. He saw through several enough other examples of other people doing what Euhemerus did. But he didn’t see through them all. Some of them successfully punked him.'

.
"The Gospels were simply constructed to euhemerize Jesus" (Carrier, 2014, On the Historicity of Jesus p. 613)

"Mark’s euhemerization would logically transfer Jesus’ demonic enemies to earthly ones, leading to the allegory of internecine betrayal in the Judas narrative (where the whole world conspires to kill him: Romans, Jews and ‘Christians’)." (Carrier, 2014, OHJ p. 560, n. 62)

 

[Craig B]

Because you're arguing only that (in your opinion) he's wrong about the use of one word, which is entirely orthogonal not only to his point, but even to whether the phenomenon he names that way actually happened or not. It's literally just playing grammar nazi.

So, yeah, if you want to show that he's wrong about anything that's actually matters, be my guest. But playing the "OMG, he used a word wrong at one point" game is just a waste of everyone's time.

That of course is not what I'm doing. I'm arguing that it is reasonable to explain alleged supernatural beings and phenomena in terms of natural events; but it makes no sense whatever to do the reverse. That this observation is relevant in a discussion of the historicity of persons who have become objects of worship seems to me to be too obvious to need stressing.

Absurd stereotype remarks like "grammar nazi" add nothing of value to such discussions either. I have no conscious quarrel with Carrier's grammar. I don't care about it.

 

[Craig B]

Ok, one more example: Lilith.

In Akkadian, "lilitu" (and for that matter its root "lil") means literally "spirit". So I guess it's the prime example of something where we KNOW it was originally a spirit. I mean, its name is literally "spirit."

Not only that, but there wasn't just ONE Lilith. They had plenty of spirits to go around. E.g., we have "lil-la-ke", the water spirit in owl form, on tablet XII of a late translation of Gilgamesh. In another story we even have multiple liliths in one place, with every branch of an evil tree being a lilith.

But through the talmudic period, it gets turned into a single entity named Lilith, and eventually even into the first wife of Adam.

I'd say you can hardly find a more blatant example of a spirit turned into a real being on Earth.

Yes, but that's not an "explanation" of Lilith, is it? To say that some woman known to Adam is "a water spirit in owl form" really doesn't explain the background to this lady. If I see an acquaintance with a woman I don't know, and ask someone else: "who's that lassie I saw x with last night in the pub?" and get the reply: "she's a water spirit in owl form"; well I'm no further forward, since I still need to have owl shaped water spirits explained to me. But if somebody said: he met her last week in a club, then I'd be happy with that as an explanation.

 

[Craig B]

Well, let's call it PX: Proposition X. If nothing else so we don't confuse Craig again

Proposition X being: celestial events and beings at times were given variants or spin-off events and beings on Earth. And the Earth part is really the only big difference. The Earth counterparts of those events may (or may not) have also been miraculous or involved (demi)gods or involved superpowers.

Well, I just gave the example of turning Ninti, a divine being in the Sumerian heavens (ONLY gods could live in heavens in their mythology, anyway) into Eve, some human girl created by the Jews' God in the Garden Of Eden. Now you may or may not agree that they originally believed that garden to be a place on Earth, but Eve gets kicked out of the garden and into the rest of the Earth within days anyway. So we have her on Earth anyway.

Quite a demotion, eh?

So you're saying God "euhemerised" Adam and Eve by throwing them out of the Garden of Eden?

 

[David Mo]

It follows, I think, that any mythicist thesis that posits a Son of Man or Jesus or whatever heavenly figure appearing in some sort of corruptible form and suffering violence and even death in a non-earthly realm is not inconsistent with ancient thought.

What "ancient thought"? Thought of ancient world is not an unity. Plato's philosophy is not the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Epic of Gilgamesh is not Judges, even though some interconections are possible.
To say that there is a coincidence with "ancient thought" is to say nothing.

In addition, the traditional Jewish thought widely speaks of the influence of Yahveh on earth. Biblical narrative is not about heavenly events, but about the conquest of the promised land and the relations of the Jews with Yahveh on earth. There is a Jewish historical sense. Mystic and allegorical interpretations are not the dominant trend in Jewish world (nor in the hellenism) but a minority. Even in Qumran or Daniel the main subject is the action of divine on earth by means of some agents.

Why do you think that we have to apply an allegorical interpretation that excludes the action of God in the earth by means of an humanized messenger to Paul's thought ? I don't know why we have to do this.

 

[David Mo]

The only relevant interpolation arguments I have read have been proposed and often widely supported by mainstream scholars who have no interest in addressing the historicist-mythicist debate or who are even very definitely anti-mythicists. Their arguments are far from being "based on anachronistic assumptions" but are firmly entrenched in a knowledge of contemporary practices in literary culture as well as the political environment of early manuscript transmission.

I had done a critical statement of the mainstream of the experts. It makes no sense to answer in terms of what these experts think.
I have counted not less of five appeals to contradiction in your comment #399 of p. 10 about interpolations in Romans. Since i was claiming that the obsession for coherence is not a feature of the mythical-religious thought your analysis is included in my criticism of anachronism.


ADDED: By the way, I don't see any "mainstream scholars" that think that the specific paragraphs of the Pauline epistles we are discussing are interpolations. See your own http://vridar.org/2014/09/08/list-of-scholars-believing-pauls-letters-were-interpolated/

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

So you're saying God "euhemerised" Adam and Eve by throwing them out of the Garden of Eden?

Psst. It's "Proposition X" not "euhemerized". Focus. I realize that trying to derail it back to playing dictionary nazi with that word must be more tempting than actually addressing anything of substance, but do try to focus

And I have to wonder how you came to the above conclusion at that. Unless you actually believe that God wrote Genesis, I guess. Otherwise, no, it's the author that pulled a PX, not God.

That of course is not what I'm doing. I'm arguing that it is reasonable to explain alleged supernatural beings and phenomena in terms of natural events; but it makes no sense whatever to do the reverse. That this observation is relevant in a discussion of the historicity of persons who have become objects of worship seems to me to be too obvious to need stressing.

Except that's both a strawman, AND you manage to be ridiculously wrong even in attacking your own strawman. Nice.

1. AGAIN: the proposition isn't that an author doing that is EXPLAINING any event. Ninti isn't supposed to EXPLAIN Eve, and Eve isn't supposed to EXPLAIN Ninti. That's your own fantasy, not what anyone else proposes in this thread. What is ACTUALLY SAID is that Eve is a version of Ninti that has been placed on Earth.

Basically do try to read what's actually being said, instead of STILL building your own ridiculous strawmen instead.

2. Now for the epic fail in even addressing your own strawman part: actually people in ancient times DID explain natural events in terms of Gods all the time. Zeus's lightning, anyone? The Nile flooding or not because of how well you appeased Osiris? Hell, read the Illiad and Odyssey to see how just about everything is dutifully credited to the gods. Read Plato's dialogues and see that even a philosopher like him credits the gods for natural stuff all over the place. So yeah, congrats, you're wrong and quite trivially so.

And the fact that events in the sky were invented to parallel and explain events on Earth, isn't even some new realization. Even Snorri Sturluson figured it out, and that was in the 12'th century.

And in a nutshell, that's why I care about attested stuff, not whether something is easy to believe to lil' ol' uninformed you. As I was saying, the argument from personal incredulity is a textbook fallacy for a reason. Do try to steer clear of it.

3. Aside from that, you're literally doing a begging the question fallacy in just assuming that there is an actual real event in there. But that's what needs to be established, not something that you can just assume as a premise.

Absurd stereotype remarks like "grammar nazi" add nothing of value to such discussions either. I have no conscious quarrel with Carrier's grammar. I don't care about it.

Yes, well, you'll just have to deal with the fact that sometimes phrases mean different things than the individual words. Sweetmeats aren't meat, sweetbread isn't bread, and a fanboy isn't always a young boy. And "grammar nazis" aren't nazis and most of the time don't actually pick on grammar. Most of the time they pick on words and simple ones at that. 'OMG, you're wrong because you spelled contraction wrong!' (a.k.a., look at me, I could win an elementary school spelling bee) or 'OMG you're wrong because you called it an abbreviation when it's a contraction!' (a.k.a., look at me, I can use a dictionary) are more like their usual fare. The latter kind being literally what you're doing here: derailing it into whether Carrier used the wrong word for a premise, rather than whether that premise actually happened or not.

But fine by me, I'll call you "dictionary nazi" instead, if that keeps you from getting derailed again.

 

[Mcreal]

So you're saying God "euhemerised" Adam and Eve by throwing them out of the Garden of Eden?

Adam and his rib were euhemerized. Out of a celestial Garden of Eden.

 

[vridar]

What "ancient thought"? Thought of ancient world is not an unity.

I have been stressing in all my contributions to this discussion that ancient thought is not a unity. Its diversity has been the central point I have been making so I think we can understand my reference to ancient thought here as encompassing a diversity.