Christians believing Jesus was divine does not disprove him existing historically. And no Christian sect believed that Jesus never walked the earth, not even the Gnostics.
The problem with that kind of line of thinking is that it would make most gods ever worshipped need to be real.
No, it wouldn't. There was no claim that the Christians' belief that Jesus was real proved him real. There was only a counter to a false claim that Christians considered Jesus a spiritual entity.
But isn't the MJ case that there was a Christian cult who worshipped a spiritual Jesus? I mean isn't that what Richard Carrier is all about?
Did anyone ever produce any evidence for these "Spirit Christ" believers who supposedly preceded the gospel writers. Doesn't carrier argue that the "earthly" aspects of Jesus were progressively added by later generations of scribes?
Carrier's mythical Jesus argument boils down to two components:
1. The six or seven legitimate Epistles came before the Gospels, so any differences between the beliefs represented in the Epistles and Gospels would indicate that the Epistle beliefs came first, and those make Jesus sound more spiritual than physical.
2. An extrabiblical book called "The Ascension Of Isaiah" depicts Jesus as an angel or other non-human supernatural entity, who gets sacrificed by evil angels/demons in one of the multiple layers of Heaven or The Heavens. This would then be shifted into a story of a human sacrifice on Earth, thus serving as an explanation for how anybody had ever believed a made-up human-but-still-supernatural Jesus (a sociological absurdity which other mythicists have never produced another way around that I know of).
But there are problems with this...
1a. The dating of these books is hazier than he allows for.
1b. As Carrier suggested, I read those Epistles. Jesus's physical presence in human form on Earth was, in fact, mentioned several times. It's sparse, but it's there. And the ghostly-sounding references fit just as well as describing the state he was in after leaving Earth, not necessarily the only state he was ever in. (Some posters here have repeatedly harped on the fact that Paul had visions of Jesus, but a person can have visions of a dead real person, so that's irrelevant, which is why Carrier doesn't bother with it.)
2a. TAOI seems to have been written about the same time as the Gospels or slightly later; an argument that it represents what the Gospel version of Jesus was derived from needs it to be earlier. To be fair, it could have longer oral history behind it, and he's not presenting TAOI itself as if it must be the original belief, but only as an
example the kind of thing that the idea of Jesus
could have come from without Jesus being real, as an answer to those who object to mythicism with "then where did the idea come from and how did anybody buy it". And for that purpose, merely the possibility that it could be old enough is sufficient, and it's better than the sociological absurdity "well, you could just make up something like that and people would believe you" that other mythicists have been coming up with. But still, without definitively being older than the human Jesus beliefs it's open to possibly being too late, as well.
2b. The fact that the character in TAOI has the common human name "Jesus" instead of an angelic name points to his having originally been a human who then got elevated to angelic status, not the other way around. (If it was originally about an angel and the name was replaced, that would indicate that there were already Jesus believers to do the replacing, whose Jesus beliefs did not come form TAOI.)
2c. The story has Jesus descending from the highest heaven through the lower ones toward Earth, stopping at each one along the way and taking the form of that level's angelic inhabitants. Different churches have written their own endings for it, with their own versions of the part where Jesus is on Earth, so, as Carrier points out, the original that can be backtracked from them has no known Earthly component. But that doesn't mean there wasn't one that got replaced, as opposed to not having one at all and then having it get added in later diverging versions. Carrier's argument seems to need the lowest heaven to be the last stop on the trip, but whether it was or there was one more stop on Earth is ambiguous. But if we follow the pattern, the pattern tells us that if he did come to Earth, he would have done so in the form of the Earth's inhabitants: a human body.
2d. One aspect of TAOI does actually look more consistent with Carrier's supernatural mythical Jesus than with a historical human one. Another part of the repeating pattern of this journey is that Jesus stops at the gates of each level and tells the guards a password. Being born as a baby from a human woman's body is not giving the guards a password at a gate. So if the pattern in TAOI would have held for its last iteration, Jesus would have entered Earth by means other than what real historical people have done. And this is consistent with the lack of baby/childhood stories in the earliest of the Gospels. But, without this part actually being included in what we know of the original TAOI, we don't know that the final iteration did follow the pattern. Maybe this is the only one where he would have originally entered a realm through a mother instead of by walking through a gate. There are, after all, other Gnostic traditions that have "Christ" as a spirit which possesses a human baby named "Jesus" at birth (which would seem to be be why at least one Gospel talks about the spirit leaving him when he died), for example.
E.g., I don't know of any Norse cults that DIDN'T believe that Thor walked on Earth at various points. I mean, stuff like his almost fishing the world serpent seems to be one of the most central myths.
E.g., I don't know of any cult of Inanna which DIDN'T believe that she did a lot of walking around the middle east.
E.g., I don't know of any cult of Mythras which DIDN'T place him on Earth.
The issue for Jesus is not just whether physically existing on Earth as a human is among Christian beliefs at all or not, but whether there was also a separate Christian belief in a spiritual one, and, if so, which was first. If the spiritual version was first, it's easier to say that was entirely imaginary all along. If the physical version was first, it's easier to say that described a real person.
Question for those who say the spiritual version was first: is getting sacrificed a part of that? If so, how does that work, since spirits don't die and all previous Jewish temple sacrifices had been corporeal? If not, then why do the Epistles talk about him getting sacrificed?
