The Jesus Wars Go Thermonuclear

[Peter Kirby]

This is the original article:

http://www.bibleinterp.com/articles/201 ... 8026.shtml

• I've read it, and I can't imagine that Carrier's reply is anything close to being a measured response.
  
  Misconstrue?

One of the big "examples" is how McGrath criticizes criteria one-by-one, instead of dealing with them as a cluster where all of them together are conclusive.

It's a legitimate criticism, I will give you. But does it mean McGrath is lying? Or is it something about which these gentlemen can debate?

McGrath is a befuddled fool, as his opening paragraph shows -

Scholars of the New Testament typically view allegorical interpretation of the texts they study with disdain. There is a long history of Christians engaging first in allegorical interpretation of the Jewish Scriptures, and then later, applying the same approach to their own Christian sacred texts. Allegory is notorious for reading things into the text that simply aren’t there, things that are exceedingly unlikely to have been in view for the authors and their earliest readers. Allegory is also notoriously unconstrained, allowing one to find in the text just about anything one wishes to.

McGrath referring to allegorical interpretations of allegorical texts is disingenuous to the maximum.

As perseusomega9 said -

... McGrath, who never read any argument he couldn't masterfully misconstrue ...

But Carrier is also a fool for exploding the way he does.

That paragraph -- it's lightly footnoted and contains generalizations. But I'm not convinced that the response from Carrier has been effective. In order to demonstrate it to be wrong (and all else related to that), one would have to make ones own generalizations--generalizations which are just as open to challenge, such as:

• Scholars of the New Testament do not typically view allegorical interpretation of the texts they study[1] with disdain.
• There is a not long history of Christians engaging first in allegorical interpretation of the Jewish Scriptures, and then later, applying the same approach to their own Christian sacred texts. I don't think anyone is jumping on this grenade. Seems right enough.
• Allegory is not notorious for reading things into the text that simply aren’t there, things that are exceedingly unlikely to have been in view for the authors and their earliest readers. The bar for something being "notorious" is even lower than the bar for some attitude being "typical."
• Allegory is also not notoriously unconstrained, allowing one to find in the text just about anything one wishes to. The word "notoriously" qualifies the statement again. And even if it didn't, the statement isn't particularly absurd in any way, if the variety of allegorical interpretations arising from subjects of interest for allegory mean much.

[1] It's not clear what "the texts they study" means: the New Testament? The Bible? The early Christian writings? Ancient writings? All texts they ever study?

The most objectionable sentence seems to be the first one, It is a very harsh way to start an essay, if a statement of controversy is being used as a statement of typicality. Presumably it wasn't intended to be as harsh at it sounds to some readers, so it rhetorically seems to assume that the reader will already be on the same page regarding this statement. And you can see that some aren't.

But the opposite claim? The one that says how wrong or even dishonest this is? That's not shown either. "Scholars of the New Testament" are mostly more conservative than all the authors that Carrier lists in rebuttal, and there are hundreds or thousands of them, depending on how you choose to count. And most of them aren't polled, so who really knows?

The most logical reply would be to point out that this is some kind of informal fallacy, complicated by the fact that the premise that most scholars feel this way hasn't ever been established, and in fact there is legitimate wide and varied disagreement over how to approach the question of allegory and identify it in texts. That the arguments will have to be weighed, not dismissed with a wave of the so-called consensus.

Perhaps this was the Deep Meaning(tm) of Carrier's reply, but it came across more as saying that McGrath's lying about all of this and that's that.

[MrMacSon]

The most objectionable sentence seems to be the first one

I fully agree. It is a strawman red-herring. and loaded.

It's not clear what "the texts they study" means: the New Testament? The Bible? The early Christian writings? Ancient writings? All texts they ever study?

Yes, so it's also a hasty-generalisation (that makes 4 fallacies, at least).

McGrath's writing is full of fallacies. He's a befuddled fool.

[MrMacSon]

Presumably it wasn't intended to be as harsh at it sounds to some readers ..

I'm skeptical. I think the main response that Christian academics have to the general proposition - that *the NT stories are largely mythicism* - is to start a wider flame-war, or go off on tangents, b/c they cannot argue from first principles. Arguing from first principles opens up more holes in the 'historical-Jesus' position.

We saw similar with responses by John Dickson and Michael Bird to Raphael Lataster's The Conversation piece, republished in the Washington Post; though Bird & Dickson went more ad hominem toward Lataster than McGrath usually is towards Carrier - McGrath doesn't have to, b/c he knows Carrier's response is likely to be a kind of literary self immolation (to play on the flame-war theme).

[MrMacSon]

Here's another example against Lataster (albeit from some no-name drip with a blog)-

The Worst Book Ever? Raphael Lataster's "No Jesus, no God."

If you are about to order this book, STOP! Think of your loved ones! Think of your cat! You will die of embarrassment for having fed this young man's purse and ego. Especially if you are Australian, or have any affiliation with the University of Sydney.

It should be called, "THERE IS NO GRAMMAR, I HAVE NO IDEA HOW TO WRITE THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE."

Or maybe,

"EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT THE HISTORICAL JESUS, I LEARNED FROM RICHARD CARRIER AND ROBERT PRICE."

Or perhaps,

"SEE HOW MANY TIMES I USE THE WORDS 'SCHOLARLY' AND HOW I PATRONIZE MY PRESUMABLY EVEN LESS-LITERATE READERS? THAT'S BECAUSE I'M WORKING ON MY PHD AND AM A REAL-LIFE, GENUINE SCHOLAR!"

OK (remember, you were warned), now for some of the ugly details. Here's how to write, against stiff competition, The World's Worst Book on the ("non") Historical Jesus. (And a potential contender for overall worst book, ever.)

http://christthetao.blogspot.com.au/201 ... worst.html

[MrMacSon]

McGrath poisons-the-well in his 2nd paragraph -

Richard Carrier has recently done more than merely offer yet another allegorical interpretation of a Biblical text. He claims that the Gospel of Mark was composed as an allegory (having suggested earlier in the book that proto-Mark was being proclaimed as an exoteric myth “whose real meaning (it’s [sic] esoteric meaning, that of a cosmic event) would be explained only to initiates.”[2] I will not discuss here his conspiracy theory approach to early Christian literature, summed up nicely when he writes, “This appears to be what typically happened to the evidence. It was erased, doctored or rewritten to support a historicity party line against a mythicist one.”[3] And I will only note in passing the irony that an approach which was often used by Christians to avoid having the Bible be untrue (as it often is on its surface level when treated as a depiction of fact), is here adopted by an atheist expressly with the aim of demonstrating that the Bible is untrue.

a lot of it is crap sentence structure

• eg. "He claims that the Gospel of Mark was composed as an allegory (having suggested earlier in the book that proto-Mark was being proclaimed as an exoteric myth “whose real meaning (it’s [sic] esoteric meaning, that of a cosmic event) would be explained only to initiates.”

I was going to take out the piece in parentheses (as one should be able to do), but even they are a grammatical stuff-up: there are two opening parentheses and only one closing one. Very poor editing.

I presume “whose real meaning would be explained only to initiates.” is what Carrier has written.

• Why insert "(it’s [sic] esoteric meaning, that of a cosmic event)" ??

Perhaps McGrath meant this -

• He claims that the Gospel of Mark was composed as an allegory (having suggested earlier in the book that proto-Mark was being proclaimed as an exoteric myth) “whose real meaning (it’s [sic] esoteric meaning, that of a cosmic event) would be explained only to initiates.”

which is a silly mixture of inserted qualifiers, but lets try -

• He claims that the Gospel of Mark was composed as an allegory (having suggested earlier in the book that proto-Mark was being proclaimed as an exoteric myth) “whose real meaning ... would be explained only to initiates.”

becomes

• He claims that the Gospel of Mark was composed as an allegory .. “whose real meaning..would be explained only to initiates.”

Then McGrath says -

I will not discuss here [Carrier's] conspiracy theory approach to early Christian literature, summed up nicely when he writes, “This appears to be what typically happened to the evidence. It was erased, doctored or rewritten to support a historicity party line against a mythicist one.”[3] And I will only note in passing the irony that an approach which was often used by Christians to avoid having the Bible be untrue (as it often is on its surface level when treated as a depiction of fact), is here adopted by an atheist expressly with the aim of demonstrating that the Bible is untrue.

Note McGrath quotes Carrier -

• "what typically [appears to have] happened to the evidence* [is] ...it was erased, doctored or rewritten to support a historicity party line against a mythicist one.”

and then McGrath admits -

• "the Bible [is] often [untrue] on its surface level when treated as a depiction of fact"

* I wish people (especially Carrier) would not refer to theological texts per se as 'evidence'. A trail of what happened to them is evidence.
.

[MrMacSon]

McGrath deserves kudos and praise for thinking quite widely -

It is interesting to compare Carrier’s allegorical approach to Barbara Thiering’s pesher approach to the texts.[7] Although they use different terminology, and reach quite opposite conclusions in important respects, they share in common the conviction that these texts are not about what they claim to be at the narrative level. Thiering writes, “If people such as the Qumran community, who held a definition of scripture in two levels, set out to write a new scripture, they would set it up deliberately for the same kind of interpretation, and would improve on the Old Testament in that the secondary meaning would yield a consistent sense without the need for forcing.”[8] Carrier takes much the same approach. He writes,

• Mark even tells us (on the sly) that he is writing in parables, so that those who follow the exoteric meaning will not understand and thus not be saved – only those who follow the esoteric meaning (the symbolic meaning) will get the real meaning and be on the road to salvation (Mk 4.9-12...). So Mark even invented a story about Jesus that provides us with a model for how to read Mark’s Gospel...Christian and Jewish theologians regularly understood casual references to names and groups of names in scripture to indicate deep complex meaning. And as I noted before, if they could read texts that way, they surely would have written texts that way...[9]

For Thiering, the Gospels, Acts, and Revelation were telling the true story of what happened to the historical Jesus and his entourage, encoded using symbols. For Carrier, the Gospels take the celestial figure of Jesus and turn him into a historical figure, using the Jewish Scriptures as well as Greek classical literature in order to create new stories which have no actual basis in history. Since I have already addressed elsewhere the problems with Thomas Brodie’s approach (which Carrier adopts and draws upon), I will not repeat that discussion here.[10] But I will give an example of the kind of method that Carrier envisages the author of Mark engaging in, which resembles Brodie’s in many ways. Carrier is worth quoting at length, to provide an example of the kind of interpretation - and speculative reconstruction of authorial process - he offers ...

But, having baited, he later switches (he starts off well here, too) -

... There is a long history of Jews and Christians reading texts in conjunction with one another, and drawing connections between them.[12] And interpreters who were persuaded of the spiritual insight of the Biblical authors have sometimes deceived themselves into believing that the connections they drew were intended – usually by the divine author of all the texts. Carrier applies the same approach, albeit with a different aim. And his allegorical view of the reason and basis for composition is no more persuasive than the allegorical interpretations of the text that have been offered down the centuries. Clever preachers have long made connections between texts, in order to find a way to bring a third meaning out of the intersection that is not present in either alone. And scholars have rightly regarded such homiletic techniques as something very different from the kinds of investigation they aim for.

[maryhelena]

Carrier has posted on the Bible and Interpretation site - a comment on McGrath's article.

What happens now? Has this gone beyond two scholars having a go at one another on their blogs. Does the Bible and Interpretation site have anything to say about this dispute - since it published McGrath's article and Carrier is accusing McGrath of being dishonest in his article?

• This article is extremely dishonest. I have now detailed numerous instances of it falsely representing my work and scholarship in general: http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/8331
  #5 - Richard Carrier - 09/11/2015 - 14:46

http://www.bibleinterp.com/articles/201 ... 8026.shtml

[MrMacSon]

McGrath is spurious when he says -

If the Gospels are not allegories, nor the euhemerization of celestial myths, then what are they?

Though at least he correctly alludes to euhemerization.

McGrath then makes a good point (a good point to me at least) -

The key point to note is that Mark – and those who wrote Gospels after him – wrote about a figure who makes good sense within the context of first century Galilean Judaism ... scholars believe that authors like Mark are not simply creating material from their own imagination, but are weaving a narrative influenced by traditions with roots in earlier decades, in a different linguistic, cultural, and religious context from their own, the mark of which is still recognizable on the material

but he gets spurious -

And just as debates about genre can be a red herring, so too can debates about eyewitness testimony. In the case of Mark, there is universal agreement that the author is not an eyewitness, and so that matter can be set aside.

especially after having discussed genre a few times (and I'm pretty sure he made appeals to genre in the past).

He then says

We cannot determine precisely how many individuals intervene in the chain of transmission between things that happened in Galilee and Jerusalem, and the author of Mark.[20]

• 20 For a radically different view from Carrier’s, see for instance Richard Bauckham, “The Gospel of Mark: Origins and Eyewitnesses,” in Earliest Christian History, ed. Michael F. Bird and Jason Maston (WUNT 2, 320; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2012) 145-169.
  
  [I'm not sure why McGrath would say "For a radically different view from Carrier’s, see ..." in regard to that likely true sentence.]

yet in the next sentence says

But historians looking closely at the details of the Gospel have with good reason concluded that some of the material is more likely historical than not.

without giving any reference/s to which historians and why they have concluded "some of the material is more likely historical than not".

[MrMacSon]

lol -

Good article, Dr MrGrath. I wonder if it is time that we coin the term "allegorimania" to describe Dr Carrier's type of approach? When Carrier writes that "The woman also flowed with blood, while the rock flowed with water", how can anyone argue against it?

The long quote from Carrier is revealing: reading through OHJ, I was shocked by how *poorly written* his book is, especially when he tries to communicate complex ideas.
#1 - GakuseiDon - 08/26/2015 - 18:20

As I said in a post above - the ad hominems and red herrings (such as reference to style) are strong among Christian apologists like GakuseiDon

GakuseiDon would have been upset about McGrath's reference to the Gospels as "the euhemerization of celestial myths".

[maryhelena]

[Carrier] has, with his mythicist theory ... created a mythicism that cannot be disproved. It's an idea without any roots in physical, historical, realities. It's all pie-in-the-sky stuff. Easy for anyone, scholar or non-scholar, to dismiss as irrelevant to a historical search for early christian origins.

You keep trotting out this nonsense: implying mythicism is somehow not 'historical'. You use any opportunity in discussions about Carrier to bash Carrier and to misrepresent mythicism and what proposal of it means.

I'm interested in bashing ideas not those who hold to them.....

''misrepresent mythicism'' - whow! Mythicism was up and running long before Carrier put pen to paper....Carrier has a version of mythicism - his very own version. That version is as open to criticism as much as is any historicist theory....

While I agree with Peter -

... Doherty went too far down the rabbit hole, and Doherty's Alice here follows after, ending up in the same Wonderland.

- and we can also accuse Carrier of chasing Doherty down the rabbit hole, Carrier has, at least in my opinion, not gone so far down.

You say you agree with Peter - that Doherty went too far down the rabbit hole - and in the next breath say that Carrier did not go down the rabbit hole far enough....

The sorry state of the ahistoricist/mythicist position is exactly as Peter wrote....Doherty - and Carrier - have gone too far.....there has to be a back-track to allow the ahistoricist/mythicist position to gain some credibility....

Yes, there was no historical Jesus, of whatever variant historicist propose. But there still is a historical question to be answered. The gospels make the claim that Pilate, a representative of Rome, was responsible for the execution, the crucifixion, of a figure important to the gospel writers. That is a historical claim that cannot be wished away by denying a historical component to the gospel story and transferring everything to a cosmic/spiritual realm.