How Do You Disprove Mythicism?

Discussion about the New Testament, apocrypha, gnostics, church fathers, Christian origins, historical Jesus or otherwise, etc.
Secret Alias
Posts: 18362
Joined: Sun Apr 19, 2015 8:47 am

How Do You Disprove Mythicism?

Post by Secret Alias »

I am not a mythicist. But I do worry about certainty. I think for instance that it was the worst possible historical outcome that an American like Richard Carrier should have personalized what could quite reasonably have been a movement which questioned the certainty we have inherited about the historicity of Jesus. You knew things were going badly when the personality of Carrier came to dominate what would have already been a controversial subject. You get the feeling with Carrier - rightly or wrongly - that he overreaches for personal reasons, for personal fame all in the name of personal gratification. Nevertheless we are where we are - i.e. with the entire notion of treating the gospel as a 'myth' invented in the period after 70 CE about a figure named Joshua who arose in Judea or Galilee in the period before 70 CE in tatters.

Nietzsche once scribbled that the best way to defeat an argument is to graft it onto the worst possible spokesman. But does the gospel as myth die with Carrier? No of course not. I'd argue that Josephus's Jewish War is a myth. Of course there was a Jewish War in the period leading up to 70 CE. But Josephus deliberately grafts whatever history he knew about onto Daniel's 70 weeks prophesy. It's plain and unmistakable. We know that the Herodian household (Agrippa and Berenice) were actively 'mythologizing' Vespasian and likely his son Titus too. The Alexander 'histories' are clearly also attempts at mythology developed from history. So to claim that defeating Carrier upholds the historicity of the gospel is a Carrier-like overreach of its own. The gospels are myths, full of inventions, lies and exaggerations. The question is whether or not there is a historical individual named 'Jesus' beneath that smoldering heap of garbage - and the truth is that I don't know what the right answer is.

I've said before that without the myths and the lies there is nothing about the Jesus story which has any relevance and significance today or any day since the gospel was first written. It's the lies that attract us to Jesus. It's the myths which make Jesus a wondrous, wonderful, wonder-worker. If Jesus was a historical person he'd be something of a joke. If God exists and existed in the world he could and can only be known through lies because lying is at the heart of creativity, because creativity is magic and without magic life would be unbearable and hardly worth living. Painters paint to make an ugly world beautiful. Those who argue for a historical Jesus, a minimal Jesus are just trying to breath life into an ugly myth which has no legs to stand on. Carrier may have been attending orgies as 'payment' for his myth-making (or so his detractors delight in retelling) - but that's only because his myth is more beautiful that the ugly invented realism of the other side. It's hard to say no to beauty even for so-called atheists. Beauty is a god whom even the godless bow down to.

But the idea that because Carrier's 'Jesus angel' is a historical 'unlikelihood' doesn't exhaust mythicism. Let me give another possible 'Christ myth' - I will call it an ancient modified Terminator myth. The plot of the Terminator movie:

Disguised as a human, a cyborg assassin known as a Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) travels from 2029 to 1984 to kill Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton). Sent to protect Sarah is Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn), who divulges the coming of Skynet, an artificial intelligence system that will spark a nuclear holocaust. Sarah is targeted because Skynet knows that her unborn son will lead the fight against them. With the virtually unstoppable Terminator in hot pursuit, she and Kyle attempt to escape.

What if the gospel was originally about:

1. the Law and prophets predicted the coming of a messiah named 'Joshua' - owing to interpretations of Deut 18:15 in readings of the Pentateuch already known in antiquity (for instance among the Samaritans)
2. the Jesus of the gospel was the awaited messiah supplemented by some idiotic calculation of Daniel 9:24 - 27
3. as the gospel was written in 70 CE it has the Jewish War firmly in mind when it claimed that the 'Jewish god' (to use gnostic language) had a plan for taking over the world with his messiah but that was thwarted by the 'terminator figure' (= Christ) entering into Jesus's body when he happened to receive baptism from John
4. if Jesus had not received baptism he would have gone on to be the king of Israel, leading a successful revolt against the Romans, a triumph for the 'Jewish god.' However he was thwarted by the designs of even more powerful god, hidden in a higher heaven, who sent down his 'Christ' spirit - a figure set up from the foundation of the world knowing the designs of the Jewish god in advance and purposefully seized the mind of the future messiah driving him to a para-suicidal death on the Cross rather than his intended throne in Jerusalem and causing the para-suicidal mass holocaust that was the Jewish War of 66 - 70 CE. In other words, the fate of the mythical 'Joshua' redeemer in a fictitious age was a foretelling of the fate of his people in 'real time.'

I am not saying that this is the right answer to solve the original 'Christ myth' but surely we can't be so stupid to say that because Carrier failed, Jesus is proven to be a historical person. Putting Carrier on the cross doesn't save the academic world. That's another (convenient) myth of these men to further their own ugly myth-making.
Last edited by Secret Alias on Tue Dec 12, 2017 6:48 am, edited 1 time in total.
“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
Giuseppe
Posts: 13732
Joined: Mon Apr 27, 2015 5:37 am
Location: Italy

Re: How Do You Disprove Mythicism?

Post by Giuseppe »

As modestly one who would like to have a so high degree of skepticism about the historical Jesus to be called a ''Mythicist'', only some considerations:
I think for instance that it was the worst possible historical outcome that an American like Richard Carrier should have personalized what could quite reasonably have been a movement which questioned the certainty we have inherited about the historicity of Jesus.
I don't have a so personal negative view about Carrier as you but, even conceding that you are right about Carrier, my readings of old mythicists of the past (Smith, Rylands, Drews, etc) have persuaded me that the Mythicist Proponent Type is to be expected just as someone similar to Richard Carrier, given the (so identical) precedents.

That means:

1) no need of an encyclopedic knowledge about particular fields of Judaism and ancient mind or languages, no need even of a particular ''esoteric'' pride in that knowledge.

2) necessary defense of the existence of a pre-Christian angel Joshua (and research of the evidence for it in the survived evidence) beyond of what are the own views on the Earliest Gospel.

3) use of a divulgative language to overcome the barrier of the academic ''consensus''.

4) Argument from Silence applied in Paul's epistles against the HJ.

Of these three points, I think that Secret Alias satisfies only the third requisite (and even that not so often). Therefore surely he is not a mythicist (afterall, for his same admission).
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
Secret Alias
Posts: 18362
Joined: Sun Apr 19, 2015 8:47 am

Re: How Do You Disprove Mythicism?

Post by Secret Alias »

My point was simply - myths develop from imagination and imagination is limitless. You can't disprove myth-making by refuting a single 'Christ-myth' or attempt at reconstructing the original 'Christ-myth.' Myths are only as good as the poets which breathe life into them. You can't watch a documentary about the Mona Lisa and say 'meh' you weren't moved by Leonardo. In order to appreciate the painting you have to go the Louvre. In the same way, let a Stephen King with the soul of a Biblical scholar 'retell' the Christ myth and it might be more difficult to resist. Myth's persuade, they don't reason.
“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
Giuseppe
Posts: 13732
Joined: Mon Apr 27, 2015 5:37 am
Location: Italy

Re: How Do You Disprove Mythicism?

Post by Giuseppe »

Secret Alias wrote: Tue Dec 12, 2017 6:51 am My point was simply - myths develop from imagination and imagination is limitless. You can't disprove myth-making by refuting a single 'Christ-myth' or attempt at reconstructing the original 'Christ-myth.' Myths are only as good as their poets.
I have thought that it was implicit in the your view that at least for you, the Carrier's case is not convincing. Or you don't like it so much.
Let a Stephen King with the soul of a Biblical scholar 'retell' the Christ myth and it might be more difficult to resist. Myth's persuade, they don't reason.
Yes, I agree surely.
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
Secret Alias
Posts: 18362
Joined: Sun Apr 19, 2015 8:47 am

Re: How Do You Disprove Mythicism?

Post by Secret Alias »

I am just saying attack the man all you want, that doesn't mean you disprove the idea that Jesus never existed or that he was an invented 'type.' And this notion of 'what is possible,' WTF do these biblical scholars pretend to be? Do they claim to be part of a predictive science? I had the same issues with the Mar Saba text. Who are these experts pretending to be? At best they are philologists. They aren't detectives. I think it must be pretty boring being an academic in the field of religious scholarship. No one or increasingly few people look to the Bible for 'guidance' in the world so what are Biblical scholars left with - being glorified storytelling critics? It isn't all that glamorous. So now they want to be gatekeepers on what is and isn't possible in ancient culture and society? Really? Where in their background did they acquire this predictive ability?

If I told my parents generation that popular music would be dominated by criminals professing their love of guns, hoes and illegal drugs they might 'believe' that this would be popular in the future but only as part of some dystopian caricature invented by those DJs smashing and burning rock n' roll records. It would be impossible to imagine the nuance of our casual enjoyment - businessmen, school children, housewives - of debaucheries sung or rapped to hip hop beats. There would be no frame of reference for that in the 1950s or 1960s vocabulary of my parents generation. In the same way when scholars say this or that 'wouldn't be possible' in antiquity I am not so sure that we know how 'historical' a metaphor like 'Christ crucified' had to be. Did the ancients appreciate the apparently contradiction that the Pentateuch describes the death of its alleged author? Or perhaps they accepted that someone wrote the account on behalf of Moses five century plus later? But that too is a historical difficulty.

My point is that I am not sure how 'historical' the gospel had to be to gain wide acceptance. But this is what these scholars do. They allow an idiot like Carrier to put up basically a strawman - i.e. 'the Jesus angel' or any one of his other points and then if he can't demonstrate the plausibility of this particular novelty they make it out to 'prove the existence of Jesus.' But that's sheer nonsense.

They want us as a collective society to go back to a default position of historicity because that's good for them either personally or professionally. But why isn't it more reasonable to ignore the bias of our collective society and cultural inheritance and default to agnosticism, i.e. the 'I don't know' position. I mean when people study whether cigarettes cause cancer, if they can't prove a link between cancer and cigarettes do we see researchers tell people 'continue smoking.' There is myth in the gospel, lots of it. There are historical individuals and places too. But the idea that Jesus might not have been a historical person isn't as crazy as the 'young earth' thing that McGrath keeps mentioning because there really is no compelling evidence to support Jesus's historical existence.

McGrath goes to church. He likes the historical Jesus. It's his personal default position. That's fine. But I don't go to church. I happen to have started at a totally different point of view because of my background. I've never thought of Christianity as a particularly honest or believable tradition. Why should his personal default position become the starting point for everyone else including me? Why shouldn't our reasonable default position in the field be 'I don't know ...' ?
“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
Secret Alias
Posts: 18362
Joined: Sun Apr 19, 2015 8:47 am

Re: How Do You Disprove Mythicism?

Post by Secret Alias »

Actually when I think about - is Moses a historical character or a historical type projected back in the future (I'd argue Ezra projecting himself back into the start of Israel)? Is Moses taken to be a historical character? Yes certainly. But he's only as real as an explanative tool for simplifying whatever history there was to the Exodus. Assuming there was some sort of exodus, who knows what the actual names of prominent shepherds or rebels within Egypt. Similarly Joshua as the successor to Moses is a glorified hero figure. Who knows what the real circumstances were to the migration of Egyptian slaves into Canaan if that even happened. The likelihood that someone named 'Joshua' was head of the group is minimal at best. Is writing a myth about the events leading up to something that happened forty or fifty years really that different from something five hundred to a thousand years earlier? Assuming all the residents in Jerusalem were slaughtered, enslaved or castrated after the war, who was going to stand up and correct the story about some nobody named Joshua who arose forty or fifty years earlier? Is it really that crazy to suggest that the author of the gospel had wiggle room to create a myth about the killing of the messiah who could have won the war for the Jews? Really?
“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
Paul the Uncertain
Posts: 994
Joined: Fri Apr 21, 2017 6:25 am
Contact:

Re: How Do You Disprove Mythicism?

Post by Paul the Uncertain »

Secret Alias
... that ... Richard Carrier should have personalized what could quite reasonably have been a movement which questioned the certainty we have inherited about the historicity of Jesus.
But (to all appearances), that simply isn't his objective. He is playing for the brass ring of uncertain inference: to achieve wide acceptance for a novel hypothesis which is both inconistent with and also more specific than the existing paradigm (= than historicism in the current climate).

In other words, he is looking past undermining confidence in what almost all biblical scholars take as their working premise (that there was some flesh-and-blood Jesus, about whom and about his surviving close associates a few ground facts are confidently held by almost all who play professionally). Carrier is not simply counseling uncertainty about the paradigm, but going head-to-head against works written within the paradigm, like any of the books about peasant, prophet, bandit, ..., or crackpot Jesuses that fill the shelves.

Instead of

Sow uncertainty: It doesn't matter whether or not a ghost story is true, people dig ghost stories. Once somebody contacted Jesus' revenant, the possibility of a religion was in full career. All that was needed was the will and organizational skill... etc.

Carrier goes for

Pitch a fully specific hypothesis: Once upon a time, there was an angel whose name can be translated "Jesus," whose existence and attributes were arguably impicit in Jewish scripture. After small organized Jewish groups who channeled this angel Jesus formed, stories about him visiting Earth cropped up among them and grew in popularity... etc.

I am using "paradigm" here in the dated, but still useful IMO sense of Kuhn - a broad-brushstroke hypothesis which is not only widely accepted in some field, but which organizes research projects within the field, by defining what is a worthy problem to work on and what counts as a solution to a problem.

Example: "Evolution by natural selection" by itself is too general to explain why some moths are darker than others, but if it's true, and some habitats are sootier than others, then some moths will be darker, the ones who live in sootier places.

If we then find an International Yellow moth living in a really sooty place, we do not even think about ditching the paradigm for "making a bad prediction." That wouldn't count as a solution. Instead, we think about the possible survival value of being a highly visible moth in those places... hmm, maybe it's easier to find mates, maybe the chief predator is "yellow blind," maybe ... And you are expected to expend effort to research those possibilities, until you find the right one, which there must be if the paradigm is true.

Reconciling a puzzling observation to the paradigm is what constitutes a worthy problem in biology. Once the paradigm is accepted, no observation counts as evidence against it until and unless every reconciliation is itself so incredible that it might actually be worth the trouble of rewriting all those old, successful solutions using some new concept.
User avatar
MrMacSon
Posts: 8798
Joined: Sat Oct 05, 2013 3:45 pm

Re: How Do You Disprove Mythicism?

Post by MrMacSon »

.
"How Do You Disprove Mythicism?"

A. It depends on how invested one is in countering mythycism (or countering doubt about a 'historical [NT] Jesus')
  1. it depends on how confident one is in 'historical [NT] Jesus'
    1. it depends on how confident one is about the information: the facts and the inferences
    2. it depends on how capable one is of arguing using that information
  2. It depends on what others are saying
  3. It depends on how one wants to engage in the current environment
  4. It depends on whether the environment is changing and, if so, how it is changing

B. It depends on what the fields are doing
  1. The ''mythycism' field'
    1. who's in the field
    2. how they're engaging more widely
  2. the ''historical-Jesus' field'
    1. how they're engaging more widely

There are very few primary ancient or classical historians engaged in early Christianity, let alone the issue of the historicity of the NT Jesus
User avatar
Jax
Posts: 1443
Joined: Sun Aug 06, 2017 6:10 am

Re: How Do You Disprove Mythicism?

Post by Jax »

MrMacSon wrote: Wed Dec 13, 2017 11:57 am
There are very few primary ancient or classical historians engaged in early Christianity, let alone the issue of the historicity of the NT Jesus
Would be nice to make a list of them.

New thread?
Secret Alias
Posts: 18362
Joined: Sun Apr 19, 2015 8:47 am

Re: How Do You Disprove Mythicism?

Post by Secret Alias »

McGrath keeps comparing Jesus Mythicism with 'Young Earth Creationism' but the situation is more like that surrounding the Obama Birther situation. I believe and believed back then that the President was a natural born American. Nevertheless Obama had to produce a long form birth certificate in order to prove his authenticity. If someone were to question Jesus in the same way and ask - where was he born? - the answer would have to be "we don't really know." I don't want to listen to those who would use the gospels as a reliable witnesses here. If you were to go one step further and ask - can we definitively know that Jesus existed I'd have to say no. While I believed Obama I'd have to say that I don't completely trust the gospel narratives. I don't think they definitively settle where Jesus was born and given the lack of clarity it's possible but not entirely certain that this 'Jesus' was a historical person.

I am not certain there was a mother named Mary. I don't at all believe there was a father named Joseph. I don't at all believe that the names of brothers is accurate.

BTW very good points Paul.
“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
Post Reply