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Originally Posted by Lanny_McDonald
Just watched a documentary on Amazon called Marketing the Messiah. An interesting look at the development of Christianity, the gospels, the bible, and fitting of narratives in historical terms and context. Would love to see Textcritic do a viewing and provide some thoughts. Text should be able to counter or support the claims made by the scholars in this doc. Can you spare some time Text?
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This is a solid film, featuring some pretty good scholars like Mark Goodacre and Amy Levine.
I think this show provides a good summary of the consensus of scholarship on the history of Christianity, and of the development and meaning of the New Testament.
I could do without the mythicism, because it is fairly dumb.
In Carrier's public presentations he will tend to hedge his bets quite a bit by claiming a probability of the existence of an historical Jesus at around 30-40%, but that is not what he has written in his one and only academic book, where he laughably suggests the probability to be around 1 in 12,500 or 0.008%. In the book, he gives two probability estimates: one based on his best probability assessment (0.008%) and then an "a fortiori" estimate based on him being maximally charritable to historicity (32%). For some reason he repeats ad nauseam how the "a fortiori" estimate is not reasonable at all and how he needs to be just to get historicity to at least that probability. We can even quantify how much less reasonable he thinks the "a fortiori" estimate is compared to his best estimated—about 4,000 times less reasonable!
Carrier fails because he simply does not understand Second Temple Judaism, and he is unable to read most of the Jewish sources in their original languages. Besides the very clean compatibility of an historical Jesus within first century Palestine, I think that he also does a very poor job of attempting to account for places in the received stories which have been obviously written to counteract the historical reality of an actual individual. Take, for example the birth narratives, which go to extraordinary lengths to place Jesus in Bethlehem, and not his home in Galilee. This sort of myth making makes absolutely no sense outside of an historical perspective, and Carrier's attempts to navigate them are incredibly ad hoc.
There are very good reasons why he currently does not hold an academic position, nor has ever held an academic position of any kind. As for his "wait and see" analogy that he attempts to draw with the fairly recent shift in scholarly consensus regarding the historicity of Moses or the Patriarchs, what we are dealing with in Jesus is simply not even remotely comparable. The reason scholars tend to reject an historical Moses or Abraham have a great deal to do with the distance of the sources themselves from the figures in view. Most of the Old Testament texts are dated to around 700–400 B.C.E., but if Moses existed, it would have been at least 500 years prior to this. The problem is that any historical Moses or Abraham are simply inaccessible. As far as I know most historians will concede that figures like these could plausible have existed, but we have no way of knowing one way or the other on the basis of the sources we have. The situation is actually much different insofar as Jesus is concerned. Scholars are well aware that the sources for the life of Jesus are very poor, but there is certainly enough there to very reasonably posit the high probability of his existence, and to deny it seems more like an agenda-driven screed than actual scholarship.
Anyhow, the film itself is on the whole very good, and I was happy to see how they handled the mythicism question at the end.
