[Textcritic]

Originally Posted by Richard Carrier

(1) "In other words, it is much more historically plausible that an actual man existed from Nazareth than it is that he was invented by eager followers." -- But not a plausible deified messiah deserving of worship. Thus, the historical Jesus was as hard a sell in Judea as a mythic one would have been. Thus, its being a hard sell cannot argue for Jesus being either historical or mythical.

I disagree, precisely because Carrier glosses the crucial details of Jesus’s execution to make his point, as I will continue to illustrate throughout. Simply put: It is not merely the incredulity of the claim that Jesus died that makes his invention so unlikely, it is the fact that he was crucified that makes it so.

Originally Posted by Richard Carrier

(2) The argument advanced in this response, however, is a slightly different one than previously formulated. This new argument is more familiarly called the Argument from Embarrassment. Basically, the "Why Would They Make That Up" argument. Many scholars have exposed the logical and factual invalidity of it. I document that fact and discuss the AfE extensively and why it doesn't work (especially in defense of a Nazareth origin, but not just that) in my book Proving History (pp. 124-69).

Carrier has in fact been prone to employing this same argument in his defense of the rabbinic texts which he commonly cites to support his own theory about a dying-rising messiah in Jewish literature. Unfortunately for Carrier, but quite germane to my use of this criterion to make the case for at minimum the existence of Jesus of Nazareth, the sources that he applies it to are ALL post-Christian, many by the tune of at least 200 years.

Originally Posted by Richard Carrier

(3) "practically EVERY Jew—whether in Jerusalem, Samaria, or in Alexandria—agreed about several fundamental principles."-- This is debatable. There were at least ten and as many as thirty Jewish sects, which were widely divergent from the so-called "mainstream" sect of the Pharisees (which most directly became the Rabbinical sect post-war), and we know little about most of them, and thus cannot say "what they agreed about." This is a logically invalid argument from silence.

In the first place, I would not consider Pharisaic Judaism as representative of first-cent. “mainstream” Judaism; more appropriately, Pharisaic Judaism retains a number of elements at the core of every Jewish sect THAT WE KNOW OF, but it should be noted that the reason for misconstruing Pharisaism as a form of consensus is because of the exceptionally high number of (late) Pharisaic sources at our disposal in the Mishna and the Talmudim. In the second place, mine is not an “argument from silence”; it is an argument from the AVAILABLE SOURCES that makes the case for various common features among THOSE SECTS THAT WE KNOW SOME THINGS ABOUT. Everything that we DO know about Judaism from the Second Temple Period—which is clearly not everything that is to be known—militantly contradicts the idea that a suffering-dying-rising messiah figure had any sort of currency prior to the rise of Christianity.

Originally Posted by Richard Carrier

I document this diversity and the scholarship and sources on it in the anthology by Lowder and Price, The Empty Tomb: Jesus beyond the Grave ("The Heady Days of Jewish Diversity," pp. 107-10, with endnotes). We cannot claim to know what fringe Jewish sects believed when we have no information about what they believed. Moreover, what we do know of the fringe sects is that they diverged in a lot of unexpected ways from what was supposedly mainstream. Thus, the many more sects we don't have information on can have diverged in many more ways still than even we know. I took Ehrman to task for the same fallacy (and he even contradicts himself on it, as I also point out):
http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/1794#20

Well, bully for Carrier. He has managed to point out what has been painfully obvious to biblical scholars for generations now about the plurality of Second Temple Judaism. Unfortunately, until he can actually provide some sort of EVIDENCE for the existence of a Jewish sect that matches his mythicist theory, all his claims about how many more ways that various unknown Jewish sects supposedly diverged from “mainstream” Judaism is completely vacuous.

Originally Posted by Richard Carrier

(4) This is a good example of what I mean: "All Jews agreed about the characteristic singularity of God: the god of Judaism was the only God for every Jew."-- This is technically false depending on how you define the word "god.” Jews were in fact henotheistic...

Carrier is splitting hairs here. Henotheism is practically indistinguishable from modern conceptions of monotheism to the untrained eye.

Originally Posted by Richard Carrier

This gets us back to item (1) above. If introducing Jesus as an object of worship was anathema to all Jews, it would be anathema whether Jesus was historical or not...

How can Carrier honestly not see the difference between worshiping a celestial deity in a henotheistic culture and deifying an executed criminal? It is one thing to anticipate a mysteriously disappearing/reappearing messianic cosmic being, it is quite another to claim that the messiah had ALREADY DIED. My entire line of argument here is that Jewish messianic claims that in one way or another hinge on the expectation of a celestial being cannot be reconciled with the Christian affirmation about a crucified HUMAN Jesus.

I will skip #6–7. I think Carrier and I both substantially agree that Christianity was a Jewish sect, and that it conformed plausibly to various elements of Second Temple Judaism.

Originally Posted by Richard Carrier

(8) My argument does not depend on the "possibility" that Christianity was a radical fringe group of Jews, but on the demonstrable fact of it.

Carrier here glosses my argument, which bears repeating, and with emphasis:

Originally Posted by Textcritic

His argument depends on the possibility that there were radical fringe groups of Jews under the veneer of everything we know about Second Temple Judaism, who harboured thoughts and dreams about a dying-rising-saviour god.

Note the important missing piece here: the issue is not the existence of a “radical fringe group”, but the kind of radical fringe group in Palestine with anticipation for a dying-rising-saviour god; most certainly not one who fit the Christian claims of a crucified human Jesus.

I can concede that there is a POSSIBILITY of the sort of group Carrier envisions under the qualification that practically anything is possible. However, all the evidence at our disposal argues against the PROBABILITY that Carrier is correct, and he can marshal no actual evidence to support it.

Originally Posted by Richard Carrier

I direct you back to item (1). I am here being argued against like this: the Christian teachings were too radical for Jesus to be mythical, because such radical teachings would never succeed among Jews; oh, and by the way, there was nothing radical about Christianity and Carrier is just inventing a teapot in space by saying so. What? Besides those two arguments contradicting each other, the first argument is illogical (remember: point (1)).

Wrong. The argument is thus: the Christian teachings DID NOT succeed among most Jews, because they in no way conformed to any recognisable Jewish messianic expectation, and were especially troubling on the point of Jesus’s humanness and his disgrace as an executed criminal; Carrier is just inventing a teapot in space by suggesting that we can’t know everything about every Second Temple Jewish sect, ergo, a dying-rising-saviour god makes the most plausible historical sense in light of the total vacuum of available evidence. Key here is the assertion on my part that my reconstruction of an historical Jesus is highly plausible, whereas Carrier's assertion is extremely implausible given everything that we do know about Second Temple Judaism, and first cent. Greco-Roman Palestine

Originally Posted by Richard Carrier

(9) A possibiliter fallacy is saying (A) "it's possible that x, therefore probably x." But I am arguing (B) "x makes the evidence more probable than ~x; therefore, probably x." The teapot argument in this reply suggests this is not understood. It would seem I am being mistaken for arguing (A), when in fact I am arguing (B). And indeed I extensively explain in my book Proving History that the only valid way to argue is (B) and I even elaborately explain why we can't use arguments like (A). So it's perverse to have me accused of doing the opposite.

Carrier’s “evidence” that I have seen marshalled in every place is either late or dubious. I will get to few of those sources cited here, but Thom Stark has already provided a withering critique of Carrier’s use of Rabbinic Jewish literature here. Anyone interested in this discussion really should take the time to read Stark’s long and detailed refutation. On this point, I will only note that I defer to Stark, who has a better handle on the rabbinics than I do. Oh, and consequently, he has a MUCH, MUCH better handle on these sources than Carrier, who—as far as I can tell, and unlike both Stark and myself—holds no formal training in Hebrew or Aramaic.

Originally Posted by Richard Carrier

(10) "Unfortunately, outside of the odd mythicist interpretation of the early Christian writings, there is not one shred of documented evidence for such a movement or doctrine." -- This is multiply false. There are not only documents that contain evidence of minimal Doherty mythicism (e.g., the Ascension of Isaiah, 1 Peter, Ignatian anti-Docetism, Irenaeus on the heresies of Jesus being born in heaven, etc.)

These are all either very late first or second century, and that IS important because it ignores the fact that the BEST sources to be found in Paul, in the Gospel of Mark, and in Q are all much more consistent in their affirmation of Jesus’ humanness, and his actual execution. These speak powerfully to his actual existence.

Originally Posted by Richard Carrier

...but there are documents whose contents make much less sense on any other theory (e.g., Hebrews, 1 Clement). The whole array of evidence I shall present in my next book, so there is no need to debate it now. We should just wait for that.

I wish I could say that I am looking forward to it, but like Carrier’s other self-published books, I will likely miss it because I am unwilling to buy my own copy, and also because I have no doubt that my university library will not concede to purchase a copy themselves. In any case, it would be of immanent help if Carrier would provide bibliographic information for his forthcoming publication, and even of more help still if he published more frequently on these matters in more widely read and recognised academic journals.

Originally Posted by Richard Carrier

Certainly, the merits of mythicism do hinge on whether it makes the contents of documents like these more probable than historicity does. So that is actually where the debate lies. But insisting there is nothing to debate is just inserting one's head in the sand.

It doesn’t really though until there is an actual debate that is taking place. While I recognise that these things do in fact change over time, at present Carrier is among an extremely small group of proponents of a theory about the emergence of Christianity that has virtually NO traction in early Christian studies. The reason for this is that the mythicists including Carrier have proven time and again that they do not know how to correctly handle the sources. Upon reviewing his CV, it is important to note that his publications on this topic tend not to appear in any of the more widely read peer-reviewed literature that would actually be noticed by scholars on the historical Jesus. How does Carrier expect anyone to engage with his ideas if he is unwilling to present them in a forum that will actually attract the attention of the experts whom he seeks to refute?

Carrier depends quite heavily on his interpretation of a text from the Dead Sea Scrolls, 11Q13, or “11QMelchizedek”. Because this is so important to his theory, and because he so badly misunderstands this text, but also, because the Dead Sea Scrolls happen to be my own field of specialisation, I have devoted a lengthy and detailed response that will follow in a separate post.