Richard Carrier’s work has been on my to-be-read list for quite some time. The Bayes’ theorem aspect of his approach had kind of deterred me for a while, but I finally took the plunge and dug into his tome, On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt when I saw that his follow-up work, The Obsolete Paradigm of a Historical Jesus kind of made it required prior reading.
There are two Christianities at play in the modern United States culture wars: mainline Protestant Democrats vs. Evangelical Republicans. This is a fight between “red-letter” Christians who emphasize the Beatitudes and the nonviolent resistance of Jesus’ earthly ministry vs. those who seek to build an oppressive government on earth with the heavenly Christ as king. Christ incarnate or Christ glorified.
What Carrier shows, however, is that the “heavenly” Christ is all that the early church knew. The authorship of the epistles of Paul and the Letter to the Hebrews predates the writing of the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. As such we need to read the New Testament out of order, in order to understand the very first form of Christianity. It looks a lot like a “cult” that modern Orthodox sects would label as heresy.
The Bayesian approach Carrier takes looks at probabilities that any given strange passage would look like it does if historicity were true, and how it would look if it were understood as myth, and assigns values in either case, so as to weigh the odds against each other. He states that there is a lot of bad scholarship in either camp, people coming with prior assumptions and biases and agendas. “[E]xercise extreme caution when reading or listening to myth advocates” (p. 29). But the conclusion is that mythicism isn’t the bogeyman it’s made out to be. Scholars are just trying to get to the root of what the first Christians must have actually believed.
In ancient Greek and Jewish cosmology, we had the “air”, which is everything between us and the moon (they didn’t know the atmosphere was so thin), where all kinds of spirits live, and then the firmament, above which are seven levels of heaven. The Ascension of Isaiah is an early Christian extra-biblical text which shows how people believed one could ascend and descend through the heavens. One of these levels is where the Garden of Eden was believed to be; so you could have “humans” there as well as physical things like trees and dirt where it was believed that Adam and Eve were returned after death to be buried. The idea here is that Jesus was crucified not on earth, but in the firmament, where he was buried and resurrected as well.
Background knowledge
He begins laying out “background knowledge” already established by existing historical scholarship. There was a lot of syncretism and diversity in the religions of the first century, but the surviving sects are the ones that preserved the documents so we don’t know a great deal about the “mystery cults” of the period. But “contrary to common assumption, innovation and syncretism … was actually typical of early-first-century Judaism, even in Palestine, and thus Christianity looks much less like an aberration and more like just another innovating, syncretistic Jewish cult” (pp. 107-108). So Greek myths about legendary heroes could have combined with biblical prophesy to produce what became Christianity.
Isaiah 53: 5-7 (NRSV)
But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have all turned to our own way, and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.
Zechariah 3:1-2 in the Septuagint, which is the version of the Bible that the first Christians had, is here translated to English:
And the Lord showed me Jesus the high priest standing before the angel of the Lord, and the Devil stood on his right hand to resist him. And the Lord said to the Devil, ”The Lord rebuke you, O Devil, even the Lord that has chosen Jerusalem rebuke you: behold! is not this as a brand plucked from the fire?”
“Zechariah is commanded in a vision to place the crown of kingship upon ‘Jesus’ (Zech. 6.11) and to say immediately upon doing so that ‘Jehovah declares’ that this Jesus is ‘the man named “Rising” and he shall rise up from his place below and he shall build the House of the Lord’.” (p. 123)
So we have Jesus (Joshua in Hebrew) the high priest, interceding for us in the heavenly places, who can be “seen” not with human eyes but in visions, who “speaks” to us through scripture.
[A] celestial being named Jesus Christ Rising, a high priest of God, in opposition to Satan, who is wrongly executed even though innocent, and dies to atone for all sins, is buried and subsequently ‘raised’, exalted to the highest station in heaven, appointed king with supreme heavenly power by God, and who will then build God’s house (the church). That sounds exactly like Christianity. And all from connecting just three passages in the OT that already have distinctive overlapping similarities. Such a coincidence cannot be ignored… (pp. 125-126)
Messianic expectations
Indeed, messianic apocalypticism was intense at Qumran, where the keepers of the [Dead Sea] scrolls were already expecting the imminent end of the world, and attempting different calculations from the timetable provided in the book of Daniel … to predict when the first messiah would come—and many of their calculations came up ‘soon’. The early first century ce was in their prediction window (p. 109).
”[T]he first century had exploded with messianic fervor, to the point that it’s not at all surprising one of these countless new messianic cults would become more successful than the rest…” (p. 114)
They were looking at Isaiah 53 and Daniel 9 “…to put an end to sin…an anointed one (Christ) shall be cut off…” and Zechariah and putting it all together just like rapture-crazy cults do today when they read the news headlines and claim them to be fulfilling the book of Revelation.
I’ve been wondering what was it about the first century that made it a crucial moment for Christ to die for sins and put an end to the temple rituals. It was the appearance of failed promises. It seems as though people believed the control of Rome was a sign or consequence that the Jewish elite were not keeping God’s commandments. They decoded Daniel and Jeremiah and concluded the Messiah would arrive at any moment. Militarily, there was no way to beat Rome. Their armies were invincible. As Carrier observes, “[F]or them only one solution remained: to deny the physical importance of the temple at Jerusalem itself. That would require replacing it, and not with another temple … but with something intangible…” (p., 239)
So did Christians scour the scriptures after the fact to find support for their beliefs? Or did the prophecies serve as inspiration for the religion? According to Carrier, they could have built all of this by reading scripture and taking notes from each other.
Extrabiblical evidence
Secular records are nonexistent. It’s as if Jesus never lived. He wasn’t reported on by secular writers of the time. It’s as if he was placed into history after the fact.
The Babylonian Talmud tells a story about Jesus “Ben Stada”/”Ben Pandera” “the Nazarene,” son of Mary, who was crucified on Passover Eve. Executed under Jannaeus, 100 years earlier than the gospels say.
How can the descendants of the original sect of Christians have come to believe Jesus lived and died a hundred years before our Gospels say he did? It is nearly impossible to imagine how such a doctrine could have developed. Unless there was no historical Jesus. Then he could be placed in history wherever each sect desired. In other words, if originally Jesus was not placed in history, then when he was placed in history—after the sects had split, ideologically and geographically—each sect could place him differently, developing their own myths in accord with their own needs and creativity (pp. 423-424).
Some Christians said Jesus died during the reign of Claudius, not Tiberias. So why the differences? Carrier calls the placement of a mythical demigod into history “euhemerization.” Romulus was placed into history at the founding of Rome. So Jesus Christ was placed into history at the founding of the church, “Jesus, then, would most naturally fit into history ‘at the founding of the Church’. From the letters of Paul we know that that was most likely the late 30s CE” (p. 426).
Clement of Rome
Around the time Luke and Acts were being composed, the bishop of Rome wrote a letter to the church at Corinth. It never cites Jesus or uses examples from his earthly ministry—it doesn’t treat him historically at all. He says the Corinthians “witnessed” the suffering of Jesus “before your very eyes,” but of course none of them were there. This is a generation after the fact. Witnessing his suffering “was something one could do metaphorically, inwardly, in the imagination” (p. 455). When Clement writes of Jesus’ passion, he is citing Isaiah 53. And his quotations attributed to Jesus are typically from the Psalms.
The Gospels
Carrier says that the literary composition of the gospels is “so thoroughly mytho-symbolic” that it argues against their historical value.
My favorite part of the book is Carrier’s study of the gospel of Mark. He lauds Mark as having an “elegant structure,” “an artful literary creation, start to finish” (p. 601). He identifies triads, ring structures, and layered patterns. History doesn’t fit patterns like this. “The extent of literary artifice here evinces considerable genius. This is what myth looks like” (p. 605).
He also addresses one of my pet peeves: “The ceaseless incomprehension of the disciples…is wholly unrealistic. No real human beings would ever be that dense or take so long to understand what Jesus was saying and doing, or learn nothing in between episodes…” (p. 597)
There is symbolism in the death of Christ during the Passover: “[T]he whole choice of what day (and even year) in which to have Jesus crucified is decided by literary symbolism, not historical plausibility. Indeed, since executions would not be performed on holy days, Mark’s narrative has no historical credibility” (p. 612).
Matthew rewrote (“redacted”) Mark to “correct” its “too-Gentile-friendly argument” (p. 649). He sort of butchers the art form in the process, though he, too, makes an effort to include his own literary patterns. Luke is the first gospel to portray itself as history, but it likewise is a redaction of Matthew and Mark. (There is no Q source in Carrier’s view.) Then we have John, the gospel of “signs.”
On “bearing witness”
John talks about providing evidence (‘bearing witness’) over thirty-one times, half of those littering three extended discourses on the subject. There is nothing like this in any of the previous Gospels. The authors of John were clearly maniacal on the subject and eager to beat that dead horse to a pulp, thereby ‘improving’ on the previous Gospels who didn’t do this but even badmouthed the whole idea. This also makes John the most ruthlessly propagandistic, and thus the most thoroughly untrustworthy, of all the canonical Gospels (p. 685).
The “Beloved Disciple”
I was taught growing up that this was John himself. But Carrier cites Floyd Filson who established this character was meant to be Lazarus. Which should be obvious from the parallels between reclining at the table in John 12 and in John 13 at the Last Supper. Also John 21 where there is a rumor that the beloved disciple would never die, this only makes sense when considering the fact that, well, Lazarus is virtually immortal at this point. The trouble is, Lazarus never existed according to the previous three gospels. Luke 16:31 has a parable with a man dead named Lazarus who does not rise from the dead.
Mark had clearly written when no miracles had yet been imagined for Jesus (thus he had to explain this); as Paul says, no signs were given to the Jews that Jesus was the Christ (1 Cor. 1.22-24; see Chapter 12, §4). Hence even when Mark invents miracles to put in his story as allegories, he makes sure no one other than the disciples ever either notices or talks about them or understands them. Even the witnesses of the empty tomb never tell anyone about it (Mk 16.8).
Matthew had already expanded and corrected this by having Jesus say instead that ‘an evil and adulterous generation seeks a sign’ and therefore ‘there shall no sign be given except the sign of Jonah’ (Mt. 12.39 and 16.4), meaning the resurrection of Jesus. Matthew thus slightly retreats from Mark by allowing one sign—and accordingly, unlike Mark, Matthew actually narrates a resurrected Jesus and makes sure that in his story the Jews ‘know’ about it (the purpose of Mt. 28.11-15). This was not the case before. Matthew is inventing new evidence. The same point was then reinforced by Luke’s repetition of Matthew’s expanded revision of Mark (Lk. 11.29) and by his invention of the parable of Lazarus (Lk. 16.19-31) and the public announcement to the Jews (Acts 2).
John ‘refutes’ this entire sentiment by littering his Gospel with explicitly identified ‘signs’ and by reversing Luke’s parable of Lazarus with an actual tale of Lazarus (Jn 11–12), as I’ll soon demonstrate. Indeed, John’s Jesus fills his ministry with ‘signs’ that ‘manifested his glory’, and it is for this reason ‘his disciples believed in him’ (Jn 2.11), a notion not found in the previous Gospels” (pp. 683-684).
There are a ton of “gospels” discovered that didn’t make it into the canon for obvious reasons. They were “all just made-up stories” (see p. 705). But it turns out the same is true for the ones that did make it in.
The Epistles
Through studying the epistles of Paul, it becomes clear that the gospel itself is not something seen by human eyes and passed on through word-of-mouth eyewitness testimony, but through visions, and searching the scriptures (the Old Testament was all they had), through which Jesus “speaks” to us, just as in 1 Clement.
Dr. Robert Sapolsky says that people with what resembles a mild version of schizophrenia are “schizotypal,” exhibiting social aloofness, overly-concrete interpretation of parables, and “metamagical thinking”, and are and have been treated as shamans in various cultures and times.
As Carrier writes, “Humans are actually biologically predisposed to hallucinate. The neurophysiology of hallucination is built-in and thus must have evolved for some useful function (or as a side-effect of something else that did)” (p. 169) Speaking in tongues, prophecy, spiritual gifts, etc., all prescribed by Paul for the church. It is clear that people with a propensity to hallucinate were given positions of authority. “Schizotypals,” he says, were treated as holy prophets in antiquity. And they gravitated towards cults that would validate them.
In his letter to the Galatians, Paul actually has to persuade his readers that he received the gospel by revelation alone, because the Galatians trusted that more than eyewitness testimony or hearsay. Paul said he was an Apostle because he had seen the Lord (1. Cor 9:1) in the same manner that the other Apostles had. And we know he didn’t see him in the flesh. So for him, there is no apostolic status given to eyewitnesses. He doesn’t even say the other Apostles were eyewitnesses. (The Apostles are never called “disciples” but they are back-ported as disciples when the four gospels were written.)
In addition to revelation, the gospel was learned “according to the scriptures”, not meaning Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, but Isaiah 53 etc. “There simply is no source known to Paul, for him or anyone, but scripture and revelations from his celestial Jesus” (p. 764), the Jesus Christ who died in the heavenly realms as prophesied by the Old Testament.
In one of the earliest pronoucements of the gospel we have, 1 Corinthians 8:6 says that all things were made through Christ. He is the pre-existent Logos, the perfect celestial Adam that Philo says the copy of whom was Adam the father of mankind. If the Logos is able to perform creative acts from the spiritual realm without having to be incarnate, why not the same with his salvific act of dying on the cross?
Philippians 2:5-11 (NRSV) is another early outline of the gospel, and it is compatible with mythicism:
Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross.
Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
Carrier also looks at 1 Peter, a letter he concedes is probably an authentic work of the Peter/Cephas, a “Pillar” of the church, who was known to Paul: “Peter could only quote and paraphrase Isaiah for details of Christ’s suffering rather than recalling what he witnessed” (p. 775).
Likewise, with the author of the book of Hebrews: “The gospel repeatedly emphasized throughout the book of Hebrews is that ‘Jesus the Son of God is the great high priest who has passed through the heavens’” (p. 786) Regarding Hebrews 2:7, Carrier says, “God made Jesus into a ‘lower rank’ [elattoō, ‘diminish; lessen; reduce in rank or influence’] than an ‘angel’ so he could suffer death—but only ‘a little lower’ than angels, a possible hint that he descended only to the sublunar firmament and not all the way to earth.” (pp. 795-796).
Conclusion
There are so-called “heresies,” like Docetism and many others, that seem to align with what the early church believed, which, according to all the evidence, appears to be that there was a heavenly/”firmament” sacrifice of the pre-existent Logos coming “in the likeness of men”, and this was deciphered solely by looking at scriptural prophecy as opposed to witnessing something with your own eyes. Then Docetism seems to have bridged the gap to historicism, which eventually won out and anathematized the previous iterations.
Throughout the book, Carrier keeps repeating, “Since I am arguing a fortiori I will grant them 80% chance,” which I think is beyond generous. But the math still works out in favor of “minimal mythicism” even with his favorably-weighted grading system. The passages regarding Bayesian theory can be a little cumbersome, but it’s easy to skim over these sections. (If Carrier heard me say this he’d say, “Then suggested an alternative!”, to which I don’t have a response… As a reader, I’m just not smart enough for it to not be incredibly boring to me.)
I’m not sure yet whether I will follow up with The Obsolete Paradigm of a Historical Jesus; I need to look into it more. Reviews and a reading of an excerpt seem to be defensiveness and sadness at a lack of academic responses to what he had laid out while hoping for other scholars to dialog with him.
This book satisfied my hunger for Bible study (which I didn’t know I still had!) despite my having grown out of religion entirely. The exegesis which Carrier performs is so much more skillful than all the pastors under whose tutelage I sat over my whole lifetime, and it was refreshing to witness.
Cover image by Jonathan Dick on Unsplash