Continuing my analysis of Carrier’s response now. Before I continue, I must note the importance of publication. Carrier’s responses seem continuously absurd to me in light of Gullotta’s response (indeed, with Gullotta’s response, I consider mythicism greatly more unlikely than I ever have), but there is something important to note. Reading Carrier earlier, it is as if he has been literally begging scholars to respond to him in peer-review. Now, it has been done in fact, Gullotta has read Carrier’s book (Carrier disingenuously claims in some spaces in his response that Gullotta skipped over some parts of his book) and has published an extensive reply to a number of his points. If Carrier’s arguments do not become strong enough to actually get published in a journal in response to Gullotta, this is where mythicism ends. His blog response is quite irrelevant since no scholar is expected to read or respond to points made in an online blog.
To further note, Carrier also claimed that there is now one peer-reviewed publication for his thesis (by Raphael Lataster) and one against (Gullotta). This is false. Christina Petterson also has a critical review in a peer-reviewed publication. Carrier calls it “evangelistic” which is ridiculous, he tries to not count it because, well, who knows. Perhaps he thinks shes biased. On that account, Lataster’s positive book review (3 pages long, shorter than Christina’s) also can’t count, since Lataster is himself heavily invested into mythicism. Either they both count or they don’t, in the end there’s more critical review of Carrier in peer-review.
-Jesus crucified by Romans or demons?
Again, in light of Gullotta’s critiques, Carrier is thrown into another state of uncertainty. After examining some of the arguments, he concludes this: “But I argue for something else being what Paul could have meant. And there is no evidence to decide between us.” Carrier says that Paul is just vague and there is no evidence from these texts one way or another.
For a little background, 1 Corinthians 2 says that the rulers of this age killed Jesus. A clear indicator of historicity, right? Not so, says Carrier. Carrier claims that the rulers of this age are actually the demons and they killed Jesus not here, but in the celestial realm, and so Paul isn’t talking about anything historical. Gullotta’s response is saying basically, “well, no Carrier, that’s not correct, you’re inventing an artifical distinction between the demons and the earthly authorities that didn’t exist in Paul’s time, and in fact Paul means what everyone else did in that time when he said what he said: the earthly authorities, controlled by the demons, killed Jesus”. Carrier throws up his hands after some analysis and says that it might go either way, who knows. Quite honestly, I’ve never seen Carrier rescind so much. Either way, I still find Gullota vastly more persuasive, “rulers of this age” was not a specific idiom, Paul is just talking about the rulers who happen to rule over this age, and so it is the rulers themselves who are the point of discussion, who are, as Paul notes, the Roman authorities as he says in Romans 13 (Carrier’s words on this passage rely on a distinction between the “rulers of this age” phrase and simply “rulers”, which in fact doesn’t exist since “rulers of this age” is not an idiom but just a reference to the rulers who happen to rule over this age). Since there was in fact no distinction between the earthly authorities and demonic powers in Paul’s time, and Paul’s writings sound exactly like what everyone else in his time was saying, it seems entirely obvious that Paul was in fact speaking of earthly rulers of this age killing Jesus who were being controlled by the devil.
Carrier also seems to want to ignore the early interpretations of Christians and non-Christians of Paul and says using them is “circular reasoning”. But this isn’t the case. If literally everyone according to our evidence read Paul in that time period to mean the same thing, that Jesus was crucified by humans, then that means what it probably means: this was in fact the correct interpretation, otherwise Paul was really, really, really bad at getting his views across. But Paul was a very educated Jew at the time and it looks as if his writings are rather very straight forward in general. There’s no reason to come up with a convoluted re-explanation of everything, it makes a lot of sense to say what the text seems to mean is exactly what it means.
-James the brother of the Lord
Here is where Carrier starts acting more like Carrier again. He calls Gullotta incompetent and dogmatic. Funnily enough, Gullotta hasn’t even been in academia for a decade and has already blown past Carrier when it comes to actual academic publications. Nevertheless, on the most important point in the debate, Carrier’s arguments shrivel. Carrier claims that there is a difference between James in Galatians 1 and James in Galatians 2 – they’re different James’s. This sounds just ridiculous to me. Besides the sheer absurdity of the claim, James is mentioned directly alongside Peter in Galatians 1. Then, in Galatians 2, when Paul is still talking about the exact same thing, he again mentions James alongside Peter. It’s beyond obvious that these are the same people – just read the text, as Carrier would say.
Carrier claims that the phrase “brother of the Lord” is simply a phrase for a rank-and-file Christian, but as Gullotta points out, this is refuted by the fact that the phrase “brother of the Lord” is only used on a single person in all of Paul’s letters: James. All other Christians, as Gullotta points out, are just called “brother”, “apostle”, “fellow worker in Christ”, “worker in the Lord”, etc. James is the only person ever singled out as the “brother of the Lord”, almost too much of a coincidence when we learn that all early Christian traditions held that Jesus had several brothers, one of them precisely named James, and in fact we know that James is an important brother of Jesus from Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews XX.9.1. Carrier has argued this is an interpolation, but Tim O’Neill has refuted this. I haven’t seen a peep out of Carrier on O’Neill’s arguments, even though I have seen that he has been directed to this post on one of his blog posts by his followers. Mark and Matthew say the same thing, but Carrier just says they are “invented” and leaves it at that, one of his fantastical non-answers. At the end, he counts this as evidence for historicity, perhaps implicitly admitting that his thesis has to go to ridiculous stretches and lengths to make any sense out of it (and as I see it, still fails).
-Homeric Jesus
Now, while most of the other arguments are quite lengthy, this one is pretty simple. Carrier completely concedes that his following of MacDonald’s thesis of Jesus being based on some Homeric characters is faulty. Carrier’s only complaint though is that “I spent over a hundred pages arguing the Gospels are mythical, the Homeric thesis is less than 5% of it!” OK then. Let’s grant this he has other arguments. In any case, Carrier’s actual discussion on Homer is refuted. That is what Gullotta was going for, and Carrier admits he entirely succeeded. So this one, everyone admits, goes to Gullotta.
-Rank Raglan
Carrier says he thinks this is a good reference class, although this wasn’t Gullotta’s point. Gullotta’s point is: why not also test Jesus with other, more rigid and comprehensive reference classes out there? Gullotta makes the point clear, they’d never serve Carrier’s thesis since all of them would show Jesus existed. That’s the first problem. Secondly, Gullotta makes it clear that Carrier has in fact heavily modified the Rank Raglan classes to make it fit better with Jesus. Indeed, some modifications Carrier makes are precisely to stick Jesus into the list. Carrier claims he is “improving it”, but I don’t think any serious taker would believe that. Carrier has obviously dishonestly modified Rank Raglan in a very rigid way so that Jesus fits in better. If one takes the Rank Raglan as it was originally proposed, without Carrier’s biased modifications, Jesus would never qualify the myth type, nor would Jesus qualify the myth type with any other reference class available. Stunningly, Jesus only fits the myth type when we consider Carrier’s modified Rank Raglan reference class, which is obviously beyond coincidence – Carrier has dishonestly modified the reference class to make Jesus fit in. Jesus doesn’t, I’m pretty sure that’s that when it comes to RR.
In the end, Gullotta seems to have made some definitive contributions to this discussion:
-he has shown that virtually everyone named Jesus at the time was historical and virtually no angel had this name, in fact angels had a distinctive El in their name
-he has, along with others, definitively removed MacDonald’s thesis and the RR class from this debate (any future discussions will simply be scholars restating that Carrier has basically just changed the class to make Jesus fit better)
-Gullotta has made the highly important observation that in Paul’s time, there was no actual distinction between the earthly authorities and the demonic authorities, every Jew “knew” that the demons controlled the Romans, and so Carrier’s distinction is artifical and imposing a modern reading on an ancient text
-Gullotta has shown that Hagar/Sarah in Galatians 4 have nothing to do with the birth of Jesus, they’re simply describing the relationship with God, Israel, gentiles, etc
Gullotta has made more important contributions, but to say the least, even if this does not end the discussion on mythicism, this at least plunges the first spear into it. Even Carrier on the first two or three issues of discussion has rescinded to claiming that we are simply “completely uncertain” on whether this or that point goes towards the historical/mythical Jesus theories, arguments he earlier was using in support of mythicism. Gullotta has irreversibly damaged mythicism.