Yes he did eventually. But the point is that even when he espoused it, he didn’t suffer professionally at all. There’s no evidence whatsoever for the claim that mythicist scholars stay silent out of fear of professional persecution. This is the same claim made by ID proponents to explain why so few scientists support ID. Members of fringe groups typically appeal to unsubstantiated claims of persecution or conspiracy in order to explain why their wacky ideas aren’t accepted more widely. The alternative (that their ideas might just be plain wrong), is unacceptable to them.
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Yes I agree completely. I have myself pointed in this discussion to G.A. Wells as a professor who, while he was a mythicist, never had his employment threatened.
On another note, I am actually quite surprised at the rate of which mythicists are, well, dying. You gave this list of mythicists in one of your other comments: Professor George Wells, Professor Robert Price, Professor Michael Martin, Professor Alvar Ellegård, Dr Jerry Coyne, Dr Richard Carrier, Dr Jay Raskin.
I found out that George Wells died this year, Michael Martin died in 2015, and Alvar Ellegård died in 2008. DM Murdock also died in 2015 because of breast cancer. Robert Price is also, in all honesty, in terrible health. This is quite interesting. It looks like while Carrier is prophesying that the heels of academia will eventually bow to him, the mythicist numbers are actually running astonishingly dry very quickly.
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Wow, I didn’t know Michael Martin had died. I knew about Wells and Murdock (who sadly put her faith in pseudoscience rather than professional medical care; symptomatic of how dangerous her beliefs were), but I didn’t know Price was on his last legs.
Contact me here and I will see what I can do in terms of getting you a copy:
https://danielngullotta.com/contact/
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I highlight this on page 326 in footnote 50.
You said that I had little investigation into the topic based on my bringing up Jesus praying alone while the disciples were with him. (and this is what the greek text says, per NET Bible notes " tn Grk “the disciples were with him, and he asked them, saying.”.
And you chose this bit while seemingly ignoring the other and bigger point of the passage. To me, the biggest hint of mythicism in the Gospels (laying aside the Epistles) is the idea (totally nonsensical) that Jesus’ contemporaries thought Jesus was risen John the Baptist and Jesus telling his disciples to not tell anyone about him. Even as Jesus is alleged to be healing and raising the dead, and becoming greatly famous, this is what the people think about him?
It makes no sense at all, except maybe to a religious person who must, at all cost, believe in the historicity.
Edit: For a brief summary of issues with historicity, check out Earl Doherty’s top 20 texts that make little sense IF Jesus was a historical person
Yes it looks like Martin has died. Price is, well, really obese and he’s in his 60’s. Obesity (and morbid obesity) is supposed to take 10-20 years off of your life, so Price may not kick the bucket who knows when.
I rethought some of my comments and I have decided that mythicists aren’t exactly all dying off – certainly the ones with respectable academic positions have all but vanished. But, in general, all the principal figures of mythicism are still alive. Carrier, Price, Fitzgerald, Doherty, Neil Godfrey, and Thomas Brodie. To be fair, Brodie basically gave up arguing about mythicism in 2014.
Fitzgerald, Doherty, and Godfrey are pretty much all examples of internet mythicists with no relevant qualifications (I don’t think Doherty even completed a degree), and no influence outside their echo chamber. Brodie, Carrier, and Price have relevant qualifications and peer reviewed publications, they’re in academia. But they don’t have a lot of company.
I’ve already given my thoughts here. John the Baptist was a man of great fame and, we must remember, Jesus was either John’s disciple during his lifetime or at least a companion of John in his ministry, and so the two were closely associated and even had the same messages they preached. During John’s ministry, he eventually upset Herod in a way that lead to his execution. So, now John is dead and Jesus takes over the ministry and the fame, and he starts preaching His message (effectively the same message as John’s in a number of ways). So, the people know John is dead, but now have heard of this new wondrous preacher perhaps saying the same things. These rumors spread, and while people don’t really know who exactly Jesus is yet, they mistake the message and think to themselves “Wait! I thought he died!” It’s not at all implausible. I’ve already commented on Peter’s confession and how it plays in to the larger context of Mark’s message. I don’t see either of these features as being problematic, and even if you do, you don’t need to accept them. Just consider them ahistorical. These are only peripheral facts in the Gospels, and rejecting them wouldn’t even get you one step closer to having a reason to question Jesus crucifixion or other things about him.
The fact that Paul and the Gospels don’t communicate about the same things in their accounts is hardly strange. The Gospels are known to ancient historians as ancient biographies, and they were only concerned with documenting the life of Jesus in its most important years: the ministry, preaching, crucifixion and resurrection (some accounts include infancy narratives and Luke says something of Jesus at the age of 12). Paul, on the other hand, has a completely different thing on his mind. Paul is addressing the concerns of the early church. He’s addressing their concerns about the gentile/Jewish division, he’s talking about divorce and living without sexual sin, etc, etc, etc, and the fact that everyone needs to believe in the resurrected Lord Jesus Christ. On a number of occasions, however, the Gospels and letters of Paul do clearly note the same, earthly facts about Jesus, including Jesus’ biological descent from King David, his crucifixion by authorities, his burial, the fact that he had twelve disciples, Jesus’ Passover meal with the disciples, and a few other things. So, while the concerns of the Gospels and Paul are in two different places, on a number of occasions they clearly converge and they’re talking about the same Jesus on Earth. There is no “sound of silence”.
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That’s definitely true, but although academics don’t care about what they write, their influence in online mythicism cannot be underestimated. It was Doherty, himself, who lead to Carrier’s conversion. To be quite honest, I haven’t heard a peep out of Doherty or Fitzgerald (who hasn’t written a thing on his blog since 2012) for a while now. Brodie also seems to have jumped out of the sinking ship in 2014, albeit not renouncing his mythicism.
Price is still around but not as much ever since Ehrman strangled him in a debate. Carrier and Godfrey seem to be the active ones, but as you said Godfrey is basically in his own state of irrelevance. The mythicist movement looks like it’s on its last legs. I didn’t know Price had any actual publications.
Wait a minute! There’s also Raphael Lataster we forgot about. Apparently he now has a PhD in Religious Studies from the University of Syndey. What do you think about this figure?
Dr. Carrier brought it to my attention that Raphael Lataster has earned his Ph.D. (Studies in Religion) from the University of Sydney. When this article was in review, Lataster had not received his Ph.D. (this took roughly two years to finish being reviewed, plus the back and forth editing fun). I was not aware he had been awarded it, therefore, footnote 13 is outdated.
We have no clue. We can say what the earliest Christian traditions say on the subject, but in reality, no idea and we have way of knowing.
Hi Daniel, I contacted Richard Carrier to see if he would be interested in providing his input on this forum. Richard said that he is in the process of a blog response to your review of his book and that he very rarely has the time for forums anymore. But, if you invite him to join this forum to discuss his blog response (after it’s out), he said that he will accept the invite. FYI.
Yes, I do not have much time for forums as well, but as my article is behind a paywall, and knew that people would be interested in it, I wanted to make sure people could contact me to get a copy. I have no doubt Dr. Carrier will have thoughts on my response. I am not sure how or if a discussion will go forward, but thank you for the invite. As I said before, people can contact me here: https://danielngullotta.com/contact/
Two words: confirmation bias.
I would just like to make an addition here. Earlier, @SuperBigV complained about the lack of mentions of the earthly Jesus in Paul. I think my initial comments sufficed to explain this:
The fact that Paul and the Gospels don’t communicate about the same things in their accounts is hardly strange. The Gospels are known to ancient historians as ancient biographies, and they were only concerned with documenting the life of Jesus in its most important years: the ministry, preaching, crucifixion and resurrection (some accounts include infancy narratives and Luke says something of Jesus at the age of 12). Paul, on the other hand, has a completely different thing on his mind. Paul is addressing the concerns of the early church. He’s addressing their concerns about the gentile/Jewish division, he’s talking about divorce and living without sexual sin, etc, etc, etc, and the fact that everyone needs to believe in the resurrected Lord Jesus Christ. On a number of occasions, however, the Gospels and letters of Paul do clearly note the same, earthly facts about Jesus, including Jesus’ biological descent from King David, his crucifixion by authorities, his burial, the fact that he had twelve disciples, Jesus’ Passover meal with the disciples, and a few other things. So, while the concerns of the Gospels and Paul are in two different places, on a number of occasions they clearly converge and they’re talking about the same Jesus on Earth. There is no “sound of silence”.
At this moment, I’m reading Bart Ehrman’s The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot (Oxford University Press), and Ehrman, before the mythicist issue came up, seems to have come across this exact thing. After listing a number of things Paul does clearly say about the earthly Jesus (pg. 123), Ehrman goes on to explore why Paul is not more interested. In the end of his investigation (which spans from pp. 123-125), Ehrman concludes:
This—at least in part—is why Paul hardly mentions other aspects of Jesus’ life. They don’t really matter to him. What really mattered was Christ’s death. That’s why when Paul writes to the Corinthians he can say with some pride that “I knew nothing among you except for Christ, and him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2). And that’s why he can later remind his Corinthian congregation the message he had preached as having primary importance:
For I delivered over to you as the most important matters what I also received, that Christ died on behalf of our sins, in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he was buried; and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the Twelve, then to more than five hundred others at one time. (1 Cor. 15:3–5)
It was Christ’s death and resurrection—not his birth, not his life, not his miracles, not his teachings—that brought salvation. For Paul, these were the only things that ultimately mattered. (pg. 125)
Ehrman concludes that Paul, besides the fact that he was addressing the early church concerns in the first place, was first and foremost taken with the importance of Jesus crucifixion and resurrection, and so consistently focused on these in his writings at the, it seems, neglect of some of the other of Jesus earthly acts. This is why Jesus earthly acts are only mentioned on occasion and not in the bulk of Paul’s discussion on Jesus or why he does not mention aspects of Jesus life found in the Gospels that could be useful to him here or there.
Ehrman’s book is available in a digitized form here:
For the record, the issue is slightly different than Paul failing to mention earthly Jesus. Paul does not seem to be aware of a distinction between his own Apostleship and that of the original disciples of Jesus!
http://jesuspuzzle.humanists.net/supp06.htm
In 1 Corinthians 9:1 Paul asks plaintively: “Am I not an apostle? Did I not see Jesus our Lord?” It would seem that for Paul the mark of the true apostle is the reception of the proper visionary revelation and authority from God. In 2 Corinthians 10 to 12, Paul defends his apostleship and compares himself to unnamed rivals (they are not from the Jerusalem group) who are competing for the Corinthians’ allegiance: “Someone is convinced, is he, that he belongs to Christ? Let him think again, and reflect that we belong to Christ as much as he does” (10:7). And he goes on in 11:4 to reveal the source of all these competing messages and claims to legitimacy:
For if someone comes who proclaims another Jesus . . . if you receive a spirit different from the spirit already given to you, or a gospel different from the gospel you have already accepted . . .
Paul operates in a world of perceived revelation from God, populated by self-appointed apostles who learn about the Christ, and formulate their own interpretations of him, through the Spirit.
In all of his arguments over the legitimacy of his position, Paul never addresses the issue in this way: “Yes, I know others were appointed by Jesus in his earthly ministry, but the way in which I was called is just as worthy . . .” Had there been such a thing as appointment by Jesus, can we believe that this, or a link to those who had been so appointed, would not be the ever-present benchmark by which all apostles were measured? Could Paul possibly have ignored such a standard throughout the debates in which he engages concerning apostolic legitimacy? In fact, Paul’s arguments reject the very idea that there could be any deficiency of qualification on his part. And the implication of 1 Corinthians 9:1 is that, since his “seeing” of the Lord is to be regarded as legitimizing his apostleship and this “seeing” was entirely visionary, the legitimacy of the others he is comparing himself to, which includes the Jerusalem apostles, is based on the same measure, namely visionary revelation.
If I may ask, why is the issue of Jesus’ historicity important to you? To be honest, it makes little difference to me whether Jesus was historical or not. I’m leaning (relatively strongly) towards him being a mythical figure that was later historisized. If I’m proven wrong, and if Jesus truly was historical, this will not shatter my worldview. What about you? If Jesus was a myth, what kind of an effect will it have on your worldview?
This argument seems to be another removal of the Pauline texts from what they actually say. Paul basically just says “I’m a real Christian true, I have the correct gospel and I got it from Jesus Himself!” To claim Paul’s argument is that “the only way one can be a true Christian is to experience a revelation from the celestial Christ which I have received” would not only be claiming something never found in Paul’s epistles to be part of Paul’s ideology, it would be to twist Paul’s words.
At this point, you need to abandon this ‘jesuspuzzle.com’ website, apparently controlled by Earl Doherty. It’s obviously a chaos of logic and you seem to have been taken in to every word on it. Why do you read the mythicists instead of real historians? The only real puzzle on that website is the fact that the front page says “Age of Reason” in big letters on the top.
Your worldview would not be shattered, perhaps, but I find that mythicism is in fact not a promulgation of logic and arguments, but in fact a product of an ideological worldview. As Ehrman says, most mythicists are really just trying to blow Christianity out of the water. I, myself, am a Christian. It would be pretty problematic if Jesus didn’t exist, but of course, it would also be pretty problematic for my worldview if the Earth was flat. I deny these claims, obviously not for ideological purposes, but because of the overwhelming absurdities and nonsense they cause rise to and the lengths that the people who support it have to travel in order to make their claims feasible, seeming to trip over every time they try.
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No, Paul is talking Apostleship, not just ‘mere Christianity’. And he does not seem aware of the earthly discipleship where the 11 disciples were coached by the Lord Jesus himself!
NASB 2 Cor. 11:5 For I consider myself not in the least inferior to the most eminent apostles. 6 But even if I am unskilled in speech, yet I am not so in knowledge; in fact, in every way we have made this evident to you in all things.
NASB 2 Cor. 11:21 To my shame I must say that we have been weak by comparison. But in whatever respect anyone else is bold—I speak in foolishness—I am just as bold myself. 22 Are they Hebrews? So am I. Are they Israelites? So am I. Are they descendants of Abraham? So am I. 23 Are they servants of Christ?—I speak as if insane—I more so; in far more labors, in far more imprisonments, beaten times without number, often in danger of death.
It would be easy for someone to say… your opponents spent time with a flesh and blood Jesus and you never had the same experience. Jesus himself picked the 12, and you, Paul, only saw a vision, etc… And yet, Paul is not aware of this argument.
Having said this, we can agree to disagree. There is probably little to no reason for me to continue on this thread. I take a hit and run approach to these forums 
IF a topic interests me, I chime in, but, being a single dissenter, it’s difficult to provide detailed responses to many of the posters here. I wish you the best. Keep your Christian faith if it helps you.
No, Paul is talking Apostleship, not just ‘mere Christianity’. And he does not seem aware of the earthly discipleship where the 11 disciples were coached by the Lord Jesus himself!
Paul is precisely aware that the twelve disciples were coached by Jesus himself, that is precisely why he has to defend himself as an apostle despite the fact that he had never met Jesus. This is why he goes to great lengths to demonstrate his apostleship, and even goes to the disciples themselves to confirm that he is preaching the same gospel that they are, without distinction.
Indeed, the very idea that Paul didn’t know that Jesus had the twelve disciples is contradicted by the very fact that he mentions them in 1 Corinthians 15:5. Furthermore, Paul is aware of Jesus’ own brother, James, as he recounts Galatians 1:19, which is as Gullotta notes, the Achilles heel of mythicism if anything. Even Carrier has to calculate it as “evidence for” Jesus in his Bayesian nonsense calculations, but denies that his thesis can’t survive in light of it. This is not some sort of spiritual brother, as Gullotta’s argument shows, including the facts that 1) Only James is ever singled out as the ‘brother of the Lord’, 2) His influence as a pillar of the early church is unexplainable without acknowledging his familial ties with Jesus, since he otherwise is not one of the twelve disciples and had a rather late Christophany, and 3) All other early Christian literature and tradition tells us Jesus had several familial brothers, including one named James. There are other reasons, but this is enough to show James was the brother of Jesus biologically, not spiritually.
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