Richard Carrier addressed in peer-review for the first time

Faith & Science Conversation
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Some of them are out of touch. Richard Carrier (and those like him) distances himself from the crazy mythicism theories.

The situation is similar to the conspiracy theories. On the one hand, there are legitimate conspiracies (such as Operation Northwoods), on the other, there are some crazy ones (in my opinion), such as aliens in Area 51, big foot, etc… Pointing to the latter is often done in order to paint all conspiracy theories as nuts. It’s the same thing you are doing with the mythicists (I feel). Sure there are crazy mythicist theories, but Earl Doherty or Rich Carrier’s theories are not on the same level.

Look, even early Christians (such as Justin Martyr) claimed that Christianity was nothing new to them (and Justin was not a Mythicist!)

And when we say also that the Word, who is the first-birth of God, was produced without sexual union, and that He, Jesus Christ, our Teacher, was crucified and died, and rose again, and ascended into heaven, we propound nothing different from what you believe regarding those whom you esteem sons of Jupiter.
…

And in that we say that He made whole the lame, the paralytic, and those born blind, we seem to say what is very similar to the deeds said to have been done by Æsculapius.

For having heard it proclaimed through the prophets that the Christ was to come, and that the ungodly among men were to be punished by fire, they put forward many to be called sons of Jupiter, under the impression that they would be able to produce in men the idea that the things which were said with regard to Christ were mere marvellous tales, like the things which were said by the poets. And these things were said both among the Greeks and among all nations where they [the demons] heard the prophets foretelling that Christ would specially be believed in; but that in hearing what was said by the prophets they did not accurately understand it, but imitated what was said of our Christ, like men who are in error, we will make plain.

So, According the Justin Martyr, there are similarities between what has bee attributed to Christ (by Christians) and to other deities by their followers, but, Justin explains this by claiming the devil knew all along what the prophesies foretold and copied them with the Greek deities. Ask yourselves. What is more likely? That Justin was right (and that the devils copied prophesies) or that Christ was a construct similar to that of other deities in that era?

And lastly, note that even in the Christian Scripture, there are bits warning Christians not to fellowship with people who deny that Christ has… come in the FLESH!

2 John 1:7 For many deceivers have gone out into the world, those who do not acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh. This is the deceiver and the antichrist.

Bart Ehrman, a Jesus historicist, notes there were Docetists who believed Jesus did not have a human body/flesh, but only appeared to have it. I wonder what these thought about Jesus’ brothers and cousins! And which view was older? Docetic one or Jesus-of-the-Flesh one?

these issues/questions are not as black and white as Jesus Historicists allege.

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Neither. Jesus was not a deity to the earliest Christians. Any attempt to understand Jesus must begin not with unrelated pagan cultures, but with the context of his own milieu, namely Second Temple Period Judaism.

Yes, and they appear very late (end of the first century). They would have no reason to deny this unless it had already been established as Christian teaching.

Well the earliest evidence we have for Docetism is at the end of the first century, after the gospels. So that answers that.

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But we are back to square one. WHO were the earliest Christians? Gnostics? 2nd Temple Judaism Christians?
https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/6923

The most startling feature of this new book is that in it Ehrman has now completely reversed a position he took against me in Did Jesus Exist (as is well known, I published a detailed critique of that awful book). He now admits that from the very earliest recorded history, indeed even earlier than that, even possibly their very first year, Christians regarded Jesus as a pre-existent divine being.

Again, this is not a mythicist position. This is Historicist Ehrman’s position!

And I find it curious that you have no issues with Second Temple Period Judaism believing in reincarnation (i.e. that Jesus was thought to have been John the Baptist raised from the dead). I know of no scholar who would ascribe this to the 2nd Temple Judaism Jews!

Ah… but how do you know WHO the denialists are? 2nd John survived, so Docetists are the denialists, but what IF the Docetists came first? It’s common knowledge (I believe) that the very first Christian Canon was compiled by the Marcion, a Gnostic “Heretic”!

Ehrman says that the different between Heretics and Orthodoxy is blurred in the early Centuries, and in some areas, there were more heretics than the Orthodox believers in a given area!!! Which of them is right? Which is based on a ‘historical’ version of Jesus?[quote=“Jonathan_Burke, post:126, topic:37430”]
Well the earliest evidence we have for Docetism is at the end of the first century, after the gospels. So that answers that.
[/quote]

What is your source for Docetism being AFTER the Gospels? It’s universally acknowledged that Marcion’s canon (and he was a Docetist Gnostic) preceded the Orthodox Christian one!

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Second Temple Period Christians. This is not a matter of historical dispute. There is no evidence for Gnostics, for example, until the second century.

So what? It’s not the scholarly consensus, and it has no relation to Jesus’ historicity.

That’s probably because your exposure to the relevant scholarship is extremely limited. Try reading NT Wright’s summary of Second Temple Period beliefs on death and the afterlife, for a start. And try reading some of the primary source material. Have you read Philo? Josephus? Look, I’ll throw you a reference for free.

"That Jewish authors in the late Second Temple period were acquainted with the idea of reincarnation has been shown above. This familiarity includes not only Talmudic sources (where the evidence is faint and confused) but also Josephus (where the ascribing of the belief in reincarnation to the Pharisees looks bizarre but the vocabulary looks correct in comparison to its Greek sources).", Vicente Dobroruka, Second Temple Pseudepigraphy: A Cross-Cultural Comparison of Apocalyptic Texts and Related Jewish Literature (Walter de Gruyter, 2013), 159.

So we even have a first century Jewish witness such as Josephus, attributing belief in reincarnation to a mainstream Jewish group such as the Pharisees. If this was impossible in Second Temple Period Judaism, he obviously didn’t get the memo.

The fact that they’re denialists means they’re denying something people had already established as a belief. As I’ve already pointed out, the earliest evidence we have for Docetists is at the end of the first century, so we know they didn’t come first. They were a later development.

Sorry, but are you kidding? Do you know the typical dates for the gospels, the typical date for 2 John, and the typical date for Docetism? The gospel of John is almost universally understood to have predated the epistles of John, and is typically dated to around 90-95 CE. The epistles of John are typically dated 10 years later, and 2 John is the earliest reference to Docetism (even taking the loosest definition of Docetism). If Docetism was even contemporary with Paul (50 years earlier), you would need to explain why there is no evidence for it until the end of the first century.

So what? Marcion didn’t live until the second century, and the early Christians already had a canon before this time.

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How can you be so sure?

POSTSCRIPT: THE MANDAEANS

Note: what follows are extracts from “Encyclopeadia of the Orient: Mandeans”.

"The only surviving Gnostic religion, now with not more than 20,000 adherents, living in southern Iraq and south-western Iran. They are often called the Christians of Saint John, as he is held as a very sacred person, but not indispensable, in their theology. Their name is Aramaic for ‘knowledge’, i.e. a translation from the Greek ‘gnosis’.
…

ORIGINS and HISTORY
… The Mandean religion could be pre-Christian, or it could date to 1st or 2nd century AD. It could actually be John the Baptist who founded the sect, or they could be a continuation of the Jewish sect that John the Baptist belonged to (guessed to be the Esseneans). Elements of the languages indicate that the community is of Jewish origin. One of the texts of the Mandeans tell about a flight of a group called ‘Nasoreans’, from areas that probably were in today’s Jordan, to the Mesopotamian region, in the times of the Jewish wars following the destruction of Jerusalem in year 70 AD. The Mandeans appears first to have gained a strong position in Babylon, …"

http://www.theologywebsite.com/history/origingnosis.shtml

The questions of when and from what source Gnosticism arose have been hotly debated. The Nag Hammadi documents give new evidence, which has yet to be fully evaluated on this as on other questions. They do not help solve the chronology of Gnosticism -. none is demonstrably earlier than the New Testament. On the other hand, the collection witnesses to non.Christian expressions of Gnosticism and so reopens the question of the possibility that Christians in the formative period used Gnostic concepts, imagery, and ter.minology to express their faith, even though at a later stage they found it necessary to combat extreme developments of Gnostic thinking.

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Justin got his facts wrong as we now know it to be. There are in fact no rising and dying gods before Jesus, no crucified messiahs, etc. Besides, Justin had an apologetic agenda to claim that the pagans had similar beliefs to the Christians.

And I find it curious that you have no issues with Second Temple Period Judaism believing in reincarnation (i.e. that Jesus was thought to have been John the Baptist raised from the dead).

That’s not reincarnation, that’s resurrection.

It’s common knowledge (I believe) that the very first Christian Canon was compiled by the Marcion, a Gnostic “Heretic”!

For someone citing Ehrman a lot, you need to start reading more Ehrman. Marcion was not a Gnostic. Ehrman writes in his The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot (Oxford University Press):

Marcion was a second-century teacher-theologian who was thriving at just the time the Gospel of Judas must have been written—mid-second century. He was not a Gnostic: he did not believe that there was a Pleroma filled with numerous divine aeons, luminaries, firmaments, and so on, nor did he think that salvation came by receiving secret knowledge from on high. (pg. 114)

So, what was Marcion? A Docetic, according to Ehrman elsewhere.

… and in some areas, there were more heretics than the Orthodox believers in a given area!!! Which of them is right? Which is based on a ‘historical’ version of Jesus?

Which of them is right? To answer this, we simply need to turn to the New Testament, our set of first-century writings. The later writings of Gnosticism and various other developing sects (such as the views of Marcion) are of little historical value and historians have long refuted their use in studies regarding the historical Jesus. Craig Evans, a world renowned New Testament scholar has often made a point of the fact that only the four Gospels are considered to be able to contain reliable material about Jesus, whereas virtually all other texts have been discarded in Jesus research by historians. By the way, Marcion’s canon doesn’t predate orthodoxy, since it dates to 140 AD.

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Because instead of reading random websites, I read scholarly literature.

  1. ‘Even if it could be proven that any of the previously discussed works or, for that matter, any of the NH [Nag Hammadi] tractates are non-Christian Gnostic documents, that would not in itself be evidence for pre-Christian Gnosticism.', Combs, ‘Nag Hammadi, Gnosticism and New Testament Interpretation’, Grace Theological Journal (8.2.207-208), (1987).

  2. ‘And even if we are on solid ground in some cases in arguing the original works represented in the library are much older than extant copies, we are still unable to postulate plausibly any pre-Christian dates.’, McRae, ‘Nag Hammadi and the New Testament’, pp. 146–47, in Combs, ‘Nag Hammadi, Gnosticism and New Testament Interpretation’, Grace Theological Journal (8.2.208) , (1987).

  3. ‘Egypt has yielded early written evidence of Jewish, Christian, and pagan religion. It has preserved works of Manichaean and other Gnostic sects, but these are all considerably later than the rise of Christianity.’, Unger, ‘The Role of Archaeology in the Study Of the New Testament’, Bibliotheca Sacra (116.462.153), (1996).

  4. ‘Some modern researchers suggest that several NT and related texts evidence contact with “Gnosticism” in various stages of its development. Texts that especially stand out are Paul’s Corinthian correspondence, Colossians, Ephesians, the Pastoral Epistles, Jude, 2 Peter, and the letters of Ignatius of Antioch (d. ca. 115) and Polycarp of Smyrna (d. ca. 165) among others. But even here the issues discussed are diverse, demonstrating a complex assortment of competing new religious movements, but no evidence of “Gnosticism.”’, Freedman, ‘Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible’, p. 509 (2000).

  5. ‘Scholarship must in all likelihood abandon the hypothesis that a cohesive Gnostic movement is reflected in Paul’s letters.’, Lüdeman, ‘Primitive Christianity: A Survey of Recent Studies and Some New Proposals’, p. 150 (2003).

  6. ‘If in all likelihood, with the possible exception of the Simonians, there was no such thing as a rival Gnostic movement within or competing with Pauline Christianity, the question arises whether there ever was a specific Gnostic myth as an entity of its own.’, Lüdeman, ‘Primitive Christianity: A Survey of Recent Studies and Some New Proposals’, p. 151 (2003).

  7. ‘But it is now widely agreed that the quest for a pre-Christian Gnosticism, properly so called, has proved to be a wild goose chase.’, Dunn, ‘The Cambridge Companion to St. Paul’, p. 9 (2003).

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I read Ehrman’s stuff. There is a book link in this thread, titled “The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot” by Bart Ehrman. If you open it to page 100, you will find the following:

At present nearly every aspect of Gnosticism is hotly contested. Scholars disagree on such basic issues as the following:

  1. Where did Gnosticism come from? Did it originate as a Christian her- esy? Did it come from non-Christian Judaism as a sister religion to Chris- tianity? Did it originate in Platonic theological circles and only secondarily come to be influenced by, and to influence, Christianity (and Judaism)? Did it come from somewhere else?
  2. When did it come into existence? Was it an offshoot of Christianity, a heretical movement of the second Christian century? Did it sprout at the same time as Christianity? Did it begin before Christianity and affect Christian theology from the very outset?

I trust that Ehrman is a trustworthy scholar and would not just make claims that do not correspond with reality. Note, Ehrman’s book is written around 2006 while the literature you are citing is dating before then.

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Right, and I thought Docetism is a form of Gnostecism, but it doesn’t need to be

In various popular sources, Marcion is often reckoned among the Gnostics, but as the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (3rd ed.) puts it, “it is clear that he would have had little sympathy with their mythological speculations” (p. 1034). In 1911 Henry Wace stated:

“ A modern divine would turn away from the dreams of Valentinianism in silent contempt; but he could not refuse to discuss the question raised by Marcion, whether there is such opposition between different parts of what he regards as the word of God, that all cannot come from the same author. ”
A primary difference between Marcionites and Gnostics was that the Gnostics based their theology on secret wisdom (as, for example, Valentinius who claimed to receive the secret wisdom from Theudas who received it direct from Paul) of which they claimed to be in possession, whereas Marcion based his theology on the contents of the Letters of Paul and the recorded sayings of Jesus — in other words, an argument from scripture, with Marcion defining what was and was not scripture.

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Ehrman is writing for a popular audience. But note that nothing he says contradicts anything I have said. Ehrman never once denies that there’s no evidence for Gnosticism before the second century. I have this book and he never disputes that fact. Nor does he cite any literature on the Gnostics any later than the sources I’ve cited. He cites his own book “Lost Christianities” on the same topic, and I own that one as well, and it doesn’t say anything which disagrees with what I’ve written either. In fact on the contrary, in that book he depicts the Gnostics as a reactionary group which emerged from within mainstream Christianity.

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Here is Jewish thought on Gnosticism, arguing that Jewish Gnosticism predated Christianity.

And, here is a Catholic Encyclopedia

Whereas formerly Gnosticism was considered mostly a corruption of Christianity, it now seems clear that the first traces of Gnostic systems can be discerned some centuries before the Christian Era. Its Eastern origin was already maintained by Gieseler and Neander; F. Ch. Bauer (1831) and Lassen (1858) sought to prove its relation to the religions of India; Lipsius (1860) pointed to Syria and Phoenicia as its home, and Hilgenfeld (1884) thought it was connected with later Mazdeism. Joel (1880), Weingarten (1881), Koffmane (1881), Anrich (1894), and Wobbermin (1896) sought to account for the rise of Gnosticism by the influence of Greek Platonic philosophy and the Greek mysteries, while Harnack described it as “acute Hellenization of Christianity”.

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@ManiacalVesalius I heard back from the library. They said “This request has come back unfilled. The US libraries that have access to this journal have a 36 month embargo from the publisher.” But I guess you have already gotten the article, so we’re good.

Let me know if there is any other journal article you’d like.

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Yes, I have gotten access to the article. There is one article that has been on my mind since you mentioned your ability to gain access and I thought I’d ask you of this one since I got access to the other one. I will send a message, thanks as always for your kindness.

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Neither the Jewish Encyclopedia nor NewAdvent are reliable sources (and the references that NewAdvent gives are all easily over a century old, Jonathan’s citations are much more recent and in more authoritative sources). In addition, all the sources mentioned in that NewAdvent source were composed before the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library, the Gospel of Judas, and other important Gnostic texts.

It seems as though you accepted my correction of your claim that Marcion was a Gnostic. What about my other corrections?

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Actually, I think the issue of Marcion’s Gnosticism is a bit nuanced. IF you count his Doceitsm as Gnosticism, then he was a Gnostic. Otherwise, he wasn’t one.

Also, I think it’s not debated that Jewish Gnosticism came before Christianity and Jewish Christians would likely be familiar with it.

Unfortunately, I’m not able to respond in detail. I don’t particularly enjoy being the lone dissenter. I think on this thread alone, my own replies have probably taken 50%+ of all posts. I think we can agree to disagree for now :slight_smile:

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Docetism isn’t Gnosticism. Gnosticism is the view that the material world is an entrapment for humanity, and the only way to escape from it is through the aquisition of some sort of secret knowledge, or gnosis (gnosis is the Greek word for knowledge). On the other hand, Docetism is simply the view that Jesus did not come to this world in an actual body, it only appeared as if He did. These two views are completely different. It’s possible to hold none of them, or one of them, or both of them, so they aren’t contradictory, but they certainly don’t entail one another. Marcion wasn’t a Gnostic, I think my quotation from Ehrman (who you heavily rely on regarding a number of things) demonstrates that.

Also, I think it’s not debated that Jewish Gnosticism came before Christianity and Jewish Christians would likely be familiar with it.

Didn’t your quote of Ehrman say its debated? I consider Gnosticism as a Chrisitan heresy not a Jewish heresy. Either way, there’s no evidence that actual Christians were gnostics before the 2nd century, which is in fact the consensus of scholars including Ehrman himself. The debate on gnostic origins is different from the debate on Christian gnosticism.

I would’ve probably also thought that your posts have taken up 50% of the comments on this thread, but I actually just learned today that BioLogos threads are tracked in their progress. If you scroll to my original post, and look a bit under it (in the ‘frequent posters’ section), I actually have posted the most in this thread 38 times including this comment, you’ve posted 35 times, and Jonathan posted 27 times. An interesting feature of Biologos I found out today. Cheers.

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From 1906, 110 years ago.

From 1909, nearly 110 years ago.

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It does sound interesting, if only to see another perspective. But for $30?? Not sure about the renting option but maybe…Thirty bucks?? You can buy a hardback for less sometimes!! But thanks for the heads up. Have heard Carrier and read some online stuff of his that was free.

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Ehrman has argued for the historicity of Jesus of Nazareth in a relatively recent book.Ehrman has his own inconsistencies, but he does maintain this one pretty easily and would contradict Carrier.

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Interesting comments here. Much of mythicist argument is based on emotion and not much else.

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