Appendix: Response to Richard Carrier’s Review (2024)

In the few years since I wrote this essay there have been developments in what scholars call ‘the quest for the historical Jesus.’ One of the main contentions is that if we do not get more rigorous in uncovering the Jesus of history, the idea that Jesus never existed or that we can say nothing about him reliably will become the default position. Justin Meggitt, who has been a target of mythicists, writes:

First, even if denial of the historicity of Jesus is rarely found among scholars within the field, the increasing popularity of this position in wider culture is unavoidable. While I won’t rehearse arguments I have made elsewhere about this phenomenon, unless those working in New Testament and Christian origins continue to think critically and publicly about what can be said about Jesus, it is likely that the denial of the historicity of Jesus will very soon become the de facto position in wider popular and academic discourse. This might not appear to matter to some in the field, who have no theological investment in whether Jesus the man existed or not, but—and this of those without power from history. It is all the more grotesque in the case of Jesus because we possess so much, relatively speaking, that claims to tell us about his life. Compare our sources about him with those that we have for similar contemporaries such as the Egyptian prophet or Theudas. Despite the challenges posed by the earliest sources we have for Jesus, especially the difficulties that arise from both the fecund imagination of the early Christians and their lack of discrimination when deciding what traditions they should pass on, this wider ethical imperative, not to perpetuate the silencing of the poor in history, makes the Quest a necessary undertaking…. Although some have recently been more optimistic about the “quest for the historical apostles,” there is little that can be established historically about any of them, as virtually all the sources, including the accounts of their martyrdoms, were written at least 150 years after their deaths. (2024, pp. 765-766, 782)

There is nothing inherently implausible in the mythicist position that Jesus started out as a vague savior myth who later became put into historical fiction, because we know this process did occur in other ancient sources: euhemerization. On the other hand, this mythicist interpretive model starts to fall apart when we consider with Ehrman that Christianity didn’t start with a vague salvation figure since, for instance, Mark preserves a Jesus tradition that cuts against his Pauline bias of promoting the cross/resurrection as the focal point of the religion. For Jesus starts out his ministry teaching the coming Kingdom of God, not of himself, and teaches the story of the rich young man who will be saved by keeping the Law and giving all his money to the poor (exemplified by the disciples who left everything worldly behind in order to serve God’s messenger). Keep in mind that Paul said, to the contrary, that if righteousness (being right in God’s eyes / justification, NRSVUE) came by keeping the Law, then Christ died for nothing (Galatians 2:19-21; also see Ephesians 2:9). We can see a historical Jesus who was transformed into the Christ of cross/resurrection theology after he died (e.g.,in the pre-Pauline Corinthian Creed). The example of the sheep and goats in Matthew makes the same point, and so Mark has to awkwardly invent passion predictions that the disciples can’t understand, so that he might negotiate the idea that Jesus knew that he would die and even though this was on no one’s radar (e.g., the disciples got violent and fled at the arrest). Ehrman comments:

In Mark he predicts his passion explicitly three times (8:31; 9:31; 10:33-34) and implicitly refers to it repeatedly elsewhere. Same with Matthew. Luke has him predict it four times; and he does so in various ways throughout John. The question I’m dealing with is not whether the Gospels portray Jesus as anticipating his death, but whether Jesus himself actually did so. The Gospels are written by believers in Jesus’ death and resurrection living 40-65 years later and basing their accounts on the stories about Jesus that had been in circulation for all that time. There are many things recorded in the Gospels that almost certainly did not happen and sayings of Jesus he almost certainly did not actually say. Historians have to figure out which is which. Which passages record what actually happened and which are based on later stories about Jesus? Passion Predictions seem most likely to be ways of showing that as the Son of God Jesus knew all along what was going to happen at the end of his life. He was not taken by surprise! (Ehrman, 2024)

As an interpretive model, I think that mythicism fails both on a general level and in terms of its inability to appropriate certain specific pieces of important evidence. A recent representative example is Paul’s claim that the Jews killed Jesus. Obviously, if Paul thought that the Jews killed Jesus, then Jesus was a historical figure who lived on Earth. This passage has traditionally been taken by some to be a later post-Paul insertion into Paul’s text, and Carrier follows this skeptical reading. But as we moved away from the blanket “pro-Jewish Jesus” model—a model of interpreting that became popular with such works as the Jewish Annotated New Testament in the early 2000s—weight began to be restored to a Jesus who belonged in intra-Jewish conflict where one Jewish faction would be nasty to others in trying to establish who were the true representatives of God. Why is this important? Recall that Paul supposedly writes:

For you, brothers and sisters, became imitators of the churches of God in Christ Jesus that are in Judea, for you suffered the same things from your own compatriots as they did from the Jews who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets and drove us out; they displease God and oppose everyone by hindering us from speaking to the gentiles so that they may be saved. Thus they have constantly been filling up the measure of their sins, but wrath has overtaken them at last. (1 Thessalonians 2:14-16).

This passage seems to fit exactly with what can only be a satirical account of the trial of Jesus in Mark, where the experts on Jewish law and tradition go into creative contortions time after time to make their transgressing of God’s will seem respectable, highlighting the letter of the Law (the Jewish High Council) vs. the Spirit of the Law (Jesus: e.g., adultery is even a lustful eye).

As Paula Fredriksen and Stephen Young note, we are not describing antisemitism here, but an intra-Jewish polemic trying to establish that the Jesus faction was the true one. This Markan reception history of Paul is the lens through which we should understand Paul’s claim that the Jews killed Christ, and in fact Mark, who used Paul as a source, was probably inventing his story out of Paul’s claim. Paul expert Benjamin White finds it unconvincing that a later scribe added the 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16 material to Paul as it is so reflective of what we see about certain Jewish characterizations across many New Testament sources, as Nathan Shedd, Sara Parks, and Joel Marcus demonstrate.

Some elements that mythicists point to are the lack of detail about Jesus in Paul, plus Mark understood as allegorical literature. But this needs to be qualified in a way that favors historicity, not mythicism. Paul says that he resolved to know nothing among you but Christ and him crucified (1 Corinthians 2:2), which suggests that Paul knew far more details than he provided, but omitted them because of apocalyptic urgency. In the same way, the Gospels indicate this selective process of choosing details, which—though problematizing the quest for the historical Jesus since much has been omitted—does lend weight to the idea that the writers had sources about Jesus and weren’t just inventing out of whole cloth. Yes, there was mythmaking like imitative haggadic midrash (and mimesis), but this technique at the time was done to historical figures like the Teacher of Righteousness by the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Mark Goodacre notes the selectivity of the New Testament writing process, for instance. Source criticism has also progressed since Carrier rejected the Q source hypothesis. While the existence of “Q” (the material common to Matthew and Luke that’s not derived from Mark) may have once been rejected in favor of Luke merely copying Matthew, scholars like Sarah Rollens now show that the Q material is distinct from Matthew in terms of content, form, and purpose, and so Carrier is wrong to deny it. It is certainly important for Carrier to deny Q, as it doesn’t mention the crucifixion, and that event is the foundation of Carrier’s vague savior myth construction.

So while I think that mythicism makes sense in general, it becomes unreliable as an interpretive paradigm when we get down into the trenches and start debating the issue verse by verse. In this regard, Carrier will make general probability arguments analogous to ‘if we put the names of the figures as heavily mythologized as Jesus into a hat, the likelihood of pulling out a historical figure is no better than one in three.’ But this probability observation doesn’t change the fact that certain issues—like that of a Jesus who didn’t teach himself, but taught the Kingdom of God, or Paul’s teaching that the Jews killed Jesus—are kinds of recalcitrant evidence that falsify (in Karl Popper’s sense) the mythicism interpretative paradigm.

Bibliography

Barber, Michael.  Death and Martyrdom in Crossley, James; Keith, Chris. The Next Quest for the Historical Jesus (p. 735-763). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.

Fredriksen, Paula. The Late Latin Quest in Crossley, James; Keith, Chris. The Next Quest for the Historical Jesus (p. 300-312). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.

Goodacre, Mark. Missing Pieces in Crossley, James; Keith, Chris. The Next Quest for the Historical Jesus (pp. 185-295). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition (2024).

Hamilton, John. (1992). “The Chronology of the Crucifixion and the Passover.” Churchman Vol. 106, No. 4: 323-338.

Meggitt, Justin.  THE RESURRECTION AND COMPARATIVE MICROHISTORY in Crossley, James; Keith, Chris. The Next Quest for the Historical Jesus (p. 764-795). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition. (2024)

Myles, Robert.  Class Conflict in Crossley, James; Keith, Chris. The Next Quest for the Historical Jesus (p. 457-475)). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. Kindle Edition (2024).

Rollens, Sarah.  Scribal Galilee in Crossley, James; Keith, Chris. The Next Quest for the Historical Jesus (pp 392-415). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition (2024).

Shedd, Nathan. Violence and Trauma in Crossley, James; Keith, Chris. The Next Quest for the Historical Jesus (pp. 718-734). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition (2024).

White, Benjamin. (2024) New Insights Into The New Testament Conference 2.  Q and A session.

Young, Stephen. Myth and Mythmaking in Crossley, James; Keith, Chris. The Next Quest for the Historical Jesus (pp. 272-297). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition (2024)