2012-07-25

Richard Carrier Recaps the Bart Ehrman-Historicity of Jesus Exhanges

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Richard Carrier has compiled a “summary of the current state of the debate after the mini blog war between [himself] and Bart Ehrman over his latest book, Did Jesus Exist?, which attempted to argue against various scholars . . . who have concluded, or at least suspect, that Jesus never really existed, but was an invention in myth, like Moses or King Arthur or Ned Ludd. . . .  I will give a state-of-play for everything.”

Carrier is keen to distance himself from those he labels “crank mythicists” and I sometimes think he is committing some of the same hasty misrepresentations of some of these that other scholars do. I’d feel much more comfortable with Carrier if he demonstrated more patience and ability to share his skills with others who lack his specialist training in the field. He only covers his own exchanges of course. Others have dabbled with general comments, most recently Larry Hurtado who seems to indicate that his entire knowledge of mythicism has been filtered to him through a 1938 Student Christian Movement publication mainly addressing the views of J. M. Robertson.

Carrier links to his past responses (March to April this year) to Bart Ehrman and James McGrath and then provides a point by point synopsis of the arguments he made and the responses to each from Ehrman and McGrath.

It’s the sort of outline I sometimes had a mind to do after my own exchanges with McGrath and a few others. What is humorous is the classic responses of both Ehrman and McGrath to the various points made as the exchange unfolded. It’s reassuring to see that the responses from McGrath in particular is no different from what they have been with me. So Carrier dots his epitome with: Continue reading “Richard Carrier Recaps the Bart Ehrman-Historicity of Jesus Exhanges”


Mark’s (Unclean) Bartimaeus and Plato’s (Honoured) Timaeus

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

English: Close-up of Eric Gill relief, Moorfie...
English: Close-up of Eric Gill relief, Moorfields Eye Hospital The words here,’Domine, ut videam’ (Lord, that I may see!), comprised the answer, according to the Gospel of Mark, to Jesus’s question to the blind beggar Bartimaeus who called out to him in Jericho. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I have always been shy of accepting the argument one sometimes reads that the blind Bartimaeus in the Gospel of Mark came by his unusual name (along with the unusual manner of its explanation) from the influence of Plato’s Timaeus.

But a passage in Earle Hilgert’s chapter, “The Son of Timaeus: Blindness, Sight, Ascent, Vision in Mark”, in Reimagining Christian Origins has for the first time opened my mind to the possibility that Plato’s famous work could be behind the name after all. (I’m not saying I am sure it is. Only that I am more open to the possibility.)

After discussing the usual things I have read before in favour of the connection — that Plato’s Timaeus includes a lot of discussion about eyesight and its ability to lead us through observation of those mysterious moving lights seen above the world to come to know the great Eternal Truths of God — Hilgert writes this:

Runia has identified some dozen passages in Philo which are clearly influenced by this encomium, not to speak of its broader impact on Hellenistic thought. Of the Timaeus as a whole, he declares,

Its influence inevitably filtered down to men of letters and even those who had received only a smattering of learning. Indeed the Timaeus was the only Greek prose work that up to the third century A.D. every educated man could be presumed to have read.

In view of such widespread conversance in the Hellenistic world with the Timaeus and with its praise of eyesight, we should not be surprised if Mark reflects acquaintance with it. (pp. 190-191)

Now I’ve been trapped. I have been catching up with some background reading to Hilgert’s chapter — Burton Mack’s 1972 Studia Philonica article and chapters by Hilgert, Mack and others in The School of Moses: Studies in Philo and Hellenistic Religion — with a particular interest in the question of any direct or indirect relationship between what we read by Philo and in the Gospel of Mark. I had not till now fully appreciated the extent of the influence of the Timaeus apparently even in the time of the Gospel’s composition. I would like to track down the evidence on which Runia’s Philo of Alexandria and the Timaeus. Hopefully the Google preview will give me enough detail to satisfy my curiosity.

A multilingual pun

Another detail Hilgert goes on to mention is something I know I must have read in Burton Mack’s Myth of Innocence some years ago but had unfortunately forgotten: Continue reading “Mark’s (Unclean) Bartimaeus and Plato’s (Honoured) Timaeus”