Musings on biblical studies, politics, religion, ethics, human nature, tidbits from science
Category: New Testament
Mostly straightforward but still some questions arise. Where does New Testament end and Church history and question of Christian origins, also certain roles of Marcion, begin? (Marcion’s argued influence on NT should be included here; also evidence of early readings found in Fathers like Tertullian.) Relevant manuscript discoveries and analysis belong here, including histories of their later copying.
Tom Holland is currently preparing a new book in which he fleshes out what he says in this video. Is Paul really like a “depth charge” in history, ultimately responsible for ripples that brought about the Enlightenment itself?
If one says that one’s inheritance is Christian what do we mean by Christian? Has not Christianity itself (including its use of Paul) been shaped according to shifting circumstances and ideologies through the ages?
I will make this the final post in my series examining Daniel Gullotta’s review of Richard Carrier’s On the Historicity of Jesus. There is considerably more in the review that I could address. For instance, I originally intended to post detailed discussions of the nature of the publications Gullotta has cited as addressing the history and arguments of mythicism to demonstrate how these sources are often cited but apparently far less often actually read with the critical sense that scholars are usually trained to exercise, and certainly the works they are themselves discussing are read even less. But other interests beckon at the moment. I will, however, single out just one particular detail in Gullotta’s review that I think epitomizes one core irony.
In the concluding paragraphs of his article Gullotta appears to confuse the question of the historical existence of Jesus with the question of what sort of person he was like. Part of the irony in this confusion lies in Gullotta’s having cited near the beginning of his review an article by Samuel Byrskog, ‘The Historicity of Jesus: How Do We Know That Jesus Existed?’, in Tom Holmén and Stanley E. Porter (eds.), Handbook for the Study of the Historical Jesus, Vol. 3 (Leiden: Brill, 2010), pp. 2181–2211, that clarifies that distinction. Byrskog writes in his opening statement:
Samuel Byrskog
The quest for the historical Jesus is not a quest for his existence as such, but for the more precise contours of his person and career. But how do we know that he in fact existed?
(Byrskog, p. 2183)
Yet Gullotta appears to confuse the two different questions at the end of his essay when he complains that Carrier has criticized the methods of historical Jesus scholars that those scholars themselves have been critical of, as we discussed in the previous post. Gullotta directs readers to the “new” world of historical Jesus scholarship in which “new methods” are accordingly applied:
In the post-Jesus Seminar world of historical Jesus studies, newer scholarship is far less invested in determining whether Jesus did or did not say any particular saying or perform any deed attributed to him. Many now argue that historians can only construct ‘the gist’ of what the historical Jesus may have said and done, and this is to ‘heed before all else the general impressions that our primary sources provide’. The confidence that historians once displayed within historical Jesus studies has been eroded due to previous excesses and flaws in older methodologies. New scholarship has been advocating for quite some time that the ‘historical Jesus … is ultimately unattainable, but can be hypothesized on the basis of the interpretations of the early Christians, and as part of a larger process of accounting for how and why early Christians came to view Jesus in the ways that they did’. In other words, Carrier’s imagined historical Jesus of the academy has ceased to exist, as contemporary scholarship has advanced beyond such idealistic pursuits.
(Gullotta, pp. 345f.)
Here Gullotta appears to be unaware that he has fallen into the wrong side of the question that Byrskog (whom Gullotta cited earlier) points out: investigating what Jesus was like, what he did and what he said is not the same thing as asking the more fundamental question, did he exist?
But Gullotta has fallen into an even more serious error when he writes that the Jesus whose existence Carrier is questioning “has ceased to exist” in the minds of the biblical scholars. Gullotta has forgotten that Carrier began his argument by raising the problems of many interpretations of the historical Jesus and making it clear that he would discuss the bare “minimal Jesus” that any and all historical Jesus figures, or even just “the gists” of them, had to meet: Continue reading “Gullotta on Carrier’s On the Historicity of Jesus: One Final Irony (or Misunderstanding? or…?)”
After setting aside a discussion of Richard Carrier’s Bayesian method as “unnecessarily complicated and uninviting” (p. 325) and opting instead to focus on six points in Carrier’s argument, Daniel Gullotta concludes:
After examining numerous fundamental problems with Carrier’s overall thesis for Jesus’ non-historicity, Carrier’s final Bayesian conclusion that ‘the odds Jesus existed are less than 1 in 12,000’ is untenable and disingenuous.
Gullotta, p. 344
That statement is misleading insofar as Gullotta has not addressed Carrier’s “Bayesian conclusion” at any point in his review. (Gullotta has not even addressed the Bayesian method except to compare it, misguidedly, with Richard Swinburne’s “use” of Bayes to prove Jesus’ resurrection.) One might infer, then, that the six points of Gullotta’s focus were “fundamental” to “Carrier’s overall thesis for Jesus’ non-historicity”, yet we have seen in the previous posts that such a suggestion seriously misunderstands (ignores) both Carrier’s Bayesian argument and the weight that Carrier himself assigned to those six points. Far from being “fundamental problems” we have seen that Gullotta’s
* Had a review addressed Carrier’s Bayesian method it would have acknowledged that this claim was but one of nearly 50 data points of background information and not a point of primary evidence to be assessed in the light of competing hypotheses;
** Had the discussion addressed the Bayesian analysis it would have informed readers that yes, Paul’s claims can be used to argue strongly for Jesus’ historicity, but that the competing hypothesis also needed to be addressed along with all other related evidence and the two hypotheses then weighed against each other.
1. focus on Carrier’s claim that a pre-Christian angel named Jesus existed erroneously shifts one of nearly 50 background data points, a point that is quite dispensable without any significant loss to Carrier’s argument, into a “fundamental” plank of Carrier’s argument;*
2. focus on his understanding of Jesus as a non-human and celestial figure within the Pauline corpus inexplicably failed to acknowledge that Carrier conceded the argument that Paul’s claim that Jesus was born of a woman was 100% expected in the argument for historicity, that Carrier argued a fortiori giving here the highest score in favour of Jesus being historical;**
3. focus on his argument that Paul understood Jesus to be crucified by demons and not by earthly forces demonstrated that he, Gullotta, lacked awareness of the range of scholarly views on this question, and in particular on the competing interpretations of the critical passage in 1 Corinthians;
4. focus on his claim that James, the brother of the Lord, was not a relative of Jesus but just a generic Christian within the Jerusalem community inexplicably failed to acknowledge that Carrier conceded the argument that Paul’s claim to have met the brother of the Lord was 100% expected in the argument for historicity, that Carrier argued a fortiori giving here the highest score in favour of Jesus being historical;**
5. focus on his assertion that the Gospels represent Homeric myths, inexplicably failed to acknowledge that Carrier made far more detailed and comprehensive arguments that the gospels were, as Gullotta himself seemed to acknowledge, primarily based on a “midrashic-like” retelling of stories from the Jewish Scriptures and emulation of Jewish heroes from those scriptures;
6. focus on his employment of the Rank-Raglan heroic arche-type as a means of comparison demonstrated Gullotta’s (a) contradictory arguments, (b) ignorance of what folklorists themselves have said and demonstrated about the function of, and ways to use, the RR archetypes, and (c) inexplicable failure to acknowledge Carrier’s points about the use and significance of the RR scale.
Surely, then, Gullotta has not “examined numerous fundamental problems” with Carrier’s thesis nor has he addressed (in fact he has consciously avoided) Carrier’s “Bayesian conclusion”.
Gullotta has failed to address what he began by acknowledging was the fundamental point of Carrier’s argument:
Simply put, the main objective of Carrier’s work is to test the ‘historicity hypothesis’ against the ‘myth hypothesis’, and after calculating the background knowledge, prior probability, as well as the evidence from the primary and secondary sources related to Jesus’ historicity, see which one seems more probable.
(Gullotta, p. 321)
With respect to points #2 and #4 above Gullotta had two excellent opportunities to address that “main objective” but failed to do so.
With respect to #1 Gullotta failed to take into account Carrier’s “main objective” and the place of nearly fifty points of “background knowledge” in that objective.
With respect to #3 and #6 our reviewer’s discussion lacked awareness of the wider scholarly views, firstly within biblical studies and secondly in an external field.
With respect to #5, Gullotta simply failed to notice about forty pages of argument belying his criticism and confused Carrier’s primary thesis with that of Dennis MacDonald, criticizing Carrier for points he nowhere makes.
Fellow-former members of the now defunct Worldwide Church of God will recognize that cult’s influence in the title. (It is tongue-in-cheek, an in-house joke.) It came to me after reading the following by PZMyers:
Now I have to recalibrate. What does “Jesus mythicist” mean? Apparently, rejecting the idea of the Son of God wandering about Galilee, and thinking that many of the tales that sprang up around him were confabulations, does not make one a Jesus mythicist. I also don’t know what the “historical Jesus” means. If I die, and a hundred years later the actual events of my life are forgotten and all that survives are legends of my astonishing sexual prowess and my ability to breathe underwater, what does the “historical PZ” refer to? Does it matter if my birth certificate is unearthed (and framed and mounted in a shrine, of course)? Would people point to it and gasp that it proves the stories were all true <swoon>?
Exactly. What do we mean by “historical Jesus” in any discussion about him, most especially the very existence of such a figure. (PZ begins by asking what Jesus mythicist means and that’s a good question, too. Most critical scholars, at least among the critical ones I have read, would say that the gospels do present a mythical Jesus, a Jesus of myth. The quest, they would say, is to find the “historical Jesus” behind the “mythical Jesus” of the gospels.
So we return to my previous post and I have thoughts of revising the conclusion of it to discuss the idea of definition more explicitly. Others may disagree but I think we can replace the concept of “reference class” with “definition”.
Outside the more fundamentalist-leaning believers few people would believe the historical Jesus is the Jesus of the canonical gospels: a miracle working, water-walking, temple-cleansing power who instilled such fear and jealousy among the leaders that they had him crucified, etc.
Many say something quite the opposite, that he was someone who was essentially a nobody that no-one was particularly interested in apart from a few village followers — hence we have no record of him until the movement his followers started somehow remarkably reached a critical mass that included gospel-writing literates who recorded how this nobody was remembered as the turning point in human history.
In general we have those two theories of historicity, the reductive theory (Jesus was an ordinary but obscure guy who inspired a religious movement and copious legends about him) and the triumphalist theory (the Gospels are totally or almost totally true).
Carrier, On the Historicity of Jesus, p. 30
The “reductive theory” confuses me sometimes, though. Some of those who say he was a “local nobody” also say that he was a political rebel not very unlike other political rebels (or maybe a prophet of “the great tribulation” before “the wonderful world tomorrow”) we read about in the Jewish historian Josephus, and who therefore was not so obscure at all. For some reason Josephus did not speak of this Jesus in the same way he spoke of other political rebels or apocalyptic prophets who met their demise at the hands of Roman power, but spoke of him as a good man without any hint of him having political ambitions or rebellious modus operandi — even though Josephus is typically hostile to all other political and religious outsiders. Nonetheless, that is the “definition” of historical Jesus that some critical scholars embrace. (For those not familiar with the arguments, they believe this to be what Jesus “must have been” because that’s the only way they can understand how he came to be crucified as a supposed claimant to be king of the Jews. Of course that leads to another question that they then must grapple with: why did the Romans in this one case execute the leader and ignore his followers?)
Notwithstanding the logical problems that surface with either definition — that he was a nobody who made no ripple in the history of his own day; that he was a political rebel who supposedly made a notice in Josephus unlike his portrayals of any other political rebel — these are the commonly advanced depictions of what is meant by the “historical Jesus”.
But scratch the surface of historical Jesus studies and we find that there are many more views on what this historical Jesus was.
So the quest at the turn of the millennium is characterised by the production of different ‘types’ of figure which more or less plausibly capture the Jesus of history:
the Jewish ‘holy man’,70
the rabbi,71
the Pharisee,72
the Galilean peasant,73
the Cynic philosopher,74
the social revolutionary,75
the sage, the seer,76
the prophet of the end-time,77
the true Messiah.78
70 Vermes, Jesus the Jew and The religion of Jesus the Jew.
71 Chilton, Rabbi Jesus.
72 Maccoby, Jesus the Pharisee.
73 The Jesus Seminar and Crossan, The historical Jesus.
74 Crossan; and Downing, Christ and the Cynics.
75 Horsley, Bandits, Prophets and Messiahs and Jesus and the spiral of violence.
76 Witherington, Jesus the sage and Jesus the seer.
77 Sanders, Jesus and Judaism and The historical figure; Allison, Jesus of Nazareth; Ehrman, Jesus.
78 Wright, Jesus and the victory of God.
Mitchell, Margaret M., and Frances M. Young, eds. 2006. The Cambridge History of Christianity, Volume 1: Origins to Constantine. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press. p. 23 (my formatting)
We finally arrive at the double-back-flip as Daniel Gullotta’s concluding word on his discussion of how wrong he believes it is to place Jesus in a Rank-Raglan scale.
Even if Jesus’ life merited a 20 out of 22 on the Rank-Raglan hero-type list (which it does not, as I have shown), this does not confirm his place amongst other mythological figures of antiquity. As the late folklorist Alan Dundes* pointed out, mythicists’ employment of this analysis does not have much to do with whether Jesus existed; it is merely an exercise in literary and psychoanalytic comparisons.124 The traditions of Jesus conforming to these legendary patterns does not negate his historicity any more than the legends connected with Alexander the Great, Augustus Caesar, and Apollonius of Tyana denies theirs.
(Gullotta, p. 344 — * Dundes, as we saw in the previous post, argues that Jesus certainly fits 17 of Raglan’s 22 points)
And here we will address what I offered two posts ago: a discussion of the rationale or place of the archetypes in any discussion of the historicity of Jesus.
After having gone to such lengths to persuade readers that the use of the Rank-Raglan archetypes was an intellectually dishonest ploy by Carrier, that the archetypes did not fit Jesus anyway, Gullotta concludes all of that by agreeing with what Carrier said in the very first place when pointing out that they do not prove the historicity or nonhistoricity of Jesus! The problem with Gullotta’s conclusion, however, is that he in fact repeats what Carrier himself said without realizing he could have quoted Carrier to make his point (supposedly) against Carrier! Carrier writes at length about how historical persons do indeed fit elements in the Raglan list and accordingly argues a fortiori.
[I]f a real person can have the same elements associated with him, and in particular so many elements (and for this purpose it doesn’t matter whether they actually occurred), then there should be many real persons on the list—as surely there are far more real persons than mythical ones.
Therefore, whether fitting more than half the Rank-Raglan criteria was always a product of chance coincidence or the product of causal influence, either way we can still conclude that it would be very unusual for any historical person to fit more than half the Rank-Raglan criteria—because if it were not unusual, then many historical persons would have done so.
(Carrier, pp. 231f)
Appeal is sometimes made to a satirical essay by Francis Lee Utley, Lincoln Wasn’t There, Or, Lord Raglan’s Hero, as evidence that Raglan’s archetypes have no value at all in assessing historicity. What is not always realized by those who point to Utley, however, is that he was writing satire and to make his case work he had to bend the rationalizations beyond breaking point as can be seen by an apologist making use of Utley’s assertions. Alan Dundes comments on Utley’s essay (p. 190):
The significance of Utley’s essay is that it underscores the distinction between the individual and his biography with respect to historicity. The fact that a hero’s biography conforms to the Indo-European hero pattern does not necessarily mean that the hero never existed. It suggests rather that the folk repeatedly insist upon making their versions of the lives of heroes follow the lines of a specific series of incidents. Accordingly, if the life of Jesus conforms in any way with the standard hero pattern, this proves nothing one way or the other with respect to the historicity of Jesus.
Carrier might add, of and by itself it allows Jesus a one in three chance of being historical.
Carrier’s point is that it is very unusual (he says it has never happened) that a historical person scores as high as many obviously mythical persons, including Jesus, on the list. (Is it kosher at this point to turn the tables and ask if the reason Gullotta was so keen to limit the number of Raglan’s points against Jesus to as few as four was to use the list to argue for Jesus’ historicity?)
And that means we can put that specific data (the Rank-Raglan-assigning data) in our background knowledge and see what it gets as an expected frequency: how often are people in that class historical vs. ahistorical? Because, given the fact that Jesus belongs to that class, the prior probability that Jesus is historical has to be the same as the prior probability that anyone we draw at random from that class is historical.
(Carrier, p. 239)
What is Carrier’s final argument, then? It may surprise Gullotta to learn that Carrier, in arguing a fortiori, was prepared to accept that chances of Jesus being historical even though a high scorer on the Raglan list was one in three.
Again, even if we started from a neutral prior of 50% and walked our way through ‘all persons claimed to be historical’ to ‘all persons who became Rank-Raglan heroes’, we’d end up again with that same probability of 1 in 3. For example, if again there were 5,000 historical persons and 1,000 mythical persons, the prior probability of being historical would be 5/6; and of not being historical, 1/6. But if there are 10 mythical men in the Rank-Raglan class and 5 historical men (the four we are granting, plus one more, who may or may not be Jesus), then the probability of being in that class given that someone was historical would be 5/5000, which is 1/1000; and the probability given that they were mythical would be 10/1000, which is 1/100. This gives us a final probability of 1/3, hence 33%. No matter how you chew on it, no matter what numbers you put in, with these ratios you always end up with the same prior probability that Jesus was an actual historical man: just 33% at best.
(Carrier, pp. 243f)
That is, Carrier is willing to concede for the sake of argument that a high number of the Raglan archetypes can be found to apply to many historical persons as well as many more mythical ones, one in three.
Given Gullotta’s insistence that Jesus fell short of even half the Raglan elements I suspect he would not be willing to argue that a third of all those we could find in the high end of the Raglan types would be historical. (One wonders if Gullotta’s criticism might have taken better turn if there was no prior animus against mythicism or presumption that any mythicist argument is by nature flawed in both motives and methods.)
Criticized for being Euro-centric and male-centric, these holistic-comparative theories have been almost universally rejected by scholars of folklore and mythology, who instead opt for theories of myth that center on the myths’ immediate cultural, political, and social settings.
(Gullotta, p. 342)
Here Gullotta is introducing a criticism of the theories that may be applicable to values of comparative literature studies but has no relevance to Carrier’s use of one of those theories. At least Gullotta does not explain how the Euro- or male-centric bias of the theories undermines the questions that are raised when seeking to explain the significance of the stories of Jesus in relation to mythical motifs.
Nevertheless, if a general point of reference for Jesus is required, why does Carrier not use Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces as his reference class? Is it because Campbell’s system is so general and universal it would fit almost any figure or story (hence the term monomyth)?
(Gullotta, p. 342)
Here again we find an odd criticism. Does Gullotta seriously suggest that Jesus should be compared with a model that attempts to describe the common human attributes found in all figures of myth, history and everyday life of us all? What would be the point of showing that Jesus undergoes at some level experiences that every figure, real or imagined, fantastical or real-life, undergoes?
Why does Carrier preference a hybrid Rank-Raglan’s scale of 22 patterns, over Rank’s original 12? Could it be because Rank’s original list includes the hero’s parents having ‘difficulty in conception’, the hero as an infant being ‘suckled by a female animal or humble woman’, to eventually grow up and take ‘revenge against his father’?
(Gullotta, p. 342)
We addressed this rhetorical question in the previous post.
Why not Jan de Vries’ heroic biographical sequence or Dean A. Miller’s characteristics of a Quest Hero?
Jan de Vries (Wikipedia photo)
Let’s look at Jan de Vries’ heroic biographical sequence and the pages Gullotta cites:
PATTERN OF AN HEROIC LIFE
I. The begetting of the hero
A. The mother is a virgin, who is in some cases overpowered by a god . . . .
B. The father is a God. . . . .
C. The father is an animal, often the disguise of a god. . . . .
D. The child is conceived in incest . . . .
II. The birth of a hero
A. It takes place in an unnatural way. Zeus brings forth Dionysus out of his thigh, Athene out of his head. . . .
B. The ’unborn’ hero, i.e. the child that is born by means of a caesarean section
III. The youth of the hero is threatened
A. The child is exposed, either by the father who has been warned in a dream that the child will he a danger to him, or by the mother who thus tries to hide her shame.
B. The exposed child is fed by animals. . . . .
C. After that the child is found by shepherds, etc. In some cases it is found by shepherds or it is taken to them.
D. In Greek legend various heroes are brought up by a mythical figure;
IV. The wαγ in which the hero is brought up
A. The hero reveals has strength, courage, or other particular features at a very early age.
V. The hero often acquires invulnerability
VI. One of the most common heroic deeds is the fight with a dragon or another monster
VII. The hero wins a maiden, usually after overcoming great dangers
VIII. The hero makes an expedition to the underworld
IX. When the hero is banished in his youth he returns later and is victorious over his enemies. In some cases he has to leave the realm again which he has won with such difficulty.
claim that a pre-Christian angel named Jesus existed,
his understanding of Jesus as a non-human and celestial figure within the Pauline corpus,
his argument that Paul understood Jesus to be crucified by demons and not by earthly forces,
his claim that James, the brother of the Lord, was not a relative of Jesus but just a generic Christian within the Jerusalem community,
his assertion that the Gospels represent Homeric myths,
and his employment of the Rank-Raglan heroic archetype as a means of comparison.
(Gullotta, p. 325. my formatting/numbering for quick reference)
We move on to the sixth and final focus of Daniel Gullotta’s critical review of Richard Carrier’s On the Historicity of Jesus:
his employment of the Rank-Raglan heroic archetype as a means of comparison.
Let’s begin with Gullotta’s own explanation of what this term means:
Developed originally by Otto Rank (1884–1939) and later adapted by Lord Raglan (FitzRoy Somerset, 1885–1964), the Rank-Raglan hero-type is a set of criteria used for classifying a certain type of hero. Expanding upon Rank’s original list of twelve, Raglan offered twenty-two events that constitute the archetypical ‘heroic life’ as follows:
1. Hero’s mother is a royal virgin; 2. His father is a king, and 3. Often a near relative of his mother, but 4. The circumstances of his conception are unusual, and 5. He is also reputed to be the son of a god. 6. At birth an attempt is made, usually by his father or his maternal grandfather to kill him, but 7. he is spirited away, and 8. Reared by foster-parents in a far country. 9. We are told nothing of his childhood, but 10. On reaching manhood he returns or goes to his future Kingdom. 11. After a victory over the king and/or a giant, dragon, or wild beast, 12. He marries a princess, often the daughter of his predecessor and 13. And becomes king. 14. For a time he reigns uneventfully and 15. Prescribes laws, but 16. Later he loses favor with the gods and/or his subjects, and 17. Is driven from the throne and city, after which 18. He meets with a mysterious death, 19. Often at the top of a hill, 20. His children, if any do not succeed him. 21. His body is not buried, but nevertheless 22. He has one or more holy sepulchres.
While Raglan himself never applied the formula to Jesus, most likely out of fear or embarrassment at the results, later folklorists have argued that Jesus’ life, as presented in the canonical gospels, does conform to Raglan’s hero-pattern. According to mythicist biblical scholar, Robert M. Price, ‘every detail of the [Jesus] story fits the mythic hero archetype, with nothing left over …’ and ‘it is arbitrary that there must have been a historical figure lying in the back of the myth’.
(Gullotta, pp. 340f)
For an annotated list of previous posts in this series see the archived page:
Let’s get some clarification and correction here. Otto Rank was on the lookout for Freudian meaning behind the myths and hence identified elements limited to the lifespan between the hero’s birth and his arrival at adulthood. Lord Raglan never read Rank and had no Freudian interest at all in relation to interpretations and analyses of myths. Contrary to Gullotta’s assertion Raglan did not “adapt” Rank’s “list”. Raglan developed his own list of 22 items, some of which by chance overlapped concepts on Rank’s earlier list.
Clearly, parts one to thirteen correspond roughly to Rank’s entire scheme, though Raglan himself never read Rank.65 Six of Raglan’s cases duplicate Rank’s, and the anti-Freudian Raglan nevertheless also takes the case of Oedipus as his standard.66
65. Raglan, “Notes and Queries,” Journal of American Folklore 70 (October-December 1957): 359. Elsewhere Raglan ironically scorns what he assumes to be “the Freudian explanation” as “to say the least inadequate, since it only takes into account two incidents out of at least [Raglan’s] twenty-two and we find that the rest of the story is the same whether the hero marries his mother, his sister or his first cousin” (“The Hero of Tradition,” 230—not included in The Hero). Raglan disdains psychological analyses of all stripes . . . .
66. For Raglan’s own ritualist analysis of the Oedipus myth, see his Jocasta’s Crime (London: Methuen, 1933), esp. chap. 26.
(Segal, p. xxiv, xxxix, xl)
Folklorist Alan Dundes set out Rank’s outline into a list format in order to compare it with Lord Raglan’s list of 22 points. Notice the way the Rank’s words have been changed for the sake of easier comparison. There is nothing wrong with that in context, but Daniel Gullotta is wrong to use Dundes’ reworded summary in place of Rank’s own outline when he is criticizing Richard Carrier for modifying some of the wording in Lord Raglan’s list.
Rank (1909)
Raglan (1934)
1. child of distinguished parents
1. mother is a royal virgin
2. father is king
2. father is a king
3. difficulty in conception
3. father related to mother
4. prophecy warning against birth (e.g. parricide)
4. unusual conception
5. hero surrendered to the water in a box
5. hero reputed to be son of god
6. saved by animals or lowly people
6. attempt (usually by father) to kill hero
7. suckled by female animal or humble woman
7. hero spirited away
8. —
8. reared by foster parents in a far country
9. hero grows up
9. no details of childhood
10. hero finds distinguished parents
10. goes to future kingdom
11. hero takes revenge on his father
11. is victor over king, giant dragon or wild beast
12. acknowledged by people
12. marries a princess (often daughter of predecessor)
13. achieves rank and honours
13. becomes king
14. —
14. for a time he reigns uneventfully
—
15. – 22. etc ……
Here is Rank’s outline of the hero myth, but note that I have converted Rank’s paragraph into a list format:
The standard saga itself may be formulated according to the following outline:
The hero is the child of most distinguished parents, usually the son of a king.
His origin is preceded by difficulties, such as continence, or prolonged barrenness, or secret intercourse of the parents due to external prohibition or obstacles.
During or before the pregnancy, there is a prophecy, in the form of a dream or oracle, cautioning against his birth, and usually threatening danger to the father (or his representative).
As a rule, he is surrendered to the water, in a box.
He is then saved by animals, or by lowly people (shepherds),
and is suckled by a female animal or by an humble woman.
After he has grown up, he finds his distinguished parents, in a highly versatile fashion.
He takes his revenge on his father, on the one hand,
and is acknowledged, on the other.
Finally he achieves rank and honors
Gullotta rhetorically asks
Why does Carrier preference a hybrid Rank-Raglan’s scale of 22 patterns, over Rank’s original 12? Could it be because Rank’s original list includes the hero’s parents having ‘difficulty in conception’, the hero as an infant being ‘suckled by a female animal or humble woman’, to eventually grow up and take ‘revenge against his father’?
(Gullotta, p. 242)
Ever since I read Daniel Dennett’s warning against argument by rhetorical question….
I advise my philosophy students to develop hypersensitivity for rhetorical questions in philosophy. They paper over whatever cracks there are in the arguments. (Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, p. 178)
….I hear a warning alarm and I check things out.
Gullotta’s rhetorical question is rendered null when we see (as I have set out above) that Rank did not say “the hero’s parents [were] having ‘difficulty in conception'” at all. Rank said “the hero’s origin is preceded by difficulties such as” — and the difficulties facing a virgin fiancée and her betrothed in the Jesus’ story are well known.
Moreover, when I read more than the page with the table of numbered points and look into what Rank himself wrote about his outline of hero myths, I find that, contrary to Gullotta’s inference, Rank did indeed include Jesus as a hero who fit his model!
Rank cites for the example of Jesus the prophetic announcements, the virginal mother and miraculous conception, the attempt on his life, his being whisked away to safety. Rank singles out the following details from Luke and Matthew as the key motifs to support his placement of Jesus in the same category as Sargon, Moses, Oedipus, Cyrus (yes, he was clearly historical!), Romulus, Hercules, Zoroaster, Buddha:
angel sent . . . to a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David
thou shall conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shall call his name JESUS. He shall be great and shall be called the Son of the Highest
seeing I know not a man?
shall be called the Son of God.
she was found with child of the Holy Ghost.
the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a dream
And knew her not till she had brought forth her firstborn son
she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger
wise men from the east
Where is he that is born King of the Jews?
Herod the king
the angel of the Lord appeareth to Joseph in a dream, saying, Arise, and take the young child and his mother, and flee into Egypt
slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under
for they are dead which sought the young child’s life.
So if, as Gullotta rightly pointed out, Lord Raglan held back from detailing the stories of Jesus against his “typical mythical elements” his predecessor, Otto Rank, did not — as we read in detail on pages 39 to 43 of The Myth of the Birth of the Hero.
Those terms Gullotta quotes (“difficulty in conception”) are not taken from his reading of Otto Rank but from another scholar, Alan Dundes, attempting to summarize and compare Rank’s views in a simplistic list. A more accurate summary would allow for the births of the following figures being allocated to the same class as Jesus — as Otto Rank does indeed allocate them.
Sargon
Moses
Karna
Oedipus
Paris
Telephus
Perseus
Gilgamesh
Cyrus
Tristan
Romulus
Hercules
Zoroaster
Buddha
Siegfried
Lohengrin
Unusual and otherwise miraculous births or conceptions and dire situations threatening the survival of the child would cover it. But one would need to read more of the book than the single page authored by a third party with a graphic layout of simplified tables to know that.
Daniel Gullotta criticizes Richard Carrier’s purported argument that the first canonical gospel (the Gospel of Mark) constructs its Jesus primarily as a counterpoint to the Greek hero Odysseus, declaring that Carrier has hewed essentially to the “discredited” arguments of Dennis MacDonald in The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark. In previous posts I have attempted to demonstrate that Gullotta’s representation of Carrier’s argument on this point in particular is without foundation; in fact, it is contrary to the clearly expressed and detailed argument that Carrier in fact does make.
Gullotta concludes this section with
Yet while Odysseus was an important figure within Greco-Roman culture, Romulus and Aeneas were far more important characters. . . . .
Furthermore, although Mark does make use of sources in constructing his gospel, the most obvious source is that of the Jewish scriptures. Given the high esteem the early church held for the Jewish scriptures, along with the numerous references and allusions made by Mark and the other evangelists to them, the Hebrew Bible is obviously the primary source for Christian literary inspiration, whereas no direct quotation or reference to Homer is anywhere to be found within the Gospel of Mark.
(Gullotta, p. 339)
Anyone reading the above words would think that Richard Carrier asserted that the Gospel of Mark Jesus primarily on Odysseus instead of, say, Romulus and, more importantly, anyone from the Jewish Scriptures. But read what Richard Carrier did in fact say:
Jesus in not only the new (and better) Moses and Elijah and Elisha, he is also the new (and better) Odysseus and Romulus (see Chapter 4, §1, and Element 47), and the new Socrates and Aesop (Element 46).
(Carrier, p. 436)
Consult the index of Carrier’s OHJ and one finds the following entry for Romulus:
There is no index entry for Odysseus.
Moreover, Chapter 4, §1 and Element 47 refer to seven pages(!) of discussion of the gospel parallels with Romulus, whom Gullotta said Carrier “should”(!) have compared with Jesus, not noticing that he in fact did — in far more extensive detail than he did with Odysseus.
Carrier early in his discussion of the gospels does indeed point out how the Roman poet Virgil drew upon and changed incidents in the epics of his Greek predecessor, Homer, but that is before he brings MacDonald into the discussion, and anyone who studies ancient Greek and Roman history will be familiar with the literary technique Virgil followed in imitating yet changing Homer’s stories. The same technique was evidently followed by the evangelists in their use of the Jewish Scriptures.
Gullotta appears to have dozed through well over forty more pages (as we began to address in the previous post) in which Carrier discussed gospel comparisons with characters from the Jewish Scriptures!
I cannot understand how Gullotta could have written such a totally false portrayal of what Carrier in fact argued. We cannot doubt that he read the book he reviewed. We cannot doubt that he has at minimum average reading comprehension and attention span. So how is it that he could write such a patently false portrayal of Carrier’s work?
From this point Gullotta loses sight of Carrier’s own line of reasoning, sometimes erroneously conflating MacDonald’s and Carrier’s views, and even at one point distorting the meaning of MacDonald’s words in order to fire a salvo at “mythicists” in general.
As I said, trying to get a complete handle on Gullotta’s fifth point is a long haul. I’ll set out the evidence for the assertions in the previous paragraph in my next post.
So from that point I continue.
That mis-aimed salvo
For example, Gullotta writes
Because almost every event in Mark has some sort of Homeric counterpart according to MacDonald, many mythicists have taken his work to indicate that the Gospels have no historical value whatsoever. This, however, is not the conclusion MacDonald has come to, and because of the popularity of his research among mythicists, he has had to clarify his own confidence in the existence of the historical Jesus.97
97. For example, ‘A Jewish teacher named Jesus actually existed, but within a short period of time, his followers wrote fictions about him, claiming that his father was none other than the god of the Jews, that he possessed incredible powers to heal and raise from the dead, that he was more powerful than ‘bad guys’ like the devil and his demons, and that after he was killed, he ascended, alive, into the sky’, in Dennis R. MacDonald, Mythologizing Jesus: From Jewish Teacher to Epic Hero (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2015), pp. 1–2. Also see Dennis R. MacDonald, Two Shipwrecked Gospels: The Logoi of Jesus and Papias’s Exposition of Logia about the Lord (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2012), pp. 543–560.
(Gullotta, pp. 337f)
Yes, indeed, Dennis MacDonald has always made it clear that he does not dispute the historicity of Jesus and that he has never intended his research to lead to such a conclusion. But not even the quotation Gullotta finds to repeat this point can support his insinuation that MacDonald’s arguments believing in the historicity of Jesus somehow equates with the gospels containing some kind of “historical value”. Gullotta appears not to notice that the quotation he supplies to supposedly rebut the idea that the gospels have no historical value itself says that the gospels are indeed fictions! One does not need to believe in the historical value of the gospels to believe in a historical Jesus as a good number of scholars can testify. (Again, where were the peer reviewers part of whose job, I thought, is to prevent such non sequiturs going to into print?)
An erroneous conflation
Almost amusing is Daniel Gullotta’s attempt to use Margaret Mitchell’s 2003 critical review of Dennis MacDonald’s Homeric thesis in support of his contention that Carrier has as much egg on his face as MacDonald for (supposedly uncritically) jumping on MacDonald’s bandwagon. But if Gullotta has paid closer attention to both what Mitchell faulted in MacDonald to what Carrier himself concluded about MacDonald’s views, he would have seen they were not very far removed from one another! Continue reading “Gullotta’s Dysrepresentation of Carrier’s Case for the Gospels as Myth … Part 3”
A few weeks ago I was asked to comment on Tim O’Neill’s post, Jesus Mythicism 3: “No Contemporary References to Jesus”. I think that was the one. So I caught up with it on my return from Thailand last night so I can respond at last. (If there is another one I was asked to respond to then feel free to advise me.)
My first point is that I don’t think I have ever taken a lot of time to look into who of the authors of the first century c.e. said nothing about Jesus and why this should be surprising if Jesus existed. As I understand it, such lists of names of “who at the time should have mentioned Jesus but didn’t” are presented as part of an argument to prove that Jesus did not exist. I have no problem with people wanting to take that line of argument and try to make their case but it is not where I am at and it is not a line of argument I have tried to follow.
My interest has been to try to explain the evidence for Christian origins according to the standard and best methods followed by historians of ancient history and so far it appears to me that that evidence is best explained by hypotheses that have no place for a historical Jesus. In other words, I do not see any evidence for the existence of a historical Jesus. That is not the same as saying I believe we can prove that Jesus did not exist. I don’t recall ever trying to “prove” that Jesus did not exist. I have often attempted to set out arguments, generally based on either or both serious biblical scholarship and the sound methodologies of ancient history, that demonstrate how the gospels and letters of Paul can well be explained without any need for reaching back to a historical Jesus.
So back to the lists of “who’s who among those who did not mention Jesus”. Here is how I see the best way to approach such lists. I have not done this exercise myself so present it here as what I think I would do if I had the time and interest to take it up.
I would take the arguments of both sides, of those who set out all the reasons such authors should have mentioned Jesus and of those who set out all the reasons we should not expect to see references to Jesus in them. And then I’d try to do my own homework on each of the authors to learn what I can about his background, interests, and what some of the scholars have to say about his work, etc.
Maybe some of you are twigging to where I am leading. In other words I am setting up the two hypotheses and then getting background information. If that reminds you of a Bayesian approach you are right with me.
I’d take each author in turn and ask how expected is the absence of a reference to Jesus in our manuscripts given all that we know about each author and 1) the non-existence of Jesus; and then 2) Jesus failing to attract the attention and interest of the author; and then compare the results.
In other words, I would not take up each argument, the one for and against, and tackle it on its own, either looking to poke holes in it or finding ways to buttress it. Forget the argument and trying to pick winners. Do serious historical research and thinking about the evidence in the light of both hypotheses and background information. Be prepared for the final balance to be tilted either way.
At the end of the day I do not see what difference the result would make to my historical interests in Christian origins. It might make a difference to those attempting to either prove or disprove the existence of Jesus. But as I have said several times now, that’s not a question I want to venture into. To me, the historical question is how to explain the evidence for Christian origins. If we need a historical Jesus to explain it then so be it; if a simpler hypothesis does not require such a figure then so be it.
The key point for me is the absence of known contemporary references to “the historical Jesus”. That brings us back to the methods set out by various ancient historians themselves, such as Moses Finley, which are in sync with the methodological principles set out by the so-called “minimalists” such as Philip R. Davies. I would love to set up an annotated archive page of all the posts I have done on that topic for easy reference.
Oh, and one more detail —
I explicitly mentioned background information in relation to each of the authors. But implicit in what I said is another spectrum of background information, too, and that’s what we mean by a “historical Jesus” figure. Do not rely on what anyone else says a source says, but do your own checking. For example, Tim O’Neill says that according to the Gospel of Mark Jesus there is no indication that Jesus was known beyond Galilee and refers to Mk 1:27-28 and 6:14. But more careful investigators will not overlook Mk 3:8 that also has his reputation extending as far as Jerusalem, beyond Jordan and up into Tyre and Sidon. And then one will have to ask the extent to which such a description is based on a need to emulate and transcend the following of Moses given the larger “midrashic” suggestions in that section of Mark. And do we take as historical the triumphal entry into Jerusalem that implies people knew about him before he came on the scene, etc etc etc.
But if Jesus was a nobody who did not even have a widespread reputation for healing (and despite Tim O’Neill’s attempt to suggest the contrary, even sceptical or critical scholars who accept the historicity of Jesus as a relative “nobody” generally acknowledge he had a significant reputation as a healer) then we need to have a good hypothesis to explain how the early converts were made to “Christianity” from the basis of such a figure in the first place.
In other words, it is going to be difficult to come up with a way to assess the rightful expectations of mention of such a figure in our extant writings. Perhaps we need to work with several hypotheses: no Jesus; minimal Jesus; a medium Jesus (as per a critical scholar’s construct); a max Jesus (as per an apologist view).
For other Archives by Topic, Annotated see the right margin.
In the previous post we began to look at Daniel Gullotta’s treatment of Richard Carrier’s argument that the gospels are more like myth than remembered history and concluded with a look at a quotation taken from page 396 of Carrier’s On the Historicity of Jesus. In the next sentence Gullotta refers to another sentence of Carrier that is taken from a full 40/41 pages after the first one.
Carrier’s claims that ‘Mark updated Homer by recasting the time and place and all the characters to suit Jewish and (newly minted) Christian mythology’ is principally based on the work of Dennis R. MacDonald.93 After heavily citing the work of MacDonald, Carrier claims, ‘[i]n constructing his Gospel, the first we know to have been written, Mark merged Homeric with biblical mythology to create something new, a mythical syncretism, centered around his cult’s savior god, the Lord Jesus Christ, and his revelatory message, the ‘gospel’ of Peter and (more specifically) Paul.’94
93 Carrier, On the Historicity of Jesus, p. 436.
94 Carrier, On the Historicity of Jesus, p. 437.
Gullotta, p. 337
That is a misrepresentation of Carrier’s argument. Carrier’s “claim” did not follow on “after heavily citing the work of MacDonald”. The words Gullotta quotes in fact followed a single citation of MacDonald.
In those 40 pages separating the quotes Gullotta has fished out Carrier set out details of his case for reading the gospels as myth rather than history and peppered his discussion with supporting (sometimes contradicting) views of other scholars. There are 83 footnotes in those 40 pages and Dennis MacDonald appears in no more than 5 of them. Others cited in those 40 pages of establishing his case for the Gospel of Mark being constructed as a mythical narrative are: Continue reading “Gullotta’s Misleading Portrayal of Carrier’s claims…. Part 2”
For other Archives by Topic, Annotated see the right margin.
–o–
This is the most difficult of my posts so far discussing Daniel Gullotta’s treatment of Richard Carrier’s On the Historicity of Jesus. On pages 336 to 340 of his review Gullotta conveys the clear impression that Carrier has relied primarily, even perhaps entirely, on Dennis MacDonald’s thesis that the Gospel of Mark was based on Homer’s Odyssey and last two books of the Iliad and has consequently concluded that the gospel is primarily myth rather than remembered history. Gullotta further leads readers to understand that Carrier claimed Jesus was essentially based on Homer’s character Odysseus and that criticisms of MacDonald’s entire thesis equally applied to Carrier’s treatment of the Gospel of Mark. I will demonstrate that all of this representation of Carrier’s argument is grossly misleading. One scarcely knows where to begin.
Let’s start with his heading for this section Mark, the Christian Homer? Jesus, the Jewish Odysseus? That heading sets up the expectation that we will learn that Carrier argues accordingly.
Gullotta begins, however, with a genuine Carrier assertion unrelated to the Homeric thesis of MacDonald: that the characteristics of myth are a combination of
(1) strong and meaningful emulation of prior myths (or even of real events);
(2) the presence of historical improbabilities (which are not limited to ‘miracles’ but can include natural events that are very improbable, like amazing coincidences or unrealistic behavior); and
(3) the absence of external corroboration of key (rather than peripheral) elements (because a myth can incorporate real people and places, but the central character or event will still be fictional).
(my formatting)
Gullotta seems perturbed by the idea that such criteria should invalidate the Gospel of Mark as “remembered history” when he comments:
Because of this, Carrier deems the Gospels to be ‘allegorical myth, not remembered history’.
(Gullotta, p. 337)
I thought most critical scholars, even devout Christian ones, considered the gospels to be primarily mythical or theological tales long removed from history. The question Carrier is taking up is whether there was a historical Jesus behind them at the beginning.
But even at this early point of the discussion Gullotta leads readers to think that such criteria and understanding of myth is Carrier’s idea. He begins the criteria with
According to Carrier, ‘the gospels are primarily and pervasively mythical’ and he bases this assessment on the following criteria
and Gullotta gives readers no indication that those criteria are Carrier’s distillation of lengthy scholarly discussion and debate.
This is not the first time we have seen Gullotta inexplicably fail to acknowledge that Carrier is prepared to concede for the sake of a fortiori argument the very position Gullotta is arguing.
The focus of my response will center on Carrier’s
claim that a pre-Christian angel named Jesus existed,
his understanding of Jesus as a non-human and celestial figure within the Pauline corpus,
his argument that Paul understood Jesus to be crucified by demons and not by earthly forces,
his claim that James, the brother of the Lord, was not a relative of Jesus but just a generic Christian within the Jerusalem community,
his assertion that the Gospels represent Homeric myths,
and his employment of the Rank-Raglan heroic arche-type as a means of comparison.
(Gullotta, p. 325. my formatting/numbering for quick reference)
For an annotated list of previous posts in this series see the archived page:
This is a new page that I have added to the Archives by Topic, Annotated — see the right margin.
–o–
Daniel Gullotta begins is foray into Richard Carrier’s argument that James was a fictive, not biological, brother of Jesus.
It has been claimed that if there is an Achilles’ heel to the Jesus Myth theory, it would be the reference to ‘James, the brother of the Lord’ (Gal 1.19). Typically, historical Jesus scholars take James to be one of Jesus’ many biological siblings; however, Carrier and other mythicists have argued that the familial language used throughout the Pauline letters is reason enough to doubt that James is Jesus’ biological brother.
(Gullotta, p. 334)
Gullotta does not identify any of the “other mythicists” who share Carrier’s argument in his footnote so it appears he knows only Carrier’s mythicist argument. For other arguments about this passage and important background information that needs to be taken into account in its interpretation see any of the other posts addressing these points. Again we are faced with the irony of reading a review that fails to consider opposing arguments in the context of all relevant background information when reviewing a book about the importance of considering alternative hypothesis against all relevant background information.
But the most curious detail of Gullotta’s criticism of this point is his failure to comment on Carrier’s conclusion that he will argue that the passage in Galatians 1:19 is exactly 100% what is to be expected if James indeed was the biological brother of Jesus!
However, I must argue a fortiori, and to that end . . . I’ll allow that it [i.e. Galatians 1:19 being a reference to James’ biological sibling status to Jesus] might be twice as likely on historicity [despite their] internal ambiguity and surrounding silence. . . .
(Carrier, p. 592)
Carrier’s point is to lay out all the evidence and background information and then in that context to compare rival hypotheses or interpretations. That is the essence of the Bayesian method that Gullotta elsewhere indicates he fails to understand. Without that understanding Gullotta is able to do no more than repeat the same proof-text type arguments that are based on scholarly tradition rather than a comprehensive survey of the data.
This is not the first time we have seen Gullotta inexplicably fail to acknowledge that Carrier is prepared to concede for the sake of a fortiori argument the very position Gullotta is arguing! One cannot imagine a more solid evidence that he has failed to understand the whole methodology of Carrier’s argument – or the principles of sound historical reasoning with competing hypotheses.
James . . .
There is a light-hearted moment in Gullotta’s review, however, when he proceeds to demonstrate his assertion that
there is solid evidence to affirm James was the biological brother of Jesus.
(Gullotta, p. 335)
Hold tight. Prepare for another Gish Gallop. The “solid evidence” appears to consist of
a list of seven names in Paul’s letters who are said to be a sample of those who are not called “the brother of the Lord”
James is reputed to be a pillar in the Jerusalem church
James has authority in the Jerusalem church
Paul highlights his meeting with him
James received a vision of the resurrected Jesus
Paul mentions his name before Peter’s (Cephas’s)
later traditions said he was a brother of Jesus
how else can we explain the above unless this James was a brother of Jesus?
“Solid evidence”? No other explanation is plausible than that James must have been a literal sibling of Jesus?
Carrier, Richard. 2014. On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press.
Gullotta, Daniel N. 2017. “On Richard Carrier’s Doubts.” Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 15 (2–3): 310–46. https://doi.org/10.1163/17455197-01502009.
Daniel Gullotta takes up Carrier’s argument that Jesus was crucified “in heavenly places” beginning as follows:
Rather than believing that Jesus was crucified at the hands of Romans, Carrier claims that Paul and the first Christians believed that ‘Jesus was celestially crucified by the ‘rulers of this world’, by which Carrier means ‘Satan and his demons.’ Most of Carrier’s evidence relies heavily upon 1 Cor 2.8 and Paul’s reference to ‘the rulers of this age’. According to Carrier, these rulers ‘cannot mean the Jewish elite, or the Romans, or any human authority’ but rather ‘Satan and his demons’. But this assessment is inaccurate because it places an artificial distinction between earthly and other-earthly powers that does not exist in Second Temple texts, particularly of the apocalyptic variety.
(Gullotta, p. 331)
Rather than point out the reasons Carrier gives for his interpretation of 1 Cor 2.8 Gullotta dwells entirely on opposing arguments without at any point indicating Carrier’s responses to any of these. Gullotta’s “rebuttals” are in fact answered by Carrier although Gullotta appears to have overlooked that fact. For example, Gullotta in the above quotation says Paul cannot mean the Jewish elite or the Romans quite ignoring Carrier’s point that
This cannot mean just Pontius Pilate and the Sanhedrin. This is everyone in power: they killed Jesus, and did so only because they were kept from knowing their doing so would save the human race.
(Carrier p. 564)
A review is entitled to disagree with Carrier’s argument but he is not entitled to a criticism that gives readers the impression that Carrier’s argument is nonexistent.
Moreover, Gullotta’s responses are not based on a comprehensive awareness of the range of arguments that have been raised in the history of the interpretation of 1 Cor 2:8 but dwell exclusively on one interpretation only, as if there is no scholarly debate. Since I have only recently explored the extent of the scholarly arguments, past and more recent, both for and against Gullotta’s position, I am reluctant to repeat them here. Anyone interested in the question and the range of arguments, including where Gullotta’s fall short, can access any of those posts. It is fine for Gullotta to disagree with any of them but it is not appropriate to write a review as if Carrier’s position finds no support among specialists in the question.
Certainly there is no doubt that demonic powers were believed to influence the actions of earthly authorities. But whether that is the point Paul is expressing in 1 Cor 2:8 is another question.
One is free to argue that Paul did believe that Jesus was crucified on earth but one cannot base that argument on a passage whose meaning is disputed among one’s peers without at least acknowledging that dispute that potentially favours Carrier’s interpretation.
Once again, I suspect Paul may well have understood the crucifixion to have been on earth, yet that position does not contradict the view that in 1 Cor 2:8 Paul says it was the demons were responsible entirely for the crucifixion of Jesus. As addressed in the above posts we see indications that even the evangelists believed that human agents were mere puppets whose strings were being pulled by Satan and demonic forces (as per the Gospels of Mark, Luke and John). (In this respect I remain less certain about Carrier’s and Doherty’s mythicist view of the necessity of a crucifixion in the lower heavens.)
Gullotta concludes his “rebuttal” of Carrier’s point by a long non sequitur listing second and third century references to earthly powers crucifying Jesus and comments:
Given our sources concerning Jesus’ death and knowledge about his executed contemporaries, the reality of a crucified Jesus as another failed messianic pretender from Palestine is remarkably more likely than a demonic crucifixion in outer space.
(Gullotta, p. 334)
Gullotta fails to notice the circularity of his appeal “other failed messianic pretenders” but what is particularly ironic is his appeal to probability. Carrier’s entire method is to establish relative probabilities of each possible explanation for the evidence against the full range of background knowledge. Gullotta typifies the flawed approach Carrier is attempting to address: the habit of appealing only to a narrow range of background information, those few details that support the conventional wisdom, and to fail to balance the probability of the historicist interpretation against arguments for the alternative probability. Gullotta has unfortunately simply swept aside the arguments and background information that he has just read in favour of the mythicist hypothesis as if the relevant pages were blank text. One must infer that Carrier’s fault is disagreeing with the consensus.
More forgivable given Gullotta’s early days as a scholar is his undermining the strength of his review by indicating his ignorance of the range of interpretations among his peers on the Corinthians passage about the rulers of this age crucifying the lord of glory. But where were his peer reviewers whose job surely it was to prevent the publication of such an oversight?
Surely, then, Gullotta has not “examined numerous fundamental problems” with Carrier’s thesis nor has he addressed (in fact he has consciously avoided) Carrier’s “Bayesian conclusion”.
There is no index entry for Odysseus.
For example, Gullotta writes
