A constructive benefit of Carrier's work is that serious alternative history is a source of ideas for storytelling and conworlding. A destructive benefit is that Carrier may serve as a ladder in my ultimate quest to prove that all humans have been wrong about all things in every way.
There are serious scholarly reasons to think that the Buddha was a mythical being. For example, his story sounds identical to the one for Mahavira. Perhaps there was only one world-renouncing prince, and rumors about him were co-opted by multiple movements. Or maybe "world-renouncing prince" just sounds archetypal to people, and a story became a myth.zompist wrote: ↑Thu Jan 19, 2023 2:31 am 2. Raphael's point is good: you can't interrogate ancient records like a police report. Jesus' life is not well documented, but it's way, way more documented and earlier documented than nine tenths of antiquity. Our records of the Buddha are far far worse. Our records of David are far worse. Or Confucius, or Laozi. Or Sargon. Or Narmer. Or Ben Zakkai. Or Zoroaster.
If you looked at every ancient text with the same nothing-can-be-proven skepticism, then we know nothing about ancient history. It's just as huge an error as deciding that the texts we have are dictated by God.
Note that even for so important a figure as the Persian emperors Cyrus and Darius, we don't know where the hell they came from. We have stories from multiple sources, all contradictory. We can't prove that Darius was an Achaemenid at all. For that matter we can't prove that there was an Achaemenes. When even emperors can't be closely documented, it's foolish to get tied up in knots over how much we know about some prophet.
We have inscriptions from early cults in the Roman Empire, philosophical schools and even private citizens, but not Christians before the Jewish War. Weirdly, the Talmud thinks Jesus lived in 70 AD. It's not easy to interpret what that means, but Carrier thinks that if Jesus existed, he was uniquely unremarkable, and that Christianity was, for many decades, one of the weakest movements in all of antiquity.
Even Jesus from Outer Space, a layman's introduction, has long chapters on the relative likelihoods of empirical evidence originating from various sources. I can't think of a neat way to summarize this. There's a chapter where he goes through the evidence for a number of non-Jesus figures one by one. For example, Persian emperors put up inscriptions, are mentioned by historians and so on. None of this is true for early Christianity.
But the Jewish Messiah really is an invented prophet-like figure. Same with Maitreya Buddha. In Chinese revolutionary movements, many leaders claimed to be Maitreya, a figure who is entirely mythical.
No one doubts that someone really started Christianity. The question is whether he was a Jesus-like figure or a Paul-like figure.
No one is making a big deal over or complaining about a theophoric name. The argument is that Jesus's name is not remarkable if he didn't exist.
The bulk of early Christian writings come from Paul, who talks exclusively about Cosmic Jesus if you accept Carrier's interpretation of the Greek original. The only real sticking point is that Carrier interprets one passage where Paul meets a "brother of the Lord" to refer to an oridinary Christian. Carrier says this is how Paul uses the phrase elsewhere.zompist wrote: ↑Thu Jan 19, 2023 2:31 am 7. I understand you're paraphrasing Carrier's theory and not responsible for it. But the chronology just doesn't fit, because "cosmic Jesus" was a fairly late phenomenon. I suggest reading Bart Ehrlich's Lost Christianities, which fills in what we're generally not taught: all the versions of Christianity that lost out to orthodoxy. There was not just one group sitting there inventing the Jesus of later Catholicism. There were multiple groups with dizzyingly varied ideas about Jesus, and the basics of orthodoxy weren't agreed on till centuries later. Some of those groups rejected Paul, BTW.
Why do you think God makes a bet with Satan, then?zompist wrote: ↑Thu Jan 19, 2023 2:31 am 8. I mostly agree with Ryusenshi's comments about the oddity of what details survive in the gospels Mythmakers don't invent details that contradict the myth they're trying to build; it's much more likely that they're incorporated because they're widely known and have to be accepted. (You can believe that Elvis is still alive, but you're unlikely to believe that rather than being a musician he was a chartered accountant.)
I think Carrier will say that the Romulus myth is recounted in Plutarch. The writer of the Gospel of Mark was writing outside Israel, and he was highly educated, even though he made conscious efforts to hide his level of classical education. Carrier may have had more evidence about Romulus, but I can't recall anything offhand. His scholarly works are available on pdfdrive: https://www.pdfdrive.com/on-the-histori ... 92150.htmlzompist wrote: ↑Thu Jan 19, 2023 2:31 am 10. Romulus ?? Does he give any evidence that Roman civic mythology was of any interest in Greece, much less the Middle East? The NT writers were obsessed with linking (and liberally reinterpreting) Old Testament stuff, but I don't see that they, or any other Jews, gave a crap for even Greek mythology.
There are mainstream scholars who think Jesus was a zealot. Only his non-existence is a fringe theory.zompist wrote: ↑Thu Jan 19, 2023 2:31 am 11. It's common to doubt that Jesus claimed divinity, especially when the motive is to turn him into a staid, careful prophet. (Much as Islam does!) But messiahhood was a pretty common idea, gods and men-becoming-gods and things-in-between-men-and-gods were common ideas. It's interesting that Luke actually shores up his nativity story with an appeal to Zoroastrianism (the magii). If Jesus didn't claim anything besides wisdom, why didn't he just end up as a rabbi, or at most a Zealot?