Richard Carrier

This is a book about the growth of Christianity in the 1st & 2nd centuries, written as a response to work by one J.P. Holding who made a number of claims about that growth. A common claim made by Holding and others is that Christian origins were too improbable for it to be false. Carrier pretty much demolishes these arguments, one by one, in such exhaustive detail that you almost feel sorry for Holding, except for the fact that Carrier repeatedly shows him to be a liar at best and a very show more poor scholar at worst. On the one hand, the book is kind of shackled by this structure; in having to structure it according to the claims of Holding, Carrier is limited in how he can tell the story. But what emerges is a rounded picture of society and religion in the first couple centuries of the Common Era, and is well worth reading. I'll keep my eye out for more of his books. The truth is always more interesting and rewarding to read than propaganda. show less

I am a huge fan of Richard Carrier and of this book, but I have a different, albeit amateur, take on the trickiest evidence mythicists have to negotiate, viz. "James, the Lord's brother" (Gal. 1:19), "born/made of woman, born/made under the law" (Gal. 4:4), and "from the seed of David" (Rom. 1:3). Instead of relying on difficult interpretations of these phrases, I would suggest interpolation. I know it is easy to call interpolation on any phrase one doesn't like, and Carrier himself does not show more like to do it without excellent evidence because it lowers the probability of his theory (relying as it does on unproven tampering with the text). However, I am confident enough in the correctness of mythicism on other grounds that these phrases stand out from Paul's letters as obvious candidates for forgery.

For the following specific textual grounds for arguing interpolation I rely on Peter Kirby's work here: http://peterkirby.com/marcions-shorter-readings-of-paul.html

"James, the Lord's brother" is contained in a passage in Galatians about Paul's supposed first visit to Jerusalem which is suspect in its entirety: it was not in Marcion's text, nor I suspect in Irenaeus'. Of course Catholics accused Marcion of deleting them, but it is no less likely that they added them in. If this line were absent, the figure of James, the human brother of a human Jesus of Nazareth, could still have been invented through a process of imaginative textual reconciliation: in Acts (as Carrier discusses) there is a problem where one James is killed and then another James carries on as the leader of the Church: combine this unidentified James with the brother James named in Mark's Gospel and Paul's remark at 1 Cor 9:5 about "the Lord's brothers", and (voila!) one has engineered a James, human brother of Jesus, who is a Church leader, then written into Gal. 1. Giving Jesus a human brother would also be an anti-Marcionite statement, to interpolate, since Marcion argued Jesus had no human birth (he descended in adult form). This interpolation solution would allow brother to hold its meaning of human siblinghood, while still not bolstering the case for the historical Jesus. This would also explain why, if this is a brother in the human sense, the sentence does not distinguish this kind of brother from the spiritual kind that Paul wrote about much more often: it wasn't Paul writing.

The phrase "born/made of woman, born/made under the law" was not in Marcion's text of Galatians. Marcion did not believe either of these things about Jesus, but they make sense as something Catholics might have interpolated to use against Marcionites.

Nor was "from the seed of David" in Marcion's text of Romans. Marcion believed Jesus had no human birth so dismissing this phrase would spare us having to follow Carrier's argument about sperm implantation.

I know Carrier will not make this argument, and there will be some who are loath to accept or to rely on interpolation arguments. Personally, from my reading I have very little confidence in the faithful transmission of the texts: Catholics were clearly willing to forge documents to bolster their theological positions - hence why several letters attributed to Paul are now regarded as forgeries. I have no problem believing they would have inserted anti-Marcionite interpolations. We cannot prove them interpolations, but readers who baulk at Carrier's most difficult arguments might like to consider this alternative way around his most problematic evidence.

Edit: it should also be noted that these 3 verses are not in DeBuhn's reconstructions of Marcion's texts: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1633263891

Edit: the blog Vridar mentions that neither Justin Martyr nor Tertullian seems to be aware of a James, brother of Jesus, who is a leader of the Christians.

Thanks for reading. show less

I am a huge fan of Richard Carrier and of this book, but I have a different, albeit amateur, take on the trickiest evidence mythicists have to negotiate, viz. "James, the Lord's brother" (Gal. 1:19), "born/made of woman, born/made under the law" (Gal. 4:4), and "from the seed of David" (Rom. 1:3). Instead of relying on difficult interpretations of these phrases, I would suggest interpolation. I know it is easy to call interpolation on any phrase one doesn't like, and Carrier himself does not show more like to do it without excellent evidence because it lowers the probability of his theory (relying as it does on unproven tampering with the text). However, I am confident enough in the correctness of mythicism on other grounds that these phrases stand out from Paul's letters as obvious candidates for forgery.

For the following specific textual grounds for arguing interpolation I rely on Peter Kirby's work here: http://peterkirby.com/marcions-shorter-readings-of-paul.html

"James, the Lord's brother" is contained in a passage in Galatians about Paul's supposed first visit to Jerusalem which is suspect in its entirety: it was not in Marcion's text, nor I suspect in Irenaeus'. Of course Catholics accused Marcion of deleting them, but it is no less likely that they added them in. If this line were absent, the figure of James, the human brother of a human Jesus of Nazareth, could still have been invented through a process of imaginative textual reconciliation: in Acts (as Carrier discusses) there is a problem where one James is killed and then another James carries on as the leader of the Church: combine this unidentified James with the brother James named in Mark's Gospel and Paul's remark at 1 Cor 9:5 about "the Lord's brothers", and (voila!) one has engineered a James, human brother of Jesus, who is a Church leader, then written into Gal. 1. Giving Jesus a human brother would also be an anti-Marcionite statement, to interpolate, since Marcion argued Jesus had no human birth (he descended in adult form). This interpolation solution would allow brother to hold its meaning of human siblinghood, while still not bolstering the case for the historical Jesus. This would also explain why, if this is a brother in the human sense, the sentence does not distinguish this kind of brother from the spiritual kind that Paul wrote about much more often: it wasn't Paul writing.

The phrase "born/made of woman, born/made under the law" was not in Marcion's text of Galatians. Marcion did not believe either of these things about Jesus, but they make sense as something Catholics might have interpolated to use against Marcionites.

Nor was "from the seed of David" in Marcion's text of Romans. Marcion believed Jesus had no human birth so dismissing this phrase would spare us having to follow Carrier's argument about sperm implantation.

I know Carrier will not make this argument, and there will be some who are loath to accept or to rely on interpolation arguments. Personally, from my reading I have very little confidence in the faithful transmission of the texts: Catholics were clearly willing to forge documents to bolster their theological positions - hence why several letters attributed to Paul are now regarded as forgeries. I have no problem believing they would have inserted anti-Marcionite interpolations. We cannot prove them interpolations, but readers who baulk at Carrier's most difficult arguments might like to consider this alternative way around his most problematic evidence.

Thanks for reading. show less

This book is more approachable than others by this author, but still has some of the same flaws. The author desperately needs an editor, the kind of editor that smacks your hand with a ruler when you fill pages with sentence fragments, fail to properly close parentheses, or just write bad sentences. The subject matter is interesting, and he is willing to discuss how he reaches his conclusions, what his sources are, and why he interprets the evidence the way he does. It isn't likely that I show more would agree with everything he says, since I've never had that happen before, with him or anyone else, but there is a lot here to think about. It's not an easy read; don't take it to the beach on Sunday for a lazy day of basking. It is less loaded with jargon and equations than most of his works, which, judging from what he says in the appendix, is due to the publisher, to whom he refers as 'math phobic'. Good job, publisher. The majority of his readers are likely 'math phobic' as well, and philosophical equations are denser and more obfuscatory even than calculus equations or physics equations. Bayes Theorem notwithstanding, he can make his point better if the readers stick with his book and understand what he's saying. show less