Arguendo

Dr. Darrell Bock 

There’s one thing we haven’t brought up that people listening probably, “Why haven’t you brought this up?” You notice we haven’t done any citation from the Gospel of John, and people go, “Why don’t you do that?” It’s because in an historical Jesus discussion, John is seen as being so explicit that the credibility of what he says is doubted, so we’re dealing with sources that skeptics will recognize, and will play with, and will accept, but they tend to be very slow about anything that’d direct out of the Gospel of John. So we’re working with evidence that a skeptic accepts as a way of thinking about did Jesus make divine claims about himself [transcript].

https://voice.dts.edu/tablepodcast/historical-jesus-divine/

There are several problems with that strategy:

i) It's true that in Christian apologetics we try to find common ground with unbelievers. That's valid up to a point. By the same token, that sometimes includes arguendo reasoning, where we "grant, for the sake of argument," an assumption or objection by the unbeliever. 

That can sometimes be a powerful strategy. It may form the basis of an a fortiori argument. A Christian apologist will play a weaker hand for discussion purposes. If he can win even when assuming that artificial handicap, then it makes his overall case that much stronger when he follows that up by playing a stronger hand. 

ii) It is, however, a problem when apologists fail to upshift. If they succeed in the arguendo stage of the argument, the next logical step is to build on that by bringing other evidence back into the discussion which they temporarily bracketed.

iii) The desire to find common ground should never be a one-sided exercise where the apologist cedes control of the debate to the unbeliever. The onus is not on an apologist to convince the unbeliever. Rather, the onus is on an apologist to provide good reasons for his position, regardless of whether the unbeliever is open to reason and evidence. Unbelievers cannot be allowed to dictate the criteria. The criteria are subject to debate no less than other matters. The rule of evidence predetermine what counts as evidence. So that's a decisive preliminary step.   

iv) If an apologist believes that John's Gospel is historically reliable, then he clearly thinks that's a defensible position–otherwise he wouldn't hold to it. So he should be prepared to defend it. The reasons he has for taking that position himself are reasons he can and should present for why others ought to share his position. 

v) Ironically, there's a sense in which John is easier to defend, on purely evidential grounds, than the Synoptics. There's stronger internal evidence for traditional authorship and/or eyewitness testimony. There's stronger external evidence for traditional authorship. And there's stronger archeological corroboration. 

vi) Although there are passages in Hebrews and the Pauline epistles where the Christology is just as high as the Fourth Gospel, it's important to have the historical grounding in a biography. Even in terms of apologetic strategy, a "skeptic" will dismiss the high Christology of the epistles because the authors had no firsthand knowledge of the historical Jesus. So the Gospel of John provides a key witness to high Christology in the setting of the historical Jesus. Not only is that valuable in its own right, but it forms a bridge between Synoptic Christology and the high Christology Hebrews and some Pauline epistles. (I'm not saying other NT documents have a low Christology. There's a difference between not affirming x and disaffirming x. The former is neutral.)

vii) To take a concrete example, if Christian apologists duck John's Gospel, Muslims will take notice of that. They will infer that Christians lack confidence in John's Gospel.   Likewise, ducking John's Gospel plays into Da Vinci Code suspicions about how orthodox Christology is an artifact of the Nicene Fathers and church councils rather than the NT. So the strategy is counterproductive. 

Partition theory

There's an abrupt mood change from 2 Cor 1-9 to 10-13. As a result, some scholars think 2 Corinthians is a two (or more) Pauline letters edited into one. There are more elaborate partition theories in which 2 Corinthians becomes a miniature Pauline canon of collected shorter letters. 

I think the most natural explanation for the dramatic tonal shift from 1-9 to 10-13 is that Paul didn't dictate the entire letter at one sitting. Rather, there was an interval of weeks or months between 1-9 and 10-13. 

I bring that up because it's relevant to something I've said on more than one occasion regarding the Gospels. Some NT scholars think the Gospels authors resequence some events for symbolic reasons. That's why some scenes are (allegedly) out of sync. 

However, even assuming chronological dislocation, that doesn't entail a narrative strategy. Rather, it could simply mean the Gospels weren't dictated at one sitting (which would be exhausting), so some "anachronisms" might be due to the fact that the Gospels have flashbacks or flashforwards, not because that's the order in which things happened, but because that's the order in which the evangelist remembers events in the life of Christ. And if the Gospels were dictated at more than one sitting, which seems inevitable, we'd expect the backtracking and zigzagging that happens in oral history. 

On rock

Coins also provide evidence of the effort to deify Livia. In some cases she is depicted as Demeter/Ceres, the goddess of grain. Philip issued coins in honor of Livia in the year 30CE, some stamped with the inscription karpophoros "fruitbearer", a clear allusion to Demeter/Ceres. Philip's coins leave no doubt as to his commitment to the Roman imperial cult and his specific loyalty to Livia herself. The linkage between the honoring of Livia and the refounding of Bethsaida is seen in coins issued in 30 CE that read "by Philip the tetrarch, founder" and "Julia Sebaste". "Founder" (ktistes) refers to the refounding of Bethsaida. 

The heights of Bethsaida rest on a rocky ridge of volcanic basalt. The earliest phase of the city reaches back to the Bronze Age. The site was chosen because it is the highest ground along the north shore of the Sea of Galilee, the ridge provides plenty of rock for building and defensive purposes, there is ready access to fresh water (such as the Jordan and Meshosim Rivers, as well as the Sea of Galilee) and there is also abundant arable land surrounding the ridge. Indeed, the original name of Bethsaida may have been Zer ("rocks") [as seen in the old geographical list in Josh 19:35, which lists "the fortified cities, Ziddim, Zer, Hammath, Rakkath, Kinneret", cities that encircle the Sea of Galilee]. It was on this "rock" that Philip the tetrarch refounded Bethsaida and began building the new city of Julias in honor of the Roman matriarch, now divinized in death (by order of the will of Augustus).

I wonder if Philip's recent announcement to rename Simon's hometown and to build a temple to honor Livia atop its rocky precipice was the actual incident that prompted Jesus to call Simon rock and promise to build his church on solid bedrock. Philip the tetrarch, the faithless son of Herod the Great, has betrayed the God of Israel and his people by embracing and promoting the rank paganism of the Romans, who worship humans and regard them as gods (see, for example, the sentiment of Paul the former Pharisee in Rom 1:22-23,25). Philip has announced that he will rename Bethsaida, the hometown of Peter and other disciples, to honor Livia, the widow of Augustus, whose divine name became Julia Augusta. In her honor and probably to support the cult of Livia and the drive to deify her Philip the tetrarch intends to build a temple on the rocky prominence of Bethsaida. In reaction to this plan Jesus promises to build his church, a community of confessing followers like Simon Peter, against which the very gates of Hades  will not prevail. That is, the political and demoniacal powers (and not simply "powers of death", as in the RSV's translation) that back Philip will not overcome the community that Jesus foresees growing up around the confession of Peter, namely, that Jesus is the Anointed One, the Son of God. C. Evans "'On This Rock I Will Build My Church' (Matthew 16:18): Was the Promise to Peter a Response to Tetrarch Philip's Proclamation?", Aaron White, David Wenham, & Craig A. Evans, eds. The Earliest Perceptions of Jesus in Context: Essays in Honor of John Nolland (Bloomsbury 2018), chap. 2. 

Paul, Apostle of Christ—the movie

http://www.craigkeener.com/paul-apostle-of-christ-the-movie/

The Negative And Subjective Side Of Near-Death Experiences

Near-death experiences (NDEs) are often cited as evidence against Christianity and other exclusivistic belief systems. Supposedly, NDEs suggest that everybody or almost everybody goes to heaven. The God of NDEs isn't the God of the Bible. And so on.

Alex Tsakiris recently interviewed Penny Sartori, a prominent NDE researcher. A lot of important points were made during the interview, and I recommend listening to the whole thing. But here are some of the highlights, followed by some comments of my own.

Raising the dead

1. There are three accounts of Jesus raising the dead. One is the widow's son (Lk 7:11-17). Another is the daughter of Jairus (Mk 5:21–43, Mt 9:18–26, Lk 8:40–56). Then there's Lazarus (Jn 11). Suppose a skeptic said that due to the lack of medical technology back then, they may only have appeared to be dead?

2. One issue is that Matthew reports the father of Jairus telling Jesus his daughter is already dead whereas Mark and Luke report him telling Jesus that she's dying/at the point of death. There are different explanations:

i) One standard explanation is that Matthew has a simplified account. Since, in Mark/Luke, after Jairus leaves home to find Jesus, someone is dispatched to tell him that his daughter has died, so the quest is moot. Due to narrative compression, Matthew cuts to the chase by having Jairus say his daughter is dead, since, by the time he found Jesus, she was gone. And I think that's a plausible explanation. Matthew paraphrases his statement.

ii) Of course, it's quite possible that Jairus said more than one thing. Did people only speak to Jesus in one-liners? 

iii) Also, there's a couple of dilemmas. To begin with, what parent wants to leave their child's deathbed? There's the anxiety that their child will pass away while they were absent. Parents wish to be there at the moment of death to comfort their child right up to the bitter end. They'd kick themselves if they weren't there when it happened. 

So what is Jairus to do? On the one hand, he might think it's better to risk leaving her bedside while she's still hanging on to go find Jesus. If he waits until she's dead, that may be too late. 

On the other hand, he might think it's better to see if she dies, then go find Jesus. That way he won't risk missing the moment of death. 

Agonizing calculations in both directions. I expect he was torn. 

It could be that she already expired when he left to find Jesus. But that presents another dilemma. If he tells Jesus that his daughter has died, he doesn't know if Jesus will say it's futile to go to his house. The reader knows that even if she's dead, the situation isn't hopeless, yet that's because we know how the story ends. But Jairus is in the thick of things, having to make snap judgments in a state of desperation and emotional turmoil. So maybe Jairus is stretching the truth to make it worthwhile for Jesus to go there. That's psychologically realistic. 

3. Consider how much time it would take for Jairus to track down Jesus, then how much time it would take for Jesus to follow him back home. That's a round trip.

To my knowledge, the ancient way of determining death was cessation of breathing. But if somebody stops breathing, it's generally a matter of few minutes before the brain begins to die. 

So even in the time it took for Jairus to leave home, locate Jesus, elbow his way through the crowd, explain the situation to Jesus, then double back, if the daughter had ceased breathing for that duration, she'd be truly dead. And minimally, it would be several hours before the widow's son was buried. So even without medical equipment/diagnostic techniques, they'd surely be dead if they permanently stopped breathing for that long an interval. 

This won't fly for readers who think the Gospels are fiction, but my post isn't addressing that mindset. I'm considering a different potential objection. 

The seven last words of Christ

1. There are harmonies of the Gospels that collate the "seven last words of Christ" on the cross:

Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do (Lk 23:34)

Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise (Lk 23:43)

Woman, see your son. Son, see your mother (Jn 19:26-27)

My God, My God, why have you forsaken me? (Mk 15:34, par. Mt 27:46)

I'm thirsty (Jn 19:28)

It is finished (Jn 19:30)

Father, into your hands I commend my spirit (Lk 23:46)

There are Good Friday liturgies centered on the last seven words, as well as musical settings (e.g. Haydn). 

Many cultures attach special significance to a person's dying words. And Jesus is extra special. 

2. However, there are "scholars" who don't think Jesus spoke all the words attributed to him from the cross. They think it's artificial to take different sayings from different Gospels and splice them together. They think the sayings attributed to Jesus in each Gospel make sense in the context of each Gospel's Passion narrative, but when you try to combine them, you end up with unrelated sayings. That disrupts the logical connections and narrative strategy of each Gospel writer. And a harmonistic sequence is arbitrary, by breaking them apart, as they exist in each Gospel, then mixing and matching them. 

3. There's a grain of truth to the objection inasmuch as any reconstructed order will be a bit conjectural. That said:

4. The dying words of Christ recorded in the four Gospels are realistic if you consider the situation:

i) Some people die a peaceful painless death. Likewise, some people are lucid right up to the moment of death. But even in that ideal situation, if they sense they're dying, this is their last chance to tell their loved certain things. So I expect they frantically consider what to say. They're rapidly running out of time, so they say whatever comes to mind whenever it comes to mind. Long silences in-between. Things pop into their heads. So there's no logical flow to what they say. 

Most of us don't make a list of things we'd like to say on our deathbed. So we improvise at the end. It might be a good spiritual exercise to draw up a list.

ii) However, that's a best-case scenario. Some dying people are only intermittently lucid. So there will be no logical connection between what they said before and what they said later. During moments of lucidity, they say whatever comes to mind. They don't keep track of what they said before. 

In addition, if, like Jesus, they're in unbearable pain, then consecutive thought isn't even possible. The pain consumes their attention. Unbearable pain destroys sustained concentration. They can't maintain a train of thought. It's all they can do is muster their dwindling energy to temporally force the pain into the back of their minds in order to think, reflect, and say something coherent. 

If would be completely unrealistic if the last recorded words of Christ read like a nice little prepared speech. It's not coincidental that the pre-Passion teaching of Christ consists of extended talks. Parables, speeches, and dialogues–whereas what he says from the cross is reduced to fragments. Broken sentences and terse utterances. A few words here, a few words there. That's what we'd expect given his excruciating ordeal. 

5. Now the Gospel writers, in selecting what statements to record, may select related sayings. 

6. The authenticity of Lk 23:34 is disputed, but that's on text-critical grounds rather than redaction critical grounds. 

Preference falsification

https://alastairadversaria.com/2016/11/17/a-crisis-of-discourse-part-2-a-problem-of-gender/

Facing death

Death takes different forms, and that affects how or whether we think about it:

i) Sudden expected death

Above a certain age, you can drop dead from a stroke or heart attack. In that respect, the elderly expect to die, but they don't have a date certain. For all they know, they might have another 30 years ahead of them. 

ii) Sudden unexpected death

In the age of modern medical science, there's a presumption against dying young. That's the opposite of the past, when there was high mortality.

As a result, it's shocking when young people die. That can happen suddenly, without warning, in a traffic accident, or due to something like a pulmonary embolism or undiagnosed congenital heart defect. 

Because the prospect of death is a safe abstraction for so many young people, that leaves them unprepared in case they're unlucky. It fosters a presumptuous attitude. And it's too late to learn from their experience. They don't get a second chance. 

This is the stuff of old-fashioned evangelistic sermons ("If I died tonight..."), and while it's easily parodied, that's a neglected truth. Our forebears, without the benefit of modern medicine, were far more alert to the precariousness of life. 

It's sobering to realize that death may be imminent when you least expect it. You thought you had decades ahead of you. 

iii) Countdown to death

Then there are cases like terminal cancer where people have advance knowledge about their lifespan. Not a date certain, but an estimate. Within a given timeframe. The clock is ticking–louder. 

Moreover, the progression of the illness accelerates the process, which clarifies whether their case falls within the outside or inside range of the estimate. They can see death approaching as the end comes closer. 

The prognosis could be off. It might underestimate or overestimate the remaining time. There might be spontaneous remission, or miraculous healing. Still, that's unlikely. The presumption is death sooner rather than later. 

In one sense this is worse than sudden death because it can foster foreboding and dread–unlike those who died unexpectedly. In another sense this is better if they take advantage of their prognosis to prepare themselves intellectually, emotionally, and especially spiritually for their impending demise. Unfortunately, many people fritter away their opportunities. They cling to this life, even when that's futile, rather than using their remaining time to prepare for eternity. 

Did God will the Fall?

It's common for freewill theists to deny that God willed the Fall. More generally, it's common for freewill theists to deny that God wills moral and natural evils, viz. war, famine, murder, disease, natural disaster, fatal accidents. Bad events lie outside God's will. Bad events are antithetical to God's will. They think it's blasphemous to attribute bad things to God's will. They think Calvinism is wicked for attributing natural and moral evils to God's will. 

I'd like to consider one aspect of that denial. Take the Fall. If Adam hadn't sinned, world history would turn out very differently. You and I exist in a fallen world. You and I wouldn't exist in an unfallen world. You and I are the end-product of a complex chain of events which includes natural and moral evils at various turns. Procreation is about men and women meeting and mating at a particular time and place. Even slight changes in the past ramify into the future so that our would-be ancestors will miss connections. For instance, WWII killed millions of people, but by the same token, millions of people exist as a result of the dislocation caused by WWII–who wouldn't be conceived absent that massive disruption.

So that raises a question: if you're the end-product of an evil event that's inimical to God's will, then doesn't this imply that your existence is inimical to God's will? If you exist as the result of some past evil, and if the historical cause of your existence is antithetical to God's will, then isn't the effect antithetical to God's will? 

To put it another way, if you could step into a time machine and erase the results of a past evil, would do so–even if that meant erasing resultant future generations from the space-time continuum? Would you erase your own parents, grandparents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, children, and grandchildren? If the precipitating event that led to their existence was diametrically opposed to God's will, then doesn't that implicate all the consequences? 

Calvinism in the Octagon: two men enter, one man leaves

https://www.premierchristianradio.com/Shows/Saturday/Unbelievable/Episodes/Unbelievable-Does-Calvinism-excuse-sinners-and-make-God-guilty-Guillaume-Bignon-Paul-Franks

With or without God

So much of #apologetics about the alleged ‘absurdity’ or ‘meaninglessness’ of life without God is nothing more than philosophically elaborate ways of saying ‘I don’t like the idea of life without God.’ #atheism

— Secular Outpost (@SecularOutpost) March 11, 2018

Although this is an example of armchair psychoanalysis, it doesn't refute what I wrote. Now, if I'm wrong, I want to be corrected. Where are the examples of meaning of life apologetics which amount to more than a subjective "I don't like the idea of life without God"? https://t.co/Cx26Y5bJmU

— Secular Outpost (@SecularOutpost) March 22, 2018

Of course, some atheists "don't like the idea of life [with] God". Take Alduous Huxley in Ends and Means:

I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; and consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics. He is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do. For myself, as no doubt for most of my friends, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom. The supporters of this system claimed that it embodied the meaning - the Christian meaning, they insisted - of the world. There was one admirably simple method of confuting these people and justifying ourselves in our erotic revolt: we would deny that the world had any meaning whatever.

Corn gods

Continuing my analysis of Richard Carrier's On the Historicity of Jesus (Sheffield 2014). I'll comment on a section from chap 5,

Incarnate sons (or daughters) of a god who died and then rose from their deaths to become living gods granting salvation to their worshipers were a common and peculiar feature of pagan religion when Christi­anity arose…

i) Heathen deities are typically physical, and frequently humanoid beings to begin with, so they can't become what they already are. Some of them are shapeshifters (e.g. Proteus), but that's changing from one physical form to another. Heathen deities are modeled on the world. Modeled on human society and animals. They personify natural forces and natural cycles. Often they come into being through sexual reproduction. They can be killed. A fundamentally immanental and anthropomorphic view of deity. 

ii) Carrier fails to distinguish between incarnation/resurrection, apotheosis/translation, and descending/reascending from the Netherworld. But those are categorically distinct. 

The genealogy of Jesus

7 and Solomon the father of Rehoboam, and Rehoboam the father of Abijah, and Abijah the father of Asaph [or Asa], 8 and Asaph the father of Jehoshaphat, and Jehoshaphat the father of Joram, and Joram the father of Uzziah, 9 and Uzziah the father of Jotham, and Jotham the father of Ahaz, and Ahaz the father of Hezekiah, 10 and Hezekiah the father of Manasseh, and Manasseh the father of Amos [or Amon], and Amos [Amon?] the father of Josiah (Mt 1:7-10).

1. The interrelationship between the "genealogies" of Matthew and Luke poses a long-standing crux. I put "genealogies" in scare quote because that in itself may be part of the problem. In modern English, "genealogy" has a narrow, technical connotation, and it's prejudicial to assume that Matthew and/or Luke were recording "genealogies" in that specialized sense.

2. For instance, is the selection criterion in Matthew strictly and solely ancestral, or does he have other criteria? In vv7-8,10, he seems to use double entendres, where "Asaph" is a pun for "Asa" while "Amos" is a pun for "Amon". Although it's possible that "Asaph" and "Amos" are scribal errors, they represent the stronger manuscript tradition. Cf. B. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the New Testament (UBS, 2nd. ed., 1994), 1-2. 

If "Asaph" and "Amos" are original, then Matthew is substituting a psalmist and a prophet for Hebrew kings. A homophonic wordplay that trades on association with each. If so, then Matthew isn't constructing a pure family tree; rather, his selection criteria include theological kinship as well as lineal ancestry.  

But in that event, the question of whether Matthew and Luke have contradictory "genealogies" is confused, since, at least in the case of Matthew, this was never meant to be strictly ancestral in the first place. The genre is more complex. Matthew, writing for a Jewish audience, has subtle puns to indicate that Jesus is not only David's royal heir, but heir to the psalmists and prophets. 

Seen by God

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPIfOId8wt8

"Schizotypals"

I continue my romp through Richard Carrier's diatribe On the Historicity of Jesus (Sheffield 2014). In chap. 4, he makes the following claims:

Christianity began as a charismatic cult in which many of its leaders and members displayed evidence of schizotypal personalities. They naturally and regularly hallucinated (seeing visions and hearing voices), often believed their dreams were divine communications, achieved trance states, practiced glossolalia, and were (or so we're told) highly suscepti­ble to psychosomatic illnesses (like 'possession' and hysterical blindness, muteness and paralysis).159 These phenomena have been extensively docu­mented in modern charismatic cults within numerous religious traditions, and their underlying sociology, anthropology and psychology are reason­ ably well understood (in addition to what follows, see also Element 29).

For example, we know the first Christians regularly practiced glosso­lalia. Acts 2 mythologizes this phenomenon, depicting the first Christians 'speaking in tongues' in the middle of Jerusalem as if this actually meant miraculously speaking foreign languages fluently that they were never taught, when in fact we know 'speaking in tongues' actually meant (as it does now) babbling in random syllables, which no one could really under­ stand except special interpreters who were 'inspired' by the holy spirit to miraculously understand and translate for their congregation. We know this because Paul tells us so (in 1 Corinthians 14; in fact the phenomenon is addressed throughout 1 Corinthians 12-14). Thus Acts has taken this real phenomenon and exaggerated it into a legendary power. But we know from Paul it operated differently. And in fact, the phenomenon Paul describes is known across the world, in countless cultures and religious traditions, and has been extensively studied.160 When we see in antiquity a phenomenon we've documented scientifically as commonly occurring in various cultures, it's far more likely to be the same phenomenon than something entirely new yet coincidentally identical. We must therefore conclude the first Christians had some social and anthropological similarities to other cults that practice glossolalia.

Acts represents this as a recurring practice in the church: Acts 10.46; 19.6 (confirmed in Mk 16.17); and in 1 Cor. 14.18, Paul himself says he spoke in tongues more than anyone, and throughout that chapter makes clear it was so commonly happening to others in his churches that he had to set up rules to govern it. And as for glossolalia, so for the other phenomena Paul reports as regularly practiced by the first Christians. The most important of which for our purposes was hallucination (visual and auditory). Humans are actu­ally biologically predisposed to hallucinate. The neurophysiology of hallu­cination is built-in and thus must have evolved for some useful function (or as a side-effect of something else that did).

Normals can hallucinate when exposed to triggers. The most common of which is sleep paralysis (where normals hallucinate at the threshold between being asleep and awake); but the most familiar are pharmaceuticals (many drugs induce hallucination, including several that were not only available in antiquity but known in antiquity), while the most culturally transmitted are trance behaviors.163 Extreme fatigue, heat, illness, fasting, grief and sleep or sensory deprivation ('incubation') can all induce halluci­nation in normals. And by the time of Christianity, cultural practices had long developed to intentionally trigger hallucination, including fasting and sensory or sleep deprivation, but more typically rhythmic prayer or chant­ing or the use of music or dance to induce an ecstatic state (Paul alludes to singing and prayer as likely trance-inducing behaviors in his congregations in 1 Cor. 14.12-15; see also Acts 16.25; Eph. 5.19; and Col. 3.16; which might suggest also dance, as in other cultures whirling or spinning are known triggers). Fasting (i.e., starving) is also attested within the church.

Accordingly, in antiquity, where schizotypals would routinely be regarded as prophets and holy men (and not seen as insane, as they are in modern cultures), we can expect schizotypals will actually gravitate into religious cults that socially integrate them or even grant them influence and status. The availability of niches of strong social support for schizotypals would explain why in antiquity there were few reported cases of psychosis (and why hallucination was not regarded as a major index of insanity except when wholly crippling or conjoined with fever), and why miracles and visions (not just Christian and Jewish, but pagan as well) were so frequently reported and widely believed to be genuine. Obviously schizotypals would prefer the company of people who take them seriously. 

And yet even non-schizotypals can become regular trance hallucinators within cults and cultures that encourage and develop their capacities in this regard. Even in hostile cultures (like our own), normals find themselves hallucinating with remarkable frequency, particularly within the context of religious assumptions and expectations (Christians hallucinate Christ; Buddhists hallucinate Buddha), and psychological priming (UFO enthusi­asts hallucinate encounters with aliens; the bereaved hallucinate encoun­ters with the recently deceased).

Many members of a cult will claim to have seen or heard things, when in fact they didn't, and pretend to go along, because (a) they want to belong (and this is the only way to fulfill their desire to fit in), or they need the benefits the community provides (such as food, shelter, love, companionship), or (for reasons of dysphoria or dissonance outside the cult) they want to believe its claims are true because they are ultimately comforting (such as giving their lives hope or meaning that they did not previously have), or they want the power and influence that being a revered spiritual leader affords them (if they can be adequately convincing and also effective at winning support). These psychological motivations can be quite powerful, and have certainly been documented to compel people to engage in conforming behavior in other contexts, so it can surely happen in this context as well. These members will pick up all the social cues and simply agree with everyone, to both fit in and convince themselves. which if sustained can even alter their memory so that they honestly believe they saw or heard things they didn't (or else they will delusionally refuse to acknowledge, even to themselves, that they didn't).

We should expect this same social phenomenon in the orig­inal church, which is why only apostles 'saw the Lord', as that is what it was to be an apostle: to be one whom the Lord chose to reveal himself (1 Cor. 9.1; 15.5-8; Gal. 1.11-12; note how Gal. 1.8 indicates that revelations from lesser divinities couldn't make one an apostle). This also explains why their number was limited. The Lord might still communicate to lower ranking members through intermediaries (angels and benevolent spirits), but you dare not claim to have 'seen the Lord'...

All of this provides considerable background support to what sev­eral scholars have already argued: that the origin of Christianity can be attributed to hallucinations (actual or pretended) of the risen Jesus. The prior probability of this conclusion is already extremely high, given the background evidence just surveyed; and the consequent probabilities strongly favor it as well, given the evidence we can find in the NT.181 Chris­tian fundamentalists are really the only ones who do not accept this as basically an established fact by now. 

Thus, in Acts 2, we see the entire church hallucinating floating tongues of fire and then babbling in tongues in a mass ecstatic trance. In Acts 7, in the middle of the Sanhedrin court, Stephen hallucinates Jesus floating up in the sky, but no one else there sees it. In Acts 9, Paul hallucinates a booming voice and a beaming light from heaven (and suffers hysterical blindness as a result); and Ananias hallucinates an entire conversation with God. In Acts 10, Cornelius hallucinates a conversation with an angel, and Peter falls into a trance and hallucinates an entire cosmic dinner scene in the sky. In Acts 16, Paul hallucinates a revelation of a man who tells him where to travel (this story probably drawing in one way or another on Paul's own mention of receiving such a revelation in Gal. 2.2). In Acts 27, Paul hallucinates a conversation with an angel. Many Christians receive spirit communications ('prophesy'), as indicated in Acts 19.6 and 21.9-10-and Acts 2.17, which quotes Joel 2.28-31 as being fulfilled in the church: 'I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams'.

Paul confirms this general picture firsthand. In Gal. 1.11-12, Paul says he learned the gospel only from a hallucinated encounter with Jesus (a 'rev­elation') whom he experienced 'within' himself (Gal. 1.16). He confirms this in Rom. 16.25-26, where Paul says, 'My gospel and the preaching of Jesus Christ is according to a revelation'. 183 The other apostles received their information from revelations as well. 'Unto us', Paul says (meaning the apostles), 'God revealed [the secrets of the gospel] through the Spirit' (1 Cor. 2.10). And in 1 Cor. 15.1-8 Paul says, 'the gospel I preached' (which in Galatians and Romans he confirms came only by revelation) is the same gospel Peter and the others preached (this is the whole gist of Galatians 1 and 2: see discussion in Chapter 11), who also experienced special iso­lated visions of the Christ just like Paul's, which again was the qualifying requirement to be an apostle ( 1 Cor. 9.1: 'Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?'). 

In 2 Corinthians 12, Paul says he and others have many glorious 'visions and revelations of the Lord', and among these he includes hallucinated trips to heaven where the hallucinator hears and sees strange things, much like the entire book of Revelation, which is a veritable acid trip, an extended hallucination of the bizarrest kind, an example of the kind of thing going on all the time in the early churches (even despite the fact that that particular example is probably wholly fabricated). Paul then goes on to relate in that same chapter a whole two-way conversation he had with God, demonstrat­ing that he not only heard voices but conversed with them; he also says he experiences an 'abundance of revelations' (2 Cor. 12.7). And in 1 Cor. 14.6, Paul says 'what use am I to you, unless I speak to you by way of a revelation, or knowledge [gnosis, meaning spiritual knowledge], or prophesying, or teaching?' 

Similarly, the fact that Christians regarded as inspired scripture such books as Daniel, which depict authoritative information coming from God through both visions and dreams, entails that Christians believed authori­tative information came from God through visions and dreams (otherwise they would not deem such books as honest or reliable, much less scripture). They could therefore see their own visions and dreams as communications from God, too. Thus, even if books such as Revelation are fabricated, as symbolic discourses on the times, they still represent themselves as genuine hallucinatory experiences. 

Early, Non-Extant Documents On The Resurrection

The early Christians had a lot of information we don't possess today that's relevant to Jesus' resurrection and other subjects. Few people would deny that Paul communicated some information orally that he didn't write in any of his extant letters, that James knew more about the resurrection appearance to him than what's described in 1 Corinthians 15:7, that the gospel authors only wrote about some of the information they had rather than all of it (John 21:25), and so on.

But it's often asserted or implied that the additional information the early Christians had in such contexts was communicated orally rather than in writing to an inordinate degree. We're told that oral communication is less stable than written communication, that memories and oral traditions wouldn't have held up well over the few decades that passed before the gospels were written, and so forth.

Responses to such objections often take the form of arguing for the reliability of the unwritten transmission of the information in question. Memory is more reliable than the critics suggest. The ancient cultures under consideration had developed sufficient methods for preserving information orally. The gospels should be dated earlier than the critics date them. Etc. Those responses are good as far as they go. However, we need to be careful to not concede too much about the alleged lack of written sources in these contexts.

Richard Carrier: Christian apologist

The most ironic section of Richard Carrier's On the Historicity of Jesus (Sheffield 2014) is chapter 4, where he unwittingly makes a case for Jesus as the fulfillment of messianic prophecy. Of course, that's not Carrier's intention, but he's blissfully blind to the apologetic thrust of his argument:

Even before Christianity arose, some Jews expected one of their messiahs heralding the end times would actually be killed, rather than be immediately victorious, and this would mark the key point of a timeta­ble guaranteeing the end of the world soon thereafter...First, the Talmud provides us with a proof of concept at the very least (and actual confirmation at the very most). It explicitly says the suffer­ing servant who dies in Isaiah 53 is the messiah (and that this messiah will endure great suffering before his death) [b. Sanhedrin 98b and 93b]. The Talmud likewise has a dying-and-rising 'Christ son of Joseph' ideology in it, even saying (quoting Zech. 12.10) that this messiah will be 'pierced' to death [b. Sukkah 52a-b].

There is no plausible way later Jews would invent interpretations of their scripture that supported and vindicated Christians. They would not invent a Christ with a father named Joseph who dies and is resurrected (as the Talmud does indeed describe). They would not proclaim Isaiah 53 to be about this messiah and admit that Isaiah had there predicted this messiah would die and be resurrected. That was the very biblical passage Christians were using to prove their case. Moreover, the presentation of this ideology in the Talmud makes no men­tion of Christianity and gives no evidence of being any kind of polemic or response to it. So we have evidence here of a Jewish belief that possibly predates Christian evangelizing, even if that evidence survives only in later sources.

The alternative is to assume a rather unbelievable coincidence: that Christians and Jews, completely independently of each other, just happened at some point to see Isaiah 53 as messianic and from that same passage preach an ideology of a messiah with a father named Joseph (literally or symbolically), who endures great suffering, dies and is resurrected (all in accord with the savior depicted in Isaiah 53, as by then understood). Such an amazing coincidence is simply improbable.

But the Talmud and the Apocalypse of Zerubbabel are not our only evidence of a pre-Christian dying-messiah theme. The book of Daniel (writ­ ten well before the rise of Christianity) explicitly says a messiah will die shortly before the end of the world (Dan. 9.2; 9.24-27; cf. 12.1-13). This is already conclusive. Given my definition of 'messiah' (in §3), Christianity looks exactly like an adaptation of the same eschatological dying-messiah motif in Daniel.

Isaiah 53 was already under­ stood to contain an atonement-martyrdom framework applicable to dying heroes generally...But of the more specific notion of a dying messiah, we also have other pre-Christian evidence in the form of a Dead Sea Scroll designated 11Q13, the Melchizedek Scroll...There are many such pesherim at Qumran. But this one tells us about the 'messenger' of Isaiah 52-53 who is linked in Isaiah with a 'servant' who will die to atone for everyone's sins (presaging God's final victory), which (as we have already seen) later Jews definitely regarded as the messiah. At Qumran,11Q13 appears to say that this messenger is the same man as the 'messiah' of Daniel 9, who dies around the same time an end to sin is said to be accomplished (again presaging God's final victory), and that the day on which this happens will be a great and final Day of Atonement, absolving the sins of all the elect, after which (11Q13 goes on to say) God and his savior will overthrow all demonic forces. And all this will proceed according to the timetable in Daniel9.Thus, 11Q13 appears to predict that a messiah will die and that this will mark the final days before which God's agent(s) will defeat Belial (Satan) and atone for the sins of the elect.

Regardless of how one chooses to understand the text of 11Q13, we still have Dan. 9.24-27, which is already unmistakably clear in predicting that a messiah will die shortly before the end of the world, when all sins will be forgiven; and Isaiah 53 is unmistakably clear in declaring that all sins will be forgiven by the death of God's servant, whom the Talmud identi­fies as the messiah. So there is no reasonable basis for denying that some pre-Christian Jews would have expected at least one dying messiah, and some could well have expected his death to be an essential atoning death,

just as the Christians believed of Jesus Even apart from 11Q13 there is evidence the Dead Sea community may have already been thinking this, since one of their manuscripts of Isaiah explicitly says the suffering servant figure in Isaiah 53 shall be 'anointed' by God and then 'pierced through for our transgressions'. For this and the following points see the discussion of the pre-Christian interpretation of Isaiah 53 in Martin Hengel, 'The Effective History of Isaiah 53 in the Pre-Christian Period', in The Suffering Servant: Isaiah 53 in Jewish and Christian Sources (ed. Bernd Janowski and Peter Stuhlmacher; Grand Rapids, Ml: William B. Eerdmans, 2004), pp. 75-146.

The Christian gospel is thus already right there in Daniel, the more so if Daniel 9 had been linked with Isaiah 52-53, which is exactly what 11QI3 appears to do. But even without such a connection being made, the notion that a Christ was expected to die to presage the end of the world is already clearly intended in Daniel, even by its origi­nal authors' intent, and would have been understood in the same way by subsequent readers of Daniel. The notion of a dying messiah was therefore already mainstream, well before Christianity arose. 

The suffering-and-dying servant of Isaiah 52-53 and the mes­siah of Daniel 9 (which, per the previous element, may already have been seen by some Jews as the same person) have numerous logical connections with a man in Zechariah 3 and 6 named 'Jesus Rising' who is confronted by Satan in God's abode in heaven and there crowned king, given all of God's authority, holds the office of high priest, and will build up 'God's house' (which is how Christians described their church)

In the Septuagint text, Zechariah is commanded in a vision to place the crown of kingship upon 'Jesus' (Zech. 6.11) and to say immediately upon doing so that 'Jehovah declares' that this Jesus is 'the man named ''Rising" and he shall rise up from his place below and he shall build the House of the Lord'. The key noun is anatole, which is often translated 'East' because it refers to where the sun rises (hence 'East'), but such a translation obscures the fact that the actual word used is the noun 'rising' or 'rise' (as in 'sunrise'), which was not always used in reference to a compass point, and whose real connotations are more obvious when translated literally. In fact by immediately using the cognate verb 'to rise up' (anatelei, and that explicitly 'from his place below') it's clear the Septuagint translator under­ stood the word to mean 'rise' (and Philo echoes the same pun in his interpretation...

If this 'Jesus Rising' were connected to the dying servant who atones for all sins in Isaiah (and perhaps also with Daniel or 11Q13), it would be easy to read out of this almost the entire core Christian gospel. Connecting the two figures in just that way would be natural to do: this same 'Jesus' who is named 'Rising' (or, in both places, 'Branch' in the extant Hebrew, as in 'Davidic heir', or so both contexts imply) appears earlier in Zechariah 3, where 'Jesus' is also implied to be the one called 'Rising' (in 3.8). Both are also called 'Jesus the high priest' throughout Zechariah 3 and 6, hence clearly the same person. And there he is also called God's 'servant'. And it is said that through him (in some unspecified way) all sin in the world will be cleansed 'in a single day' (Zech. 3.9). Both concepts converge with Isaiah 52-53, which is also about God's 'servant', whose death cleanses the world's sins (Isa. 52.13 and 53.11), which of course would thus happen in a single day (as alluded in Isa. 52.6). And as we saw earlier, Jews may have been linking this dying 'servant' to the dying 'Christ' killed in Daniel 9 (in 11Q13), whose death is also said to correspond closely with a conclusive 'end of sin' in the world (Dan. 9.24-26), and both figures (in Daniel and 11Q13) were linked to an expected 'atonement in a single day'...These dots are so easily connected, and with such convincing force...here I am concerned only with the existence of the scriptural coincidences.

As I mentioned, an 'exoteric' reading of Zechariah 3 and 6 would con­clude the author originally meant the first high priest of the second temple, Jesus ben Jehozadak (Zech. 6.11; cf. Hag. 1.1), who somehow came into an audience with God, in a coronation ceremony (one would presume in heaven, as it is in audience with God and his angels and attended by Satan) granting him supreme supernatural power over the universe (Zech. 3.7)...As it happens, the name Jehozadak means in Hebrew 'Jehovah the Righteous', so one could also read this as 'Jesus, the son of Jehovah the Righteous', and thereby conclude this is really 'Jesus, the son of God'. This is notable considering the evidence we have of a preexistent son of God named Jesus in pre-Christian Jewish theology...And all from connecting just three passages in the OT that already have distinctive overlapping similarities. 

The pre-Christian book of Daniel was a key messianic text, laying out what would happen and when, partly inspiring much of the very messianic fervor of the age, which by the most obvious (but not originally intended) interpretation predicted the messiah's arrival in the early first century, even (by some calculations) the very year of 30 CE...By various calculations this could be shown to predict, by the very Word of God, that the messiah would come sometime in the early first century CE. Several examples of these calculations survive in early Christian literature, the clearest appearing in Julius Africanus in the third century.47 Julius Africanus, in his lost History of the World, which excerpt survives in the collection of George Syncellus, Excerpts of Chronography 18.2.

The date there calculated is precisely 30 CE; hence it was expected on this calculation (which was simple and straightforward enough that anyone could easily have come up with the same result well before the rise of Christianity) that a messiah would arise and be killed in that year (as we saw Daniel had 'predicted' in 9.26...

Jesus could do no mighty work there

And he could do no mighty work there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and healed them (Mk 6:5).

In his commentary, Darrell Bock makes a couple of trenchant observations about this provocative statement. Cf. D. Bock, Mark (Cambridge 2015), 202. I'd like to briefly expand on Bock's comments:

i) Bock's first point is that in the Gospels, people are usually healed by coming to Jesus or being brought to Jesus. If, however, Jesus faces a wall of animosity in Nazareth, then far fewer people than normal will present themselves to be healed. So it's not about his absolute inability to heal them, but about their refusal to seek him out for healing. Jesus typically leaves it to the ailing individual (or friends and family) to take the initiative. 

ii) In addition, there's a link between faith, the message, messenger, and healing. Jesus won't make a policy of healing people who aren't open to the Gospel. Physical healing is secondary. That's for this life, whereas salvation is primary–that's for all time. Jesus won't reward hostile unbelief. Accepting the gift but rejecting the giver. 

Is Jesus a mythical hero?

I'm continuing my analysis of Richard Carrier's turgid monograph On the Historicity of Jesus (Sheffield 2014):

The twenty-two features distinctive of this hero-type are:

1. The hero's mother is a virgin. 

2. His father is a king or the heir of a king. 

3. The circumstances of his conception are unusual. 

4. He is reputed to be the son of a god. 

5. An attempt is made to kill him when he is a baby. 

6. To escape which he is spirited away from those trying to kill him. 

7. He is reared in a foreign country by one or more foster parents. 

8. We are told nothing of his childhood. 

9. On reaching manhood he returns to his future kingdom.

10. He is crowned, hailed or becomes king. 

11. He reigns uneventfully (i.e., without wars or national catastrophes). 

12. He prescribes laws. 

13. He then loses favor with the gods or his subjects. 

14. He is driven from the throne or city. 

15. He meets with a mysterious death. 

16. He dies atop a hill or high place.

17. His children, if any, do not succeed him. 

18. His body turns up missing. 

19. Yet he still has one or more holy sepulchers (in fact or fiction). 

20. Before taking a throne or a wife, he battles and defeats a great adversary

(such as a king, giant, dragon or wild beast).

and

21. His parents are related to each other. 

22. He marries a queen or princess related to his predecessor.

1. Qedipus (21) 

2. Moses (20) 

3. Jesus (20) 

4. Theseus (19) 

5. Dionysus (19) 

6. Romulus (18) 

7. Perseus (17) 

8. Hercules (17) 

9. Zeus (15)

10. Bellerophon (14) 

11. Jason (14) 

12. Osiris (14) 1

3. Pelops (13)

14. Asclepius (12) 

15. Joseph [i.e., the son ofJacob] (12)