Richard Carrier's recent talk at a freethought conference (MP3), courtesy of Toto at FRDB in
this thread.
It's very interesting. He contrasts three sorts of theories:
- Traditional Xian one: Jesus Christ was a superhuman god-human hybrid who worked lots of miracles.
- Secular historical-Jesus position: JC was 100% human with 100% human parentage, an obscure religious prophet who got executed by the authorities.
- Jesus mythicism: there was no earthly JC. Instead, he was a sort-of god who got reinterpreted as having had an earthly existence.
He argues that Xianity fits Hellenistic religious trends very well:
- Syncretism, especially cross-cultural syncretism. Very common.
- Monotheism, though usually with the form of a big god and a lot of little deities. Can anyone say angels and saints?
- Individual salvation. Dying and rising gods were originally in agricultural cults about the death and resurrection of the vegetation, but they came to emphasize individual death and resurrection.
- Cosmopolitanism. One isn't born into it, but instead chooses it, and one's fellow followers become one's honorary brothers and sisters.
Jews had been reluctant to go along with it, but by the beginning of the Common Era, some Jews had done some Hellenistic-Jewish syncretism. Xianity then emerged from it.
RC then gets into dying and rising gods, and as he so correctly says, Mithras was NOT one of them. However, he went through some ordeal or other that involved the killing of a bull. You can see carvings of Mithras cutting a bull's throat in some surviving Mithraism sanctuaries.
RC discussed our first source about Jesus Christ, Paul's letters. Paul talked mostly about a heavenly JC who was a demigod, one who was only known through revelation and Old Testament texts, and not from some earthly existence.
He also mentioned Philo talking about a similar sort of demigod, though I'd like to see sources about that.
As to reinterpreting deities as human, that was very common in the Greco-Roman world. It's called euhemerism, after someone named Euhemerus who did a lot of that. He interpreted Zeus as an earthly king, and I'd guess that he was memorable for being a ladies' man.
RC also mentions the Roswell incident, and how over 30 years some fragments of a high-altitude balloon experiment got exaggerated into the recovery of a flying saucer and autopsies of its operators.
On the subject of mythmaking, one could add how the Rastafarians turned Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie into a messiah figure.
RC also mentioned the origins of Islam and Mormonism from prophets who claim to have had revelations. Such prophets could be having hallucinations, and given my numerous experiences of waking dreams, I would not be surprised if many people conclude that they had been journeying in some other realm. Of course, there are cases of fakery, and that's rather evident for Joseph Smith.
Looking back in antiquity, our only source for a certain Alexander of Abonutichus, Lucian of Samosata, makes him seem like an outright charlatan.
RC recommended three books:
- Earl Doherty, The Jesus Puzzle, which he prefers to ED's second book as more concise.
- Robert Price, The Christ-Myth Theory and Its Problems.
- Randel Helms, Gospel Fictions, arguing that much of the Gospels' content is pure fiction.
