Post by ignorantianescia on Nov 23, 2017 18:14:44 GMT
I know jagella is banned now, but maybe he or lurkers will still benefit from some response to his latest claims. I have omitted everything that only relates to personal conduct.
Carrier explained that there are indeed clay tablets upon which are inscribed Inanna's dying and rising to heaven. I don't believe Evans tried to counter this claim.
There is no doubt that Inanna (or in Akkadian texts Ishtar) dies and gets back to life. However, this is done by restoring her to her old self with special food and water and by putting her clothes/jewelry/powers back on her. Unlike Jesus, she doesn't get an improved glorified body. There is no "rising" in the sense of "dying and rising gods", maybe only "going up" in the sense of moving out of the underworld. It is also interesting that she still has to find a replacement, so she still has to play by the rules of death even after being 'revived'.
Then there is the thing about "rising to heaven". This also doesn't happen in the sense that "dying and rising" implies. Inanna leaves the underworld, but doesn't immediately rise to heaven because she first has to find a replacement to take her place in the underworld. Though she presumably returns to heaven later. The Encyclopedia of Religion also notes that the directional verb used in the story is ambiguous.
There are more problems in considering Inanna an influence on the belief in Jesus' resurrection, on which more later, but I want to return to the original point I made. You offered this example as something comparable to Stark's exposition. But this merely amounts to somebody claiming something in a debate and his opponent not contesting it.
Of course there are differences in the stories. Carrier likes to argue that you can focus on the many differences between West Side Story and Romeo and Juliet, but the former is obviously influenced by the latter.
That is a reasonable argument to make about the West Side Story and Romeo and Juliet but not for Jesus and Inanna because the comparison relies on certain assumptions. The reason why is that there can be no doubt that the story of Romeo and Juliet was readily available in the period the West Side Story was made because Shakespeare's works are an important part of the English literary canon. But early Jews generally didn't have access to Akkadian texts like the story of Ishtar written in a moribund language and certainly not to the version with Inanna in a then obscure dead scholastic language. We only know of Sumerian (2nd millennium BC) and Akkadian versions. So the parallel doesn't apply here.
It is remarkable that for many Mythicists it is often not good enough to note that Josephus and Tacitus had ample opportunity for finding non-Christian sources about Jesus, as they note that this only demonstrates possibility (and if there were no additional argumentation, that would be correct). But some are then more than eager to refer to supposed pagan parallels in texts that were nearly impossible for your typical 1st-century Jew or Christian to acquire and read.
It's also worth asking why the category of dying and rising gods was invented in the first place. James Frazer, the anthropologist who popularised the category, sought an evolutionist explanation of the origin of religions and thought that the periodically reoccurring sacrifice of a king was a common feature of mythologies. So all the gods in the category were male (Inanna/Ishtar wasn't included) and many were supposed to be linked to agriculture ('resurrection' linked to spring). Frazer used the category to explain the origins of Christianity through evolutionist influences of other religions, so he needed the dying and rising gods to explain the resurrection, although he was not a Mythicist. It is important to understand that Tylor and Frazer represent something of a pre-empirical stage in the anthropology of religion; they relied on a beanbag of fairly anecdotal facts, not on methodical fieldwork. The most influential scholar on the issue is Jonathan Z. Smith, who did more than any other scholar to make the category lose favour, who concludes that the category was always created with Christianity in mind.
It just seems really strange to me that Carrier would make these kinds of mistakes. He's not stupid, obviously, and he knows a LOT about the relevant material. Sorry, but I find your charges to be hard to believe.
To clarify, I do not think that Carrier is stupid. I have said so several times now. I do think he is more an eisegete than an exegete. And if you want to write a book it falls upon you to investigate the evidence that we provide to you. Saying that you find it hard to believe doesn't cut it.
Now how is anybody supposed to respond to this criticism? Do you expect Carrier to prove his textual criticism isn't "nuts"?
This is a reasonable question. I have already invoked a text-critical problem when I referred to Carriers treatment of the weeks in Daniel, but I did not describe it as such. Simply assuming that the Greek text must be right, not checking the Hebrew and any other variants, and then implicitly misattributing and misdating the Greek text of Daniel in the Septuagint (the text in modern editions of the Septuagint is not the original Septuagint text, but a later translation by Theodotion) to top it off is by any measure "nuts", yes.
Anyway, what I said there initially was not intended as a charge or accusation, it was a concessive statement. So I did not expect Carrier to respond to it.
OK, but the evidence still sucks no matter how you adeptly you argue about why it sucks.
This was about the practice referencing in primary sources, not about the quality of the evidence. The response is therefore completely beside the point.
Why stop there? Go all the way and use the same proof that Jesus is the risen Lord! After all, Paul claims to have seen Jesus in a heavenly vision. That's really good evidence for Jesus in the heavenly realm. Paul said so. And we know we can trust Paul on other matters like the Lord's Supper. Paul said God told him about it.
This confuses secular historical and theological use of the sources. If an early source commenting on a supposedly historical person or occurrence mentions embarrassing details, then there are no sound secular reasons for rejecting those details.
Religious claims are not too rare in ancient source material and they are generally discounted for recontructions of what happened, without this discrediting the entrire source. Josephus claims there whad been omens predicting the destruction of Jerusalem, including a peasant turned doomsday prophet. Nobody claims on the basis of this that Jerusalem wasn't destroyed or that Josephus is completely ahistorical because of this.
How improbable is it? How long did it take for tinfoil found at Roswell to transform into a crashed alien spacecraft?
This is topical of sorts but not the same. Jesus' historicity is completely uncontested in surviving sources. The first claims that Jesus did not exist pop up in the eighteenth century and that is far too late to give us any relevant information on the matter. The things non-Christians contest before then are his nature and his actions, not his existence.
Roswell's alien woo, on the other hand, is widely contested despite a fervent core of believers. In this respect it is more like the belief that Jesus was the Son of God and not like the belief that he did exist.
So Jesus' existence is from the outset almost treated like a historical fact, while the alien theory of Roswell has always been a controversial and pseudoscientific interpretation.
No, it's evidence that "Mythicism's historical standards" don't prove anything but merely provide reasons to doubt. Mythicism might very well be wrong. Who knows? Maybe all our doubts about Bigfoot might be proved wrong some day when somebody catches one. Until then, I remain a skeptic.
Nope, if the Mythicist 'method' would only just enable recklessly wrongheaded conclusions, it is the sanest thing to discard it.
Your Bigfoot analogy contains very different assumptions, because it pertains to biology. How likely is it that a viable population of large apes, who require a lot of food, exists in the North West of the United States? Very unlikely. How likely is it that a Jewish apocalyptic preacher from Galilee got crucified in Jerusalem during Passover? These are completely different questions and the assumptions are not at all transferable.
Uh, Paul and the gospel writers were all Christians. They wrote what they believed was true based on their religious beliefs. Josephus' works were tampered with by Christians to make it appear he wrote about Jesus. As for Tacitus, we do not know what his source about "Christus" was. He may have been merely repeating what Christians believed. This evidence is woefully weak.
It cannot be inferred from the fact that some things that Paul or the evangelists followed from their religious beliefs that anything they wrote is unreliable. If that's what you wanted to imply it's a total non-sequitur.
You are assuming that Christians modified Josephus "to make it appear he wrote about Jesus". That is not at all what the scholarly consensus is, which is that Christians tampered with the Testimonium Flavianum, that already existed, to make it include Christian claims.
It is just about possible that Tacitus simply repeated Christian claims, but that doesn't mean at all that this is likely (in fact it isn't). You cannot conclude that the evidence is weak from merely noting a possibility - though this is part and parcel of Carrier's 'method'.
I'm far from convinced. This is not anywhere close to the meticulous refutation that Stark dealt. All it proves to me is that Carrier could execute an (abnormally nasal) Gish gallop against a rather conservative Christian NT scholar.
There is no doubt that Inanna (or in Akkadian texts Ishtar) dies and gets back to life. However, this is done by restoring her to her old self with special food and water and by putting her clothes/jewelry/powers back on her. Unlike Jesus, she doesn't get an improved glorified body. There is no "rising" in the sense of "dying and rising gods", maybe only "going up" in the sense of moving out of the underworld. It is also interesting that she still has to find a replacement, so she still has to play by the rules of death even after being 'revived'.
Then there is the thing about "rising to heaven". This also doesn't happen in the sense that "dying and rising" implies. Inanna leaves the underworld, but doesn't immediately rise to heaven because she first has to find a replacement to take her place in the underworld. Though she presumably returns to heaven later. The Encyclopedia of Religion also notes that the directional verb used in the story is ambiguous.
There are more problems in considering Inanna an influence on the belief in Jesus' resurrection, on which more later, but I want to return to the original point I made. You offered this example as something comparable to Stark's exposition. But this merely amounts to somebody claiming something in a debate and his opponent not contesting it.
The "dying and rising gods" category is an unfortunate survival bequeathed to us by the Tylorian savages who botched social science with the methods of positivist primitives. But it was already regarded as unempirical by contemporary Biblical scholars and modern ones have confirmed that. It is sufficient for now to say that none of his examples died and were resurrected. Many died, yes, but then those (except Inanna) went on to live in the afterlife without first getting resurrected. Osiris was not resurrected, but put back together and mummified by Isis and remained ruler of the afterlife. Inanna comes the closest, but her life or death is a function of her power, dress and regalia without any special intervention such as a resurrection like Jesus. It is more or less a typical "escape from the underworld" myth.
That is a reasonable argument to make about the West Side Story and Romeo and Juliet but not for Jesus and Inanna because the comparison relies on certain assumptions. The reason why is that there can be no doubt that the story of Romeo and Juliet was readily available in the period the West Side Story was made because Shakespeare's works are an important part of the English literary canon. But early Jews generally didn't have access to Akkadian texts like the story of Ishtar written in a moribund language and certainly not to the version with Inanna in a then obscure dead scholastic language. We only know of Sumerian (2nd millennium BC) and Akkadian versions. So the parallel doesn't apply here.
It is remarkable that for many Mythicists it is often not good enough to note that Josephus and Tacitus had ample opportunity for finding non-Christian sources about Jesus, as they note that this only demonstrates possibility (and if there were no additional argumentation, that would be correct). But some are then more than eager to refer to supposed pagan parallels in texts that were nearly impossible for your typical 1st-century Jew or Christian to acquire and read.
It's also worth asking why the category of dying and rising gods was invented in the first place. James Frazer, the anthropologist who popularised the category, sought an evolutionist explanation of the origin of religions and thought that the periodically reoccurring sacrifice of a king was a common feature of mythologies. So all the gods in the category were male (Inanna/Ishtar wasn't included) and many were supposed to be linked to agriculture ('resurrection' linked to spring). Frazer used the category to explain the origins of Christianity through evolutionist influences of other religions, so he needed the dying and rising gods to explain the resurrection, although he was not a Mythicist. It is important to understand that Tylor and Frazer represent something of a pre-empirical stage in the anthropology of religion; they relied on a beanbag of fairly anecdotal facts, not on methodical fieldwork. The most influential scholar on the issue is Jonathan Z. Smith, who did more than any other scholar to make the category lose favour, who concludes that the category was always created with Christianity in mind.
The charges I made about him (for instance messing up his chronology of Daniel, getting his scholars wrong) are all as empirical as they get and they are all abject errors.
To clarify, I do not think that Carrier is stupid. I have said so several times now. I do think he is more an eisegete than an exegete. And if you want to write a book it falls upon you to investigate the evidence that we provide to you. Saying that you find it hard to believe doesn't cut it.
For the record, I also think that his textual criticism is completely nuts. But I do not think that he is an ignoramus all around.
This is a reasonable question. I have already invoked a text-critical problem when I referred to Carriers treatment of the weeks in Daniel, but I did not describe it as such. Simply assuming that the Greek text must be right, not checking the Hebrew and any other variants, and then implicitly misattributing and misdating the Greek text of Daniel in the Septuagint (the text in modern editions of the Septuagint is not the original Septuagint text, but a later translation by Theodotion) to top it off is by any measure "nuts", yes.
Anyway, what I said there initially was not intended as a charge or accusation, it was a concessive statement. So I did not expect Carrier to respond to it.
You can hate ancient primary sources for that, you can curse and shake your fist at them, but they're not going to change their ways now because of our modern scholarly conventions. So we will have to do the job with the texts that are available.
This was about the practice referencing in primary sources, not about the quality of the evidence. The response is therefore completely beside the point.
However, there is more. Insisting on an infinite regress of sourcing is silly. So at a certain point we come to assess the inherent plausibility that a source has some valuable information. It is here that the case for a historical Jesus is looking up. We know that Paul claims to have met Jesus' brother, James, and also other people whom he regards as having known Jesus personally.
This confuses secular historical and theological use of the sources. If an early source commenting on a supposedly historical person or occurrence mentions embarrassing details, then there are no sound secular reasons for rejecting those details.
Religious claims are not too rare in ancient source material and they are generally discounted for recontructions of what happened, without this discrediting the entrire source. Josephus claims there whad been omens predicting the destruction of Jerusalem, including a peasant turned doomsday prophet. Nobody claims on the basis of this that Jerusalem wasn't destroyed or that Josephus is completely ahistorical because of this.
consider how likely it that an unhistorical character is fabricated in a setting less than a generation ago and then widely adopted as historical. Is that kind of fabrication possible? Sure! But is it probable? Far from it.
This is topical of sorts but not the same. Jesus' historicity is completely uncontested in surviving sources. The first claims that Jesus did not exist pop up in the eighteenth century and that is far too late to give us any relevant information on the matter. The things non-Christians contest before then are his nature and his actions, not his existence.
Roswell's alien woo, on the other hand, is widely contested despite a fervent core of believers. In this respect it is more like the belief that Jesus was the Son of God and not like the belief that he did exist.
So Jesus' existence is from the outset almost treated like a historical fact, while the alien theory of Roswell has always been a controversial and pseudoscientific interpretation.
I have already mentioned Simon bar-Kosibah to you as an example. According to Mythicist standards scholars could have once concluded that bar-Kosibah didn't exist (Justin Martyr can be explained away with the usual Mythicist bag of tricks; perhaps it was an interpolation, the text surely flows nicely if you remove the reference), but then in the 1950s letters written by him and addressed to him were discovered. That is clear evidence that Mythicism's historical standards are off base.
Nope, if the Mythicist 'method' would only just enable recklessly wrongheaded conclusions, it is the sanest thing to discard it.
Your Bigfoot analogy contains very different assumptions, because it pertains to biology. How likely is it that a viable population of large apes, who require a lot of food, exists in the North West of the United States? Very unlikely. How likely is it that a Jewish apocalyptic preacher from Galilee got crucified in Jerusalem during Passover? These are completely different questions and the assumptions are not at all transferable.
We have four gospels with a total of five independent sources for Jesus. We have Paul's epistles, in which he passingly mentioned that he met Jesus' brother. And we have non-Christian mentions by Josephus and Tacitus.
It cannot be inferred from the fact that some things that Paul or the evangelists followed from their religious beliefs that anything they wrote is unreliable. If that's what you wanted to imply it's a total non-sequitur.
You are assuming that Christians modified Josephus "to make it appear he wrote about Jesus". That is not at all what the scholarly consensus is, which is that Christians tampered with the Testimonium Flavianum, that already existed, to make it include Christian claims.
It is just about possible that Tacitus simply repeated Christian claims, but that doesn't mean at all that this is likely (in fact it isn't). You cannot conclude that the evidence is weak from merely noting a possibility - though this is part and parcel of Carrier's 'method'.