Could Mark Goodcare Help Illuminate Two Big Ideas?
I hope so! If not, I worry that we might stay in the dark for a long time.
Mark Goodacre is one of the leading New Testament scholars in the entire world—to get a sense of what an excellent scholar Goodacre is, just click on this image and look at the praise for Goodacre’s 2002 book The Case Against Q:
And Richard Carrier is an extremely lucid and informed and interesting scholar—he has encyclopedic knowledge and a sharp intellect. Carrier has advanced two big ideas that both need to be engaged with:
(1) that Jesus probably wasn’t a historical figure
(2) that it’s possible to apply a certain methodology to history that will turn history into a more rigorous field
I’m just a random layperson, but I’m hugely frustrated with the lack of engagement with Carrier’s two big ideas, so the question is: How can we help Carrier to break through and get engagement from the top scholars on these two big ideas?
We’ll remain in the dark on Carrier’s two big ideas until engagement happens—only engagement will allow us to shed light on these two ideas, and investigate these two ideas, and find out how strong these two ideas really are.
I fear that the engagement will take decades to happen.
But fortunately, I think that Goodacre might be able to help stimulate engagement on these two big ideas, since Goodacre is—like I said—one of the leading New Testament scholars out there.
Until there’s engagement, there will be an annoying silence and that annoying silence will make it impossible to know if Carrier is—on each of his two big ideas—100% right or 100% wrong or 75% right or 75% wrong or 80% right or 80% wrong or what the deal is.
(Goodacre and Carrier did have a discussion years ago, but both of them would definitely agree with me that that discussion was the furthest thing from thorough and robust—it was a short discussion and there wasn’t any serious engagement. And that discussion didn’t address Carrier’s second big idea—it only addressed the issue of whether Jesus was a historical figure.)
So what are Carrier’s two big ideas and why should anybody care about these ideas?
Was Jesus a Historical Figure?
The first big idea is that Jesus probably wasn’t a historical figure:
Of course, the issue of Jesus’s historicity will mainly interest people who are interested in Christianity.
But the exotic beliefs that Carrier describes from early Christianity are so transfixing and intriguing that I think that anyone will find these exotic beliefs to be absolutely delightful to read about—Carrier has a new 2020 book whose cover art and title beautifully convey these beliefs’ exotic nature:
Carrier wrote the following about his 2020 book’s cover art:
It’s an original painting by artist Rena Davonne. It’s intentionally psychadelic-conceptual, in keeping with the mystical and hallucinatory origins of the Christian religion, and the mod-style feeling of the title. It evokes an aesthetic and an abstraction; it shouldn’t be taken literally. Obviously, the thesis is not that Jesus flew down to a geocentric earth in a cross-shaped spaceship, nor that the outer reaches of space really were so colorful to the naked eye.
But the elements are indeed a silver spaceship-like cross descending from the stars toward earth (if you look closely, to Palestine in particular) through a geocentric universe as seen through the eye of the mind, in the very sense described in the writings of the Jewish theologian Philo of Alexandria. Philo describes how the universe looks differently to those who can see with the mind; most of which features are invisible to ordinary sight. You are thus here seeing the rings of the cosmos, occupied by their corresponding geocentric planets (Moon, Venus, Mars, and so on), lit up according to their respective harmonies and ethereal elements.
Among the “planets” so schemed is the Sun. So the star you see way off above left is the True Star, after which all stars are but mere copies—another thing Philo explains in his works. In Christian conception—for example, as Ignatius describes—at the resurrection Jesus became that True Star and shined from the heavens to the eye of the faithful with a light brighter than any normal star—and Satan and all other celestial beings were compelled to bow thereto. This is indeed the kind of weird thing ancient Christians believed, dispelling the anachronistic insistence today to imagine they had perfectly normal beliefs like buttoned-up modern-science-tending Christians today.
If all of that sounds bizarre, it is. Actual ancient conceptions of how the universe looked and worked were that psychedelic and bizarre, a fact most modern interpreters don’t know or forget. Which is an underlying theme of the whole book. Hence it’s a theme of the conceptual art fronting the book. Rena did an outstanding job.
In his 2017 piece “How Did Christianity Switch to a Historical Jesus?”, Carrier gives the following excerpt from his 2014 book On the Historicity of Jesus—the excerpt summarizes how Carrier thinks that Christianity most likely began:
Between the 30s and 70s some Christian congregations gradually mythicize the story of their celestial Jesus Lord, just as other mystery cults had done for their gods, eventually representing him rhetorically and symbolically in overtly historical narratives, during which time much of the more esoteric truth of the matter is reserved in secret for upper levels of initiation (Elements 11-14, 44-48). Right in the middle of this process the Jewish War of 66–70 destroyed the original church in Jerusalem, leaving us with no evidence that any of the original apostles lived beyond it. Before that, persecutions from Jewish authorities and famines throughout the empire (and, if it really happened, the Neronian persecution of 64, which would have devastated the church in Rome) further exacerbated the effect, which was to leave a thirty-year dark age in the history of the church (from the 60s to the 90s), a whole generation in which we have no idea what happened or who was in charge (Element 22). In fact this ecclesial dark age probably spans fifty years (from the 60s to 110s), if 1 Clement was written in the 60s and not the 90s (see Chapter 8, §5), as then we have no record of anything going on until either Ignatius or Papias, both of whom could have written well later than the 110s (Chapter 8, §§6 and 7).
It’s during this dark age that the canonical Gospels most likely came to be written, by persons unknown (Chapter 7, §4), and at least one Christian sect started to believe the myths they contain were real, and thus began to believe (or for convenience claim) that Jesus was a real person, and then preached and embellished this view. Because having a historical founder represented in controlled documents was a significant advantage (Chapter 8, §12; and Chapter 1, §4), this ‘historicizing’ sect gradually gained political and social superiority, declared itself ‘orthodox’ while condemning all others as ‘heretics’ (Chapter 4, §3), and preserved only texts that agreed with its view, and forged and altered countless texts in support. As a result, almost all evidence of the original Christian sects and what they believed has been lost or doctored out of the record; even evidence of what happened during the latter half of the first century to transition from Paul’s Christianity to second-century ‘orthodoxy’ is completely lost and now almost wholly inaccessible to us (Elements 21-22 and 44).
No element of the theory I just outlined is ad hoc.
The letters of Paul corroborate the hypothesis that Christianity began with visions (real or claimed) and novel interpretations of scripture, and this is not a fringe proposal but is actually a view shared by many experts. The idea of a ‘celestial savior’ is corroborated by documents such as the Ascension of Isaiah and has precedents in theologies like the continual death-and-resurrection of Osiris, and is found even in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Euhemerization of god-men by placing them in historical contexts was commonplace in antiquity. That ancient texts could have symbolic and allegorical content is well established in classics and religious studies, has ample support in the sociology of religion and was common practice in ancient mystery cults and Judaism. Christianity did possess the central features of ancient mystery cults. And the fact that such ‘mysteries’ were kept secret and revealed only to initiates, who were then sworn to secrecy, is a well-known fact of ancient religion. Everything else is an undeniable fact: the Epistles do reveal the constant vexation of novel dogmas; the devastating events of the 60s did occur; the history of the church is completely silent from then until the mid-90s or later; a historicist sect did later gain supreme power and did decide which texts to preserve, and it did doctor and meddle with numerous manuscripts and even produced wholesale forgeries to that same end—and not as a result of any organized conspiracy, but simply from independent scribes and authors widely sharing similar assumptions and motives.
The only element of the basic myth theory that is even incredible (at least at first look) is the idea that a transition from a secret cosmic savior to a public historical one happened within two generations, and without a clear record of it occurring. But the unusual circumstances of a major disruption in the church opened the door to rapid developments in its dogmas, and the complete silence of the record in the following period blocks any attempt to argue ‘from silence’ that there was no transition from myth to legend. That this development did not get recorded is because nothing got recorded.
When we consider the prospect of newly evangelized Christians, handed a euhemerized Gospel, but not yet initiated into the full secret, and then being set loose to spread their unfinished beliefs and founding their own churches and developing their own speculations, the idea that a myth could be mistaken as and transformed into ‘history’ in just a few generations is not so implausible as it may seem, particularly given that the geographical distances involved were large, lifespans then were short, and legends often grow with distance in both time and space. There may even have been a ‘transitional’ state of the cult in which the historical narratives were seen as playing out what was simultaneously occurring in the heavens (so one could believe both narratives were true), or in which certain sect leaders chose to downplay or reinterpret the secret doctrines and sell the public ones as the truth instead (as Origen seems to have thought was a good idea). Any number of possibilities present themselves; without any data from that period, we cannot know which happened.
Hence I already dealt with this objection more than adequately in Chapters 6 (§7), 7 (§7), and 8 (§§4 and 12). For comparison, even if we granted historicity, then we do not know how some sects transitioned to a cosmically born Jesus in the Christianities Irenaeus attacks as heresies (Chapter 11, §9) or a cosmically killed Jesus in the Ascension of Isaiah (Chapter 3, §1), or to a Jesus who lived and died a hundred years earlier (Chapter 8, §1). Thus, our ignorance in the matter of how the cult transitioned is not solved by positing historicity. Either way, we’re equally in the dark on how these changes happened.
We need scholarly engagement in order to see how well Carrier’s anti-historicist hypothesis truly holds up—my hope is that scholars like Goodacre will help to make that engagement happen.
But my fear is that it’ll take decades for us to see what Carrier’s anti-historicist hypothesis looks like under the bright light of thorough and robust engagement—in my view, it would be a terrible outcome if it took that long for illumination to occur.
Can We Make History More Rigorous?
The second big idea will interest everybody—it affects the entire field of history and would have a cosmic impact if it were put into practice:
Carrier proposes that historians adopt a Bayesian methodology that would have various advantages over the status quo—in his 2015 piece “Tim Hendrix on Proving History”, Carrier puts forward that adopting this Bayesian methodology would do these things:
make explicit and clear and transparent the logical tools that historians—whether consciously or unconsciously—already use
allow historians’ inputs to be identified and analyzed and critiqued
allow for a fortiori reasoning so that subjective estimating doesn’t render the field of history invalid
avoid false precision and instead account for uncertainty
distinguish subjective estimates from arbitrary estimates
make debates about inputs fundamental to the field of history—this would force historians to justify subjective estimates with data and would yield a situation in which inputs were peer-validated
prevent historians from saying “x is probable” without explaining whether “probable” means 55% or 95% or 99.99%
prevent historians from not explaining why a particular probability is the correct one as opposed to some other probability
prevent historians from failing to even explain how they managed to get above 50%, which is what “x is probable” means
force historians to use sound Bayesian reasoning in order to answer how they got to their probabilities
settle which inputs historians need to be looking for and asking about and guessing at and arguing over
help historians distinguish prior probability from consequent probability
help historians understand the likelihood ratio’s role, which most historians are problematically oblivious to
help historians understand that you get a posterior probability when you combine a prior probability with a likelihood ratio
help historians not mess up their reasoning
help historians know when they’re relying on priors
help historians know how the priors one relies on should affect one’s conclusions
help historians avoid the trap of not properly testing their theories against alternatives, which is a major trap in the field of history that even historians who are aware of the trap still fall into all the time
This is cosmic stuff—the proposal is that historians adopt a methodology that will (A) set the field of history on a firm logical and mathematical foundation and (B) change for the better how historians operate.
But it’s the same situation as the Jesus discussion—again we need scholarly engagement or else we’ll continue to have no idea if Carrier’s contribution is 100% solid or 0% solid or 60% solid or 40% solid or 90% solid or 10% solid or what the deal is, and again my fear is that the lack of illumination might last decades.
So we need scholarly engagement on both of Carrier’s big ideas—my hope is that my piece here will help to create engagement on these two big ideas so that we can find out what holds up and what doesn’t, what makes sense and what doesn’t, and what’s sound and what isn’t.
I hope that Goodacre can help out with this—the sooner the illumination happens, the sooner the truth will emerge and people like me won’t have to be in the dark on this stuff anymore.