“The Brothers Karamazov” – A Moral & Philosophical Critique (Part II)

In my last post in this series, concerning Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, I talked about the concept of good and evil and the character Ivan’s personal atheistic perception that they are contingent on God existing (or at least an afterlife of eternal reward or punishment).  While there may even be a decent percentage of atheists that share this view (objective morality being contingent on God’s existence), I briefly explained my own views (being an atheist myself) which differs from Ivan’s in that I am a moral realist and believe that morality is objective independent of any gods or immortal souls existing.  I believe that moral facts exist (and science is the best way to find them), that morality is ultimately grounded on objective facts pertaining to human psychology, biology, sociology, neurology, and other facts about human beings, and thus that good and evil do exist in at least some sense.

In this post, I’m going to talk about Ivan’s influence on his half-brother, Smerdyakov, who ends up confessing to Ivan that he murdered their father Fyodor Pavlovich, as a result of Ivan’s philosophical influence on him.  In particular, Smerdyakov implicates Ivan as at least partially responsible for his own murderous behavior since Ivan successfully convinced him that evil wasn’t possible in a world without a God.  Ivan ends up becoming consumed with guilt, basically suffers a nervous breakdown, and then is incessantly taunted by a demonic apparition.  The hallucinations continue up until the moment Ivan comes to find out, from his very religious brother Alyosha, that Smerdyakov has hung himself.  This scene highlights a number of important topics beyond the moral realism I discussed in the first post, such as moral responsibility, free will, and even moral desert (I’ll discuss this last topic in my next post).

As I mentioned before, beyond the fact that we do not need a god to ground moral values, we also don’t need a god or an afterlife to motivate us to behave morally either.  By cultivating moral virtues such as compassion, honesty, and reasonableness, and analyzing a situation using a rational assessment of as many facts as are currently accessible, we can maximize our personal satisfaction and thus our chances of living a fulfilling life.  Behavioral causal factors that support this goal are “good” and those that detract from it are “evil”.  Aside from these labels though, we actually experience a more or less pleasing life depending on our behaviors and therefore we do have real-time motivations for behaving morally (such as acting in ways that conform to various cultivated virtues).  Aristotle claimed this more than 2000 years ago and moral psychology has been confirming it time and time again.

Since we have evolved as a particular social species with a particular psychology, not only do we have particular behaviors that best accomplish a fulfilling life, but there are also various behavioral conditioning algorithms and punishment/reward systems that are best at modifying our behavior.  And this brings me to Smerdyakov.  By listening to Ivan and ultimately becoming convinced by Ivan’s philosophical arguments, he seems to have been conditioned out of his previous views on moral responsibility.  In particular, he ended up adopting the belief that if God does not exist, then anything is permissible.  Since he also rejected a belief in God, he therefore thought he could do whatever he wanted.

One thing this turn of events highlights is that there are a number of different factors that influence people’s behaviors and that lead to their being reasoned into doing (or not doing) all sorts of things.  As Voltaire once said “Those who can make you believe absurdities can also make you commit atrocities.“  And I think what Ivan told Smerdyakov was in fact absurd — although it was a belief that I once held as well not long after becoming an atheist.  For it is quite obviously absurd that anything is permissible without a God existing for at least two types of reasons: pragmatic considerations and moral considerations (with the former overlapping with the latter).  Pragmatic reasons include things like not wanting to be fined, incarcerated, or even executed by a criminal justice system that operates to minimize illegal behaviors.  It includes not wanting to be ostracized from your circle of friends, your social groups, or your community (and risking the loss of beneficial reciprocity, safety nets, etc.).  Moral reasons include everything that detracts from your overall psychological well-being, the very thing that is needed to live a maximally fulfilling life given one’s circumstances.  Behaving in ways that degrade your sense of inner worth, your integrity, self-esteem, and that diminish a good conscience, is going to make you feel miserable compared to behaving in ways that positively impact these fundamental psychological goals.

Furthermore, this part of the story illustrates that we have a moral responsibility not only to ourselves and our own behavior, but also in terms of how we influence the behavior of those around us, based on what we say, how we treat them, and more.  This also reinforces the importance of social contract theory and how it pertains to moral behavior.  If we follow simple behavioral heuristics like the Golden Rule and mutual reciprocity, then we can work together to obtain and secure common social goods such as various rights, equality, environmental sustainability, democratic legislation (ideally based on open moral deliberation), and various social safety nets.  We also can punish those that violate the social contract, as we already do with the criminal justice system and various kinds of social ostracization.  While our system of checks is far from perfect, having some system that serves such a purpose is necessary because not everybody behaves in ways that are ultimately beneficial to themselves nor everyone else around them.  People need to be conditioned to behave in ways that are more conducive to their own well being and that of others, and if all reasonable efforts to achieve that fails, they may simply need to be quarantined through incarceration (for example psychopaths or other violent criminals that society needs to be protected from, and that aren’t responding to rehabilitation efforts).

In any case, we do have a responsibility to others and that means we need to be careful what we say, such as the case with Ivan and his brother.  And this includes how we talk about concepts like free will, moral responsibility, and moral desert (justice).  If we tell people that all of their behaviors are determined and therefore don’t matter, that’s not a good way to get people to behave in ways that are good for them or for others.  Nor is telling them that because a God doesn’t exist, that their actions don’t matter.  In the case of deterministic nihilism, it’s a way to get people to lose much if not all of their motivation to put forward effort in achieving useful goals.  And both deterministic and atheistic moral nihilism are dangerous ideas that can get some people to commit heinous crimes such as mass shootings (or murdering their own father as Smerdyakov did), because they simply cause people to think that all behaviors are on equal footing in any way that matters.  And quite frankly, those nihilistic ideas are not only dangerous but also absurd.

While I’ve written a bit on free will in the past, my views have become more refined over the years, and my overall attitude towards the issue has been co-evolving alongside my views on morality.  The main crux of the free will issue is that libertarian free will is logically impossible because our actions are never free from both determinism and indeterminism (randomness) since one or the other must underlie how our universe operates (depending on which interpretation of Quantum Mechanics is correct).  Neither option from this logical dichotomy gives us “the freedom to have chosen to behave differently given the same initial conditions in a non-random way”.  Therefore free will in this sense is logically impossible.  However, this does not mean that our behavior isn’t operating under some sets of rules and patterns that we can discover and modify.  That is to say, we can effectively reprogram many of our behavioral tendencies using various forms of conditioning through punishment/reward systems.  These are the same systems we use to teach children how to behave and to rehabilitate criminals.

The key thing to note here is that we need to acknowledge that even if we don’t have libertarian free will, we still have a form of “free will” that matters (as philosophers like Daniel Dennett have said numerous times) whereby we have the ability to be programmed and reprogrammed in certain ways, thus allowing us to take responsibility for our actions and design ways to modify future actions as needed.  We have more degrees of freedom than a person who is insane for example, or a child, or a dog, and these degrees of freedom or autonomy — the flexibility we have in our decision-making algorithms — can be used as a rough guideline for determining how “morally responsible” a person is for their actions.  That is to say, the more easily a person can be conditioned out of a particular behavior, and the more rational decision making processes are involved in governing that behavior, the more “free will” this person has in a sense that applies to a criminal justice system and that applies to most of our everyday lives.

In the end, it doesn’t matter whether someone thinks that their behavior doesn’t matter because there’s no God, or because they have no libertarian free will.  What needs to be pointed out is the fact that we are able to behave in ways (or be conditioned to behave in ways) that lead to more happiness, more satisfaction and more fulfilling lives.  And we are able to behave in ways that detract from this goal.  So which behaviors should we aim for?  I think the answer is obvious.  And we also need to realize that as a part of our behavioral patterns, we need to realize that ideas have consequences on others and their subsequent behaviors.  So we need to be careful about what ideas we choose to spread and to make sure that they are put into a fuller context.  If a person hasn’t given some critical reflection about the consequences that may ensue from spreading their ideas to others, especially to others that may misunderstand it, then they need to keep those ideas to themselves until they’ve reflected on them more.  And this is something that I’ve discovered and applied for myself as well, as I was once far less careful about this than I am now.  In the next post, I’m going to talk about the concept of moral desert and how it pertains to free will.  This will be relevant to the scene described above regarding Ivan’s demonic apparition that haunts him as a result of his guilt over Smerdyakov’s murder of their father, as well as why the demonic apparition disappeared once Ivan heard that Smerdyakov had taken his own life.

“The Brothers Karamazov” – A Moral & Philosophical Critique (Part I)

I wanted to write some thoughts on Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, and I may end up writing this in several parts.  I’m interested in some of the themes that Dostoevsky develops, in particular, those pertaining to morality, moral responsibility, free will, moral desert, and their connection to theism and atheism.  Since I’m not going to go over the novel in great detail, for those not already familiar with this story, please at least read the plot overview (here’s a good link for that) before pressing on.

One of the main characters in this story, Ivan, is an atheist, as I am (though our philosophies differ markedly as you’ll come to find out as you read on).  In his interactions and conversation with his brother Alyosha, a very religious man, various moral concepts are brought up including the dichotomy of good and evil, arguments against the existence of God (at least, against the existence of a loving God) such as the well-known Problem of Evil, and other ethical and religious quandaries.  I wanted to first talk about Ivan’s insistence that good and evil cannot exist without God, and since Ivan’s character doesn’t believe that God exists, he comes to the conclusion that good and evil do not exist either.  Although I’m an atheist, I disagree with Ivan’s views here and will expand on why in a moment.

There are a number of arguments against the existence of God that I’ve come across over the years, some of which that I’ve formulated on my own after much reflection, and that were at least partially influenced by my former religious views as a born-again Protestant Christian.  Perhaps ironically, it wasn’t until after I became an atheist that I began to delve much deeper into moral theory, and also into philosophy generally (though the latter is less surprising).  My views on morality have evolved in extremely significant ways since my early adult years.  For example, back when I was a Christian I was a moral objectivist/realist, believing that morals were indeed objective but only in the sense that they depended on what God believed to be right and wrong (even if these divine rules changed over time or seemed to contradict my own moral intuitions and analyses, such as stoning homosexuals to death).  Thus, I subscribed to some form of Divine Command Theory (or DCT).  After becoming an atheist, much like Ivan, I became a moral relativist (but only temporarily – keep reading), believing as the character Ivan did, that good and evil couldn’t exist due to their resting on a fictitious or at least non-demonstrable supernatural theological foundation and/or (perhaps unlike Ivan believed) that good and evil may exist but only in the sense that they were nothing more than cultural norms that were all equally valid.

Since then, I’ve become a moral realist once again (as I was when I was a Christian), after putting the philosophy of Ivan to the test (so to speak).  I realized that I could no longer justify the belief that any cultural moral norm had as equal of a claim to being true as any other cultural norm.  There were simply too many examples of moral prescriptions in various cultures and religions that couldn’t be justified.  Then I realized that many of the world’s cultural moral norms, though certainly not all of them, were largely universal (such as prohibitions against, at least certain forms of, stealing, killing, and others) which suggested a common human psychological component underlying many of them.

I also realized that as an atheist, much as Nietzsche realized, I now had to ground my own moral views on something that didn’t rely on Divine Command Theory, gods, Christian traditions, or any other foundation that I found to be invalid, illogical, unreasonable, unjustified, or not sufficiently demonstrated to be true.  And I had to do this if I was to find a way out of moral relativism, which simply didn’t sit well with me as it didn’t seem to be coherent with the bulk of human psychology and the more or less universal goals that humans strive to achieve in their lives.  It was ultimately the objective facts pertaining to human psychology that allowed me to resubscribe to an objectivist/realist morality — and now my views of morality were no longer contingent on merely the whim or dictates of some authoritarian god (thus bypassing the Euthyphro dilemma), but rather were contingent on objective facts about human beings, what makes us happy and fulfilled and what doesn’t (where these facts often disagree with moral prescriptions stemming from various religions and Divine-Command-Theory).

After dabbling with the teachings of various philosophers such as Aristotle, Kant, Mill, Rawls, Foot, and others, I came to accept a view of morality that was indeed coherent, sensible, sufficiently motivating to follow (which is a must), and which subsumed all the major moral theories into one framework (and which therefore had the best claim to being true since it was compatible with all of them –  virtue ethics, deontology, and consequentialism).   Now I’ve come to accept what can be described as a Goal Theory of Ethics, whereby morality is defined as “that which one ought to do above all else – when rational and maximally informed based on reason and evidence – in order to increase one’s personal life fulfillment and overall level of preference satisfaction”.  One could classify this as a subset of desire utilitarianism, but readers must be warned that this is NOT to be confused with traditional formulations of utilitarianism – such as those explicitly stated by J.S. Mill, Peter Singer, etc., as they are rife with problems resulting from not taking ALL consequences into account (such as consequences pertaining to one’s own character and how they see themselves as a person, as per the wisdom of Aristotle and Kant).

So how can good and evil exist without some God(s) existing?  That is to say, if a God doesn’t exist, how can it not be the case that “anything is permissible”?  Well, the short answer is – because of human psychology (and also social contract theory).

When people talk about behaving morally, what they really mean (when we peel back all the layers of cultural and religious rhetoric, mythology, narrative, etc.) is behaving in a way that maximizes our personal satisfaction – specifically our sense of life fulfillment.  Ask a Christian, or a Muslim, or a Humanist, why ought they behave in some particular way, and it all can be shown to break down to some form of human happiness or preference satisfaction for life fulfillment (not some hedonistic form of happiness).  They may say to behave morally “because then you can get into heaven, or avoid hell”, or “because it pleases God”, or what-have-you.  When you ask why THOSE reasons are important, it ultimately leads to “because it maximizes your chance of living a fulfilled life” (whether in this life or in the next, for those that believe in an afterlife).  I don’t believe in any afterlife because there’s no good evidence or reason to have such a belief, so for me the life that is most important is the one life we are given here on earth – which therefore must be cherished and not given any secondary priority to a hypothetical life that may or may not be granted after death.

But regardless, whether you believe in an afterlife (as Alyosha does) or not (as in Ivan’s case), it is still about maximizing a specific form of happiness and fulfillment.  However, another place where Ivan seems to go wrong in his thinking is his conclusion that people only behave morally based on what they believe will happen to them in an afterlife.  And therefore, if there is no afterlife (immortal souls), then there is no reason to be moral.  The fact of the matter is though, in general, much of what we tend to call moral behavior actually produces positive effects on the quality of our lives now, as we live them.  People that behave immorally are generally not going to live “the good life” or achieve what Aristotle called eudaimonia.  On the other hand, if people actually cultivate virtues of compassion, honesty, and reasonableness, they will simply live more fulfilling lives.  And people that don’t do this or simply follow their immediate epicurean or selfish impulses will most certainly not live a fulfilling life.  So there is actually a naturalistic motivating force to behave morally, regardless of any afterlife.  Ivan simply overlooked this (and by extension, possibly Dostoyevsky as well), likely because most people brought up in Christianized cultures often focus on the afterlife as being the bearer of ultimate justice and therefore the ultimate motivator for behaving as they do.

In any case, the next obvious question to ask is what ways of living best accomplish this goal of life fulfillment?  This is an empirical question which means science can in principle discover the answer, and is the only reliable (or at least the most reliable) way of arriving at such answers.  While there is as of yet no explicit “science of morality”, various branches of science such as psychology, sociology, anthropology, and neuroscience, are discovering moral facts (or at least reasonable approximations of these facts, given what data we have obtained thus far).  Unless we as a society choose to formulate a science of morality — a laborious research project indeed — we will have to live with the best approximations to moral facts that are at our disposal as per the findings in psychology, sociology, neuroscience, etc.

So even if we don’t yet know with certainty what one ought to do in any and all particular circumstances (no situational ethical certainties), many scientific findings have increased our confidence in having discovered at least some of those moral facts or approximations of those facts (such as that slavery is morally wrong, because it doesn’t maximize the overall life satisfaction of the slaveholder, especially if he/she were to analyze the situation rationally with as many facts as are pragmatically at their disposal).  And to make use of some major philosophical fruits cultivated from the works of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Hume, and Rawls (among many others), we have the benefits of Social Contract Theory to take into consideration.  In short, societies maximize the happiness and flourishing of the citizens contained therein by making use of a social contract – a system of rules and mutual expectations that ought to be enforced in order to accomplish that societal goal (and which ought to be designed in a fair manner, behind a Rawlsian veil of ignorance, or what he deemed the “original position”).  And therefore, to maximize one’s own chance of living a fulfilling life, one will most likely need to endorse some form of social contract theory that grants people rights, equality, protection, and so forth.

In summary, good and evil do exist despite there being no God because human psychology is particular to our species and our biology, it has a finite range of inputs and outputs, and therefore there are some sets of behaviors that will work better than others to maximize our happiness and overall life satisfaction given the situational circumstances that we find our lives embedded in.  What we call “good” and “evil” are simply the behaviors and causal events that “add to” or “detract from” our goal of living a fulfilling life.  The biggest source of disagreement among the various moral systems in the world (whether religiously motivated or not), are the different sets of “facts” that people subscribe to (some beliefs being based on sound reason and evidence whereas others are based on irrational faith, dogma, or emotions) and whether or not people are analyzing the actual facts in a rational manner.  A person may think they know what will maximize their chances of living a fulfilling life when in fact (much like with the heroin addict that can’t wait to get their next fix) they are wrong about the facts and if they only knew so and acted rationally, would do what they actually ought to do instead.

In my next post in this series, I’ll examine Ivan’s views on free will and moral responsibility, and how it relates to the unintended consequence of the actions of his half-brother Smerdyakov (who murders their father, Fyodor Pavlovich, as a result of Ivan’s influence on his moral views).

Atheism, Morality, and Various Thoughts of the Day…

I’m sick of anti-intellectuals and the rest in their assuming that all atheists are moral Nihilists, moral relativists, post/modernists, proponents of scientism, etc. ‘Dat ain’t the case. Some of us respect philosophy and understand fully well that even science requires an epistemological, metaphysical, and ethical foundation, in order to work at all and to ground all of its methodologies.  Some atheists are even keen to some form of panpsychism (like Chalmers’ or Strawson’s views).

Some of us even ascribe to a naturalistic worldview that holds onto meaning, despite the logical impossibility of libertarian free will (hint: it has to do with living a moral life which means to live a fulfilling life and maximizing one’s satisfaction through a rational assessment of all the available information — which entails BAYESIAN reasoning — including a rational assessment of the information pertaining to one’s own subjective experience of fulfillment and sustainable happiness). Some of us atheists/philosophical naturalists/what-have-you are moral realists as well and therefore reject relativism, believing that objective moral facts DO in fact exist (and therefore science can find them), even if many of those facts are entailed within a situational ethical framework. Some of us believe that at least some number of moral facts are universal, but this shouldn’t be confused with moral absolutism since both are merely independent subsets of realism. I find absolutism to be intellectually and morally repugnant and epistemologically unjustifiable.

Also, a note for any theists out there: when comparing arguments for and against the existence of a God or gods (and the “Divine Command Theory” that accompanies said belief), keep in mind that an atheist need only hold a minimalist position on the issue (soft atheism) and therefore the entire burden of proof lies on the theist to support their extraordinary claim(s) with an extraordinary amount of evidentiary weight. While I’m willing to justify a personal belief in hard atheism (the claim that “God does not exist”), the soft atheist need only point out that they lack a belief in God because no known proponent for theism has yet met the burden of proof for supporting their extraordinary claim that “God does exist”. As such, any justified moral theory of what one ought to do (above all else) including but certainly not limited to who one votes for, how we treat one another, what fundamental rights we should have, etc., must be grounded on claims of fact that have met their burden of proof. Theism has not done this and the theist can’t simply say “Prove God doesn’t exist”, since this would require proving a null hypothesis which is not possible, even if it can be proven false. So rather than trying to unjustifably shift the burden of proof onto the atheist, the theist must satisfy the burden of proof for their positive claim on the existence of a god(s).

A more general goal needed to save our a$$es from self-destruction is for more people to dabble in philosophy. I argue that it should even become a core part of educational curricula (especially education on minimizing logical fallacies/cognitive biases and education on moral psychology) to give us the best chance of living a life that is at least partially examined through internal rational reflection and discourse with those that are willing to engage with us. To give us the best chance of surviving the existential crisis that humanity (and many more species that share this planet with us) are in. We need more people to be encouraged to justify what they think they ought to do above all else.

Sustainability, Happiness, and a Science of Morality: Part I

Human beings seem to share the fundamental goal of wanting to live a satisfying and fulfilling life. We all want to be happy, and the humanist movement is an excellent demonstration of the kinds of strategies that have been most effective at achieving this admirable goal – such as the push for democracy, equality, basic human rights, and the elimination of poverty. Clearly we have a long way to go before human happiness is anywhere near universal, let alone maximized – if these are in fact possible futures within our grasp. We’re certainly not going to get there very easily (if at all) unless we address a number of serious societal problems.

One of the most pressing issues facing us today, because of it’s negative impact on just about every other societal problem, is the problem of overpopulation. The reasons for this are obvious and include the decreasing number of available resources per capita, thus forcing people to stretch their resources thinner and thinner over an ever growing population, and/or inclining some societies to go to war with others in order to obtain more resources. Then there’s also the problematic increase in environmental degradation and waste production as the population grows. Beyond the typical resources we’re depleting such as energy/power, food, clean air and water, and raw materials for making various products, there’s also other limited resources that are often overlooked such as the amount of available (let alone habitable) space where people can live, grow food, store waste, etc. There’s also a relatively small percentage of people employed in professions that not only require very special training but that also form the backbone of our society (such as teachers, doctors, scientists, etc.). As these latter resources get stretched thinner and thinner (i.e. education, healthcare, and scientific expertise and research), we’re effectively diluting the backbone of our society which can eventually cascade into societal collapse.

To be sure, there are several ways to combat many of these problems that are caused or exacerbated by overpopulation, for example, by shifting from a goods-based economy to a service-flow economy that recycles product materials that would otherwise be wasted (in part by leasing many of the products that are currently bought and later thrown into a landfill), by increasing the percentage of less-pollutive or non-pollutive renewable energy sources, and finding other ways of decreasing the demand for and increasing the efficiency and distribution of all the resources we rely on. The problem with these approaches however is that although these technologies and admirable efforts are slowly improving, the population is also increasing at the same time. So even if we are in fact increasing efficiency and decreasing consumption and waste per capita, we are simultaneously increasing that very capita, and so it is difficult to tell if technological progress has been (or will eventually be) fast enough to produce a true increase in overall sustainability per capita. It would be fallacious and unjustified to simply assume that to be the case – that technology will always be able to fix every problem. If anything, to error on the side of caution, we should assume that this isn’t the case until we have enough data and knowledge to prove otherwise.

Population Reduction is the Name of the Game

An obvious solution to this problem is to decrease the population growth rate such that our technological capabilities are more than sufficient enough to deliver a sustainable future for us. This goal may even require a negative growth rate, and at some point we’re going to have to start talking about what kinds of societal changes are necessary in order to achieve that goal. We may need some new incentives and/or some other kind of population control measures and policies, however, I’m hopeful that solving this problem is pragmatically achievable if we can manage to seriously educate the populace about how their reproductive choices affect the lives of everyone else in the world and how it is likely to impact future generations (though I don’t think this will be an easy task by any means). If people knew that certain reproductive choices would likely lead to either themselves, their children, or their children’s children, living in a future society filled with unprecedented amounts of poverty and war, environmental and economic collapse, and numerous other sources of suffering – any rational person would heed that knowledge and try their best to combat that possible future.

So a large part of the solution is simply educating everybody about the facts and probabilities of these undesirable outcomes. There are already many individuals and groups of people working on these types of endeavors, trying to push for renewable energy, pro-environmental advocacy and other sustainable living practices and policies, spreading education about family planning and trying to increase the access to and adoption of birth control methods, etc. Unfortunately, these practices haven’t yet been adopted by anywhere near a national nor global majority – far from it. However, if the movement becomes more globalized and builds up to a critical mass and momentum, eventually we’re likely to see the average person’s physical and psychological well being improve, which will further reinforce the incentives to improve and perpetuate the movement, because people will start to realize the tangible benefits they are gaining as a result.

Systematic & Ideological Barriers to Sustainability & Happiness

Unfortunately there are some serious systematic and ideological barriers that are preventing the sustainability movement from gaining traction and they’re ultimately inhibiting what would otherwise be fairly reasonable rates of progress. I think that the primary systematic barrier against achieving sustainability has been corporate-capitalism and the free-market economic models currently in place. While it may be true that there are certain forms of capitalism along with certain regulated market models that could work in principle if not also in practice, unfortunately these aren’t the brands of capitalism and market models that are currently employed by most industrialized nations (though some nations have more sustainable models than others).

What we currently have now are globalized economic systems and models that are fundamentally based on maximizing profit and consolidating privately owned production means at the expense of not only exploiting and depleting our natural resources and environment but also by exploiting unethical sources of human labor. Furthermore, these models have in turn led to unprecedented levels of socioeconomic inequality and environmental degradation. Then again, what else should we expect to happen when we employ corporate-capitalist free-market models which inherently lack adequate and universal economic, labor and environmental regulations? Despite the fact that the wealthy corporate elite, and the many politicians and citizens that have bought into their propaganda, have actually been touting this model as “the best in the world” or “the best model possible”, we can see that this isn’t true at all both by the fallacious fundamental principles that the models are based on and the actual results they’ve been delivering thus far. If we’re going to have a sustainable future, let alone one that provides us more satisfaction and happiness throughout our lives, we’re going to have to jump off of this sinking ship, and adopt an entirely new societal model.

We also need to consider the ideological barriers that have been hindering the sustainability movement as well as the humanism movement in general. For example, there are many prominent religions such as Christianity and Islam (which are highly influential as they make up over half the population of the world) that believe that one of the primary goals for human beings (according to their “divinely inspired” scripture) is to “be fruitful and multiply” while also claiming a general dominion over all the plants and animals of the earth. While the latter “dominion” over the earth has been interpreted by some as “responsible stewardship” (which is compatible with sustainability), it has often been interpreted as “ownership” over the environment and as justification to exploit it strictly for the benefit of human beings (not realizing our intimate dependence on all other ecosystems). Worse yet, the former “be fruitful and multiply” adage can only be reasonably interpreted one way, and unfortunately this “advice” is the antithesis of a sustainable model for society (though it has been an incredibly effective meme for the expansion of these religions and their cultural influence and power). Indeed, it is the exact opposite of what we should be doing at this point in human history, and perhaps the greatest irony here is that the current overpopulation problem was largely a result of this adage, and the subsequent viral spread of these Abrahamic religions over the past fifteen hundred years especially.

Two other religious beliefs worth mentioning here, which have also been highly popularized by the Abrahamic religions (notably Christianity), are the beliefs that “the end is near” and that “no matter what happens, everything is in God’s hands”, as these beliefs and the overall mentality they reinforce do nothing to support the long-term responsible planning that is fundamental to a sustainable societal model. The latter belief plays on an unfortunate human cognitive bias known as risk compensation, where we tend to behave less responsibly when we feel that we are adequately protected from any harm. In the case of a fanatical belief in divine protection, their level of risk compensation is biased to the theoretical maximum, thus making them the most likely to behave the most irresponsibly. The former belief (“the end is near”) unavoidably shifts the believer’s priorities to the short term (and in proportion to the strength of the belief), and with the specific intention of preparing for this “end that is to come”, rather than basing their beliefs on reality and evidence and responsibly preparing for a brighter future for all of humanity and the rest of the planet that we depend on.

Certainly, these religious beliefs aren’t the only ideological barriers to sustainability, as there are a number of other irrational political ideologies that are largely though not exclusively based on the rejection of scientific evidence and consensus, and have served to heavily reinforce the fossil-fuel and other natural resource driven corporate-capitalist model. This unsustainable model has been reinforced by denying facts about climate change and many other facts pertaining to human impacts on the environment in general. In some cases, I find it difficult to tell if the people that make these absurd claims actually believe them to be true (e.g. that 99+% of scientists are somehow conspiring or lying to everybody else in the world), or if they are just implicitly pleading ignorance and rationalizing so that they can maintain their profit-driven models for outright insatiable greed. I find it most plausible that politicians are collaborating with certain corporations to deny scientific facts because they want to continue to make billions off of this resource exploitation (at least for as long as they can get away with it), and are doing so in large part by brainwashing the constituent base that elected them into office with mounds of corporate-funded misinformation, fear mongering, and empty political rhetoric.

It should also come as no surprise that the people that believe and/or perpetuate these political ideological barriers to sustainability are most often the very same people that believe and/or perpetuate the aforementioned religious ideological barriers, and it seems quite evident that politicians have taken advantage of this fact. Many of them surely know quite well that if they can persuade religious voters to vote for them by convincing those voters that they share a common ground on some moral issue, then those voters become distracted from critically thinking about the primary political agendas that those politicians are really pushing for behind the curtain. The very agendas that are in fact hindering a sustainable future from ever coming into fruition.

We’ve all seen it – certain politicians claiming that they oppose stem cell research or abortion, or that advocate for abolishing the separation between church and state (though generally not admittedly), and use this tactic to suck in these (often) single issue religious voters, while ironically promoting a number of policies that often violate the morals of those very same voters (unbeknownst to the voters). They enact policies that perpetuate war, capital punishment, poverty, and the military-industrial complex. They enact policies that worsen socioeconomic inequality and the accumulation of wealth and power in the hands of a few at the expense of the many. They enact policies that are destroying the finite supply of natural capital we have left on this planet. They enact policies that ultimately hinder democracy, equality, and universal human rights.

So in the end, most religious voters (and some non-religious voters that are similarly misled), while admirably trying to do what they believe is the most moral thing to do, end up vastly increasing the amount of immoral behavior and suffering in the world, due in large part to the politicians that manipulated them into doing so. Which is why it is crucial that people make their decisions based on reason and evidence and also critically think about the consequences of their decisions and actions as they are sometimes more complicated than we are often led to believe. We need to think more critically of all the policies and legislation that we are choosing based on who we vote for, and we also need to be wary of policies that may initially seem to align with our morals and desires, and yet will actually result in more suffering or other unforeseen problems in the long run.

In the next part of this post, I will elaborate more on the broader human goals we all seem to share, and how a science of morality can help us use those broader goals to alleviate these societal problems and simultaneously help us to achieve a future where we are all collectively happier than we ever thought we could be, with far more fulfilling lives.  Here’s the link to part two.

The Book of Acts as Historical Fiction

Previously, I wrote a series of posts that mentioned several elements from Richard Carrier’s historical/literary analysis of the Gospels in the New Testament (showing that they are not historically reliable, but are rather allegorical fictions), as discussed in his book On the Historicity of Jesus.  I decided to write a complementary post which mentions various elements from Carrier’s analysis of the Acts of the Apostles, since it is believed to have been written by the same author as The Gospel According to Luke.  Let’s begin.

Although it is implied in the preface of the book of Acts that it is supposed to be some kind of historical account, this couldn’t be further from the truth.  In fact, Acts has been thoroughly discredited as nothing more than a work of apologetic historical fiction, and the scholarship of Richard Pervo conclusively demonstrates this to be the case.  Regarding any historical sources that Luke may have used for Acts, the only one that has been confirmed with any probability was that of Josephus (a person who never wrote about Jesus Christ nor Christianity, yet was likely used by Luke for background material), and although there may have been more historical sources than Josephus, we simply don’t have any evidence preserved from those other possible historians to make a case one way or the other.  All of the other sources that we can discern within Acts are literary sources, not historical ones.  Included in these literary sources is what may possibly have been a (now-lost) hagiographical fabrication, and basically a rewrite of the Elijah-Elisha narrative in some of the Old Testament (OT) texts of Kings, although placing Paul and Jesus in the main roles instead, which obviously would have been a literary source of historical fiction (not any kind of historical account).

The scholar Thomas Brodie has argued that this evident reworking of the Kings narrative starts in Luke’s Gospel and continues on until Acts chapter 15, thus indicating that Luke either integrated this literary creation into his story or he used an underlying source text, such as some previous Gospel that not only covered the acts of Jesus but also the acts of the apostles.  So it appears that Luke either used this source text or his own literary idea and then inserted more stories into it, effectively expanding the whole story into two books, while also utilizing some material from Mark and Matthew during the process (and potentially other now-lost Gospels) and some material from the epistles of Paul.  In any case, the unnamed source text mentioned thus far is a hypothetical one that can only be inferred to have existed from the evidence of what’s written in Acts.  Luckily, the remaining literary sources that scholars can discern Luke used are indeed sources we actually have and thus can directly compare to and analyze.

As an example, the scholar Dennis MacDonald has shown that Luke also reworked fictional tales written by Homer, replacing the characters and some of the outcomes as needed to suit his literary purposes.  MacDonald informs us in his The Shipwrecks of Odysseus and Paul (New Testament Studies, 45, pp. 88-107) that:

“The shipwrecks of Odysseus and Paul share nautical images and vocabulary, the appearance of a goddess or angel assuring safety, the riding of planks, the arrival of the hero on an island among hospitable strangers, the mistaking of the hero as a god, and the sending of him on his way [in a new ship].“

Paul actually tells us himself that he was shipwrecked three times, and that at least one time he spent a day and night adrift (2 Cor. 11.25).  It’s possible that Luke was inspired by this detail given by Paul and used it to invent a story that expanded on it, while borrowing other ideas and details from famous shipwreck narratives including those found in Jonah, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid.  In fact, Acts rewrites Homer a number of other times.  Paul’s resurrection of the fallen Eutychus was based on the fallen Elpenor.  The visions of Cornelius and Peter were constructed from a similar narrative that was written about Agamemnon.  Paul’s farewell at Miletus was made from Hector’s farewell to Andromache.  The lottery of Matthias we hear about was built off of the lottery of Ajax.  Even Peter’s escape from prison was lifted from Priam’s escape from Achilles.  There are other literary sources besides Homer that the author of Acts used as well.  For example, the prison breaks in Acts share several themes with the famously miraculous prison breaks found in the Bacchae of Euripedes such as the miraculous unlocking of chains and being able to escape due to an earthquake (compare Acts 12.6-7 and 16.26 to Bacchae pp. 440-49, 585-94).

However, the source that Acts seems to employ more than any other is the Septuagint.  While MacDonald has shown that the overall structure of the Peter and Cornelius story is based on writings from Homer, the scholar Randel Helms has shown that other elements were in fact borrowed from the book of Ezekiel in the OT, thus merging both story models into a single one.  For example, both Peter and Ezekiel see the heavens open up (Acts 10.11; Ezek. 1.1), both of them are commanded to eat something in their vision (Acts 10.13; Ezek. 2.9), both respond to God twice by saying “By no means, Lord!” using the exact same Greek phrase (Acts 10.14, 11.8; Ezek. 4.14, 20.49), both are asked to eat unclean food, and finally both protest saying that they have never eaten anything unclean before (Acts 10.14; Ezek. 4.14).  Clearly, the author of Acts isn’t recording anything from historical memory, but rather is assembling a fictional story using literary structures and motifs that don’t have much if anything to do with what happened to Peter or Paul.  The author appears to be inventing this “history” in order to convince his readers of how the previously-required Torah-observance was abandoned in early Christianity, and to convince his readers that this abandonment of Torah-observance was even approved by Peter all along, and confirmed to be approved of through divine revelation.  Yet, we know this to be a lie because Paul even tells us himself (in Gal. 2) that he was for a long time the only advocate for a Torah-free version of Christianity, and it was merely tolerated by Torah observers like Peter (and often contentiously so).  Similarly, in Acts 15.7-11, we can see that it is basically just Paul’s speech from Gal. 2.14-21 put into Peter’s mouth, which is the exact opposite of what Paul told us actually happened.

In fact, all the other stories in Acts are just like this, where they are a fictional product created from prior literary sources that had no relevance to any actual Christian history, just so Luke could make a point that he thought was important.  There may have been some actual authentic sources behind some of the events we read about throughout Acts, but there is simply no evidence for them, nor any way to discern what those historical elements could even be since if any exist, they are embedded in what looks to be a literary invention as opposed to any kind of real history.  It seems that Luke was writing this to sell some particular idea of how the church began and later evolved in its early years.  Just as Luke had done in his Gospel, Acts tries to portray the Torah-observant and Gentile sects of Christianity as having been continuous and harmonized, it tries to stress the close relationship between Paul and the other apostles, and also the unity of the first believers.  In doing so, the author of Acts had to undermine the Epistles of Paul, most especially Galatians.

One example that shows us the historical revisionism seen throughout Acts is the fact that Paul tells us himself that he “was unknown by face to the churches of Judea ” until a number of years after his conversion (Gal. 1.22-23), he tells us that after his conversion he went away to Arabia before eventually returning to Damascus, and he tells us that he didn’t go to Jerusalem for at least three years (Gal. 1.15-18).  Yet, in Acts 7-9, the author tells us that Paul was known to and interacting with the Jerusalem church non-stop from the beginning (even before his conversion), and rather than going to Arabia immediately after his conversion, in Acts we are told that he went immediately to Damascus and then back to Jerusalem but a few weeks later, never ever spending so much as a minute in Arabia.  So Acts is filled with confirmed instances of historical revisionism, rather than any actual historical accounts.

Another more obvious example of Luke’s inventiveness in Acts is when he expands Jesus’ post-resurrection time on earth to an entire span of forty days, with Jesus hanging out (in secret) with his disciples and dozens upon dozens of other believers.  During this time, he has Jesus teaching them even more than he did while he was alive, before having Jesus fly up to outer space to reside with angels (Acts 1.3-12).  This is a clear-cut example of myth in the making.

The scholar Burton Mack has given other examples of how Luke’s version of the history of early Christianity in Acts is entirely unrealistic.  He tells us:

“Luke says that the standard sermon was preached to the Jews on the day of the Pentecost and often thereafter, whereupon hundreds converted and the whole world became the church’s parish overnight…[but this is] a story that does not make sense as history by any standard.“

Not only is this nonsensical in terms of the ridiculously hyperbolized growth rate, but also in the most general sense of how people would have really behaved.  As Mack says:

“No Jew worth his salt would have converted when being told that he was guilty of killing the messiah.  No Greek would have been persuaded by the dismal logic of the argumentation of the sermons.  The scene would not have made sense as history to anyone during the first century with first-hand knowledge of Christians, Jews, and the date of the temple in Jerusalem.  So what do we have on our hands?  An imaginary reconstruction in the interest of aggrandizing an amalgam view of Christianity early in the second century.  Luke did this by painting over the messy history of conflictual movements throughout the first century and in his own time.  He cleverly depicted Peter and Paul as preachers of an identical gospel…That is mythmaking in the genre of epic.  There is not the slightest reason to take it seriously as history.“

To summarize Mack’s conclusion, the narrative we see in Acts is so incredible and unrealistic, it couldn’t possibly have been based on historical events.  Rather, it is what Luke wanted to have happened and/or what he wants his readers to believe happened.  This sentiment applies throughout the entire book of Acts.  In terms of background information, this conclusion comes as no surprise since all other “Acts” literature written by Christians was entirely fabricated as well, for example the Acts of Peter, the Acts of Paul, the Acts of Andrew, the Acts of John, and the Acts of Thomas, and all of these Christian fabrications look quite similar to the Acts that we find in the NT.  There simply isn’t any reason to trust the Acts found in the NT anymore than these other Christian fabrications, especially after having demonstrated that it is riddled with hyperbole and historical fiction.

Adding to this is the large number of literary coincidences (just as we saw in the earlier post-series concerning the four Gospels in the NT), which aren’t at all believable as history.  As the scholar Robert Price observed:

“Peter and Paul are paralleled, each raising someone from the dead (Acts 9.36-40, 20.9-12), each healing a paralytic (3.1-8, 14.8-10), each healing by extraordinary, magical means (5.15, 19.11-12), each besting a sorcerer (8.18-23, 13.6-11), each miraculously escaping prison (12.6-10, 16.25-26).“

Likewise, just as Peter was sent by God to save Cornelius after he sends for Peter following a vision (Acts 10), Paul is also sent by God to save the Macedonians “when a certain Macedonian man ” sends for him in a vision (Acts 6.9-10).  Luke also made Paul’s story parallel that of Christ’s, where, as Price tells us “both undertake peripatetic preaching journeys, culminating in a last long journey to Jerusalem, where each is arrested in connection with a disturbance in the temple “, and then “each is acquitted by a Herodian monarch, as well as acquitted by Roman procurators “.  Furthermore, both are interrogated by “the chief prests and the whole Sanhedrin” (Acts 22.30; Luke 22.66; cross-referencing Mark 14.55, 15.1), and finally both know that their death is pre-ordained and they both make predictions about what will happen afterward, not long before they die (Luke 21.5-28; Acts 20.22-38; cross-referencing 21.4).

Notably however, Paul does almost everything at a larger scale than Jesus.  Paul’s journeys traverse a much larger region of the world, almost the entire northeastern Mediterranean in fact.  Paul also travels on and around a significantly larger sea than Jesus did (Mediterranean vs. Sea of Galilee).  Even during the one particular journey by sea where Paul faces death from a perilous storm, and is saved by faith, on Paul’s occasion his ship is actually destroyed thus dramatically exceeding the level of peril that Jesus had faced during the storm he encountered.  We also hear that Paul’s trial spanned several years rather than merely a single night as was the case for Jesus.  Unlike Jesus, we hear that there were actual armies plotting to assassinate Paul, and also unlike Jesus, we hear that Paul had actual armies come to rescue him (Acts 23.20-24).  Whereas Jesus was said to stir up violence against himself by his reading scripture in a synagogue (Luke 4.16-30), Paul actually stirs up violence against himself by his reading scripture in two synagogues (Acts 13.14-52, 17.1-5).  Though Paul and Jesus both die and are resurrected from the dead, Paul alone marches right back in the city unharmed and continues to preach the gospel in public throughout the region (as if entirely unimpeded), winning many more disciples for Jesus as a result (Acts 14.19-21), whereas Jesus didn’t win any new disciples after his resurrection and didn’t even attempt to do so.  Even at the end, unlike Jesus, Paul is eventually sent to meet none other than the emperor of Rome himself — another example of something that Jesus was never said to have accomplished.  So despite all the coincidental parallels between Paul and Jesus, by Luke’s account in Acts, Paul has been colored as someone who was not only far more famous and more successful than Jesus was, but also one who faced more dangers and at larger scales.

All of these parallels found between Peter and Paul, and between Paul and Jesus, are simply wholly improbable as history.  Another parallel (or set of parallels) worthy of mention concerns the account of Paul’s conversion (Acts 9.1-20), which looks like nothing more than a rewrite of the Emmaus narrative found in Luke’s Gospel (Luke 24.13-35), which is another demonstrably fictional story.  Both stories involve a journey on a road from Jerusalem to another city (Emmaus: Luke 24.13; Damascus: Acts 9.1-3).  Both stories feature a revelation of Jesus Christ; in Luke the revelation came as “they drew near (eggizein) ” the city where “they were going (poreuein) ” (Luke 24.28), whereas in Acts the revelation came as Paul “drew near (eggizein) ” the city where “he was going (poreuein) ” (Acts 9.3).  In both stories we read that Jesus appears and rebukes the unbeliever and then gives them instruction, and accordingly they become believers and then continue on their way to preach what they’ve now come to believe.  Both stories involve at least three men on the road together and yet only one of those men is actually named (Paul [as Saul] in Acts, and Cleopas in Luke 24.18).  In both stories “the chief priests” of Jerusalem are portrayed as the enemies of the church (Luke 24.20; Acts 9.1, 14).  In Luke’s Gospel we hear that God said Jesus had to suffer whereas in Acts we hear that God said that Paul had to suffer (Luke 24.26; Acts 9.16).  Both stories feature some form of blindness, where Paul is blinded by the divine light of his vision in (Acts 9.8), and Cleopas and his friend are unable to see that their fellow traveler is Jesus (Luke 24.16).  Both stories also end with this blindness reversed (Acts 9.17-18; Luke 24.31).  In Luke’s Emmaus narrative, the visitation occurs on the third day (Luke 24.21), and in Acts the visitation is followed by a blindness that lasts for three days (Acts 9.9).  Finally, in Luke, the blindness is cured after a meal begins (Luke 24.30-31), where in Acts, a meal begins after the blindness is lifted (Acts 9.18-19).

As we can see, in order for Acts to be any kind of history, one would have to assume that all of these parallels are merely historical coincidences which is orders of magnitude less probable than that they are simply inventions that were intentionally created to reflect one another.  It’s certainly possible for a couple of these coincidences to be historical, but it is nigh impossible for all of them to be historical.  Either way, there isn’t any way to weed out any of the possible historical details from within this plethora of fictional constructions.  Overall, Acts just shares far too many features with popular adventure novels that were written during the same period, in order to lend it any trust as history.  Here’s an overview of those features:

1) They all promote a particular god or religion.
2) They are all travel narratives.
3) They all involve miraculous or amazing events.
4) They all include encounters with fabulous or exotic people.
5) They often incorporate a theme of chaste couples that are separated and then reunited.
6) They all feature exciting narratives of captivities and escapes.
7) They often include themes of persecution.
8) They often include episodes involving excited crowds.
9) They often involve divine rescues from danger.
10) They often have divine revelations which are integral to the plot

Since Acts shares all of these features and thus looks exactly like an ancient novel of the period, there is simply no good reason to assume that all of the parallels it has with other literary sources are merely historical coincidences.  Rather, we should conclude that they are in fact what they have been shown to be: literary constructs and other elements of fiction.

Luke, Acts & The Historicity of Jesus

Clearly Luke constructed tales that were meant to affirm the historicity of Jesus, that Jesus was resurrected from the dead (resulting in a conspicuously empty tomb), that he was touched by his disciples, that he slept and dined with them during a forty-day “retreat” that was held in secret behind closed doors, and that he then flew off into outer space while they all watched (Luke 24 and Acts 1).  It goes without saying that all of this is ridiculous and obviously not historical.  There aren’t any witnesses to these events other than fanatical followers, and so not a single disinterested person ever verified any of it.  It isn’t until Acts 2 that we first hear about the public history of the Christian mission where Christians start publicly announcing their gospel.

However, something rather strange occurs at this point.  Throughout Acts‘ supposed history of the movement, from the time it goes public in the city of Jerusalem, at no point in the story (not in any of the 28 chapters) do we hear about either the Romans or the Jews ever showing any knowledge of there being a missing body.  Likewise, we never hear about them taking any action to investigate what could only be to them a crime of tomb robbery and desecration of the dead, which were both quite severe offenses punishable by death.  Matthew’s Gospel even claims that the Jewish authorities accused the Christians of such crimes before Pilate himself (Matt. 27.62-66; 28.4, 11-15), and although this too is certainly fiction, it does illustrate what could not have failed to happen, if a body actually went missing.

Due to the fact that Christians were trying to use the missing body as evidence for a risen Jesus, they certainly would have been the first suspects of such a tomb robbery, if it had indeed occurred.  At best, they would have been secondary suspects, if indeed Joseph of Arimathea was the last person known to have custody of the body (Mark 15.43-46; Matt. 27.57-60; Luke 23.51-56; John 19.38-42).  So he would have been the first person hauled in for questioning, and yet, conspicuously he is nowhere mentioned in this history of the church, as if nobody knew anything about him (or as if he didn’t exist).  If he hadn’t been hauled in for questioning (whether he existed or not), the Christians would have been next in line to be hauled in for questioning for such an offense.  Yet, we never hear a single event in Acts where Christians were accused by Romans or Jews of grave robbery, which implies that there wasn’t any missing body to investigate, and thus no empty tomb known to the Roman or Jewish authorities.  This means that Christians couldn’t have been pointing to an empty tomb as evidence, for they would have been questioned about it, and possibly convicted whether they were involved or not with the disappearance of the body.  Acts is conspicuously silent on this matter and suggests that there were never any disputes whatsoever regarding the body, there weren’t even any false accusations of theft mentioned, nor were there any questions about it at all.

More importantly, the Romans would have had a larger problem to deal with here other than simply grave robbery, for the Christians were said to have been preaching that Jesus had escaped his execution (whether described as a supernatural event or not), that he was seen congregating with his followers, and that he disappeared.  It is doubtful that Pilate or the Sanhedrin would have believed any claims that Jesus had risen from the dead (nor is there any evidence that they did believe this), but if the tomb was empty and Jesus’ followers had been reporting that he had continued to preach to them and thus was still a fugitive, Pilate would have been inclined if not obligated to haul in every Christian for questioning and undergo a massive manhunt for such a threatening escaped convict.  Furthermore, the Sanhedrin would have also been obligated to find and kill Jesus as per their initial plan.  However, we don’t hear any of this happening in Acts.  Nobody asked where Jesus was hiding at, nor who helped him to escape.  This is more than enough to prove that Acts‘ account of the events here is fiction, let alone completely unrealistic.  There was no missing body, no empty tomb, and thus no criminal that was on the run from the law, for if the Roman or Jewish authorities had heard any of this being publicly preached as claimed in Acts, we would no doubt have heard about the expected repercussions, including the likely persecution of Christians by the Roman and Jewish authorities that would have been interrogating them.

If we are to grant that the original Christians believed any of the events in Acts as historical, then the absence of all of these pertinent details and expected events (regarding the missing body), at best, supports the theory that the original Christians were actually preaching that Jesus rose in an entirely new body (a spiritual resurrection) as opposed to the old one that he discarded and left in the grave.  In line with this theory is what Paul wrote, that the body that dies “is not the body that is to come “, but instead this buried body is left to be destroyed, while an even better “replacement ” body is already stored up in heaven waiting for each of us (1 Cor. 15.35-50; 2 Cor. 5.1-4).  At worst, and more likely than any other theory that has been proposed, is that Acts is entirely a fabrication, and there was in fact no historical Jesus, and the earliest Christians instead believed in a celestial Jesus (where he was effectively an archangel) whom communicated to them exclusively through revelation and through hidden messages in scripture, which is a theory that is supported by the material found in Paul’s epistles (the earliest and most reliable Christian sources we have in the NT).

In closing, we can see that Acts, just like the Gospels in the NT, is not at all reliable in terms of having any historical merit.  There are numerous parallels found throughout suggesting that there were many literary sources used for its contents, and Luke was inventing the material contained within, while adding some historical peripheral details (demonstrably obtained from Josephus) to add local color to the stories he was writing as most authors of fiction are known to do.  Other than those less relevant peripheral details, the actual events described within it are entirely unrealistic, not corroborated by any independent evidence, and are exactly what we’d expect to find in an ancient novel of the period in question.  Again, for those interested in this topic, I highly recommend reading Carrier’s On the Historicity of Jesus, as I have only mentioned a fraction of that which is contained in his overall analysis, and it is very important that one reads all of the background knowledge and evidence to fully understand just how weak the case for historicity really is.  You will not be disappointed.

The Gospels as Allegorical Myth, Part 4 of 4: John

The final post in this series will mention a few elements from Richard Carrier’s analysis of the Gospels as found in his book On the Historicity of Jesus, specifically pertaining to The Gospel according to John.  As with the previous three Gospels, John also appears to have written a religious novel filled with allegorical myth and fiction, and doesn’t appear to be interested in reporting any factual historical accounts.  Likewise, just as was the case with Luke and Matthew, John quite evidently had knowledge of the previous Gospels and used them as sources.  Though some scholars have maintained that John was writing independent of the other Gospels, there is simply no evidence to support that independence.  Rather, there is abundant evidence that John did in fact know about those Gospels and used them as (at least some of the) sources for his own, with the main difference being that John simply redacted them much more freely than Luke or Matthew did with their sources.

One example of John’s apparent knowledge of Mark’s Gospel, for instance, is the fact that John copies Mark’s pairing of the “Feeding of the Five Thousand” miracle with the miracle of Jesus walking on the water, in exactly the same sequence (So John 6 was likely derived from Mark 6.31-52).  However, as we saw in the analysis regarding Mark’s Gospel, Mark’s specific choice of pairing and sequencing of various miracles were intentionally placed as they were for the purpose of producing a particular literary structure.  Additionally, the paired events themselves are obviously ridiculous and historically implausible, so the most likely reason John shared the pairing that Mark employed is that he in fact borrowed it all from Mark.  Adding to this likelihood is the sheer number of details that they both have in common, including the details that “five thousand” people were fed, exactly “twelve baskets” of crumbs remained, that Jesus performed this miracle starting with exactly “five loaves and two fishes”, and that the amount of food needed to feed the crowd would have cost “two hundred denarii”.

In John’s Gospel, we also find the same literary structure for the narrative regarding Peter’s denial of Christ that Mark originally wrote in his Gospel (compare John 18.15-27 with Mark 14.53-72).  John also mentions the story of Jesus curing a blind man with spit that we first heard about in Mark, although in John, we can see that he freely changed some of the details.  Whereas in Mark, Jesus only uses spit for the magic spell, in John, Jesus uses spit mixed with dirt to make mud which he applies to the blind man’s face.  John also changes the additional magic that Jesus had to use in order to get the spell to work.  In John, after Jesus applied spit, he told the blind man to go “wash in the Pool of Siloam” to get the spell to work, whereas in Mark, the blind man was “half cured” from the spit (as we infer when he tells Jesus that although he could see now, the people he saw looked “like trees walking around”), then Jesus simply touched his face once more and then the spell worked successfully (compare John 9.6-7 with Mark 8.23-25).

John also has numerous similarities with material in Luke and Matthew as well (especially Luke).  Only in John and Luke’s Gospels do we hear about the new character, Martha, the sister of Mary (Luke 10.38-42; John 11.1-12.2).  Only in them do we hear about the miraculous scene where Jesus produces an extremely large catch of fish (Luke 5.1-11; John 21.1-4).  Only in them do we hear the claim that there was in fact a second Judas among the twelve disciples (Luke 6.16; John 14.22).  We also only hear in these two Gospels that Judas Iscariot was possessed by Satan (Luke 22.3; John 13.16-27).  In them alone, we hear specifically that the disciples chopped off the right ear of the high priest’s slave (Luke 22.50; John 18.10).  Both alone mention that Pilate declared Jesus innocent thrice (Luke 23.4, 16, 23; John 18.38, 19.4, 6).  Both alone claim that Jesus had been buried “where no man had yet been laid” (Luke 23.53; John 19.41).  Only in these two Gospels do we hear that there were two angels seen outside of Jesus’ empty tomb (Luke 24.4; John 20.12).  Both alone say that the resurrected Jesus visited the disciples in Jerusalem (not Galilee as in Matthew and Mark) and inside a room (rather than outdoors as in the other Gospels) as well as having Jesus show his wounds and even share a meal with them (Luke 24.33-43; John 20.18-29, 21.12-13).  To be sure, John modifies and adds to many of the contents he’s borrowing from Luke, but either way, the number of similarities and coincidences between the two is far too great to conclude that John isn’t using Luke as a source (even if he is doing so rather creatively).

After we concede to the fact that John is using the other Gospels as sources, we can take notice of the fact that John intended on rebutting a particular theme that those previous Gospels all had in common, that “no sign shall be given” that Jesus is the Messiah (e.g. Mark 8.11-12), which was in line with what Paul said when he mentioned that no signs were given to the Jews that Jesus was the Christ (1 Cor. 1.22-24).  So in Mark for example, even though he invents miracles to put in his stories as allegories, he is careful to make sure that only the disciples (no independent witnesses) are the ones that ever notice, mention, or understand those miracles.  The only thing remotely close to an exception to this in Mark is at the end of his Gospel, when the three women saw that the tomb was empty and heard from a man sitting inside that Jesus had risen (which wasn’t really a miracle that they witnessed, but they were surprised nevertheless), and yet even with this ending we are told that the women simply ran away in fear and never told anyone what they had seen (Mark 16.8).

Matthew had already added to this material in Mark, “correcting” it by instead having Jesus say that “an evil and adulterous generation seeks a sign” and therefore “there shall no sign be given except the sign of Jonah“, meaning the resurrection of Jesus on the third day (Matt. 12.39, 16.4).  Thus we can see that Matthew took what Mark wrote and went one step further, by allowing that one sign, and narrating the story so that the Jews “know” about it (hence his reason for writing Matt. 28.11-15).  So Matthew invented new evidence that we never saw in Mark.  Luke merely reinforced what Matthew had written (Luke 11.29), yet added to it with his invention of the parable of Lazarus (Luke 16.19-31) as well as the public announcement that was made to the Jews (Acts 2), thus illustrating the previous Gospels’ “no sign shall be given” theme.

John rebuts this entire theme by packing his Gospel full of “signs” and by taking Luke’s parable of Lazarus and turning it into an actual tale of Lazarus (John 11-12).  We even read in John 2.11 that “Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him“, thus implying that it was because of these signs that his disciples believed in him (something we don’t hear about in any other Gospel).  We read just a few verses later in John 2.17-18 that when Jesus was asked for a sign, he simply says that his resurrection will be a sign.  Notably however, John doesn’t say here that this will be the only sign.  Quite the contrary, for in John 2.23 we hear that “When he was in Jerusalem during the Passover festival, many believed in his name because they saw the signs that he was doing“, and later we read that “a great multitude followed him because they beheld the signs he did ” (John 6.2), followed by John telling us that when people “see the sign he did“, they declared that Jesus was a true prophet (John 6.14).  In John 3.2, we read that a Pharisee named Nicodemus said to Jesus “no one can do these signs that you do, unless God be with him“, and even in John 4.48-54 we read that Jesus said “You will in no way believe unless you see signs and wonders” and then he provides them with a miracle to see.  We are even explicitly told that these signs were indeed the evidence that showed that Jesus is the Christ (John 7.31, 9.16, 10.41-42), and there are several other references to the signs that Jesus gave, including John telling us that there were even more than those mentioned in his Gospel (John 20.30).  So John clearly attempted to rebut this theme present in the other Gospels, and made it blatantly obvious that he was doing so.

Adding to this rebuttal seen throughout John’s Gospel is his resurrection narrative that was the most ridiculous of all — the “Doubting Thomas” narrative (John 20.24-29), where the resurrected Jesus asks Thomas to stick his finger and hands in his open wounds so that he would believe.  So we have multiple examples of the author of John (or authors, as scholars actually believe there were multiple authors that contributed to the extant manuscripts of the Gospel we now have) creating proof, and insisting that all this new evidence justifies belief that Jesus is the Christ.  This is also why John alone invented an eyewitness “source” for his Gospel (never heard of before in the others), whom he referred to as the “Beloved Disciple” (although it is implied that this unnamed person was Lazarus), and said that he got all of his information from him.  In any case, the incredibly propagandistic style and contents in his Gospel make it thoroughly untrustworthy (more than any of the other Gospels in fact) in terms of historical accuracy.

Beyond this obvious propaganda, John is also filled with several long, implausible speeches (that we’ve never heard of before his Gospel) of Jesus, and yet conspicuously absent from these speeches are the Sermon on the Mount, as well as any appreciable amount of moral instruction.  We also see many new characters (such as Lazarus and Nicodemus) and new events that the other Gospel writers seemed entirely unaware of.  John also scrambles the order of many events, for example, moving the episode of Jesus clearing the temple from the end of his ministry to the beginning of it.  John also expands Jesus’ ministry from one to three years, having Jesus go on multiple trips to Judea and Jerusalem rather than only once.  John even moved the date (and thus also the year) of Jesus’ execution in order to make Jesus’ death correlate with the exact day that the Passover lambs were slaughtered, likely in order to make a different theological point with regard to viewing Jesus as the Passover lamb.  Thus John appears to be the worst of all the Gospels in terms of him most freely redacting what the previous Gospel authors wrote, adding and inventing whatever he wanted.  Thus, if John is trying to convince his readers that what he wrote is factual history, then by modern standards, John is clearly lying (just as Luke was).

One of the biggest problems that scholars have faced when trying to analyze John’s Gospel is the fact that we don’t have what John originally wrote.  Scholars are aware that somebody later on rearranged the Gospel, adding and removing content and ultimately scrambling the order of many scenes.  One can see quite clearly that his Gospel has been altered just by noting that it finishes with two different endings, where each ending was written completely unaware of the other (John 20.30-31 and 21.24-25), with each serving as conclusions to two different resurrection appearance narratives (with John 21.1 added as a hasty attempt to stitch the two together).  This “multiple ending” problem had actually happened in Mark’s Gospel as well, where there are at least five different known endings.  Even the famous story of the adulteress (John 7.53-8.11) with the famous line “let he who is without sin cast the first stone” wasn’t present in the original text as scholars know that this was added by a later editor.  There is plenty of evidence in fact that suggests that there are corruptions throughout the entire text.

We can see in John 5, for example, that Jesus goes to Judea (specifically Jerusalem; 5.1), and yet in John 6 Jesus is not in Judea but rather “went off to the other side of the sea of Galilee”.  This is a problem because the sea of Galilee is nowhere near Jerusalem, let alone in Judea.  Evidently, in the original text, preceding John 6.1, Jesus was in Galilee at some location on the opposite end of the sea of Galilee (and not in Jerusalem), so the order of events became jumbled due to various alterations over time.  We’re also told in John 2 (13, 23) that Jesus was in Jerusalem and then we’re told that he entered Judea (3.22), but obviously if he was in Jerusalem (a city in Judea) then he was already in Judea, so it seems that some part of the text was deleted here that would have mentioned Jesus returning to Galilee prior to him re-entering Judea a second time.  There are other examples like this which I’m not going to mention here because there are more interesting materials in John that I’d like to get to now.

As with the other Gospels, John also has several literary structures of his own.  One of the most brilliantly crafted is the sequence where Jesus is traveling from Cana to Cana (something we’ve not yet heard of until John).  This role of Cana is a literary construct that John likely invented to illustrate different degrees of faith and how to obtain those levels of faith.  The story takes place over several days and the literary sequence starts with a miracle at Cana “on the third day” (turning water into wine) and ends with another miracle at Cana on another “third day” (“resurrecting” a father’s son), which is also combined with other notable references as an obvious metaphor and allusion to Jesus’ future resurrection.  Here is what this quite elegant literary structure looks like:

Traditional Context (features a woman as a mother)

–   John 2.1-12: A wedding completed at Cana.

–        – Featuring a mother and her son.

–        – A miracle is requested and fulfilled.

–        – Complete faith in a traditional Jewish context.

–        – Story ends at Capernaum (2.12).

I.  Traditional Context (ends with a man)

–                    A. John 2.13-22: Clearing of the Temple.

–                          – A miracle is requested and not fulfilled (2.18).

–                          – Jesus’ words are thrown back at him (2.19 = 2.20).

–                          – A question is thus voiced as disbelief (2.20).

–                          – A metaphor (of resurrection) is misunderstood (2.19-22).

–                          – The temple Jews have no faith.

–                     B. John 3.1-21: Nicodemus the Pharisee.

–                           – Jesus is believed because of his miracles (3.1-2).

–                           – Jesus’ words are thrown back at him (3.3 = 3.4).

–                           – A question is thus voiced as doubt (3.4).

–                           – A metaphor (of rebirth) is misunderstood (3.3-4).

–                           – A “teacher of the Jews” (3.10) has partial faith.

–                      C. John 3.22-36: John the Baptist.

–                            – Jesus is believed because of his word (3.27-34).

–                            – Jesus’ words are explained; Jesus is the savior (3.35-36).

–                            – John has complete faith.

II. Marginal Context (begins with a woman)

–                       A. John 4.1-15: The Samaritan woman at Jacob’s Well

–                             – A miracle is requested and not fulfilled (4.15).

–                             – Jesus’ words are thrown back at him (4.10, 13-14 = 4.11-12, 15).

–                             – A question is thus voiced as disbelief (4.11-12; 4.15 is sarcasm).

–                             – A metaphor (of living water) is misunderstood.

–                             – The woman has no faith.

–                        B. John 4.16-38: The Samaritan woman reconsiders.

–                              – Jesus is believed because of his miracle (4.16-19).

–                              – Jesus’ words are thrown back at him (4.16 = 4.17).

–                              – A question is then voiced as doubt (4.29).

–                              – A metaphor (of spiritual messiah) is misunderstood (4.21-25).

–                              – The Samaritan woman has partial faith.

–                         C. John 4.39-42: The Samaritans of Sychar.

–                               – Jesus is believed because of his word (e.g. 4.41).

–                               – Jesus’ words are understood; Jesus is the savior (4.42).

–                               – The Samaritans have complete faith.

Marginal Context (features a man as a father)

–   John 4.43-53: A funeral averted at Cana.

–        – Featuring a father and his son.

–        – A miracle is requested and fulfilled.

–        – Complete faith in a marginal Jewish context.

–        – Story began at Capernaum (4.46).

John clearly invented this material to make a point, and it looks like he designed it all to fit into a particular pattern of metaphors and parables: two miracles that parallel and invert one another occurring at Cana, and nestled in between two sequences of three conversational narratives, with the first of those triads paralleling the second in terms of the developing faith in each example (no faith, partial faith, and finally complete faith).  We can also see that the first triad is in a traditional Jewish context, and then the second one repeats the same themes in a relatively marginal context, with John alternating the roles of men and women (something we also saw Mark do in his Gospel).  Note also how the two events that ensconce this overall structure both involve an announced problem of some kind (running out of wine in the first event, and an official son’s illness in the last event).  Both involve a request to fix the problem, both involve a rebuke where Jesus says something ornery to the person making the request.  Both also involve a reaction where the requester then puts complete faith in Jesus, followed by a successful solution to the problem (where what they believed Jesus could do, he successfully accomplishes).  John also repeats the same literary components in traditionally Jewish and in marginally Jewish contexts (so we have two sets of each); first a traditional Jewish context (a Jewish wedding) followed by another traditional context (temple Jews and John the Baptist), followed by a marginally Jewish context (Samaria) finally followed by another marginal context (helping a Herodian official).

So we can see that John, just like the other Gospel writers, has created literary structures (a triadic ring structure in the case above) filled with metaphor and allegorical messages (in this example regarding different levels of faith and their respective effects, as well as allusions to the crucifixion and resurrection which I’ll mention more in a moment), as opposed to John reporting any kind of historical events as he claims in his preface.  Once again, it is simply very implausible for historical events to occur in such an order and with such coincidental patterns, and this is compounded by the number of historical implausibilities that are all entirely expected elements to find within fiction.  These implausibly coincidental sequences as well as the types of events and behaviors are not something we ever expect to occur in real life.  John is in fact writing a religious novel here, and is inventing material and arranging it in very specific ways to serve his own literary and theological purposes.

Like the other Gospel writers, John also borrows texts from the Old Testament (OT) and rewrites them or adapts certain ideas in his narratives.  For example, the first miracle at Cana, which is John’s only “new” miracle not present in the other Gospels, illustrates this fact.  This story exemplifies the Word of God in the book of Exodus, where we hear that Aaron “did the signs in the sight of the people, and the people believed” (Exodus 4.30-31), which is the basic model that John employs for his entire Gospel.  In the story found in Exodus, we read that God told Moses that he would give him three signs to perform such that if they didn’t believe after the first two signs he gave, they would definitely believe after the last one was given, with the latter point seen in the following verse:

“If they will not believe even after these two signs, nor listen to you, then you shall take some water that you took from the river, and pour it on the dry ground, and the water that you took out of the river shall become blood upon the ground.” (Exodus 4.9)

As we can see, the last miracle Moses was going to perform was turning water into blood, which closely parallels John’s first miracle of having Jesus turn water into wine, thus John appears to be starting where Moses left off and transforming “the last” into “the first”.  One may recall that toward the end of John’s Gospel, at the crucifixion, we read that Jesus spews both water and blood from his body (John 19.34), and so Jesus’ ministry appears to have ended with a reminder of the miracle that it began with.  This is something that Jesus even alludes to in John 2.4 where two references to John’s crucifixion scene are mentioned (Jesus references the hour of his death, and references the fact that he would no longer be his mother’s son).  This demonstrates that John rewrote the crucifixion scene (including the spewing of water and blood from Jesus, which is unique to John’s Gospel alone) as he had these parallels in mind when he matched it with his scene at Cana.  In accord with this intentional matching is the fact that the crucifixion is an anti-type of the scene at Cana: at Cana his mother gives a command to Jesus, and at the crucifixion Jesus gives a command to his mother; at Cana we hear his mother saying to do whatever Jesus says, and at the crucifixion Jesus tells Mary what to do; whereas at Cana Jesus’ mother asks him to make wine from water, at the crucifixion Jesus gives them blood with water; at Cana we hear Jesus asking what he has to do with her, and at the crucifixion he says that he has nothing to do with her (due to a transformation of kinship); at Cana Jesus says that his hour has not yet come, and at the crucifixion his hour had indeed come.  John even repeats the same Exodus theme where he says that the miracle of the water and blood coming from Jesus happened “so that you may believe” (John 19.35), just as God had told Moses what would happen after performing his turning water into blood.  So there is strong evidence here that John is simply replicating the last miracle that Moses performed.  There is also evidence that John borrowed and adapted some of his details from a similar miraculous tale told of Elijah in 1 Kings 17.8-24.  In that story, we read another tale involving a woman and her son, although in that particular story they expected to die soon because they were starving to death (1 Kings 17.12).  The woman’s son is approaching death from illness and Elijah is called upon to heal him (1 Kings 17.24), similar to what we hear happen in John when Jesus later saves a man’s son from deadly illness (his second miracle at Cana).

Related to this is the odd fact that Jesus seems quite rude to his mother when he says “Woman, what have I to do with you?“, which upon further analysis doesn’t appear to be any kind of historical report, but is rather an anti-type of Elijah, when in the tale with Elijah, the woman in need of food says to him “What have I to do with you?” (and the exact Greek is used in both the story with Jesus and that of Elijah in the Septuagint translation of 1 Kings).  In both stories the prophet involved tells those needing food to take empty pitchers and remove from them the required provision, which then miraculously appears before them.  Thus, rather than John being concerned with any kind of factual history, this is just another example of a literary construct John invented, and that he carefully integrated into his revised account of the crucifixion and the entire Cana-to-Cana structure.  John is simply lying and passing it off as history, as the evidence illustrates more and more upon closer analysis.

One good demonstration of John’s overall inventiveness is when he creates an eyewitness, the “Beloved Disciple” (John 21.24, 19.35, 19.25-27, 20.2-8), who is inserted into the same story told by the previous Gospels, and yet this person is conspicuously absent from those previous Gospels.  Unlike in John, there aren’t any male disciples at the cross in any of the other Gospels, nor is anyone resting on Jesus’ chest at the Last Supper.  John clearly inserted this character into the stories that he borrowed and redacted from the other Gospels, and then dishonestly claimed that this person was his “source” for the contents in his Gospel.  This is further confirmed by the fact that John makes considerable effort to imply that the “Beloved Disciple” was in fact Lazarus, a character that was not among the list of twelve disciples mentioned in the previous three Gospels. In fact, Lazarus wasn’t ever mentioned in any of the other Gospels except in Luke’s Gospel when he was only mentioned as a deceased character in Jesus’ fictional parable of “Lazarus and the Rich Man”.  How do we know that John made considerable effort to imply that this never-before-heard-of witness was Lazarus?   There are many reasons, for example, the fact that only one character in his Gospel is described several times as “the one whom Jesus loved”, and that was indeed Lazarus (John 11.3, 5, 36).  Also, right after Lazarus was introduced and described as Jesus’ beloved, we hear that he is reclining with Jesus at supper the very next day (12.1-2, 9-11).  So when we later hear that “the one whom Jesus loved” is also reclining with Jesus at the Last Supper, it is quite obvious that this is supposed to be Lazarus once again.  This should also be the case for every other instance when we hear a reference to “the one whom Jesus loved“, such as at the crucifixion, at the empty tomb, and finally at the resurrection (John 19.26-27, 35, 20.2-8, 21.7, 20).

The final giveaway that the Beloved Disciple is Lazarus is the fact that we hear in John 21.21-24 that a rumor had spread around the community that the Beloved Disciple would not die, and there simply isn’t any reason for this speculative rumor to have arisen other than the fact that in John’s Gospel, Lazarus had been resurrected from the dead by Jesus. So clearly people were wondering if Lazarus would ever die a second time, hence the rumor that began to circulate.  We also hear that the Beloved Disciple was the first person to see the burial cloths that Jesus had cast off and left in his then empty tomb, and earlier in John we were told that Lazarus had been wrapped in burial cloths which he also cast off at his resurrection.  Accordingly, Lazarus is the first person to believe that Jesus had risen since he had experienced a similar resurrection himself and could relate to it firsthand (John 20.8).  However, there are even more similarities worth noting.  In both Jesus’ and Lazarus’ resurrection accounts, we hear the peculiar detail of the soudarion (a small cloth covering the face of the deceased), and in both stories this cloth is clearly distinguished from the burial wrappings.  In both, we hear references to being bound or unbound by these wrappings, as some metaphor for becoming unbound or liberated from death.  Additionally, in both accounts we are also given a colorful and detailed description of these burial wrappings, their placement, etc.  So the many parallels make it quite obvious that the “Beloved Disciple” is in fact Lazarus.

All the details that John gives us about the Beloved Disciple being Lazarus merely exposes that John is lying throughout his Gospel, because there is no corroboratory evidence that Lazarus ever existed, not even from the demonstrably untrustworthy Gospels that John himself used as sources.  Nobody else knows anything about this Lazarus character (let alone his most extravagant resurrection story, in fact the most incredible resurrection story told in any of the Gospels) and we simply don’t hear anything about him except in John’s Gospel.  Thus, a non-existent Lazarus couldn’t have witnessed anything, despite John telling us that he did.  This absence from the other Gospels implies that this is a definite fabrication.  Adding to the exposure of this lie, is the fact that John assigns a high level of importance to the whole Lazarus resurrection event.  The event is so integral to the plot that John tells us that it was because of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead, and thus gaining so many newly convinced followers, that the Jewish elite then plotted to kill Jesus (John 11.53).  Yet, we don’t hear anything about this integral reason for the plot against Jesus in any of the other Gospels.  So the fact that John made this “Lazarus resurrection” story integral to his Gospel, just further illustrates that his Gospel is a fabrication, where he is just rewriting “history” (or more accurately he is rewriting the pseudo-historical accounts given in the other Gospels) as he pleases, likely to suit his own purpose of re-emphasizing the many “signs” that were said to be proof that Jesus was the messiah.

Lastly, John appears to have invented this Lazarus tale in order to reverse and thus to rebut or refute the Parable of Lazarus as found in Luke.  The bottom line here is that whenever we find instances of imaginary people in earlier stories being turned into real people in later stories (i.e. Luke’s Lazarus versus John’s Lazarus), what we are seeing is in fact a major marker for myth-making, and one that was quite common in antiquity.  Furthermore, the fact that John turns Luke’s imaginary Lazarus into a real person isn’t the only indication that he is trying to refute Luke.  There are several other indicators of this in fact.  In Luke’s parable, we hear about a rich man that ends up burning in hell and he sees up in heaven a dead beggar named Lazarus that he once knew, and he sees this Lazarus resting on the “bosom of Abraham”, so he begs Abraham to resurrect Lazarus from the dead so that he may warn his still-living brothers in order to avoid the same torturous fate.  The parable ends with Abraham refusing to resurrect Lazarus because “if they will not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded if someone rises from the dead” (Luke 16.31), thus further repeating the point mentioned in the synoptic Gospels that Jesus would not be performing signs since they won’t persuade anyone.  One coincidence worth noting here is the mention of Luke’s Lazarus resting on the bosom of Abraham (Luke 16.22-23), thus ever more confirming that John’s “Beloved Disciple” who we hear was reclining “on Jesus’ bosom” (John 13.23) was in fact Lazarus.  More importantly, we can see that in Luke’s parable, Lazarus does not rise from the dead, whereas John completely reverses this as well in his Gospel, and not only does Lazarus rise from the dead, but his resurrection actually convinces many people to turn their favor toward Jesus and be saved, which goes completely against what Jesus said in Luke’s Gospel (as well as what the other Gospels were saying).

Not only is John’s Lazarus sited as convincing others through his being resurrected, but John also sites Lazarus as a witness to the crucifixion, the empty tomb, and to Jesus’ resurrection (and as the source for John’s entire Gospel), thus illustrating that the overall purpose of John inventing Lazarus was to convince people (despite this going against what Jesus had said wouldn’t work in Luke).  So it is clear that John’s invention of Lazarus was to be a refutation for Luke, and this only further reduces any chances that John is ever accurately reporting history in his Gospel, for he’s freely redacting the Gospels he used as sources, and not at all interested in preserving what they had to say (if he assumed they were accurate histories, which even if he thought so, we can see that they are not), nor is he receiving this from any kind of witness.  As it has been made quite clear by now, what we are seeing in John’s Gospel is allegorical myth and fiction, with these stories created to serve specific literary aims even beyond the creation of literary structures that we saw an example of early on in this post.  As such, just as with the other Gospels, John’s Gospel can’t be trusted as any kind of reliable historical sources.  Rather we are seeing numerous examples in the Gospels of employing well-known ancient literary methods of writing fiction and allegory (most especially students of literary Greek, which the Gospels were written in).

It should also be noted as I near the conclusion of this post, that the common historical methodological criteria that scholars have tried to use to sift out possible historical details of Jesus that are buried in a sea of myth have been proven to be either fallacious and/or unreliable, and this has been demonstrated by the fact that when scholars apply these same criteria to the exact same evidence under consideration, they get different results (which proves the methods are unreliable).  Since fiction often contains peripheral details that are historical and since fiction is written in all manner of genres, due to the principle of contamination we are unable to establish if there are any details in any of the Gospels that can support the historicity of Jesus.  The best method proposed thus far, and one that has been proven reliable mathematically and proven to be logically sound is the application of Baye’s Theorem.  So for those that wish to refute Carrier’s arguments or his conclusions, one must do so by refuting the prior and consequent probabilities that Carrier defends, and one must support their own proposed probabilities with evidence and logically sound argumentation.

This concludes this particular series of posts.  As mentioned in the previous post, regarding The Gospel According to Luke, I may eventually make a fifth post to complement that one, and discuss Luke’s book of Acts to illustrate how it too is quite obviously fiction, and looks very much like a typical ancient novel with all the goodies one would expect to find therein.  For those interested in the most recent scholarship regarding the historicity of Jesus Christ, I highly recommend reading Richard Carrier’s book, as it is the most comprehensive analysis regarding the historicity of Jesus I’ve ever read or heard of, and is very well documented and well researched (featuring a nice 40-page bibliography with everything well referenced regarding extensive work from numerous top scholars in the field).  I only provided readers of this post-series with a small fraction of what Carrier researched and wrote in his book, but I hope that for those interested, it was informative and fascinating!

The Gospels as Allegorical Myth, Part 3 of 4: Luke

In the first two posts in this series, we looked at various elements of Richard Carrier’s analysis of the first two Gospels found in the New Testament, specifically The Gospel According to Mark and The Gospel According to Matthew, as discussed in Carrier’s On the Historicity of Jesus.  We saw many examples that illustrated that those Gospels were demonstrably myth and fiction, as opposed to being any kind of written histories.  In this post, I’ll be mentioning some elements of Carrier’s analysis as it relates to The Gospel According to Luke.

For starters, The Gospel According to Luke is the first Gospel to superficially represent itself as history.  Unlike the other Gospel authors, Luke actually does write more like a historian, where he adds superficial historical details to form a local color, and even attempts to date some of the events contained therein.  He even includes a preface (although rather vague) explaining what his authorial intentions are.  Unfortunately, after a close examination of what he wrote, we can see that he was no better than Mark or Matthew, and in fact fabricates numerous details throughout his Gospel.  One interesting element that tips us off is the fact that Luke creates a resurrection narrative that is thoroughly designed to answer the skeptics of Matthew’s account, employing a tactic that “requires” his own story to be true.  However, since no other Gospel (nor Paul for that matter) ever mentions the odd and quite convenient details that suddenly make their first appearance in Luke, we can be fairly certain that it is indeed a fabrication.  For example, Luke mentions that Peter not only double-checked the women’s claim that the tomb was empty, but that he also handled the shroud (Luke 24.11-12); that Jesus showed the disciples his wounds and made sure that the disciples touched him and fed him to prove he wasn’t a ghost (Luke 24.36-43); or that the resurrected Jesus actually hung out and partied with many (dozens) of his followers for more than a month before eventually flying up into the clouds of heaven (Acts 1.2-9).  So we can see several examples of Luke fabricating historical events, deliberately trying to win a particular argument against doubters (which included many Christians that had very different beliefs about the details and nature of the resurrection).  That we find these types of things in what Luke wrote, should serve as a clear warning to not trust anything that he has added to the stories found in Mark’s and Matthew’s Gospels.  Rather, we should assume that, just as Mark and Matthew demonstrably fabricated their stories for a particular purpose, such is the same for Luke (unless of course, we find evidence to believe otherwise).

Further justifying this assumption of fabrication is the fact that, although Luke at least tries to sell his readers the pretense that he is reporting history, his methods are entirely non-historical.  He is not doing historical research, nor weighing various facts, nor checking their validity with respect to independent sources in order to write about what events he thinks most likely transpired.  Instead, Luke appears to be producing an expanded and redacted amalgam of Mark’s and Matthew’s Gospels, which were themselves non-historiographical products composed of carefully constructed literary structures containing various allegorical and obviously mythical contents.  Unlike what we’d expect from historians (and those living in Luke’s era no less), Luke never names his sources nor explains why he (or we, the reader) should trust them, nor does he mention how he chose to include or exclude the contents we find in his Gospel.  What we find from Luke is instead an insistence that he diligently followed what had been handed on to him — another claim we know to be a lie, since we have two of his sources (The Gospels of Mark and Matthew) and are able to confirm that he freely altered them in order to support his own agenda.  For example, though there are many instances of Luke borrowing excerpts from Matthew and Mark’s Gospels, he also changes some of the details, such as redacting Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount and changing it (effectively reversing it) into a Sermon on a Plain.  Despite this reversal that Luke makes to Matthew’s version, both Matthew and Luke’s Sermons are followed by the unrelated narrative where Jesus heals the centurion’s son in Capernaum (Matt. 8.5-13, Luke 7.1-10), and both Sermons are preceded by a general account of Jesus healing many people (Matt. 4.23-5.1, Luke 6.17-19).

Another more conspicuous example of Luke redacting Matthew’s Gospel in particular (and creatively so), is when Luke rewrites Matthew’s Nativity Narrative.  In his version, Luke reverses almost every key element.  Whereas Matthew depicts Jesus’ family (Mary and Joseph) as basically outlaws, fleeing from Bethlehem and Herod’s dominion and authority and cowering many miles away for more than 10 years, Luke depicts Jesus’ family as being in complete obedience of the law and going to Bethlehem in observance of their emperor’s command (Luke 2.1-4).  While Matthew tells us that Herod was searching to kill the infant Jesus, Luke has Jesus being presented in the Jerusalem temple to several public pronouncements of Jesus’ messianic status by Anna and Simeon (an event that obviously wouldn’t have escaped Herod’s attention, nor that of Herod’s informants).  Also, when Matthew has Jesus’ family hiding in Egypt to escape Herod’s wrath, Luke has Jesus’ family living deferentially in their home in Nazareth for that entire time, even bringing Jesus back to Jerusalem for the Passover every year without fail, to remain in full compliance with Levitical law (Luke 2.41).  So it appears that Luke deliberately changed the reason that Jesus was “born in Bethlehem” yet somehow “came from Nazareth”, which were details that Matthew had already attempted to harmonize in his own Gospel.  It’s unlikely that Luke would attempt the same harmonization unless he knew that Matthew had already started this “Bethlehem” tradition.

There are several other differences between Matthew and Luke’s Nativity narratives that are unlikely if those differences weren’t intentional.  As mentioned before, for Luke, the family of Jesus is always obedient to religious and secular law (and they are never in danger), but also notably they are never hiding in a foreign country (unlike in Matthew’s Gospel).  Luke also completely removes the involvement of foreigners (e.g. the Persian “magi”) and instead replaces them with (apparently Jewish) shepherds.  He even replaced Matthew’s magical star (which informed the “magi”) with an angelic light from heaven (informing the “shepherds”; Luke 2.8-18).  Clearly, Luke didn’t like Matthew’s version of the story, so he changed it to fit his own desires.  It’s also unlikely that Luke’s Nativity Narrative would share so many elements with that of Matthew’s, for example, the way angels send practically the same messages to Mary and Joseph, the fact that both accounts involve an annunciation and mention a virgin birth, and that both have a genealogy in them (though Luke’s genealogy differs from Matthew’s) — unless these similarities and presumably intentional differences are because Luke was in fact borrowing and redacting Matthew’s Nativity Narrative.  There are even certain phrases in Matthew’s narrative that Luke copied verbatim (e.g. “and you will call his name Jesus”, Matt. 1.21 vs. Luke 1.31-32, where the Greek used is identical), thus further supporting this conclusion.  To be sure, in many cases, Luke’s Gospel doesn’t redact Matthew’s line-by-line or verbatim, but it was often the case in antiquity that many redactions were made more freely, to conform to the author’s own linguistic style and literary preferences, which Luke certainly employs.

As mentioned in the last post, whereas Mark’s Gospel was advocating a Pauline (i.e. “gentile-friendly”) form of Christianity, Matthew’s Gospel seemed to be a redaction of this, where instead Matthew emphasized the importance of a Torah-observant (strictly Jewish) form of Christianity.  Luke’s Gospel seems to strive to unify these two major divisions of early Christianity, both the Gentile and Torah-observant sects.  Luke’s account (spanning both Luke’s Gospel and Acts) seems to be revising history in several ways in order to give the impression that both of these Christian divisions were actually in continuous harmony with one another, while also portraying Jesus and Christianity in general as a credible and reverent sect that was law abiding and even respected by the Romans.  In fact, Luke portrays Jesus and Christianity as only opposed by a branch of the Jewish elite.  Thus, Luke is effectively rebutting Matthew, just as we saw that Matthew was attempting to rebut Mark.  So rather than promoting Gentile or Torah-observant Christianity per se, Luke is promoting a harmonious church — one that is a positive and faithful transformation of Judaism into what is ultimately the Gentile church (although Luke is careful not to explicitly describe it as such).  Notably, this amalgamated model of Christianity that Luke describes throughout his Gospel is a significant example of Luke freely changing fairly important details and perspectives that are conspicuously unknown to Matthew and Mark, and it seems fairly clear that Luke did this as a response to the ongoing disagreement between these dissenting sects of Christianity, and so he revised the events in his story as if to imply that they weren’t ever an issue.  In any case, Luke doesn’t appear to be reliably reporting history here, but rather is revising it to fit his literary and theological aims.

Luke also heavily relies on re-writing texts and older myths found in the Old Testament (OT), which, as we’ve seen with Mark and Matthew’s Gospels, illustrate that Luke isn’t writing history here or repeating any kind of eye witness reports, but is in fact simply reusing older myths as models for new ones.  Of the material that Luke adds to that found in Mark and Matthew, there is quite a bit that is demonstrably fabricated rewritten versions of the Elijah-Elisha narrative in 1 and 2 Kings, placing Jesus within them as the central character and changing the setting to 1st century Roman Palestine.  Sometimes Luke directly parallels those stories and other times he inverts them, but there are too many coincidences for this to have plausibly arisen by chance.  Here’s a list of some examples:

Luke 1.5-17 reverses 1 Kings 16.29-17.1

Luke 7.1-10 transforms 1 Kings 17.1-6

Luke 7.11-17 transforms 1 Kings 17.17-24

Luke 7.18-25 transforms 1 Kings 22

Luke 7.36-50 plays on 2 Kings 4.1-37

Luke 8.1-3 plays on 1 Kings 18

Luke 9.51-56 transforms 2 Kings 1.1-2.6

Luke 9.57-62 transforms 1 Kings 19

Luke 10.1-20 transforms 2 Kings 2.16-3.27

Luke 22-24 adapts elements from 2 Kings 2.7-15

In order to illustrate this myth rework that Luke is employing, I’ll mention a couple examples from this list that Carrier explores as they exemplify the rest well.  In Luke 7.11-17, we hear of a new story that Mark and Matthew have no apparent knowledge of, that is, the healing of the Widow’s Son at Nain.  The story on its own is already quite obviously fiction, employing many dramatical elements and miraculous events that we would typically find in fiction rather than in reality.  Also, as it happens this kind of story was a trope at the time, where effectively the same story was told a few decades later about the medical doctor Asclepiades by Apuleius, and similar stories were told by Pliny the Elder before Luke even began writing his Gospel.  It sounds like an urban legend — a tale retold many times involving different people living in different places, but with very similar elements otherwise just as we’d expect from an urban legend, including the typical convenient lack of an actual eye witness account for any of the events in the story.  Adding to these already obvious signs of fiction, is the fact that this story is simply a rewrite of the exact same legend told of Elijah in 1 Kings.  Here are some of the parallels between the two:

• Luke — “It happened afterwards…” (7.11)
• 1 Kings — “It happened after this…” (17.17)

• 1 Kings — At the gate of Sarepta, Elijah meets a widow. (17.10)
• Luke — At the gate of Nain, Jesus meets a widow. (7.11-12)

• 1 Kings — Another widow’s son was dead (17.17)
• Luke — This widow’s son was dead (7.12)

• 1 Kings — That widow expresses a sense of her unworthiness on account of sin. (17.18)
• Luke — A centurion (whose “boy” Jesus had just saved from death) had just expressed a sense of his unworthiness on account of sin. (7.6)

• 1 Kings — Elijah compassionately bears her son up the stairs and asks “the Lord” why he was allowed to die. (17.13-14)
• Luke — “The Lord” feels compassion for her and touches her son’s bier, and the bearers stand still. (7.13-14)

• 1 Kings — Elijah prays to the Lord for the son’s return to life. (17.21)
• Luke — “The Lord” commands the boy to rise. (7.14)

• 1 Kings — The boy comes to life and cries out. (17.22)
• Luke — “And he who was dead sat up and began to speak” (7.15)

• 1 Kings — “And he gave him to his mother” (17.23)
• Luke — “And he gave him to his mother” (17.15)

• 1 Kings — The widow recognizes Elijah is a man of God and that “the word” he speaks is the truth. (17.24)
• Luke — The people recognize Jesus as a great prophet of God and “the word” of this truth spreads everywhere. (7.16-17)

The main tip-off here is Luke’s use of the exact same phrase, given verbatim, from the Septuagint text of this Elijah story (“and he gave him to his mother”), which along with the other parallels is a strong indication of literary borrowing (as these coincidences arising by chance are highly unlikely).  There are also several differences or inversions that are worth noting which are also unlikely to have arisen by chance, for example, when Luke changes the ultimate message the story is trying to convey.  Whereas in the OT text, the idea and recognition of sinfulness leads to a form of despair and is accompanied with the idea that the man of God (or simply God) is a troublesome visitor who comes to punish sinfulness with death, in the New Testament (NT) text, the idea of unworthiness is joined with a sense of profound faith along with a powerful reverence for the Lord.  The NT text shows a clear conviction that despite one’s unworthiness or sinfulness, the Lord comes to heal and save people from death, so rather than the OT portrayal of God passing along the sins of a mother onto her child, the NT portrayal replaces this with the concept of a God that doesn’t look at one’s unworthiness or sinfulness but rather looks at one’s faith in the Lord.  We can even see that in the OT portrayal, we hear “that the Lord is the author of evil, the one who brings harm to the widow (1 Kings 17.20), whereas in the NT, God is seen as the one who comforts and heals instead (Luke 7.7).

The second example that Carrier describes is in regard to Luke 9.51-56 and how it emulates 2 Kings 1.1-2.6, where there are many more examples of direct verbatim and some near-verbatim borrowing from the Greek Septuagint, as well as many parallels and deliberate differences and inversions.  Both stories also have the same five part structure: a plan of death and assumption into heaven (2 Kings 1.1-6, 1.15-17, and 2.1; Luke 9.51), a sending of messengers (2 Kings 1.2; Luke 9.52), those messengers being turned back (2 Kings 1.3-6; Luke 9.53), there’s mention of calling down fire from heaven upon those who rejected those messengers (2 Kings 1.7-14; Luke 9.54-55), and finally journeying from one place to another (2 Kings 2.2-6; Luke 9.56).  Even where there are a large number of other differences between the two stories, the changes Luke made aren’t incoherent at all, and they fully correspond to stable patterns of adaptation including modernization, abbreviation, emulation, and fusion, all of which are common in Luke’s imitation of OT texts.  So just as we saw in Matthew and Mark’s Gospels, Luke is also making up new stories of his own by rewriting other myths found in the OT.

The last example from Carrier’s analysis that I’m going to discuss here is the Emmaus narrative of Luke 24.  This is a tale of a resurrection appearance that isn’t found in any other Gospel, and thus is a distinctive example of Luke’s inventiveness.  In this story, Luke talks about a man named Cleopas (along with some unnamed friend or companion) who goes on a journey from Jerusalem to a nearby city called Emmaus, after hearing that the corpse of Jesus has vanished.  On the way to Emmaus, the resurrected Jesus appears to both of them (although in disguise) and explains to them the secrets of the kingdom, which in this case happens to be a spiritual rather than a physical kingdom.  Afterward, he vanishes and Cleopas realizes who the “stranger” was and goes on to proclaim to others what Jesus told him.  Interestingly enough, the name Cleopas conveniently means “tell all” (i.e. “proclaim”), which is one of several obvious markers that what we are reading is myth.  Whenever characters in the story have a name that has a meaning which is extremely relevant to the tale told (in this case Cleopas “proclaiming” to others what he was told and had seen), it is most often the case that the name was specifically chosen or invented for exactly that reason.  Additionally, the absurd nature of the story gives us more hints that this is myth, including the miraculous vanishing, Cleopas’ unrealistic conversation with a total stranger, and the patently fictional concept of a disguised divine visitor.  In fact, this looks just like the age-old “Vanishing Hitchhiker” legend, conformed to an ancient Roman setting.

The founding myth of Rome, which was at that time famously known everywhere and even celebrated in yearly passion plays, is almost identical to the story that Luke is telling us.  In the Roman version, a man named Proculus (which in archaic Latin means “Proclaimer”, just like Cleopas’ name) takes a journey from a nearby city called Alba Longa to Rome, after the Roman people just learned that the corpse of Romulus had vanished.  On the way to Rome, the resurrected Romulus appears to him (although not in disguise, but rather in a magnificent and glorious form), and Romulus explains to Proculus the secrets of the kingdom (specifically, how to conquer and rule the world), and then Romulus ascends into heaven (which Luke eventually has Jesus do as well).  After this, Proculus, realizing who he was, goes on to proclaim to others what he was told.  If in fact Luke’s intended “Emmaus” is supposed to be the “Ammaus” that was mentioned by the Jewish historian, Josephus (a town located a few miles away from Jerusalem), then in both tales the proclaimers are going from a city on a mountain to a city in a valley (located just a few miles away), in almost the same east-to-west direction.  However, some of the differences are even more telling, for example, while Proculus receives his gospel on the road to Rome, Cleopas instead receives his gospel on a road from Jerusalem.  Whereas Romulus appears in a glorious and explicitly recognizable form sharing the secrets of the visible, physical kingdom/empire on Earth, Jesus appears in disguise, sharing the secrets of the hidden, spiritual kingdom in heaven.

So Luke has reversed the importance of a few key characteristics in Rome’s founding myth, as if to devalue it and send a different message with his story.  Whereas in the Roman myth, all roads lead to Rome, in the Lukan myth, all roads lead from Jerusalem, possibly illustrating that unlike the Romans, the Christians’ resurrected hero promises a hidden kingdom originating from Jerusalem.  Whereas in the Roman myth, Romulus’ glorious appearance is what proved to Proculus that what he was being told was true, it was the powerful word of the gospel that proves to Cleopas that what the stranger said was true (as well as what proves that the stranger was in fact Jesus).  So overall this story appears to have adopted most of the elements of the Roman myth, but as is often the case with mythmaking, this re-written myth is meant to illustrate different values (in this case, some of the differences between Christian and Roman values).  It should be noted that Carrier elsewhere demonstrates in his analysis just how much the Gospels borrowed from this earlier Romulus resurrection tale, as this narrative isn’t the only instance of borrowing, and in fact we find numerous parallels between the resurrection story of Romulus and various elements not only in Luke’s Gospel, but also in Matthew’s and Mark’s.  To illustrate the similarities, recall that in the first post in this series, I mentioned how there were many authors in antiquity who wrote fictional historical biographies, including the example of Plutarch’s Life of Romulus.  In Plutarch’s biography of Romulus, he mentions a few attributes of Romulus that are remarkably parallel to the Gospels’ description of Jesus.  For example, among other things we are told of Romulus that:

• He was the son of god.
• He was born of a virgin.
• An attempt was made to kill him as a baby (and he was saved).
• He was raised by a poor family.
• He became a lowly shepherd.
• As a man he becomes loved by the people, and hailed as king.
• He is killed by the conniving elite.
• He rises from the dead.
• He appears to a friend to tell the good news to his people.
• He ascends to heaven to rule from on high.

Plutarch also mentions that as he wrote this, there were still annual public ceremonies being performed, celebrating the day Romulus ascended up to heaven.  The sacred story that was told at such ceremonies was described as such: at the end of Romulus’ life, there were rumors circulating that he had been murdered by a conspiracy of the Senate (much like how Jesus was “murdered”, in a sense, by a conspiracy of the Jewish Sanhedrin), the sun went dark (just as was the case with Jesus), and Romulus’ body vanished (as did Jesus’).  The people wanted to look for Romulus, but the Senate instructed them not to, “for he had risen to join the gods”.  Most went away in happiness, wishing for only good things from their new god, but “some doubted” (as is mentioned in all the Gospels after Mark; e.g. Matt. 28.17, Luke 24.11, John 20.24-25, though it is implied in Mark 16.8).  Soon after all this, a close friend of Romulus named Proculus, reported that he met Romulus “on the road” between Rome and some nearby town and he asked Romulus, “Why have you abandoned us?”, which Romulus then replied and said that he had been a god all along but had come down to earth and taken human form in order to establish a great kingdom, and that he now had to return to his home in heaven.  Then Romulus instructs Proculus to tell the Romans that if they are indeed virtuous, they will possess all worldly power.  Plutarch then mentions that this annual Roman ceremony of the Romulan ascent involved some people reciting the names of those who fled vanishing in fear, while some people re-enacted the scene of being afraid and fleeing (sharing many similarities to the ending of Mark’s Gospel).

Clearly, there are numerous parallels between the story of Romulus and the stories of Jesus we hear about in the Gospels.  Most importantly, this tale of Romulus is widely attested as being pre-Christian.  Although Plutarch wrote this biography sometime between 80 and 120 CE (during the time the Gospels were being written), he was recording a long-established Roman tale and custom, and this has been proven by noting that the sources Plutarch used for his fictional biography were undeniably pre-Christian (including: Cicero, Laws 1.3, Republic 2.10; Livy, From the Founding of the City 1.16-2.8; Ovid, Fasti 2.491-512 and Metamorphoses 14.805-51; and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities 2.63.3; which were all written prior to the Gospels).  Beyond the parallels noted here, in terms of the origins of Christianity and the various influences on its origin, it should also be noted that within several different cultures there were in fact a number of pre-Christian savior gods who took on human form and endured various trials, passions, and tribulations, with many of them even dying and later resurrecting from the dead (e.g. Osiris, Zalmoxis, Dionysus, Inanna) and sharing their victory over death with those that believed in them and/or those that took part in various mysteries (including baptisms and pseudo-cannabalistic rites similar to the Eucharist).  One last thing to note regarding these other savior gods is that even though they all were placed into history, with many even having detailed biographies written about them, we can be fairly certain that none of them actually existed.

Now getting back to the Emmaus narrative in Luke, beyond the fact that this Emmaus narrative is written in a distinctively Lukan style (employing his syntax and vocabulary), it also appears to be crafted specifically for the purpose of echoing and reinforcing Luke’s first two opening chapters.  This echoing is especially obvious when comparing Luke 2.40-50 and Luke 24.13-33, where we hear about “another Passover, another Jerusalem visit” and another “couple beginning their journey away from Jerusalem”, where they are either discovering or erroneously believing “that Jesus was not with them”.  In both sections of Luke we hear about a couple that is distraught about having lost Jesus, and both of them quickly return to Jerusalem after a climactic discovery (when Cleopas and his unnamed friend discover Jesus is present, or when Mary and Joseph realize that Jesus is absent).  Likewise, Mary and Joseph find Jesus “after three days”, just as Cleopas and his friend do (Luke 2.46 vs. Luke 24.21).  Both stories involve Jesus asking what exactly they’re doing (i.e. “Why are you looking for me” and “What are you talking about”), and both are followed by Jesus explaining some scripture to those present, telling them that “it is necessary” that he did what he did (i.e. “it’s necessary for me to be among the things of my father” and “it’s necessary for the messiah to suffer these things”).  Furthermore, both stories involve the theme of people not understanding what had happened, and of course, both feature Jesus having disappeared.  Notably neither of these stories found in Luke were ever seen in the other Gospels, thus implying that Luke either invented both stories, deliberately having them echo one another, or implying that Luke used another (likely fictional) source that no longer exists.

In summary, we can see that Luke is inventing the material in his Gospel, as illustrated by the many instances of convenient coincidences as well as other historical implausibilities, with Luke also borrowing and freely redacting material from Matthew and Mark’s Gospels (which as we’ve already seen are demonstrably myth).  Luke also appears to have borrowed and rewritten other myths from texts found in the OT (including his rewriting the Elijah-Elisha narratives found in 1 and 2 Kings).  Furthermore, Luke’s Emmaus narrative as well as his general narrative of the resurrection appears to have used the myth of Romulus as the model for it (as the other Gospels appear to have done as well).  The only sources we can identify that Luke used for the main elements of his stories are unreliable ones (in terms of having any historical merit), as they themselves were littered with numerous markers of myth and various elements that are wholly unrealistic, yet are exactly what we would expect to find in fiction.  There is also reasonably strong evidence that Luke used Josephus as well, specifically as a source for adding various elements of local color to his fictional history.  On top of this, it is also agreed by scholars that the author of Luke’s Gospel was also the author of Acts, and several scholars (including Richard Pervo) have thoroughly demonstrated that Acts is riddled with historical inaccuracies and obvious fiction (Acts looks exactly like an ancient novel), and this authorial link thus further discredits the idea that Luke is reporting history accurately in his Gospel (Here’s a related post I’ve written mentioning some of Carrier’s analysis on Acts to expand on this topic and illustrate what scholars have found in more detail).  So, as was the case with both Matthew’s and Mark’s Gospels, even if there may in fact be some nuggets of historical truth buried within the fiction that Luke wrote, we are once again unable to discern what those historical truths may be (if there are any), as we simply don’t have any independent evidence or historical sources to corroborate such details.  The fourth and last post in this series will highlight some of Carrier’s findings regarding the last of the four Gospels, namely, The Gospel According to John.

The Gospels as Allegorical Myth, Part 2 of 4: Matthew

In the first post I wrote in this series, I mentioned many of the elements from Richard Carrier’s analysis of the Gospels, that show that they are quite obviously allegorical myth and fiction rather than any kind of actual historical account.  Though I only mentioned a fraction of the elements explored within the Gospel According to Mark that are clear markers of myth, there were enough examples within that fraction alone to undeniably demonstrate it to be myth.  In this post, I’ll be discussing Carrier’s analysis on The Gospel According to Matthew.

The first thing to note in The Gospel According to Matthew, is that Matthew quotes Mark’s Gospel in many places (often verbatim), and so scholars agree that Matthew used Mark’s Gospel as a source and essentially redacted it as needed to serve his own literary and theological aims.  Thus, right off the bat, because Mark’s Gospel was demonstrated to be fiction/myth, the fact that Matthew is using it as a source means that Matthew’s source is just as likely to be fiction and myth.  We’ll still survey the content in detail throughout this post, but the fact remains that copying myth and fiction from another source only produces more myth and fiction, and thus Matthew’s emulation of Mark’s fiction is a tell-tale sign of myth, as he appears to have had no actual independent sources from which to base his own position and arguments on.  Additionally, just as we found in Mark’s Gospel, all of the magic and miracles performed in Matthew’s Gospel, e.g. Peter walking on the water, are obvious markers of myth and fiction (which goes without saying).  The second thing to note is that just as we saw in Mark’s Gospel, Matthew’s Gospel also shows no signs of being any kind of researched history.

Most scholars also agree that Matthew redacted Mark’s Gospel in various ways, not only to fix and improve on it (from Matthew’s perspective anyway), but also to reverse its too-Gentile-friendly model of Christianity.  Whereas Mark’s Gospel favored a brand of Christianity that was developed by Paul (in which Torah observance was optional), Matthew’s Gospel seems to emphasize the need to continue a Torah-observant Christianity, having Jesus insist that all converts remain or become practicing Jews in all other ways (including practicing circumcision, obedience to dietary and other Jewish laws, minus the temple cult rituals).  Matthew also added certain narratives that weren’t found in Mark, such as the nativity (in fact, we don’t hear anything about Jesus’ youth or birth in Mark’s Gospel), which included the ridiculous claim that Jesus was born of a virgin (another obvious marker for myth that we’ve seen in countless other stories about demigods and mythic heroes).  Matthew also made an absurd redaction to Mark’s “empty-tomb” narrative, as well as some other noteworthy redactions which will be discussed later in this post.

Often times, when Matthew tries to “fix” what Mark had written, Matthew just makes the story even more ridiculous than it already was.  One example was in the story of Jesus riding triumphantly into Jerusalem.  Mark has him sit on a young donkey that he had his disciples fetch for him.  Matthew changes the story so they fetch two donkeys for him, the young donkey and its mother, and then Jesus rides into Jerusalem on both donkeys (which is logistically impossible).  The reason that Matthew does this seems to be that he wanted the story to more closely match a “literal” reading of the Old Testament (OT) prophecy that had originally inspired the detail in Mark.  In fact, Matthew actually goes further than Mark and quotes the scripture (Zech. 9.9) that Mark clearly also used as his own source (yet which Mark didn’t mention explicitly).  The Septuagint text regarding this prophecy reads “on an ass and a new foal” (meaning a very young baby donkey), and the original Hebrew reads “on an ass, on a young male ass, the child of a [female] ass”, which was most likely a poetic idiom for just “young male donkey”, but because Matthew took this literally, he has Jesus riding on two donkeys rather than just on a young donkey.  Clearly Matthew did this so that he could make the connection to Zechariah more explicit and thus to create an instance of “prophecy” historicized.  Matthew makes a few mistakes like this in his Gospel by either mistranslating OT texts or taking a literal interpretation when it’s not warranted, but in the most notable cases it seems that Matthew was trying to fulfill certain prophecies based on his own interpretation of OT scripture.  There are quite a few cases, not only in these Gospels, but also throughout the rest of the NT where what we are seeing is clearly intentionally historicized prophecy rather than remembered history, and this is a significant marker of myth.

One unfortunate consequence of Matthew’s redactions is that he completely destroys Mark’s own beautiful and brilliantly crafted literary structure by moving certain events around, and adding and subtracting various elements throughout.  However, Matthew also recycles some of the pieces of Mark’s Gospel to create some of his own large-scale literary structures.  For example, after Matthew introduces Jesus’ ministry, he adds a five-fold division of sections by repeating five times the complete phrase “and it happened when Jesus had finished”.  Each time the phrase is used, it ends an extended insertion of discourse that Matthew has added to the teachings found in Mark’s Gospel.  Since Matthew’s main goal was to expand the teachings in Mark’s Gospel and make them more strict and firmly Jewish, his overall structure reflects this intention, using those five-time repeated phrases to alternate between various narratives and discourse.  We see the following:

(Chapters)
1-4:      Narrative (Intro – birth, baptism, and ministry)
5-7:      Discourse (“Jesus’ demands upon Israel”)
–           Ending with the key phrase at 7.28-29

8-9:      Narrative (“Jesus’ deeds within and for Israel”)
10:       Discourse (teaching the disciples how to do the same)
–           Ending with the key phrase at 11.1

11-12:  Narrative (“Israel’s negative response”)
13:        Discourse (“explanation of Israel’s negative response”)
–           Ending with the key phrase at 13.53

14-17:  Narrative (“founding of the church”)
18:        Discourse (“teaching for the church”)
–           Ending with the key phrase at 19.1

19-22:  Narrative (entering Judea and ending in Jerusalem)
23-25   Discourse (on “the future judgment and salvation”)
–           Ending with the key phrase at 26.1

26-28:  Narrative (Conclusion – betrayal, crucifixion, resurrection)

Unlike Mark, Matthew inserts these five special long discourse sections (the five “Great Discourses”) in his overall structure.  Similar to Mark though, Matthew also crafted his Gospel into a large chiastic superstructure which looks like this:

A – Genealogy (summary of past times: 1.1-17)
B – Mary [1], an angel arrives, and the birth of Jesus (1.18-25)
C – Gifts of wealth at birth (magi), attempt to thwart birth (Herod) — (2.1-12)
D – Flight to Egypt, woe to the children, Jeremiah laments destruction of the first temple (2.13-21)
E – Judea avoided (2.22-23)
F – Baptism of Jesus (3.1-8.23)
G – Crossing the sea [twice] (8.24-11.1)
H – John’s ministry (11.2-19)
I – Rejection of Jesus (11.20-24)
J – Secrets revealed through Jesus (11.25-30)
K – Attack of Pharisees (12.1-13)
L – Pharisees determine to kill God’s servant (12.14-21)
K – Condemnation of Pharisees (12.22-45)
J – Secrets revealed through Jesus (13.1-52)
I – Rejection of Jesus (13.53-58)
H – John’s death (14.1-12)
G – Crossing the sea [twice] (14.13-16.12)
F – Transfiguration of Jesus (16.13-18.35)
E – Judea entered (19.1-20.34)
D – March to Jerusalem, woe to the children (24.19), Jesus predicts destruction of the second temple (21.1-27.56, 23-25)
C – Gift of wealth at death (Joseph of Arimathea), attempt to thwart resurrection (Sanhedrin and the guards) — (27.57-66)
B – Mary [2], an angel arrives, and the resurrection of Jesus (28.1-15)
A – Commission (summary of future times: 28.16-20)

However, there’s more to it than this, as within the overall structure there are several sub-structures that reinforce the larger one.  For example, the F segments (the baptism of Jesus, and the transfiguration of Jesus) parallel each other in another common structure that looks like this:

A) Baptism Ministry – Preliminary setting: John’s witness (3.1-12)
B) Transfiguration Ministry – Preliminary setting: Peter’s witness (16.13-28)

A) Revelation of the Son (3.13-17)
B) Revelation of the Son (17.1-8, with a reference back to John at 17.9-13)

A) Satan resisted (4.1-11)
B) Satan cast out (17.14-23)

A) Removal to Capernaum (4.12-16)
B) Removal to Capernaum (17.24-27)

A) Recruiting of disciples (4.17-22) and beginning of ministry (4.23-25)
A) Sermon on the Mount (5.1-8.1, it is in part about forgiveness)
A) Faith and worship produce healing (8.2-17)
A) What disciples must give up (8.18-23)
B) Sermon on discipleship, faith, recruiting, and forgiveness (18)

Matthew also carefully crafted the crucifixion narrative specifically to be more elegantly chiastic than Mark’s version:

A – Passover and crucifixion (26.1-2)
B –  Priests plot (26.3-5)
C –   Jesus anointed for burial (26.6-13)
D –    Preparations: Judas enlisted (26.14-16);  Passover prepared (26.17-19)
E –      Judas exposed (26.20-25)
F –       Lord’s supper [a mock death] inaugurated (26.26-28)
G –       Nazirite vow made (26.29)
H –        Removal to Olivet (26.30)
I –           Abandonment (26.31-35)
J –            Jesus asks God not to be released (26.36-46)
K –            Judas betrays Jesus (26.47-56)
L –             Trial before Sanhedrin (26.57-68)
M – Denial of Peter (26.69-75)
L –             Sanhedrin delivers Jesus to Pilate (27.1-2)
K –            Judas hangs himself (27.3-10)
J –            Pilate does not release Jesus (27.11-26)
I –           Mockery (27.27-31)
H –        Removal to Golgotha (27.32-33)
G –       Nazirite vow fulfilled (27.34)
F –      Crucifixion (27.35-44) and death (27.45-50)
E –     Temple exposed (27.51)
D –    Results:  Jesus’ lordship confirmed (27.52-54); the least are faithful (27.55-56)
C –   Jesus buried (27.57-61)
B –  Priests plot (27.62-66)
A – Passover and resurrection (28.1-10)

Jesus had to be completely abandoned by men for his sacrifice to be effective (so he would be completely humbled: Phil. 2.7-8), and so Peter’s denial of Jesus is essential to the story (and thus becomes the centerpiece of Matthew’s literary structure).  As we can see from the last four literary structures mentioned, this is quite clearly myth that Matthew is writing, for history just doesn’t work out as perfectly as these events are arranged.  Furthermore, we know that Matthew changed the order of some of what was in Mark’s Gospel in order to get this to work, and so just as Mark created narrative material that was historically implausible (if not outright ridiculous) in order to get the literary structure to work, we see Matthew doing the same thing here.  In both cases, as Carrier mentions, the obviously complex literary design has completely eclipsed any interest in historical truth.  Another thing worth noting is that none of this can honestly have been orally transmitted.  The level of detail and intricate structure (as in Mark’s Gospel) used can only realistically be crafted, preserved, and understood using a written text.  Yet, what we are reading is written in a context that clearly implies these are all orally transmitted conversations taking place between Jesus and the disciples (who are supposedly illiterate no less, and couldn’t read nor write).  So once again, these implausibilities and inconsistencies are another marker for myth.

Another supreme example worth noting is the famous “Sermon on the Mount”, an extremely well-crafted literary work that couldn’t possibly have come from an illiterate Galilean.  Rather, scholars are quite certain that this originated in Greek, not the Hebrew or Aramaic that Jesus and the disciples would have spoken.  Scholars know this because this sermon relies on the Greek Septuagint text of the Bible for all of its features and allusions.  It shows an extensive reliance on the Greek text of both Leviticus and Deuteronomy especially, and notably in other Greek texts.  To give an example, the part of the sermon which mentions turning the other cheek and other aspects of pacifism (Matt. 5.38-42) has been redacted from the Greek text of Isaiah (50.6-9), so is unlikely to be the words of Jesus (if he even existed).  The sermon as a whole also has another complex literary structure that could only have come from a skilled writer, not some everyday speaker.  Also, quite notably, it reflects certain interests that would have arisen after the apostles began preaching the Christian faith and organizing communities, as they were struggling to do so successfully.  Looking at the elegant structure of the Sermon on the Mount, we can see another brilliant use of triadic structure (just as we saw in Mark’s Gospel):

– A.  Introduction (crowds ascend the mountain: 4.23-5.1)
–   B.  The Nine (3 x 3) Blessings (5.3-12)
–     C.  Summary Statement (salt and light: 5.13-16)
–       D.  The Three Pillars Begun:
–             [1] How to Obey the Torah (5.17-48)
–                   General Principles (5.17-20)
–                    [a]  1. Murder (5.21-26)
–                          2. Adultery (5.27-30)
–                          3. Divorce (5.31-32)
–                    [b]  1. Oaths (5.33-37)
–                          2. Vengeance (5.38-42)
–                          3. Loving Your Enemies (6.43-48)
–             [2] How to Pay Cult to God (6.1-18)
–                    General Principles (6.1)
–                     1. Almsgiving (6.2-4)
–                     2. Prayer (6.5-15)
–                          [1] Not as the Hypocrites or the Gentiles (6.5-8)
–                          [2] The Lord’s Prayer (6.9-13) — central focus, thus everything centers on this
–                                 1. Introduction and Address (6.9a-b)
–                                 2. Three (3) “Thou” Petitions (6.9c-10) — God is thus at the (exact) –                                    center of this structure.
–                                 3. Three (3) “We” Petitions (6.11-13)
–                          [3] On Forgiveness (6.14-15)
–                     3. Fasting (6.16-18)
–              [3] How to Deal with Society (6.19-7.12)
–                     [a] – General Principles (store up treasure in heaven: 6.19-21)
–                           1. Eye Parable (6.22-23)
–                           2. Value Parable (God before mammon: 6.24)
–                           3. Encouragement (6.25-34)
–                     [b] – General Principles (do not judge: 7.1-2)
–                           1. Eye Parable (7.3-5)
–                           2. Value Parable (pearls before swine: 7.6)
–                           3. Encouragement (7.7-11)
–       D.  The Three Pillars Concluded:
–     C.  Summary Statement (the Golden Rule: 7.12)
–   B.  The Three (3) Warnings (7.13-27)
– A.  Conclusion (crowds descend the mountain: 7.28-8.1)

As we can see upon closer inspection, this is far too elegant and intricate to be a casual speech, and is quite obviously a written literary creation (and one that was carefully thought out and painstakingly arranged).  It has also been pointed out that this sermon fits very well within known rabbinical debates over how Jews could still fulfill the Torah after the destruction of the Temple cult.  As it happens, the general consensus among the rabbis was that good deeds now fulfilled that role (notably acts of love and mercy) — which is essentially also what the Sermon on the Mount says.  Beyond that, the three classical pillars of Judaism that were famously mentioned by Semeon the Just (a rabbi of the Maccabean period), which were: the law, paying cult to God, and social behavior — were the three main points mentioned in the sermon on Matthew’s Gospel.  So it seems that Matthew arranged his discourse to create a Christian interpretation of the three classical pillars of Judaism.  Perhaps more telling of this being myth, is the fact that the contents of the sermon imply that the temple cult no longer exists when it was written.  Nowhere does Jesus in this extremely long speech explain what to do about the temple sacrifice code in Leviticus or Deuteronomy, not even to reject it or avoid it, or that it was no longer needed.  Rather, the speech simply assumes that’s no longer an issue.  That is, it assumes the temple cult has already been destroyed, which means this speech was written after 70 CE (not during the supposed time of Jesus’ life, 30-35 CE).  Thus, it doesn’t come from Jesus, but rather is another unmistakeable case of carefully crafted myth and fiction.

On top of all of these findings, Matthew also added many details that depict Jesus as a new Moses.  For example, scholars have long recognized that Matthew’s Nativity Narrative is a rewrite of the nativity of Moses (drawing not only on Exodus, but also on its first-century expansion in the anonymous Biblical Antiquities), and Matthew has Jesus deliver his new commandments on a mountain (in the Sermon on the Mount) to emulate Moses delivering the commandments of God from Mount Sinai.  In Matthew, Jesus’ Great Commission from a mountain is designed to echo in many respects Moses’ Great Commission before he ascended a mountain to die (Deuteronomy 31-34).  Also, the five Great Discourses (delivered by Jesus) appear to serve as a replacement for the five books of the Pentateuch (which Jews originally believed were written by Moses).  So we can see many examples like these of Matthew’s literary-historical revisionism.  More examples include how Matthew expands Jesus’ forty day period in the wilderness and temptation by the Devil (an event in Mark that seems to be referencing the forty years of temptation in the wilderness of Moses and the Jews), where Jesus undergoes the same temptations as the Jews, but unlike them, Jesus passes every test (and quite conveniently so).  So in this case, Jesus is thus seen as reversing the curse that was bestowed on the Jews when they failed to pass those very tests during their time in the wilderness.  Listing some of those parallels again, we have:

Deut. 8.2 — Israel was in the wilderness for forty years.
Matt. 4.2 — Jesus is in the wilderness for forty days.

Exodus 16.2-8 — Israel was tempted by hunger and fed upon manna.
Matt. 4.2-4 — A hungry Jesus is tempted to turn stones into bread.

Exodus 17.1-3 — Israel was tempted to put God to the test.
Matt. 4.6-7 — The same thing happens to Jesus.

Exodus 32 — Israel was lured into idolatry.
Matt. 4.8-10 — The devil confronts Jesus with the same temptations to worship something other than Israel’s God (Satan himself).

Matthew thus invented a narrative here, putting words in Jesus’ mouth, to create a literarily symbolic story involving obviously fictional events.  This is exactly the same kind of literary invention that we saw employed in Mark’s Gospel, where events are created to serve an allegorical purpose and often stem from emulating a previous mythical event (as in the legend of Moses).

As with Mark’s Gospel, the disciples also behave in ways that are unrealistic, including Matthew’s recycling of the “dense lackey” behavior we saw before.  For example, in Matt. 14:13-21 we read:

^“Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself. But when the crowds heard it, they followed him on foot from the towns.  When he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them and cured their sick.  When it was evening, the disciples came to him and said, “This is a deserted place, and the hour is now late; send the crowds away so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves.”  Jesus said to them, “They need not go away; you give them something to eat.”  They replied, “We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish.”  And he said, “Bring them here to me.”  Then he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds.  And all ate and were filled; and they took up what was left over of the broken pieces, twelve baskets full.  And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children.”

Then just a few verses later (Matt. 15.32-36) we read:

“Then Jesus called his disciples to him and said, “I have compassion for the crowd, because they have been with me now for three days and have nothing to eat; and I do not want to send them away hungry, for they might faint on the way.”  The disciples said to him, “Where are we to get enough bread in the desert to feed so great a crowd?”  Jesus asked them, “How many loaves have you?” They said, “Seven, and a few small fish.”  Then ordering the crowd to sit down on the ground, he took the seven loaves and the fish; and after giving thanks he broke them and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds.”

So after the disciples just saw Jesus make enough food for the five-thousand people in Matt. 14, when they go to the four-thousand people in Matt. 15, the disciples wonder where they could possibly find “enough bread in the desert to feed so great a crowd”.  Talk about short-term memory!  It’s simply not believable that the disciples would be so dumb, that they’d not assume Jesus would simply perform the same miracle exactly as he did before.  Jesus did it once before (and with 1000 more people), so the fact that they wouldn’t immediately assume that Jesus would simply repeat this miracle again, is far from realistic.  It seems that Matthew is once again, employing Homer’s model of Odysseus’ fickle and stupid crew members (or the fickle and clueless Jews we read about in Exodus) that Mark employed in his Gospel.  Matthew also repeats Mark’s use of the ridiculous way that the soon-to-be disciples begin following Jesus.  Just as we saw in Mark’s Gospel, in Matthew’s Gospel, they simply drop what they’re doing, quit their jobs without question, and follow a man passing by (Jesus) whom they know nothing about, simply because he asked them with one terse statement.  In real life, it would be extremely improbable to see people acting this gullible, care-free, and irresponsible, especially when it pertains to how they’re going to continue to make a living (having enough food to eat, etc.).  However, in myth and (non-realist) fiction, these kinds of silly behaviors happen all the time, and often serve an allegorical purpose and/or serve as a way of helping to get the set of events to fit into the desired literary structure in just the right way.

An interesting historical anachronism mentioned in Matthew’s Gospel (as well as in Mark’s and Luke’s), and one that would be easy for most readers to miss, relates to the tomb narrative and resurrection, where it is mentioned that after the women arrive at the tomb, they see that the stone had been “rolled away”, leaving the tomb open.

However, it should be noted that more than 98% of Jewish tombs from this period (the Second Temple period, 100 BCE to 70 CE) were closed with square blocking stones, not round ones that could be rolled.  To be clear, in every instance where the blocking stone for the tomb is mentioned as having been moved, it is specifically mentioned that it was rolled away (not merely slid away, such as what would be done with a square stone).  In every instance, the Greek verb “kuliein” which always means “to roll”, was employed.  These are the only uses of any form of this verb in the entire NT (Matt. 27.60, 28.2, Mark 15.46, 16.3-4, Luke 24.2).  In fact, only four round stones were known prior to the Jewish War, and all of them were used to block entrances to elaborate tomb complexes of the extremely wealthy (such as Herod the Great and his ancestors).  Round blocking stones didn’t become more common until after this period, and so this is yet another one of many hints that shows that Matthew is in fact writing his Gospel at least a decade or more after 70 CE (after the Second Temple period ended), despite the fact that he is trying to pass it off as having been written around 30-35 CE.  Historical anachronisms like this one merely provide more confirmation that we aren’t reading actual history here.

The final points I wanted to mention concern other elements of the tomb and resurrection narratives.  There are many implausibilities riddled throughout this story, some fairly implausible and others that are simply ridiculous.  For example, in Matthew’s story, apart from the claim of the resurrection itself which is obviously fiction, after Jesus dies and is resurrected, “…The tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised.  After his resurrection they came out of the tombs and entered the holy city and appeared to many” (Matt. 27.52-53).  Obviously had this actually happened, and many people in the city saw this, we’d expect someone (if not many people) to have recorded the event (including pagans and non-Christian Jews), and yet we find no such corroboration for said events.

Another interesting redaction that Matthew made of Mark’s Gospel involves the women at the tomb.  In Mark’s Gospel (16.1-8), we read:

“When the sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him.  And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb.  They had been saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?”  When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back.  As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side; and they were alarmed.  But he said to them, “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him.  But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.”  So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”

Yet, in Matthew’s Gospel (28.2-10), we hear a completely different outcome:

“There was a violent earthquake, for an angel of the Lord came down from heaven and, going to the tomb, rolled back the stone and sat on it.  His appearance was like lightning, and his clothes were white as snow.  The guards were so afraid of him that they shook and became like dead men.  But the angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid; I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified.  He is not here; for he has been raised, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay.  Then go quickly and tell his disciples, ‘He has been raised from the dead, and indeed he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him.’ This is my message for you.”   So they left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy, and ran to tell his disciples.”

Whereas in Mark’s Gospel, the women were afraid, ran away, and didn’t tell anybody what had happened, in Matthew’s Gospel, quite the opposite occurs, and the women run off to go tell the disciples what they had seen.  So we can see that Matthew intentionally changed what Mark had written, because the story that Mark wrote didn’t serve Matthew’s own literary or theological aims.  In fact, in general Matthew expands and redacts Mark’s resurrection and empty tomb narrative, greatly exaggerating it and making it even more implausible than it already was.  In Mark’s narrative, for example, there is simply a man sitting in the tomb dressed in a white robe, while in Matthew’s narrative, rather than a man sitting in the tomb, Matthew says that an angel came down from heaven, with an appearance like lightning and clothes white as snow, thus adding some hyperbole to make the miraculous nature of the story more explicit.

So looking at everything that’s been shown here, we can see that just as we saw in Mark, Matthew has several carefully crafted literary structures (including the use of triads and chiasmi) that are clearly written products (with many allegorical messages contained within) rather than actual historical events, speeches, discourses, etc.  It’s simply implausible that history would ever work out conveniently enough to produce consecutive events that have such an obvious arranged structure, yet it is entirely expected to find exactly these kinds of structures in an intentional product of fiction and myth.  We also can see numerous instances of other historical implausibilities, including some anachronisms, various episodes of unrealistic behavior, as well as obvious borrowing and redactions of other source texts including the Old Testament and the Greek Septuagint.  Thus, just as with Mark’s Gospel, the principle of contamination prevents us from being able to discern between any possible historical events contained within this Gospel (if there are any), and those that are fiction and myth, because plausible fiction (notably in the peripheral elements of a fictional story) is often mixed in with the less plausible.  So unfortunately, even if there were actual historical events contained within this Gospel (or Mark’s for that matter), we would have no way to identify them.  Therefore, in the absence of any external corroboration (let alone that which is credible), all we can do is assume it is all fiction and/or myth, and since most of it demonstrably is anyway, this assumption is unavoidable unless we find new evidence to think otherwise.  In the next post, I will be discussing elements of Carrier’s analysis with respect to The Gospel According to Luke.

The Gospels as Allegorical Myth, Part I of 4: Mark

Previously, I’ve written about the historicity of Jesus, and mentioned how the most recent analysis, in Richard Carrier’s On the Historicity of Jesus (the first comprehensive, academically published, and formally peer-reviewed book written on the subject), showed that it was in fact very unlikely that Jesus Christ ever existed as a historical person, but rather likely began as a celestial deity who was later euhemerized, that is, placed into history as if he were a real person.  As a part of Carrier’s comprehensive analysis, he analyzed the Gospels, and thoroughly demonstrated (as many other scholars have before him, though to varying degrees) that the Gospels are quite obviously mythical allegorical fictions, and thus can not be used as evidence to support the historicity of Jesus.  As a former Christian, I never analyzed the Gospels from a literary or historical-critical perspective, as this wasn’t particularly relevant nor entirely feasible with my faith-based assumption that I was reading an “inerrant book inspired by God” supposedly based on nothing but true history.  As a result, I never gave it much thought, nor realized just how much literary invention there was.  In some cases, the care and thought taken to write these narratives is nothing short of brilliant.  I wanted to share some of the content and literary devices discovered not only to illustrate that the Gospels are demonstrably mythical allegorical fictions, but also because I thought some of the literary devices used were impressive feats in themselves which I believe deserve recognition.  I’ll be discussing a few of these elements found within the Gospels, as mentioned (though in greater detail) by Carrier in his comprehensive analysis.  I’ve decided to split this into a series of four posts, one for each Gospel.

First of all, before even identifying or examining these literary constructs, allegories, and prospective elements of myth, we can already see by reading the Gospels that they fail to show any substantive content of being actual researched histories.  Nowhere in the Gospels do they ever name their sources of information, nor do they read as eye witness testimonies (nor do they identify themselves as such), nor is it mentioned why any sources used would be accurate to rely upon.  The authors never discuss any historical method used, nor do they acknowledge how some contents may be less accurate than others, nor do they mention alternate possibilities of the events given the limited information they had from their sources.  They never express amazement or any degree of rational skepticism no matter how implausible an event within the story may be — something we would expect from any rational historian (even one living in antiquity).  The authors never explain why they changed what their sources said, nor do they even acknowledge that they did such a thing in the first place — despite the fact that Matthew and Luke clearly relied on Mark as a source (as did John, though less obviously so), for example, and then they all redacted Mark’s version as needed to serve their own literary and theological purposes (which explains some of the contradictions found between one Gospel and another).  Instead, the Gospels appear to be fictional historical biographies, likely written by specially interested Christians whose intent was to edify Jesus, just like many other fictional historical biographies that were made for various heroes and sages in antiquity.  In fact, all students of literary Greek (the authors of the Gospels wrote their manuscripts in literary Greek), commonly used this fictional biographical technique as a popular rhetorical device — where they were taught to invent narratives about famous and legendary people, as well as to build a symbolic or moral message within it, and where they were taught to make changes to traditional stories in order to make whatever point they desired within their own stories.

So we already have a bit of contemporary background information showing us that fictional biographies were commonplace at the time, and thus warrant caution when examining writings that may look like histories upon first glance.  However, there are also certain things we should expect to find in writings that are laden with myth and allegory as opposed to history.  We can’t simply try to categorize the writings as fitting within some particular genre, as myths have been written in any and all genres, even as historical biographies (as was just mentioned), for example Plutarch’s Life of Romulus.  In fact, quite a large amount of ancient biography, even of real people, was composed of myth and fiction, and thus we are forced to actually examine the content in detail to determine whether or not it is more likely to be myth or history.  Some characteristics of myth include (but are not necessarily limited to): potent and meaningful emulation of previous myths, or potent emulation of real events in some cases; the presence of historical improbabilities — which is not only limited to magic or miracles, but also natural events and human behaviors that are unrealistic as well as the presence of amazing coincidences; and also the absence of external corroboration of key (rather than peripheral) elements, since a myth often incorporates some real historical people and places that surround a central mythical character and story (just as we see in most fiction, e.g., though Dorothy’s home-state of Kansas is a real place, the primary setting, main characters, and story in The Wizard of Oz, including the Wizard of Oz himself, are fictional constructs).  It should be noted that not all of these characteristics need be present simultaneously for a story to be myth, but the more that are, or the more instances of each type found, only increases the likelihood that what one is reading is in fact myth rather than history.

From a historical-critical perspective, the most important thing to note is that whenever there are elements of myth found in a story, the rest of the story can no longer be used as reliable historical evidence (concerning any of the more plausible events found within the same story), due to the principle of contamination — just as a court of law assumes that a personal testimony that contains claims of magic, miracles, amazing coincidences or other implausibilities occurring is highly suspect, unreliable, and therefore must be dismissed from the pool of evidence under consideration.  So in the context of the Gospels, if they are in fact demonstrated to be filled with highly devised literary structures constituting elements of allegory and myth, though that fact isn’t in itself evidence against a historical Jesus, it means that the Gospels can no longer be used as evidence for a historical Jesus.  Furthermore, if any mythic content found in the Gospels can be cross-examined with other examples of myth found in history, for example, if one demonstrates that there is a historically high probability that any person claimed to possess certain attributes (e.g. being born of a virgin) are usually non-historical people, then the Gospels can in fact be used as evidence against the historicity of Jesus (as opposed to them merely being unusable to support historicity).  Before I begin, I want to mention that although the Gospels in the New Testament (NT) had anonymous authors, for the sake of simplicity, I will refer to the authors as Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John.

Beginning with the later story of Barabbas in Mark’s crucifixion narrative (Mark 15.6-15), Mark tells us:

“At the feast, Pilate used to release to them one prisoner of their choice.  And there was one called Barabbas, chained up with those who’d engaged in rebellion, who in the insurrection had committed murder.  The mob went up and began to ask him to do what he usually did for them.  And Pilate answered them saying, ‘Do you want me to release to you the King of the Jews?’  For he realized the chief priests had seized [Jesus] out of jealousy.  But the chief priests stirred up the mob, so he would release Barabbas to them instead.  And Pilate again answered and said to them, ‘So what should I do about the one you call the King of the Jews?’  And they cried out again, ‘Crucify him!’  And Pilate, wishing to satisfy the mob, released to them Barabbas, and sent Jesus to be whipped and crucified.”

There are several elements in this passage alone that suggest it is surely myth, and not historical fact.  For one, no Roman magistrate, let alone the infamously ruthless Pontius Pilate, would let a violent and murderous rebel go free, and most importantly, no such Roman ceremony (i.e. letting the mob choose to free a particular prisoner) is attested as ever having taken place, as we simply don’t have any Roman documentation or archeological artifact found thus far to support such a claim.  Even more telling though, is the fact that this ceremony quite obviously emulates the Jewish Yom Kippur ritual, namely the scapegoat and atonement, and this apparent allegory takes place in a story that is itself about atonement (Jesus’ fundamental role as portrayed in Mark’s Gospel).  Since there is quite a bit of evidence that the earliest Christians believed that Jesus’ death served to merge the sacrifices of the Passover and Yom Kippur, it is surely no coincidence that Mark appears to have done just that, by having Jesus be a Yom Kippur sacrifice during Passover.

Another interesting coincidence is the name Barabbas itself, an unusual name that means ‘Son of the Father’ in Aramaic, and Jesus is often portrayed as the ‘Son of the Father’ as well.  So in this story we have two sons of the father; one released into the wild mob carrying the sins of Israel (such as murder and rebellion), effectively serving as an allegorical scapegoat (Barabbas), and the other sacrificed so his blood may atone for the sins of Israel (Jesus) — and we have one bearing the sins literally, and the other bearing the sins figuratively (just as we find in the Yom Kippur ceremony of Leviticus 16 in the Old Testament).  We get further confirmation of this belief in the Epistle to the Hebrews (9-10), where we hear Jesus’ death described as the ultimate Yom Kippur atonement sacrifice. Interestingly enough, it is also implied in this part of Hebrews that Jesus’ death and resurrection would have taken place in the heavens, as that was where the most perfect atonement sacrifice would be made and where the most perfect holy temple would be for which to pour the blood of that sacrifice (another element supporting the contention that Jesus was initially believed to be a celestial deity rather than a historical person).  So Mark here appears to be telling us through his own parable, to reject the sins of the Jews (notably violence and rebellion) and instead embrace the eternal salvation offered through the atonement sacrifice of Jesus Christ.

Additionally, in this story, Mark seems to be pointing out how the Jews are erroneously viewing Jesus as the scapegoat, where Jesus is scorned, beaten, spat upon, crowned and pierced, and dressed in scarlet, and though Barabbas is the actual scapegoat, the Jews mistakenly embrace him instead.  So Mark seems to be portraying the Jews as acting completely blind to the situation and choosing their sins (i.e. Barabbas) rather than their salvation (i.e. Jesus).  Finally, this story seems to suggest that the Jews have also chosen the wrong model for the expected messiah.  Whereas Barabbas could be seen as the murderous revolutionary, in line with the common Jewish belief that the messiah was expected to be a kind of revolutionary military leader, Jesus on the other hand, exemplified the suffering servant model of the messiah (another Jewish messianic model, though arguably less popular than the former), and one that would circumvent any need for a military revolution by enacting a spiritual victory through his death instead.  So the Jews appear to have chosen the type of messiah they want, rather than the type of messiah that God wants instead (or so Mark believes anyway).  Furthermore, rather than using a random lottery (i.e. God) to choose which “goat” would serve as the scapegoat, and which would serve as the atonement, the Jews removed God from the equation and made the choice themselves.  If one looks at all of these elements together, we can see just how brilliant Mark’s story is, having multiple allegorical layers weaved into one.

Only a few verses later, we read about the rest of the crucifixion narrative and find a link (a literary source) with the Book of Psalms in the Old Testament (OT):

Mark 15.24:  “They part his garments among them, casting lots upon them.”

Psalm 22:18:  “They part my garments among them, and cast lots upon them.”

Mark 15.29-31:  “And those who passed by blasphemed him, shaking their heads and saying, ‘…Save yourself…’ and mocked him, saying ‘He who saved others cannot save himself!’ ”

Psalm 22.7-8:  “All those who see me mock me and give me lip, shaking their head, saying ‘He expected the lord to protect him, so let the lord save him if he likes.’ ”

Mark 15.34:  “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Psalm 22.1:  “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

On top of these links, Mark also appears to have used Psalm 69, Amos 8.9, and some elements of Isaiah 53, Zechariah 9-14, and Wisdom 2 as sources for his narratives.  So we can see yet a few more elements of myth in the latter part of this Gospel, with Mark using other scriptural sources as needed for his story, whether to “fulfill” what he believed to be prophecy or for some other reason.

Earlier in Mark (chapter 5), we hear about another obviously fictional story about Jesus resurrecting a girl (the daughter of a man named Jairus) from the dead, this miracle serving as another obvious marker of myth, but adding to that implausibility is the fact that the tale is actually a rewrite of another mythical story, told of Elisha in 2 Kings 4.17-37 as found in the OT, and also the fact that there are a number of very improbable coincidences found within the story itself.  In the story with Elisha, we hear of a woman from Shunem who seeks out the miracle-working Elisha, finds him, falls to his feet and begs him to help her son who had recently fallen gravely ill.  Someone checks on her son and confirms that he is now dead, but Elisha doesn’t fret about this, and he goes into her house, works his miraculous magic, and raises him from the dead.  In Mark’s version of the story (Mark 5.22-43), the same things occur.  We hear about Jairus coming to look for Jesus, finds him, falls to his feet and begs him to help him with his daughter.  Someone then comes to confirm that she is now dead, but Jesus (as Elisha) doesn’t fret, and he goes into his house, works his miraculous magic, and raises her from the dead.

As for some other notable coincidences, we see Mark reversing a few details in his version of the story.  Instead of a woman begging for her son, it is a man begging for his daughter.  While in 2 Kings, an unnamed woman comes from a named town (Shunem) which means “rest”, in Mark we have a named man coming from an unnamed town, and the man’s name (Jairus) means “awaken”.  In Mark’s conclusion to this story (5.42), he mentions that “immediately they were amazed with great amazement”, and he appears to have borrowed this line from 2 Kings as well (4.13 as found in the Greek Septuagint version of 2 Kings), which says “You have been amazed by all this amazement for us”.  It’s important to note that this verse from 2 Kings (as found in the Greek Septuagint), refers to an earlier encounter between the unnamed woman and Elisha where he was previously a guest in her home and this verse was what the woman had said to Elisha on that occasion.  Then Elisha blesses her with a miraculous conception (as she was said to be a barren woman in 2 Kings).  In fact, this miraculous conception was of the very son that Elisha would later resurrect from the dead.  So to add to this use of 2 Kings we also have another reversal from Mark, reversing the placement of this reaction (double amazement) from the child’s miraculous conception (in 2 Kings) to the child’s miraculous resurrection (in Mark 5.42).

Another hint that Mark is writing historical fiction in his Gospel is the way he structures his narrative such that he can successfully accomplish certain literary goals rather than historical plausibility.  One primary example of this is the ceaseless incomprehension of the disciples to what Jesus is saying and doing, where they are quite honestly dumber than can be reasonably believed.  This archetype of the “dense lackeys” appears to be adapted either from Homer’s similarly unrealistic portrayal of Odysseus’ fickle and clueless crew, or the portrayal of the Jews in Exodus.  Mark’s use of this type of literary device, requiring the invention of narrative material to make the structure work, thus allows him to accomplish a certain literary theme that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise.

The disciples also behave unrealistically in other ways, such as being gullible beyond belief.  For example, in Mark 1.16-20, we read:

“As Jesus walked along the shore of Lake Galilee, he saw two fishermen, Simon and his brother Andrew, catching fish with a net.  Jesus said to them, “Come with me, and I will teach you to catch people.”  At once they left their nets and went with him.  He went a little farther on and saw two other brothers, James and John, the sons of Zebedee. They were in their boat getting their nets ready.  As soon as Jesus saw them, he called them; they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired men and went with Jesus.”

So after one brief statement from Jesus, without even a second thought, these random fishermen simply dropped what they were doing and followed him?  These fisherman didn’t have to be persuaded at all, even though they know nothing about this man, who Jesus is, or his reputation.  They don’t bother making sure that their means of income and food (including their boat) are taken care of as they leave?  Instead, they simply drop it all, leave it all, and go without question.  This kind of behavior is incredibly improbable in real life, as people simply don’t act like this.  However, in myth and (unrealist) fiction, it happens all the time.

Another way Mark develops this theme is through an elegant ring composition, another common literary device popular at the time (used in myth as well as in history).  In the central part of Mark’s narrative (revolving around Jesus’ travel by sea), Mark carefully crafted nested cycles of themes specifically to convey an underlying message about faith and one’s ability (or lack thereof) to understand the gospel.  Here is what the ring structure looks like:

Cycle 1:

Phase 1 (4.1-34) — Jesus with crowds by the sea (preaching from a boat)

Phase 2 (4.35-41) — Eventful crossing of the sea

Phase 3 (5.1-20) — Landing with healings/exorcisms

Interval 1:  Step 1 (5.21-43) — First stop (after an uneventful boating)

Step 2 (6.1-6) — Second stop

Step 3 (6.6-29) — Going around

Cycle 2:

Phase 1 (6.30-44) — Jesus with crowds by the sea (with an uneventful boating)

Phase 2 (6.45-52) — Eventful crossing of the sea

Phase 3 (6.53-55) — Landing with healings/exorcisms

Interval 2:  Step 1 (6.56-7.23) — Going around

Step 2 (7.24-30) — First stop

Step 3 (7.31-37) — Second stop

Cycle 3:

Phase 1 (8.1-12) — Jesus with crowds by the sea (with an uneventful boating)

Phase 2 (8.13-21) — Eventful crossing of the sea

Phase 3 (8.22-26) — Landing with healings/exorcisms

It’s really quite brilliantly crafted when you look at it: three triadically composed intervals, each of which contains one triadically composite minimal unit.  Furthermore, every “Phase 1” in all cycles, takes place during the day and describes Jesus’ actions with crowds on one side of the sea.  Every “Phase 2” occurs on the evening of that same day (though not stated explicitly in Cycle 3’s “Phase 2”, it is implied by what would have been a long sea crossing), and also describes actions between Jesus and the twelve disciples in the boat while in transit across the sea.  Each “Phase 3” represents Jesus’ healing (and/or exorcising) of people who either come to him or that are brought to him following his arrival on the other side of the sea.  Then there are other healings or exorcisms that are interspersed among the intervals that follow each “Phase 3”.  Each cycle of this triad occupies one day, so the whole ring structure represents three days, ending with a resolution on the third day — all of which concludes by transitioning into a debate regarding who Jesus really is and what the gospel really is (Mark 8.27-9.1, which is the first time we hear Jesus speak about any of this himself).

Prior to this triad, Jesus had also journeyed to the sea and taught by the sea three times without embarking on a boat (Mark 1.16, 2.13, and 3.7), and then he embarks on a boat (Mark 4.1, and 3.9), and makes six journeys by boat, three eventful ones (each being a part of a three-phase cycle repeated three times) and three uneventful ones that constitute a looser pattern (Mark 5.21, 6.32, and 8.10).  In between the three eventful sea journey cycles, we find two intervals where Jesus travels inland away from the sea of Galilee and back again, and these two journeys also share another triadic pattern: three land journeys in chiastic arrangement.  The first one, from the shore to the house of Jairus (Mark 5.22), then another from the house of Jairus to the hometown of Jesus (Mark 6.1), and finally from the hometown of Jesus to circulating around the towns (Mark 6.6), thus completing “Interval 1”.  Then the sequence is reversed, first circulating around the towns (Mark 6.56), followed by stopping at Tyre (Mark 7.24), and finally back to the shore (Mark 7.31), thus completing “Interval 2”.  So the arrangement appears to be ABC : CBA.

In both intervals, the first stop is always at a house, and in each case involves women and children.  Each circulating phase involves both the disciples and the authorities (Herod or the Pharisees).  The second stop in each interval is also an inversion of the other.  In the first case, in his hometown (a metaphor for Israel), “Those hearing him” are “astonished” and don’t believe in him (a metaphor for the Jews rejecting the gospel), while in the second case, in a foreign country among the gentiles, where he miraculously makes a man “hear” and the people are “astonished” in the exact opposite sense, saying he does everything well and proclaiming and spreading his fame everywhere.  So in both cases, “they were amazed”, yet the first was negative amazement, and the second, positive amazement.  As we can see, every unit of this narrative appears to serve the same purpose, a particular message about faith and the gospel, with the incomprehension of the disciples and rejection of Jesus by his neighbors and kin on the one hand, and the near instant faith of outsiders on the other hand, despite the fact that they don’t even understand it.  We even see this cyclic triad beginning and ending with the theme of “seeing, hearing, understanding” (Mark 4.12 versus Mark 8.17-21), and it continually contrasts human expectations with the actual realities that Mark explains of the gospel.

Adding to this already brilliant triadic ring structure is another one interwoven within it: two matching sequences of five miracles each, interspersed with parables, preaching, and some general references to miracles.  All of the narrated miracles in the triad form a well crafted sequential structure:

1st Sequence:

“Mastery of the Waters” (Stilling of the Storm) 4.35-41

“Exorcism of a Gentile Man” (The Gerasene Demoniac) 5.1-20

“Curing an Older Woman” (The Woman with a Hemorrhage) 5.25-34

“Curing of a Younger Woman” (Jairus’ Daughter) 5.21-23, 35-43

“Miraculous Feeding” (Feeding of the 5,000) 6.34-44, 53

2nd Sequence:

“Mastery of the Waters” (Jesus Walks on the Sea) 6.45-51

“Exorcism of a Gentile Woman” (The Syrophoenician Woman) 7.24-30

“Curing of a Deaf Man with Spit” (The Deaf Mute) 7.32-37

“Miraculous Feeding” (Feeding of the 4,000) 8.1-10

“Curing a Blind Man with Spit” (The Blind Man of Bethsaida) 8.22-26

It should be noted that many miracle narratives of Jewish holy men, including Moses, exhibit a sequence of five miracles, and in fact the two sequences that Mark uses have notable correlations with the wilderness narrative of Moses (Exodus 13-17), thus suggesting another likely source that Mark used for his miracle sequences.

Another literary construct that Mark employs involves the way he structured the entire Gospel, basically into four different parts: The Discipling Narrative (Chapters 1-3), The Sea Narrative (as described before, chapters 4.1-8.26), The Road Narrative (Chapters 8.27-10), and The Passover Narrative (Chapters 11-16).  While there is already a brilliant internal several-layer triadic ring structure in the Sea Narrative, there is yet another chiastic ring structure surrounding it, where the Discipling Narrative and Road Narrative mirror each other around the central Sea Narrative as follows:

A – Peripheral ministry begins (1.14-34)

B – People looking for Jesus to be healed (1.35-38), but Jesus says he needs to teach more people.

C – Jesus ventures out (“throughout all Galilee”; 1.39-45)

D – Jesus stops at Capernaum (2.1-12), and explains that he can forgive sins.

E – Problems and controversies (2.13-3.12)

F – An important gathering on a mountain (3.13-19)

G – Jesus is accused of being in league with Baalzebul (3.20-35), and preaches that those who reject Jesus are damned.

— The Sea Narrative (Chapters 4-8) —

G – Jesus accuses Peter of being in league with Satan (8.27-9.1), and preaches those who blaspheme the Holy Spirit are damned.

F – An important gathering on a mountain (9.2-13)

E – Problems and controversies (9.14-32)

D – Jesus stops at Capernaum (9.33-50)

C – Jesus ventures out (expands his ministry beyond Galilee; 10.1-6)

B – People looking to Jesus for boons (10.17-45)

A – Peripheral ministry ends (10.46-52)

Just as was most typical in the myths and legends of counter-cultural sages, Jesus’ ministry has two phases, the central one (in Jerusalem) and the peripheral one (outside Jerusalem).  In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus’ central ministry doesn’t begin until the last narrative, that of the Passover.  In the Passover narrative we see a few more ways where Mark employs triads, having three women who appear three times, touching each of the three days of Jesus’ death and resurrection (and at three stages: his death, his burial, and his resurrection).  Another notable finding within the Passover Narrative are parallels to Jesus’ Baptism mentioned earlier in Mark.  For example:

A- John cries with a loud voice (1.3)

A – Jesus cries with a loud voice (15.34)

B – An allusion is made to Elijah (Mark 1.6; 2 Kings 1.8)

B – An allusion is made to Elijah (15.34-36)

C – The heavens are torn (1.10)

C – The temple curtain is torn (15.38), which is a symbol of the barrier between earth and heaven.

D – Holy Spirit descends upon Jesus (1.10)

D – Holy Spirit departs from Jesus (15.37)

E – God calls Jesus his son (1.11)

E – The centurion calls Jesus God’s son (15.19)

The final parallel that I wanted to mention was that found between the Passover Narrative and the story of a different Jesus, named Jesus ben Ananias.  This was a man who was known as an insane prophet that was active in the 60s CE who was then killed in the siege of Jerusalem (around 70 CE).  His story was told in Josephus’ Jewish War, and thus Mark was likely to have known about it, and the number of parallels between what Josephus wrote and that of Mark’s Passover Narrative are far too numerous to be a mere coincidence.  Clearly Mark either wrote his narrative based off of what Josephus wrote, or based on the same tale known to Josephus.  Here are the parallels between Mark’s Jesus and that of Jesus ben Ananias as found in Josephus’ writings:

1 – Both are named Jesus. (Mark 14.2 = JW 6.301)

2 – Both come to Jerusalem during a major religious festival. (Mark 11.15-17 = JW 6.301)

3 -Both entered the temple area to rant against the temple. (Mark 14.2 = JW 6.301)

4 – During which both quote the same chapter of Jeremiah. (Jer. 7.11 in Mk, Jer. 7.34 in JW)

5 – Both then preach daily in the temple. (Mark 14.49 = JW 6.306)

6 – Both declared “woe” unto Judea or the Jews. (Mark 13.17 = JW 6.304, 306, 309)

7 – Both predict the temple will be destroyed. (Mark 13.2 = JW 6.300, 309)

8 – Both are for this reason arrested by the Jews. (Mark 14.43 = JW 6.302)

9 – Both are accused of speaking against the temple. (Mark 14.58 = JW 6.302)

10 – Neither makes any defense of himself against the charges. (Mark 14.60 = JW 6.302)

11 – Both are beaten by the Jews. (Mark 14.65 = JW 6.302)

12 – Then both are taken to the Roman governor. (Pilate in Mark 15.1 = Albinus in JW 6.302)

13 – Both are interrogated by the Roman governor. (Mark 15.2-4 = JW 6.305)

14 – During which both are asked to identify themselves. (Mark 15.2 = JW 6.305)

15 – And yet again neither says anything in his defense. (Mark 15.3-5 = JW 6.305)

16 – Both are then beaten by the Romans. (Mark 15.15 = JW 6.304)

17 – In both cases the Roman governor decides he should release him. (Mark 14.2 = JW 6.301)

18 – But doesn’t (Mark)…but does (JW) — (Mark 15.6-15 = JW 6.305)

19 – Both are finally killed by the Romans: in Mark, by execution; in the JW, by artillery. (Mark 15.34 = JW 6.308-9)

20 – Both utter a lament for themselves immediately before they die. (Mark 15.34 = JW 6.309)

21 – Both die with a loud cry. (Mark 15.37 = JW 6.309)

The odds of these coincidences arising by chance is quite small to say the least, so it appears Mark used this Jesus as a model for his own to serve some particular literary or theological purpose.  In any case, we can see that Mark is writing fiction here, through and through.

The last scene in Mark’s Gospel that I’d like to mention is that of Jesus clearing the temple (11.18).  This is another unbelievable claim, especially since the temple grounds were enormous, occupying many acres (the temple as a whole occupied nearly forty acres, and a large portion of that, more than ten acres, was devoted to public space), and they were extensively populated.  In fact, there would have been hundreds of merchants and moneychangers there, and the temple would have been heavily guarded by an armed force deployed specifically to prevent this sort of thing from happening.  Jesus would have been killed on the spot had this actually occurred.  It appears that Mark added this scene for another literary purpose, namely the parallel between Jesus and Jeremiah.  When Jesus clears the temple he quotes Jeremiah 7.11 (in Mark 11.17).  Jeremiah and Jesus both enter the temple (Jer. 7.1-2; Mark 11.15), they both make the same accusation against the corruption of the temple cult (Jeremiah quoting a revelation from the Lord, Jesus quoting Jeremiah), and they both predict the destruction of the temple (Jer. 7.12-14; Mark 14.57-58; 15.29).  Mark thus appears to be exhibiting knowledge that the Romans would destroy the temple, further illustrating that he was writing this Gospel after 70 CE, and so he composed a fictional story to suit the fulfillment of that “prediction”.

So we can see a large number of literary sources that Mark merely re-wrote for his fiction, a large number of parallels with other sources, many strange coincidences and other implausibilities, and most impressively several intricately crafted literary structures (some interwoven into others and/or several layers in complexity) and other literary devices that obviously served some overall literary purpose that Mark was trying to accomplish.  It’s easy to see why Mark would have to invent the various narrative materials that he did (hence the numerous historical implausibilities) in order to get the literary structure he wanted to work successfully.  There were indeed more elements of myth than those listed in this post, but I think these were the most telling and some of the most impressive ones found within Mark’s Gospel.  In the next part of this series, I will be discussing some of the elements of the Gospel According to Matthew as mentioned in Carrier’s analysis.

On the Historicity of Jesus Christ: The Euhemerization of a Myth

Not long ago, I finished reading Richard Carrier’s latest book titled: On The Historicity of Jesus, and I must say that I was thoroughly impressed.  For those that are unaware of Carrier’s latest book, here’s a link to a summary as found on the publisher’s website, here’s another link to a great PDF presentation of Carrier’s case, and finally, a link to a YouTube video where Carrier makes his case more clear.  Basically, Carrier re-examines the evidence regarding the historicity of Jesus, after being inclined by some friends and colleagues to read Earl Doherty’s The Jesus Puzzle, which basically makes the case for mythicism.  For those unaware of the mythicist positions (of which there are many), the most basic contention is that Jesus Christ originated as a myth and thus was never an actual historical person.  While most mythicist theories proposed thus far have been poorly researched and arrive at certain conclusions through fallacious reasoning and poor historical critical methodology, Doherty actually presented a plausible case for it.  After Carrier read Doherty’s book, he was asked (and inspired) to write a book on the topic.  Carrier’s On the Historicity of Jesus is in fact the first academically peer reviewed book to analyze such a topic, and a brilliant work at that.

Carrier dismissed mythicism for a long time and never took the claim seriously until relatively recently.  One of the main reasons for this was that the scholarly consensus was overwhelmingly in agreement that the man referred to as Jesus Christ did exist historically, even though he is believed to have been quite different from the man we read about in the New Testament of the Christian Bible.  However, when Carrier examined the reasons behind the scholarly consensus, he was surprised to see that there was a lot of fallacious reasoning used including the perpetuation of early Christian scholarly assumptions which were taken for granted to be true by later secular scholars.  Once Carrier confirmed this scholarly background information, he decided that he’d have to start from square one and re-examine the evidence from scratch.

Historicity or Myth?

In this new book, Carrier basically tests two hypotheses against one another; a minimal historicity position against one for minimal mythicism.  The two positions can be described as such:

Minimal Historicity

1. An actual man at some point named Jesus acquired followers in life who continued as an identifiable movement after his death.
2. This is the same Jesus who was claimed by some of his followers to have been executed by the Jewish or Roman authorities.
3. This is the same Jesus some of whose followers soon began worshiping as a living god (or demigod).

Minimal Mythicism

1. At the origin of Christianity, Jesus Christ was thought to be a celestial deity much like any other.
2. Like many other celestial deities, this Jesus ‘communicated’ with his subjects only through dreams, visions, and other forms of divine inspiration (such as prophecy, past and present).
3. Like some other celestial deities, this Jesus was originally believed to have endured an ordeal of incarnation, death, burial and resurrection in a supernatural realm.
4. As for many other celestial deities, an allegorical story of this same Jesus was then composed and told within the sacred community, which placed him on Earth, in history, as a divine man, with an earthly family, companions, and enemies, complete with deeds and sayings, and an Earthly depiction of his ordeals.
5. Subsequent communities of worshipers believed (or at least taught) that this invented sacred story was real (and either not allegorical or only ‘additionally’ allegorical).

Religious Trends & Other Background Knowledge

Carrier examined the background knowledge pertaining to the origins of Christianity within the context of the several centuries and cultures surrounding its development, and found that Christianity fit right in to the trend of other Hellenistic mystery religions that had formed prior to Christianity.  Various religions were forming as syncretisms of foreign cult deities and various Hellenistic elements, and in the case of Christianity, it appears to have been a syncretism of Hellenism and Judaism.  There were several other trends as well that were seen with newer religions in the centuries leading up to Christianity, aside from syncretism.  Another trend was the transition from polytheism to monotheism via henotheism, where there could be several gods or demigods (including angels and demons), but that were all subservient to one supreme God.  Yet another trend was that of individualism, where agricultural salvation cults were transformed or retooled into personal salvation cults.  A fourth trend was that of cosmopolitanism, where all races, cultures, and classes were admitted as equals, with fictive kinship (i.e. members were all “brothers”), and where people began to “join” a religion rather than merely being born into it.

Christianity was but one of many other religions that fit in line with these major cultural religious trends of the time.  Additionally, Christianity also shares some fairly specific elements with some earlier as well as contemporary mystery religions.  The concepts of a dying-and-rising Savior god (who is also the son or daughter of a Supreme God) that undergoes a passion or suffering of some kind, often sharing their victory over death by providing an eternal afterlife for their followers, also had a precedent in earlier Hellenistic/Pagan religions and mythologies (e.g. Osiris, Romulus, Zalmoxis, etc.).  Likewise, pseudo-cannibalistic rituals like the Eucharist were practiced by other contemporary and earlier pagan mystery cults whereby the participants would have a communal meal to symbolically eat the flesh and drink the blood of their gods.  Not surprisingly, baptism (whether in water, blood, or other media) was also a practice common to Egyptians, Babylonians, and other pagan cultures (e.g. followers of Mithraism, the mysteries of Isis and Osiris, etc.) for many years before Christianity originated.

So we can see the obvious influence (or at least cultural precedent) that Pagan/Hellenistic religions had on some elements of Christianity during its development.  Obviously there are notable differences between Christianity & other contemporary and prior religions (just as there were many differences between one pagan religion and another) but it goes without saying that the similarities are far more important in analyzing potential influences to Christianity’s origins, and the great number of similarities and evidence of Jewish/Hellenistic/Pagan syncretism is fairly obvious.  So within the cultural and historical context of the geographic regions in mind, Christianity is exactly the kind of religion one would expect to develop.  Likewise, the euhemerization of Jesus Christ, where he was likely taken from myth and only later placed into history, also fits in line with what many cultures did with mythological beings.  In fact, one important element of analysis that Carrier employs is determining where Jesus Christ sits within what is called the Rank-Raglan hero class, which is a selection of hero-type attributes discovered by the scholars Otto Rank and Lord Raglan.  If we make a list of only those that possess at least half of the twenty-two features on the list, there are many mythological beings that meet this criteria (at least fifteen heroes that are well known), but not a single historical person has been shown to make the cut.  Here is the Rank-Raglan hero class to demonstrate the point:

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).
21. His parents are related to each other.
22. He marries a queen  or princess related to his predecessor.

The fifteen people who scored more than half of these twenty-two features (in decreasing order) were:

1. Oedipus (21 features)
2. Moses (20 features)
3. Jesus (20 features)
4. Theseus (19 features)
5. Dionysus (19 features)
6. Romulus (18 features)
7. Perseus (17 features)
8. Hercules (17 features)
9. Zeus (15 features)
10. Bellerophon (14 features)
11. Jason (14 features)
12. Osiris (14 features)
13. Pelops (13 features)
14. Asclepius (12 features)
15. Joseph [i.e. the son of Jacob] (12 feaures)

As we can see, even though the number of real persons in the course of antiquity numbered somewhere in the hundreds of millions, and the number of mythical persons invented within the same time frame only numbered in the thousands at best, every single person on the list is a part of that much smaller group of mythical beings.  Another important point that Carrier makes regarding the people on this list is the fact that “every single one of them was regarded as a historical person and placed in history in narratives written about them.”  That is, they were all eventually euhemerized.  So the probability of Jesus Christ being the only exception on this list, that he alone was a real person in the midst of all others who were mythical, is staggeringly low.  In fact, the gospels of the New Testament look exactly like allegorical fictions, produced to place a Jesus on Earth with mythical tales, miracles, parables and sayings.  Carrier includes this kind of background information, including a literary historical critical examination of the Gospels, in his overall analysis, thus complementing a quite thorough set of background knowledge.

So What are the Odds of an Historical Jesus?

Carrier utilizes a Bayesian probability method for establishing the odds of the two hypotheses mentioned earlier, and this is accomplished by estimating the prior probability of each hypothesis on their own merit, and by noting what the probability of each hypothesis is given the background evidence that exists.  In all cases of probability calculation, an upper and lower range were estimated in order to give a reasonable “best” and “worst” case scenario (with the “best” case being far more generous than is warranted).  After examining both hypotheses against the available evidence, Carrier concluded that the likelihood of the historicity of Jesus Christ (and minimal historicity at that) had the odds of 1 in 3 at best, and around 1 in 13,000 at worst.  In other words, it is very unlikely that Jesus Christ ever existed as an actual historical person.  It seems much more likely that Jesus Christ originated as a celestial being and was later euhemerized, that is, placed into history, just as many other mythological beings were in times past.

This analysis in no way proves that Jesus Christ never existed, but it does establish that the burden of proof is now on those trying to defend historicity, as the analysis has indeed shown that historicity (and minimal historicity at that) is overwhelmingly improbable.  What I find most amazing is that so much of history over the last two millennia and so many different cultures across the world have been so greatly affected by the Christian religion, even up to this day.  Not only have these effects likely been based on the false pretenses of a historical Jesus, but almost all followers of the Christian religion throughout that history have been completely unaware of these likely mythical origins.

For those that wonder why we haven’t found large numbers of early Christian texts that support mythicism, one must realize that the early Christian church was looking for dogmatic stability, and this kind of stability is not as likely with a religion based solely on divine revelation (just look at the revelatory origins for Islam and Mormonism).  If the early church didn’t want someone else coming along saying that they also received revelations from Jesus (changing the dogma that was already in place), they would have better success if Jesus was placed in history, because once historicity is established (or assumed), it’s much more difficult to fabricate new and conflicting information.  Just as with the large number of other Christian sects that we know nothing about, the early Christian church that won the battle over these other sects would have chosen to preserve only those texts that supported their views, and in many cases would have destroyed those that did not.

It’s definitely worth marveling over the uncertainty of history, given the potent artificial selection pressures that largely mediated what has survived to this day.  Had we lost just a few more sources of historical information from antiquity, this analysis of Carrier’s wouldn’t have even been a possibility.