No, really, that's the claim in a sad piece at Wired, sad from Wired giving him a platform and also from letting him call himself a historian, with the professional implications that may have. I guess calling himself "Jesus mythicist," or "Gnu Atheist," let alone "liar about interpreting the Hebrew Bible" would be too much. (I now realize this is my first time to directly blog about him, though I kicked his butt repeatedly, via idiotic nonsense of his anally-retentive worshiper Coel at old blogs of Massimo Pigliucci. He is the first and second, and occasionally a troll as both, and was busted in the past, as discussed at one of Massimo's old sites, misinterpreting Aramaic Targums and eventually admitting by silence that he didn't know Biblical Hebew.)
Enough prologue, though. On to the piece.
It actually doesn't start with that claim, though. Carrier, presumably trying to spread his Bayesian erudition bullshit across a broad area, first puts the old "you killed your grandma" worry about backward time travel into a new twist. He says time travelers would risk this by taking modern viruses to the past, riffing on the title of the piece.
Let's take a look at an extended excerpt, because there's several issues.
In general Carrier thinks that science fiction authors tend to underestimate the difficulties a time traveler would face surviving in the past. “It would take you a while to get settled,” he says. “You’d have to figure out the customs, the language, how to get money so you could eat. There are a lot of things you’d need to sort out, because it’s basically an adventure mission. You’re basically going into the Congo with whatever’s on your back, and then you need to get your base of operations and figure stuff out, and then you can relax and wait for whatever scene or event you’re trying to watch.”
One of the biggest threats would be viruses, an issue that’s seldom tackled in science fiction. “The problem with time travel is that if you went back in time, you would probably wipe out the whole population then, and they would probably kill you within months with viruses that you have no immunity to,” Carrier says. “So note to time travel authors: You have to come up with a universal immunity so that the time traveler who goes back is not bringing viruses that everybody is not immune to, and is immune to viruses that his body has never encountered.”
OK?
The first graph? Pure absurdity. A Borg-like chip or something would address the language issue, and would be used to augment something like Rosetta Stone training. Money? Said time traveler would be equipped with shekels, talents, sesterces, or whatever, upon being sent backward. Also, as with Apollo 8 and 10 scouting things out before Apollo 11, a first time traveler would get the lay of the land for followers.
Viruses? Nonsense. The time traveler would be vaccinated against all the major ones, and be slipped some gamma-globulin etc. in the backpack for viruses without vaccines. No "universal vaccine" involved. As for the flip side? He's ignorant of vectors. Disease spread was only a problem in truly urban areas in antiquity. So, that's dismissed.
Next, there's straight-up Carrier arrogance:
“If I had to go into the past, and it had to be the Roman Empire, I would probably pick right after the victory of Vespasian, because from everything I’ve read, Vespasian seems a very pragmatic fellow. I feel like I could go there and convince him to institute a proper constitutional government, in exchange for certain technologies of empire, like the railroad, for instance, and the printing press. Possibly gunpowder. That wouldn’t fix every problem—it would turn the Roman Empire into the British Empire, basically, which is a slight improvement, but still pretty far back—but if we could get that constitutional government set in, we could have social progress as well as scientific and technological progress a thousand years earlier, and we could bypass the hell of the Middle Ages.”
Gee, what a shock that Carrier thinks he's smart enough to advise Vespasian.
If this happened, I'd slip in right behind Carrier, and whisper to him a riff on the old Latin proverb: Memento insanitate.
Oh, we're getting close to the "Jesus was Klaatu" (no, really) but not there yet. We are in mythicism territory, though:
“We have the complete Babylonian Talmud, and it does mention Jesus and Christians, but weirdly it always places the story of Jesus’ execution a hundred years earlier. It puts it right after the death of Alexander Jannaeus, in some sort of Hellenized Jewish context. [Jesus] is stoned by the Jewish authorities—there are no Romans, because Romans aren’t there yet—he’s stoned by Jewish authorities in Joppa rather than outside Jerusalem. So there’s this whole different narrative. He’s placed in a completely different century. And it’s definitely the same guy—Jesus of Nazareth, mother was Mary, the whole thing. … It’s usually just dismissed as some sort of change or error or whatever, but it’s actually hard to explain if there was an actual historical Jesus.”
Oh, let's start with the fact the Babylonian Talmud was written 500 years after the Christian gospels, Carrier. And, contra you on it, and contra former mythicist R. Joseph Hoffman on Toledoth Jeshu, while these Rabbinic Jewish writings may have elements that trace back earlier, they're less historic than the gospels, and ultimately have polemicist roots. Like these:
In the 1230s Nicholas Donin, a Jewish convert to Christianity, pressed 35 charges against the Talmud to Pope Gregory IX by translating a series of blasphemous passages about Jesus, Mary or Christianity. There is a quoted Talmudic passage, for example, where Jesus of Nazareth is sent to Hell to be boiled in excrement for eternity. Donin also selected an injunction of the Talmud that permits Jews to kill non-Jews. This led to the Disputation of Paris, which took place in 1240 at the court of Louis IX of France, where four rabbis, including Yechiel of Paris and Moses ben Jacob of Coucy, defended the Talmud against the accusations of Nicholas Donin. The translation of the Talmud from Aramaic to non-Jewish languages stripped Jewish discourse from its covering, something that was resented by Jews as a profound violation.
Beyond that, it's not hard to explain at all. This site sort of takes care of the rest of his claims about the Talmud.* (I once was tempted by the Alexander Jannaeus idea, as it provided an extra century for Christian growth to develop. But, all the Xn gospels anchor on John the Baptizer as well as Pontius Pilate as well as Caiaphas. Plus, Acts talks about disciples of John "versus" disciples of Jesus. And, it talks specifically about Apollos as one of them, and Paul mentions him, though without a tie to John.) This site takes care of the reliability of Jewish sources in particular as well as Carrier's sources in general, and puts the lie to Wired calling him a historian.
OK, and now, from a book I shall never read, referenced by Carrier.
The first Christians were preaching that Jesus was a space alien, he was like Klaatu from The Day the Earth Stood Still. That was their view. You really don’t understand the origins of Christianity if you don’t understand this. There’s a lot of pushback against it, because of the anachronistic belief that he didn’t come from ‘outer space,’ he came from ‘heaven.’ But back then that was outer space.
What bullshit.
Ancient people in general did not believe in "outer space" in this way. I guess Carrier is now channeling his inner Erich von Däniken. Metatron from Qumran was no more a space alien than this. Basically, this is drawing a caricature of the ancient world. It also ignores that the people intelligent enough to not only be literate but the ancient world's intelligentsia certainly weren't so simplistic.
And, yes, the Erich von Däniken of Gnu Atheism and Jesus mythicism is believed to be a historian by Wired. And accurate by the likes of Coel.
To wrap up? Back to this historian stuff. He is not, and he is even less a biblical scholar. His degrees may be in history, but his polemicist attitude undercuts his claim to be a historian. (Also, at the height of his mythicist high priesthood, he didn't peddle himself as one. He holds no tenure nor tenure-track academic position. He lists himself as "independent lecturer" through the present, which means nothing. His academic publications are few and far between. His only full books appear to be from a quasi-vanity press that focuses on Gnu Atheists and whose Wiki page doesn't even list Carrier! (Also, the founder of Pitchstone appears to have published his own dad as one of his first projects. And, some of the authors in the stable, like Peter Boghossian, are wingnuts, and Shermer's a full-on libertarian.)
I want to tackle "liar" one more time, though. He's a liar if he really believes that non-mythcist actual biblical scholars run scared of mythicism. No, it's more that with mythicists, especially ones like him that are Gnu Atheists as well, it's as much a Gish Gallop to engage them as it is Duane Gish.
Updated side note: While Paul says he doesn't really know any biography of Jesus, he DOES clearly state that Jesus was "born," and was a human being, normally born, in Galatians 4:4.
* I updated this to say "sort of" takes care of Carrier and the Babylonian Talmud because it doesn't fully address the BT's lack of historicity. Also, the guy's a nutter on Xi Jinping Thought.
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Other updates: For a VERY interesting take on not just proto-Rabbinic era Jewish literacy at the time of Jesus but a hot take on "the disappearance of half the Jews" and why, read this piece.
And, as a placeholder for future blogging, via that piece? The Jewish shtetl of "Fiddler on the Roof" et al was as much fabrication by photographer Roman Vishnaic as reality.
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