Richard Carrier

[Lord Privy Seal]

Thanks for pointing that out. You demonstrate that it is even easier for political officials to ignore Jesus' resurrection than I made a case for.

See, here's your problem. This notion of political officials "ignoring Jesus' resurrection" only makes sense from a perspective where "the resurrection of Jesus" is a sect's religious doctrine that can be ignored. The establishment can only ignore Jesus' resurrection because it didn't literally happen on Earth a few hours ago. If it had, then in the eyes of those responsible for his execution, Jesus would have represented an immediate threat to their survival.

Here is a person who can (if the Gospel narratives were literal fact) control the weather, order demons around, manufacture limitless food out of a lunchbox and resurrect the dead. A person who drew huge crowds so eager to follow him that on one occasion they tried to make him be their king by force. Jesus would have been able to keep an army in the field without needing supply lines, with the power to heal its casualties and resurrect its dead. The earthquake and darkness would have implied even greater supernatural power. A resurrected Jesus would have represented a direct military threat to the Roman Empire and the Jewish puppet regime. "Hushing up the story" would not have entered into the leaders' minds, because they'd have had far more reason to worry that he'd come and kick their asses with his magic!

That the establishment is portrayed reacting to a story, a religious doctrine ("let's ignore this and hush it up") is proof that they weren't reacting to a fact of demonstrated supernatural power in the real world. They would have had no reason to automatically understand Jesus as safely ascended unto Heaven, due to appear only at the consummation of a future prophetic Apocalypse. Only a Christian would have that understanding in mind as they read the Gospel resurrection stories. Placing this developed Christian understanding of Jesus and his mission in the minds of Jews and pagans when even Jesus' disciples in the story could not have known of it is an anachronism. It provides more evidence that the author of the Gospel of Matthew was not cataloging facts, he was writing a story.

The portrayal of the Roman/Jewish establishment trying to ignore and hush up a story, a doctrine, makes sense in an allegory because that's the actual kind of opposition the Gospel's audience was facing: the threat of their teachings being ignored or suppressed.

Nutshell: The Jews and Romans in gMatthew don't react to an alleged factual resurrection. They react to the doctrines of the Christian community the Gospel was written for, with that community's understanding of Jesus residing in Heaven until a future Apocalypse taken as a given. This supports Dr. Carrier's contention that the Gospels were written as mystical allegories rather than as putative history.

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Suppose you fabricated the resurrection of Vladimir Lenin. You got all your friends to vouch with you that Lenin walked the streets of Moscow for forty days after his death. Would you, not telling your friends, throw two lines into your account mentioning how a graveyard was emptied and dead people inhabited Moscow? Would that strengthen your case?

Suppose you're writing The Chronicles of Narnia. You know that including talking animals and magic in your story isn't going to be a problem for you because you're not trying to fabricate history. If someone comes up and says, "Oh, come on, you don't expect me to believe in witches and talking lions, do you?" you'd either patiently explain to them that they're completely misunderstanding the intent of the Chronicles, or maybe just laugh in their face. You have no way of knowing that a couple hundred years in the future when modern civilization is collapsing (as the Roman Empire was when proto-Catholic Christianity came into power), that people would start claiming that the events in The Chronicles of Narnia must have really happened because the stories include real historical settings like mid-20th Century England, and Aslanianity is the new Imperial official religion. Or that a thousand years and some centuries after that, secular historians would start trying to figure out what "the historical Pevensie Children" were like, and debate over whether the Narnia stuff came from a pretend game the older ones set up for Lucy, or religious visions they claimed to have experienced.

Or, if Carrier's hypothesis is wrong, "the Jesus story" could be a legend that grew in the telling, a First Century version of the Roswell flying saucer crash. There's a Government Cover-Up™ in that story, too. I don't think anybody claims that Christianity got started when a couple dudes were bored one day, and one of them said, "Hey, I've got an idea: let's make up a new religion about this guy named Jesus who got resurrected from the dead last week!"