Richard Carrier

[Undeceived]

It still leaves you to explain your original implication that no one would report meeting the walking dead while the gospel writer did.

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?

But they weren't guarding an imprisoned man; they were guarding a DEAD BODY, presumably so that his disciples would not abscond with it during the night and claim that he had risen from the dead. Why would they expect not to be punished if they reported that A CORPSE DISAPPEARED, when that was almost certainly the reason they were posted?

Any Roman soldier who abandoned his post was sentenced to death. If you doubt me and wikipedia, google away.

How do the priests react to the report of an appearance by AN ANGEL OF GOD? By offering the soldiers a bribe and telling them to lie about it, even though the lie would probably cause them to be punished. And apparently, the appearance of a fucking messenger of god, which caused them to faint in terror, had no other effect on them once they came to and had a few coins in their hands.

How can THAT story make sense????

People refuse to respond to God all the time-- it's their freewill choice. The Bible, and life in general, is full of examples. The Israelites heard the LORD at Mt. Sinai and saw the Red Sea part, yet they worshiped idols anyway. If God appeared to you this minute, would you love Him? And if you didn't love Him, what would you tell others about your encounter?

If in fact the Christian claim is correct, that no one would expect a resurrection and therefore it must be true, why would anyone guard against what no one would expect?

The guard was against Jesus' disciples stealing his body. Matthew 27:

62 The next day, the one after Preparation Day, the chief priests and the Pharisees went to Pilate. 63 “Sir,” they said, “we remember that while he was still alive that deceiver said, ‘After three days I will rise again.’ 64 So give the order for the tomb to be made secure until the third day. Otherwise, his disciples may come and steal the body and tell the people that he has been raised from the dead."

[Minimalist]

The guard was against Jesus' disciples stealing his body.

You know, when the Romans crucified someone they left the fucking body on the cross as a warning to others. That was the whole point of crucifixion: sending a message. The Romans were far more adept at killing someone if they wanted a simple killing. A sword thrust was much cheaper.

But in the little passion play that xtians concocted a reason had to be found to get the body off the cross and into a tomb....then the tomb had to be guarded so it wasn't stolen but then there had to be no one around to see the godboy exit the tomb...except in the "gospel of peter

10. When therefore those soldiers saw it, they awakened the centurion and the elders, for they too were close by keeping guard. And as they declared what things they had seen, again they saw three men come forth from the tomb, and two of them supporting one, and a cross following them. And the heads of the two reached to heaven, but the head of him who was led by them overpassed the heavens. And they heard a voice from the heavens, saying, You have preached to them that sleep. And a response was heard from the cross, Yes.

which has veritable legions of Romans and "Elders" camping out watching to see if the godboy makes an appearance. It also has a giant walking, talking, cross which probably explains why it didn't make it into the bible.....it was too fucking stupid even for early xtians to swallow!

[A_Nony_Mouse]

Matthew 28:

A classic example of how later xtian writers had to edit their earlier shit to deal with claims that the body was stolen by his "followers."

I realize you fall for this shit hook line and sinker but try to understand that the rest of us see it for what it is.

Horseshit.

Damned near EVERY excuse/explanation/copout has to invent something to in evidence. And there must be at least four excused because there are four gospels. And then they must never admit the four are mutually exclusive. And they must never apply one ad hoc copout for one gospel to apply to the other gospels.

These people were born brain damaged.

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It still leaves you to explain your original implication that no one would report meeting the walking dead while the gospel writer did.

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?

Please explain why I would not make not of what thousands of people witnessed. There is no reason people would question me when I was merely reporting what thousands of people told me.

Yes, you are incapable of elementary reasoning.

If in fact the Christian claim is correct, that no one would expect a resurrection and therefore it must be true, why would anyone guard against what no one would expect?

The guard was against Jesus' disciples stealing his body. Matthew 27:

62 The next day, the one after Preparation Day, the chief priests and the Pharisees went to Pilate. 63 “Sir,” they said, “we remember that while he was still alive that deceiver said, ‘After three days I will rise again.’ 64 So give the order for the tomb to be made secure until the third day. Otherwise, his disciples may come and steal the body and tell the people that he has been raised from the dead."
[/quote]

Why in the world would they care about body theft? It was hardly a Roman issue what Judeans and Galileans did to there dead. Make all the claims you want. Is Rome going to notice? And why?

In the vernacular, who in the fuck would give a rat's ass if he resurrected or not? Not the Romans. The Emperor was not going to fall, the empire was safe regardless of who was king of the Judeans.

It does not make a lick of sense that any Roman for any reason would have given a damn.

The issue is the Christian claim that no one would have thought anyone would rise from the dead as "proof" of really rising yet the idea clearly dates from before he/it was born.

[Tonus]

Any Roman soldier who abandoned his post was sentenced to death. If you doubt me and wikipedia, google away.

Errr... that was my point. What good would a bribe do them, if the penalty for screwing up was death? Why wouldn't they instead admit that an angel of god came down and freed the risen Christ? Especially if the appearance of the angel was accompanied by AN EARTHQUAKE???

The story makes no sense, as told.

People refuse to respond to God all the time-- it's their freewill choice. The Bible, and life in general, is full of examples. The Israelites heard the LORD at Mt. Sinai and saw the Red Sea part, yet they worshiped idols anyway. If God appeared to you this minute, would you love Him? And if you didn't love Him, what would you tell others about your encounter?

Is it really true that people see such amazing things all of the time and refuse to respond? We live in a world where a people come in droves to see a smudge that they believe to be the face of Jesus and where someone paid $28,000 for a piece of toast with the virgin Mary's face on it. People constantly 'respond' to the dumbest and most superficial crap that has even a tenuous link to the divine. But we're supposed to believe that the events following the death of Christ were greeted with a shrug of the shoulders, even in the case of guards who might be executed for not telling the truth?

To me, it seems much more likely that people would respond to the truly miraculous the way they respond to banal things that they wish were miracles. Instead, we have a book with many examples of people who directly witnessed the hand of god and were, inexplicably, unimpressed. That just doesn't make sense to me.

[Lord Privy Seal]

Matthew 28:

11 While the women were on their way, some of the guards went into the city and reported to the chief priests everything that had happened. 12 When the chief priests had met with the elders and devised a plan, they gave the soldiers a large sum of money, 13 telling them, “You are to say, ‘His disciples came during the night and stole him away while we were asleep.’ 14 If this report gets to the governor, we will satisfy him and keep you out of trouble.” 15 So the soldiers took the money and did as they were instructed. And this story has been widely circulated among the Jews to this very day.

The Roman punishment for letting a prisoner escape was death. It would have been very much in the guards' and the chief priests' interests to "hush up" the resurrection of Jesus. If a man walking around looks and talks exactly like a dead guy you killed, what are you going to do? Deny that it's him. The magistrate will pretend he's witnessed a clever trick, nothing more. If he attempts to arrest Jesus again, he will have admitted that Jesus rose from the dead, thus inviting a Jewish revolt.

It's a conspiracy, maaaan! First of all, if you had watched Dr. Carrier's presentation, you would have seen that in gMatthew's chiasmic structure, this attempt to suppress Jesus' resurrection is set in symmetry with King Herod's attempt to suppress Jesus' birth. That story in turn was put into the Gospel to cast Jesus as the new Moses (compare with the story of "Pharaoh's" attempt to prevent Moses' birth). It is also used as a narrative reason for Jesus to travel to Egypt and return, thus embodying the origin story of the Jewish people. The passage from Hosea that Matthew quotes ("for out of Egypt I have called my son") is in context a reference to the Israelite nation as a whole, not a prophecy about a man in the future. Jesus thus becomes the founding archetype of a New Israel, the Christian community. Paul echoes this theme when he turns the story of Hagar and Sarah into an esoteric allegory about the earthly Jerusalem and the Heavenly Jerusalem respectively, contrasting "the children of the slave woman" (non-Christian Jews) with "the children of the free woman" (Christians).

The tale of guards placed on Jesus' tomb "to keep his followers from stealing his body" makes no sense as a literal narrative. Why? Because Pilate (supposedly) gave Jesus' body to one of his followers (Joseph of Arimathea) in the first place! Jesus' followers wouldn't have to steal his body to fake a resurrection, were they inclined to do so. They already had it!

Second, which one of Jesus' disciples was an eyewitness to this Top Secret Conspiracy between the Jewish leaders and the Romans? Why did the Conspirators invite him to the party? The fact that the author of gMatthew uses the omniscient perspective as a narrator to relate events that no Christian eyewitnesses could have seen ought to be a clue that he's telling a story, not relating "the facts" handed down from the Apostles.

How is this case any different? If dead people come into town professing Jesus as Lord and Savior would you, the magistrate or political scribe, record that?

The story is set during the Passover, when hundreds of thousands of pilgrims from all over the Empire were in Jerusalem. Plenty of them would have been literate, and the rest would have returned with tales of the stupendous events they supposedly witnessed. Keep in mind that the "Jesus as Lord and Savior" thing would not have had the kind of well-known talismanic significance at that time that it does now. It would have been a new idea. So, Jews at that time would not have had the kind of automatic adverse "nooooo, not 'Jesus as Lord and Savior!'" reaction that you're imagining here. That reaction is the result of 2,000 years of Christian antagonism and persecution. So, hundreds of thousands of Jews (not to mention all the Greek and Roman pagans) would not have automatically and uniformly leaped to a "Quick! We've got to try to stop Christianity from getting started!" conspiracy. The existence of that sort of narrative only makes sense through the lens of an already-existent and marginalized Christian community for whom the Gospel was being written. In other words, it's a reflection of the time of gMatthew's authorship, not the time of the story's setting.

Realistically, the reaction of Jewish and Roman leaders to the resurrection of a crucified miracle-worker, a horde of dead people crawling out of their tombs, a major earthquake, darkness upon the land and so forth would be something closer to "ERMAGHERD! ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE! MOBILIZE THE LEGIONS! CUT THE LIVING DEAD DOWN AND MAKE SURE THEY STAY DEAD THIS TIME! SUMMON EVERY PRIEST AND WIZARD YOU CAN FIND! WE MUST BESEECH THE GODS TO SAVE US!" than "Earthquake? What earthquake? Let's just hush this up, shall we?" Remember, Pilate and the Jewish leaders could not have known that Jesus and his undead army would all just conveniently disappear, remembered only by a handful of followers of a tiny sect. A powerful Necromancer with an army of undead at his command would have been rather more worrisome to the authorities than the prospect of yet another little messianic cult getting started.

The scripture under scrutiny, Matthew 27:

51 The earth shook, the rocks split 52 and the tombs broke open. The bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. 53 They came out of the tombs after Jesus’ resurrection and went into the holy city and appeared to many people.

54 When the centurion and those with him who were guarding Jesus saw the earthquake and all that had happened, they were terrified, and exclaimed, “Surely he was the Son of God!”

In the chiasmic structure of gMatthew, this is set opposite the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist. In that story, the heavens are split, and the voice of God proclaims Jesus as his Son. In this story, the Earth and the Temple veil are split, and Jesus' Sonship is proclaimed by men. As above, so below. This story only makes sense as a mystic allegory. Roman soldiers would not have been aware of a Christian doctrine of Jesus as the Son of God. They would not even have viewed Yahweh as 'the' big-G "God." To them, he would have been one more deity, like Zeus or Athena or Osiris or Isis. Once again, we are not seeing a realistic, remembered reaction of pagan Roman soldiers to supernatural events, we're seeing a narrative device in a Christian allegory.

Another thing to keep in mind is the Jewish burial custom in New Testament times. The bodies of the dead were placed on benches in rock-cut tombs (for those who could afford such tombs) and allowed to rot. A year or so later, the bones were collected and placed in boxes called ossuaries for more compact permanent storage. So, we are not talking about embalmed and buried corpses being restored to life, but disassembled skeletons packed in boxes. Or to put it another way, this story is an enactment of Ezekiel's vision of the "Valley of Dried Bones", which refers to the rebirth and restoration of the nation of Israel. Placed here by the author of gMatthew, it points to the establishment of the new spiritual Israel, the Christian community.

[A_Nony_Mouse]

It still leaves you to explain your original implication that no one would report meeting the walking dead while the gospel writer did.

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?

And you are telling me it weakens the case FOR YOU and it was one of the things you had to overcome as it caused you to question your faith.

In fact it does strengthen your faith. So it works. The author knew how to work the uneducated and gullible. Claims of the miraculous always sucker in the believers.

Specific to the issue the story says they were seen by many people. So it is remarkable that only one person mentions it IF it really happened which obviously it did not.

If in fact the Christian claim is correct, that no one would expect a resurrection and therefore it must be true, why would anyone guard against what no one would expect?

The guard was against Jesus' disciples stealing his body. Matthew 27:

62 The next day, the one after Preparation Day, the chief priests and the Pharisees went to Pilate. 63 “Sir,” they said, “we remember that while he was still alive that deceiver said, ‘After three days I will rise again.’ 64 So give the order for the tomb to be made secure until the third day. Otherwise, his disciples may come and steal the body and tell the people that he has been raised from the dead."
[/quote]

Why would anyone care if the body was stolen much less the Romans. They knew the Galileans were so stupid they would believe anything. It would hardly matter. After all they were so gullible they believed the gospel resurrection stories which obviously never occurred. Obviously it would not matter either way.

[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!"

[Undeceived]

The Jews and Romans in gMatthew don't react to an alleged factual resurrection.

It's nice that you've come up with a "just-so" story how this all happened. Now how about some positive evidence, as opposed to negative assertions that all our current Biblical evidence isn't sufficient and therefore "the Jews and Romans don't react to an alleged factual resurrection"? How can you logically leap from "there's not the overwhelming evidence I expect" to "it's all a lie"? Please explain.

Suppose you're writing The Chronicles of Narnia.

Provide an example in which early AD fiction-writers produced a work with depth and meaning comparable to the Gospels, which they did not intend to be taken as fact. One example.

[Lord Privy Seal]

It's nice that you've come up with a "just-so" story how this all happened. Now how about some positive evidence, as opposed to negative assertions that all our current Biblical evidence isn't sufficient and therefore "the Jews and Romans don't react to an alleged factual resurrection"? How can you logically leap from "there's not the overwhelming evidence I expect" to "it's all a lie"? Please explain.

Let me try to be more clear. The Jews and Romans portrayed in the Gospel of Matthew (as distinct from the real historical people of that time) react to a story ("let's ignore this and hush it up") rather than responding realistically to terrifying supernatural events ("THE SUN JUST DIED AND EARTHQUAKES AND ZOMBIES! WE'RE ALL DOOMED!"). This indicates that the author of gMatthew is concerned with spiritual stories and doctrines and the situation of his religious community, rather than writing a literal, accurate account of recent history. Dr. Carrier provides plentiful examples of evidence for this in the Gospel narratives, such as their carefully-constructed chiasmic structure, the rich symbolism they employ, and so on.

In other words, the portrayed reaction of the Jewish leaders and the Romans in gMatthew fits with the situation of the author and his community decades after the story's setting, not with the setting and events of the story itself. I cited "positive evidence"--the characters all somehow just know that Jesus' mission does not involve marching on Jerusalem with his undead army and magical powers to punish them for torturing and killing him. This is an anachronism. Like if a script-writer for M*A*S*H* (set in the Korean War) wrote in a reference to the Tet Offensive (the Vietnam War). If you were a future archaeologist reading a M*A*S*H* script from the ancient American Empire and encountered that anachronism, it would tell you that the author of M*A*S*H* was writing during the Vietnam War era or some time later, with that era's concerns foremost in mind, not taking flawless dictation of events at a military hospital during the Korean War.

Provide an example in which early AD fiction-writers produced a work with depth and meaning comparable to the Gospels, which they did not intend to be taken as fact. One example.

Every religious text ever written has/had "depth and meaning comparable to the Gospels" for the people who believe(d) in it. You think every religious text ever written--except for the ones you believe in--is fiction. I should also point out that I do not think the Gospel writers were consciously writing fiction the way, say, J.K. Rowling was when she wrote the Harry Potter books. I think they were writing allegorical stories (or parables, if you prefer that term) that they believed contained profound spiritual truth. And, as the video in the OP shows, they did so quite brilliantly, with multiple levels of ingenuity in the construction and arrangement of their stories. The Gospels are literary masterpieces of mystical literature. Trying to force them into the mold of newspaper reports is like searching for the racetrack where the Tortoise and the Hare held their famous race, because the story's obviously worthless if it didn't actually happen in some physical location on Earth.

[A_Nony_Mouse]

Provide an example in which early AD fiction-writers produced a work with depth and meaning comparable to the Gospels, which they did not intend to be taken as fact. One example.

The Aeneid http://classics.mit.edu/Virgil/aeneid.html By Virgil Written 19 B.C.E close enough to AD to count? You can google it. After centuries of Romulus and Remus all the Romans became descendants of a Trojan.