rationalskepticism.org

lpetrich wrote:Richard Carrier has recently delivered some very interesting talks on why he now thinks that the Jesus Christ of the Gospels was a myth.

Why I Think Jesus Didn't Exist: A Historian Explains the Evidence That Changed His Mind - YouTube
He has the slides for his talk online in this file: Historicity of Jesus

He had at first thought that Jesus mythicism was crackpottery, but after discovering Earl Doherty's The Jesus Puzzle, he changed his mind. He notes several trends in Hellenistic religion that Christianity fits very well: syncretism, monotheist tendencies, individual salvation, and cosmopolitanism, including being initiated rather than being born into the religion. Also that at least three dying and rising savior gods have documentation older than Christianity: Romulus, Osiris, and Zalmoxis. But he took pains to point out that Mithras did not die and get resurrected.

These Hellenistic savior gods have several things in common: They are sons of gods, and sometimes daughters, they go through a "passion", they defeat death and share their victory with their followers, and they have earthly stories told about them. Just like Jesus Christ.

RC discussed how Paul describes JC as celestial, just as some people had described Osiris as being. He also made analogies with the origins of Islam, Mormonism, and the Roswell ET mythos. That last one is a story that grew rather greatly in the telling, and RC proposes that the New Testament is much like that.

Why the Gospels Are Myth: The Evidence of Genre and Content - YouTube

His criteria for myth include:

• Meaningful emulation of prior myths.
• Historical improbabilities that are frequent and central to the story: miracles, remarkable coincidences, people who act in unrealistic ways.
• No external corroboration of central characters, though peripheral ones may be.

After noting a lot of fakery in the Jewish and Christian religious literature of around 2000 years ago, he noted various improbabilities in the Gospels, like people immediately becoming JC's followers.

RC then got into what he calls the Rank-Raglan mythic-hero profile. He gave a nod to Otto Rank and The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, as well as to Lord Raglan. Jesus Christ scores *very* high, alongside people whose existence we nowadays do not accept. I remember scoring some recent well-documented heroes, like George Washington, Napoleon Bonaparte, Abraham Lincoln, Charles Darwin, Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler (a negative hero), John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and Muammar Khadafy (another negative hero), and they all scored very low, about 5 or so. Tsar Nicholas II is unusual in scoring 14 (Nicholas II).

He followed that with "the ascension mythotype", something where Romulus is very similar to JC, complete with a "Great Commission".

Then a lot of stuff on chiasms and inclusions and parallels and their abundant presence in the Gospels. Real historians who try to write that way, like Suetonius, end up departing from chronological order.

RC concluded by noting some counterarguments, like using various historicity criteria. He claims that they are all either fallacious or fallaciously applied. It seems to me that this question ought to be addressed empirically, by comparing originals with mythicized versions whenever both are available.