Did Jesus Exist? by Bart Ehrman

Nothing you said addressed the point if my comment. How is Marcion relevant? Do you understand anything about Marcionism? Docetism? It is a completely different religion from the Christianity that started developing at the same time. Which is 100 years after the supposed killing of the Jesus dude. 70 years after the death of the Paul dude.

Your point? Do you have anything relevant?

You said the Bible was Apocryphal.(You hedged it by granting the "dude" named Paul wrote stuff)I am saying the guy who called himself Paul, is accepted to have existed, and is massively accepted as the writer of 7 of his 10 epistles, which Marcion attributed to him.The only other book in the first Bible (Marcion's) is Luke-Acts.So 7 of the 11 are certainly not Pseudoepigraphic, by any stretch.I am saying your headline point is false.Demonstrably false.

maricons book was not the Bible.

There are two undisputed leaders in the Jesus Myther school: Robert M Price and Richard Carrier.Price has a 44 minute YouTube video called THE FIRST BIBLE and it is about MarcionHe also has a massive book called the Pre-Nicene New Testament, and it is his own translation of 54 early texts.Amazon has Price's own words reproduced

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About the Author
Robert M. Price holds doctoral degrees from Drew University in both theology and New Testament. He is currently Professor of Scriptural Studies at the Johnnie Colemon Theological Seminary, traveling lecturer for the Center for Inquiry Institute in Amherst, New York, and editor of the Journal of Higher Criticism. His books include The Amazing Colossal Apostle: The Search for the Historical Paul, Deconstructing Jesus, The Da Vinci Fraud, The Reason-Driven Life, Paul as Text: The Apostle and the Apocrypha, and The Widow Traditions in Luke-Acts: A Feminist-Critical Scrutiny. He has published in the American Rationalist, Evangelical Quarterly, Journal of Psychology and Theology, Reformed Journal, and elsewhere.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Marcionite invasion

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The history of a distinctively Christian scriptural canon begins with Marcion of Pontus in Asia Minor. Traditionally dated about 140 AD/CE, Marcion actually may have begun his public ministry earlier, just after the turn of the century. One ancient tradition makes Marcion the amanuensis (secretary) of the evangelist John at the end of the first century. That is probably not historically true, but no one would have told the story if they had not assumed Marcion was living at that time. It was a general tendency of early Catholic apologists to late-date the so-called “heretics” to distance them from the apostolic period in the same way apologists today prefer the earliest possible date for the epistles and gospels.

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Marcion was the first Paulinist we know of. It would later be a matter of some embarrassment to the church fathers that the earliest readers and devotees of the Pauline epistles were the Marcionites and the Valentinian Gnostics. We know of no Paulinists before these second-century Christians. The mid-first century existence of Pauline Christianity is simply an inference, admittedly a natural one, from taking the authorship and implied dates of the Pauline epistles at face value as works representing a wing of first-century Christianity. But it is quite possible that the Pauline literature is the product of Marcionite and Gnostic movements in the late first and early second centuries. Even if most of the Pauline epistles are genuinely from the first century, the most likely candidate for the first collector of the corpus remains Marcion. No one else in the relevant time period would have had either the interest or the opportunity. No one was as interested in Paul as Marcion. Why?

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It was because he shared with his theological cousins, the Gnostics, the belief that the true God and Father of Jesus Christ was not the same deity as the creator and law-giver God of Israel and of the Jewish scriptures. In this belief Marcion was perhaps influenced by Zoro-astrian Zurvanism, a dualistic doctrine, as Jan Koester suggests. Marcion allowed that the creator God was righteous and just but also harsh and retributive. His seeming grace was but a function of his arbitrariness: Nero might render a verdict of thumbs-up or thumbs-down as the whim moved him, and so with the God of Israel. Marcion deemed the Jewish scriptures historically true and expected messianic prophecies to be fulfilled by a Davidic king who would restore Jewish sovereignty. But Marcion deemed all of this strictly irrelevant to the new religion of Christianity. In his view, which he claimed to have derived from Paul’s epistles, Jesus Christ was the son and revealer of an alien God who had not created the world, had not given the Torah to Moses, and would not judge mankind. The Father of Jesus Christ was a God of perfect love and righteousness who would punish no one. Through Jesus, and by extension Paul, the Christian God offered humans the opportunity to be adopted as his children. If they were gentiles, this meant a break with paganism. If they were Jews, it entailed a break from Judaism and the Torah. Marcion preached a strict morality. All sex was sinful. Begetting children only produced more souls to live in bondage to the creator. Marcion believed Jesus had no physical birth but had appeared out of heaven one day in a body that seemed to be that of a thirty-year-old, complete with a misleading belly button, although not human at all: rather a celestial being. Jesus taught and was later crucified. His twelve disciples were to spread his gospel of an alien God and his adoption of all who would come to him. But things v/ent awry: the disciples, as thick-headed and prone to misunderstanding as they appear in the Gospel of Mark, underestimated the discontinuity of Jesus’ new revelation with their hereditary Judaism, thereby combining the two. This was the origin of the Judaiz-ing heresy with which Paul deals in Galatians and elsewhere.

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Marcion had noticed an oddity most Christians never notice as they read the New Testament: if Jesus had named the Twelve to succeed him and seemed satisfied with them, why was there a need for Paul at all? And why should he come to eclipse the others in importance? The Twelve are, for the most part, merely a list of names. By contrast, Paul wrote letters that formed the basis of much of the church’s theology. Marcion saw a simple answer: the risen Jesus saw how far off the track his disciples would go and decided to recruit another who would get the message straight. This was Paul. To invoke a recurrent pattern in Christian history, think of Martin Luther, Alexander Campbell, John Nelson Darby, Joseph Smith, Charles Taze Russell, Victor Paul Wierwille, and others. All these believed that original, apostolic Christianity was corrupted by an admixture of human tradition, and they believed they had a new vision of the outlines of the original, true Christianity and could restore it. This is what Marcion thought already in the early second century. It should not sound that strange to us. Like these later men, Marcion would succeed very well in launching a new church, one that would spread like wildfire all over and even beyond the Roman Empire. Most noteworthy is the fact that the New Testament was his idea.

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The emerging Catholic Church, which would develop into the medieval church, which then subsequently split into Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, was by this time employing the familiar authority structure of scripture and tradition. By scripture was meant the Septuagint, the Greek translation of Jewish scriptures, including the so-called apocryphal or deutero-canonical books of the Maccabees, Judith, Tobit, Sirach/Ecclesiasticus, Wisdom, Baruch, the Epistle of Jeremiah, 1 Esdras, and so on. This was “scripture.” Tradition, on the other hand, was a growing body of sayings attributed to Jesus and stories about him, as well as the summaries of “apostolic” doctrine represented in such formulae as the Apostles Creed and similar summaries in the late second century by writers like Irenaeus and Tertullian, to name two. There were a number of early Christian writings of various kinds (gospels, epistles, apostolic acts, revelations, church manuals) that were written and circulated more or less widely, but these were at first more expressions of the.faith than either the source or criteria for faith. That is not to say they were not important. Think of the writings of Calvin and Luther: they are important to Calvinists and Lutherans who still study them, but Calvinists and Lutherans would not consider the wise writings of their founders to be scripture on the same level with the Bible. Admittedly, the difference in actual practice may evaporate, but that is just the technical distinction that is important here. The question that concerns us is precisely how the early Christian writings came to cross that line and join the category of scripture. The earliest Catholic Christians felt no need as yet for new scripture since they found the Septuagint Bible adequate to their needs as long as they could use allegory and typology to see in it a book about Jesus Christ and Christianity.

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This reinterpretation of Jewish scripture was not something Mar-cion was willing to undertake. He insisted on a literal, straightforward reading of the Septuagint, refusing to treat it as a ventriloquist dummy and make it seem to speak with Christian accents. Theodore of Mopsuestia (350-428) had the same attitude, though he was no Marcionite. Read in a plain-sense fashion, the Jewish scriptures, Mar-cion realized, had nothing to do with Christianity. Even lacking his belief in two different biblical Gods, one can see his point when one thinks of the strained arguments needed in order to make various Old Testament passages sound like predictions of Jesus. And it is still common today to hear Christians contrast the severe God of Israel with the tender Father of Jesus. So Marcion repudiated the Jewish scriptures. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe them, because he did. He simply felt they were the scriptures of someone else’s religion and didn’t overlap with Christianity as he understood it. Nor was he anti-Semitic or even anti-Judaic. For him, Judaism was true on its own terms, just not the religion of Jesus Christ or of the apostle Paul.

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Without the Septuagint as his scripture, Marcion felt the need to compile a new canon that would teach Christian faith and morals authoritatively. He accordingly collected the early Christian writings he felt served this purpose. These were paramountly the Pauline epistles except for the Pastorals, 1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus, because these did not exist yet, still waiting to be written in reaction to Marcion and other “heretics” in the mid-second century. Marcion had shorter, earlier versions of the texts than ours. Likewise, he had a book he knew simply as “the gospel” corresponding to a shorter version of our Gospel of Luke. Catholic writers decades later would claim he had edited and censored the texts, cutting out material that served to link Christianity with its Jewish background. Marcion no doubt did do some editing, textual criticism as it seemed to him, but it seems that Catholic apologists did much more in the way of padding the texts with their own added material, claiming their own versions were original and should be adopted instead of the Marcionite text. Marcion called his scripture the Apostolicon (“Book of the Apostle”). In his and his opponents’ claims and counter claims, we begin to see the inevitable relation of the twin issues of text and canon–which versions of which writings are authoritative?

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ASIN ‏ : ‎ 1560851945
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Signature Books; 1st edition (November 15, 2006)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 1248 pages

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This is the early Christian collection that we know of.It probably should count as THE Bible, with the definite article.If anything should.

Marcion's collection of works, some of which it is thought he wrote or heavily edited himself, predates the Christian, but it was not the precursor to the modern Christian Bible. The early Christian collection was likely a response to Marcion's, many of whose beliefs they did not share.Does this exchange you're having with Theodoric tie in to the question of the existence of the historical Jesus?--Percy

So you know nothing about Marcionism or Docetism. I was hoping these subjects were leading us to some evidence for the existence of Jesus. Marcion did not believe in a human Jesus, but rather in, Jesus the trickster, who was enveloped in some sort of magic at all times.

So in other words, you already knew that these subjects(Marcion in particular) would lead us away from the existence of Jesus as revered by many millions of Christians. All that your scholarly quest for the reality of Jesus Christ(as God) has done is reinforce your lack of belief. I can't persuade you to be a believer any more than you will persuade me to be a critical scholar. From Message 3

Theo:

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This book seems like it crystallizes my biggest criticism of Ehrman. He acts at time likes a creationist. he already has the conclusion and he searches for evidence to support his conclusion. He does not weigh all of the evidence and then come to a conclusion.
He has made comments in other books about
his*disdain for mythicists.*
His scholarship can be very impressive at times, but it seems like he may have thrown that out the window in order to attack his archenemy; the mythicists.

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It sounds like Earl Doherty uses evidence much better than Ehrman does in this book.

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Did you ever email Earl? You hang out with some of the biggest skeptics on the planet! Its a wonder...

What? I have no idea what you are trying to say here. What is the point you are trying to make? Again you have to resort to attacking knowledge and expertise in order to justify your faith. Not a good look.I have had email conversations with him in the past. I have had email exchanges with a number of scholars on a number of subjects. Relevance?
So you still have no actual argument or response so resorting to personal attacks again. Will you ever learn anything about debate?

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Marcion's collection of works, some of which it is thought he wrote or heavily edited himself, predates the Christian, but it was not the precursor to the modern Christian Bible. The early Christian collection was likely a response to Marcion's, many of whose beliefs they did not share.
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Does this exchange you're having with Theodoric tie in to the question of the existence of the historical Jesus?

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I actually don't think Marcion heavily edited, as he is often accused. But I am wondering where to start and what to respond to.I should just say that my initial point is that Theodoric was looking at later Bible collections (he mentioned Paul's epistles almost as an afterthought, when they were THE (Christian) BIBLE at first, and I felt it was quite a glaring error), and he was using that to make the point that The Bible was full of pseudographs, when quite the opposite is the case, if one uses the proper methodology - start early, when you look at datums.Now:Paul's letters are indeed relevant to the historical Jesus.Just look at the intra-Jesus Myther debates, for evidence of that. Robert M Price and Richard Carrier have different styles, to put it mildly. Different ways of reading the texts. Price will explain away a verse by saying later Christian scribes added it in, and Carrier will criticize Price. Price will respond, saying "How can we maintain Jesus Mythicism if we allow that Paul actually wrote this". Carrier will then show no less than five different ways the text can BOTH have been written by Paul AND be consistent with Jesus Mythicism.Then Carrier will give the Pauline quote a 1 to 5 scale grade score which indicates Carriers opinion as to how strong the evidence (every line in the Bible counts as a type of evidence to Carrier) can be used to argue for or against historicity of Jesus.

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So you know nothing about Marcionism or Docetism. I was hoping these subjects were leading us to some evidence for the existence of Jesus. Marcion did not believe in a human Jesus, but rather in, Jesus the trickster, who was enveloped in some sort of magic at all times.

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Marcion's beliefs probably were a radical descendent of Jewish beliefs in The Two Powers of Heaven.See the Alan Segal book (based on a PhD thesis) Two Powers In Heaven, from 1978.I can quote it if you want.As for Marcion, I doubt you will respond to points I make, if past discussions are any indication. You claim everything is off topic, and you complain about my pasts an/or book quotations I type up.I used to own far more books (plus journals) than I presently have in my possession.I presently have:Marcion The Gospel of The Alien God by Adolf HarnackMarcion On The Restitution Of Christianity by R Joseph HoffmanPlus some works by Joseph B Tyson (though not very many, like I once had, and I think his volumes I presently have are less specifically about Marcion than Paul)I tend to agree more with the latter two, on Marcionite issues.Price used Hoffman's chronology, among other things, I see. He made Marcion's life much closer to the time of Paul. Harnack had proposed that Marcion was already into adulthood at the end of the first century.edit: Hoffman made Marcion a first century adult. strike Harnack.Typo

I'm more likely to reply to on-topic points. Does the exchange you're having with Theodoric tie into the historicity of Jesus? Does Carrier have any evidence?--Percy

How about we go about things this way:Read this Richard Carrier response to Robert M Price, and then tell me what you think about the difference in techniques and style.https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/17174Understand that Theodoric often references Carrier as if his ultimate conclusions are self-evidently true (he is indeed impressive, granted)I should make myself into Theodoric when I debate the Many Worlds Interpretation, and use some lines from Stephen Hawking as my argument from authority showpiece. (He said the MWI is "self-evidently true" and accepting it as ultimate reality is "trivial")Nothing messy to see here folks, just accept an move on...

How about we follow the Forum Guidelines:

5. Bare links with no supporting discussion should be avoided. Make the argument in your own words and use links as supporting references.

--Percy

Galatians 1:19 has a "brother" reference to James, and it is an undisputed biological human named James, and a relationship (of some sort) to Jesus.Both the vridar site (run by Jesus Myther Neil Godfrey) and Robert M Price say it was inserted after 100 CE.Carrier responds to this type of tactic by Jesus Mythers:(OHJ is a book Carrier references, and I think Theodoric said he has a copy, so it would be nice if he could put Carriers arguments into a comprehensible response IN HIS POSTS HERE AT EvC)

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The one example Price spends the most time on is of course one of his own passion projects: his insistence that the letters of Paul are “heavily” interpolated (rather than, as I grant, only occasionally so) and that many deemed authentic, like Galatians, are really second century forgeries. The reason I don’t concede these points, however, is that there is simply no good evidence for them. Price’s case for such notions I found to be so multiply flawed I had to abandon it as unprovable, or indeed even contradicted by a balance of evidence. Galatians is so clearly a pastiche of Pauline correspondence, no credible case can be made that anyone in the second century would have produced it, even less so fabricated it in the first. And until far better evidence arises, I see zero basis for adopting its forgery as a premise. The improbability of that conclusion commutes to any conclusion based on it, so using it as a premise can only reduce the probability of any conclusion you want to reach with it.

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Indeed, that is so even if this premise’s probability were as favorable to Price as “50%,” as that literally means you are halving the probability of any conclusion you use that premise to reach. Why would I want to halve the probability of my conclusion? Even if we assigned Price’s case a 90% likelihood (and we can’t), that still lowers my conclusion’s probability by 10%. In other words, it does not increase anything; it always makes your case worse, no matter what your case is. So why propose it? We need facts to be well-nigh certain to use them as direct evidence in a case (see my discussion of this point in respect to Kamil Gregor; background facts can be less certain, but those will be ancillary, not central points in any case, and would be included only with the full recognition of their uncertainty).

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In my research I found the frequency of interpolation in New Testament manuscripts to be sufficiently low per century that we have no evidence-based reason to believe more than 1 in 200 verses have been inserted or substantially altered; and the rate might be as low as 1 in 1000 for the first century of textual transmission. Without any evidence the base rate is higher (and “evidence” means objective facts everyone can verify, not subjective suspicions or “feelings”), I cannot responsibly act like it is. The consequence of this is that to simply “say” the phrase “Brother of the Lord” was “interpolated” after the name James in Galatians 1:19 is to assert something all evidence indicates cannot be any more likely than 1 in 200. You are thus reducing the probability of whatever conclusion you then reach by two hundred times. Perhaps it is Price’s self-confessed inability to comprehend how probability works that prevents him from grasping this and thus realizing it’s a problem for his position.

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(BTW, I explain all of this, and how I derive these base rates, and how you need good evidence to overcome them, in OHJ: p. 569, n. 73, in respect to why we can conclude 1 Thessalonians 2:15-16 is interpolated, and p. 591, n. 103, on why that same reasoning does not work for Galatians 1:19. The data these base rates derive from I cover in my peer reviewed journal article on Tacitus reproduced in Hitler Homer Bible Christ, pp. 382-83.)

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It’s worth pointing out that “1 in 200” is vastly better odds than any supernatural explanation can claim (those come with prior odds of millions to one against even at our most charitable: see Naturalism Is Not an Axiom of the Sciences but a Conclusion of Them and The Argument from Specified Complexity against Supernaturalism), so interpolation is always more likely than “Jesus was a resurrected miracle-working demigod,” for example. But I am not ever testing mythicism against that hypothesis. I only consider non-supernatural theories of historicity as at all worth considering and thus comparing against mythicism.

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I mention this because of another cognitive error we all, but Christian apologists especially, are prone to: flattening all probabilities into the same probability. Everything that’s called “improbable,” for example, will be treated as equally improbable, and so “improbable” erroneously becomes synonymous with “not true.” And so, for instance, “that’s improbable” becomes an argument against accepting “interpolation rather than resurrection,” because they lose track of the fact that something can be both improbable and more probable than something else, e.g. “interpolation is more probable than resurrection” can be true even when “interpolation” is very improbable. People have a hard time grasping basic principles of probability like this, which is why it is so important to get better at it so as to educate them, or thus expose the mistakes in their reasoning otherwise resulting from their intuitive mathematical errors like this.

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Run from math, lose the argument. Learn it. Live it.

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Theodoric used interpolations as his dismissal argument against Josephus' reference to JAMES BROTHER OF JESUS CALLED CHRIST, and he referenced an obvious Christian insertion in another section of Jesus as proof.Theodoric does not tell us how Carrier scores the Galatians 1:19 reference nor does he tell us how Carrier scores the Josephus reference.

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Should We Assume Romans 1:3-4 Is Bogus?

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Price’s second criticism, which he builds on the first, is to ask, “how,” without embracing his position of a veritable swarm of interpolations in Paul, “can one harmonize the Mythicist notion of Jesus as a heavenly archangel descending to earth” (he must mean, sublunar realm) with the “adoptionist Christology of Romans 1:3-4,” which says “Jesus, though ‘declared Son of God in power…by his resurrection from the dead’, was already qualified as Messiah by virtue of his Davidic lineage.” Ironically, I think Price might be committing the very sin here that he is accusing me of: assuming modern mainstream conceptions of adoptionism and its relation to this passage are correct (they are not), in order to derive his conclusion that this passage must have been interpolated (By whom? An adoptionist contradicting themselves?).

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The passage in question reads (translating literally):

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…concerning His Son, [the one] having come-to-be from the semen of David according to the flesh [and] having been singled-out as God’s Son in power according to the Spirit of Holiness from [his] resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord.

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Romans 1:3-4

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Paul is consistently an adoptionist. He repeatedly implies God adopted Jesus as his son, throughout his letters, setting this up as a model for how we can be adopted by God and thus become God’s sons, too (and so Jesus is “the firstborn of many brethren”). And we know from Philo that Paul (and thus his fellow Christians) regarded Jesus as the already-established “archangel of many names” in Jewish angelology, who Philo tells us was always called the Son of God, in fact even “Firstborn Son of God,” the exact same phrase Paul repeatedly uses of Jesus (see OHJ, Ch. 5, Element 40).

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So it’s important to notice that Paul does not say in Romans 1 that Jesus was “adopted” as God’s son at his resurrection; he says “singled out as God’s Son in power” from his resurrection onward. Jesus is thus being reconfirmed in a station he had abandoned to effect his atoning sacrifice, being restored to power, the very power he had given up in the incarnation to be “a slave” to the natural world order (just as Paul says in Philippians 2:5-11). Paul makes clear Jesus was always God’s son, even from the dawn of creation (Romans 8:3-4, Galatians 4:4; cf. Ps.-Paul, Colossians 1:15; and Hebrews 5:5-10). So his being “singled out as” the Son from his resurrection onward (when he resumed his supernatural state, after having voluntarily submitted to a mortal one) was only a reconfirmation of a status he already once had.

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Price further conflates “messiah” with “Son of God.” The archangel Philo describes, who is clearly the archangel the earliest Christians believed Jesus was (and they believed this of him even if he existed), was always the Son of God. That was a position of supernatural status, not a biological reality. A messiah could also be called God’s son (as any king or priest could), but the messiah was a specific mortal-world agent, someone chosen (anointed) for a specific mortal-world task. All high priests and kings were so-described as messiahs (and “sons of god”). But “the” messiah often meant the final chosen one, who would inaugurate the awaited end of the world. Sometimes it meant the final messiahs—as in the Talmud, there are two eschatological messiahs, the penultimate messiah “Son of Joseph” who would die and then be resurrected by the ultimate messiah “Son of David,” signaling the last days (see OHJ, Ch. 4, Element 5).

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In Paul’s credal statement in Romans he is clearly using it in the final messianic sense: Jesus became not just any messiah but the Messiah Son of David in the flesh, meaning biologically (whether miraculously, procreatively, or allegorically; Paul does not say). This was a temporary, voluntary status he assumed, to initiate the end of days. It is a status he only held, and only could hold, in a body of flesh—indeed, Davidic flesh, as prophecy required. Because this is an explicit reference to the prophecy of Nathan (more tellingly in the Septuagint translation Paul is riffing on), that God would take “semen from” David’s belly and “produce” from it a Son who would sit an eternal throne; the figure thus described clearly being Jesus in Christian conception.

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There is no sense in which Paul would imagine someone’s becoming the Messiah Son of David by birth (by entering a body of flesh) as identical to being declared the Son of God in Power (a supernatural position of cosmic rule). That could only happen to a spiritual being (hence, “according to the spirit,” not according to the flesh). Paul is saying that the archangel who was the Son of God, already the appointed viceroy of the universe assigned many of God’s powers, indeed even tasked with effecting God’s creation for him (per Philo; and Paul, e.g. 1 Corinthians 8:6), gave up all of that (Phil. 2:6-7) so he could assume a body of flesh so that he could become the final Davidic messiah (Phil 2:8-10), for which sacrifice God then rewards him by reappointment to his former supernatural status as God’s immortal son and viceroy, once again assigned God’s powers over creation.

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Price complains this is “harmonization,” but it’s already in harmony. I don’t have to add anything to get this result—all of what I just said is well-established in evidence, not something I am making up to force a harmony. Philo and Paul do equate Jesus with the same archangel who was always the Firstborn Son of God in power. Paul is referencing Nathan’s prophecy. Paul did write and endorse the cosmological account in Philippians of how Jesus gave up that supernatural status to assume a body of flesh and die. Paul doesn’t say Jesus was “adopted” or only “first” so appointed to his cosmic viceroy status after that. And so on. What I am doing is not harmonization. It’s reading what Paul wrote; and doing so, as we ought, in the context of the actual evidence of what Paul and other Jews then believed.

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Only if you ignore all these facts and misread Paul the way modern historicist scholars mistakenly do can you get the problem Price has created. There is no problem. That’s a fabrication of modern historicist scholars. We need to read the texts of Paul as they are written, not with modern historicist assumptions; to the contrary, we should be adopting only those assumptions we can establish already were facts when Paul wrote (such as regarding Jewish angelology and messianism). Not circularly assuming later interpretations of Paul were extant when Paul wrote, so as to conclude Paul was endorsing those interpretations.

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I think Price needs to get out of the framework historicists have fabricated here, and look at the text anew. Just as he knows we should be doing. But we need to do it consistently, across the board. It is precisely by doing that that I get the results I do. It’s the one fundamental lesson historicists need to learn. And I think Price would agree with me. He just forgot to do it here.

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Theodoric should be making these arguments, here. And admitting to the reality of multiple possibilities

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Ejaculated, Cosmic, or Allegorical Seed?
A similar mistake might be what prevents Price from understanding how solid my arguments are that Paul meant “came-to-be from the seed of David” in a literal (and thus cosmic) sense or the same allegorical sense he means elsewhere—such as when he says even Gentiles, upon conversion, come-to-be “the seed” of Abraham, which Paul explicitly tells us he means allegorically. Although he is referring to metaphysical realities, he is not referring to copulation or procreation, he is referring to which world-order—mortal or celestial—we can claim heritage to. If he could speak this way of our being “of the seed of Abraham,” then he could speak this way of Jesus being “of the seed of David.” We have literally no evidence against that being the case. So we cannot claim to know it isn’t.

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I think the evidence for Paul in fact meaning what he says literally is even stronger—God took semen directly from David and formed a body for Jesus from it, the only way Nathan’s prophecy could be rescued from having been falsified (no eternal throne was sat by the seed of David’s belly). But that’s actually beside the point. My argument is not that we know what Paul meant here. My argument is that we don’t know what Paul meant here. I make this very clear in JFOS. There is no evidence to increase the probability of any reading of Romans 1:3-4.

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People who want Paul to have meant “descended from David” in the normal biological way have no evidence to offer that that’s the case. It’s simply a presupposition. And one that grates against the evidence: that’s not what the Greek says, in fact Paul speaks very weirdly here if that’s what he meant (as I explain in JFOS and OHJ); and it does not accord at all with what he says in Philippians 2, where Jesus does not descend from David, but from outer space, directly into a body manufactured for him—no mention of it ever being in anyone’s womb or produced by copulation. That means Paul is just as likely to have meant this verse in the directly literal sense (the least ad hoc way to read anything, as it requires no presuppositions at all), which is the cosmic sense (God directly made a body for Jesus out of semen taken directly from David exactly as Nathan said), or in the allegorical sense (just as Paul elsewhere speaks of being “of the seed” of Biblical figures). The issue is not that I or anyone can prove either of those possibilities more likely than the historicist’s; the issue is that no one can prove they are less likely than the historicist’s. Consequently, we can’t use this passage to argue for any hypothesis, historicist or mythicist.

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Perhaps Price’s inability to grasp how probability works blocks him from understanding this point? Because he seems trapped in a black-and-white fallacy where either Romans 1:3-4 “must” be referring to biological descent or it “must” be referring to a cosmic or allegorical framework. He is thus violating the Law of Excluded Middle by excluding a middle possibility: that we don’t know. Thus he confuses the ontological fact that, yes, it must be one or the other, with the epistemic fact that we lack the data we need in order to know which it is. My argument is the latter. I am not saying Paul did believe Jesus was given a body directly manufactured from David’s semen or that this prophetic requirement was in some way satisfied allegorically. I am saying we cannot know he did or didn’t. I am saying there is no evidence that makes the historicist interpretation any more likely than either of those alternatives, particularly given the weird way Paul phrases this in Greek, and what he, and the Bible, elsewhere say.

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So when Price says that the cosmic and allegorical alternative “strikes me as a fantastically cumbersome ad hoc hypothesis,” it’s not—nothing I say in defense of it is ad hoc, but all entirely, demonstrably true. It entails no more assumptions than the historicist reading does: they need to presume something strange about Paul’s choice of vocabulary, and about how Paul thinks this actually satisfies Nathan’s failed prophecy as written; they need to ignore the fact that Paul actually does talk about being of a Biblical seed allegorically (they have to just “import” their own assumptions that he “wouldn’t” do that here even though he did it there), and that Paul never says Jesus had a father other than God or “descended” from David (they have to just “import” their own assumptions that that is what he meant); they have to pretend Paul doesn’t talk about God manufacturing bodies (our future ones, and both Adam’s and Eve’s) and use the exact same vocabulary in Romans 1. And so on.

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By contrast, Price argues we don’t need to point any of this out because “scholars commonly understand Romans 1:3-4 as either Paul quoting a Roman creed-fragment to ingratiate himself with his readers, or as a post-Pauline insertion,” as if interpolation isn’t a vastly less probable option (as I just noted, and hence why few scholars embrace it here, and those who do, do so solely on circular presuppositions, not objectively verifiable evidence), and as if Paul’s having to ingratiate himself to a crowd believing Jesus biologically descended from David doesn’t outright refute mythicism altogether. It’s thus Price’s approach I find wanting. That’s why I don’t adopt it.

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Theodoric does not tell us the score Carrier assigns to the Romans 1:3-4 text.Carrier hardly says there is absolutely no chance Paul is referring to an earthly born, human Jesus.Theodoric never tells us what I will tell you:Carrier admits there are multiple possibilities.Carrier admits there is a certain amount of evidence that can support the argument for a historical Jesus.Theodoric only says there is no evidence that can justifiably be counted as supporting a historical Jesus.Theodoric wont tell you. I just did

You just cut-n-pasted 3000 words into a message. This, too, is from the Forum Guidelines:

6. Avoid lengthy cut-n-pastes. Introduce the point in your own words and provide a link to your source as a reference. If your source is not on-line you may contact the Site Administrator to have it made available on-line.

If you have evidence to present and arguments to make then that's what you should do. In your own words.--Percy