How to indicate speculative relations?

> Philo doesn't ever mention Jesus

Why would he? He lived in Alexandria and moved in different circles. And he's not dealing with contemporary events. He barely mentions anyone. His overwhelming focus is on philosophy.

The idea is not that Philo thought Jesus of Nazareth was the Logos. Far from it. He borrowed the word Logos from the Stoics, and used it instead of the word Demiurge to avoid a problem of overlapping terms with different meanings.

Carrier's idea is that Philo, as the outstanding Jewish philosopher of his day, probably had a following among Hellenized Jews who were anxious to understand Judaism within a Platonic framework. Philo is famous for making the claim that Plato and the Greeks borrowed their philosophy from the Jews, who got it from Moses.

It's Carrier's idea (but not original to him, I don't think) that Paul was a Hellenized Jew whose belief system before Christianity was Greco-Jewish syncretism. In other words, Platonism or Philonism. It's an old idea among historicists that Paul's conversion experience on the road to Damascus might have been a sudden insight that Jesus of Nazareth was Philo's Logos.

But mythicists have always objected that the account of Paul's conversion is only from Acts (say 90 CE).

Paul himself only tells us he had some kind of revelation at some point. Before that he was persecuting the Christians, and he himself was "was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my own age among my people and was extremely zealous for the traditions of my fathers." (Galatians 1:14).

So, Carrier doesn't get specific. Someone, could have been Paul himself, could have been someone else or some group, could have plausibly drawn on the ideas of Philo to create a Mythical Jesus, after which Jesus became historicized in tradition, and later in the gospels.

To my way of thinking, Paul would certainly be the prime suspect for this plot line but you've already seen how I avoid coming to final conclusions. It's my Libra Rising ;)

Maybe I should add, just to be clear, that the strength of this argument is that all the pieces were already there to create the myth. No one had to come up with anything new. Even the name Jesus was already there, in the verses from Zechariah.

Sorry - tablet died - had to move rooms & fire up the computer. I was writing
:-) It appears that I'm the one who has forgotten. Apologies!

Hmm - it appears it was the wind down here at the beach, not my tablet playing up. Connectivity is bouncing in and out, so I'll have to contemplate this offline.
Of course, you know, Philo is my weakspot :-) and this project https://www.geni.com/projects/Herod-the-Hasmoneans-in-the-time-of-t... was me trying to pull together connections of influence from Alexandria to Herod's court (as Paul says he's connected to that family). It's Simon ben Boethus, High Priest who might have had the opportunity to ntroduce a Hellenised Judaism into the centre of Jewish thought. Or that's what I was trying to follow up.

The reason I picked on Olav Haraldsson (Saint Olaf the Eternal King of Norway) rather than Ragnar Lodbrok when groping for a parallel was not completely random.
The existence of Olav Haraldsson is pretty solidly embedded in the Norwegian historical matrix - lots of contemporaries who are mentioned in reasonably contemporary sources, lots of stories that hang together.
But his saga also contains several miraculous and frankly incredible elements, and the number of manuscripts that have survived that describe his life is *not* large. So there seems to be strong reason to believe in a "Historical Olav", and little reason (for a current-world-understanding person) to believe in either a "scriptural Olav" (miracles included) or a "literary Olav" (where someone came along and invented the whole thing).

Thanks for sharing, Justin. The Roswell example was a nice barb!

Harald,

That Roswell thing is sort of annoying, I think. I see the humor in it. And I have a lot of personal connections to Roswell and the story,.

But really. In the interest of giving his presentation some humor and punch, Carrier is misrepresenting the story. He does that a lot with other material, too.

Really, it wasn't just "sticks and tinfoil". It was almost certainly something along the lines of a crashed weather balloon. Then the government mishandled its release of the information, and that led to increasingly elaborate stories.

Carrier's point holds up, even under closer examination, but the facts are actually a bit different.

Well, that reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers

Harald, in some ways St. Olav is similar to another story I was thinking about using.

Annalee Skarin (1899-1988) was a "Mormon mystic". She wrote a bunch of books, most famously Ye Are Gods, that are still popular today. My interest in her is that she was my grandmother's cousin. Her books are mostly typical of her genre -- she communicated with the spirit world.

One piece that sets her apart from most others is that she believed that death is not necessary to make the transition to heaven. It is possible, she thought, to be "translated". That is, to enter heaven while still in your physical body.

When she was approaching death herself, she and her husband went to great lengths to hide it. Basically, she faked her own translation and non-death. She really did die but I often meet people who believe she ascended into heaven in her physical body just like Jesus.

That says something about the nature of myth-making. This is the 21st century. It happened in our lifetimes. There are records. There are living people who know the real story and aren't shy about telling it. But still there are people who believe.

Ulf, thanks for the link. I had never heard it called Chinese Whispers before. In my part of the world we call it Telephone. We played it in school, starting in Kindergarten, whenever the teacher wanted to make this point.

Sharon,

Yes, I definitely about your interest in this period. And yes, Simon ben Boethus will have been at the center of it. As you know, Philo himself was a shirt tail relative of the Herodians. And if Paul himself was connected also, then the family connections increase the plausibility that Paul was drawing from Philo.

I'm afraid I got sidetracked researching Annalee Skarin, once my connectivity returned to the usual 3rd world speed of a snail . Wowee!!! And pity for her relatives too.

Maybe a little embarrassing right now but she belongs to the venerable tradition of prophets and visionaries on the American Frontier. She'll end up being an iconic figure.

Oh dear - and she was a crackpot - and obviously quite a toxic influence on the lives of her children and husband.

On another point - I was just thinking to myself of the analogies that might be drawn between the gospel writers and fake news sites of today :-)

I'm not sure I would use either the words crackpot or toxic.

At least, her ideas don't seem particularly crackpot when judged against the entire spectrum of human religious beliefs. Her idea of translation, for example, has only minor differences from some other religions, but is so very improbable from a scientific point of view.

Her ideas were received enthusiastically by mainstream Mormons, until she was excommunicated. Then, everything fell apart. Her husband and children sided with the Church against her. Mormon women are supposed to defer to their husbands. A woman's salvation depends on her husband's priesthood so her refusal to give in was positively scandalous.

It would be hard to overstate the monolithic Mormon culture in the Intermountain West in the 1950s. When I was a kid, we were the only non-Mormon family in town, and that was itself scandalous. When I was much older, I had problems finding a job and a place to live because people didn't want to hire or rent to someone who didn't belong to the Church. I had a friend who committed suicide when he was excommunicated, even though he had been at odds with the Church for years.

So when I say Annalee lost everything, I truly mean everything. It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that she her personal relationships fell apart. But, toxic? That puts the blame on her for not submitting to authority. In fact, the real story here is so much more complex and interesting.

She seems to have faked her own death as a scam:, abandoned her teenagers completely, and convinced a man to leave his job one year before he'd receive his pension so they could go from one place to another under aliases for the rest of their lives in order to prove that her bizarre theory was true.

And the point is ... ?

I see an archetypal story. A visionary has a calling. It turns the world upside down. It draws crowds. The established church turns her into a dissident by condemning her. The way the particular story unfolds depends on who wins the battle.

She's not the first or the only. In the end it's the same story as Jesus, St. Paul, Mohammad, Martin Luther, Joseph Smith, and a thousand other visionaries and preachers.

I need to correct an mistake in my earlier message. I remembered the story wrong. I thought her marriage to Hugh Avarell ended after her 1952 excommunication.

That bothered me all day because it can't be right. By 1952 her two daughters were married but I know they were about 16 and 18 when their parents divorced. So, I looked it up. That marriage ended in 1942.

She married Reason Skarin in 1943, so she was already married to Reason when she was excommunicated. He did not try to make her back down. It was her ex-husband and older daughter who opposed her. Her younger daughter supported her.

Most of the published information about Annalee Skarin comes from the work of her older daughter Hope Hilton, who opposed her, and son-in-law Lynn Hilton, who was a professor at BYU and a Utah state legislator.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_M._Hilton

I had remembered an article in Sunstone that was more sympathetic. Sunstone is a magazine for Mormon intellectuals. Found it -- Samuel W. Taylor, "The Puzzle of Annalee Skarin: Was She Translated Correctly?" in Sunstone, April 1991. Here's the link:

https://www.sunstonemagazine.com/pdf/081-42-46.pdf

She was a popular speaker. Her excommunication came as a surprise. "After addressing an enthusiastic congregation, she was ushered into the bishop’s office where she was confronted by Elder Mark E. Petersen, a member of the Council of the Twelve. He denounced Ye Are Gods as inspired by Satan, and demanded that she repent and repudiate the book. "And then it was that I, who love Christ above all others," she wrote, "was acclaimed to be the great anti-Christ." When she rejected the ultimatum, she was tried by a Church court and excommunicated in June 1952."

The charges against her seem a bit dated now: "The major thrust of Elder Petersen’s reaction was that 'Mrs. Skarin announces that she has received her books as revelations from the Lord.' The Church believes in continual revelation, which only the president is authorized to receive for its guidance. Annalee 'does not so much as mention the president of the Church,' Elder Petersen charged, but 'attempts to give revelations on her own part and defends this fact even though she is a woman.'"

Really, though, her teachings were not much different from mainstream Mormonism. A guy I knew is quoted in this article as saying that the Utah church officials "just could not stand having a mere woman teaching their own doctrine and.., having it accepted as inspiration through her, instead of themselves."

All of this is a rather long way of saying I don't think Annalee Skarin is any more or less of a crackpot or scammer than other religious visionaries. The whole idea of a crackpot misses the point. People either believe or they don't.

The original point was that Annalee Skarin has some parallels to the story of Jesus, specifically around the question of her death. There are people today who believe she faked her translated, and others who believe the evidence of her death was faked. Similarly, the Christian scriptures tell us there were rumors the disciples stole Jesus' body to fake his resurrection, and there are many people who believe Jesus faked his death.

So, what we get is a modern parallel to Jesus that shows belief can spread quickly even if it's facially improbable, and even there might be evidence to the contrary.

I agree with Justin, either we often do believe or not. But some things are difficult to explain, events that have occurred that defy our logic, when trying to explain we often have to roam around in engineered solutions that is just if not even more farfetched than the simple truth that is that we simply can't explain everything in logical terms.

To say that everything is fabrications does not hold even though we live in a world of much falsehood where it's difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff or more correct, the truth from lies. Humans are anyway created to believe, even though the objective of our faith varies greatly so is the faith itself just as strong, it's a very small difference between the atheists and the religious. they are just as stubborn in their beliefs, so I myself prefer those who have an open attitude, doubt has its value.

Agreed.

I'm not sure if there's anything more to add to this discussion. I feel the need to defend the scientific method as necessarily underpinning historical / genealogical research. This discussion hasn't been about atheism at all - which isn't a set of beliefs - but how we assess data validity. That there are phenomena that science hasn't an explanation for is unquestioned. Science itself would never deny this: quantum physics is the most obvious example. The scientific method isn't atheist evangelism - so the analogy about the similarity to religion - which I presume refers to intolerance -doesn't really make any sense to me. While there are many phenomena that science cannot explain- death isn't one of them.

Sharon, I'm not understanding your point here. Both atheism and theism are ideological positions. And that's why Jesus Studies are so disreputable among mainstream historians. The field is dominated by theists who opposed by a minority of atheists.

From the outside looking in the conclusions on both sides have little to do with the scientific method or assessing data validity. The conclusions are tainted by subjectivity on both sides. The theists miraculously find reasons to support passages that might be questionable, while atheists miraculously find reasons to doubt the same passages.

The problem seems to be that the field of Jesus Studies only attracts people with an ideological ax to grind.

Historical methodology -- the scientific method -- is not served by a dogmatic approach. It requires as much impartiality as any of us can bring to the table.

To say science can explain death is to miss the point entirely. Death isn't the issue for a historians. Historians don't (nowadays) dabble in metaphysics. The focus is on the emergence and evolution of belief systems, not on whether those systems have scientific validity.

This is why it matters so much to find a way of analyzing the texts that gets beyond dogmatic declarations about validity or non-validity. The texts themselves are mostly late compositions, and very often they survive only in fragmentary copies that are even hundreds of years later. Analyzing them doesn't get you much beyond simplistic affirmations of personal subjectivity.

For example, when you say that Jesus did certain things to fulfill a prophecy, or that Annalee Skarin was a toxic influence on her family, you haven't actually said anything relevant to an academic argument. Narratives based on subjective reactions to the material are not the point.

With respect to Jesus, the much more important question is whether there was a historic Jesus to do any of those things. And, if there was, an honest acknowledgement that there is no way to establish without a doubt whether the event was devised to fit the prophecy, or whether the prophecy was pressed into service to give meaning to the event.

And with respect to Annalee Skarin, it's important to understand that her most of her beliefs fell firmly within the religious tradition she came from. Even her idiosyncratic take on translation was nothing more than a "logical" extension of the Mormon church's teaching about the translation of some biblical figures.

In other words, what constitutes a "reasonable belief" in terms of history is not, most definitely not, something determined by what is scientifically reasonable. Instead, the test is whether it is explicable within the culture from which it emerged.

My point was an objection to the introduction of atheism into a discussion about the historicity of Jesus; and the suggestion that the scientific method doesn't value doubt.

On =For example, when you say that Jesus did certain things to fulfill a prophecy, or that Annalee Skarin was a toxic influence on her family, you haven't actually said anything relevant to an academic argument. Narratives based on subjective reactions to the material are not the point.=

These are straw man arguments
-The comment about Annalee Skarin was a conversational aside on a life story you'd referred to. I wasn't making any point at all, except letting you know I’d gone and read it. Saying that somebody who pretends to be dead for more than a decade in order to prove her point is a toxic person, wasn’t offered as a counter to anything you'd said (in fact, I thought I was agreeing with you), or as an academic argument.

-I did not say Jesus did things to fulfil the prophecies. I said: “The most we can really say is that Paul appears to have believed that he did exist. To what extent Paul and his fellow exegesists believed, vs cynically manipulated, the life story to fulfill the OT messianic prophecies, is open to valid debate. And even if you fall on the side of true belief & actual events; you're left with a messiah who cynically manipulates his own movements to fullfill them.”
This isn't an unacademic subjective reaction. It isn’t a reaction at all. I was laying out the parameters within which any debate about the authorial intentions of Jesus’ biographers would have to fall.

More later - I have guests coming to toast the sunset, so had better go and get ready :-)

OK. I can accept your explanation that you intended your comments about Annalee Skarin as conversational asides. I read them as responses to my point that she is an iconic figure and typical of prophets and visionaries everywhere.

You don't like her. That's clear. But it's too black and white. It follows a line of purely political propaganda. I think you need more research,

Even so, she's a distraction here. She was relevant only because she is an example of someone who has followers who believe she did not really die. I hope that means if we have to give up debating here we can continue in private.

You said:

> And even if you fall on the side of true belief & actual events; you're left with a messiah who cynically manipulates his own movements to fullfill them.”

This is the part I'm responding to. And no, you're not left with that. This should be a very simple point. John Dominic Crossan sees the gospels as parables. John Shelby Spong sees them as a midrash constructed around a liturgical year, which amounts to the same thing. There is quite a bit of room here to see actual events that are being interpreted to make a connection to Messianic prophecies.

Richard Carrier sees the gospels and Acts as historical fiction, which amounts to saying almost the same thing but within a different framework.

And that brings us back to the inherent weakness of using imagined authorial intentions to excavate historicity.