Myth or Reality?
Does it matter?
In a remark on another forum, a responder to a question noted that he didn’t care whether Jesus was real or a myth, that since the Jesus of the bible obviously could not have done the things he was said to have done, that was enough for him as an atheist. That got me thinking.
As an atheist myself, in one way, that resonates. In one way, it really doesn’t, does it? If none of the miracles occurred (and as a modern believer in science, I cannot see any miracle of the type related there as being possible in the reality we live in), then seriously, the Christ of the bible must be mythical, right?
The problem with that statement from a historical perspective is that until modern times, people just didn’t think that way. Science wasn’t real to the vast majority of humans until actually very recently in human history. In some parts of the globe, it barely registers on the scale of reality for most of the population even today, in fact. Which is one reason why some religions hold such sway in those areas — people still see myth as reality, and truly don’t understand the concepts inherent in scientific circles that depend on direct observation and solid physical evidence. Concepts still very new to human society overall.
Go back a thousand years or so, and you could walk into town to go to the market, have a mild and harmless stroke on the way home, recover, then claim you saw the popular version of the local goddess tell you something amazing, and 99% of your neighbors would believe you. Or, you could outright lie and everyone but your family would. People claimed to see things supernatural in ways that were not considered to be fake or untrue on a regular basis — some cultures believed there was a supernatural being living in every natural plant or animal in nature.
Given that kind of cultural scenario, it’s no surprise that people could be taught in church on Sundays that Christ did all these wonderful miracles, and everyone would believe it. Or at least keep doubts to themselves, you know, just in case. Nobody even thought (or talked about it if they did) that some kind of evidence might be needed to consider whether the story might be true or not. And they didn’t because people NEVER considered the idea of “evidence” for physical phenomena a necessary kind of concept. After all, the idea of proof was limited to matters of legality and courts, which were far above the experience of most of humanity. So, what you were taught must be true, after all, right? Who questions Authority?
And Authority was who was teaching you. The Church had Authority, it was behind the ruling classes in Europe, supported them, and forced them to toe the line on religious matters, at least until the Reformation.
By then, the printing press had been invented, more folks could read, or knew someone who could, and knowledge became more available, slowly. Differing versions of the bible were eventually printed, and became more widely available.
Of course, until then, the bible was written in Latin, and only priests or scholars could speak Latin, so who had physical access to the written Word, anyway?
Until they did, and many saw that Word was, well, different from what the RCC taught, and people realized that the RCC was very careful about what parts got left out! Not just what they actually taught.
Then, eventually, science was invented. The idea that phenomena needed to be proven with observable evidence was introduced, and eventually, western societies began teaching that stuff to most of us.
Of course, this is a greatly simplified version of events. It was a lot more complex than that, but for my purposes here today, that’ll do.
So, enter the nineteenth century, and the relative expansion of the idea of biblical scholarship. It existed before that, but it wasn’t until the expansion of education to the wider masses that it became more widely practiced or understood. Before that, it was much more closely held to smaller, and richer, groups. But in keeping with that history, most of the scholars until very recently were employed by religious universities, where they were bound by doctrine.
But still, human curiosity being what it is, those folks began studying the bible as it had never been studied before, and slowly, over time, those folks started looking at real history, as being revealed by real scholars of history who were beginning to rely on actual physical evidence and not hearsay.
And also, as this was happening, scientists were advancing the practice of science where physical evidence IS the gold standard, because until more technology was available, human senses were all we had to go on, scientifically.
And so things carried on, western society getting more and more sophisticated, technologically and also scientifically, and education became more available. (Though the quality isn’t exactly similar across the board, but that’s a completely different breed of animal, much less color!)
And then, in 2013, enter Richard Carrier. Of course, he was around long before that, but that year saw the publication of his signature work (so far), “The Historicity of Jesus”, a peer reviewed book that set out to prove, using modern scientific and mathematical processes along with a close look at real historical data, whether or not Jesus of Nazareth was a real human being.
For those curious, here is his blog:
https://www.richardcarrier.info/
In it, he documents his activities and his work.
Now, I’m not going to get into the weeds. For the purposes of this article, his level of accuracy is not at issue. Why his work matters, however, is the meat of the matter.
It matters because in western society, we value science, and science depends on physical evidence to determine what is real and what isn’t. Now, of course, today, we can “see” a lot more than we could two hundred years ago, because of the advancement of technology, so our picture of reality today is vastly different from what we thought of as reality two hundred years back, and especially two thousand years ago.
Enter America’s religious community. Now, most of us aren’t fanatics, or horribly serious about our religious views impacting on our daily views of the physical world. We value what we were taught in school about science and the world we live in, and our world view includes the scientific point of view. What that means religiously, is most of us have this disconnect. We disconnect the miracle parts of the bible from the world we know and assume those are just made up, but the rest is kind of ok. You know, more primitive and superstitious societies back then, right? But we know better, don’t we?
Oops.
Do we? Really? Carrier points out that a lot of us haven’t quite thought that one through. He points out the quiet part — that in the realm of reality — the one we live in — the bulk of the evidence we have and can examine shows that during Jesus’ purported lifetime, there is NO physical evidence of his being real. A man who had supposedly upset the very top tiers of his society religiously, has no direct evidence that he ever lived, much less was tried and executed, while small-time relatively unknown criminals the Romans executed at that same time were regularly documented by name.
Now, again, please understand this is not an endorsement of Carrier’s case or conclusions, but merely a restatement of them to make my point.
The entire reason he is excoriated and initially scoffed at and ignored is because by pointing out that quiet part, he has hit on a weakness in the religious arguments of Christianity, and those whose livelihoods depend on that are alarmed that his work could affect their careers. How?
By destroying the beliefs in society that support the institutions they work for, thereby lessening the demand for their scholarship. Now, before you scoff at this, understand how that works.
Religious institutions get their money from people attending them for an education. There are also donors, but those donors donate for the same reasons people pay to attend — because they believe what that institution teaches, religiously. (Or, that institution’s secular curriculum is so well established that they consider the religious part a necessary side issue.)
If Christianity in the US becomes a lost cause due to people beginning to believe what Carrier and other mythologists (yes, there are others) are teaching, those numbers will fall, and one of two things will have to happen, eventually. Either they’ll fail altogether or they’ll have to change or dump that religious aspect of their existence. Both are, obviously, anathema to those who run or are employed by those institutions!
As a result, the very idea that Christ may have been merely a myth, to a lot of modern Americans, may be what tips their minds into disbelief. A lot of folks are almost there anyway due to the actions of the fanatical Evangelicals, and once people get the idea that those folks have been pushing a fake Christ, they’ll drop Christianity like a hot potato.
When THAT occurs, those religious institutions will have a real problem, as will all those biblical scholars whose employment contracts keep them toeing the line on their employer’s doctrines.
Ergo, those scholars have a real need to keep Carrier and his fellow mythologists’ ideas sidelined.
Oh, and just in case you think like they do, here’s his page where he documents others who also take his theory seriously. Note that he says, specifically, that not all of these necessarily agree with him, just that a lot of them say it is a theory that should be taken seriously from a scholarly point of view.
Thanks for reading! I do appreciate it!
(Is anyone else having an issue with their notifications being sent/updated the day AFTER the claps/comments/ responses actually got posted? Mine have been doing this for almost a week!)
