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Mark Goodacre debates Richard Carrier: Did Jesus exist?

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Once in a while, it’s fun to post a debate on a strange topic.

Topic:

Richard Carrier is the world’s foremost proponent of the “mythicist” view of Jesus – that he never actually existed as a historical person. He explains his theory that St. Paul only ever spoke of Jesus in the spiritual realm and that the Gospels are “extended parables”. Mark Goodacre is NT professor at Duke University. He contends that Carrier’s mythicist view is extremely far fetched and the evidence for the historical Jesus is beyond reasonable doubt.

Here are the participants:

Mark Goodacre is an Associate Professor in New Testament at the Department of Religion, Duke University, North Carolina, USA. He earned his MA, M.Phil and DPhil at the University of Oxford and was Senior Lecturer at the University of Birmingham until 2005. His research interests include the Synoptic Gospels, the Historical Jesus and the Gospel of Thomas.

Richard Carrier holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University in ancient history, specializing in the intellectual history of Greece and Rome, particularly ancient philosophy, religion, and science, with emphasis on the origins of Christianity and the use and progress of science under the Roman empire.

The MP3 file is here.

This debate took place on Justin Brierley’s “Unbelievable?” show based in the UK.

Carrier uses the letters of Paul as his sources, because they are the earliest. He doesn’t think that there is enough there to ground Jesus as a real person in history. Goodacre responds by looking at the letters of Paul to see what facts about a real, historical Jesus are there, and also which other eyewitnesses Paul talked to. In particular, Carrier has to respond to the early creed in 1 Corinthians 15 as well as his meeting with Peter and James, two other eyewitnesses, twice in Galatians. 1 Corinthians and Galatians are two early Pauline letters that are unanimously regarded as authentic. Carrier’s strategy is to try to introduce parallels between myths and the historical Jesus.

Goodacre also raises the crucifixion a historical fact about Jesus, which is a virtually undeniable fact about Jesus that is not even denied by people like the radical atheist John Dominic Crossan. Goodacre says that the crucifixion story would be embarrassing to the early Christians. They would not have invented a story of their Messiah-candidate being crucified – it was considered to shameful of a way to die. Carrier responded that other groups make up history that is embarrassing to them all the time. Goodacre says this practice was not common among the groups of Jews that we know about. Carrier says that there are other unknown groups of Jews that we have no evidence for who did do that. Then he calls arguing based on the practices of the Jews that we do not know about an “argument from ignorance”.

Carrier talks about how Philippians has that embarrassing passage about Jesus abandoning his divine capabilities to humble himself by becoming an actual human being, and says that this is evidence that he was not an actual human being. (Unforced error!) Philippians is another one of the Pauline epistles that is not in doubt. Carrier then says that John invents historical reports in order to emphasize certain things about Jesus, and therefore that means that other non-John sources are therefore all falsified by John’s exaggerating on some details. He then cites the radical atheist John Dominic Crossan to say that historical narratives are actually extended parables.

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Remembering “The Piltdown Man” – 100 years later

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Have the Darwinian faithful ever been so optimistic about their theory that they stretched the evidence dishonestly? Well, yes, there have been instances of “hiding the decline” in the biological sciences.

Here’s one described in the Seattle Times: (H/T Evolution News)

Tuesday is the centennial of the grossest fraud of 20th-century science: Piltdown man. It is a case worth remembering.

On Dec. 18, 1912, amateur geologist Charles Dawson presented to the Geological Society of London a partial skull. It was purported to be a human ancestor 500,000 to 1 million years old, an age scientists now assign to Homo erectus. Dawson said he had found the fossils in a gravel pit near Piltdown Common, south of London.

Dawson had no scientific credentials, but his friend Arthur Smith Woodward did. Woodward was the keeper of the geological department at the British Museum. He had been at the dig and had seen the jawbone “fly out” of the ground under the blow of Dawson’s pick.

There was a problem with the jawbone. It was from an orangutan only a few hundred years old. It was fitted with two fossilized chimpanzee teeth, filed down to make them look more like human teeth. The cranium fragments were human, from the Middle Ages. All had been treated with an iron solution and acid to make them look older.

Scientists didn’t have many fossil skulls in 1912, but none of them looked like a human cranium with an ape jaw.

Several scientists, including one from the Smithsonian Institution, argued that the jaw and cranium did not match. It took 40 years for them to be proved right, and even longer for Dawson to be confirmed as the con man responsible.

The surprising thing is that this is not the only time that this has happened with Darwinists and global warmists.

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Interview with cold case homicide detective J. Warner Wallace

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Cold-Case Christianity by J. Warner Wallace
Cold-Case Christianity by J. Warner Wallace

J.W. Wartick reviewed the book a while back, and called it “the best introductory apologetics book in regards to the historicity of the Gospels I have ever read“.

Well, here is a new interview with J. Warner Wallace about the new book.

Excerpt:

How is Christianity a “cold case”? When detectives investigate cold cases, they’re investigating events (murders) from the distant past for which there are often no living eyewitnesses and little, if any, direct or forensic evidence to make the case. Detectives learn how to evaluate and employ circumstantial evidence to demonstrate what happened at the scene of the crime. In a similar way, Christianity makes a claim about an event in the distant past for which there are no living eyewitnesses and little, if any, direct or forensic evidence.

What is your background as a detective? I’ve been working murders in Los Angeles County for 15 years and cold cases for the past 12. Many of these cases have drawn national attention and have been featured on FOX News, Court TV and Dateline NBC. Along the way, I came to appreciate the nature of circumstantial evidence and recognized the skills I developed as a cold-case detective would serve me well in my investigation of the claims of the New Testament Gospels.

What are some of the principles of investigation used in Cold-Case Christianity to evaluate the claims of the New Testament? I’ve identified 10 principles of investigation I believe will assist believers and skeptics as they evaluate the Gospel accounts. Cold-Case Christianity will help people to understand the importance of investigative presuppositions, the role of abductive reasoning, the power and nature of circumstantial evidence, the value of word choice in eyewitness statements and much more. The techniques we use as detectives are appropriate and relevant to the study of the claims of Christianity.

What made you change from a self-described “angry atheist” to a passionate defender of the gospel? When I first read through the Gospels, I observed “unintended eyewitness support” from one Gospel account to another. Like eyewitnesses I had interviewed at crime scenes, one Gospel writer would describe an event in a way that raised as many questions as it answered. The parallel testimony of another Gospel writer would then inadvertently answer the questions raised by the first account. This “eyewitness attribute” I observed in the Gospels intrigued me as an investigator. I eventually decided to use the tools of Forensic Statement Analysis to evaluate the Gospel of Mark. My conclusions forced me to take Mark’s account seriously. My journey toward Jesus began with this investigative approach to the Gospels.

This book makes me think of Lee Strobel’s “The Case for Christ” book. He brought a journalist’s perspective to the historical Jesus. What could be more interesting than a journalist? A cold case homicide detective who has to make cases to juries all the time. Like Strobel, Wallace is coming from a skeptical background, too. So he knows how to talk to skeptics in a way that many Christians who have always been on the inside don’t know. I think it helps that he has an outside-the-ivory-tower career and has to deal with non-Christians and even criminals all the time. He’s rooted in real-life, and knows how to talk about spiritual things in ways that are interesting to ordinary people.

By the way, there is a Kindle edition of it, although I will want a hard copy to lend. I’m pretty sure that this book will be easy to lend to my co-workers – there is just something about detectives that people find interesting. Think of Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot, for example.