I finished reading Richard Carrier’s new book, “The Obsolete Paradigm of a Historical Jesus,” a couple of days ago. It did change my mind about the relative merits of the theory Jesus was only seen in visions versus the theory that Jesus was a real person. The evidence I thought was the strongest for the latter theory, passages in the letters of Paul suggesting he thought of Jesus as historical, is more ambiguous than I believed. The passages were those indicating Jesus was “born of a woman, born under the law” (Galatians 4:4), saying Jesus was of the Jewish race “according to the flesh” (Romans 9:5), and referencing “Jame, the brother of the Lord” (Galatians 1:18-19). Carrier’s arguments about those passages are very detailed and as far as I can tell sound.
I am not yet ready to lean definitely toward the mythicist position, but I do want to think this through more carefully. When I first looked into the work of Carrier and other mythicists about 15 years ago it left me doubtful that anything about an historical Jesus could be recovered. Subsequently I set aside my interest in the subject for a while. I have to admit that in the meantime my mind reverted back to the assumption Jesus was historical, probably less due to intellectual conviction than because that assumption had been part of my imagination for so many years.
My page on this site about the historicity of Jesus will have to be revised. My arguments there no longer seem sufficient to wave aside the mythicist position so easily. But I will keep my other pages mostly intact for now. What I intended with this website wasn’t really about whether Jesus was historical, although I am interested in the question. What I intended was to assess what the teaching of Jesus was. I want to do that both for its contribution to my own spiritual life, as the gospels have inspired me since I was a child, and as a means of discussing what look to me like erroneous versions of his teachings.
I will have to approach that question differently than I had planned though. Rather than trying to excavate a presumed teaching behind the various sources about Jesus, I’ll examine his teaching as presented by various authors, such as Paul and the authors of the four canonical gospels. Whatever points the sources have in common will be of interest, whether Jesus was historical, the product of visions, or a literary character of longstanding cultural influence.
So that is where I am at now. I’ll do a bit of rewriting of the current pages to clarify my intentions, and then resume my explorations into the endlessly fascinating topic of Jesus and the origins of Christianity.
Jesus Reconstructed 