At 0:57 David’s comparison to the King Arthur legend was perfect for me. I read Tennyson’s “Idylls of the King” in high school and loved the stories, then I looked up British history to find when Arthur actually reigned. Imagine my surprise when I discovered he wasn’t there.
Actually King Arthur IS there, in the Welsh Brut, theres two of them ;) This was taught in schools up until 1920s! Athrwys ap Meurig in the Book of Llandaff an then the 2nd Artoris. Wilson and Blackett argue that the King Arthur of legend is an amalgam of at least two (out of five) historical King Arthurs between 200 and 1000 CE, and that Gryffydd ap Arthur - or, as we know him, Geoffrey of Monmouth - was the first to combine their careers. These two King Arthurs were Arthur ap Macsen, that is the son of Maximus who they say defeated the Emperor Gratian at Soissons, later killing him at Lyon in 383. Arthur ap Meurig, that is Artorius son of Mauricius who flourished 500-575, the “Liberator who smashed the various invasions of the first half of the 6th century”.
Great episode, always love seeing Fitzgerald and you know I love ya, Derrick! I've often wondered if the thing holding Ehrman from defecting to Mythicism is just his immense body of work that would need asterisks all of a sudden. Does he have too much invested in his current stance? I'd love to hear your response, Derrick.
I think it's something like this. He would have to do an awful lot of back tracking. Scholars are meant to welcome opposing views but this is too personal for him.
@@johnnehrich9601 Sure you can, we would just study it like every other mythology. Well, maybe eventually it will be merged into classics or perhaps a new field will emerge like late Hellenism or late antiquity and merge it into a grouping of things from around the same time period instead of having its own dedicated discipline.
@@johnnehrich9601 I’d like to see that happen if think it would really move the subject forward if more emphasis was placed on studying it in its context side by side to everything else that was going on in its time; socially, politically, economically, spiritually, religiously, etc..
My deconversion was that quick too. I was arguing with someone that there was no evidence for hell... and then it hit me... I literally felt my brain crack.
Here's another thought, regarding what you said at 1:13:50 about Alexandria, Egypt. It was a major sea port for ships from all around the Levant and when a ship would come into port, it was common for the people on these boats to take the writings and scrolls they had onboard to the Library at Alexandria, where they would be copied and added to the tomes of literature already at the library. There were other ways the Library got their 'books' including giving large sums of money to royal agents who would travel to places like Rhondes and Athens in Greece to purchase old scrolls and manuscripts and also to take scrolls from ships visiting the port of Alexandria, having their professional scribes make a copy of it, keep the original, and give the copy back to the ships captain: "According to the Greek medical writer Galen, under the decree of Ptolemy II, any books found on ships that came into port were taken to the library, where they were copied by official scribes.[38][3][39][8][20] The original texts were kept in the library, and the copies delivered to the owners." So, it's no wonder Philo was able to read the works of Plato and then expand on the Platonic 'gnostic' ideas of a divine, un-corrupted God who created a demiurge called 'the Logos' who spoke matter into existence (because the pure God could not interact with the physical world because it would corrupt his purity), and then these two divine being brought about a 3rd divine being that Plato called 'the world spirit'. What's interesting is that the Logos, as the divine entity that created the physical universe, is, by the act of creation, the intermediary between lowly humans who were created and the most high God who wasn't created, so the idea of an intermediary between God and man already existed in philosophical (Philo+Sohpia) thought prior to the creation of the myth of Jesus. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria
Very good discussion with lots of food for thought. I followed up with the article you talked about (Did Jesus Exist) and enjoyed it, too. Thanks guys!
@@scottsmith2235 There are videos of Russell Gmirkin who is an expert on the Elephantine Papyri discussing them in great detail. They are very interesting and informative. However, they can be somewhat "dry" and hard to sit through all at once.
What i wonder is why Paul, who was apparently born roughly around the same time as "Jesus" was supposed to be, somehow never met him and never wrote about his life on earth, nor in his epistles did he even mention talking with people who supposedly knew Jesus as a fleshly being, which you would think Paul would want to do and compare the physical man with the spiritual being in the air whom Paul met when he fell down on the road.
@@DaithiMcG Acts 22:6-11 is supposed to be Paul's first-person account of the road incident, at odds with the two third person omniscient accounts in that book.
@@deewesthill1213 Acts is widely acknowledged to be an unreliable source. David is saying that we never hear that tale from Paul himself; he never writes about it or references it in his genuine letters.
Note to myself I need to read more books. All of David's and then also I've heard mentioned Bart Ehrman, Richard Carrier, Philip Davies "Did Jesus exist", Dave Allen, Chrissie Hanson, Philo of Alexandria, Playing God - the evolutionary history of world religion
Excellent and savage interrogation Derreck. I think you've turned David back into a believer. Good job! Is there a book(s) that explain what the allegories in the Gospels are referring to?
Anyone who knows more than one language knows just how imprecise most of even the best translations are. If the gospel writers really thought they were recording for all of posterity, and they know they are NOT writing in the same language that Jesus spoke, you'd think after each quote in Greek, they would add the literal Aramaic words they thought came directly from Jesus's lips. That they don't, speaks (in any tongue) they were making this up.
@@atheologica (Lataster 2019) "Another biblical scholar who seems to have reconciled himself with the reasonableness of the agnostic position is the man to whom this book is dedicated. I agonised about whether to mention this, as some may find it opportunistic and impolite, especially given his recent death, but have decided to honour the great man’s memory by being transparent over his actually held positions, particularly as it makes it very clear that he was consistent in his minimalist outlook. That unflinching - and essentially persecuted - minimalist regarding the Old Testament, Philip R. Davies, revealed to me, a few months before his death, that on the Historical Jesus, “agnosticism is indeed a very sensible conclusion”, adding, “it concurs with my own”." Philip R. Davies, personal communication, February 14, 2018.
@@atheologica someone who doesn't believe in Jesus in either case, but I take your point. He wasn't making the positive assertion that Jesus didn't exist. Still, agnostics are attacked just as much as mythicists.
Sorry I missed this when it first came out. Still getting used to your live guest format. You couldn't have picked a more interesting and entertaining guest. I have heard some really convincing arguments for mythisim recently. Esoterica has a very interesting episode about the other 3 first century would be messiahs who DID manage to break into the contemporaneous historical record. As a matter of fact just heard on the E another interesting theory today that Christianity could be a creation of a certain mystical Jewiish sect that Paul may have been a member of. Anyway an awesome discussion men and as always keep up the good work! PS - Bryce really is the authority of Mormon history
Derrick, a couple of things you guys didn't touch on regarding the authors of the synoptic Gospels. Not only were they highly educated Greeks, they also had benefactors who financed their writings (they needed supplies to compose their works), they were from well to do families who could actually afford to send their kids to school to learn to read and write. There were no free public schools back then so if someone could read/write, you KNEW they came from a family of affluence. Also, the gospel writers likely had access to libraries and had staff who would fetch them materials and reference works from those libraries. I would also say that they likely had paid copyists who then took their 'autographs' (original copies) and copied them by hand and made enough of them to sell or give to these budding Jesus movement assemblies/ekklesia and probably to members of other cults located in these large urban areas (where many ecclesia met) because the authors would have lived in these more urban areas where there were the literary resources required to compile their mythic tropes and the general populace would often frequent more than one cultic center and worship more than one deity.
I still think the most important take-away from these arguments between atheists whether Jesus existed on earth or in people's fertile imagination is that there is so little information either way, there is no way to know any more than basic existence.
*Mark 4:10-12 also makes sense* if some people thought Jesus would bring the “Kingdom of God” in human form, but were disappointed by his death. Thus the invention of an even bigger claim: Resurrection, etc. But given the resurrection, why didn’t Jesus preach that and why didn’t people know about the Resurrection beforehand? Mark’s solution: write that he did peach it, but people didn’t understand. A historical, disappointing Jesus is a better explanation for Mark 4:10-12 than an invented Jesus.
P.S. I did a search. Can't find Philip R. Davies' Did Jesus Exist anywhere. Any ideas? Thanks. David, David, Davis. If JC didn't exist then neither did his cousin John the Baptist. We gotta be consistent here. Josephus was totally interpolated. David is right this stuff is fascinating. I plan to study Biblical stuff at Uni next year. Just cos I'm interested (and I have time).
PS I assume you're only joking, but it's interesting that only one gospel says John the Baptist was Jesus' cousin. The others can't seem to agree on just what their relationship was at all (or if they even lived at the same time)...
@Atheologica this is an excellent essay that I think sums up the current state of historical research on the Jesus question quite well, but it really doesn't do much to support the mythicist's cause.
I still think he was just a failed apocryphal preacher. Oh, not Jesus, Paul was. According to whom, Jesus never preached anything. (By this same token, one could claim Jesus was a failed artist, whom never painted a picture worth keeping. Or a failed gladiator who never entered the ring.)
The best book on the historicity (or lack there of) the bible, is by the archaeologist Israel Finkelstein "The Bible Unearthed" I highly recommend it. It's based on "boots on the ground" research.
Derreck! Somebody STOP me! At 1:20:06, you and David get into Jesus being an Egyptian. There might be some truth to this. Josephus mentions 'the Egyptian' in both the War of the Jews and The Antiquities of the Jews, as someone who came out of Egypt to Jerusalem who had followers, who was called a prophet, who took his followers to the Mt. of Olives and got into a skirmish with a legion of Romans who killed 400 of his followers but 'the Egyptian' escaped. This story is mirrored in John 18, when Judas brought a band of soldiers and some officers to betray Jesus, and Peter, having a sword on his person, drew it and cut off the right ear of the high priests slave, indicating there was a skirmish that involved Roman soldiers and this prophet guy named 'Jesus'. Also, Jesus' parents took him into Egypt for quite some time before coming back to Israel and it's possible Jesus learned magic tricks (turning water into wine, healing the blind 'plant' he'd put into his audience, etc) while in Egypt. Sometimes I think the Gospels do preserve tiny remaining kernels of true stories in them that might have happened at some point but that were 'mostly' lost via oral transmission. These kernels might point to either a singular person who inspired the later aggrandized story of the 'life' of Jesus, or might point to several messianic wannabe prophets who lived close to the time of 'Jesus' who wanted to become the 'savior' of the Jews by leading them in revolt against the Romans, which of course would get your ass crucified by those pesky Romans, but it did create the idea or template for a Savior to whom Greco-Roman motifs were later added to his basic story by the Hellenized writers of the N.T.
At 0:57 David’s comparison to the King Arthur legend was perfect for me. I read Tennyson’s “Idylls of the King” in high school and loved the stories, then I looked up British history to find when Arthur actually reigned. Imagine my surprise when I discovered he wasn’t there.
He will come back though, when England needs him most.
Actually King Arthur IS there, in the Welsh Brut, theres two of them ;) This was taught in schools up until 1920s! Athrwys ap Meurig in the Book of Llandaff an then the 2nd Artoris.
Wilson and Blackett argue that the King Arthur of legend is an amalgam of at least two (out of five) historical King Arthurs between 200 and 1000 CE, and that Gryffydd ap Arthur - or, as we know him, Geoffrey of Monmouth - was the first to combine their careers.
These two King Arthurs were
Arthur ap Macsen, that is the son of Maximus who they say defeated the Emperor Gratian at Soissons, later killing him at Lyon in 383.
Arthur ap Meurig, that is Artorius son of Mauricius who flourished 500-575, the “Liberator who smashed the various invasions of the first half of the 6th century”.
Great episode, always love seeing Fitzgerald and you know I love ya, Derrick!
I've often wondered if the thing holding Ehrman from defecting to Mythicism is just his immense body of work that would need asterisks all of a sudden. Does he have too much invested in his current stance? I'd love to hear your response, Derrick.
I think it's something like this. He would have to do an awful lot of back tracking. Scholars are meant to welcome opposing views but this is too personal for him.
@@SilverSixpence888 Personally, I think he would be talking himself out of a job. Can't do Jesus/NT studies if your main subject is just imaginary.
@@johnnehrich9601 Sure you can, we would just study it like every other mythology. Well, maybe eventually it will be merged into classics or perhaps a new field will emerge like late Hellenism or late antiquity and merge it into a grouping of things from around the same time period instead of having its own dedicated discipline.
@@johnnehrich9601 I’d like to see that happen if think it would really move the subject forward if more emphasis was placed on studying it in its context side by side to everything else that was going on in its time; socially, politically, economically, spiritually, religiously, etc..
My deconversion was that quick too. I was arguing with someone that there was no evidence for hell... and then it hit me... I literally felt my brain crack.
Here's another thought, regarding what you said at 1:13:50 about Alexandria, Egypt. It was a major sea port for ships from all around the Levant and when a ship would come into port, it was common for the people on these boats to take the writings and scrolls they had onboard to the Library at Alexandria, where they would be copied and added to the tomes of literature already at the library. There were other ways the Library got their 'books' including giving large sums of money to royal agents who would travel to places like Rhondes and Athens in Greece to purchase old scrolls and manuscripts and also to take scrolls from ships visiting the port of Alexandria, having their professional scribes make a copy of it, keep the original, and give the copy back to the ships captain: "According to the Greek medical writer Galen, under the decree of Ptolemy II, any books found on ships that came into port were taken to the library, where they were copied by official scribes.[38][3][39][8][20] The original texts were kept in the library, and the copies delivered to the owners." So, it's no wonder Philo was able to read the works of Plato and then expand on the Platonic 'gnostic' ideas of a divine, un-corrupted God who created a demiurge called 'the Logos' who spoke matter into existence (because the pure God could not interact with the physical world because it would corrupt his purity), and then these two divine being brought about a 3rd divine being that Plato called 'the world spirit'. What's interesting is that the Logos, as the divine entity that created the physical universe, is, by the act of creation, the intermediary between lowly humans who were created and the most high God who wasn't created, so the idea of an intermediary between God and man already existed in philosophical (Philo+Sohpia) thought prior to the creation of the myth of Jesus. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria
Really excellent show! Great discussion.
Let's go!
Very good discussion with lots of food for thought. I followed up with the article you talked about (Did Jesus Exist) and enjoyed it, too. Thanks guys!
Ah, yes - I think David, you are hinting about the Elephantine Papyri, the kryptonite, the ticking time bomb, of fundamentalism.
I know right, I don’t think the Elephantine papyri get enough appreciation for their significance as far as debunking abrahamic faith goes.
Wow-I didn’t know about this, will researching it. Thanks.
@@scottsmith2235 There are videos of Russell Gmirkin who is an expert on the Elephantine Papyri discussing them in great detail. They are very interesting and informative. However, they can be somewhat "dry" and hard to sit through all at once.
@@8RBrain Interesting-thanks.
What i wonder is why Paul, who was apparently born roughly around the same time as "Jesus" was supposed to be, somehow never met him and never wrote about his life on earth, nor in his epistles did he even mention talking with people who supposedly knew Jesus as a fleshly being, which you would think Paul would want to do and compare the physical man with the spiritual being in the air whom Paul met when he fell down on the road.
These are all good questions! Though to be fair, Paul never tells us that story about bumping into Jesus on the road to Damascus...
@@DaithiMcG Acts 22:6-11 is supposed to be Paul's first-person account of the road incident, at odds with the two third person omniscient accounts in that book.
@@deewesthill1213 Acts is widely acknowledged to be an unreliable source. David is saying that we never hear that tale from Paul himself; he never writes about it or references it in his genuine letters.
Note to myself I need to read more books. All of David's and then also I've heard mentioned Bart Ehrman, Richard Carrier, Philip Davies "Did Jesus exist", Dave Allen, Chrissie Hanson, Philo of Alexandria, Playing God - the evolutionary history of world religion
Excellent and savage interrogation Derreck. I think you've turned David back into a believer. Good job! Is there a book(s) that explain what the allegories in the Gospels are referring to?
Anyone who knows more than one language knows just how imprecise most of even the best translations are. If the gospel writers really thought they were recording for all of posterity, and they know they are NOT writing in the same language that Jesus spoke, you'd think after each quote in Greek, they would add the literal Aramaic words they thought came directly from Jesus's lips.
That they don't, speaks (in any tongue) they were making this up.
Worth pointing out that Philip Davies was privately a mythicist, despite being publicly a historicist.
Joel. Really?
@@unicyclist97 Posthumously confirmed? I'm already suspicious. What does Lataster *actually* say in the book?
@@atheologica (Lataster 2019) "Another biblical scholar who seems to have reconciled himself with the reasonableness of the agnostic position is the man to whom this book is dedicated. I agonised about whether to mention this, as some may find it opportunistic and impolite, especially given his recent death, but have decided to honour the great man’s memory by being transparent over his actually held positions, particularly as it makes it very clear that he was consistent in his minimalist outlook. That unflinching - and essentially persecuted - minimalist regarding the Old Testament, Philip R. Davies, revealed to me, a few months before his death, that on the Historical Jesus, “agnosticism is indeed a very sensible conclusion”, adding, “it concurs with my own”."
Philip R. Davies, personal communication, February 14, 2018.
@@unicyclist97 Agnosticism ≠ Mythicist
@@atheologica someone who doesn't believe in Jesus in either case, but I take your point. He wasn't making the positive assertion that Jesus didn't exist. Still, agnostics are attacked just as much as mythicists.
Sorry I missed this when it first came out. Still getting used to your live guest format.
You couldn't have picked a more interesting and entertaining guest. I have heard some really convincing arguments for mythisim recently. Esoterica has a very interesting episode about the other 3 first century would be messiahs who DID manage to break into the contemporaneous historical record. As a matter of fact just heard on the E another interesting theory today that Christianity could be a creation of a certain mystical Jewiish sect that Paul may have been a member of.
Anyway an awesome discussion men and as always keep up the good work!
PS - Bryce really is the authority of Mormon history
What’s on the E? I’m gonna have to check these out! Esoterica?
@@annascott3542 Yes an Esoterica episode about Paul from about a month ago
@@geraldmeehan8942 thanks
Can you say we’re not going to fight/yell/scream, “because we’re grown ups” one more time for those in the back of the class?
Is it me, or does David Fitzgerald look like an older Jay Dyer?
Derrick, a couple of things you guys didn't touch on regarding the authors of the synoptic Gospels. Not only were they highly educated Greeks, they also had benefactors who financed their writings (they needed supplies to compose their works), they were from well to do families who could actually afford to send their kids to school to learn to read and write. There were no free public schools back then so if someone could read/write, you KNEW they came from a family of affluence.
Also, the gospel writers likely had access to libraries and had staff who would fetch them materials and reference works from those libraries. I would also say that they likely had paid copyists who then took their 'autographs' (original copies) and copied them by hand and made enough of them to sell or give to these budding Jesus movement assemblies/ekklesia and probably to members of other cults located in these large urban areas (where many ecclesia met) because the authors would have lived in these more urban areas where there were the literary resources required to compile their mythic tropes and the general populace would often frequent more than one cultic center and worship more than one deity.
I still think the most important take-away from these arguments between atheists whether Jesus existed on earth or in people's fertile imagination is that there is so little information either way, there is no way to know any more than basic existence.
*Mark 4:10-12 also makes sense* if some people thought Jesus would bring the “Kingdom of God” in human form, but were disappointed by his death.
Thus the invention of an even bigger claim: Resurrection, etc.
But given the resurrection, why didn’t Jesus preach that and why didn’t people know about the Resurrection beforehand?
Mark’s solution: write that he did peach it, but people didn’t understand.
A historical, disappointing Jesus is a better explanation for Mark 4:10-12 than an invented Jesus.
P.S. I did a search. Can't find Philip R. Davies' Did Jesus Exist anywhere. Any ideas? Thanks. David, David, Davis. If JC didn't exist then neither did his cousin John the Baptist. We gotta be consistent here. Josephus was totally interpolated. David is right this stuff is fascinating. I plan to study Biblical stuff at Uni next year. Just cos I'm interested (and I have time).
John the Baptist wasn't really Jesus's cousin. John did exist and was attached to Jesus in later stories.
PS I assume you're only joking, but it's interesting that only one gospel says John the Baptist was Jesus' cousin.
The others can't seem to agree on just what their relationship was at all (or if they even lived at the same time)...
Here you go!
bibleinterp.arizona.edu/opeds/dav368029
@Atheologica this is an excellent essay that I think sums up the current state of historical research on the Jesus question quite well, but it really doesn't do much to support the mythicist's cause.
I still think he was just a failed apocryphal preacher. Oh, not Jesus, Paul was. According to whom, Jesus never preached anything. (By this same token, one could claim Jesus was a failed artist, whom never painted a picture worth keeping. Or a failed gladiator who never entered the ring.)
The best book on the historicity (or lack there of) the bible, is by the archaeologist Israel Finkelstein "The Bible Unearthed" I highly recommend it. It's based on "boots on the ground" research.
If Jesus was real where did Gnosticism come from?
Gnosticism isn't a valid category. It has been rejected by the Westar Institute.
Jesus ben Ananias still existed though, right?
Derreck! Somebody STOP me!
At 1:20:06, you and David get into Jesus being an Egyptian. There might be some truth to this. Josephus mentions 'the Egyptian' in both the War of the Jews and The Antiquities of the Jews, as someone who came out of Egypt to Jerusalem who had followers, who was called a prophet, who took his followers to the Mt. of Olives and got into a skirmish with a legion of Romans who killed 400 of his followers but 'the Egyptian' escaped. This story is mirrored in John 18, when Judas brought a band of soldiers and some officers to betray Jesus, and Peter, having a sword on his person, drew it and cut off the right ear of the high priests slave, indicating there was a skirmish that involved Roman soldiers and this prophet guy named 'Jesus'. Also, Jesus' parents took him into Egypt for quite some time before coming back to Israel and it's possible Jesus learned magic tricks (turning water into wine, healing the blind 'plant' he'd put into his audience, etc) while in Egypt. Sometimes I think the Gospels do preserve tiny remaining kernels of true stories in them that might have happened at some point but that were 'mostly' lost via oral transmission. These kernels might point to either a singular person who inspired the later aggrandized story of the 'life' of Jesus, or might point to several messianic wannabe prophets who lived close to the time of 'Jesus' who wanted to become the 'savior' of the Jews by leading them in revolt against the Romans, which of course would get your ass crucified by those pesky Romans, but it did create the idea or template for a Savior to whom Greco-Roman motifs were later added to his basic story by the Hellenized writers of the N.T.
Sounds like shit still rules
Did you just knock Canadians ???😡😡
I love Canadians. ;)
I have ot on good authority that Derreck is projecting, and actually, desperately, secretly pines to be Canadian.
@@DrKippDavis
Would not surprise me, he is such a nice fella.
@@Skymannot6939 he wants you to think so.
@@DrKippDavis
Yeah! He is kinda humble, friendly, he seems to care that makes him less American, and qualifies him to be a Canadian aey!(sp).
Mithras is not astrological. That too is new agey bs as well.