Richard Carrier Scrawls in Crayon on the Gospels

 I've been asked to respond to the following comment by Richard Carrier, historian (etc, etc):

"John is historicizing Jesus’s divinity. Mark allegorized it. Matthew turned it into a scripture. And Luke is the first to represent it as a history. And John is the first to insist everything he says is literally, historically true. That’s all fact. That’s the sequence. Denying it is denying reality.

"Meanwhile, John did not add anything not already in Paul. And Mark is based on Paul. So there was no progression 'to' John’s Jesus. The only difference between John’s Jesus and Paul’s is John is repeatedly insisting Jesus was really on earth. That’s it."

To be frank, this is skeptical baby-talk for the masses.  It the lazy, imperious, impressionistic scrawling of a crayon on a cathedral wall.  

(1) I refuted Carrier's argument against the historical reality of Jesus in a couple chapters of Jesus is No Myth: The Fingerprints of God on the Gospels.  That part of the book was easy; Carrier is sloppy and a vulnerable target, as were Reza Aslan and Bart Ehrman.  After that chore, in the more important part of the book, I showed how thirty traits in the gospels, including Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John, demonstrate their historicity in a deep and inimitable way.  

Then I controlled that main argument by comparing the gospels on those 30 traits to "alt-gospels" that skeptics, including Carrier, have claimed resemble the first four books of the New Testament.  It turned out that not one of those "fake gospels" remotely resembles the real ones when it comes to these historically-relevant traits.  The desperation even of renowned scholars in offering such poor analogies reveals how unique the gospels remain.  (Tim McGrew particularly enjoyed my take-down of Ehrman's attempt to find a parallel to Jesus in early-modern Poland, of all places!  Perhaps Ehrman was hoping no one would take the trouble of reading the chief early source for the life of the rabbi he foolishly picked as a potential Jesus clone!)  

The gospels are, one might say, a cathedral of words, patterns within patterns, parables and metaphors and quips, dramatic dialogues, frames, miracles rising from stone like living gargoyles, sculpted into forms quite different from the "wonder-works" of mystics or legends (Apollonius, Sai Baba, the apocryphal Jesus), with a dozen different kinds of link showing Christ as fulfillment of the Old Testament (not just in Matthew, but in all the gospels), simple, elegant words which have changed the course of civilization.  

Carrier's mythicism is a childish scrawl across those stones: "Nah-ah!"   

Carrier then "reviewed" my book in a long, rambling piece which got a hundred or so things wrong -- almost every single comment he made about it was completely off, even when he tried to describe my thesis.  He thought the book was about his own scrawling, not about the cathedral.    

2. Some analysts don't even think that was the order in which the gospels were written.   Carrier would, no doubt, dismiss their arguments contemptuously.  

3. I'm not sure what the distinction is supposed to be between Luke presenting the Gospel as history, and John saying it actually happened.  That sounds like the same thing, to me.  Luke clearly insists what Carrier says John is the first to say: that he had looked closely into the facts, and found them to be as follows.   

4. And how is Mark not telling history as well?  He names names, beginning with John the Baptist, who is known from Josephus as well as the gospels.  He describes locations, beginning with Israel's longest river, the Jordan, and with Galilee, and Capernaum, none of which is Wonderland or Middle Earth, but known features of the landscape in the Middle East.  He talks about a synagogue and fisherman.  He gives them names which we know from ossuaries were, in fact, common in the 1st Century in Palestine.  He describes customs which were common among the Jews of Palestine at that period.  All that, in the first chapter alone.  

That's history.  Carrier may not admit that it is true history, but even if Mark doesn't do any of the navel-gazing historiography of Thucydides or Polybius (as Luke does, to some degree), he is clearly at least pretending to tell a story about something that happened recently in real places to actual people.  Yes, he says Jesus does miracles, but those who study history closely, know that real people in real history (including some people I have known) also report miracles.  (As Craig Keener showed in two long books on the subject.)  

(5) The gloss "Mark is based on Paul" is, again, a child's crayon scratching marks on a cathedral wall.  

Carrier himself argues that actually, Paul never mentions the historical Jesus.  Paul mentions Jesus' brothers, but didn't mean biological brothers (he says), so that doesn't count.  And so on. 

How can a detailed description of the life, actions, teachings, death, and (yes, promised four times before that death) resurrection of Jesus be "based on" an author who allegedly never mentions an historical Jesus?  

One would, no doubt, need to read the rest of this particular scrawl to figure out how where precisely it begins in cognitive space.  But one does not need to trace every gimlet and hinky of a child's smear to recognize it as such.  Carrier is reducing Mark to an instantiation of something he finds in Paul.  So he simply wipes away all the concrete details of the book.  "Nothing to see here, folks!  Walk by quickly and don't look!" 

Which can be refuted merely by reading the book.  Gaze at the ramparts.  Watch the figures in light.  Here the life of the most vivid and powerful figure in history stands, for all to see, and no, you will not find this in Paul, as Carrier himself insists elsewhere.   

Or you can go more analytical, as I did in Jesus is No Myth: The Fingerprints of God on the Gospels.      

(6) The same is true of John's Gospel.  "John did not add to anything not already in Paul?"  What does that even mean?  Presumably Carrier means Jesus is presented as divine in Paul, then also in John.  That is true, and is true of all 1st Century Christian literature.  But obviously, John "added" lots to that skeleton, which is all that Carrier allows to Paul.  Even sensitive readers like AN Wilson are shocked to find John so concrete, detailed, and historically-credible, even as his Christology soars like a cathedral. 

John doesn't add anything to Paul?  Only the life, wisdom, miracles, death and resurrection of the most famous, startling, and transformative man in history?  

Surely one can find better sense in most children's scrawling!  

In short, I don't think these comments really need to be refuted.  Like other forms of reductionism, they may sound plausible at first sight, because simple theories have a kind of a jarring resonance, like the note of a bell.  Simple theories are always plausible so long as you simply listen to the ring, and ignore contrary evidence.  

I remember walking along a river in China where for more than a mile, great poetry of China and the world had been hung on the wall protecting the city from floods.  I caught a sudden scrawl, and recognized the style immediately, out of those hundreds or thousands of works: Chairman Mao!  

Mao, like Carrier, was a clever man, and his bold style, which ignored Chinese poetic convention for filling spaces, was distinctive and eye-catching.  But his reductionistic theories were too simple, and his revolution against Chinese tradition ultimately failed, because there was too much great stuff in that tradition for the Chinese to let go.  His scrawl proved eye-catching for a moment, but his revolution against the "Four Olds" and Chinese tradition ultimately failed.  

Richard Carrier has a bit of the same gift.  He cannot be mistaken for a great historian or philosopher, by those who read other poems.  But his claims are eye-catching.  They can even excite a mob temporarily, when people are in the mood to deface cathedrals.  But Carrier's childish scrawls can never take a Gospel down.