 Hey everybody, tonight we're doing any whether or not Jesus existed and we are starting right now with Dr. Boyce's opening statement. Thanks so much for being with us, Dr. Steven Boyce, the floor is all yours. Thank you, James. It's good to be here. Good to have an opportunity to engage this discussion with Dr. Carrier who I have great respect for and have had previous conversations. Look forward to this discussion. Hopefully we'll give the audience something to remember. I'm gonna go ahead and share my screen. It's all right. Again, I appreciate Dr. Carrier and his work and his study. And I'm looking forward to this discussion debate with him. To find common ground with Dr. Carrier, I decided to go a direction where we could agree for the most part on material. So I wanna start with Paul's experience, particularly in his life when we're dealing with the subject of the historicity of Jesus. To mention, we think sometimes that he was around in 50 and 60, although that's when he probably wrote many of his epistles, but he was there not far after Jesus's death as a part of a council known as the Sanhedrin, when a man by the name of Stephen was protesting them and accusing them of murdering the Messiah. It says that they laid their coat to the young man by the name of Saul and he was there. He was alive during those events. He was a student under Gameliel. Not long after that, he was sent out in commission to imprison and even put to death Christians on the basis not about whether Jesus had died or that he was buried, but rather on the basis that his claim, their claims, these Christians were claiming the man they put to death resurrected from the dead and he detested that and put people in prison for that. Later after his conversion, whether you believe it was a hallucination, a vision or the real Jesus, that's not the point of this debate regardless of that conversion from a Pharisee on the Sanhedrin to a Christian, he continued to recognize in 1 Corinthians that Jesus died and that his physical body was actually buried. He used those terms and he only not, he not only recognized that, he recognized the form of death that he died. It was a Roman crucifixion and it's weird that he would later in Galatians too, choose to identify with that kind of a death which was an embarrassment and a shame but yet he was not ashamed of the gospel, as he said. And he believed that the Jews if they continued to believe in works to justify them rather than true salvation in Christ then actually Jesus' death, he says, is needless or it was in vain. So he not only believed that Jesus was a person before his conversion, after his conversion, he even went so far after his conversion to debate the fact that Jesus was the promised descendant given to Abraham and he made sure to identify the singular promise descendant to him. He used the word seed, the descendancy, not seeds, plural, that is Christ, he said. So he recognized later in chapter four that through that promise to Abraham, a descendant was born through, and he used the word of a woman, a Jew under the law of Moses. So he put himself in a position to be a Jew as a person under the law, born of a woman. Paul believed that about the physical Jesus. Now his position about Jesus really shifted more due to the resurrection than actually his death. They all agreed on his death. So premise number one is this, when we're looking at Paul's experience is Paul the Pharisee before his conversion believed in a man who claimed to be a Messiah but that he was an imposter. He was put to death by his counsel, the Sanhedrin for the sin of heresy, which is exactly what Moses commanded them to do. They believed they were following the law of Moses by putting him to death. Now Paul the apostle after his conversion believed the man was actually the true Messiah and the greatest evidence that convinced him of that at first was a resurrection, a dead body coming to life. His position as a Pharisee, he believed in a man named Jesus. He was put to death. His position as a Christian, he believed in a man named Jesus put to death. The difference was the resurrection experience he had. Then later on, he met with the eyewitnesses particularly he mentioned in Galatians one, Cephas who is the Aramaic name for Peter. And he mentions that in his process of going and visiting with him for 15 days, he saw none of the other apostles except James the brother of the Lord, Taun Adelphan II Koryu in Greek. And one of the things that's unique about this perspective is that there's much debate about what does Adelphos or Adelphan mean? And sometimes people say it's a physical relative or it's a Jewish brotherhood, a Christian brotherhood or a companionship or a family as a whole. And the answer is true to all the above. So how do we identify terms like this to know the specifics? Is he talking about a family relation? Well, what needs to be called into mind here is the description. Why did Paul use James's name with a description? And to help us with that, why did he call Peter Cephas? And then later call him by his great name, Peter. Here's the answer. These are names given when looking at groups. This was a way of writing in this time where there was multiple names that were the same. For example, Cephas would have been identified because that's the name that Jesus gave him in his earthly ministry, setting him aside. Think about it. Jesus had multiple disciples with the same name. Simon is the most popular name in Palestine in that era. He gave him the name Petra or Peter and Cephas, the Aramaic version. And in doing so, he was distinguishing Cephas. And if you don't believe me, just follow Paul's writing here. Paul, when he talks about Peter in a group, always refers to him as Cephas. He does it in Galatians one, Galatians two, first Corinthians one, first Corinthians three, first Corinthians nine and first Corinthians 15. And then when he talks about him as an individual away from a group, he calls them by his Greek name, Peter, like he does in Galatians two. And then he turns right back around and calls them Cephas when he's talked about with a group. It was a way of identifying clarity and writing to a specific person of interest. This was a way of clarifying in a regular basis to distinguish. He did the same thing for James. Now, keep this in mind. He distinguished which James he spent time with as opposed to the rest of the apostles. Remember, Paul made a declaration, I tell you the truth. He says, and I do not lie to you. I didn't see any of the other apostles except James. Now, if he just said James there, that would have been very confusing. Why? The apostles in addition to this James had two others, James the brother of John and James what they call the less or potentially the younger or he was shorter, one or the other. There were multiple Jameses. So he had to bring clarification. Once he clarifies them here, he continues just calling him James the rest of the time. There had to be distinguishing of which James it is. And to just have this James without a name or to keep it general would have confused the audience about who he's talking to because they're like, well, did he meet with James the brother of John during that time? Cause he was still alive. Was it James the less? Which James he clarified. We see the same thing in Acts chapter 12. The writer does the same thing there. He mentions two Jameses in one chapter. James the brother of John same phrase in Greek was put to death by Herod. And why did he do that? Because he mentions James from Jerusalem, the bishop of Jerusalem in the same chapter later coming down. So if he just said James was killed by Herod, they would have been reading that go which James got killed by Herod. He clarified by association. James, let's talk about the name is it's the most common name out of a hundred that we've done data on in the Palestinian area. When you're examining these documents, the Gospels and Acts, Josephus, the Judean desert texts and the tunes from 330 BC to 200 CE as demonstrated by Dr. Richard Bacchum and even higher numbers given by Dr. Illum who wrote the lexicon of Jewish names of late antiquity. Therefore, when writing during this time names must follow descriptions, locations, family relations. For example, Jesus or Joshua is the sixth most popular name in that time and era of Palestine. And anytime Jesus is represented, it's Jesus of Nazareth or Jesus the Christ, the Messiah, the Lord Jesus to identify him clearly. They did the same thing in Jesus's disciples. You had Jude and Judas. So you had Judas Iscariot to separate him from the other Judas. And even the writers would make sure to identify him as the one who betrayed the Lord. You did the same thing with James, James the brother of John or the son of Zebedee and James the less. It's a way of distinguishing. If Paul was only referring to James as the brother in a sense of Adelphos was just a Christian community, he left the potential of identification more ambiguous because now you don't know which apostle James he met with and it opens the audience to be more James since it is the 11th most common name in Palestine. That leaves a broader audience. It doesn't clarify at all. In fact, it leaves it more ambiguous. Now this is consistent, not just in the New Testament writings. Josephus did the same thing. And I wanna make sure I focus on book 20, chapter nine. This section is undisputed because he uses the same phrase about James the brother of Jesus when he calls them Taun Adelphon Eesu, the brother of Jesus, James. To clarify this James, he not only clarifies James and Jesus, but also Jesus, I should say, because why is that? Because at this time, if you had households in Palestine, Jesus the sixth most popular name, James the 11th, guess what? A lot of families probably had brothers in the homes with those two names. So he adds an additional clarification known as or who was called the Christos, the Messiah. Now it's abundantly clear which James, which Jesus he's talking about. Gnostic writers did the same thing in attempts to identify and to convince their audience that they're legitimate eyewitness people. For example, in the gospel of Thomas, he wants you to know he's Didymus. That means twin Thomas. So that you would believe he's identified as the one who was known as Didymus Thomas with Jesus is 12. Then in the gospel of Peter, you have Simon Peter at the very end of the manuscript. It says Simon Peter and my brother Andrew. Just so you know which Simon Peter is, he associated him with a family. The Gnostic texts did the same thing seeking to convince you of a family relationship. Jude chapter one does the same thing. Jude, the Adelphan of James. Same thing, Jude is a popular name, clarifying which Jude, the brother of James in the church of Council Jerusalem. Tacitus does the same thing when referencing Jesus in order to identify the Christian movement that was taking place in Rome. He made sure to clarify by using Christus whom the name of Christianity received its origin and he makes sure to give the timeline of Tiberius under Pontius Pilate. Now remember Tacitus stated numerous times he had records of the Roman Senate and he received this information throughout his study and that this Christianity is rising and he traces it back to a man with the description of the Messiah. He does that in order to identify a person of interest. So Tonius did the same thing. Statements were consistent with this. And remember we find this consistent in the writings of Pliny and Tacitus back and forth. Christians are meeting for a church. They're thinking they're conspiring to overthrow the Roman government. So, Tonius joins in on this conversation of conspiracy Roman government, what's going on and he recognizes that this uproar in Rome is by these Christians who followed this Christus, this Christ, this Messiah that's being brought forth. So, they recognized an individual starting a movement that was still shaking Rome at the end of the century and into the new century. So, premise two, description, family, connections, locations were necessities to identify people of interest accurately. Paul identified James as a legal brother, not a potential general brother in order to not confuse his audience with James the last, James the brother of John. Other writers in history utilize these same descriptions in that time period for people of interest as well. Lastly, I wanna mention Hegesepus who continues these terms, same identification of the family of the Lord. He says this, of the family of the Lord, there were still living grandchildren of Jude who we just talked about, who it is said has been the Lord's brother. There it is again, a Delphu according to the flesh, meaning it's physical bloodline. Now, according to Hegesepus, this confusion is uproar in Rome was bringing Christianity to talk about this kingdom to overthrow kingdoms. And according to Hegesepus, Domitian sought out the distant relatives of Jesus and was able to bring some of the grandchildren of Jude before him, question them about the intention of this kingdom. They declared the kingdom was not of this world, it was a heavenly kingdom. He strictly warned them and dismissed them. And Hegesepus in describing these events that took place also pursued in memoirs a dynasty of Jesus's family. He said these words, I made for myself a succession up through anesthetists. And he talks about this dynasty in his memoirs, these family bloodlines of Jesus. So from the time of Jesus, his brother James was the first bishop if you would have Jerusalem. And through his descendancy, that relationship to Jesus continued bishops and leaders into the church of Jerusalem up until Simeon was martyred and then they elected a man named Justice from the audience, not from the dynasty. And now that's important to note, he pinpoints a timeline when Jesus's descendants or his friends and family, his close narrative brothers and grandchildren, second, third cousins, et cetera were all being cut off from leadership in church because they died out. It was around the time 110. He learned this from his travels in Jerusalem, Corinth and Rome. So my premise three is this, the family, the dynasty, the Diadokane, if you were to use the word Diadokane, this dynasty of Jesus continued as leaders within the church of Jerusalem until about the time 110 AD. And Justice was the first bishop of Jerusalem elected outside of this Diadokane. Therefore, Jesus was a real man who had a real relatives that could be traced at least to the early second century. And his fame grew within the Roman Empire causing havoc for those on the outside looking in. So in a conclusion of all this, Paul's experience before and after his conversion from Pharisee to Christian, he believed in a physical Jesus. He believed he was a heretic at one point and righteously by the law of Moses put to death for what he said and claimed. But after his experience, again, despite what you believe, if it's a vision, a hallucination or a real resurrection, despite what you believe that change in his life, he believed the resurrected body of Jesus took place and therefore he changed his position of Messiahship. Then we look at the history and the recollection of Paul to his followers and we find James the brother. James the brother of Jesus was an identified person of interest by family connection, not by general claims. And in the third premise, Haggisipus gave us a story and a dynasty of Jesus, his accession from his brothers all the way to the grandchildren to the time of Simeon and justice. And with that, I leave my time to Dr. Kiran. Thank you. Thank you very much, Dr. Boyd. And with that, very excited to have you here, folks. If it's your first time here at Modern Day Debate, we are thrilled to have you here, no matter what walk of life you were from, Christian, atheist, Muslim, you name it. We're glad you're here. Hit that subscribe button for more big debates like this one coming up in the future. And I gotta tell you, I'm excited for this one. There's a lot of hype, people in the chat. This is going to be a great debate. So thank you very much, gentlemen, for being here and Dr. Kiran, the floor is all yours. All right, thank you. Yeah, good to be here. And I've always enjoyed having discussions with Dr. Boyd's. It's one of the more reasonable folks that I engage in. So it's good to be here for that. All right, I'm gonna open with my standard bullet point over simplification of why I'm not convinced by a case like that. And then I'll go into specific examples that Dr. Boyd's gave. Now, the general thesis that I argue in on the historicity of Jesus is that there were, for example, many categories that Jesus belongs to, one of which is savior cults and savior lords. And there were numerous savior cults at that time. All of them purport to worship a historical hero. They all have some sort of hero that they claim to place in history who didn't exist. We have no reason to believe any of these savior gods existed. But all of these savior cults believe that their savior lord through some form of suffering, sometimes it's a death, sometimes it's not. Through some form of suffering, conquered the forces of death and thus guaranteed a blessed afterlife to their followers, often through baptism and sacred meals. You can show that trend. We have examples of these cults for Hercules, Dionysus, Osiris and Nana, Mithras, Salmoxis and so on. But we have no evidence any of those heroes really existed and good reason to believe they didn't. Therefore, we can't assume Jesus is any more historical than those other heroes. We need evidence that he was an exception because he looks just like them, a Jewish version of them, a Jewish version of a suffering hero who conquered death thereby guaranteeing a blessed afterlife. So we need good evidence that he was an exception to the rule, the only suffering savior who actually existed. And I don't think there's any good evidence of that. I'll get into the evidence that Dr. Boyce mentioned and I'll include that with a bunch of other things that people usually state. The only documents that mentioned Jesus that were written by anyone alive at the time never clearly placed him in real earth history. Paul, for example, Hebrews, first climate. Paul repeatedly says anything about Jesus was known only from scripture and revelation, Romans 16, versus 25 to 26, even Romans 10, versus 14 to 16, all through Galatians one, first Corinthians 15 and so on. Paul says he received his knowledge of the resurrection of Jesus and the Eucharist sermon of Jesus by revelation directly from the Lord. In other words, Jesus was directly speaking to him from outer space, not from human witnesses. Paul never refers to anyone having been the disciples of Jesus. The word disciple doesn't appear anywhere in Paul or is ever having known him in life. Paul never says that. Paul never really identifies Jesus' mother or father but speaks of his birth only allegorically or metaphorically. Paul only says born of a woman. It's in a context of an allegorical argument about allegorical seeds of Abraham and allegorical women, all of us being born of Hagar when we were under the law and then born of Sarah when we're saved. Basically, we joined the resurrection of Jesus. So it's very ambiguous when Paul talks about Jesus being born of a mother. He doesn't name the mother. He doesn't say it's a Jewish mother. He doesn't say anything. It's all in this context of this allegorical argument that Paul even outright says is an allegory. He says these women are an allegory that I'm talking about, Hagar and Sarah and who's born of which is a metaphorical argument for the metaphysics of the world. He's not talking about biological mothers. Even if he knew the biological mother of Jesus, that's not what he's talking about there. There's no other mention in the epistles of Paul of Jesus having actual parents or naming the parents or anything like that. Paul also mentions brothers of the Lord. There are two mentions in the letters of Paul but he says all baptized Christians were brothers of the Lord. So we can't tell if he ever meant biological brothers of Jesus. Paul never makes a distinction. It's ambiguous against. We have these ambiguous references and can't nail them down as definite references to biological relations of Jesus. In fact, there's no clear attestation to Jesus really having lived by any source who lived at the time. That alone does not mean he didn't exist but it does mean we lack one of the most important forms of evidence we usually have that someone really existed. And Paul's strange silence about the real Jesus and his whole life and so on about Jesus having met people on earth while alive. Despite writing tens of thousands of words about Jesus is more to be expected if Jesus was indeed only met in the imagination as Paul says in dreams and visions and wasn't a real person. The first we hear of a historical Jesus like a definite clear statement that he was a guy walking around on earth is in the gospels. But the gospels are by unknown authors writing a lifetime later in a foreign land in a foreign language and they name no sources. The gospels are also manifestly mythical in structure and content. In fact, there are full of unbelievable claims every chapter of every gospel and no historical claim they make about Jesus is corroborated anywhere else. And that's actually it. No later historian had any known sources other than the gospels that we can establish or Christian informants citing the gospels and sources that are not independent of that can't be used to corroborate that. And apart from that there is no other evidence Jesus really existed. So all we really have is a contemporary Paul who says Jesus was only met in visions and then unbelievable myths written a lifetime later in a foreign language and foreign land and later historians simply repeating what those myths said just as they did with other myths like about Romulus and other figures. And that's all we have. And that's simply not good enough for me to establish that Jesus was the lone exception among all the suffering savior lords of the time the only one who really lived. And that's the basic stump speech as it were. But I'm gonna go into what Dr. Boyce mentioned how much time do I have? Okay. To be clear, I don't know if it the way Dr. Boyce presented it I'm not sure if he understands what my theory is what did I present in my peer reviewed work which is that Paul does believe that Jesus is made of Jewish flesh Davidic flesh in fact and believes that he was became immortal and died and was crucified and was resurrected. The question is where Paul never places any of these things on earth. This is the thing he says these things like the crucifixion and the burial he says are known from scripture he doesn't mention anyone being witnesses to them. And he says it resurrection or anything else note about Jesus is only gotten from revelation when he talks about the story of Jesus he says the death and resurrection known by scripture and then he was seen by the apostles. There's no mention of Jesus appearing or being seen by anyone before that for example. So this is actually is why I'm talking about this as a cosmic belief that Paul had he didn't believe there was a historical Jesus it's just in the same sense that there was a historical Satan and a historical Michael on a historical Gabriel he thinks these are celestial beings engage in celestial dramas. That's the theory and then the question is what does the evidence support? And there's no reference in Paul to him anyone knowing about Jesus in any other way than scripture and revelation which supports the cosmic hypothesis. Paul never uses the word descendant that's nowhere in the letters of Paul that's an assumption that people bring to the text and I think this is one of the main problems why historians misread the evidence because they're importing a lot of faith assumptions into the texts that aren't there. I already mentioned the born of a woman issue the Lord's brother issue. Dr. Boyce brings up a new argument that I hadn't heard someone articulate before which is the proposal that we can only explain why Paul names James this way if he meant a biological brother of Jesus that actually takes the argument out of context when Paul actually makes this argument he's swearing up and down to the Galatians that he never spoke to anyone that he only heard the gospel from Jesus and he never spoke to any Christian about the secrets of the gospel until years later and so he says on the one occasion even then he says I only met basically says I met none of the apostles except he says I met Peter but I met no other apostle he says I met of the apostles I met no one and then he says only James and if you look at the grammar if Paul met he met two apostles he would have said I met two apostles Peter and James the brother of the Lord for example he doesn't say that he uses really elaborate the Greek grammar L. Trudinger talks about this and I cite him in my work that the grammar actually is exclusive it actually the way the grammar the grammar that Paul chose in the Greek is saying that this James is not an apostle he's saying I met no other apostles but I met this guy named James who was a brother this is a brother of the Lord who could mean a biological brother could mean a baptized Christian but in any case I think it's very clear and many Bible translations now agree with this is that Paul is actually saying that this James is not the apostle James he's saying it's some other James and the only reason he names him is because he has to in his argument he has to name the people he met or else he'd be called out as a liar so he's saying you know I met these people I only met one apostle it was Cephas but I also met James brother of the Lord on that occasion he says then years later I went back and met more of them so in the context that's what Paul is doing here it doesn't matter he's not trying to specify a particular James he's just saying I met a James he's the brother of the Lord but I met no other apostles just Cephas that's actually what the grammar says in there and that leaves it ambiguous so we don't know if he means about just a regular rank and file Christian or if he means some sort of special category Christian that wasn't an apostle. The stuff about Cephas there's a story in the Gospels about how Jesus named Cephas and I do think that is an assigned name I think Cephas is not, it is not a natural name it is sort of a nickname it's basically calling yourself for the rock like the actor it's not a real name I think it was an assigned name but it could have been assigned by revelation the Peter could have had a revelation of Jesus who assigned him that name and then it got turned into an earthly story in the Gospels we can't prove otherwise so it's 50-50 either way we need some other evidence to ascertain which storyline actually explains the evidence and when you get to Josephus we don't have any evidence that Josephus had any sources for this and of course I don't, we can get into why I don't even think Josephus mentioned Christ in this James passage I think he mentioned originally Jesus the son of Damneus there's a whole story where I think this is a corruption that occurred later by accident in the scribal transmission of the text but even if that's not the case we have no evidence that Josephus has any sources by which he would know that Christians called all the brothers of the Lord or called all baptized Christians brothers of the Lord so when he's telling a story about a prominent brother of the Lord we can't establish that Josephus knows that this is a biological brother or just a cultic brother so the information is actually unusable simply because he doesn't give sources or details as to indicate to us that he knows anything more than what we already see in the letters of Paul or in the Gospels for example. When we get to Tacitus none of the information in Tacitus does Tacitus say comes from the Neuronian period Tacitus is writing the early second century if Tacitus even said these things I doubt he did but even if he did he would have been getting it from Christian informants in fact the most likely source would be his best buddy Pliny the younger who they corresponded a lot about material to put into Tacitus's history so he would have gotten information from Pliny who got it from the Christians he interrogated and they could be quoting the Gospels at them so we don't have example here from Tacitus of anything that corroborates the Gospels it's just repetition of the same information that's spreading around that originated with the Gospels so that doesn't help us determine whether the Gospels are myths or histories or not. Sertonius Christus specifically in the Latin very clearly Christus is someone in Rome instigating at that time under the reign of Claudius this is well after Jesus would have died can't be the same guy so there's no way that that has any reference after the historical Jesus and we get to Hegassippus this is late second century 180 to 200 AD Hegassippus we don't have we have quotations from him but the quotations we have from him are full of really absurd apocrypha ridiculous legends and stories history about James the brother of the Lord for instance is not a single part of it is historically plausible for instance so he we're talking about now we're looking 100 150 years after the fact where legends had grown up about the family of Jesus but when you go 100 years earlier you find no evidence that any of these legends exist or true and even in Acts you look in Acts you find no evidence that any of this stuff is true in Acts very prominently not a single member of the family of Jesus is ever in a leadership position in there James the brother of Jesus is mentioned as being with the church but he is not either of the James's that are mentioned in the book of Acts it lists the James's that are in the apostles and neither of them is the brother of Jesus and then it separately mentions that the brothers of Jesus were also there so Acts the author of Acts does not see them as the same people Acts has no knowledge of the family of Jesus ever being involved in the teaching of the church and that to me would be impossible unless Acts is completely erasing history or completely altering it which eliminates it as a method or as a source or it wasn't true it was a later legend that was invented so we can't use that to back up the history of Jesus and what's my time left okay and that's the gist obviously in a debate like this there's like a million threads we could go down and argue in particular I'm summarizing I'm being brief so all of these things you will find evidence and discussion of on my blog or in my book on the historicity of Jesus you'd find the scholarship cited you could find the footnotes and a lot more detail different arguments and back and forth that you could have on these things but the upshot of all of it is all of this evidence is extremely ambiguous and you have to put layers and layers of interpretation on it just to get the result that Dr. Boyce wants to get that should not be the case it should be much easier to prove the historicity of Jesus Paul should be talking about his life should be talking about people having met him people should be asking Paul questions about that Paul should be forced to fight arguments to respond to arguments about this fact that Paul did not meet Jesus in person that argument never comes up Paul never has to argue against that so there's many opportunities in Paul where the life of Jesus the reality of Jesus should come up but it doesn't and when it does come up when Paul talks about how we know anything about Jesus he only says revelation and scripture those are the only sources that he mentions happening as sources for anything that's really weird and that requires explanation and then when we get to the Gospels again unsourced we had in the foreign language foreign country no way to fact check them no evidence anyone did and these kind these Gospels are similar in what they do to the Gospels the sort of stories told of all these other Savior heroes they had similar historical narratives told about them in history doing things performing feats and teaching lessons and so on or even getting killed as the case may be but those stories are false too so the question is we need more evidence that the Gospels are more than just a myth built to allegorize the teachings of the Gospel the same way all other Savior cults did with their thing same with what we do with Moses you know Moses didn't exist but the stories were told he was given a family he was given a narrative he was given teachings he was giving struggles and so on all to sort of narrativize and teach the Jewish teachings their their origin story but more importantly the laws and why they follow them so the same reason would be the same motivation to be to invent the Jesus figure in the same context by the time we get to the second century we're so far removed from these sources that we have no evidence of anyone being aware of the actual sources of the Gospels what we have is our extant are people who just believe what the Gospels said were true just like people who would believe that the stories about Moses are true or the stories about the Roman founder of Romulus was true and we have no evidence from them that they had sources for any of the other wild legends that started growing up at this time so we can't rely on that to reconstruct the historical Jesus either and I think when we look at that and triangulate it doesn't put good odds on the historicity of Jesus after all Thank you very much for that opening statement as well Dr. Carrier and folks want to let you know a case you missed the bottom right of your screen tomorrow morning we'll be having an especially controversial debate you don't want to miss it that's at the bottom right of your screen and so hit that subscribe button if you haven't already we're going to jump into rebuttals now which are shorter it's going to be an eight minute rebuttal followed by a six minute and then open dialogue so Dr. Boyce, thanks so much the floor is all yours for that eight minute rebuttal I made sure I unmuted that time all right thank you Dr. Carrier for your presentation and in your opening I've always enjoyed conversation with you I've never had any issues we I always walk away at least learning something right couple things that I'd like to push back on a little bit in the fact that for example the allegorical side of Abraham the descendancy it was a physical promise in the past that was allegorized for his audience but the application of that allegory had literal effects and so I think at that point when he's talking about the different wise talking about Hagar with Ishmael and Sarah with Isaac there was a parallel indication based on this was your spirituality now this is your spirituality but by the time he gets to chapter four he's actually bringing the finality of consummation the allegories all pointed to this this illustration all pointed to this that in the fullness of time which is a literal statement not an allegorical statement God sent forth his son born of a woman not of one of those women that he was mentioning with Hagar or Sarah but rather the allegory the systematic approach to what we would call exegesis of that text he said has spiritual implications but God brought it to finality and now your descendancy is through that by faith so he used an allegory I agree with that 100% but I think that allegory had a consummation that had a literal effect in the fullness of time the statement about James is going to be an interesting one that it was a random person that the only problem I push back on that is that he doesn't just mention that one time for the rest of Galatians he mentions James again in fact he mentions James as one of the pillars with John and Cephas so we don't know what James that is if he doesn't establish James already in the book since he established which James it is in chapter one he doesn't have to reestablish his identity the rest of the time which is what we see he mentions James two more times with the group of the lead apostles with John and Cephas so because he already established which James in chapter one he doesn't have to reestablish again and we see this consistently as I mentioned in Acts chapter 12 we have two James's there in order to not conflate them or confuse them he identified James the brother of John physical brother in order to distinguish him from the James that came up from Jerusalem so that they weren't confusing which James was martyred by Herod and we see writers constantly transition out of that so I don't think that James was just a baptized brother that doesn't give any credibility to the audience because he's making a claim of promise and that's allowing himself to be challenged on it a little bit too and so to have a person of interest there needed to be more clarity than James and the fact that he repeats James's name he already established which James it is by identifying him early on that that is a systematic approach to writing that's consistent at that time and that's natural because there's so many people with the same name again James is the 11th most common name it's just the Greek version of Jacob's name in Hebrew and so there's a lot of clarity going on and that's why he uses Cephas's name in groups but when it comes back to being individual just by himself it's Peter his Greek name because he's distinguishing and setting him aside as an identifiable person of interest now I do find it interesting so none of the other Gospels and you know I've watched numerous times Dr. Erman talk about this I think he debated Dr. Price on this matter many years ago I can't remember he even went so far say that the four Gospels are first century independent sources of themselves that support it now I agree with Dr. Erman I think they are and and and at some point I think Dr. Karen I might even touch on Luke in a different debate I'm sad we don't get to do this one but maybe some other time so I don't in fact I want to make sure this debate just stays outside of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John it's not because I don't believe in them and trust them I just don't think it it's needed for all the material we're laying out right now to prove a historical Jesus but I would say that they are independent sources that that give precedence whether you believe their eyewitness accounts or not they're relating information that was even if you want to believe traditionally passed down to them through the families now I want to mention Hegesipus you mentioned that they were there towards the end of this he was there towards the end of the second century into the third but he was actually from 110 to 180 he died in 180 most of his research was done around 150 in the middle of the second century and he traveled particularly to Rome and to Jerusalem and he kept memoirs and he actually went to Corinth as well he mentions his travels running into guys that were trained by Paul like Clement of Rome for example he apparently had ran into his writings quotes his writings now we mentioned the fact that he is a secondhand information from Eusebius which is true but remember Eusebius was a court historian for Rome his work was not without being criticized in fact he was very criticized often because they felt like he had theological biases when siding with individuals over Papias on the kingdom and things like that but very few times was he pushed back by his peer reviewed histories on his historical criteria because remember Eusebius had records from Odessa and we and for your audience I may not know this he had records from Odessa he had the library there in Caesarea commissioned by Constantine he was under the watchful eye of Rome and Christianity so anything he said would and could and did get held against him as a way of peer review so he reporting hegasepuses claims actually in his description quotes the preface of his volumes and memoirs was relaying information that he had received from the churches that actually housed Paul and the apostles and the others that were eyewitnesses these are records that he took and anybody at any point could have pushed back against Eusebius on that but he was just relaying the information he received from hegasepuses and we also know that guys like africanus were dealing with the idea of the resurrection and the death per se specifically in the death like what happened when it went completely dark he makes argument that phallus said it was just an eclipse it was just a special one of a kind event and then africanus concludes based on phallus who's in the first century this is nonsense like I don't agree with him but phallus wasn't defending Jesus he was actually trying to explain a naturalistic way of how the times went dark while Jesus was on the cross he was trying to naturalistically explain it away and africanus was reading the research of phallus and pushing back against it and yet so phallus was also a first century witnessed by record to resist Jesus's explanation of death not to support it and africanus almost used it as a punching bag to straw man in back so we do see others in addition to that and as far as tacitus goes I don't know how much time how much time do I have james okay well I might get to we get one more so we'll go through this but as far as tacitus goes we got to remember about tacitus I don't think he necessarily got his information from rumor and he may have corresponded with plenty of course about this we know he did but we have to remember tacitus on numerous occasions stated that he received information from records he was given full access to roman records and if you look at the language of tacitus there he says our leader Pontius he was speaking on behalf of a roman not so much about information he declares an actual time in the time of tiberius that's a specific time under a specific ruler it's almost as if he went to the archives to find time place leadership an event because he's trying to trace christianities blow up to where it all started and he pinned its origin to the time of our leader Pontius Pilate so I think that his information probably came more from from archives and information he had received at that time as well I'll concede that we have another cross so I'll concede to the next section James you got it we'll jump into the eight minute rebuttal from Dr. Carrier as well for as all yours yeah right cool yes I actually I agree that when in Galatians Paul is talking about an actual event when he says that Jesus became incarnate when he implies he became the carnate and died and resurrected that is a historical event that occurred recently in Paul's mind the question is where Paul never places that event on earth and implies that it didn't occur on earth that's why I mentioned all the other stuff about Paul never says any any source about Jesus other than scripture and revelation so that's the question the issue there so there was a literal culmination in Paul's mind but I think you've got the order backwards Paul talks about the allegory of Abraham's seed for how Gentiles become you know effectively spiritually Jewish in Galatians 3 in Galatians 4 he starts with which is actually the middle of the argument but he starts the chapter with how Jesus this basically this creedal formula about how Jesus was born under the law born of a woman made of a woman actually he uses the phrase that Paul prefers to use for God's manufacturing of things rather than personal birth immediately after that is where Paul then says these women not immediately after that but immediately after that he talks about the argument of the Sarah and Hagar story and then he says this is an allegory and he says being born of Hagar means being born to the world order being born under the law being born of Sarah is what happens when you are released from that so if you were able to interrogate Paul according to the line of his argument he would have said oh yes so Jesus was born of Hagar so that he could die to the law then he was raised from God and so he's also born of Sarah at that point just as we will be or just as we are if to understand the argument and if people read the argument from Galatians 3 to Galatians 4 you can see this is the rhetoric that Paul is building so Paul is not you there isn't any reason for Paul to mention Jesus being born of a mother or made of a mother there other than the only reason that he gives which is he's talking about what mothers mean what he's talking about when he's talking about mothers so when you read it in context you don't get anything historical a lot of it and so it's just not usable as evidence in that regard for people who want to go into that more I strongly recommend I wrote a blog on how Galatians yes Galatians is allegorical and where I go into the rhetoric and the structure of the argument and how you can see what Paul is doing there I think to understand the passage you really got to look at it in context and get the order of order and structure of his argument in the right way in Galatians Galatians 2 Paul does not say it's the same James in Galatians 2 that he's talked about in Galatians 1 he does identify differently the James in Galatians 2 as the pillar he's one of the top three apostles so he already has identified that James and he's identified him differently than he identified the James in Galatians 1 and I want to reiterate like if Paul had meant to say that he met two of the pillars even but two of apostles he would have said I met two apostles or I met only two apostles and then named them he doesn't say that he says of the apostles or he says you know I went to meet the apostles I met Peter but I met no other apostles I only met James the brother of the Lord and like I said several Bible translations official Bible translation committees peer-reviewed literature Elder Schrödinger's article and so on established pretty clearly when you look at the grammar there's nothing else Paul could mean then that the James he's talking about there is not an apostle and the only reason he's mentioning him is that he's bound to he has to he can't leave out any person that he met that time because he might be accused of lying or trying to hide something so he just throws that in there there's no other reason for him to mention it other than the fact that he is required by his argument to mention everybody he met on that occasion he met on that occasion and he's very you know that's how he's identifying it so he's saying I just met a rank and file Christian James at that time and the apostle Peter and then in Galatians 2 then he's talking about a different group of people we're talking about Kaphos again but he's talking about the pillars and so he says James the Peter James John and Kaphos the pillars so we know that Paul is actually distinguishing these two James they're not the same people the James in Galatians 2 is an apostle the James in Galatians 1 is not an apostle as the grammar dictates so I don't think that argument is usable I won't go too much into the gospels being independent sources I mean tons of evidence that they're not I think even people anybody who's watching this debate knows all the evidence of the gospels used in many cases outright quoted each other used each other as sources and never cite any other sources so there's no evidence of the gospels are independent in the sense that's relevant to this which means not didn't know about each other but had separate sources from each other there's no evidence of that's the case so you can't use that as an argument so you just don't have evidence of that yet in case we don't know when Hegisippus learned anything so talking about his career he doesn't say where or when he learns particular stories and when he tells the stories they're ridiculous stories like the story about James if you read it there's nothing in it as historically possible it reads like the acts of John or any of the other sort of ridiculous apocrypha that was being fabricated at the time so we can't establish that Hegisippus has any sources for any of this stuff there's no corroboration for it for anything earlier he doesn't even mention having any sources he doesn't say who his source is or he doesn't say how we check these things where he learned them from the story about James he clearly got from some sort of apocryphal Christian text an apocryphal acts like the acts of James perhaps so we can't make any assumptions about where he's getting his information there and the reason there's no pushback is because everybody who would have pushed back their books aren't being preserved so if you look at take for example Hegisippus is ridiculous completely unbelievable story about James where he's actually buried next to the temple a complete violation of Jewish law there's many other things in there that is just not even remotely believable no one pushed back on that because they like that story they wanted to use that story the Christian elite that were preserving documents for us to know of it now they liked the story they didn't corroborate it they didn't check it there's no peer review going on here this is a propaganda mill that is deciding which made up stories they're going to approve and which one's not and of course notice which are the ones we don't get to read Hegisippus even right so there's a ton of things Hegisippus wrote that we weren't allowed to read they only pick things that hey UCBs only pick things out of Hegisippus that he wanted to cite because he liked the stories there's no evidence that UCBs corroborated there's no evidence that anyone else fact-checked them these are just the stories Christians wanted to tell and because they're blatantly and obviously false like the James story in Hegisippus we know they have no reliable checks on what they're deciding to preserve so there's no historical fact-checking going on here at all that's actually quite clear which is why we can't trust things like this we have tons of examples of that kind of thing as well what's my time left all right I'll briefly mention okay I don't know how much you've gone into Thalus decisively conclusively we know Thalus never mentioned Jesus nor wrote in the first century africanus is using a mention of an event unrelated to Jesus and tying Jesus to it he's basically constructing history using sources that don't mention Jesus Thalus didn't mention Jesus this is africanus himself making up a story using Thalus's details about an earthquake in Nicaea at the same time there was a full eclipse in Nicaea now neither of these events occurred in Jerusalem nor would have been visible or experienceable there so africanus is really playing fast and loose with his source but Thalus definitely didn't mention Jesus so we can't reference that and we know Tacitus did not have a source from the early period because we know the source that he used for the Neuronian era is the history of Rome by Pliny the Elder Pliny the Elder was actually there and so he wrote a whole book a whole volume on the reign of Nero that's Tacitus's likely source for the main details here but we know that this Pliny the Elder did not mention anything about Tiberius executing Christ or any of that because his son adopted son and Pliny the Younger writes to Trajan saying he doesn't know anything about these Christians and Pliny the Younger was a devotee of his father's works he read them assiduously had his notebooks read his notebooks and everything Pliny the Younger clearly had never heard the story that we see in Tacitus when he's writing to Trajan other than through interrogating Christians so it's clear that if his father had mentioned these details he would have mentioned these details to Trajan because it would have been perfectly relevant to any kind of legal trial that Pliny was going on to there and time so that's why we disregard that so we're gonna jump into six minute rebuttals folks have to draw your attention we are absolutely thrilled for the first time ever superstar debater Shabir Ali will be joining us for the first time this coming Monday as you can see at the bottom right of your screen debating on whether or not or namely who Jesus was whether or not Jesus fits better in the Quran or in the Bible so that's a juicy one you don't want to miss it and with that jumping into six minute rebuttals I've got the timer set Dr. Boyce the floor is all yours or you might be on I'll get it I promise by the end of this I'm gonna get this done right okay all right again thank you Dr. Carrier for your response I appreciate the information you're sharing and appreciate the manner in which you're sharing it as well just a couple more responses to this I would make the claim when it comes to particularly the discussion of chapter four of Galatians with Abraham himself remember the Jews and even by commencement of the Old Testament scriptures of Paul they were looking for physical bloodline descendant of Abraham who would have been through also that Davidic blind bloodline as well but if it doesn't go back to a physical bloodline remember these Jews in in Greeks he's writing to in Galatia were not eyewitnesses of Jesus's ministry their second hand informants of it so to convince them they need to have substantial evidence and if a Messiah did not physically come into the world and physically be born they're not going to believe in him he's disqualified it had to be a Jew who fulfilled in his life the law and that's why Paul said he was under the law he was abiding the law he kept the law he fulfilled the law there's a major implication there it would have been impossible to persuade the thousands of Jews and Gentiles through the law the law and the Torah and the prophets that a Messiah came without a physical birth as a Jew from the bloodline of Abraham there had to be some sort they're not just going to whimsically fall into that there had to be something substantial for them to many of them to trash their pagan gods and move on to believing in this resurrected Jesus there had to be some sort of affirming of a physical man who was in that time who was killed who was crucified and they believed the report from the eyewitnesses that they were resurrected now the statement that Paul never talks about really earth but when we go back to 1 Corinthians 15 he uses this defense almost in a courtroom kind of setting defending this resurrection particularly makes mention of not only that he died but that he was physically buried there was some sort of burial for him that indicates something we do here on earth not something up in outer space as much to me there's a earth element there when he deals not only with the death but a physical burial and remember Paul was a part of the Sanhedrin he was trained by Gamaliel as I stated in my earlier statements of Paul's ministry as a Pharisee he was there when Stephen accused his counsel of killing the Son of God he was there it wasn't like they were well who is this Jesus guy even though Paul wrote in the 50s he was alive during the time period that Jesus would have been on earth he wouldn't have believed something he's not somebody believing a report 20 years later he was alive when Christians were claiming this about a guy back when he was still a Pharisee and his event of conversion is not very much long after that so he wouldn't have just believed in somebody that didn't exist unless he actually knew there was a guy that they put to death the question between the Pharisees and the Christians was not Jesus not his crucifixion not his death or whether the Jews put him to death they blamed him for it the question is what happened to that body that was the debate between the Pharisees and the Christians and Paul utilizes that later in Acts when he's actually stuck between the Sanhedrin he's turning around and they're like all right we're going to put that we're going to harm him he says look am I on trial because I believe in a resurrection because he knew in the Sanhedrin the Sadducees didn't believe in a resurrection of the body and the Pharisees did he said I'm just teaching what our fathers always taught that people rise physically from the dead am I on trial for that then they fought with each other and the Romans pulled him out of there what that tells us is that the debate between Pharisees and Christians was not about the body the death who killed Jesus how he died it was what happened after he died so again I think Paul was fully believing in the historical man of Jesus even as a Pharisee because he was alive when his Sanhedrin was even being accused of killing him and murdering as the word Stephen used as far as the James goes again I think that it's not this I do think it's the same James because he's not talking about apostles as much as pillars in the church back in Jerusalem which would have included that James the other James would have been killed by that point and there's a James the less but there if there's no distinguishing difference we're left with the question of I don't know what James that is but he's already identified a James by association in chapter one and there's some dispute that we could have I guess on the translation part of I may there in Greek at the transition of accept or in place of the apostle whatever you want to translate there there is good dispute but it is also contextually used in other places in the same manner meaning accept and the good evidence of this is actually in 1 Corinthians 15 because he mentions James independently from the 12 there and he doesn't give the clarification of which James because the other James is are in the 12 so it's clear he's not talking about James the just or James the brother of John because he establishes in chapter 12 a separate group the group of the 12 so that leaves one leader left in Jerusalem who'd have been an eyewitness now remember at that time there's there is discussions and Paul would have been a lot earlier than some of the gospel accounts that we have but in that time remember he is going off of stories that he has received we know that through Jerome preserving and translating from Caesarea a document from a Hebrew Matthews gospel that Jesus did have a physical appearance to James it's very possible that information is consistent with what Paul received that James had an appearance as far as the gospels go as independent sources though they may use or borrow whatever term we want to use there from each other they are independent in places many places you have the Lucan sources and versus the Matthews sources John is very very independent from the others although he uses some of the same stories there do see there does seem to be independent sources although they do borrow from each other and you may even argue perhaps Dr. Carrier that they correct each other etc and that's fine but there are places where they do bring independent material about Jesus within their own sources as we see thank you very much we are going to jump into the six minute rebuttal from Dr. Carrier as well followed by open conversation and we'll have Q&A coming up later on folks so get your questions in and with that Dr. Carrier the floor is all yours okay I'll take the points backwards this time there's no evidence that any of the material that the gospels introduce each one of them had a source they don't cite sources they don't name sources we have no evidence that these sources exist so we can't argue from the speculation that they might have had sources that's not evidence so we can't argue from that we don't know that the James appearance in 1st Corinthians is a biological brother of Jesus Paul doesn't say that so we don't know which James that is so that that's not usable in this argument either to say that there is good dispute about the grammar I don't think the I think the debate is pretty well solidly on one side but the fact that there's a dispute means we also can't use the passage right so if it's if there's a dispute it's unresolved if that's your position then we can't rest a premise on that either so so that argument is code so this is the problem that we run into there now I think if you look into the debate you'll find that the the Trudinger is actually right about this there actually are no similar constructions in Paul this is a unique particular construction the the there are other examples of this construction in Greek literature but Trudinger actually points out that they actually are doing what Trudinger is saying where they're actually making an exception within a group the common group here is Christians and he's talking about apostles and then someone who's not an apostle that's how this structure often gets used exactly in this way I actually did a blog post about this recently so if you're interested you can check that out too Paul says the ones called pillars in Galatians too so he's talking about a known designation so this isn't just something he's making up this is something that people recognize when he says the ones called pillars everybody knows what he means so that that is a that is a clear demonstration then there are three of them and he names them so there's no dispute to anyone no one will be confused as to which James he means there so he's actually very carefully designated which James he means there so that doesn't help us with Galatians 1 there's actually no concern about the body in Acts this is I didn't bring this argument because it's kind of a digression I think but it's in the book on the historicity of Jesus in chapter 9 this is actually a really weird feature of Acts that there is no concern not by the Romans not by the Jews it never comes up in trial as to what happened to the body no one's even talking about it so that's kind of weird you might want to wonder how to explain that it could be that Acts is actually working from an earlier version of the story in which there was no body to account for when you look at the trials of Paul the dispute is always about whether he had a vision whether the vision was authentic and whether it or was faked or not and it's always it's always focuses on Paul's vision is actually the thing that converts him and I want to I wasn't going to bring it up before because it's kind of not relevant the fact that the Acts claims that Paul was there for the execution of Stephen that doesn't tell us what Paul or Stephen were saying or believing at the time Book of Acts is a post-gospel text so it doesn't help us determine what was actually going on at the time but Paul says himself in Galatians 1 that no one in Judea knew him until long after he converted so we know this story in Acts is false Paul was not there he did not witness the execution of Stephen that did not happen Paul himself says it did not happen because he says he wasn't even ever even there no one had even seen him he didn't even visit Jerusalem until long after his conversion so that's an example of why we can't really rely on Acts for this we need to go to Paul and Paul just doesn't corroborate any of these details the question is died and buried yes I do think Paul is talking about an actual death and an actual burial this is why I have a whole section in all the history of Jesus where I go through the Jewish apocrypha the Talmud and Christian texts showing that it was a belief at the time that every level of heaven including the firmament had copies of everything on earth so there were gardens and castles and things like that Hebrews even mentions this that there's a copy of everything in the heavens and there's different kinds the Talmud and other sources talk about the different increasingly superior copies as you go up the levels so there's like a version of everything going up so yeah there were gardens and things in the firmament and stuff in which one could be buried and in fact we have the apocryphal story of Adam and Eve with the life of Adam and Eve which is a text around the same time that Christianity began that attests to the fact that there were people Jewish writers believing that Adam and Eve are actually brought up to the third heaven and buried in the garden there the original garden of Eden is actually an outer space there if lots of examples of this scrolls, chariots, castles and so on of everything in all the levels of heaven so that is not a problem that is what they believed about the world it's weird to us now that belief but that is what they believed that so we have to interpret what they're saying and what was possible in the context of their worldview of how they understand the world's work not the way we do and Galatians 4 has nothing to do with anyone arguing about the physical bloodline of Jesus that's not an argument that comes up there if Paul ever had to make that argument we don't know what argument he made now we I do think that Paul believed that there was physical Davidic flesh in Jesus when he's when in Romans 1 he actually I think he's actually quoting or paraphrasing or drawing on the Nathan prophecy which says if you read it literally it says that the Messiah will come literally from the semen directly from David like there won't be a descendancy there won't be any kind of intermission they will be literally the Son of David now that's because the Nathan prophecy was originally about Solomon so it actually did mean literally the Son of David would be the Messiah later interpreters of course could read that in different ways but if you read it literally it sounds like God has arranged a direct relationship that he's actually made the body of Jesus out of Davidic seed directly whether that's the case or not Paul never says it's unclear so we can't really establish it from the text if Paul disagreed with this Paul wouldn't mention just birth by woman to establish messianic birth because a woman could be anybody he didn't say Jewish woman he didn't say woman descended from David or a woman descended from Abraham he didn't it's not how he's saying woman here he says born under a law born under a woman and then when he's talking about the different the control of the law over people and stuff he goes to these women I'm talking about are allegories this is a born under a woman is an allegory for which world order you're born into and that's Paul very clearly says that so that that's what's going on here it's that kind of story Paul's not in this place talking about the Davidic ancestry of Jesus that's not relevant to the story there time thank you very much we're going to jump into open conversation folks thank you very much gentlemen the floor is all yours am I muted oh I made it all right thank you Dr. Carrier for your presentation I appreciate the disposition and how this is going I'd like to continue that here in the next 30 minutes I do have a question and you can shoot right back at me after this one if you don't mind me going first here the argument here from Galatians about not being in Jerusalem was particularly about him not being a part of of cooperating with the actual alleged you would say alleged eyewitnesses but he's not saying you couldn't could you clarify what you're talking about there's no Jerusalem in Galatians you don't you mean a different passage I think no no well you're talking about how he never went he was he was not there oh I see I get you I understand Galatians one Paul's discussion of his geographic travels gotcha I'm on geographic travel just exact yeah but particularly he's talking about the dealings with the apostles but he was obviously there before him right because I mean in chapter number one he literally says I was unknown to any of the churches of Judea until he returned well he was I know he was he can't he can't have been known yeah but if they knew him as a persecutor if they watched him sit there and collect the clothes of Stephen you know that that's that would contradict Paul's statement Paul very clearly understands that he wasn't in Jerusalem and during this time he didn't come back but he persecuted me elsewhere but let me ask you this he says for you have heard of my former ways of life in Judaism how I used to persecute the church where else would he have done that in Judaism well he mentions returning to Damascus to do it he was doing it in the Diocese where did he get sent from where was the council that sent him out Paul never says right so that that doesn't sure right the Sanhedrin act says that but that contradicts Paul where Paul says he was never in Jerusalem until later so if he was commissioned by the Sanhedrin yeah but here's my question if he's questioned by the Sanhedrin the Sanhedrin is based out of what place well Paul never mentions being in or being questioned by the Sanhedrin so well he was a Pharisee a Pharisee that's a part of the Sanhedrin correct that's that was a claim no no Pharisee Josephus was a Pharisee for example Josephus was not a Sanhedrin member the Sanhedrin is a body of 72 people who enforces law in particular cities in fact there's technically a Sanhedrin in every city but there's the Jerusalem Sanhedrin is usually called the Sanhedrin but that's 72 people Pharisees were thousands probably millions of Jews Pharisees were a sect that studied in her particular sect so so those aren't the same thing Paul says I'm not getting the exact wording but it's very close to this he says I was unknown to the churches in Judea they only knew that I persecuted Christians which means that no one knew that him persecuting Christians in Judea right because he's explicitly saying that I wasn't persecuting Christians in Judea or else they would have known him they only knew of him persecuting Christians elsewhere that's what Paul says himself in Galatians 1 so yeah but that based on his level but I agree with here's where we agree we agree that the persecution took place in a different location but he was sent if he was a disciple of Gamaliel Gamaliel was in Jerusalem he had to train under Paul never says that Paul actually gives us his pedigree he omits any any famous pedigree like that the Gamaliel thing is in Acts I think Acts is making that up we have no corroboration that he studied under Gamaliel in Acts but even if he did that could have been decades before right so so that doesn't really help us with with anything here and I think you might want to change the subject I just like a bit of advice so I think this is tangential to the debate that we brought here to do maybe it is but I think I think that I mean I what we'll move on from that do you think the author of Luke and Acts are the same I do yeah okay so that's a lot of material that you're saying is not independent in of itself a lot of sourcing where he's claiming all these things especially from the very beginning of his the opening of Luke is very um historical in its setting to give out information that he's saying he received whether you think Luke wrote it or not how is that not I guess in your mind how is that not independent source based on all the content Luke does a lot of things to dress up as gospel to make it look like a history um borrowing the preface style as an example trying to date events the only dates one event really but uh but but doing that is the kind of thing that makes it look like a history um but conspicuously absent from his preface unlike other preferences or other source statements in histories is a statement of sources and why you should trust them Arian the historian of Alexander for example mentions who he's using why he's using them and why you should believe what they say Luke doesn't do that he conspicuously never names what his sources are or says who they are and we know his sources they're either mark and Matthew or mark and Q depending on which theory you believe in I don't believe in Q but I don't accept Q yeah so he's using mark and Matthew because he's quoting them verbatim so uh so we know for a fact he's using them as a source he's changing up their stories so he changes up a lot of the nativity of Matthew because he doesn't like it and there's been good scholarship on the specific rhetorical changes that Luke made and you can see how they're actually based on Matthew he's reversing a lot of the mathian story it's a lot of this that you can go into in the details of this but Luke tries to make it look like a history but he conspicuously omits the things that we actually find in real histories at the time and to give you an example like Luke clearly uses Josephus's Jewish antiquities for a lot of his color material a lot of his background material comes from there he probably used a similar historian for the Aegean when he does a lot of the it gets details right about the Aegean but their details have nothing to do with Christianity their incidental details of the color in the context the historical fiction he's writing we don't have any examples of his corroborating of corroborating evidence of the Christian parts of all of us but you look at how africanus uses thalus and flagon to two sources that don't mention Jesus and weaves them together and then puts Jesus in the story and creates a new story africanus does this in the third century luke acts is doing the same thing he takes all these stories of Josephus and then ties all these people into them so like Gamaliel is a prominent figure that's why Gamaliel gets mentioned in acts because the author of luke wants to tie all Christian history into this great so it's actually there's and I did my first doctorate on luke and material in luke and acts I would actually say if you're looking at who's following who and I don't have time to pull out all my dog I think actually Matthew's writer was following luke on many occasions in fact the genealogies are different so I don't think they're copying each other Matthew used a very Jewish section like 1414 14 like he separated based on Jewish sectioning back into David starting with David middle David luke actually went a completely different direction I think that they're very independent even in their lines because they did not even use digital format they're very independent in ideology and plans right they don't agree with each other very much on a lot of things they want to tell a different story but yeah I mean obviously that's a that's a kind of very minority position Matthew and priority or at least Matthew before luke I would advise people to look at Goodacre's arguments he has detailed arguments as to why that doesn't work I think I think by the way that I think Matthew I think there was actually a Hebrew version of Matthew that was first and it and most people think Matthew Matthew and priority based on some of the church fathers quotes you think it's Hebrew Matthew Matthew luke then Mark no I think there's a Hebrew Matthew that we know that we don't have anymore and it was pretty much just an M source it was Matthew's source I don't think it was the full gospel I think Mark was the first Greek gospel I think everything started with because Matthew quotes Mark verbatim so Matthew's clearly so yeah Oh yeah Matthew our Matthew cannot Mark cannot have come from Hebrew so it sounds like you're more like you're imagining a Hebrew cue but actually there's multiple places in Matthew where actually he does use Hebrew idioms that he had to translate into Greek you can see numerous examples of Matthew taking Jewish philosophy whereas Mark doesn't even deal with it because he's writing to a Gentile audience probably in Rome Mark doesn't know how to Aramaic and explains it to his audience you have Luke has tons of Septuagintalism so Luke is trying to emulate the style of the Septuagint so a lot of the Aramaicisms and Luke are actually the result of him emulating the Septuagint it's like someone you know emulating the King James Bible and then claiming that there was a Hebrew source because it sounds like the King James Bible that that's not how that works but with Matthew I think the same things going on like Matthew's Matthew has his own Hebrew knowledge I don't think he's using sources I think he's putting his own spin on things and writing things his own way well Luke was clearly using multiple influences his opening line was taken strictly from the physician's manual back in the second century BC I mean he actually literally used the same line of opening to defend something as a physician would sure sure right there in the first line I mean word for word minus his change of audience so he was a similarity to Josephus Josephus has a similar I would say well I would say it was actually to me the writer of Luke and Josephus were influenced by similar historical writings I don't think either one of them was borrowing I don't think either one of them were borrowing from each other I actually think they were yeah I I disagree with that but we don't need to go into that argument here that's fine I think I'm sure you know the literature you know Mason and everybody has written on this as to why they're the specific mistakes that Luke makes that can only be explained by his using Josephus and not the other way around but if people want to go into that you know you can you can research it later it's it's it's off topic I think for us today yeah well I told you I want to debate you on Luke but we'll save it all right so Galatians one going back to Galatians one on the persons of interest going back to what I was saying about James for example if Paul's just identifying a general person for the sake of protecting himself by not missing somebody the guy is not identified at all where anybody could actually pinpoint they can pinpoint see this and and see if his claim is viable but if it's just some random Joe or James in this there's no credibility to that witness so it's obvious that the Galatians already know who Kifas is right and they already know who the pillars are so the concern that Paul would have because this is what would happen is he would make a claim oh I only met Kifas and he just did that and then Kifas goes you know visits Galatia and then they ask him so did he only visit you and he says no there was another guy there and oh like they were uproarious but if Paul says oh and I met James the brother of the Lord there and then they would ask Kifas is that true did he only meet this guy named James and you and he would say yes and then Paul would be secure so the reason you know Paul is trying to make very clear that he can't get caught in a trap like that so that's why he has to name the guy this other guy that he met and he has to distinguish that he's not an apostle that's why he uses this convoluted grammar I'm not talking about James the apostle I met this other James but he was a brother of Christ so I should mention it because I could have gotten gospel information from this guy but then in the next passage he says he lists the three names and he says the ones called the pillars so he's very clear carefully distinguishing them as a whole other subgroup that is clearly already known to the Galatians because he says you know they're called right the Galatians but he knew these people and Galatians one for him to just list him he would not have indicated this would have been the only place and I backtracked this through the rest of the narratives this would be the only place where the name with that description the brother of so and so is a general term that leaves the audience an ambiguity because could you rephrase that I'm not sure which passage so if it was just a guy named James Paul would have left in Galatians one right sorry about that yeah going back to Galatians one if it was just James he would have mentioned a guy named James but in the phrasing of this the James being the Taun Adelphan if you would that phrasing in all the biblical narratives whether you're looking at whether you think they're authentic or not acts Paul's other places utilizing it with Josephus how they utilize those terms with all the commonality of names those those designs were there to give more specifics not general this would be the only place that I can find Dr. Carrier is the only that would actually work against you if you're going to maintain that position and here's why we have Paul explicitly saying that all baptized Christians are brothers of the Lord so if he's supposed to be so specific as to specify biological brother of the Lord he would have to do that he couldn't say brother of the Lord Taun Adelphan he uses as clearly as as fictive kinship identifier all throughout his epistles Paul frequently says this with a personal name who does he do that with with a personal name I'd have to check exactly he does it but he talks about the brethren I'm gonna have to check with that he does it pretty sure he calls them when he addresses a church pretty sure I have I would count our examples of that but I have to pull out the book and pull the foot down he he calls the general church's brothers but he never calls an identifier not just brothers generally but the brother of an individual that is first century writing in Greek he's he'll say like my brother your brother etc it takes the place of the definite article right but not in this case this is a this is a descriptive identifier to a personal name that's we're gonna have I'm gonna have to look that up because I'm I'm pretty sure that's not true Paul uses Taun Adelphan a lot in a fictive way it does not designate biological it's not enough to designate biological because Paul explicitly says there are cultic brothers of Jesus never says they're biological brothers of Jesus if he meant biological brother of Jesus and needed to specify he would have to specify it so the fact that he didn't he just uses the brothers and the only time he uses the full planism is when he's contrasting the brothers with apostles because this only happens twice 1 Corinthians 9 and here in Galatians 1 where he needs to make a distinction between apostolic Christians and Christians of lower rank otherwise he just abbreviates he doesn't use the planism he abbreviates it as just brothers but you ask what brothers of what why are they brothers they're brothers of Jesus as Paul explicitly says in Romans so so we need to go into it today but I will check and email you my source list on the Greek and see and I and let me let me be clear so you're not misunderstanding me either because I don't want your I don't want to mislead anybody the phrasing of Adelphan as a general group happens all the time I'm not saying it doesn't but when he attaches an individual personal name with the description of the brother another example like I said Acts 12 James the tawn Adelphan of John was meant to identify and this was true I mean think about the disciples of Jesus he had two of everybody I mean he had Jude two Judices so you have Judas to scare it's usually a description so Judas is scary and then the gospel writers obviously bitter against him a little bit at the phrase the one who betrayed the Lord just so you know it's not the other Judas and then they James was a problem again being the sixth most popular name in Palestine naturally Jesus has two James's so they have James and John James the brother of John or John the brother of James or the sons of Zebedee whatever line you want to put there to distinguish between James the last and James the brother of John sure all that's true there's the exception for the brethren of Jesus right because Paul that's the one case where Paul says all baptized Christians are adopted sons of God and therefore the brethren of Jesus so that's a different case than all these others because here we don't have an adopted cultic brother of the Zebedees right that's not that doesn't exist but the cultic brethren of Jesus does exist Paul says so so that's why the analogies to all these other brothers are not applicable because yes they're identifying a brother of a particular brother of like if he'd said brother of Kaphos James the brother of Kaphos that would have been very clearly a reference to a biological brother of Kaphos because he wouldn't need to specify because there's no such thing as a cultic brother of Kaphos but if you've everybody knows that everybody the Galatians all know about the cultic brother brothers of Jesus so that's a different case where he would need to specify there where he wouldn't in any other case well like for example and he does it in the female forms too for sisterhoods I mean he got a Roman 16 for example he mentions this Deaconess if you would named Phoebe he calls her his sister he calls I mean just depending on your view of 1st Timothy and so Timothy his son Titus his son he does use this endearing family talk but look what he says only because they're all brothers of Jesus right so they are all the brethren they're all brothers of each other and they're all sisters of each other it's the same word but they're all sisters of each other but that sisterhood is to him whereas in this case it's to another individual that's not him so that's where like for example I don't think Paul made that distinction I don't think when he says my brother he means you know it was just as if they were all biological brothers of Jesus he would also say my brother right because so is fictive kinship right there would be personal pronouns there would have been fictive kinship terminology works exactly the same way as biological so you can't make the distinctions that you're trying to do here well the the point I was making with that is in other places say Roman 161 with Phoebe he doesn't call her a sister of the Lord he just says my sister Phoebe yeah that was my point that was my point this would be the only this would be the only place where that descriptive is general not specific to a name attached to a personal to there's two personal name well okay that's your name I think what you mean is the full pleonasm brother of the Lord and then that's not just like that's what I'm saying that's not because you're right that only appears twice in Paul and only once assigned to a specific person that is true yeah and that's kind of a specific one phrase yeah if you're talking about the whole phrase well I think we need to interpret an author by their own style not by other author's style so that's why I brought up Roman 16 if he does this all the time with other names and he never attacked that but he doesn't say brother of the Lord right he doesn't say brother of the Lord so so the pleonasm he only uses when he's contrasting apostles with rank and file he's not doing that with Priscilla he's not he doesn't need to contrast her with an apostle he's just saying my my sister through most of the letters most of the time Paul just abbreviates and just says my brothers my sisters right general he leaves general he means fictively right so so these are not biological connections at least well I'll give you another example and I know you probably I'm not sure if you accept Ephesians as Paul named but let's just use it for Ephesians right I do not it would not it's not even I mean the reason we don't believe it's Ephesian it's Paul is because it's the wrong style so we can interpret Paul's style with Ephesians unfortunately well I brought it up for particular like again another example of that time for he says Tychicus the beloved brother and faithful servant in the Lord using now whether you believe that was Paul or somebody personally Paul this style again demonstrates it's this Galatians one to my study and I'm not perfect and I admit that anybody can fact check me and I will gladly back out and say hey there was another spot I missed this would be the only place where that type of setup takes place in all the Pauline writers particularly seven letter you would accept as Paul I want to be sure I understand though like because what you mean so it before it sounded like you were saying saying Tauna Delphan by itself Paul never does to anyone else what you mean is adding of the Lord that adding that piece is the part that you're calling attention to that consistency of title description that goes on in that time of writing I would agree that that is rare in Paul in fact he does it only twice and and so the question is why does he do it only twice and so we could get on a 5050 argument where it could be he only does it because the only two times he does do it it's when he's contrast what's the other time you have in mind what's the other time first Corinthians nine he doesn't name anyone but he he talks about the apostles in distinction to the brethren that's what I'm saying like generally he does that all the time but when it comes to condensing it to a single person no okay no he doesn't do that all the time brethren of the Lord is a phrase that occurs only once in Paul no no no I mean brethren like addressing a corporate yeah I know I know I say one thing and then you like take it as a different premise and start from there so I think we're creating confusion okay let's back up so let's back up so generally we agree that brothers is used regularly for Paul to talk about the whole christian hood and the singular he'll say the brother my brother etc my brother so and so then in first Corinthians you're specifically talking about with the phrase courias or courion at the end in the Lord where he categorically places the whole group as you've lost me in the Lord is that what you quoted from first Corinthians nine or did I hear you wrong no no no oh no it's brothers of the Lord of the Lord yeah which verse are you in I don't remember specific names there that's why I'm asking uh no it's not that's that's why I that's why I think there's confusion here I didn't mean to cite it as an example of there being a personal name in there Kephus is there but he doesn't anyway Kephus comes up later which verse is this oh I see in verse number five come on verse there we go five yes sorry verse five rest of the disciples and the brothers of the Lord yeah right right that's and that's like yeah that's definitely that family feel and that's why I've said numerous times a Delphos could mean it could mean Jewish brotherhood Jews used it all the time in relation to their nationality it could be a community of believers of like-mindedness but at times it does have blood relation and typically when you have a person named that needs clarification we see Josephus did it and I know you dispute a little bit of chapter 20 about Chris does I think I understand your argument so let me make sure that you understand where I'm coming from on this is that yes that's possible the problem is that there's a huge monkey wrench thrown into this which is that the normal practice normal that's that's true if we didn't have a section where Paul says that we're all adopted the baptized Christians are adopted by God and our all brothers in Jesus if that passage didn't exist you'd have a point but because that passage does exist now we have a problem the exact same terminology and the exact same procedures that you're talking about will now apply to both groups there won't be a distinction so when you need to make a distinction it would have to be explicit so what we have in Galatians 1 is not explicit enough for your purposes if Paul means to identify James as a biological and not a cultic brother which he would have to do because all the Galatians know about cultic brothers and Paul's never intentions anywhere else they're being biological brothers he would need to specifically say like a brother of the Lord in the flesh or something like that he would only have to do that because of this weird cultic tradition within Christianity that they're all adopted by God and thus the sons of Jesus it creates an exception to this particular case that doesn't apply to other cases like the brothers the Zebedee brothers and things like that so those analogies don't carry over does that make sense it does but I think it actually leaves the audience confused as to who in the world they're supposed to be because I think it actually brings greater clarity by being overly specific which is my point of that was is that's consistent with other writings that's what he would say in the flesh right he would have added in the flesh to specify but I mean the biological brother of Jesus but we don't see that necessarily in other places like Acts 12 James the brother of the Lord being killed he didn't say the brother according to flesh it's assumed as much contextually a Delphos is assumed by its content no actually it's very unclear what they mean in Acts whether he means if you identify a name to a name it's typically it's not clear if he means a cultic brother of the Lord an actual biological brother of the Lord because there are two James's in in a chapter yeah in an actual one there are two apostles so I think this is the apostle we're talking about here but if you go to chapter 12 you have a James that's killed by Herod and he clarifies it's the it's read it it's the brother John yes see okay that proves my point so he's made very clear this is not the brother of the Lord it's the brother of John now there is no cultic brother of John so there's no need to specify brother of John in the Lord or in the flesh so it's his it's his physical brother yeah there's no need to do that here because there's no such category as fictive brothers here but there is a well he does because there's another James coming there's another James he mentions in the same section he has to make okay so Acts 12 2 it's James the brother of John so the author of that line does not have to say anymore because there there is only one way that could mean it means biological there is no second thing that that could mean whereas for for brothers of the Lord it is confusing because there are two categories of brothers of the Lord there are adopted brothers of the Lord and then there are biological brothers of the Lord now we don't find the biological one in Paul anywhere we find the adopted one very explicitly in Paul so Jesus is a different case where we have this whole fictive brotherhood it doesn't exist for the brotherhood of John so James the brother of John you don't need to specify in the flesh right but for brotherhood if it said the brother of the Lord you would have to specify which kind of brother adopted brother or literal brother little brother right so so that's why the analogy doesn't carry over is what I'm saying is that I think it's consistent though in my opinion we and we can move on I know there's plenty of other subjects but I think it's consistent in writing to do it the way it is both in Acts and Galatians and even in the way Jews Cephas and others use it because consistency isn't evidence right so consistency gets you to 50-50 at best it doesn't get you over so it doesn't resolve the question of which is meant by this passage it's just saying it could he could mean either thing but we don't have any evidence as to which it is now I think the evidence weighs in favor of fictive because I think you would have to specify in the flesh here all right so I think we beat that dead horse I think it's dead maybe maybe and I probably I hit it more times these are worth going into though because like there were several points there where we misunderstood each other so it was worthwhile it was worth for clarification getting on the same page yeah figure out what we are listen I'm to I'll admit I hit the horse I'll admit I hit the horse more than you did how about we leave it at that okay sure um can we talk about what's talk about how much time do we got James two and a half minutes left oh man really quickly on tacitus you and I have corresponded in the past about this so you think that tacitus received his information from plenty more so than because did tacitus not admit he had records that he had seen in Rome that he was actually given access to court records in Rome not in this passage and there wouldn't be this wouldn't be in a record in Rome there was that kind of bureaucracy didn't exist until Diocletian hundreds of years later there's no way hundreds of executions in Jerusalem are being recorded in the archives in Rome and even if they wasn't there an act of pilot not a real one and uh right so um you know but it was talked about when the acts of pilot talked about the archives of Rome burned several times before tacitus so he's not likely to have the access to that he would have had access to the acts of the senate because that was published and disseminated to other libraries so when Domitian replaced the books that were burned in the library in Rome under his reign he was able he would have been able to replace the act of sonata because there were copies to to go get whereas whether there were Tony has talked about them too so Tony has said this during Caesar's time they actually enacted this I don't know if you call it a modern day what we call a newspaper or whatever you want to call it but it's the Tony has talked about that was issue yeah the act of sonatas yeah and local towns would have their own yeah it's the Gazette it would it would have it would be full of stuff so it'd be like the equivalent of newspaper but no tacitus doesn't say he got this information from there at all in any way and it's very unlikely that he would bother because as soon as he heard that story that was too delicious for him to even bother checking so he would be astonished that Christians were admitting to this and so he would he would just quote it he's not going to spend hours digging through archives if they even but he was tracing it back to a man though like because they were trying to where did this group blow up in Rome from and they're trying to trace it back to a name he doesn't mention the name yeah he doesn't mention doing any kind of tracing activity he just says this is the origin of the name in fact he references the person yeah but that doesn't tell us anything about where he's getting this information I think the easiest and most obvious place he's getting it is Christians well my point is he's familiar with the got to with got it up into the sorry closing is no worries at all give you a chance to if you have any final thoughts from that dialogue you guys have a chance to mention them in your clothes I'll let Dr. Carrier finish that one I'll let I'll let him finish out what he was saying he was I'll let you finish Dr. Carrier I lost my track on that anyway you're talking about the house it is giving the information from more likely from Christians discussions rather than um yeah because we know for example Pliny Pliny the younger and I'm on my time now we're going to five minutes we're going to jump right into the closing statement that's right and starting the timer right now yeah when when Pliny when Pliny wants to know what Christians believed he says he didn't know until he asked Christians so he wasn't consulting any acts either or any source material he just asked Christians now we know Tacitus asked Pliny for information about his stuff and we know Pliny asked Christians and that's where Pliny learned stuff about the Christians it's very unlikely that Tacitus would bother and with any other source and in any case we have no evidence that he did which is the key point we can't turn speculations into facts so we can't use them as premises it would be delightful if we could know where Tacitus got this information but we're not told and there's no particular evidence that he got it from any kind of reliable source so we can't use it it's frustrating but that's that's how history works especially the ancient history we're stymied like that a lot of times but that's just the state of the evidence that's how it is I'll just reiterate my my main point when we're looking at someone who's as heavily mythologizes Jesus a lot of savior gods are replaced in history there are a lot of other kinds of hero figures placed in history Esop you know poor lower class sages that did a lot of things similar to Jesus including getting themselves killed for blasphemy unjustly by the by the temple elite you know there's there's a lot of these stories going around these made up heroes for these particular functions we know that's the case and Jesus looks a lot like these guys so we would need to ask what evidence do we have that makes Jesus an exception that makes him historical and them not right and then when we go looking we don't find it we should find more I think we should find more evidence of Jesus than we do we don't the first place you would go is people who are live and write tons and tons about him who are live at the time of him Paul didn't meet him in life but he writes thousands and thousands of words about him but all we get from Paul is references to Jesus only being known through scripture and revelation no reference to any hand-picking disciples people hanging out with him him having adventures or particular deeds in life particularly teachings in life Paul doesn't even mention parables for example he doesn't mention him being a creature he doesn't mention him being an exorcist or a miracle worker so none of that's in there none of that's in Paul Paul is weirdly silent about the historical Jesus in our sense in his sense the historical Jesus is this visionary being that he knows by revelation he has private conversations with he talks about he has conversations with Jesus up in heaven they talk to each other and this is how he says people get information from Jesus so that's how it looks like when we look in the time of Jesus now if we go an average lifetime later suddenly these books appear now these books don't appear in Palestine they don't appear in so far as we know Hebrew or Aramaic you can speculate but we don't have any evidence of that being the case all we have are the Greek texts and it looks like you know Mark came out of the Greek text Matthew came along and embellished and altered it Luke came along and embellished and altered it John came along and did what people are usually taught to do which is rewrote them all in his own words but still using their material and expanded and added and so on and expanding and adding is also what people were taught in school to do so that's actually part of what we know these guys had in their training being able to write this the Greek that they write that sort of compositional Greek and so but there's no evidence that any of this has any sources other than themselves it's right so we and their fabulous stories their ridiculous stories even the stuff that isn't miraculous is often not believable we didn't go into that this time I've done it in other debates though but so these are highly mythologized unbelievable stories in a foreign language in a foreign land by unknown authors never citing sources for any of their material so this is in history this is the worst source situation to be in it's terrible so that's not good enough right so because we have similar stories like these told about other non-existent heroes savior heroes especially but many other types of heroes so so that's not enough we can't cite that so we can't use that so what do we do well we've got historians that come decades and decades later but there's so much later that the gospels are already in circulation Christians are already quoting the gospels the gospels are already infecting their creeds when you look at Paul he talks about he mentions the creed different creeds several times in Philippians 1st Corinthians and so on but when we get to Ignatius suddenly the creed is elaborately incorporated the name of Pilate the name of Mary all of these gospel details are now in the creed they're not in the creeds in Paul's day and Ignatius is writing roughly around the same time as Tacitus Photonius etc so so we know the gospels have already infected Christian teaching and they're most likely sources these guys would have about Christians are Christians through the legal process or just directly asking them so and we have no evidence of any other source that they're using so we can't establish to any of the historians as independent of the gospels there's no dependency that we can establish there is no other evidence and so that is a really terrible terrible case for Jesus like the evidence looks bad is what I'm saying compared to other people of similar nature thank you very much for that closing Dr. Harry or we'll kick it over to Dr. Steven Boyce for his closing as well before we jump right into the Q&A so thanks so much the floor is all yours great thank you James for inviting me on to this and thank you Dr. Carrier I'm sure you had a thousand of the things you could have done tonight always have just I haven't had a discussion with you I didn't enjoy so I hope it's mutual if I'm ever in California I echo that yeah quite I'll try to connect with you if I'm ever in California and if I'm any call of California probably somebody should call for help I shouldn't be there but I do appreciate the time that we've had I just to kind of rehash some of my points and obviously I don't know if anybody else knew this but I don't think Dr. Carrier or myself believed that we were actually going to convince the other person of our arguments tonight but debates are for our audiences to listen to and to kind of rehash my points on my first premise I still stand by the fact that I believe that Paul was originated as a Pharisee of Pharisees from the area of Jerusalem trained by Gamaliel sent by the Sanhedrin as a person who would have known why the mission of killing Jesus was necessary according to the law of Moses the change in Paul was based on what happened to the man that died I'm convinced based on not just the gospel testimonies but particularly even his own that there was something that took place in him on Damascus that changed him and that was on the defense of what happened to the body and he believed it resurrected from the dead with the usage of terminology I enjoyed our conversation today about James and Jude and these names about brothers glad we were able to bring some clarity to each other to make sure we understood it I still stand by the fact that because of the commonality of the usages of these names in Palestine and by the way most of these names to the audience you may not know this the reason a lot of these names popularized in the top 10 out of 100 were thanks to the the Maccabean family a lot of these names originated and got so popular because of the Maccabean periods during the Maccabean wars Judas Maccabean Simeon Simon all of these names came from pretty much family members of the Maccabean family at that time which really grew in Palestine and so as a result we see in other places of the New Testament as well as even Jesus himself needed the description Jesus of Nazareth because there were many Jesuses there were many or Hebrew name of Joshua in the land of Palestine during the life ministry of Jesus there were a lot of souls it could be a reason the name change took place there for him is because of the popularity of souls name going to a more Greek format and then Peter was Simon Simon is the number one name these names become confusing in literature but if the audience is familiar with the the apostles or the ministry of Jesus gang if you would when you start mentioning them and putting those same distinguishers that you see the gospel writers do for James the the brother of John or James the less or Judas Ascariot who betrayed the Lord versus the other Judas as one of the gospel writers but it's Judas not Ascariot just just so you know it's not that one they had to give clarifiers so that you as a reader would not be confused as to who was being talked about I believe in Galatians one Paul was following that same pattern throughout to identify an individual specifically not generally and I still believe that this would be an only exception with a personal name there rather than a group or a collected group here in this unique place and then we see it consistently in other writings to identify I still hold to that position that this was a a way to bring clarity to similar names as far as the ancient references that we talked about with James and through Josephus I believe that those sections were there to clarify not only James but to clarify Jesus too and apparently Josephus had some sort of record I know there's dispute about the name being there but it makes once again that clarity and more sense to bring clarity to both the common name of Jesus and the common name of James and again as I stated in my presentation the Gnostic writers did the same thing to try to gain credibility in their writings Peter the brother of Andrew so that you would believe he is the one who was with Jesus or didimus Thomas rather than just generally Thomas which is also a top 50 name didimus Thomas would have took readers to go oh that's talking about the guy that was with Jesus because he was a twin and that was a feature that described him to me that is a consistent avenue as far as hegasepis went and closing I think hegasepis is actually a little bit more important though he may not have a perfect history Eusebius validated it and as I stated Eusebius was a court historian who was under the watchful eye of not just Christianity but Rome and he had access to things that we just don't have and were thankful for what he did preserve he was by no means perfect at any point was he a perfect historian and he had opinions that he was pushed back on quite a bit theologically from others that came during his day and after but again I want to thank Dr. Carrier for this debate thank you James for having me on and inviting me to it I trust it was informative for your audience and it gives Dr. Carrier and I something to think about after we get off thank you very much for both of you pleasure is all mine and thank you very much folks for your questions we're going to jump into it and we're going to try to move fast so we can get every one of your questions in this one from constellation Pegasus says originally no devil and fallen angels Christianity invented that later why fight if Jesus existed or not if Christianity is proven to be false I think this is for you okay Dr. Boyce yeah there's two things in there and they're both wrong but okay Dr. Boyce well I mean angels angels were taught very very early on and even in the inter testament period before the New Testament I mean you have the book of watchers I mean you've got stories of the fallen angels by names I mean first the whole falling of the whole war in heaven and Satan is a fallen angel all that predates Christianity many many many years before there was a second part to that question that's right he said so then why argue over historicity if Christianity is proven to be false I mean that that is a different question that I do get asked a lot do you have a comment on that Boyce well I don't I don't see how the angels and demons part I don't see the connection either Christianity part maybe I maybe I'm thrown off by the first question well the whole maybe the whole gospel doesn't make sense without that backstory which I would agree with but that's where the backs that's why it came out of that backstory yeah I mean obviously according to the gospels angels appeared to Mary gave her the news appeared to Joseph I mean angels were very instrumental and even after Jesus' temptation angels comforted him on the side when he was tempted 40 days and 40 nights in the wilderness in Matthew 4 and Luke 4 so they're instrumental in the New Testament but they didn't just show up in the New Testament yeah to get away from that faux pas and just focus on the question the second part of the question I would say the reason I think it's important is because it's history and I think a lot of people are wrong about this and we need to reform the way we talk about this in history so I think if Christianity has a different origin story than is usually taught then that is important I don't I'm not teaching it or proposing it to defeat Christianity in fact I have an article on my blog I very specifically tell people do not use this as an argument against the truth of Christianity because it is a weaker argument than just confronting the resurrection on the presumption of historicity right you can just assume historicity and easily prove that the miracles aren't true and easily prove that the theology isn't true so don't you know the only people I think who can have fruitful debate about this are the two groups of people as people who are already atheists who aren't committed to Jesus existing and scholars who have accultivated a certain scholarly objectivity and are willing to like entertain the possibility that certain people did or didn't exist so you could have a debate over the existence of Homer there there actually is one it's mostly on the side of there wasn't a Homer but but it's discussed in the field and it's discussed because it's it's history it's relevant to history and the people who study it so it that's why they do it they don't do it to try and refute you know Homer worshipers or something like that this one coming in from constellation Pegasus says Jews laugh at the idea of Paul if he was who he said he was and he wouldn't have been killing Christians in areas he had no authority to do so not sure who it's for that's not that's not a carrier yeah it's not really true so before the Jewish war the Jews had established by treaty with Rome the right to govern their own people by their Jewish laws and there were actually Jewish courts in multiple cities so the diaspora you actually could be subject to a Jewish court if you were Jewish and by but if you were a Roman citizen you could appeal to Roman law and get out of that right you had to get out of jail free card acts depicts this with Paul whether that's a true story or not it is actually a thing that happened that is actually how the law worked back then now after the Jewish war this was not the case the treaty treaty was destroyed and nullified by the war but before the war there actually worse inherent courts all over the place you actually could be given Brits of authority to go but you would only go and be pursuing Jews right now which makes sense because Paul had not been converting Gentiles yet the only Gentiles that converted to Judaism were converting to Judaism and constantly we were voluntarily submitting themselves to Jewish law even in diaspora towns so they would be subject to Sanhedrin courts in those towns unless they had some sort of other citizenship that they could appeal to to escape you got it and this one coming in from do appreciate it S.J. Thomason's has how does Dr. Carrier explain acts 2311 where Jesus stood next to and encouraged Paul it's nice when the questions actually address the person they're asking it to it actually helps a little bit better I'm not sure I understand the question they said all I can let's see I'm in the same boat they said can you explain acts 2311 where Jesus stood next to Paul and encouraged Paul I think they're saying would you say that it was a hallucination or something different or that's oh I see I mean it's fiction acts is fiction and I have a lot of arguments for this and I follow a lot of scholars who agree with me on it in chapter nine of on the historicity of Jesus so I don't think there's an event here to explain but if there was a story that Paul was telling about which this is sort of an exaggerated version of which yeah this is a dream right this is a dream or who's nation Paul talks Paul has Jesus come and talk to him all the time we have that in 2nd Corinthians 12 so this is dead Jesus by the way it's talking to Paul and he had Paul relates a whole two-way conversation that he had with dead Jesus this is Paul himself doing this yeah it's obviously dreams or hallucinations can I clarify on that go ahead can I clarify on that yeah please please though I believe Paul had a physical Jesus he believed in I don't think that passage is talking about a physical Jesus showing I think it's the presence of Jesus and it specifically says Lord there so I think he believed that that spirit of presence was with him I would actually say it's a spiritual presence not which a physical bodily appearance if you would I'm not looking at if I'm interpreting it as a pastor yeah I'm going to interpret that that's entirely possible in context in Jewish the way Jewish texts would write I'm not looking at the Greek of that passage so I can't say for sure but appearances of the presence of the Lord that is a thing in Judaism yes oh that's and I think that's the text angel of the presence was a thing it was often Michael sometimes as Gabriel the metatron there's different kinds of roles that angels would be assigned so angel of the so you know presence of the Lord would literally just mean an angel of the Lord that would be completely congruent with the way people talked back then this one coming in from ye of little faith says Dr. Carrier routinely routinely accuses historicists of lying he recently wrote that none have told the truth about his work and asked why Dr. Carrier do you engage in this way only when people lie about my work so for example Dr. Boyce has done none of this uh Dr. Boyce's approach that's completely honestly and if he doesn't know something I've written he doesn't pretend to know right so so but what I run into with what they're talking about there and I have lists of examples I don't just accuse people of lying by the way I I extensively prove it with evidence so if you if I've ever called anyone a liar go to my blog look them up and look at the evidence and then decide and you should be outraged frankly at the way they completely lie about what's in my book what's not in my book or what I have to argue to what I haven't argued they do outright lie now there's a certain people that do this and when they do it I call them out I actually prove the evidence and preside it and in any ordinary sane rational society that would shame them but instead people just aren't interested in checking the facts to see if that's the case so uh so yeah if you're if you're concerned about me calling anyone a liar go look at the evidence I will have presented it in detail and then you can make your own judgment call as to whether the person in question lied or not this one coming in from David P. Neff says this is the best debate I've seen on this subject kudos to both of you for a respectful dialogue I have much respect for both of you and want to remind you folks our guests are linked in the description so you can hear more from them by clicking on those links Pineapple Platymas says why do either of you need evidence of good ideas sometimes they think they're trolling well get the name not give it away I can do some yeah I can I can do some philosophy on that though taking it more seriously than it probably is intended ideas are like pre sense or something right or ideas of how to conduct your life or things like that good ideas you know sell themselves as the whole idea but we're not talking about what the historicity of Jesus is a complex question because it deals with tons of complex sources of very complex historical context all other languages so so there's nothing it's not like there's nothing going to be self evident about either the historicity of Jesus or the non-historicity of Jesus you got it and thank you very much for your question coming in from Dharma Defender says in first Corinthians 15 Paul mentions five one five five hundred and fifteen witnesses to Jesus it's interesting that none of those all important eyewitnesses testimonies were preserved I think that's for you Dr. Boyce well I think they were preserved by Paul here because this was a common thing in fact he challenged the readers of Corinthian stating that of those 500 many of them were still alive up to that point so his statement was actually a challenge he wasn't just making a claim he was making a claim that he felt like they could even go in and challenge his claim with he's saying hey 500 plus people saw this too a lot of them are still alive go ask them this is a defense and like I said as I mentioned before Jerome translated a pick a depiction there in the Hebrew Matthew of a resurrection appearance to James which is what Paul says here too so people obviously at that time were familiar with the eyewitnesses and did have conversations with the eyewitnesses and Paul was totally open to letting them be challenged to which of those were still alive by the time he was writing this so I don't see that as necessarily it didn't need to be going that direction I think it's actually clear what he's doing here he's making a defense and opening the opportunity to be challenged I think I can redirect the question because I think that misses the point of what they were asking so I deal with this a lot in a different way which is my question as a historian is what did they see right so so when Paul says if he appeared to Kephas etc he appeared to the brethren and so on I want to know what he means right but we don't he doesn't say we have an account from him about his vision and he does seem to imply that it's the same as everyone else's so you can make that inference but we don't actually have a story from any of those 500 saying this is what I saw hi I'm Jacob this is what I saw and that's limiting to us as historians it means we cannot import assumptions into this so we cannot assume that he's talking about Jesus showing up from the grave and hanging out for a month having dinner parties like acts depicts but but then you have acts too where the public history of the church starts and you have all the brethren having an appearance which is the tongues of fire they have the Holy Spirit arrives well maybe that's the remnant of the original appearance to 500 maybe it was more like that it was more like a Fatima ecstatic sort of vague appearance it wasn't like a guy walking around eating dinner with you so the question is that's why it matters that we don't we don't have the testimony of those 500 people is because we don't know what they that those testimonies were we have these other dudes that we don't even know who they are writing a different language in a different land and making up stories about it but we don't get to hear from the people themselves and I think that is a serious problem both religiously as well as historically for that and that's that's why it matters that we don't have the testimonies of those 500 you got it and thank you very much for this question coming in from doc pluroma not says if the Christian Messiah was a quote unquote stumbling block for Jews and foolishness for Gentiles how would euphemarism work given first Corinthians 123 was quote the plan unquote it's a very confused question what were they asking me this question sounds like they're asking me this question I think they're asking you yeah I think that's a question to you so I think there's a euhemerism was the word they're going for there thank you um there's a disconnect I'm not sure what they mean about first Corinthians and then the stumbling block is a whole separate passage um I so there's a lot one could go on in this but I'll just say like if I'm right this is assumed for the moment that that my model of the origins of Christianity is correct when Paul says that the Messiah or the crucifixion is a stumbling block for the Jews what he means is these Christians are going around talking about a cosmic crucifixion that has occurred that they only know about from scripture and revelation and the Jews are like that's ridiculous like I wasn't there like I didn't see any of this what are you talking about and so that's why and then the Greeks of course ask for the Greeks the same thing it's foolishness to the Greeks same thing because the Greeks are rationalists they disavow at least Greek elites or rationalists they disavow a belief in things learned by revelation so going around preaching things by revelation the Greeks that's you're just a bunch of fools and whereas the Jews they're like they believe in revelation but the stumbling block is they don't understand like well what are you exactly are you teaching now and why well how can you teach it with this authority like we didn't meet this guy we don't know what you're talking about and so for them it's distrust in the origin and truth of the revelation whereas for the Greeks it's disbelief in revelation all together and I think that's what's going on and I think it's going on even if Jesus existed historically I think that's what Paul's talking about so the passage isn't terribly usable for historicity I think what he's doing there with the Jews is basically saying that there's no doctrine that was more offensive to them that their Messiah that would come from their decency would be crucified on a Roman cross as a public embarrassment like there is no there's actually there's actually no evidence for that that has a common assumption in the field but actually the Talmud has exactly the opposite view the Talmud teaches that the Messiah Ben Joseph would be killed and that he would be resurrected by the final Messiah would come immediately after the Messiah Ben David but it's the method of crucifixion I think is the point not so much that he would die but the method no not at all there's the martyrs of you know the Maccabean martyrs are all crucified and yet their blood atones for Israel is actually part of the explicit doctrine of the martyrdom doctrine yeah yeah that's the point it's like so if you go around saying that the martyrs were crucified and therefore they're holy that wasn't offensive to Jews they totally got it right so so you could sell the same point about Jesus he's just another martyr who was unjustly killed and that his death proves the you know the the beauty and truth of Judaism etc so that really can't be the obstacle and we don't really have any evidence of Jews balking at the manner of death as the issue there's no sources that suggest that that's a would have been a barrier to them in and of itself this one coming in from do appreciate your question and Ron remind you guys folks our guests are linked in the description we do really do appreciate them and we also appreciate your questions that they're very I appreciate they're of a higher rigor tonight they're especially high this one coming in from Doc Pluroma not says shockingly only acts mentions Paul learning under Gamaliel and then in parentheses he says a conciliatory peacemaker but if true persecuting Christians is difficult to square given Hillel tradition known for tolerance I am skeptical well Paul said he was a Pharisee a Pharisee he also was apparently traditionally by family in that line a fair cycle teaching so he would have been whether I mean again I I accept acts as accurate to him being under Gamaliel either way to be a Pharisee you had to be under rabbi teachings instruction Torah memorization all of those things it doesn't limit his credibility as a Pharisee or a representative the fact that he was sent to Damascus means he was of value to the council itself of the Sanhedrin so he obviously had great favor with somebody you don't get commissioned by the Senate as I got a carrier said earlier Sanhedrin was not just like all Jews that were Pharisees not all Pharisees were in the Sanhedrin in fact some were Sadducees it was a select few so to even be commissioned by them you won favor with somebody if it's not Gamaliel who else was it I don't know but it was obviously somebody of great importance and he had worked his way up if you would through the ranks yeah thanks for adding that I forgot about that earlier that we should have made that point to people as well that there are there are Sadducees and Pharisees in the Sanhedrin and they disagree with each other they're probably other sectarians too but I think the Essians tended to stay away from those political organizations but there were probably there were many there were dozens of sects so there could have been other sectarians and the Pharisees were split between two sects the questioner mentioned Hillel but they're also the Shammites who are super conservative Shammites, yeah so and they're super conservative even the you know even the Hillelite rabbis are like whoa these guys they're really conservative so it depends on who has what power went right who can influence what but there's a good question is to I think what the questioner is doubting whether Paul persecuted Christians it sounded like that I say that because I've heard other people say this I don't understand why they would doubt this Paul himself mentions it multiple times as a actually a particular particular stumbling block for him like getting accepted so so that and but he uses it as a classical minister narrative right is like oh I was this unrepentant sinner this horrible person and then I found Christ and became wonderful and so on so it's almost the same thing you see if a lot of ministries so there's nothing unusual about that that happening but Paul does mention it now one thing Paul doesn't mention is why there's no mention of what authority he was acting under why he was persecuting him or what he did like what were the penalties what laws was he enforcing we don't know like Paul never says or at least if he did say we don't get to read that letter and and even as an ancestral he said his ancestral traditions and the law right that's vague right what law right what were they breaking there's over 600 there's over 600 in the law yeah I know even so it is there's no obvious violation of the law in in the Christian teaching at that time so so that you know we don't know and we would love to know what it was that Paul thought was so offensive that you would go hunting these guys but we know those things happened there were you know sectarian persecution we know their accounts of pursuing sorcerers for example but Talmud seems to tell stories of the Christians being persecuted as sorcerers that's probably made up but but it's an example of the kind of thing happening the question is what were the actual laws that they were violating and why were they so serious that there would be a guy who would go out of his way to go town to town looking for them we don't actually know and even acts is vague on the actual the I would say they argued over the person they were all disagreeing about the person of who Jesus was could it be claim to be was there's no law against that there's no law against that that's the thing but heresy it's heresy there's no such thing as heresy either heresy isn't a law a false prophet it was so they put prophets to give you an example heresy is different from violating the law Sadducees were heretics to the Pharisees there was nothing illegal and no one was persecuting Sadducees and in fact you see in the Talmud like they were heretics because they denied the resurrection and the Pharisees punishment for that was well God just won't resurrect them then nanny nanny that that's all they did right so there's no like legal persecution of let me reuse a word let me reuse the word blasphemy and blasphemy blasphemy is a specific law but the Christians weren't breaking it because blasphemy means uttering the name of God in vain like uttering it aloud there's a very specific law at that time that's a very specific act Christians weren't doing that so they couldn't have been false prophet was put to death and that's that was their association was what they're called right so that's a hypothesis but is that well that's that's not max no one is executed and acts for being a false prophet no one Paul isn't doesn't mention executing you know persecuting well Stephen claims they murdered the Messiah the next one previewing but that would be the false prophet would be Jesus right he's already dead so you wouldn't go persecuting people talking about a false prophet they would have to themselves be the false prophet to end up on the dock right so that so that anyway so we don't know we don't actually know why Paul is persecuting Christians it had to be something this one from Don Fulman says for Dr. Carrier what other main figures in the Bible do you think didn't exist other than Jesus Paul existed James existed but Jesus didn't I am assuming they mean the New Testament because a lot of people in the Old Testament didn't exist I would say I don't think Elijah and Alicia it were real I think they're made up heroes I don't believe Moses existed I don't think any of the patriarchs are historical in fact like about half of the Old Testament they're fictional characters but when you get to the New Testament I think they're like about half the apostles might be invented so like Thomas Didymus I think is a fabrication because he doesn't exist in any of the early lists of apostles and Thomas Didymus is a fake name it just means twin twin so it's not a name so it's twin in Greek and twin in Aramaic so I think Thomas is made up I think Lazarus is made up and in fact we see him get made up Luke makes him up in a parable has Jesus literally speak of Lazarus as a fictional character the name is Eliezer it's a common Jewish name but the figure of Lazarus gets turned into a real person and John and I think that's made up I don't think the Lazarus and John was a real person and there are probably other apostles that weren't real the ones who confirm are real are the ones that Paul mentions because he mentions them I'd say apostles not disciples so like Kaphos, Peter James and John Paul actually mentions those guys and so and he mentions them as apostles and as ranking apostles the pillars are actually the top three and in the Gospels they maintain that order but James, John, and Kaphos are the top three so I think that's the tie-in but I'm less certain about the other apostles I think some of those lists of names are made up some of those people are probably made up You got it Ann Thank you very much for this question coming in from Amir Eshaf Ruh says to Dr. Carrier Jesus was a historical person in parentheses and they say Romans 1 verse 3 and Galatians 1 verse 18 okay sorry let's see I don't recognize it sounds like stuff we already covered in the debate so it's the way they put it is it reminds me of deductive logic but it's not the way that they put the question is I've never seen it so Amir if you could put it in the live chat then another way for me to understand I'm but this one coming in from Carrier he's talking about him being a descendant he's talking about him being a descendant of David I'm assuming that's where he's going with it yeah the word descendant is not in Romans 1 however this one coming in from Constellation Pegasus says what writings exist that show Jews were ordering the killing of this new sect called Christians I would like to see that like to see look documents about this is that what they're saying I think that's what they're saying I mean I mean this gets to a point that I think I think Dr. Boyce and I didn't get into because I think we both agree with our knowledge of history 99.999% of all documentation won't have survived and in fact we know like the origins of Christianity there were there would have been tons of letters in Paul's day Paul's not the only one writing letters and we don't even have all his letters he even references other letters that we don't have but there have been tons of other missionaries writing letters so and that's just the Christians who have you know interest in preserving their own history even they didn't preserve almost all of their stuff and so if you get to other groups like we have almost nothing from Judaism about Christians gosh I think until the Talmud I don't know if we have any actual Jewish text about that but it's not because the Christians didn't exist it's because Jewish text didn't survive so there would have been tons of documentation but there's no necessary expectation that it would survive now there are certain versions of the historicity of Jesus the theory where it would entail if that version were true that would entail a survival of certain documents but all that would mean is that that's argued against that particular version of historicity so like the Matthew says Jesus was famous all across Syria that can't be true if that were true we'd have a lot more documentation survival but if Jesus was just pretty much a minor guru and Christianity was a very small fringe sect there were like dozens of Jewish sects and we have almost no documentation on any of them and if Christianity was like the smallest one we have no reason to expect any survival of documentation so that doesn't really argue that and that Christians didn't exist or it doesn't argue that Jesus didn't exist either the silence of the record is a weak argument for that reason I don't know if Dr. Boyd says anything to add to that I agree and I mean Paul said he did it so I mean there's an early the first century right there and and it is a statement against interest and there's no doubt that Tacitus and others recognized they were at least concerned with these meetings these secret meetings that were happening around the time of the mission so but they were they were having church but they were worried about conspiracy I hadn't thought of this before that's a good point to make a distinction Tacitus is talking about Roman law not Jewish law and the law that the Christians were violating under Rome was illegal assembly so assemblies yeah we yeah it's illegal assembly so we take the the amendments for granted the right to assembly is explicitly in the United States Constitution that is actually the first time in history I think where that right to assemble was actually established so that you couldn't outlaw it most of the time assemblies were illegal without the permission of the government you had to have a license to assemble so severe was this law under Rome that the Asia Minor which is now Turkey had been so rebellious that the emperor was not even granting licenses to assemble to build fire departments so it says the thing that Pliny the Younger is really concerned about is like can't you let us form fire departments we need fire brigades so that we can fight fires in the cities and this is nope they've become political they're not allowed so they wouldn't even give licenses for fire stations they would in other provinces but in Asia Minor they weren't but this is the illegal assembly is what and we really have the letter of Pliny the Younger when he's persecuting Christians himself it's very explicit that it's the illegal assembly law that he's enforcing there he says they were not guilty of anything else so that's they feared conspiracy though they feared overthrow conspiracies and meetings yeah but that never comes up an actual trial document so like that's why it doesn't come up in Pliny the Younger or Trajan Trajan's own letter on the Christians doesn't mention any such concern in fact it's clear that they had no such concern because Trajan says leave them alone but it was the the daunting the government was the thing but Paul is actually you mentioned his Greek name it's actually a Latin name Paul is Roman which may be Paul loss in Greek Paul loss in Greek I guess it's his his name's Greek Paul loss but that comes from the Latin word yeah yeah yeah right so so that's why probably that's why people probably thought he was a Roman citizen now one could think correct maybe Paul was operating as a Roman operator like enforcing illegal assembly laws but he doesn't seem to mean that either because he seems when he's talking about his own trials and stuff he's only interacting with the Jews he's not being attacked by the Romans he's as a turncoat against the Romans or anything like that and he never mentions working for the Romans in this either so I think he's he's got to be Jewish law that he's enforcing seems pretty clear that's the mindset that he was in and required that revelation like you said he I think he did either genuinely or really he had a genuine turn apart for sure whether that was based on genuine experience or not either way but so anyway the Romans had different interests in the Jews so so there but still this there are different different laws were applying to who is persecuting whom this one coming in from Amir Ashafra thanks for letting me know they said that you're putting it in probability terms and now I actually understand it okay so basically they said the probability that Jesus existed given Romans one verse three and Galatians versus chapter one verse 18 is greater than the probability that he doesn't exist given those same verses and then I'll I'll read the read you the verses they say it's first Romans one three says regarding his son who asked who's earthly life was a descendant of David and then Galatians 118 says then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to get acquainted with Cephas and stayed with him 15 days give you a chance so we already cover this in the debate the word descendant is not in there that's a translation license someone took license with the words it actually says made of the seat of David and I do think Paul means literally made of the seat of David I think God formed a mortal body of Jesus out of the seat of David and there's precedent and basis for that I cite a bunch of it not just in my book but more recently in Jesus from outer space I cite some more examples of attestation of this kind of thing so it's vague point being it's ambiguous as to whether he means an earthly person or a celestial mortal someone who was temporarily immortal in a celestial realm so that's vague unfortunately as to historicity that's why it doesn't give you the greater than operator at best it gives you an equal and then the same thing with Galatians we went all we covered Galatians heavily in our debates so you can just go back and when you said the descendancy you're talking about the word spermitas there what what do you mean it's not there I'm the seed or often crimson seed it's semen literally yeah but usually it has that descendancy implication right but the word is not there it's very important because a lot of people think the word matters and but that word's not there so if you're to translate it correctly it just means made out of the seed of David but that's a weird phrase and ambiguous as to what it means what does that mean does it mean descent or does it not mean descent that would depend on your interpretation of the text so we can't use the text to defend the interpretation just from coming in from do you appreciate your question this one from Brandon Hansen says question for Dr. Carrier why do some atheists confuse faith and blind faith isn't faith reasoned from evidence and blind faith is based on nothing do you agree I'm not sure the context of how that's relevant to our debate today I have a stickler about semantics I am a big proponent of ordinary language philosophy so the word faith is multi-valent like most words so it depends on the context of what you mean so faith can just mean confidence which can be won by evidence or someone could use faith specifically to mean confidence without evidence like it does actually have that meaning so it depends on the context of who's using the word for what when so I don't see the question being useful you got it and Don Fulman says Dr. Boyce is there more evidence for the historicity of Jesus than most any historical figure of the time well certainly the first century you know when it comes to Pontius Pilate or it comes to say say Caiaphas the high priest that's mentioned in the Gospels or Annas the high priest there are traditions that seem to later come in about these high priest or about I mean even even Tacitus we just saw mentioned Pilate but when it comes to the amount of evidence for a historical figure of that time I think we have more evidence for a person like Jesus than we do just about anybody in that companionship of that timeline that's not true at all Pilate we have his autograph signature on a stone we don't have that for Jesus we have a contemporary a detailed contemporary account by Filo of Alexandria who was an ambassador to Rome about these issues so like he actually was first not firsthand but he was actually there in that region at the time and actually understood all the story of what was going with the webpilates we have a much better account for much more reliable source a nameable, identifiable contemporary source but what Hila did there's no information outside of his signature I mean there's there's not a ton of information yeah we have a lot Filo writes Filo writes a lot and Josephus has a huge huge name but this is actually accepting the gospel narratives as independent sources in the first century and that's why I know but Josephus is not writing a mythology right so Josephus has has a source cited history and he's actually from the region of the time so so when Josephus gives detailed stories about Pilate we have nothing like that for Jesus like nothing not even close and Filo writes a great deal more about Pontius Pilate than anybody else writes about Jesus other than the Gospels of course but that's that's particularly the problem the Gospels are mythologies and Paul they're not history well and that's but that's what we were debating is I don't think Paul ever gives us details about a historical like earthly walking Jesus he doesn't give us a narrative about Jesus nothing like we have for Pontius Pilate for example I can give you a quick quick response Dr. Boyce since the question is originally for you if you want otherwise we can jump to the next question no that's that it's just it all comes down to how you accept the gospel narratives and Paul and your perspective it comes down to that based on how you weigh the evidence this one that's one way to put it the mythic life says Hebrews 138 quote Jesus Christ the same yesterday today and forever unquote does this description fit a historical or mythical character best well I would say both but let Dr. Boyce answer that I mean the point of that is that Jesus what the writer of Hebrews is talking about his eternality whereas this was a great debate in the early church I mean for example many believed at a later time that Jesus began his origin whereas the writer of say the gospel John defended the origin being before time that he was there with God and all things were made by him and for him then this Gnostic group came and there this was a debate in the early church theologically that's actually in Paul so Paul has Philippians the pre existence of Christ he mentioned he was sent yeah right he mentioned well he had the opportunity to be equal to God and chosen not to be that's actually kind of a very similar reference to the what's called Jewish emanation theory so the idea that what's in John is right out of Judaism that the Logos was unified with God and then emanated from God and became a separate entity the first Archangel Filo talks about this the Archangel of Archangels who's the Logos of God so this and even John 1 is past tense Jesus was God then he became the Logos etc etc so that's Jewish totally Jewish there's nothing actually weird about it it's more in line with what Paul teaches in Philippians where Jesus exists before and he says in 1 Corinthians 8 that Jesus is the agent of creation which is the same thing as the Angel of Archangels or the Angel of Angels that Filo talks about the Logos is also the God's agent of creation and so there's a lot of other parallels between this angel and Jesus in Paul just from Paul straight along but that I don't use that as an argument that Jesus was mythical and here's why is because that is equally likely on both theories it is equally likely that if there was a historical Jesus just as Bart Nerman has said in his book how Jesus became God that very early on Christians came to believe like right out of the gate practically after his death that Jesus must have been the incarnate angel of archangels so they believed in his pre-existence probably not during his ministry we can't really know because we don't really have eyewitness documents from that period but certainly almost immediately after we see this in the creeds that Paul's talking about they believe that he was the incarnation of this angel and one can believe that about a historical person we have examples of Gurus in India for example who claimed to be you know the long the avatars of whatever and so on so there's a lot of people who claim to be the incarnation of something or other that goes back to time immemorial who are real people and I think that's completely explicable and would totally make sense in that time Bart Nerman's book goes into why it made sense in that time he talks about a lot of contextual documents and stuff that show that this was in line with Jewish thinking at the time it wasn't that weird or Jesus was a celestial figure and it was always so but became mortal in some other you know like a lower celestial space both theories explain that evidence equally well so I don't think that evidence argues for historicity or against it agreed I actually agree with that I think that I think all that speaking of is his eternality and anybody from either side could take that to me yeah it's a question of are they attributing that to a historical person or not and they easily could right right you got it and Jeff is G peck sicken 007 says Paul never said he ate in each chapter he wrote ergo Paul must have never eaten think it was some sort of I don't know what particular part of the debate is so this is interesting so this is Bayesian logic here this is the mistake a lot of people make when you look at the likelihood which is probability of E evidence given or probability of the yeah given the hypothesis every single time sometimes mathematicians because they assume you already know all the math they drop B just background knowledge but the term B should be in every one of those so it's normally P E given H and B and B this is very important so the probability of E on H depends on background knowledge so for example is it expected based on the way people wrote back then based on human nature based on how letters were formed etc is it expected that someone would mention that they ate in every chapter of a letter they wrote the answer is no so the hypothesis does not predict that Paul would do that consequently there's nothing unexpected about it so the probabilities don't go the way that the questioner was trying to get it to go I don't I don't think that's a good argument at all by the way and Paul did say he would not eat certain things in Romans 14 if it offended his brother there is a chapter I don't I don't suggest that argument so I I wouldn't I would never attribute it to you either this one coming in from Dustin Ellerby says does the god of Israel in parentheses Trinity have a brother I don't know who that's question too but I mean no could you read the question again I didn't understand it you bet they said does the god of Israel in parentheses Trinity have a brother I know there's no teaching of that anywhere um I mean it would also depend on which era you're talking about like if you go way back to the Abrahamic era where we're actually not in monotheism yet or hinotheism I don't understand the question so I really can't answer it you got it and thanks very much for this question Nicodemus the daemon says after reading phylo I agree with Dr. Carrier bro or was it bow and arrow says why Jesus come from three of 14 generations of ancestors in parentheses 314 I don't understand that question either I don't I don't I don't get it neither is it about if you think about Matthew specifically with the numbers of Matthew or am I misunderstanding I don't know it doesn't mention it they they just said why Jesus why does Jesus come from three of 14 generations of ancestors in parentheses 314 three of 14's is Matthew's genealogy so it can't be Luke he's gotta be talking about Matthew but that's that's Jewish writing that goes back to numerics very important numbers in sections 314 so that's why again I think Matthew originated as a Jewish account I think it was a Hebrew account because he used a lot of Hebrew numerics in the 14 I will agree I'll agree with that part that that Matthew is clearly Jewish he is a Jewish Christian and definitely imports a lot of Jewish ideas like that so that's totally expected that sort of it's not literally gamatria but it's it's it's that kind of thinking you got it this one coming in from Quani upstate says if everything if everything people claim to have witnessed regarding Jesus occurred does it prove he was everything he was said to be i.e. the son of an all powerful God who is is that to me they don't I would definitely I'd mention it if let's see I think it's for both of you I never put anything I just read it can you read it can you read it again he said and that's that's a good point folks if you can do me a favor if you can address it even if you think it's obvious for who it is for it oftentimes isn't for me and oftentimes for the guest neither so they say even if everything it's almost midnight don't make me think too hard okay oh my gosh yeah there it is yeah they say if everything people claim to have witnessed regarding Jesus occurred does it prove he was everything he was said to be I see the son of an all powerful God I'd say that's for you Dr. Trump of course and everyone knows my answer to that one I would say regardless of regardless of which way you go in this for me as a Christian there is a faith element you're not getting out of this without a an element of faith because if you are not the eyewitness but you choose to believe the evidence of cooperation of the eyewitnesses you're you're not just believing an event by eyesight you're you're believing it by groups of bringing evidence of a case so you're putting your faith in something evidential so I do think there's a level of faith there so does it prove everything no because you can have two people and Jesus did this if you look at the gospels he performed certain miracles in front of two crowds and certain crowds came up with denial of what he did and then the others believed what he did so even when Jesus had scenarios like that happening in his ministry there was two opinions about him he proved he tried to prove himself as the prophet of Moses he said Moses testifies against you because he spoke of me Jesus did all kinds of things to to demonstrate his messiahship and some believed him some didn't so does it absolutely prove everything no because people in his day said it didn't prove anything and they saw him actually do things so eyewitness accounts are important but you still have to have some level of faith even with eyewitness accounts of my opinion you got it thank you very much for this question coming in from James W good job debaters and Dr. Carrier really enjoyed it Amy Newman and I are hosting an after show link in description tell us why you think Jesus didn't exist and that is indeed true that link is in the description along with our guests and then said thank you James my pleasure and this one coming in from Finding Truth says does Carrier actually believe this how does he define they're giving you the heat Dr. Carrier Dr. Carrier they say how does he define evidence did Julius Caesar exist what is that let's see jug slash container I have articles on both those things you'll be delighted so go to my website richardcarrier.info in fact let me quickly I still have an article on Julius Caesar did Julius Caesar exist how do we know this I would recommend that you start however with my article on Hannibal so you can type in Hannibal because I think there's only one article but about the historicity of Hannibal read that because I go into the methodology of how we do this I have a whole chapter on this and Jesus from outer space as well if you want to do that but I including Caesar there's a section on Caesar in there but from Hannibal you can find my article on Spartacus and from Spartacus the opening paragraph links to all my other articles one of which is on Caesar and so you can find my article on that there as to how do I define evidence I have a whole article on that as well Bayesian definition of evidence so you can probably blog or search my blog for Bayesian definition of evidence maybe or try some different phrases and stuff you'll find my article on how you define evidence using Bayesian logic got you this one coming in from do appreciate it Alexander writes says this might have already been mentioned I'm coming in late but what do you think all the witnesses who saw Jesus actually saw or who did they see I think it's for you Dr. Carrier okay so I have another article you can check it out on the 500 so use the number 500 so then he appeared to 500 so you can you can search my blog for that and I have a whole article on it I'll take that as asking what my opinion is not necessarily what I think I can prove because I think in reality we don't know so the end of the day as a historian we don't know we can talk about hypotheses we can order those hypotheses and rank them in terms of probability but we don't we don't have an account from anyone and we don't have any evidence to pertain to to really say for sure that we know like we know various things could happen but I suspect that the appearance to the brethren and Paul is very explicit that there's only one appearance of Jesus in 1 Corinthians 15 that is all at once he doesn't say that he appeared to the 12 all at once he just says to the brethren all at once so there's only one group experience in that list and it's to all the brethren and I think he said all the brethren originally I think pentak I think he said all the brethren on pentacost and that because the Greek is very similar I think there's been a corruption but whether that's the case or not I think acts two is a embellishment kind of like a mythologization of the event Paul is talking about so I think it was something like that it was an ecstasy similar to the shakers would have or the Seventh Day Adventists or the Vodun rituals where masses of people have like personal experiences like lights in the sky or feeling a presence and they all interpret this as them all having a visitation of the deity or spirit or angel or whatever it is so I think that's what actually happened I think it was an ecstatic event everybody had a personal hallucinatory experience it was a simple experience it wasn't an actual Jesus figure with beard and everything and they interpreted as a celestial Jesus a heavenly Jesus appearing to them and confirming things to them whether verbally or only conceptually we don't know but that's what I think happened and it would be congruent with what we scientifically know of how religious ecstasies and revelations occur throughout world religions in history you got it and thank you very much for this question Amir Ashafra appreciate it says why is Jesus being manufactured out of David's sperm more likely than Jesus being a descendant of David biologically from natural birth the latter is more parsimonious more parsimonious and least ad hoc yeah except it requires a historical man right so I think you have your order of causation backwards so let's look at the scenario if Jesus didn't exist then they could not use that argument right if Jesus did not exist there's only one way they could get the Nathan prophecy to be true which is to make it literally true to make it exactly what the passage says it says literally the messiah will be made of the sperm of David's belly not a descendant no literally because it was about Solomon Nathan's prophecy was originally about Solomon it was so it really was it meant directly from David like no intervening steps just David and Solomon so if there's no historical Jesus and you have to believe in a messiah that has undergone his incarnation and death to to reverse the sins of Satan you know the destruction of Satan of the lower world and so on if you if you're going to sell this to yourself even much less to other people you have to sell it as congruent with a Nathan philosophy so you there's only one way to do that which is God took semen from the belly of David and used it stored it and used it to make the body of Jesus for that very purpose so that scripture would be fulfilled the word of Nathan is literally true in that case and we have many examples of weird prophecy interpretations exactly like this not exactly like this but a lot like this in its weirdness and we have a lot of examples of evidence of sperm banking like this there was an angel for example called the angel of night that used to collect semen deliver it to God and then ask God if this semen would become a villain or a hero and God would say whatever and then the angel would go back and re-implant it so so this kind of semen manipulation cosmic semen manipulation wasn't a going belief at the time and we have a similar example for Zoroastrianism where the semen of Zoroaster was stored in a lake for a thousand years and then impregnated a woman later in that case it was impregnation of a woman but it has its idea of the supernatural preservation of the seed to affect a goal that the God had later on but the reason is is that when you when the prophecy says this has to happen so the only way you can have a messiah that didn't historically exist is if you came up with some way to make the Nathan prophecy true and there's really only one way to do it well it's like if I can add to that really quickly the the the writers of Kumeran about second century for second century BC were actually using that Davidic prophecy anticipating what a messiah would look like if he came on the scene they understood the prophecy of Second Samuel referring back to that Davidic covenant the king that will reign forever an eternal kingdom they obviously didn't believe it happened in David's lifetime and they were still having this expectancy yeah yeah by then no one no one was interpreting the prophecy literally anymore you couldn't right they expected it to come under David bloodline but you could go back to preserving it literally preserving the word of God to be literally true on the cosmic model so so there's actually that's actually an argument for it but the point point in terms of Bayesian probability is that they had to do this the probability that they would do it is a hundred percent so that's another example of background knowledge changing the predicted probability so even on mythicism it 100% predicts that they're going to come up with some sort of way to make the Nathan prophecy true so so consequently that doesn't that doesn't help us change the probability of historicity this one coming in from constellation Pegasus says I've learned a lot tonight I was under the I was under the impression from others that Paul persecuting Christians was false and didn't happen this is a thing going around so I've run into more and more people making this assertion I don't know where it comes from or or why I don't understand what the motivation is like how does this help the cause of atheism or anything I don't know I don't know it's strange there's no reason to believe that I don't know why people are saying that and thanks and good day to you sir says Richard Dr. Carrier I've heard you say Bayesian reasoning was used to crack the enigma code in World War II sorry for being slightly off topic but was curious maybe I'm not sure I'm not as up on the enigma code history but it has been used to do a lot of cool shit so Barge McGrane has a book called The Theorem That Would Not Die and it is a great history of Bayes Theorem and it will cover that story if it's if that's a thing so if you're interested that that'll be the place to go you got it I'm sure Wikipedia covers it too I want to say even the 21st century now thank you so much folks for all of your questions we've got to let these guys go it's getting late but want to say huge thank you Dr. Carrier and Dr. Boyce it was a great one where you literally do appreciate you guys hanging out with us it was a fantastic debate and thanks for being with us tonight right on that's awesome thanks guys I'll be right back in just a moment folks with updates about upcoming debates and the channel so stick around for that post-credits scene in just a moment I'll be right back he's in my dear friends thrilled to have you here I've got to go pretty quick because it's actually it's even late here it's 10 o'clock here so I've got to get to sleep because we have a debate tomorrow morning at the bottom right of your screen that's the debate we're going to have tomorrow morning it's going to be controversial it's going to be juicy you don't want to miss it my dear friends and thanks for your last so sorry we didn't see it quite on time constellation Pegasus says last question why were the Gossels written so late after the death of Jesus I am so sorry that we didn't get to ask that in time we wrapped up before I even saw your question so we do want to say thank you folks for all of your support of the channel thank you for hanging out here whether you be Christian atheist Muslim you name it we are glad you were here my dear friends we really do hope you feel welcome and thanks for all of your support we are absolutely pumped we just had our first ever in person conference if you hadn't seen it we've been releasing footage debates from that conference all week amazing my dear friends I hope you're well though I want to say hello to you in the old chat is good to see you nano as well as Don Larson Jr thanks for your kind words I love you too and Joe the Toe good to see you again Zach Morgan pumped that you were with us says where is godless girl I don't know I don't know I'll ask slang good to see you Dominus Augustus glad you are here Dan R 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