On the Historicity of Jesus Quotes

“This problem can be illustrated with a mock analogy. Imagine in your golden years you are accused of murdering a child many decades ago and put on trial for it. The prosecution claims you murdered a little girl in the middle of a public wedding in front of thousands of guests. But as evidence all they present is a religious tract written by ‘John’ which lays out a narrative in which the wedding guests watch you kill her. Who is this John? The prosecution confesses they don’t know. When did he write this narrative? Again, unknown. Probably thirty or forty years after the crime, maybe even sixty. Who told John this story? Again, no one knows. He doesn’t say. So why should this even be admissible as evidence? Because the narrative is filled with accurate historical details and reads like an eyewitness account. Is it an eyewitness account? Well, no, John is repeating a story told to him. Told to him by an eyewitness? Well . . . we really have no way of knowing how many people the story passed through before it came to John and he wrote it down. Although he does claim an eyewitness told him some of the details. Who is that witness? He doesn’t say. I see. So how can we even believe the story is in any way true if it comes from unknown sources through an unknown number of intermediaries? Because there is no way the eyewitnesses to the crime, all those people at the wedding, would have allowed John to lie or make anything up, even after thirty to sixty years, so there is no way the account can be fabricated. If that isn’t obviously an absurd argument to you, then you didn’t understand what has just been said and you need to read that paragraph again until you do. Because”
― Richard C. Carrier, On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt

“Accordingly, historicists have to explain why in Paul’s letters there are no disputes about what Jesus said or did, and why no specific example from his life is ever referred to as a model, not even to encourage or teach anything or to resolve any disputes, and why the only sources Paul ever refers to for anything he claims to know about Jesus are private revelations and hidden messages in scripture (Element 16), and why Paul appears not to know of there being any other sources than these (like, e.g., people who knew Jesus).”
― Richard Carrier, On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt

“Acts as Historical Fiction The book of Acts has been all but discredited as a work of apologetic historical fiction.1 Nevertheless, its author (traditionally Luke, the author of the Gospel: see Chapter 7, §4) may have derived some of its material or ideas from earlier traditions, written or oral. But the latter would still be extremely unreliable (note, for example, the condition of oral tradition under Papias, as discussed in Chapter 8, §7) and wholly unverifiable (and not only because teasing out what Luke inherited from what Luke chose to compose therefrom is all but impossible for us now). Thus, our best hope is to posit some written sources, even though their reliability would be almost as hard to verify, especially, again, as we don’t have them, so we cannot distinguish what they actually said from what Luke added, left out, or changed.”
― Richard Carrier, On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt

“Christian rhetoric hardly conceals the fact that it is identically henotheistic, with not just the one God (to whom was later assimilated and originally subordinated the additional gods of the Lord Christ and the Holy Spirit), but many other subordinate gods, including a ‘god of this world’ (i.e., Satan: 2 Cor. 4.4) and a panoply of angels (divine ‘messengers’) and demons (literally, daimones or daimonia, ‘divinities’) possessed of all the same roles, attributes, and powers of pagan gods (see my definitions in §3).”
― Richard Carrier, On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt

“For not even one person to have ever exhibited this interest in writing nor for any to have so satisfied it is bizarre. Saying this all went on in person is simply insufficient to answer the point: if everything was being resolved in person, Paul would never have written a single letter; nor would his congregations have so often written him letters requesting he write to satisfy their questions—which for some reason always concerned only doctrine and rules of conduct, never the far more interesting subject of how the Son of God lived and died. On the other matters Paul was compelled to write tens of thousands of words. If he had to write so much on those issues, how is it possible no one ever asked for or wrote even one word on the more obvious and burning issues of the facts of Jesus’ life and death?”
― Richard Carrier, On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt

“Imagine for a moment that one of your friends writes you a twenty-page letter passionately wanting to share her excitement about a new teacher. This letter has only one topic, your friend’s new teacher. [But] at the end of her letter, you still do not know one thing about her teacher. Yet, Paul presents the central figure of his theology this way. . . . It [seems] impossible to imagine how Paul could avoid telling one story or parable of—or fail to note one physical trait or personal quality of—Jesus.”
― Richard Carrier, On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt

“The Romans would have had an even more urgent worry than bodysnatching: the Christians were supposedly preaching that Jesus (even if with supernatural aid) had escaped his execution, was seen rallying his followers, and then disappeared. Pilate and the Sanhedrin would not likely believe claims of his resurrection or ascension (and there is no evidence they did), but if the tomb was empty and Christ’s followers were reporting that he had continued preaching to them and was still at large, Pilate would be compelled to haul every Christian in and interrogate every possible witness in a massive manhunt for what could only be in his mind an escaped convict (not only guilty of treason against Rome for claiming to be God and king, as all the Gospels allege [Mk 15.26; Mt. 27.37; Lk. 23.38; Jn 19.19-22] but now also guilty of escaping justice). And the Sanhedrin would feel the equally compelling need to finish what they had evidently failed to accomplish the first time: finding and killing Jesus.”
― Richard Carrier, On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt

“But be that as it may, the telling point is that in this parable, a rich man ends up burning in hell and sees up in heaven a dead beggar he once knew named Lazarus, resting on the ‘bosom of Abraham’, so he begs Abraham to let Lazarus rise from the dead and warn his still-living brothers to avoid his own hellish fate. The parable ends with Abraham refusing, because ‘if they will not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded if someone rises from the dead’ (Lk. 16.31). Key to this parable is that this fictional Lazarus does not rise from the dead, and that even if he did, it would convince no one, and therefore it won’t be done. This is thus another expanded exercise in making the repeated point that Jesus will not perform signs because they will not persuade anyone (as I surveyed earlier). Notice what happens in John: he reverses the message of Luke’s parable, by having Jesus actually raise this Lazarus from the dead, which actually convinces many people to turn and be saved, the very thing Luke’s Jesus said wouldn’t work. In fact, just as the rejected request in Luke’s parable imagined Lazarus going to people and convincing them, John’s Lazarus is then cited as a witness to the crucifixion, empty tomb and resurrection of Jesus, and is so cited specifically to convince people—again what Luke’s Jesus said wouldn’t work.”
― Richard Carrier, On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt

“These were well-recognized code words in the mystery cults, which meant the same thing there as they clearly do for Clement here: ‘babes’ were Christians not yet inducted into the higher mysteries, while the ‘mature’ had been, and thus knew teachings that other Christians did not. But Clement also indicates in the above quotes that there were also teachings that ‘babes’ were privy to that non-Christians (the ‘profane’) were not to be told.”
― Richard Carrier, On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt

“We know from Philo there was already a Jewish tradition of a preexistent being named Jesus who was the Form of God (Element 40). It cannot be claimed Philo came up with this notion on his own, since that would entail a wildly improbable coincidence. So we surely are looking at a derivation from an earlier Divine Logos doctrine. Then we’re told this Jesus did not try to seize power from God in heaven (as by some accounts Satan had once done, resulting in his fall to the lower realms), but instead divested himself of all his power and higher being, enslaving himself (either to God’s plan or the world of flesh) by ‘being made’ [genomenos] in the ‘likeness’ of men (not literally becoming a man, but assuming a human body, and thus wearing human ‘flesh’).”
― Richard Carrier, On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt

“Mark was certainly written after 70 (the year the Jerusalem temple was destroyed), but how long after is an open question We really have no evidence that Mark was written any earlier than 100, in fact, so it's simply presumption really that puts his Gospel in the first century. [...] Nothing is known of the author. Late tradition claims he was Peter's secretary, but there is no reason to trust that information, and it seems most unlikely. Mark is advocating against Torah-observant Christianity (see Chapter 10, §5) and thus would have been Peter's opponent, not representative. There is no evidence really that Matthew was written in the 80s. Nothing is known of the author. We know 'Matthew' was not an eyewitness, because he copies Mark verbatim and just modifies and adds to him [...], which is not the behavior of a witness, but of a late literary redactor. [...] John wrote after Luke-as almost everyone agrees [...] It could have been written as late as the 140s (some argue even later) or as early as the 100s (provided Luke was written in the 90s). [...] John was redacted multiple times and thus had multiple authors. 32 Nothing is known of them.”
― Richard C. Carrier, On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt

“The 'usual' consensus on the four canonical Gospels is that Mark was written around 70, Matthew around 80, Luke around 90, and John around 100.21 Those are all arbitrary ballpark figures, which don't really have much basis in fact. Of course, fundamentalists want all those dates to be earlier, whi le many well-informed experts are certain they are later, and I find the arguments of the latter more persuasive, if inconclusive. As to authorship, none of the Gospels was written by the person they were named after, or in fact by any known person. We know they were not written by the disciples of Jesus or anyone who knew Jesus. The titles of the Gospels conspicuously assign them as 'according to' the names given (Mark, Matthew, Luke and John), which designation in Greek was not used to name the author of a work, but its source, the person from whom the information was received or learned.”
― Richard C. Carrier, On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt

“As Helmut Koester observes, 'the vast variety of interpretations of the historical Jesus that the current quest has proposed is bewildering', [...] Among the many Jesuses imagined and defended by historians, currently the most popular is the view that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet (a detail notably nowhere to be found in Chilton's account). But judging by the book of Daniel, Daniel was an apocalyptic prophet, too, yet we know that book is complete fiction. Thus, finding evidence that the character of Jesus depicted in the Gospels was an apocalyptic prophet is no more a guarantee of his historicity than it is of Daniel's. Which is to say, no guarantee at all. When we know many of Jesus' apocalyptic predictions were learned from (perhaps even faked) hallucinations of a bizarre and monstrous Jesus-double in heaven (written up as the book of Revelation), the idea that he 'must' have been historical in order to have issued apocalyptic prophecies simply goes out the window. [...] Why are we to assume that the sayings attributed to Jesus in the Gospels didn't come from the very same origin as the sayings attributed to Jesus in the book of Revelation? Yes, we cannot presume they did. But neither can we simply presume they didn't.”
― Richard C. Carrier, On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt