APR
2012
Can I just say that I love that Iamblichus gets a shoutout here? Awesome.
Carrier’s most amusing claim in the first critique (of the HuffPo piece) was, in my opinion, his implication that Semele was a virgin. He bases this on a very minor Orphic version of her myth found in Hyginus, in which Liber’s heart is put in a potion and given to Semele, from which she gets pregnant (there is no mention of her being a virgin, however, and she is a well-known consort of Zeus, who as anyone knows does not have chaste relationships with women). The more common Orphic myth involves Zeus swallowing the heart of the torn-up Dionysus (then called Zagreus) and impregnating Semele the old-fashioned way. But of course, the most well-known version simply has her impregnated by Zeus and then incinerated when Hera tricks Semele into asking Zeus to make love to her in the same way Hera does. There is some fairly obvious symbolism at work here regarding Zeus’ phallic thunderbolt. All this is to say that Semele is far from a virgin in almost all imaginings of her in classical myth. Quite the opposite: she’s the one mortal who has experienced true, divine penetration, which is (unfortunately for her) unbearable for mortals (hence her incineration).
He likewise suggests there’s a virgin birth regarding Romulus, but offers no citations. If there is, it would have to be very minor as well, not making it into the Oxford Classical Dictionary or the main secondary source, Bremmer’s Roman Myth and Mythography. In virtually all the accounts, Mars rapes the mother of Romulus and Remus. Bremmer even argues that the paternity of Mars is embedded in the earliest versions of the myth itself.
It’s this sort of abuse of myth in the pursuit of turning Jesus into a dying/rising mystery deity that makes their claims and methodology suspect. That they’ve decided to get personal is all the more unfortunate.
Bart,
I decided to join your blog so I could dialogue with you and other fans of your work and also give to charity. I am wondering something: after your next book on how people came to believe that Jesus was God, would you be interested in possibly debating Richard Carrier in book form? I would love for there to be a debate book between, say, you and Carrier. It would also be great to have one historicist and one mythicist comment on the debate, say, Maurice Casey commenting in defense of your position and Robert Price commenting in defense of Carrier’s position. Or, instead, if there was a debate between Carrier and Casey, would you be interested in commenting on the debate? A debate book like this would really help a nonexpert like myself out. In this way, you would only present your main arguments for an historical Jesus and tackle Carrier’s arguments in his forthcoming book *On the Historicity of Jesus Christ*. In a book format, we could do away with time constraints so that everyone has time to put forth their best arguments and counterarguments in as much detail as they would like to.
Matthew
Dr Ehrman, I think responding to Carriers allegations, while time consuming and probably very annoying, is very important. For some reason this particular triade has garnished a lot of attention, and to the non historian (99% of us) your credibility as a historian may come into question. While it is a well known fact that your work is always carefully researched and throughoutly top grade amongst historians and academics and those that really follow your work, its the casual obserers and lay audiance that need to hear this, as we have to rely on those doing the serious historical work for our information (we cant ALL be historians!) and there are many, like myself, that look to your work something we can surely count on to be right. We know you cant spend all your time fighting with mythicists, but a big knockout punch to Carrier should do the trick 😉
I paid for a one month subscription but will surely be upgrading to the 12 month after this expires. Thanks Bart!
FYI, Carrier has pointed out that you did misquote him when you quote this from his blog post “Ehrman Trasktalks Mythicism”: “mythicist Thomas Thompson meets every one of Ehrman’s criteria” when he actually says, “mythicist Thomas Thompson meets every one of Ehrman’s criteria–excepting only one thing, he is an expert in Judaism rather than Christianity specifically.” To be fair, though, with the way Carrier goes on, it’s as if he himself forgot that he wrote the bit that you left out, especially when he subsequently writes, “So did he just ‘forget’ when he says he knows of no one who meets his criteria?” after already admitting that Thompson doesn’t fit the criteria. Still, it was a mistake on your part.
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