Female Problems

The fact of the lack of trust given to women as witnesses is a standard of resurrectional apologetics, and Carrier resorts at first to babbling incoherently and demanding once again detailed proofs he never provides himself, wanting "evidence Christians ever used any female testimony to promote the gospel" (we are obliged to assume, in Carrier's world, that the Gospel reports that women found the empty tomb first were legends after the fact, or some other excuse), while he feels free to say that no one ever was able to read the Gospels at the right time, for which he has no evidence either. As always, the game is to pretend that you don't need to provide evidence because you're asserting a negative, even as your negative implies or contains a corresponding positive you don't bother to prove and don't think you need to prove. (See here on Gospel dates, not "long after Paul's day" as claimed.)

But beyond this, an attempt is made to show that women were not that bad as witnesses after all, and it starts with the usual pointers to women in the OT, which has little if anything to do with the period in question. Of course since Mariam, etc were not relied on for legal or eyewitness testimony, and Huldah spoke from God and not of herself, the names given are even more irrelevant.

It is also noted that of course, "women were a major target of the Christian mission" but if we want to play that card, then we will turn back Carrier's own attempt to abuse the "group expectations" factor my saying that these women would have expected to be lied to, and that women would have regarded their own as unreliable in light of expectations. Two can play this game, and while I am not serious, the recognition that "many more females than males were converting to Christianity in its first centuries" isn't supported by anyone with any evidence from the critical formative years I am discussing. Merely citing a few names isn't a census that proves the point; but if Carrier wants to play that game of citing texts to prove his point while freely ignoring or explaining away those that don't, then his little list of women is already overwhelmed by Luke's 5000 male converts in Acts 4:3. And of course, appeals to women appearing in the Pauline letters (never mind that women would be mentioned as providing space, and not their husbands, since the home was a woman's sphere of influence) puts the cart before the horse, begging the question of why these women converted in the first place, even if based on the other 16 points we have made.

We will leave aside as creative paranoia the suggestion that women were purposely placed in stories as a way of kissing up to other women; not that Carrier yet again satisfies his own demands for evidence before saying such things. I also will not argue that "having women as prominent converts and members of the Church would be embarrassing" and do not do so, so that Carrier again is doing nothing but padding his paycheck. Where we will return is to the section claiming that female witnesses were indeed trusted; and here, Carrier naively claims that "[j]ust because it was unseemly for a woman to appear in court does not mean her testimony was not trusted." He is oblivious here to the connection - which appears in a part of Malina and Neyrey he apparently missed or chose to ignore - between females and private tasks [177ff]. To go outside the role meant to go outside what you were supposed to do. Thus indeed it does mean that testimony in court is not to be trusted from women; it is not their "thing" to do. Thus Carrier embarrasses himself yet again finding error where there is none, and furthermore, there is no impropriety in arguing "from courtroom decorum to everyday credibility" - or rather, credibility not where "everyday" events were concerned (that is another red herring), but "from courtroom decorum to credibility about the incredible." Hence the appeal to Josephus using women to testify about heroic sacrifices is of no relevance; nothing these women report is of incredible value. (In fact, that Josephus lists their qualifications can only suggest that he sees a need to, in order to validate his reliance on them, especially in light of what he says elsewhere about women's quality as witnesses, that we noted.) It is that events of importance (which would tend to be public, in a man's sphere) exceeded the sphere within women were supposed to be able to operate - in other words, it is as though you asked a color-blind man to testify about the wallpaper. Thus the relevance of citing Josephus about levity in women: A person of levity might be trusted to tell you the time, or if he saw a car pass by; but not if he had seen something out of the ordinary or extraordinary, or contrary to expectation. Bauckham in Gospel Women puts it this way: What Josephus offers is " version of the common ancient prejudice that women are less rational than men, more easily swayed by emotion, more readily influenced, all too prone to jump to conclusions without thoughtful considerations." Carrier's attempt to divorce this pervasive social reality from the likes of Celsus' comment about Mary as a hysterical female is itself patently hysterical. (In particular, women were considered gullible and prone to superstitous fantasy in religious matters, and "excessive in religious practices.")

The appeal to John 4 is particularly ludicrous. The story is entirely consistent with the view that women's testimony was generally considered unreliable. If John believes that the woman's testimony is sufficient, it is odd that (4:42) he has the Samaritans directly address the woman as a group, denying that they still believe just because she told them about his prophecies, and declare that they now accept that Jesus "really is the savior of the world" because they have seen and heard for themselves. (Of course, the mere declaration of messiahship isn't on the order of belieiving in a resurrection, especially given expectations of the day.) John 4:42 seems to emphasize that the Samaritans seeing for themselves is preferred over the woman's testimony, for what now becomes a much more certain and soteriologically significant belief. Carrier might argue that any alleged superiority of grounds for and intensity of belief implied by 4:42 has to do with first-hand experience of Jesus by the Samaritans being superior to second-hand testimony about him - regardless of the gender of the witness. But it would be extremely unlikely for John to at all downplay the importance of belief on the part of those who have merely heard and not seen for themselves in light of John 20:29.

No less desperately speculative is the idea that for Luke, "if men had reported [the empty tomb], they may have been thought just as silly." No such reaction is given to men who report the empty tomb among the disciples; Thomas is doubtful, but he does not think it silly that Jesus has been raised, and Cleophas gets no such reaction from his reports. And the same as well for the throwout the maybe Luke just put in the story as a contrivance; once any excuse becomes valid, we may as well say that aliens raised Jesus from the dead since having actual evidence in hand before theorizing isn't required.

Amazingly enough, Carrier even has the nerve, after prostituting Malina and Neyrey for his own purposes, to say they "made a serious mistake" (and I made one in trusting them) for their claim that women were not trusted in court as witnesses; this Carrier accomplishes by pointing to the color of the sky the day Malina and Neyrey wrote, as he notes that "two of their three sources pertain only to Classical Athens" - as if he had proven that the conditions that caused this point of view to exist somehow were different in the Hellenistic or Roman era. Let Carrier's bark at these credentialed scholars speak for itself. What we need is actual evidence that the claims are wrong or outdated; the retort on the third source is that it only proves "that it was unseemly to compel a respectable woman to appear in court, or to let a woman act as a lawyer," but that "the very same evidence proves a woman's testimony was sought in court and was as valid as any man's" - though no quote of the text is provided to show that this is the case; Carrier merely summarizes the story. We will endeavor to check the source ourselves at a later date, with a reminder that I have in prior times caught our subject misreporting sources. But it may not matter anyway, for we will argue that Carrier, again, simply does not grasp the connection between the matter of spheres of influence and reliability of women in terms of testimony to public/incredible events.

A reader also asked Malina about Carrier's charge of he and Neyrey making a "serious mistake" in citing older scholarship and claiming that their sources' conclusions "do not apply even to the Hellenistic, much less the Roman era" while the third does not prove what they claim. --while their third source doesn't prove what Malina and Neyrey claim, but "something quite different". Malina replied (I have the response on file, but have not taken the liberty to quote without permission) with the point that trials were agonistic contests, not fact-finding processes (referring to Paul R. Swarney, "Social Status and Social Behavior as Criteria in Judicial Proceedings in the Late Republic," in Baruch Halpern and Deborah W. Hobson, Law Politics and Society in the Ancient Mediterranean World, 137-55) and thus to bring in a woman would be a victory of dishonor for the side that lost. He also added that women could be witnesses in proceedings that were not trials; he also compared widows going to court to a person calling for emergency services. Nevertheless he affirms as we do, that women as witnesses was not the norm but an exception: The irony is that even as Carrier strains to find examples of women being in courts and testifying, he still admits that it was "regarded as scandalous" - thus in fact proving my point. Nothing I say implies that this scandal meant women did NOT testify; nor that they were never, ever allowed to. And indeed, had Carrier been less anxious to score points and more careful about his reading, he would have noted that Malina and Neyrey make no mistake; they specifically say, that the exclusion was in general -- not that they "could not testify in Greco-Roman courts" as Carrier falsely phrases their argument. Thus as well the variation of opinion if Gaius means nothing - and also, only proves our point, since even Gaius says that it is "commonly believed" that women are poor witnesses. Indeed this is stepped on by Carrier's earlier points that Christianity didn't attract converts from the elite like Gaius, but from those "commoners" Gaius refers to.

The matter next moves to Jewish views, and while Carrier admits that the thesis holds for Jews in Palestine, he insists that "Hellenized Jews are another story" - though not on shred is provided in support of this, as Carrier instead resorts to his repeated canard of unattested but surely-present variety. Further on is a repeat of the earlier attempt to force a dichotomy between "how women ought to behave" and how much their testimony was trusted. The Talmudic quote given, though Carrier fails to see it, again only supports my point: "women are admitted as competent witnesses in matters within their particular knowledge" (emphasis added). Revelation from God was considered the sphere of knowledge for males. Rabbis and teachers of the law were not female in this era. Nor were prophets (the much earlier examples of Deborah and Huldah notwithstanding). I make no claim, as Carrier puts it, that women could NEVER appear in court (I dare Carrier or his paymaster to find it). What Carrier needs to find is testimony that women would have been trusted to testify about something like the empty tomb - outside their sphere of given influence. It is not merely, "finding a tomb empty" at issue, but visions of angels as well. Bauckham [272] notes a parallel example in an account of Ps.-Philo, in which Miriam the sister of Moses is not believed when she claims to have had a prophetic dream. Because her parents were faithful Jews, it would be absurd (as Carrier would do) to suggest that she was not believed because of some skepticism about dreams of prophecy: In a similar story in Josephus, it is Miriam's father who has the dream, and there is no skepticism at all. Yet another story in Ps.-Philo, that of Manoah and his wife, is similar, and makes explicit Manoah's reasons for not believing his wife: "...I do not rely upon her words; she may have changed something while speaking, or omitted or added something..." The core issue is not so much reliability of women as witnesses (though that follows from the core issue); it is rather the idea of "the priority of man in God's dealings with the world." [275]

From here some criticism is directed at evidence presented by other authors, like Wright; in all of these, Carrier makes the same mistake of assuming that what is argued for is blanket condemnation of female testimony, when the matter is rather an orientation that was considered to make them less critical. (Despite Carrier, people of "levity" and "temerity" do more than simply giggle and scold; those who act inappropriately in contexts, are just as much subject to miss important details because of the same attitude, and are therefore not as reliable as witnesses, and become less reliable as the scale of gravity of event rises.)

In a final section Carrier offers a contorted thesis explaining "why Mark places women at the empty tomb," and as expected, hypocrisy forbids him providing any actual evidence of the sort he ever-presently demands of Christian apologists. In essence, it is said that Mark places them there as part of some obscure and subtle confirming message that "the last will be first". The two Marys, he makes out to be part of some cockeyed allusion to "Egypt and Israel" coming out of the Exodus, using reasoning that makes Alvin Boyd Kuhn look sane, and which sounds a great deal like certain Valentinian exegeses of the Gospels (and never mind that "Mary" was the name of a fourth of Jewish women in this period [Bauckham, 298]). In terms of creativity and authenticity, I prefer the idea of Roman Piso theorists that Acts was intended to secretly relate the locations of stopovers with houses of prostitution. Of course, since Carrier "cannot prove this is not what Luke was doing with his entire document [Acts]" and since visiting houses of prostitution was a "central theme" of wealthy men of the era, contrary to any of Carrier's assumptions he might make, having Paul go to these specific cities is exactly what Luke would invent, to carry through the Roman Piso message that you can sure have a good time if you know where to go. And so ends the need to engage any further Carrier's literary and historical fantasies. (Though for help on how texts were called out by real history, not vice versa as Carrier's whole argument would have it, see here.)

The Shameless Mercenary

In case you're wondering....

Carrier's response to my 11th point had 7647 words. From his rate sheet here we find that he charges "6 cents per word written" for this type of work. Assuming that Johnny didn't ask for a rush job, that means that Richie was paid $458.82 for his response to this section. More on why we make a note of this later.