Damore It's Used, Diverse it Gets

From the start of this point, Carrier once again falls into the unevidenced appeal to variety: "Not everyone shared the same prejudices as everyone else." In one sense that is true: Everyone had prejudices; but not the same ones. Nevertheless it remains that this can only be said in the sense that people were not going to be prejudiced against their own group. Malina and Neyrey (Portraits of Paul, 3) put it this way: "...[D]efining characteristics of persons in antiquity were nearly always understood in terms of group of origin (generation) and place of origin (geography). In fact, the social classification of persons by generation, geography, and gender constituted the significant focal categories by which people understood each other." The texts of the day tell the message: "Know one (group member), know them all." Meand of knowledge of others were "anti-introspective and anti-psychological" [13]. "Honorable people derive from and are rooted in honorable locales, regions, and [cities]...The converse is equally true. Ignoble persons bespeak ignoble families, low quality-regions, and contempible [cities]." [24] "...[P]ersons are known exclusively in terms of their embeddedness in others, that is, their group heritage and consequent social relationships." [61] "To know any region of origin is to know all individuals from that region -- both physically and culturally!" [115] And most importantly: "In-group members are treated with loyalty, openness, allegiance, and support. Those falling outside the in-group boundaries belong to the out-group. With the out-group dealings are indifferent, even hostile. For all practical purposes, ethnically out-group persons are, once more, a different species of being." [122] And: "One is never expected to question these prejudgments, and given social experience, even contrary evidence is selectively overlooked or considered non-existent because it is absolutely impossible." [169] In light of these statements, Carrier's attempt to butter the issue over with appeals to PC diversity are merely a joke in context.

But here Carrier does appeal to evidence; although it is evidence that is directed at the wrong argument. As I expected, Carrier tries to circumvent my point about prejudices against Jews by saying, "we already know that many Gentiles flocked to Judaism even before Christians came along, either converting to it, supporting it, or holding it in high esteem." But that is not the point. Carrier confuses Judaism as a religion with being a Judean in an ethnic sense. The latter is the point I am also after, not merely the former! It does not matter how many converted to the Jewish religion. The issue would also have been, How many would have wanted to become ethnic Jews? How many would have worshipped a man who was an ethnic Jew? Thus indeed Carrier's entire retort on this point is misunderstandably misdirected, and no doubt caused by his confusion of thinking that ancient Judaism, like modern Judaism, was not particularly associated with an ethnic group.

Update, 5/05: Apparently stung by the embarrasment of misreading my argument, Carrier petulantly accuses me of trying to "change" my argument! He then reaches the absurd conclusion that I am claiming that this was a prejudice against people geographically born in the land of Judaea -- including any Greeks and Romans born there ("Countless Romans and Greeks were born and lived in Judaea, and hailing from there was no issue for them or anyone else.")! Apparently Carrier has a definition of "ethnic" that the rest of us were otherwise unfamiliar with.

Carrier also claims I "can't come up with anything to rebut what I actually said: that prejudice against Jews and Judaism was not universal." And there is no need to rebut an appeal to an unattested, phantom lack of prejudice. His appeals to "Caesar and Augustus protecting the Jewish religion" reflect hard political realities and a keeping of the peace more than they reflect a lack of prejudice, and are no more a relief of prejudice than were "separate but equal" laws. Carrier also continues his fallacious appeal to religious matters, and offers these sole accounts that would affect the ethnic aspect:

Josephus hailed from Judaea and was a Jew, and yet was not a victim of prejudice--to the contrary, the Roman authorities took him into their own. Even the Emperor Titus fell in love with the Jewish princess Berenice, and put her aside only in response to the prejudice of others.

The example of Josephus, who received the patronage of the Flavians, speaks for itself: Josephus was essentially a traitor to his people, and in any event, this no more disproves a personal prejudice against ethnicity than it would that a white Southerner of the Civil War error might allow a black slave to take care of their children or cook their dinner. The example of Titus only serves to validate my point: Titus was shamed for his deviance! If even the Emperor of Rome was compelled to abandon a Jewish wife because of prejudices, what hope would an average Roman joe have of maintaining allegiance to a Jewish prophet whose cult was rooted in his personality? It also no more erases personal prejudice than would that white slaveholders slept with their black female slaves.

Too general to reply to is Carrier's comment that "the original Jewish sects of Christianity did fail." On the contrary, as has been shown by Stark in The Rise of Christianity, Jewish Christianity did continue to succeed; but without more details as to what Carrier is trying to argue, not much more can be said. We will address his comments on numbers of conversions later, in the appropriate place.

Next, Carrier once again puts the cart before the horse, appealing to "what Paul was doing: throughout his letters the impression is clear that he wanted to create a community that would transcend racial and social prejudices and encompass everyone, essentially ending the unwelcome strife between Rome and God's People by finding a way to unite them in peace." Yet Carrier remains oblivious to that Paul does this to persons who would have already overcome that barrier by accepting Jesus, and had the vindicating evidence required to get them to abandon their prior prejudices! Carrier is yet again absurdly appealing to what is said "after" as evidence of what must have happened "before"!

Carrier continues further along the same erroneous lines, confusing religious acceptance with ethnic acceptance. As such no response is required; he has missed my point conspicuously and incredibly. We will discuss more of importation of religions in point 4 about newness.

Just as anachronistic is Carrier's idea that "Christian missionaries were meeting a new market demand, of a growing mass of the discontented." He is yet again importing modernist, individualist ideas into the social world of the NT; the reality however is that "discontent" such as he imagines, though it would exist, would not be seen as solved by Christianity (even if a "solution" would have been desired, which, as our example of Iraq in point 1 shows, would have been far from the case). As Pilch and Malina report in The Handbook of Biblical Social Values [79ff], this was a world of "limited good" within which all resources were considered at a fixed value (as practically, they were). The "discontented" who wished to rise in the ranks, would perceive that they did so at the expense of others, including their fellow poor, who would have the same perception and would resent any attempt to "rise above" others. Thus in fact the ancient person regarded their lot as decided by fate; however dissatisfied they may have been, there was nothing that they could do about it, and any discontented person seeking resolution of the sort Carrier envisages would incur the envy and probation of their fellow ingroup members. If anything, Christianity as a newcomer would be rejected as a religion trying to cut from the pie that was already distributed. Carrier's retort comes from the mouth of one who lives in a world that perceives goods as limitless, with "resources that are endlessly available to the individual" and one's life is made of what one chooses.

So Carrier, due in part to misunderstanding, fails to show that there was nothing about being Jewish that prevented Christianity from achieving the small success it did in its first hundred years. Next up from Carrier is my point about Jesus being a working-class carpenter; once again, Carrier appeals to the notion of variety of opinion ("other groups did not share this low opinion") though he is compelled to admit that the only evidence he can find is within Judaism (where at any rate, as I note, Jesus as a member of the Jewish "ingroup" would overcome the stigma among Jews; nevertheless, let us imagine it being said that Shammai the carpenter would undertake such a profession as the hypostatic incarnation of the Jewish God, and Messiah, as opposed to just a teacher; and that, after receiving training that would give him the prestige he lacked as a carpenter -- education Jesus did NOT have). Carrier addresses the matter of the profession but ignores that the more critical part of the equation is who the person was making the cabinets. Paul and Shammai we would expect to have to earn a living with vulgar work at some point -- but not the Son of God! Thus it remains the same "barrier to conversion" despite Carrier.

Update 5/05: Carrier once again seems to have problems with basic reading, as he turns the above into an argument that "only Jews respected tradesmen", which is indeed "bizarre" as he says, but his own red-herring reading is the source of the "bizarrity". Carrier also reads into the above a false argument that "no one would worship a deity who worked in a lower class occupation" which is not my point -- the point rather is that any deity who DID have such a lower class occupation would need to prove himself or herself as deity in order to overcome the associated stigma. Carrier says he has provided examples of deities with lower-class occupations, but unless he shows that there was no belief in the deity of such entities prior to knowledge of their occupation, he is barking up the wrong tree -- as usual. And he makes yet a third strawman on this point, insinuating that this implies that "Greco-Roman tradesmen all despised themselves and each other," a strawman I have already dismantled: There is a scale of difference between a tradesman who is a tradesman, and a tradesman who claims to be a deity -- and then goes outside the limited group of tradesmen claiming this!

And then there is a red herring that smells above all others Carrier hoists aloft in this round. Inevitably, those who have tried to contact scholars I have used in an effort to get them to rebut me have failed in one of two ways: The scholar has either backed me up, forcing the critic to retreat into spin mode, or else the writer has misrepresented my position and caused the scholar to reply to a straw man. Carrier manages to do a bit of both here, as he says that I have made in the above, an "adamant claim that no one in antiquity had notions of improving their condition." He says, "That is outrageous. It is not what any of the scholars he quotes have ever argued" -- and it is not what I have argued, either. Thus I in turn imitate Carrier, and ask all readers to stop trusting Carrier, and actually call up those articles that Carrier quotes out of context and read them. Then you will see how I actually discuss the total situation very differently than Carrier lets on. To put it simply, the argument is not that there were no notions of improving condition, but that to improve condition required overcoming a specific set of obstacles, such that Carrier's claim of missionaries "meeting a new market demand" is simplistic nonsense. Carrier's example of Lucian's family buying an appreticeship for Lucian is a case in point: Lucian's family no doubt had to take into consideration whether their neighbors would have envied their efforts; they would have had to ensure that there was a balance in their approach, such that they were not seen as trying to rise above others; in short, it is the same point that I have made all along, that without some sort of vindicating factor (like the resurrection for Christianity), people or a movement went nowhere. And unless Christianity could show it deserved to rise above others, claims that it did rise above others, and that it made all men equal in Christ (slave and free) would never have worked, and the movement would have shrivelled and died, or else totally revamped itself.

Thus Carrier only manages to humilate himself when he writes to Malina, and Malina only confirms my real and true point, not the strawman Carrier presented him with. Malina told Carrier that "morality based on limited good held people back, except those devoted to greed" -- and unless Christianity had the factual (and therefore, moral) basis to revamp social structures, then Chistianity too would have been seen as greedy. Malina notes "the commonplace: every rich person was a thief or the heir of a thief" -- but without validation, it's seeking to "restore the distribution of goods according to human dignity as intended by God," (as Carrier puts it, not Malina) would have been seen as theivery. Malina says that what "people wished to do was to maintain the status that they believed was proper to their kin group" -- and unless Christianity had a valid basis to change the status of people, then they had no reason to leave their proper place and reverse those wishes. Malina says "this often entailed improving their circumstances when they were dislodged from their status" -- but I am talking about people trying to keep from being dislodged from their status by accepting Christianity.

Carrier does well to qualify as well that "the poor were poor because of the immoral greed of the rich, not because of mere 'fate.' " Mere fate? Is Carrier going to claim that these people as a whole did not regard fate as the base reason why the rich were rich, and the poor were poor, and those poor who became rich could become rich? I agree that the poor would feel cheated, and would want what they were owed -- but I also say that they had obstacles to overcome to get it, and that unless it had the basis to say it had the authority to "set things right" then it would fail for being seen as trying to rise above others. (Carrier says Malina "told [him] Jews would have seen in Christianity an effort to realize God's law as established in Leviticus 25:10-55" -- no doubt they would have seen it as an effort, but the issue is, whether they would have seen it as an authoritative effort that God had blessed and sanctioned!) Thus Carrier has failed to grasp this very simple point because he has, as usual, merely skimmed my material rather than making the most basic effort to understand it.

The connection to Galilee, Carrier dismisses as having "hasty generalizations" abounding, even as he admits that yes, Jesus' Galileean origins would cause balking -- though he supposes, just by the "Jewish elite," when indeed, by the evidence and the nature of the society, that stigma attached from all Jews outside Galilee. Carrier's appeal to Judas the Galileean as a rebel leader simply shows his ignorance of the social mores of the period; Judas would win acceptance from other Jews as "the enemy of my enemy" (the Romans) being a friend -- again, this would NOT apply for Jesus, who held no truck and made no promises about unseating Rome militarily, and if anything, seemed to encourage cooperation, and predicted that Rome would someday be the winner. Jews of Palestine would dislike a Galileean less than they'd dislike a Roman -- but the matter is one of hierarchy within which the stigma remains, and Carrier has no refutation of this point. His naive comment that we lack any textual evidence (aside from rabbinic comments) about disdain for Galilee again only bespeaks his ignorance; it is mere imaginative fantasy that maybe, just maybe, Galileeans were appreciated prior to the rabbinic era, for prejudices do not simply die out, and do not simply spring up, in this very different world of the NT. Moreover, Carrier does miss a very relevant comment from Josephus that Galileans "from childhood were trained for war," and that Galilee, as Vermes notes in The Changing Faces of Jesus [244], "produced the most notorious leaders of the [Jewish] fight against Rome." The Galileans were renowned as fighters, not as preachers or religious leaders. Admitting that Jesus was a Galilean would immediately raise the suspicion that he was "up to no good" against the Roman state. Admitting further that Jesus had suffered crucifixion, the death of rebels against Rome, would confirm that opinion even further!

Jed Clampett in a Tux

Carrier ironically tries to claim that Nazareth was "not the tiny hovel it is often made out to be" by appealing to a "Jewish inscription from the 2nd or 3rd century" -- over 100 years after the fact! Carrier wants to know whether "priests [would] deign to shack up in a despised hick town"; in the period after Jewish dispersal, this is a remarkable question, when it is clear that prejudices would at times have to take a back seat to practicality. Moreover, the priests, as persons of status, would see their move as something that would "reform" the hick town, if anything (when Pilate became governor of Judaea, did that increase the status of Judaea in his own eyes?!?); thus as well the point is irrelevant, and shows again Carrier's ignorance of the social mores of the period. (This is also an ironic twist around from Skeptics who argue that Nazareth must not have even existed in the first century!) That Nazareth had "a large stone building...grain silos, cisterns, ritual immersion pools, storage caves, a stone well, and a significant necropolis" is very nice. What of it? Bithlo, a "hick town" of such reputation near me, has 7-11s, running water, and even a few paved roads, but that hasn't gotten it out of its reputation yet. Carrier is truly confused if he supposes that these features somehow lifted the social status of Nazareth in the eyes of outsiders. A Nazarene bragging about his burg's "great new silo" would be remarkably funny to even someone from Capernaum, where there was much vital industry giving the town over to prosperity; even funnier to an average Jerusalemite next door to the Jewish Temple!

And it gets worse. Carrier, frustrated for an explanation for the comment of one of his "everyday" disgruntled oppressed masses expressing the very snobbery I describe, becomes caught up in the idea that John 1:46 is representative of Nathaneal as a "lone snob" denigrating Nazareth! This is nothing but special pleading (and is contrary to the expert view of Malina and Neyrey, from whom I got this point); in this social world, stratification was a significant part of life, and looking down on such regions, persons and cities as one could in one's position was par for the course for the tenor of this society. Carrier clearly does not appreciate this point, and must engage in special pleading to circumvent John 1:46. It also escapes him that Herod's rebuilding of Sepphoris in Galilee was a reversal of the very values I have explained -- a huge, metropolitan city, populated and managed by the elite who were sympathetic to the ruling powers and did not share this value with the surrounding villages (see here; note especially: The surrounding towns did not sympathize with the Sepphoreans, who refused to wage war against Rome). He says further:

Josephus reports that Galilee was renowned for its prodigious oil production, and the governorship of Galilee was highly coveted--for a time Josephus was governor of Galilee himself, and certainly appears to have been proud of it.

"Oil production" (as well as payment of tribute -- racist goverments gladly take taxes and resources from despised minorities!) means exactly nothing in regards to the value assigned the people and their culture; Carrier's appeal to this is inane. For Josephus he credits, Josephus, Life 390, 228; JW 2.590 (where he also notes that Galilee contained 240 cities and villages). Line 390 contains nothing of this; it relates that one named Justus ran away from Josephus. 228 is a record of orders Josephus gave to soldiers. Nothing is said about the governorship of Galilee being "highly coveted" or that he was proud of it; and even if it did, this would not tell us whether there was pride in the position as opposed to the land itself, and even if there were signs of pride, this would mean nothing inasmuch as Josephus, writing a work his patrons (the Flavians) would read, would hardly find any expression of less than pride in his position conducive to his continuing health. War 2.590 refers to the repairing of a wall. Carrier clearly hopes that no one will check these references.

He further notes "the respected Jewish scholar and sage Eleazar the Galilean" -- oblivious to that 1) no one was ever asked to worship this man; 2) in order to become a scholar, he had to leave Galilee and be tutored, very likely in the prestigious city of Jerusalem (Josephus specifically says he was "very skillful in the learning of his own country") -- and thus would have routed around the stigma in a way Jesus did not. (Of course, if Carrier thinks this erased the geographical stigma for him anyway, may we remind him of continued prejudices against educated minority persons, even in these enlightened times. Furthermore, note that Eleazer was sent into the heart of the Parthian Empire -- deadly enemies of Rome, which just as well suggests that as a Galileean, he was given the "dirty job" that others wouldn't touch!)

Carrier's further attempt to explain why John 1:46 exists, for reasons not related to those offered by credentialed scholars in the field, need not be addressed. It is a theory of excuses to suppose that John used this to subtly appeal to the poor and oppressed; based on the data, the fact is that John here and elsewhere records real prejudices of a real and hard time, within which one like Jesus needed something "extra" -- as Eleazar would have gotten from a Jerusalem education (which Jesus did not have) to overcome the stigma.

Update 5/05: Carrier's gyrations at this point become almost comical, as he goes to such depths as to try to fix blame on me for not recognizing and correcting his own errors. But to that in a moment. First Carrier puffs for a few lines about how invincible his case remains; then we get to specifics.

• In terms of priests moving to Nazareth, Carrier notes that his late inscription "documents an event only thirty years later" -- so what? Is Carrier trying to prove that Nazareth was or was not a tiny town, and at what point? When he decides what the evidence was meant to prove, we can talk. My point is that if he's going to accept something written hundreds of years after the fact as valid, then he'll have to do the same for the Gospels a mere 40-50 years (by his reckoning) after the events written of. He then tries to dismiss the "practicality" aspect of the priests moving into Nazareth by saying that my explanation "makes no sense in this case, for there were numerous major cities in Galilee, and elsewhere in Judaea outside Galilee, where priests could have gone. So there was no practical necessity here." Oh? There mere existence of these towns proves that they could have gone there? How about such things as available facilities, inclination of the inhabitants, convenience and ease of relocation, and so on? The point is not that other cities were chosen or not chosen, but that Nazareth was one that was chosen, and the mere fact of priests moving there proves nothing at all in terms of what Carrier is trying to argue. Carrier's idiotic claim that clearly the priests had "no prejudice" against Nazareth, because they moved there after all, ignores the very basic fact that people move to places they can't stand all the time! -- and they do so even if they are not made to go by force. By his own twisted logic, I must never have attended Florida State University in Tallahassee, because I regarded that town (and still do) as unrepentedly backwards. Carrier also invents the idea that I claim that the priests went to "teach" the Nazarenes (despite his quotes, the word is nowhere in the article) and then vainly constructs his own argument based on this point I never made.
• Carrier then tries to snake around his asinine appeal to wells and cemeteries as symbols of status. First he peevishly accuses me of using a false analogy to modern times -- though all this does is show Carrier's own snobbishness as a member of the elite: analogically, our small villages in America are much more community- and collectivist-oriented, and therefore, analogically very close in these respects to what an ancient person would be like. Carrier then professes (wisely) to have no idea what I am criticizing him for, and then tries to repair himself, to wit:

  The fact remains that no town would have major stone structures in the ancient world unless it possessed or received some wealth, and that entailed some measure of status.

  Wealth! All any town needs to have "major stone structures" is 1) a lot of stone and 2) a lot of backs willing to lift them! (And you don't need even that for a storage cave and a necropolis! How much money does Carrier think was needed to get that cave for Nazareth, we wonder!) So Carrier continues to gyrate and spin himself deeper into a hole trying to refute the scholarly consensus on these points. (We wonder if he'll write to de Silva now and try to get him to change his mind?)

• After noting then the silence of Josephus in terms of prejudice against Galilee (which we would not expect anyway, since Josephus was governor there, and to express prejudice for it towards the people who put him over it would hardly be a wise thing to do!), Carrier then pulls his most childish shebang of this round, claiming I stepped into a "bear trap." How? I noted that lines Carrier appealed to from Josephus did not say what he claimed they did. His reply is so infantile and so exemplary of his desperation that it deserves full report (emphasis added):

  Holding then steps into a bear trap. He says that "line 390" in the Life of Josephus contains "nothing" about what I argue, that in line 228 "nothing is said about the governorship of Galilee," and that JW 2.590 refers "only" to "the repairing of a wall." From all of this, Holding mistakenly claims that "Carrier clearly hopes that no one will check these references." Yet in saying this, Holding proves he is not a skilled researcher and has no competent knowledge of the sources he is working with. The fact is, I made a small mistake in writing down the numbers of my source citations in that one footnote (which I have since corrected). But the error was so small that had Holding actually read the paragraph, not the line, in each case he would have seen that the material I referred to is there. The fact that he didn't do so simple a check as this proves that Holding is just mining his sources and doing the absolute minumum to prove his case instead of honestly and seriously studying the sources and making sure his claims are correct. Holding doesn't read Josephus. He just jumps to single sentences that help his case--not even caring if there are any other sentences that hurt his case. And instead of knowing the facts--which I did, and only then took the trouble of tracking down the exact references--Holding is completely ignorant of the facts, and therefore incapable of tracking them down. Instead, he just uses what he wants and ignores the rest--the truth be damned.

  In other words, I am responsible for correcting Carrier's errors by doing a "simple check"! Well, yes indeed. Carrier when he mis-typed "390" could have meant line 190, or 290, or 39, or 309, or 930, etc etc. and I am responsible for checking all of them! I have read Josephus, thank you -- but I am not obliged to chase down every possible typographical alternative just because Carrier does not type and then proofread. In fact, if Carrier were the expert he claims to be, he would have recognized his error upon proofreading. Apparently he isn't. In any event, since Carrier wishes to become an infant, we will remain with our answer, since he does not provide the "repaired" citations here: Even if it did what he claimed, this would not tell us whether there was pride in the position as opposed to the land itself, and even if there were signs of pride, this would mean nothing inasmuch as Josephus, writing a work his patrons (the Flavians) would read, would hardly find any expression of less than pride in his position conducive to his continuing health.

• On Eleazer, Carrier merely tries to claim that there is "no basis whatever for this claim" and asks how I know "there were no schools in Galilee"! Not that he hasn't a drop of evidence that there were any such schools at all; he merely cites the existence of rabbis from Galilee, and notes that they disagreed with rabbis in Jerusalem, so that it would be "simply incredible" to suppose that they went to schools in Jerusalem and not in Galilee! Yet, I am accused of making up facts to secure my case! (Here's a hint: You don't have to agree with a school 100% in order to go to it! One can rather more readily envision the Galileean rabbis being a group off to themselves while in Jerusalem -- and what will Carrier do next? Create schools out of whole cloth for every potential fracture point in Jerusalem? Maybe even create one school for smokers and another for non-smokers? The absurdity and desperation of Carrier here speaks for itself.

  On Eleazer as well I am accused of moving the goal posts because I point out that Eleazer was not asked to be worshipped. This, despite Carrier, has a great deal to do with whether "a Galileean would be looked down upon and never revered" because an Eleazer has far, far less to overcome to beat the stigma than would Jesus! To use the canard Carrier is surely familiar with: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." If he does not see how it would be harder for a divine being "from" Galilee than for a mere human teacher, his scale of conception needs a great deal of fine tuning.

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  Virgin Territory

  Carrier's final point here is a repeat of his prior anachronisms with reference to use of the OT. There is no evidence that there was any Jewish expectation of a backwater Messiah (Micah 5:2, from the prestigious town of Bethlehem, was it) or that pre-Christian Jews expected such a thing. Carrier further misses my point about having Jesus born or living in Sepphoris or Capernaum; it remains that these would be better places to be from that Nazareth, if a Galileean origin had to be dealt with. I am not saying "Christians were eager to lie" -- I am saying that Jesus himself could have moved to Sepphoris; or that the Gospels could have remained silent about his origins, and placed greater emphasis on his activities in more prestigious locales. He does however rightly perceive that I have in mind, to some extent, Christ-mythers when I make this point. In closing, he notes correctly (on my point about the virgin birth vs adoptionism) that "many Christians did exactly that, i.e. preached some form of adoptionism" but this did not happen until the second century at the earliest, Carrier's unargued claim that Paul may have done so notwithstanding. More in a later chapter, as Carrier does. However, he is also in error to claim:

  But presuming the Christians wanted to believe (and hence to preach) that Christ was God Incarnate, there is no other way the story could have sold except by positing a virgin birth to an unmarried woman--and thus the need for these circumstances nullifies any difficulty this idea would pose to persuading mockers. This is because Jesus could only have been God Incarnate if he was not fathered by a human being, and to impregnate a married woman would be adultery (and God cannot sin), leaving only four options: to impregnate a whore, slut, widow, or virgin. Of these, the last is the most miraculous and "pure," and the only one that could gain the Christians the rhetorical advantage of prophetic confirmation.

  Carrier is grossly in error here. As we note elsewhere:

  Beyond that, Brown [Brow.BirM, 521] observes that the virginal conception "would have become the subject of preaching (and therefore likely to be included in the kind of writing we find in the New Testament) only when its christological significance was seen." He also observes that the primary theological doctrine associated with the virginal conception (that Christ was thus not tainted by original sin) was first cited by Augustine. (ibid., 530 -- who probably misunderstood what Paul said anyway) That being the case, we may suggest that the NT writers did NOT observe any christological significance in the virgin birth per se - any more than they did in any of Jesus' other miracles collectively....Campenhausen [VonCamp.VBT], though skeptical of the virgin birth himself, has performed a survey of the theology of the virgin birth in the early church, and observes, rather dryly, that the virgin birth was "anything but the starting point of the early Christian message." (ibid., 10) He does not speculate as to why this was so, but does note that it was only in the time of Ireneaus that the virgin birth was regarded as an essential part of doctrine, with hints of its theological import being found earlier in the works of Justin (c. 150 AD). Thus, he writes (ibid., 24):

  ...the doctrine of the virgin birth was not formulated for the sake of a theological line of thought; it is simply a supposedly 'apostolic' piece of biblical tradition that was handed down.

  Thus Carrier erroneously reads the doctrinal signficance of the virgin birth into the text. There was nothing that would have prevented God from impregnating a married woman, since no physical sex was involved, just an act of divine fiat. (For more on why Carrier is also in error to say it would have caused "a net increase in the popularity of the cult," see here particularly with respect to the risk of calumny.)

  Update, 5/05: Somehow from the above Carrier gets the warped idea that I think he "was referring to the doctrine of immaculate conception" and then rambles on for several sentences gnawing on that red herring. The real point is that, contrary to Carrier, and in line with what Brown says above, the virginal conception of Jesus was not seen as a solution to the problem of inherited sin until hundreds of years later. Nonplussed by the lack of evidence for this as an early solution, Carrier now claims that his argument is that a "virgin Christology" was offered as an answer because "God could not have sex (least of all with someone else's wife), because God could not sin" so that "only a nonsexual conception was ideologically possible." Apparently Carrier has completely forgotten that adoptionists (who sprang from the Jewish branch of Christianity) didn't agree that this was the only solution, and that Gnostics had their own ideas on how to solve it, and that Jews also had the option of a theophany -- no birth at all! The point remains, as Brown says, that the virgin birth is presented as a piece of lore that was passed down, with no conceptions of how, theologically, it meant anything. (It has occured to me that Carrier is simply too uneducated to know the difference between the virginal conception of Jesus and the immaculate conception of Mary, because he only knows the term "virgin birth" with respect to Jesus. The former term is more technically correct, however, and is widely used: See for example here and the title of Brown's book here. At the very least Carrier should have had the common sense to realize that I would not be defending a uniquely Catholic doctrine like the Immaculate Conception!)

  So in conclusion:

• Again, Carrier anachronizes with reference to Messianic expectations.
• Carrier fails to appreciate the nature, extent, and expression of ancient prejudices, and indeed stands against the social science scholarship on this point, erroneously reading the ancient world in modern, individualist terms.

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  The Shameless Mercenary

  In case you're wondering....

  Carrier's response to my second point had 6040 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 $362.40 for his response to this section. More on why we make a note of this later.

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  Go Home!