Been thinking about Qanon a lot lately.
Whee, let’s talk about Jesus Mythicism without trying to invoke the handful of prominent mythicist scholars who are probably great big shitheads who I don’t want to associate with!
Content warning: Atheist talking about Jesus!
I’ve said before that I’m a Jesus Mythicist. My thinking on this is that the documentation of Jesus’ life is full of unreliable bullshit; incorrect information about historical figures, the dates don’t line up, the accounts contradict one another and when they agree with one another it’s often a direct quote of something that seems impossible without recording technology. Basically, I don’t doubt there was a dude called Jesus/Yeshua around in that period, but everything else about the book’s account looks sketchy as hell. If a character’s life is made up of sequences of conflicting fictions, then what is there left to say ‘hey, this guy existed as a historical figure.’
What I’ve been thinking about lately is how this position is kind of one of a nested set. That is, I imagine most historicists and I have almost identical positions; I have no reason to believe the sermons or teachings in the New Testament come from that dude, and weren’t ascribed to him afterwards. In fact, given the way that we know the scriptures were formed, with books that don’t mention things like the resurrection or virgin births coming in first, with impossible attributions, it’s pretty much a collection of exceptions. Historicists will look at the trial of Jesus, the behaviour of Pontius Pilate, the releasing of Jesus Barabbas (I mean come on), the one-day turnaround of the Jewish people against the Messiah, and all of those things, to be so obviously fictional that they strip those things out too.
And eventually all you get at the end of it is ‘there was probably a guy, named Jesus, and he probably had some kind of following, or other, and it probably led to the people who eventually wrote the Bible pieces attributing their opinions to him.’
Except a big chunk of the story of Jesus was by a guy who explicitly said he never met him, so any insight from Paul has to be either hearsay (he heard it from someone else) or fucking fantasy (because he dreamt it up). And at that point, we’re now talking about someone about whom we have no actual historical records from his opposition, and the historicists would therefore dig down down down to the most likely thing that the record accounts, which is…
There was a guy named Joshua, in Jerusalem, sometime around 30 AD.
More or less.
And at that point my mythicist take is: Well that dude is clearly mythic, where even if there is a real person who really existed, any information about him is absolutely unavailable in light of the nonsense surrounding him in the subsequent extremely fraudulent stories.
And the historicist take seems to be: Well there clearly was a dude who really existed because it doesn’t cost us anything to imagine any of the many dudes like this in this time were named Joshua, and therefore we can accept there definitely was a Jesus, even if any other information about him is absolutely unavailable.
Like, there doesn’t seem to be a bunch of air between those positions.
There is a version of this narrative that I find interesting, but also don’t really think is provable one way or another that has been forwarded by people I’d rather not mention because they’re weirdoes about black people. The notion is that if you look at the texts that survive in terms of their iteration on an idea, that there’s first Paul talking about visions of a Jesus and then the author of Mark is saying oh but this guy Mark met Jesus and then there’s the author of Matthew saying hey, but this guy Matthew has an account that says Jesus came back from the dead and then suddenly Mark wants to update his story and so on –
It can look a lot like a conspiracy theory escalating out of control. It can look a lot like people who are managing to grift an audience incorporating one another’s grifts as they fight over the movement moving forwards.
Anyway, been thinking about Qanon a lot lately.