Carnival of the Liberals 85

Wow! LXXXV is a lot of carnivals. Go and read Carnival of the Liberals LXXXV.  My fave:

Greg Laden presents “The Bible as Ethnography.” This is a poor title for an awesome post, in which Greg deals with the idea “that a good chunk of the old Testament is telling a story about nomadic pastoralists”, linked to Southeast African cultures. In other words, could the old Testament be an “African thing”? It’s a fascinating idea.

Commentary: God delusions cloud a world of wonders

Michael Coulter writes in The Age,

…What I see is a world slowly tearing itself apart for the sake of one faith or another. A world where an extreme faction of Islam wishes to put me and mine to the sword for my unbelief, and to shackle half the world for the crime of being born female. A world where an extreme faction of Christianity wants to throw away science for the sake of millenniums-old superstitions, and is prepared to kill in the name of life. A world where an extreme faction of Hinduism wishes to religiously purify India. A world where people are unashamedly trying to fulfil the biblical conditions for Armageddon.

Moderates say that these factions are perversions of faith…

Read more of “God delusions cloud a world of wonders.”

More on historical research

A previous post discussed how unreliable is Kersey Graves’ book, “The Worlds’ Sixteen Crucified Saviors, using as reference a review by Richard Carrier, assembled from his comments on the book in 2003.

In the course of this review, Carrier points out that almost any history book written before 1950 is of dubious value, simply because methods of scholarship and new research have made so much historical study obsolete

Graves’ scholarship is obsolete, having been vastly improved upon by new methods, materials, discoveries, and textual criticism in the century since he worked. In fact, almost every historical work written before 1950 is regarded as outdated and untrustworthy by historians today.

Richard Carrier is the author of Sense and Goodness without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism.

Why does God side with busybodies?

see more Political Pictures

Sketchy scholarship in The World’s Sixteen Crucified Saviors

In 1875, Kersey Graves wrote a book about mythical parallels to the Christian story of Christ. No one has yet produced a comprehensive review of his argument. A good, but brief, review of the book is here, by Richard Carrier: “Kersey Graves and the World’s Sixteen Crucified Saviors.” Basically, Carrier reports that Kersey Graves was very sure of himself; but he cites few references, makes assumptions, and blurs distinctions. Myths of journeys to the Underworld are not similar enough to count. Sometimes his parallels are from well after the time of Christ and could be based on the Christ story. He also uses the parallel of Christ’s solstice birthday being the same as for many sun gods. But we know that Christ was given that birthday around 300 A.D. for cultural and political reasons. So the book is not reliable. See the review for other problems with Graves’ methods and conclusions.

However, there are two early early examples of death and resurrection that Kersey Graves did not mention.  the Thracian God Zalmoxis and the Sumerian Goddess Innana.

Carrier describes them as follows:

The only pre-Christian man to be buried and resurrected and deified in his own lifetime, that I know of, is the Thracian god Zalmoxis (also called Salmoxis or Gebele’izis), who is described in the mid-5th-century B.C.E. by Herodotus (4.94-96), and also mentioned in Plato’s Charmides (156d-158b) in the early-4th-century B.C.E. According to the hostile account of Greek informants, Zalmoxis buried himself alive, telling his followers he would be resurrected in three years, but he merely resided in a hidden dwelling all that time. His inevitable “resurrection” led to his deification, and a religion surrounding him, which preached heavenly immortality for believers, persisted for centuries.

The only case, that I know, of a pre-Christian god actually being crucified and then resurrected is Inanna (also known as Ishtar), a Sumerian goddess whose crucifixion, resurrection and escape from the underworld is told in cuneiform tablets inscribed c. 1500 B.C.E., attesting to a very old tradition. The best account and translation of the text is to be found in Samuel Kramer’s History Begins at Sumer, pp. 154ff., but be sure to use the third revised edition (1981), since the text was significantly revised after new discoveries were made. For instance, the tablet was once believed to describe the resurrection of Inanna’s lover, Tammuz (also known as Dumuzi). Graves thus mistakenly lists Tammuz as one of his “Sixteen Crucified Saviors.” Of course, Graves cannot be discredited for this particular error, since in his day scholars still thought the tablet referred to that god (Kramer explains how this mistake happened).

There is great need of new work in this area. There really is a huge gap in modern scholarship here–this is one of the few subjects untouched by the post-WWII historiographical revolution. Most scholars today consider the subject dead, largely for all the wrong reasons. And there is little hope. The subject is stuck in the no-man’s-land between history and religious studies, whose methods and academic cultures are so radically different they can barely communicate with each other, much less cooperate on a common project like this.

So it’s as well to skip this book: it will fill your head with factoids of dubious reliability. Check out some of the more modern authors that Carrier mentions and go on from there. If you are looking for a PhD subject in an unworked field, perhaps reurrected saviors before Christ is for you.

Carrier’s conclusion:

…you will never be able to tell what he has right from what he has wrong without totally redoing all his research and beyond, which makes him utterly useless to historians as a source.