“Flemming can perhaps be compared to Michael Moore, in that what his films actually say is often not as wrong as critics claim, but it sometimes exaggerates or underqualifies (as any entertaining medium will always do), and is presented in such a way that it enrages people and in their anger they over-interpret its message and pick on its errors rather than engaging with the difficult facts it gets right. But then, that’s why it gets attention. So I’m still on the fence as to whether this fills a valuable niche or goes too far. At any rate, it’s not my movie.”

I would have to say Flemming’s film went too far in the direction of simply really bad scholarship. From the mistranslation of Hebrews, the attribution to Paul of a message by Peter to Simon the magician, the archaic Jesus movies, the statement that Paul never quoted Jesus, the suggestion that the Gospels have no historical credibility because they are written four or more decades after the events, the idea that John’s Gospel was based on the other three, the complete sliding over of the criteria of authenticity, the lack of interaction with any bona fide biblical scholars (Tim LaHaye doesn’t qualify, as you well know), TO the positioning of Dundes, Price, you, and Harris on the other side, this film, though rather entertaining, promotes so many ridiculous notions that it can only convince those who are already biased against the historical roots of the Christian faith. Frankly, I loved the sound track and have shown the movie to dozens of people. It’s a great conversation starter. But for you to say that it “sometimes exaggerates or underqualifies” is itself an underqualification. I’m afraid that you men who were featured on the film have damaged your own reputations.

David (and Richard)–regarding Philippians 3.21: You’re right; I’ll take that up later. But overall, I would say this: anyone who wants to offer a huge paradigm shift needs to have massive evidence to back up his claims. It will not do simply to say that a word occasionally can mean something and then apply that meaning to this passage. Much, much more evidence is needed. Again, I don’t know the evidence that Richard has supplied on this verse, but I would expect to see some Koine usage of exchanges that do not involve clothes or the derivative, as well as some that involve the exchange of what is corporeal for that which is incorporeal. The exchange of clothing motif fits well with the belief that Christians put on their new bodies at the resurrection, but it doesn’t seem to be particularly compatible with the notion that they are exchanging a corporeal body for an incorporeal one.

I was hoping you could comment on Richard’s analysis of Philippians 3:21. It seems to me that the passage can only mean that our present bodies will be transformed. Yet Richard argues that Paul has an exchange in view. I just can’t make sense of this when I try to translate the passage in the manner Richard suggests (”who will exchange the body of our humiliation”???). Do you think Richard’s translation works? (This might, however, be better discussed in a separate post.)

Richard’s Q & A reads as follows:

Q: Doesn’t Philippians 3:21 clearly state that the body will be transformed?

A: Not clearly, no. Philippians 3:21 says Jesus “will change the scheme of the body” of our humble condition “to correspond in form with the body” of his glory (metaschêmatisei to sôma…summorphon tô sômati), which is vague as to details. I discuss this on pp. 118-19 (with corresponding notes, pp. 204-05). As I explain there, the key verb (metaschêmatizô) was also used to refer to changing clothes, which is not a transformation but an exchange, so this verse alone is inconclusive. That means it must be read in the context of Paul’s other statements, especially his frequent allusions to resurrection as changing clothes (pp. 120-50). Likewise, Paul’s only other use of this verb is in the sense of “disguise” rather than real transformation (three times: 2 Cor. 11:13-15), and that connotation of “disguise” comes from the verb’s colloquial use in referring to the changing of clothes (e.g. Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 7.257, 8.256-57).

Source:

http://www.columbia.edu/~rcc20/SpiritualFAQ.html#trans-phil

No worries. I took no offense. I fully understood your circumstances, as you explained them well enough, with all the appropriate qualifications. Moreover, your criticisms were still often warranted. For many of the reasons you identify, I’m not happy with the translation, it is at once too literal and too loose, and has implications I did not foresee.

I also sympathize with your struggle. You may have had a harder time figuring out my views from GWWT because my views often evolve over time. My conclusions before GWWT differed from those during filming, which differed from those I hold now, all as a result of further research and debate and discussion (and I mean in many ways, not just on Jesus questions). I think the extended interview on the DVD makes more clear where I stood at that time.

In the film itself I’m only used to establish some points. Which is appropriate, IMO, since a documentarian’s interview subjects need not agree with each other or the filmmaker’s conclusions, they only need to agree with what they are actually portrayed as saying–thus when subjects are portrayed as arguing what they do not, that is deplorable (FOX news once did this, and I took them to task for it in an article for Skeptical Inquirer), but I wasn’t treated that way in GWWT.

Since then I have come down more on the side of the Jesus myth camp (I presented a more scholarly case for it in a lecture at Stanford). Though I don’t agree with every single claim in GWWT. And I have been trying to make it clear that this remains only a theory (a fact the Stanford newspaper correctly reported). But I do think it deserves to be examined more seriously by academic experts.

Flemming can perhaps be compared to Michael Moore, in that what his films actually say is often not as wrong as critics claim, but it sometimes exaggerates or underqualifies (as any entertaining medium will always do), and is presented in such a way that it enrages people and in their anger they over-interpret its message and pick on its errors rather than engaging with the difficult facts it gets right. But then, that’s why it gets attention. So I’m still on the fence as to whether this fills a valuable niche or goes too far. At any rate, it’s not my movie.

On the matter of the KAI, that indeed has no bearing on the issue of historicity (or not in any way I can imagine). It only relates to the abuse of the verse on the matter of the nature of the resurrection (not its historicity). But you will see what I mean when you do get around to reading the chapter (in which, as throughout ET, I presume the historicity of Jesus).

On the rest of what you say, I generally agree with you. In fact, when I spoke of misusing my words, I was not referring to you doing so, but to those who could do so to make the very points you were rightly arguing against (thus I was not criticizing you, but the same kind of people you were criticizing).

The only major disagreement, I think, is on the use of universal gender. I do not think adding “and sisters” to the translation would be sound practice, as that would imply Paul actually made that distinction (and thus did what PC proponents today want him to have done), which would be yet another way such a translation could mislead or be abused, the very same faults you identified already in my translations as-is. So repeating the same faults would not be an improvement. This is an example of where there simply is no satisfactory English, which leaves a literal rendering as the least misleading option.

After all, basic skills of reading comprehension should already communicate the same point. That Paul is not excluding female members of the Church when he speaks of the brethren here is already entailed by the context, since to assume otherwise entails Paul did not believe what he says applied to women, which would be a bizarre and baseless assumption. Yes, language evolves, but it is not yet where you seem to think it is, and it is not clear that it ever will be. No language will ever be perfect for all occasions, so we need to learn to cope with its limitations, and rely on reading comprehension and context to convey much of our meaning. Hence, as I see it, to assume anyone of competence will think Paul was excluding women here is simply unreasonable.

In all other respects, I recommend comparing this example, with all the other passages I translate in that same chapter (and my corresponding commentary in text and footnotes), before drawing any generalizations, since I think this example is not typical of me (certainly not in terms of the number of coinciding errors and choices).

I think you misunderstood Richard’s comment about the historicity of Jesus. Richard does hold that Jesus probably never existed. When he said that he assumed the historicity of Jesus, I think he meant something like “For purposes of the essay, I assumed the historicity of Jesus.”

Thanks so much for writing! I’m delighted to hear from you, especially so that you can set the record straight. I must apologize at the outset: I THOUGHT I knew your views better than I did. When you said that you assumed that there really was a historical Jesus, I was taken aback. MY assumption was that you did not start with that assumption because (a) you were prominently featured in Brian Flemming’s “The God Who Wasn’t There,” along with Alan Dundes and Robert Price. You three were the Greek, literary, and historical-theological scholars, respectively, that Flemming used to build his case that Jesus never existed. So, now I’m scratching my head and wondering, “What other things does Carrier hold to that I assumed he did not?”

As for the “very weird direction” I was going in the blog, as I mentioned several times, I wasn’t sure what you were saying. My point was first to critique the translation since a friend sent it to me. (As a sidenote, I bought the book because he made me aware of it.) And second, I was trying to fill in the blanks of what your argument was. I’m still not clear on that point, nor on how the KAI makes any difference. I guess I’ll just have to read your article! I’m afraid that my time commitments are way over the top right now, but I assure you I will give it a careful read even if not in the immediate future. Thanks for setting me straight on these points.

As for the translation, I will respond to your seven points of explanation below.
(1) I believe you meant “participles emphasize aspect over time” rather than “participles emphasize aspect over tense,” since Greek tenses include aspect as part of their definition. Even here, of course, that’s not the best way to state things. Time in participles is relative, which means that they are dependent on other elements in the sentence for their force. It is better to speak of the temporal value of participles as antecedent, contemporaneous, or subsequent, rather than past, present, or future. Be that as it may, from purely an English stylistic perspective as well as clearly representing the Greek, I thought your translation of EGEIRAS was inadequate. But, as you say, to express this with a relative clause would be to obscure your point.
(2) Fair enough on the capitalization of Spirit.
(3) On the lack of translation of AUTOU, the choice not to translate it was a bad choice, as you now admit. But for you to say “I wish we did not live in a world where we had to be so precise simply to avoid someone misusing our words,” I think that’s a bit overstated. My principal critique was that this was an inadequate translation. And I registered several caveats throughout the blog about not knowing what you were trying to say. But I could, at the same time, offer a critique on the translation. So, I don’t think it’s fair of you to criticize me for misusing your words since I only spoke with any definiteness about your translation.
(4) I understand your concern about the PC contention on how to translate ADELPHOI, but I would have to say that I disagree with you. First, the plural form ADELPHOI can mean simply ‘brothers’ in Greek or it can mean ‘brothers and sisters.’ The standard Greek lexicon for the New Testament is BDAG. They note, “The pl[ural] can also mean brothers and sisters…” This is followed by several references, including both literary and non-literary Koine texts, in which a single brother and sister are collectively called ADELPHOI. Of course, you and I both know that the reason Greek does this is because the word for sister is ADELPHE and the word for brother is ADELPHOS. In the plural, when both brothers and sisters are in view, the default gender is the masculine (just like it is for ‘lions,’ and ‘dogs’ in English, while ‘cows,’ though feminine in the singular is the default gender for both cows and bulls when used collectively). Further, your resistance to seeing the English language as evolving strikes me as rather naïve. You said, “If the masculine can include women in Greek (as it could), then so it can in English, and in fact long has.” Are you really arguing that because something is so in Greek, this somehow connects to English usage? The historical argument (“and in fact long has”) seems to suggest a diachronic over synchronic priority in how you approach linguistics. Surely you’re not saying that people today had better get used to the fact that since English USED to mean both men and women when it says ‘men’ or USED to mean both brothers and sisters when it says ‘brothers,’ it still does, are you? I would have thought that you had to be acquainted with Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale in grad school to see that that is not the way to think about language. And if that was not required reading, an understanding of the artificial atticizing of Greek during the Hellenistic period would have taught you, by analogy, that we can’t go back. This is how English is now, whether you like it or not. Like all living languages, it is evolving.

You added “Likewise, I find ‘we are obligated not to the flesh’ to be clumsier than what I chose.” That misses the point of what I was noting: you used two independent clauses to convey a single hypotactic structure in Greek, which, in my view, makes for an awkward English rendering (“we owe nothing to the flesh, we ought not live in the flesh”). But again, we each have a different view on English style.
(5) I understand why you did what you did with the first person plural in the translation of v. 13. However, you still made an assumption that had interpretive implications. By calling the second person the “philosophical ‘you’” (by which I think you mean the use of the indefinite second person), you assumed that Paul was not directing his attention to his readers. It may not affect your particular point, but I would argue with the assumption that this is an indefinite second person here. That usage is fairly rare in Koine anyway, especially in the New Testament. But I think your translation simply reveals your lack of acquaintance with New Testament syntax. Your complaint at the end of this point was “it annoys me again that such concerns pull the straightjacket tighter and thus limit our freedom to translate meaning rather than droll literalism.” This complaint is not justified. You switch between a slavishly literal rendering to a very free one, and a free translation that skews Paul’s argument. I now realize that his argument on these issues was irrelevant to your purposes, but at more than one point your translation assumed a particular interpretation that is not shared by all. I don’t see principle in this vacillation, just inconsistency.
(6) I understand the point you are raising about KATA. However, in Romans 8, Paul makes some statements using EN SARKI (vv. 8, 9) and KATA SARKA (vv. 4, 5, 12, 13). What struck me most about your translation was its insensitivity to Paul’s usage.
(7) Yes, those things happen to the best of authors. No problem. Your article is quite lengthy; it’s very easy to overlook a certain amount of errata in such dense material.

Richard, thanks for your explanation. This helps a great deal, and I’m glad you had this chance to vindicate yourself. At the same time, I still have to wonder how much time you have logged in the Greek of the New Testament, especially in the corpus Paulinum. The minor errors you made in the translation of these three verses, in light of your explanation, still suggest that New Testament exegesis and Koine Greek are not your primary areas of specialization. Nevertheless, I can readily concede, based on your comments, that all such errata are peripheral issues to the point you were making in the chapter.

I am grateful that you have taken the time to respond to this blog.

You seem to be assuming my translation of Rom. 8:11-13 has something to do with ahistoricity or was tweaked to help ahistoricists somehow (I never imagined any such thing). As you will eventually see when you read the book, I translated it in a deliberately awkward way to put into relief the role of the kai in 8:11, and then to articulate the context of 8:11 as speaking of the present-day church, all to a purpose completely different than you assume. But due to all these possible ways to “abuse”my translation, as you point out, I do see this now as among the worst translations I effected in that chapter, though only through my carelessness about details that didn’t pertain to the point I was making, and potential abuses I never imagined. I would correct it if a new edition were published (though I don’t expect one to be).

But in case you were wondering what the hell:

(1) Participles emphasize aspect over tense, thus aorist participles do not have to be rendered in the past tense when the context is otherwise clear. When I wrote “raiser” I was using it in the event-aspect, not intending to emphasize any tense relation (since I take it as obvious the event occurred in the past, e.g. “if the attitude of the electors of President Bush persists, then we will continue to have bad administrations” would convey the same meaning, emphasizing the event rather than the tense, although obviously Bush was only elected in the past and it would be silly to think otherwise). There is no way to render a past participle in English here without using a subordinate clause, which would have obscured the very point I was trying to make (which is not any point you seem concerned with, as you will see when you finally read the chapter), hence I chose the simplest structure I could (and I would not change this).

(2) In my argument from this passage I make no use of the word “spirit” at all, which is why I missed the fact that I had not consistently capitalized the word here. That is simply an error of style, which escaped my notice because the distinction was irrelevant to anything I was saying at the time. I certainly do not imagine any distinction being made. This is an error I do occasionally make elsewhere. Since I attach no real meaning to whether such words are capitalized (like Gospel, God, Lord, etc.), yet I have been influenced by both styles in my reading, my brain flips a coin from time to time. In much the same way I often inconsistently switch between British and American spelling. Though the editors I think normalized my chapters in ET on that score, I don’t think they were looking for inconsistencies of capitalization, and though I engaged a great number of proof runs myself, it didn’t occur to me to look for this sort of thing either. It is simply ironic that this harmless fallibility converged with others here to produce a perfect storm.

(3) As you note, it is unclear whether the autou is a possessive or an intensive, so since it made no difference to the point I was to make, I simply rendered it “the” (which could refer to either and thus retains the ambiguity, though since I did not imagine this being taken the way you point out, I can now see the danger of that choice, especially when conjoined with the completely unrelated accident of capitalization–I would certainly change both if a corrected edition were ever produced, preferring “this” to “the,” though I wish we did not live in a world where we had to be so precise simply to avoid someone misusing our words).

(4) I reject the PC contention that the general masculine excludes women in English. If the masculine can include women in Greek (as it could), then so it can in English, and in fact long has. The relatively recent claim to the contrary is a silly hyper-feminist campaign against common sense (no offense intended to the many more reasonable feminists out there). Thus, I did not intend any gender exclusion when rendering the Greek literally. I’ve gotten stodgier about this as I get older, I suppose. I have similar attitudes now against the CE/BCE trend (which I perceive as even sillier). Likewise, I find “we are obligated not to the flesh” to be clumsier than what I chose to convey the same meaning (and except when I needed to be awkward, clarity for the reader was my aim here), so evidently we have different ideas of what sounds nice.

(5) The point of verse 13 certainly did not exclude Paul, and since I saw no need to switch subjects, I kept the first person plural for clarity (since logically Paul’s saying “we x, because you y” is, strictly speaking, a non sequitur, and not a distinction Paul intends to make, and though he clearly intends the philosophical ‘you’, I felt this would not be obvious to someone who read this passage out of context). I make nothing of the matter, except that Paul is talking about the current members of the Christian church here–which, again, surely included him. Since I did not want to give the impression that Paul didn’t mean him, too, and since nothing I argue turns on the person of Paul’s verbs, I took the liberty to avoid distracting the reader from the only relevant points I was making. I did not perceive any harm in this, as the meaning still seems to be entirely the same to me, though now that you have brought my attention to the obscure ways such a rendering can be doctrinally abused, I would change it simply to head off abuses, though it annoys me again that such concerns pull the straightjacket tighter and thus limit our freedom to translate meaning rather than droll literalism.

(6) Because in English “according to” and “after” (in the metaphorical senses intended by kata here) are now in modern dialect archaic or obscure in their meaning, I try to avoid them. Hence I translated ‘kata’ as I believe it was intended (as Paul equated attachment to the flesh with residence in the flesh, e.g. 2 Cor. 5). Though I can see how someone might want to argue that Paul thought we could still live in a body of flesh without living according to the flesh, obviously his instruction here is to do just that, so I never imagined anyone thinking I was intending to deny it. If I had made any issue of the preposition, then I would have discussed its ambiguities in Greek. But in this case there was no need for such a digression, as nothing I say turns on that matter here. I wouldn’t change my translation here, either, as I think the meaning is adequately clear from the given context.

(7) My omission of “by the spirit” is a typo. Looking back I see it in earlier drafts but at some point it became accidentally deleted. As it had no relevance to the point I was making, I overlooked its disappearance. I had to laugh when I discovered this, as no other other verse had so many converging (yet individually trivial) errors and unintentionally ’significant’ decisions as to make this verse look altogether rather sad! In the words of Mister Darcy, “By this reckoning my faults are grave indeed!” I hope you don’t judge the rest of the chapter by this one example–and I apologize if this convergence of events has misled anyone.

If someone has read the work, to what degree does Carrier interact with the Greco-Roman mystery cults?

Am I misunderstanding you, or are you saying that you don’t think it’s a very early church creed like many scholars do?

Thanks Dan for the reminder to continually deal with the issues, doing our best to set aside our emotions—even . . . no, especially with something like this. This response of yours needs to be a separate blog!

First, I do want to give those who oppose my views—including outright heretics—the benefit of the doubt. If I don’t, I will be sloppy in my handling of the ancient texts. A case in point is when I did not look carefully at the apparatus of the International Greek New Testament project’s work on Luke 1.34, when I commented on Robert Price’s handling of the text. Because I was not giving him the benefit of the doubt, I ended up impugning his character. In this case, I was wrong, terribly wrong. He had the facts right, and I did not. So, I wrote to Robert Price and apologized to him. I said that I would post an apology and correction on-line (it’s on bible.org) and that the wording in the next printing would delete those inaccurate statements I made about his views. The fourth printing of Reinventing Jesus is now out and it does not say what it said before; we were able to rewrite a couple of pages with just a couple of words’ room left! Dr. Price thanked me and even called me a ‘Christian and a scholar.’

As for Carrier, I know his overall views well, but my point was that I didn’t want to be prejudicial in handling the evidence that he brings to the table, largely because I had not seen the evidence yet (just his translations). We must recognize that we can learn from those who are far outside the realm of orthodoxy, Richard Carrier included. I now have the book and plan to do some blogging about in the coming weeks. I will examine the arguments and those that are found wanting will be mentioned as such. Those that are decent arguments will be so mentioned. After all, the Christian belief in the resurrection does not rest on solid, indisputable fact. There are indeed strong probabilities that it rests on, and some indisputable facts. But it is not an iron-clad case that could be put forth in a court of law. We learn what our weakest arguments are from our enemies; hence, it’s important to read what they have to say.

I believe that this is the only right position to take when we are dealing with those who are opposed to the Christian message. If we paint them with a black brush before we hear what they have to say, it looks as though we are afraid of something—perhaps of some truth they have discovered that ruins our belief system. The one thing I have tried to do in my ministry is to allow students to raise all the kinds of questions that they want to. We should never fear pursuing truth. And when I find egregious errors of logic or evidence, I will point them out. From Carrier’s translation of Romans 8.11-13, I have seen enough to suggest that he is pushing his agenda but doing so at the cost of sound exegesis. But since I haven’t read his footnotes that defend his translation, I can’t say that for sure.

I was actually hoping that someone had read the book and could comment on his defense of that translation. But too many responses to this blog have been ad hominem. That’s not the way to treat people, folks. Let’s engage in the dialogue and do so with a civil tongue.

Finally, some of you brought up a few arguments about historicity that, in your mind, proved that these guys were looneys. Not so fast. One mentioned the Comma Flavianum (the famous passage in Josephus which mentions Jesus of Nazareth). That passage has been disputed for a long time as to its authenticity. Most scholars today feel that there are definitely Christian accretions that crept into the text (as I do), but that the core was stable. Josephus really did acknowledge that Jesus existed. But some more radical scholars want to excise the whole thing.

Others point to 1 John 1.1 or 1 Cor 15 as proof that Jesus existed and that the resurrection must be true. They don’t realize that the argument from 1 John is easily defeated by skeptics: John didn’t write it; it came later and was meant to promote the myth of a historical Jesus.

But 1 Cor 15 is much harder for them to deal with. This is because it’s demonstrably early (c. AD 53), in an undisputed letter by Paul, and is very clear about Jesus’ resurrection. If this passage can hold its own, then the idea that Jesus never existed is dashed to the ground. So, one way to solve the problem for skeptics is to say that this passage was an early interpolation that was added to 1 Corinthians. I know a little about textual criticism and can critique that view readily: all theories of textual fragmentation, added interpolations, and the like must be tested against hard evidence. And the hard evidence is that we don’t have a shred of evidence that 1 Cor 15 ever existed apart from in its proper place in this letter. The manuscripts are solid on this front. Once a scholar starts to pick and choose what goes into the text and what does not—all based on conjecture rather than evidence—his agenda is showing. It’s question begging to the max, and hardly worthy of genuine historical investigation. Or, as Kurt Aland, the world-renowned textual critic, said: “All theories of composition and interpolations fall shipwreck on the rocks of textual criticism.” In other words, an ounce of real evidence is worth a pound of presumption. I haven’t yet read what this new bread of atheists argues about that, but it should be interesting.