Richard Carrier - Not the Impossible Faith: Why Christianity Didnt Need a Miracle to Succeed

Not the

Impossible Faith

Why Christianity Didnt Need a Miracle

to Succeed

by

Richard C. Carrier, Ph.D.

2009

For my fans. Keep fighting

for the truth, against error,

distortion, and lies.

Not the Impossible Faith:

Why Christianity Didnt Need a Miracle to Succeed

Copyright 2009 by Richard Carrier, Ph.D.

All Rights Reserved

Published by Lulu.com

www.richardcarrier.info

Contents

Introduction 7

1. Who Would Believe in a Crucified God? 14

2. Who Would Follow a Man from Galilee? 47

3. Was Resurrection Deemed Impossible? 80

4. Was the New Always Bad? 120

5. Who Would Join a Moral Order? 125

6. Who Would Join an Intolerant Cult? 136

7. Was Christianity Vulnerable to Disproof? 150

8. Who Would Want to be Persecuted? 208

9. Was a God Incarnate Always Repugnant? 235

10. Would Groupthinkers Never Switch Groups? 245

11. Did No One Trust Women? 283

12. Did No One Trust Illiterate Laymen? 307

13. Would the Facts Be Checked? 313

14. Who Would Follow an Ignorant Savior? 356

15. Who Would Follow an Executed Criminal? 360

16. Were Christian Teachings Too Radical? 362

17. Did Christians Encourage Critical Inquiry? 371

18. How Successful Was Christianity? 393

A common apologetic argument for the truth of the Christian religion is that its origins were too improbable for it to be false. This argument has appeared in many forms over the years, but most of the usual ideas are combined into a single popular effort by James Patrick Holding (alias Robert Tur-kel), a Christian minister and one-time prison librarian. J.P. Holdings argument is that the origin and success of Christianity in the ancient Roman Empire was so improbable it must have been based on a true story of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. This book refutes his argument. But in the process, it educates the reader on numerous fascinating aspects of ancient religion, history, society, and culture, and explains in entirely natural terms why Christianity was a successwhen it actually was.

J.P. Holding is something of a dark horse in the apologetics community. He is very popular online. I often travel the country, speaking to humanist groups near and far, and I always meet people who know his work. They are usually Christians once seduced by his rhetoric who later lost their faith upon discovering how horribly hed misled them. Its perhaps not surprising then, that professional Christian apologists seem inclined not to associate with him. I suspect they dont want to be seen as endorsing his shoddy research, unprofessional demeanor, and unrepentant reliance on fallacious argument. Indeed, he insults whoever exposes his errors, and often responds by simply making things up.

Originally, J.P. Holding had assembled his arguments in a lengthy and rambling online effort, which he constantly edited whenever criticized (so establishing its original text was no easy matter, though as he now presents it in five languages I assume he doesnt edit it much anymore). He clearly doesnt want his readers to know where to find them or ever read them. That all but amounts to an admission of defeat.

My original critique is still available online.

The book you now have in your hands reproduces my entire critique still catalogued on the Secular Web, but is revised in three respects: Ive added this new introduction; Ive taken what is still in Chapter 19 online (Responses to Critics) and re-integrated all that material into the other chapters where it belongs (so here there are only eighteen chapters); Ive edited everything in various ways; and often what was an endnoted digression now appears in the main text. Some notes have also been deleted, others added, and many sections partly rewritten. But more than all that, as a book this can now be carried around, handed to friends, written in the margins, and actual page numbers cited.

In the following eighteen chapters I will compare Holdings claims and arguments with the actual facts of ancient history, identifying errors in his research, fallacies in his reasoning, and his frequent (I suspect deliberate) distortion of the facts. Holding presents seventeen factors where Christianity did the wrong thing in order to be a successful religion and concludes from this that the only way Christianity could succeed under those seventeen hostile conditions was because it was a truly revealed faith, in particular because it had the irrefutable witness of the resurrection behind it. Each of those points will be addressed in its own separate chapter, with a final chapter on a more general point pervading all the others.