Richard Carrier - Hitler Homer Bible Christ: The Historical Papers of Richard Carrier 1995-2013

Hitler Homer Bible Christ

The Historical Papers of Richard Carrier 19952013

RICHARD CARRIER

Ph.D.

Philosophy Press

2014

To life

What a strange thing it is

to be alive and to acquire knowledge.

We struggle to see the truth

as the evidence of it dissolves

over time.

Our brains are the bits

of the universe struggling to know itself,

and often getting it wrong.

Hitler Homer Bible Christ

Copyright 2014 Richard Carrier

Additional copyrights noted in the text.

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 1493567128

ISBN-13: 978-1493567126

Published by Philosophy Press

Richmond, California

www.richardcarrier.info

History (General). 2. Ancient History. 3. Greco-Roman World.

4. Public administrationRomeHistory.

5. RomePolitics and government30 B.C.-284 A.D.

6. HistoryMethodology. 7. HistoryPhilosophy.

8. Hitler, Adolf1889-1945Translations into English.

9. HomerCriticism and interpretation.

10. VirgilCriticism and interpretation.

11. Tso chuanCriticism, interpretation, etc.

12. Heroism. 13. Soul. 14. Ghosts. 15. Coins, Roman.

16. HerodIKing of Judea734 B.C.

17. Civilization, AncientExtraterrestrial influences.

18. Jesus ChristDate of birth. 19. Jesus ChristHistoricity.

20. BibleNew TestamentCriticism, interpretation, etc.

21. Josephus, Flavius Criticism and interpretation.

22. Tacitus, CorneliusCriticism and interpretation.

CONTENTS

Doing History

1 :: :: 1

2 :: :: 11

3 :: :: 15

4 :: :: 25

History Done

5 :: :: 31

6 :: :: 71

7 :: :: 83

8 :: :: 131

Debunking the Bogus

9 :: :: 143

10 :: :: 155

11 :: :: 163

12 :: Hitlers Table Talk : Troubling Finds :: 167

The Vexed Bible

13 :: :: 193

14 :: :: 203

15 :: :: 213

16 :: :: 231

The Troublesome Evidence for Jesus

17 :: :: 315

18 :: :: 327

19 :: :: 337

20 :: :: 369

-:-

Books and Chapters by Richard Carrier

( with common abbreviations )

HHBC = Hitler Homer Bible Christ: The Historical Papers of Richard Carrier 1995-2013 (Richmond, CA: Philosophy Press, 2014).

NIF = Not the Impos1sible Faith: Why Christianity Didnt Need a Miracle to Succeed (Raleigh, NC: Lulu.com, 2009).

OHJ = On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield-Phoenix, 2014).

PH = Proving History: Bayess Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2012).

SGG = Sense and Goodness without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2005).

[ TCD = John Loftus, ed., The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2010). ]

TCD s = Richard Carrier, Christianity Was Not Responsible for Modern Science, TCD , 396419.

TCD w = Richard Carrier, Why the Resurrection Is Unbelievable, TCD , 291315.

[ TEC = John Loftus, ed., The End of Christianity (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2011). ]

TEC d = Richard Carrier, Neither Life nor the Universe Appear Intelligently Designed, TEC , 279304, 40414.

TEC m = Richard Carrier, Moral Facts Naturally Exist (and Science Could Find Them), TEC , 33364, 42029.

TEC s = Richard Carrier, Christianitys Success Was Not Incredible, TEC , 5374, 37275.

[ TET = Robert Price & Jeffery Lowder, ed., The Empty Tomb: Jesus Beyond the Grave (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2005). ]

TET b = Richard Carrier, The Burial of Jesus in Light of Jewish Law, TET , 36992.

TET s = Richard Carrier, The Spiritual Body of Christ and the Legend of the Empty Tomb, TET , 105232.

TET t = Richard Carrier, The Plausibility of Theft, TET , 34968.

WNC = Why I Am Not a Christian: Four Conclusive Reasons to Reject the Faith (Richmond, CA: Philosophy Press, 2011).

Doing History

The Function of the Historian in Society

Originally published in The History Teacher 35.4

(August 2002): 519-26. Reproduced with permission.

The public rarely understands what historians do or why they are necessary. Weve often been asked, What do you really do ? Inevitably, in the classroom or at a cocktail party, we hear the gibe, You historians dont do anything important. You dont really produce anything. You dont save lives or contribute to the economy. However the question is worded or the idea implied, we are often asked what the point is of spending our energies or institutions money on historical study, teaching, and research, especially about events in the remote past. We also are often asked why anyone should bother learning, much less teaching, special skills only of use to historians, like heuristics or dead languages. Hasnt everything been translated already? Isnt it all just opinion anyway? Does it matter what really happened in the past?

Such attitudes would be merely annoying if they werent so alarming. There is a memorable scene in the film Schindlers List , in which a Jewish historian is listed as nonessential and earmarked for an extermination camp until, passed off by Schindler as an expert polisher of artillery shells, he is saved and put to useful work. This example is admittedly extreme. But it hints at the frightening outcome of a society that has abandoned any value for real historians, trading them in for ideologues and pseudohistorians of the type that bolstered Hitlers Third Reich.

This essay will help forestall the naysayers and educate the naive, who believe historians have little social utility. It is hard to find anything that analyzes and explains, in simple terms, the vital functions a historian fulfills for the healthy society, functions only a skilled historian can fulfill. An approach is needed both expository and normative: describing what historians do, but also what they [p.1] ought to do, in order to be of use to humankind. Here I shall try to tackle that task, hoping at least to inspire both students and teachers of history to reevaluate the positive roles historians play in our society.

A simple come-back to questions about our alleged uselessness is this: Is your memory unimportant? Nonessential? A do-nothing? Would you really let anyone carve it out or, worse, transplant whatever memories they wish to put there? Surely no one but a fool would say yes. A human is a useless cripple without a memory, and can become someone elses puppet when true memories are replaced with false. Society is no less dependent on maintaining its true memory, on not letting its memory vanish or become manipulated and eclipsed by others fantasies, myths, or false memories. A society afflicted with Alzheimers or troubled by a collective psychosis is just as doomed as any individual suffering the same ailments. Historians are the memory cells of the metaphorical brain that is the whole human race: it can no more do without them than you can do without the memory cells of your own brain.

To function as a society with an accurate memory requires an entire culture of historical study, teaching, and research. Good historians dont grow on trees. Nor do books spontaneously correct or update themselves. Nor can works of scholarship be interrogated or asked new questions without the efforts of trained historians. To put it another way, historians are the workhorses of long-term social memory.

Some aphorisms will hammer this home, carrying to fruition the analogy of your memory cells and the historian. To know who we are, we have to know who we were: what we used to be, how we got here, and the progress we have made, even the progress we havent. We need to know what has and hasnt worked, what has and hasnt been tried, if we are to avoid past mistakes, benefit from past successes, and maintain a store of realistic models from which to draw and inspire new innovations and solutions to new problems. By removing the distorting lens of a single culture or time, historians help us to better understand humanity. To know what humans are really and truly capable of, the good and the bad, we need a continuous databank of human behavior, of our heroism, villainy, mediocrity. To know how things get done, and how they fail, the historian sets out to discover and record the most relevant and essential information. Mythology will not serve as a substitute: for to deal with reality, we need to know reality, not fantasies and [p.2] idealizations. We want historians to be as truthful with us as we want our own memories to be, perhaps even more so. We cannot do without them.