The opening of Paul’s letter to the Romans contains a statement that Jesus was a descendant of King David (Romans 1:3). Most Jesus Mythicists claim that Paul only believed in Jesus as a celestial figure, not an earthly, human and recently historical one. So, as usual, they have to strive hard to find ways to make a text fit their convoluted theories. The results are typically contrived and unconvincing.
Sometime in the late 50s AD Paul wrote a letter to the Jesus Sect community in Rome. It differs from most of his other surviving letters in that he was addressing a community he had not yet visited, rather than one he had founded or at least knew well personally. So it opens with an introduction that is something of a credal statement and an apologia:
Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God, which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures, the gospel concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and was declared to be Son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord, through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles for the sake of his name, including yourselves who are called to belong to Jesus Christ.
(Romans 1:1-6)
This is a densely-packed statement and is clearly meant to be so. But it contains an element which is of particular interest to the issue of the historicity of Jesus. Paul says that Jesus “was descended from David according to the flesh” (γενομένου ἐκ σπέρματος Δαυὶδ κατὰ σάρκα). Since the “David” in question is the ancient king of Israel and Paul specifies Jesus’ descent from him “according to the flesh”, this seems to be a unequivocal indication that Paul believed Jesus was, at least in one respect, both a human and a descendant from a human ancestor. This is uncontroversial and actually fairly unremarkable, given that while Paul seems to have understood Jesus to have also had a heavenly pre-existence (see Phil 2:5-7), he makes other references to Jesus as an earthly, historical human being (see Gal 4:4, 3:16, Rom 9:4-5 and 15:12).
At least, this is unremarkable for most scholars. Most Jesus Mythicists, however, claim that Paul did not believe in an earthly, historical and human Jesus at all. They claim that he saw Jesus as a purely celestial being; one that takes on a fleshly form in the heavens and is crucified, died and rose from the dead there, without ever coming to earth. In this way they explain how Paul could talk about Jesus doing all these very human and earthly sounding things while still claiming his letters as evidence for their supposed Mythic Jesus form of proto-Christianity.
This is made slightly easier for them by the fact that Paul, like the writers of similar epistles after him, seems little interested in the biography of Jesus and is more concerned with theological aspects of the Jesus story. But there are still elements in Paul’s seven undisputed letters that do not fit at all well with the Mythicist reading. Paul says Jesus was born as a human, of a human mother and born a Jew (Galatians 4:4). He he says he was a descendant of Abraham (Gal 3:16), of Israelites (Romans 9:4-5) and of Jesse (Romans 15:12). He refers to teachings Jesus made during his earthly ministry on divorce (1Cor. 7:10), on preachers (1Cor. 9:14) and on the coming apocalypse (1Thess. 4:15). He mentions how he was executed by earthly rulers (1Cor. 2:8) that and he says he had an earthly, physical brother called James who Paul himself had met (Galatians 1:19 – see also Jesus Mythicism 2: “James the Brother of the Lord”).
Mythicists have plenty of ways to reinterpret these bothersome passages or find other ways to dismiss them. The problem is that their arguments are, as usual, contorted, ad hoc or rely on dubious readings and so have been found unconvincing by the vast majority of scholars, Christian or otherwise. But the reference to Jesus as “descended from David according to the flesh” has proven a particularly thorny problem for Mythicists and they have had to work hard to jam it into the framework of their theory. Their efforts are varied but none of them are convincing and one prominent effort in particular is so ridiculously convoluted as to be quite laughable.
Mythicist Tactic 1: Accommodation
One way Mythicists have tried to deal with Paul’s statement in Romans 1:3 is to accept it as it is, but read it in light of their theories. Given that Paul uses a common formulaic expression about ancestry and descent (see below) and refers to a human king who Paul clearly believed to be historical, this is very difficult to reconcile with the idea of a celestial Jesus who has no earthly human existence. The references here are decidedly earthly. But Mythicists are nothing if not creative thinkers.
One Mythicist who has been creative in his interpretation of Romans 1:3 is the Canadian writer Earl Doherty. Doherty is an amateur enthusiast whose reworking of earlier Mythicist theories is arguably responsible for the recent resurgence of Mythicism among other atheists: one of a number of fringe and contrarian ideas that have been given a boost in acceptance thanks to the peculiar culture of the internet. Doherty claims to have a bachelors degree “in Ancient History and Classical Languages”, and developed his Mythicist thesis as a hobby, contributing to online fora on the topic and then expanding his ideas on a website in the late 1990s. In 1997 he published an article summarising his views (“The Jesus Puzzle: Pieces in a Puzzle of Christian Origins”, Journal of Higher Criticism, 4 (2), Fall 1997). In 1999 his arguments were presented in detail in a book The Jesus Puzzle: Did Christianity Begin with a Mythical Christ?, published by Canadian Humanist Publications. He then reworked this book further and released a self-published updated version in 2005. Finally, he expanded his arguments further in a final book on the subject, Jesus: Neither God Nor Man – The Case for a Mythical Jesus (2009).
Doherty’s arguments have not been well received by professional scholars, who see them as typical of the work of an enthusiastic amateur who works backward from an a priori conclusion and then finds evidence which he thinks fit his ideas – which is precisely the opposite of how scholarly analysis should be done. But he was the doyen of the new wave of Mythicist contrarians for some years and his 2002 book seems to be the work that convinced the current standard bearer of the theory – the inevitable Dr Richard Carrier PhD. – who has further reworked some of Doherty’s weaker arguments or rejected them in favour of his own. Few to none of the current crop of Mythicist apologists use Doherty’s arguments about Romans 1:3 and it is easy to see why.
Doherty claims that Paul did not believe in a recent, historical, human and earthly Jesus, but rather in a purely celestial one who never appeared on earth at all. He argues that Paul’s references to Jesus, properly understood, are to a heavenly figure revealed purely via visions and interpretations of the Scriptures, who took fleshly form in the sub-lunar sphere and was crucified, died and rose from the dead there, not on earth. This way of dealing with Paul’s references to his nature “according to the flesh”, to him being crucified, dying and being buried etc., all while maintaining these are somehow not references to an earthly human, is not original to Doherty. It has its roots in the early twentieth century Mythicist theories of Paul-Louis Couchoud (1879-1959), a French physician and poet who wrote several books trying to boost Mythicism. Doherty attempts a comprehensive working out of this idea, but runs into difficulty with stubbornly earthly Pauline elements like Romans 1:3.
For Doherty, Paul’s main source of knowledge about Jesus is not any memories of him or teachings about him as an earthly and recently deceased human prophet and teacher given to Paul from those who knew him, but almost entirely from his reading of the Jewish Scriptures:
In more than one passage, Paul tells us quite clearly that he has derived his information and gospel about the Christ from the scriptures. In 1 Corinthians 15:3-4, the fact that “Christ died for our sins,” that “he was raised on the third day,” is “according to the scriptures.” The latter phrase, as pointed out earlier, can have the meaning of ‘as we learn from the scriptures.’ In Romans 16:25-6, Paul (or perhaps a later pseudo-Pauline editor) proclaims his gospel
‘about Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery kept in silence for long ages but now revealed, and made known through prophetic writings at the command of God…’
Here the words plainly say that Christ is a mystery that has been hidden for a long time, but is now revealed by God through a new reading of scripture, inspired by the Holy Spirit.
(Doherty, Jesus: Neither God Nor Man – The Case for a Mythical Jesus, p. 85)
Paul certainly does emphasise that Jesus and the significance of his death and resurrection were foretold by the prophets and the Scriptures. This is hardly surprising, given that the idea of a Messiah who dies as a redeeming sacrifice was (contrary to Mythicist claims) not what was expected and Paul and the rest of the early Jesus Sect had to refer to their holy texts to argue that this was, in fact, what was meant to happen. But Doherty’s repeated claim that Paul says “he has derived his information and gospel about the Christ from the scriptures” is nonsense – Paul says no such thing. Nowhere does he say he got his “information” about Jesus this way, only that who Jesus was and what he did can only be understood in the light of those Scriptures. Doherty constantly lards his arguments with this assumption, but it is not one found in the Pauline evidence.
Doherty refers to a range of Old Testament texts which are, to this day, held up by Christian apologists as “proof” Jesus’ death and resurrection had long been foretold by the prophets, just as Paul uses them in his letters: the “Suffering Servant” passages of Isaiah 52:13-53:12, Hosea 6:2, Zechariah 12:10 etc. (see Doherty, pp 85-6). But in Doherty’s hands these are not Paul using these texts to argue against the standard expectations of the Messiah, but rather him appealing to them because at least some Jews already saw them as referring to a dying and rising Messianic redeemer. This is another claim made more as wishful thinking than as solid argument. Doherty does not bother to actually show any evidence pre-Christian Jews read these texts this way other than rather feebly suggesting they … may have:
Although it is often pointed out that mainstream Jews of the time drew no doctrine of a sacrificed Messiah from their sacred writings, it does not follow that no one did.
(Doherty, p. 85)
And this about the extent of his argument on this critical point. This is weak stuff.
But it is here that Doherty runs up against Romans 1:3 and its statement (as interpreted by all scholars who are not part of the tiny Mythicist fringe) that Jesus was the descendant of a human, earthly king. How can this fit with Doherty’s purely celestial, entirely non-earthly Messiah?
At the very beginning of the collection of New Testament epistles, in the opening verses of Romans, lies a statement which many declare requires us to go no further. Even if Paul were never to breathe another word about Jesus of Nazareth, they say, in verse 3 lies something which unmistakably points to the concept of an historical man in Paul’s view of the Christ.
(Doherty, p. 87)
Indeed. Yet Doherty then declares with characteristic boldness “yet the situation is quite the opposite” How?
He begins by focusing on the statements made before the reference to David in Romans 1:1-3, which he translates as:
‘Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God, 2 which he promised (or, announced [NEB]) beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures, 3 the gospel concerning his Son, who… [RSV]’
(Quoted in Doherty, p. 87)
He then declares that the “gospel” Paul refers to is wholly revealed via Scripture, not “from other men, not from Jesus himself through channels of apostolic transmission” (p. 88). Then he claims:
God in scripture had looked ahead – not to Jesus, but to the gospel that told of him. How could Paul present things in this bizarre way? He is telling the Roman Christians that scripture contains the forecast of his apostolic gospel, not the forecast of Jesus and his life. …. As Paul presents it, scripture was not the prophecy of Jesus’ life and activities. It was the prophecy of the gospel which told of those activities.
(Doherty, p. 88)
This is hopelessly confused and typical of what happens when an amateur goes hunting for ways to make the texts fit their private theory. Doherty has misunderstood the word “gospel” for its common modern usage – a reference to the accounts of Jesus’ “activities”. But Paul is using the original term εὐαγγέλιον – literally, “good news”. The “gospel” or “good news” that Paul declares here and everywhere else in his writings is the news that Jesus has been “declared to be Son of God with power …. by resurrection from the dead” (Romans 1:4). This is the news that Paul has spent his career bringing to the Gentiles, including the Romans he is addressing in this summation of his whole message.
So in his desperation at finding a way to make Romans 1:1-4 fit his thesis, Doherty has mistakenly read the “gospel” as a reference to the accounts that tell us of “Jesus’ life and activities” and so leaps acrobatically from this erroneous reading to the conclusion that “[i]n this picture, no life of Jesus has intervened between the writing of scripture and the revelation of the gospel to Paul”. So by these gymnastics, he waves any idea of an earthly Jesus away, bravely declaring “[w]herever or whenever the activities of the Son had taken place, they were not located in history between the two events” (p. 88).
Having proceeded by this muddleheaded argument that assumes “gospel” refers to “[accounts of] Jesus’ life and activities” and not the good news of his redeeming death and subsequent elevation as Messiah, Doherty turns to the tricky reference to his descent from David. He translates Romans 1:3-4 as:
‘3…who arose from the seed of David according to the flesh (kata sarka), 4 and was designated Son of God in power according to the spirit (kata pneuma) of holiness (or, the holy spirit) after his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord.’
(Quoted in Doherty, p. 88)
This, he claims “gives us two items of this gospel about the Son”, still thinking that “gospel” means “[accounts of] Jesus’ life and activities”. He then declares these statements to be “frustratingly obscure” and says that “according to the flesh” is “a seemingly vague and particularly cryptic phrase”.
Of course, it only becomes “vague”, “obscure” and “cryptic” once you have just gone to heroic lengths to remove an earthly, human and recent historical career for Jesus and so now have to puzzle out what this reference to him having an aspect “according to the flesh” might mean. Anyone who does not create this problem for themselves can see what the phrase and its counterpart “according to the spirit” mean quite easily: Jesus was a descendant of David in his human aspect (“according to the flesh”) but was elevated to the spiritual status of Son of God (“according to the spirit”) by his resurrection from the dead. Problem solved. Doherty’s “obscure” and “cryptic” puzzle is one of his own creation, forced on him by his a priori conclusions.
Doherty prefaces his solution to the tangle he has created for himself by asking:
Is this [reference to Jesus as the seed of David] a piece of historical information? If so, it is the only one Paul ever gives us, for no other feature of Jesus’ human incarnation appears in his letters.
(Doherty, p. 89)
This is yet another of Doherty’s remarkable declarations, given that Paul actually gives us several such references. As already noted, we have Gal 4:4, 3:16, Rom 9:4-5 and 15:12 which refer to Jesus being born of a Jewish woman, as a descendant of Israelites and a descendant of David’s father Jesse. Mythicists, including Doherty, have convoluted ways to wave off these references as well, but Doherty just blithely ignores them here.
Doherty then tries to find a way to dismiss this reference to earthly, human descent:
In fact, [Romans 1:3] follows, grammatically and conceptually, out of what Paul has just said: it is an element of the gospel about God’s Son which has been announced in scripture. Paul has told us clearly and unequivocally that this is where he has obtained this piece of information. In verses 1-2, he has focused on the message to be found in the sacred writings. Why would he suddenly step outside that focus and interject a biographical element about Jesus derived from historical knowledge—then return to scripture for his second element?
(Doherty, p. 89)
But Paul has not told us “told us clearly and unequivocally” that he “obtained this piece of information” purely from Scriptures – that is something Doherty has simply decided to read into what Paul says. So he is not “suddenly [stepping] outside” any focus purely on Scriptural information. He considers the gospel – the “good news” – that Jesus was a descendant of David elevated to the status of Son of God by his resurrection something foretold by Scripture. Doherty cannot have that, because it spoils his whole thesis, so he tangles up the text in his assumptions so that he can arrive where he started – his assumed purely celestial and spiritual Jesus:
Paul did not need to appeal to history here, for scripture was full of predictions that the Messiah would be descended from David. In reading these, Paul would have applied them to his own version of the Messiah, the Christ who was a spiritual entity, not a human one.
(Doherty, p. 89)
So somehow Doherty has to transform a reference to Jesus as coming from “the seed of David, according to the flesh” into a reference to a non-earthly Jesus via some hand-waving about how Paul has “applied” references to the Messiah’s descent from David to this purely “spiritual entity”. His sleight of hand here is not exactly impressive:
Was it possible for the divine Son who operated entirely in the spiritual realm to be “of David’s seed,” and in a way that was “in the sphere of the flesh”? I suggest that the answer is yes, and that Christ’s “arising from David” is a characteristic of Christ in the spirit world, a mystical and mythological feature.
(Doherty, p. 89)
To support this Doherty has to develop his ideas about how Jesus existed in a “sub-lunar fleshly realm” that allows him to do all kinds of earthly sounding things (be crucified, die, be buried) while still not doing any of them on earth. He does this over many pages before finally returning to the thorny issue of Jesus being “of David’s seed”.
First he quotes Romans 9:6-8:
‘It is not the children of the flesh (tes sarkos) [i.e., children of Abraham in natural physical descent] who are the children of God; rather, the children of the promise are reckoned as (Abraham’s) seed.’
(Quoted in Doherty, p. 168)
He argues that the reference to “the children of the promise” is to Gentiles and he refers to Galatians 3:29 where Paul clearly does talk of the Gentiles being, figuratively, “Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise”. So by this typically convoluted route, he decides that because Paul could refer to Gentiles being figuratively “of the seed of Abraham”, Jesus too could be, mystically, “of the seed of David” in Romans 1:3.
The only fly in Doherty’s ointment here is that the Romans 9:6-8 reference to “the children of the promise” that he relies on clearly makes a distinction between those who are descendants of Abraham “of the flesh” and those who are figuratively so as “children of the promise”. The former are Jews who actually are literal descendants of Abraham. And, rather awkwardly for Doherty, that troublesome Romans 1:3 reference to Jesus as a descendant of David specifies that this descent was “according to the flesh”. But the ever inventive Doherty is not daunted:
Why does Paul in Romans 1:3 use the term “flesh,” “kata sarka”? Because here Christ has a relationship with the inferior world of humanity. The phrase specifies it as ‘in relation to a human being,’ ‘in relation to flesh.” (If Paul were speaking of a human Jesus who was reputedly of the house of David, whether by father or mother, he would have had no need to note that it was by physical lineage, no need for “kata sarka.” That would have been undeniable.)
(Doherty, p. 168)
Again, this is weak stuff – the very passages Doherty uses for support show that Paul’s references to “the flesh” are biological. So it makes far more sense that he uses the term “according to the flesh” in Romans 1:3 because Paul is highlighting both his human status as a descendant of the ancestor of the expected Messiah (“according to the flesh” ) and his spiritual status as the exalted Son of God, raised from the dead (“according to the spirit”).
It would not be surprising to anyone, given the tangled logic of his argument, Doherty has spent years online trying to defend his weird reasoning on this point. It is equally unsurprising that his Mythicist successors have not found his weak argument on Romans 1:3 worth defending and have been forced to turn to alternatives.
Mythicist Tactic 2: Interpolation
Doherty’s acrobatics have proven unconvincing even to most other Mythicists and so some have had to fall back on a very common way Mythicists deal with evidence that does not fit their theories – they claim it is a later interpolation. Trimming the evidence to fit their conclusions in this way is actually difficult to pull off, but it is made somewhat easier in the case of Pauline texts by the fact that a vast number of verses and passages in Paul’s letters have been called into question at some time or another. His are some of the most critically analysed texts in history, so it is not too difficult to find someone in this well-ploughed field who has questioned the authenticity of pretty much any Pauline element you care to mention.
This is made slightly more easy in the case of Romans 1:1-6 because there is a vast literature on all elements in this passage, given that it is a dense statement of beliefs which was used by various warring sides in the Christological and Trinitarian disputes of the first centuries of Christianity. That means elements which seem to bolster certain later doctrinal positions have been questioned as to their authenticity and it has been suggested by a few scholars that they were added to reinforce much later debates about the nature of Jesus.
The reference to Jesus as “descended from David according to the flesh” was particularly awkward for Docetists to deal with, given that they considered Jesus to be a wholly spiritual being who appeared on earth with only an appearance of humanity and was not born a human at all. Which has led to some speculation that it was added to the Pauline text later by more orthodox Christians for precisely this apologetic purpose.
Of course, speculation is one thing – making a solid case for this kind of interpolation is much more difficult. Mythicists who attempt to do so tend to use, knowingly or not, many of the arguments of Hermann Detering.
Detering (1953-2018) was a German pastor who held a number of deeply eccentric views on the origins of Christianity, including that Jesus was wholly invented out of earlier traditions, that Christianity has its origins in Buddhism, that Paul was originally the heretical figure known as Simon Magus, that his writings were later “rehabilitated” by various changes and interpolations to turn him into an orthodox figure and that Augustine’s Confessions is a medieval forgery, as are most early references to Jesus. Writing mainly in German, he developed these ideas to great length and managed to convince almost no-one of any of them. Even the great Mythicist apologist, Dr Richard Carrier PhD., calls his work “ad hoc”, “speculation” and “illogical”.
But some other Mythicists are less fussy about whose work they cherry pick from. Detering includes Romans 1:3-4 in his long list of supposed interpolations to rehabilitate the formerly heretical writings of “Paul”/Simon Magus and says these verses are “an interpolation by a later redactor who wanted to make the theology of the original letter accord with his own.” (Detering, The Falsified Paul, pp. 111-12).
He begins by claiming that the “interest of the writer in the Davidic descent of his Christ is peculiar, if one considers that in 2 Corinthians the same writer (= “Paul”) declares very clearly his total lack of interest in “Christ according to the flesh” (2 Cor 5:16)” (Detering, p. 112). Except if anyone looks at 2 Cor 5:16 they do not find Paul is talking about any “total lack of interest” in the human, pre-resurrection Jesus, but rather he is making a point about the renewing power of his salvation for believers:
From now on, therefore, we regard (οἴδαμεν) no one from a human point of view (literally ‘according to the flesh’); even though we once knew (ἐγνώκαμεν) Christ from a human point of view (ditto), we know him (γινώσκομεν) no longer in that way. So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!
(2 Cor 5:16-17)
Neither of the the words used here for how the believers “regard” each other ( a form of οἶδα – to be aware of, behold, perceive) and how they once knew Jesus and how they know him now (both forms of γινώσκω – to know, recognise, understand) say anything about how “interersted” Paul is in the earthly Jesus “according to the flesh”. Both are about how things are perceived, not how much “interest” anyone should have in them. Detering’s reading is nonsense.
His second argument is equally weak:
The plural in 1:5 – “through whom we have received grace and apostleship” – does not agree with the singular in 1:1 and could be connected with the tendency of the redactor …. to exclude a special revelation to Paul …. and to incorporate him into the succession of the twelve.
(Detering, p. 112)
Again, this is a very strange reading, given that the salutation in Romans 1:1-6 reads perfectly naturally as moving from Paul’s personal status (thus the grammatical singular) to the shared salvation given by the raising of Jesus (thus the move to the plural) which encompasses all who are saved “including yourselves who are called to belong to Jesus Christ” (Romans 1:6). Nothing here indicates interpolation.
His third argument is that “Verse 1:1 anticipates 1:7 and shows very clearly that the person who wrote this already knew what stood in the following verse.” On this he quotes the nineteenth century “Dutch Radical” critic Willem Christiaan van Manen (1842-1909) who argued that none of the Pauline epistles were authentic:
‘If he was free to do so, he would have taken care to provide a better transition to verse 7 and would not have spoken of “being called holy” right after his “including yourselves, who are called…”‘
(van Manen, quoted in Detering, p. 112)
At least in this third argument Detering has some very slender scholarly support. In 1975 John C. O’Neill argued against the authenticity of most of Romans 1:1-7, including the reference to Jesus being “of the seed of David according to the flesh” (see O’Neill, Paul’s Letter to the Romans, 1975). C. H. Weisse had proposed the same back in 1866, Alfred Loisy had done so in passing in 1935 and A. D. Howell Smith conceded it as a possibility in 1942. But O’Neill is the most recent scholar to argue this in any detail and he marshals what he considers to be manuscript evidence to bolster what had previously been subjective speculation:
Fortunately we have a Greek manuscript (G) which does not contain the credal statement, and which reveals the proper connection of ideas in the salutation. This manuscript reads:
‘Paul, servant of Jesus Christ, called an apostle among all the Gentiles on his behalf.’
It is hard to imagine a scribe omitting such a long and important section, even by accident, and therefore I conclude that the long section was a marginal comment or interpolation, which was incorporated very early into the standard text of Romans.
(O’Neill, p. 26)
Here he is referring to a ninth century manuscript called Codex Boernerianus (a.k.a. Codex Gp or 012). This is a curious item that belongs to the “Western” text-type family of Greek manuscripts and so is not considered as textually authoritative as the “Alexandrian” text-type examples. It is in Greek, but with a Latin intertextual translation above the Greek text. This, its date and style, its many textual and linguistic oddities and a short Irish poem in the lower margin of one page (folio 23r) indicate that it was made by Irish monks at the monastery of St Gallen in what is now Switzerland.
Whoever created it, its text indicates that he and/or his predecessors in its textual succession were probably not very literate in Greek at all. In many places the Greek seems to be conforming to the interlinear Latin version rather than the other way around and in many others it seems to be almost phonetic in its spelling. These and many other peculiarities make it a very strange choice for any textual argument.
Romans 1:1-7 is certainly missing everything from 1:1a-1:5b, but it is not just missing – there is a large lacuna on the page where we would expect the missing text and we find similar lacunae in the manuscript at Romans 2:17-24, 1 Corinthians 3:8-16, 1 Corinthians 6:7-14, Colossians 2:1-8, and Philemon 1:20-25. So it is not as though the scribe simply missed out the key verses in Romans 1 – here and elsewhere there are blank spaces on the page where we would expect these verses to be and these spaces are about the size we would expect for the missing verses.
Exactly why is not absolutely clear, though there is a likely explanation. The manuscript was in poor condition when a facsimile was produced from it in 1909, with these lacunae clearly indicated even then. It was further damaged by water during the bombing of Dresden in 1945 but a digital reproduction of the manuscript makes it clear that the lacunae are actually original to the manuscript and not simply the results of damage and deterioration. So why did the scribe leave these blanks? The most probable explanation is that the exemplar he was working from was itself damaged or defective and the text at these points could not be made out, so the scribe left blank spaces in his work to not only indicate this but to also give a future scribe with access to a better exemplar an opportunity to, literally, fill in the gaps.
This makes O’Neill’s reliance on the lacuna on folio 10r for a textual argument for interpolation in Romans 1 entirely unconvincing. It is also interesting that several other scholars repeat the claim that the text of Codex Gp misses 1:1a-1:5b without mentioning the lacuna or the other lacunae in this manuscript (BeDuhn, for example – see below). This is very odd, and it seems this is a piece of faulty information that has passed from scholar to scholar without them actually checking the manuscript. However you look at it, Codex Gp, properly considered, does not support the interpolation claim.
Without this manuscript evidence, the arguments for interpolation fall back on much more subjective arguments such as ones based on stylistic analysis. As already noted above, the opening of the letter found in Romans 1:1-7 is long; containing a series of statements about Paul, prophecy, Jesus, salvation and, finally, the Romans being addressed. Those who have argued for interpolations find this length suspicious and claim an earlier, briefer opening has been packed with later claims for doctrinal reasons.
Ancient letters often did have quite short openings, usually of the “X, to Y, greetings” formula or brief variants – e.g., “X, to Y his son, greetings”. Then again, Paul was writing letters with very specific pastoral and theological purposes, usually to larger groups rather than individuals, so his greetings tend to be longer. Exactly how much longer varied. The opening of 1 Thessalonians is quite brief:
Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy, to the church of the Thessalonians in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ: Grace to you and peace.
(1 Thessalonians 1:1)
The salutation at the opening of Philemon is longer, but still fairly short compared to Romans:
Paul, a prisoner of Christ Jesus, and Timothy our brother, to Philemon our dear friend and co-worker, to Apphia our sister, to Archippus our fellow soldier, and to the church in your house: grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
(Philemon 1:1-3)
But others are longer, with more elements included than the addressers and addresees:
Paul, called to be an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and our brother Sosthenes, to the church of God that is in Corinth, to those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints, together with all those who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
(1 Corinthians 1:1-3)
And when Paul seems to have some burning issues on his mind, his salutations could get longer still:
Paul an apostle—sent neither by human commission nor from human authorities, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead— and all the members of God’s family who are with me,
To the churches of Galatia: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to set us free from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen.
(Galatians 1: 1-5)
That is only slightly shorter than the opening of Romans. And these are examples from the small number of letters which scholars generally agree were actually by Paul himself. What they show is that it is very difficult to make an argument based on what a Pauline salutation “should” look like. If we add to this, as has already been noted, that Romans was written in very different circumstances to the other surviving letters of Paul – i.e. as an introductory address to a community Paul had not yet met – then it does not seem surprising that it would include some more credal statements and references to his own status and credentials. Different letters in different circumstances generally require different styles, even today. All this means that the stylistic argument based on some conception of how the letter “should” begin is not founded on anything very solid.
The final argument made by the Mythicists who want to insist that the key phrase in Romans 1:3 is a later interpolation to make is an argument from silence. Marcion of Sinope (c. 85-160 AD) preached a variant form of Christianity in the second century which we know of mainly via the works of those who argued against him, particularly Tertullian (150-c.240 AD) and Epiphanius (c. 320-403 AD). Marcion is remarkable for a number of reasons, but especially because he seems to be the first Christian to create a collection of the Christian texts he considered to be authoritative, rejecting many others that he did not accept. Other Christians disagreed vehemently with his ideas about Jesus and God, which they regarded as heretical, and also with his rejection of the whole of the Old Testament, most of the gospels and all but ten of the letters of Paul. In reaction, they looked at the issue of what texts they did regard as authoritative, which stimulated the creation of the Biblical canons used by Christians to this day.
Not only did his detractors dislike his excision of works they considered scriptural, they also condemned his trimming of certain verses and passages from the texts he accepted – Tertullian called him “the Pontic mouse” (Sinope being in Pontus) who “gnawed the Gospels to pieces”, and complained loudly about his “mutilations” of the texts he used so as, according to Tertullian, to make them fit his “heretical” theology. Of course, Tertullian was writing a generation after Marcion so a question therefore arises. Were all these differences between what Tertullian found in his copies of the letters of Paul and the versions found in Marcion’s Apostolikon (his collection of ten Pauline letters) really “mutilations” or did Marcion’s texts of the letters actually represent an earlier and more authentic version of what Paul wrote? Was Tertullian working from later versions that had been selectively amended and added to; perhaps specifically to counter Marcionism?
Given that we have no copies of the Apostolikon, it is impossible to answer this question. But this has not stopped some scholars (and, when it helps them, Mythicists) from concluding that if an element seems to be missing from Marcion’s versions of the Pauline letters (as far as we can reconstruct them via Tertullian, Epiphanius and others), this bolsters some claims of later interpolation.
Tertullian definitely read the key verse on Jesus’ Davidic descent in his edition of Romans, as he used it to counter another “heretic”, the Monarchian Praxeas (Adversus Praxean, XXVII) and to counter Docetism more generally elsewhere (De carne Christi, XXII.2). But given that Marcion’s conception of Jesus seems to have been Docetic, a specific mention of him being “of the seed of David in the flesh” would have been a good argument to use against him. After all, Tertullian makes use of a similar reference to Jesus as “son of David” (Luke 18: 37-39) to counter Marcion’s view of Jesus by reference to a text Marcion included in his works (see Adversus Marcionem, IV:36). So why not refer to Romans 1:3 on this point? Thus, they argue, Marcion’s Apostolikon must not have included Romans 1:3 in its version of Romans and this indicates that it was not original the text.
There are two main problems with this argument. Firstly, while Tertullian does not make use of Romans 1:3 against Marcion, he also does not note its absence from Marcion’s version of Romans either. This is significant, given that the anti-Marcionite writers often note the lack of certain verses in Marcion’s version of the texts and Tertullian is particularly insistent on the point of Marcion’s many “mutilations”. Jason BeDuhn notes this silence in his recent monograph on Marcion’s canon:
We would certainly expect Tertullian and Epiphanius to cite vv. 2–3 against Marcion had they been present in the Apostolikon; yet why do they not explicitly note an omission? They would have had
(BeDuhn, The First New Testament: Marcion’s Scriptural Canon
the opportunity to do so either here or elsewhere where they discuss Paul’s attribution of Davidic ancestry to Jesus (cf. Tertullian, Carn. Chr. 22.2; Prax. 27.11)., 2013, p. 295)
, 2013, p. 295)BeDuhn goes on to note that Origen also fails to note any Marcionite omission of the Romans 1:3 reference to Jesus as descended from David in his discussion of Jesus’s Davidic descent in Commentarium in evangelium Joannis X.21.4. Origen refers directly to Romans 1:3 and discusses how what Paul says is true “if we apply this to the bodily part of [Jesus]” but is not literally true when referring to “His diviner power”. He then says:
Marcion, I suppose, took sound words in a wrong sense, when he rejected His birth from Mary, and declared that as to His divine nature He was not born of Mary, and hence made bold to delete from the Gospel the passages which have this effect.
So BeDuhn is right that if Marcion’s version of Romans did not have the Davidic reference in 1:3, it is very odd that Origen talks about him misunderstanding Paul’s words on this point and only talks about him deleting Davidic references elsewhere and not to him deleting the Romans 1:3 reference. This indicates that Marcion did, in fact, include Romans 1:3. BeDuhn seems to think so:
The latter statement could be construed as implying that Marcion had no objection to this passage, since it makes a clear distinction between Jesus’ Davidic ancestry “according to the flesh” and his divine status as “son of God,” which the birth stories do not. Note that Origen appears to distinguish Marcion’s views from those of docetists, who would reject any human ancestry for Jesus. Perhaps some reconsideration of Marcion’s christology is needed.
(BeDuhn, p. 295)
All this indicates that Marcion’s text included Romans 1:3. At the very least, all this shows just how difficult it is to determine what Marcion’s texts did or did not contain by working purely from the references to them in his detractors’ comments and therefore how tenuous any argument based on these reconstructions must necessarily be.
Which leads to the second problem with the argument against Romans 1:3 based on Marcion’s (possible) texts. Even if we ignore the issues above and accept that Marcion’s version of Romans did not include the Davidic reference, we still cannot determine if this was because Marcion was preserving an earlier, more authentic text of Romans or if, as his opponents claimed, he did remove this and other parts of his texts. There is simply no way of establishing this.
Taken together, all these problems make the interpolation tactic deeply speculative at best and, on balance given the lack of manuscript support for it and the objections to the speculative arguments it is based on, actually improbable.
Which has led one prominent Mythicist to strike out on his own with a new argument that is most diplomatically described as … well, “courageous” would be both polite and generous.
Mythicist Tactic 3: A … Cosmic Sperm Bank in Outer Space?!
Enter the perpetually unemployed PhD. grad student and indefatigable Mythicist blogger, Dr. Richard Carrier. As mentioned above, Carrier is a long time anti-theist activist who appears to have been converted to Mythicism by Earl Doherty’s books. In 2002 Carrier wrote a detailed review of Doherty’s 1999 version of his book The Jesus Puzzle in which Carrier identified no less than 11 problems with Doherty’s arguments. Rather than concluding that these problems undermine Doherty’s claims, Carrier proceeded to list “a few items that Doherty missed in his own arguments that actually support him” and as his review proceeds it reads less like a critical analysis and more like helpful notes on how to improve the thesis. And this is what Carrier then proceeded to attempt, with his book On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt (2014) being the ultimate result.
Most of the current crop of Mythicists present few arguments which are actually new – they tend to simply rehash the old Mythicist arguments that were considered and rejected by scholarship a century ago. But when he came to the Davidic reference in Romans 1:3, Carrier seems to have found neither Doherty’s accomodation tactic or the interpolation tactic convincing, so he strikes out on his own with a new argument.
He declares that Romans 1:3 says Jesus “was given a human body formed of Davidic seed” (pp. 532-3) and goes on to explain that “Paul says Jesus ‘was made from the sperm of David according to the flesh'” (p. 575). This is a remarkable literal reading of Romans 1:3, with the word σπέρματος (seed) being read not metaphorically as referring to ancestry and descent but literally as human semen.
He briefly notes that “an allegorical meaning” of this element “is possible”, but his footnote to this concession refers to two fellow Mythicists: Doherty’s arguments on Romans 1:3 and those of the undergraduate student Thomas Verenna. Carrier fails to take account of the evidence for the most obvious alternative and non-literal reading of this verse: that Paul is saying Jesus was a human descended from – “having come of the seed of” – a human ancestor, David.
This is an astonishing omission, given that if we look for how the word σπέρμα is used by Jewish writers elsewhere, this metaphorical usage is precisely what we repeatedly find. It is a common expression used in reference to descent from an ancestor; translating forms of the Hebrew זֶרַע. In fact, we can find multiple uses of it in this way in the Septuagint where it is referring specifically to descent from David. For example:
καὶ εἶπεν ᾿Ιωνάθαν τῷ Δαυίδ· πορεύου εἰς εἰρήνην, καὶ ὡς ὀμωμόκαμεν ἡμεῖς ἀμφότεροι ἐν ὀνόματι Κυρίου λέγοντες· Κύριος ἔσται μάρτυς ἀνὰ μέσον ἐμοῦ καί σοῦ καὶ ἀνὰ μέσον τοῦ σπέρματός μου καὶ ἀνὰ μέσον τοῦ σπέρματός σου ἕως αἰῶνος.
(And Jonathan said to David, Go in peace, and as we have both sworn in the name of the Lord, saying, The Lord shall be witness between me and thee, and between my seed and thy seed for ever– [even so let it be].)
(1 Samuel 20:42)
Or again:
καὶ ἐπεστράφη τὰ αἵματα αὐτῶν εἰς κεφαλὴν αὐτοῦ καὶ εἰς κεφαλὴν τοῦ σπέρματος αὐτοῦ εἰς τὸν αἰῶνα, καὶ τῷ Δαυὶδ καὶ τῷ σπέρματι αὐτοῦ καὶ τῷ οἴκῳ αὐτοῦ καὶ τῷ θρόνῳ αὐτοῦ γένοιτο εἰρήνη ἕως αἰῶνος παρὰ Κυρίου.
(And their blood is returned upon his head, and upon the head of his seed for ever: but to David, and his seed, and his house, and his throne, may there be peace for ever from the Lord.)
(1 Kings 2:33)
Or again:
μεγαλύνων τὰς σωτηρίας βασιλέως αὐτοῦ καὶ ποιῶν ἔλεος τῷ χριστῷ αὐτοῦ, τῷ Δαυὶδ καὶ τῷ σπέρματι αὐτοῦ ἕως αἰῶνος.
(He magnifies the salvation of his king, and works mercy for his anointed, even for David and for his seed for ever.)
(2 Samuel 22:51)
And to these we can add 1 Samuel 24:22, 2 Samuel 7:12 and 1 Chronicles 17:11. These are just the examples of figurative uses of the word σπέρμα to specifically refer to descendants of David. There is a large number of other examples of its use figuratively in relation to others or to descent and ancestry generally: see Psalms 18:50, Psalms of Solomon 7:8, 9:17, 17:4, 17:7, 17:9, and John 7:42 (referring, again, to descent from David) and 4 Ezra 8:16. In fact, in the Septuagint alone about 75% of the uses of forms of this word are figurative references to descendants or ancestry, with the remainder being literal references to plant seeds or to semen in passages about ejaculation and nocturnal emissions. For Carrier to simply ignore all this relevant evidence is remarkable.
But he does so because of the idiosyncratic way he reads the verb in Romans 1:3: γενομένου. This is a form of γίνομαι: a very common verb with a wide range of meanings, including everything from “to happen” to “to become” or “to come into being”. Carrier places great emphasis on the fact that “Paul never uses that word of a human birth, despite using it hundreds of times …. rather, his preferred word for being born is gennaō” (Carrier, pp. 575-6).
This is true, though not especially significant given that Paul talks about actual births very seldom: Carrier cites all three times in his footnote on this point. His argument here is further weakened by the fact that forms of γίνομαι are used in many places to refer to births. In the Septuagint we find it used this way in Genesis alone in 21:3, 46:27 and 48:5. In Josephus we find it used this way in Antiquities I.304 and VII.154. And we find it used this way by non-Jews as well, e.g. in Plato’ Republic VIII.553 and Marcellinus Life of Thucydides 54. That aside, Simon Gathercole notes that the few times Paul uses the more specific word γεννάω he is using it in regard to the immediate parents, whereas in Romans 1:3 he is referring to more indirect ancestry. The word γεννάω refers to the “begetting” or “engendering” of a child – properly by the father but, by extension, by the mother. So, as Gathercole notes, “this would not work in the genealogical sense of Rom. 1:3 because David did not beget Jesus” (Gathercole, “The Historical and Human Existence of Jesus in Paul’s Letters,” Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus, 16 (2018), p. 191, n. 32). So the word is not so unusual and not strange in this context.
Despite this, Carrier goes in search of what γενομένου could mean here. For this he turns to 1 Corinthians 15:45, arguing:
Notably, in 1 Cor. 15:45, Paul says Adam ‘was made’, using the same word he uses for Jesus; yet this is obviously not a reference to being born but to being constructed directly by God. If so for Adam, then so it could be for Jesus (whom Paul equated with Adam in that same verse)
(Carrier, p. 576)
The verse in question reads:
Thus it is written, “The first man, Adam, became [ἐγένετο] a living being”; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit.
The problem for Carrier here is Paul is referring to Genesis 2:7 and if we look at that in its context in the Septuagint it does not actually support his argument:
“…και έπλασεν ο θεός τον άνθρωπον χουν λαβών από της γης και ενεφύσησεν εις το πρόσωπον αυτού πνοήν ζωής και εγένετο ο άνθρωπος εις ψυχήν ζώσαν…”
(then the Lord God formed [έπλασεν] man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became [εγένετο] a living being.)
(Genesis 2:6-7)
So here we certainly do find a form of the relevant verb (γίνομαι), but it does not refer to the forming, making or “manufacturing” of the first man. The verb used for that is έπλασεν – a form of the verb πλάσσω meaning “to shape, to form”. The form of γίνομαι is used for when God breathes life into Adam and he transforms from an inert shape into a living man. So Carrier’s claim that Paul uses a form of γίνομαι to refer to Adam being “constructed” and that this would be what it means in relation to Jesus is simply incorrect. Paul talks of Adam “becoming” a living man, certainly, but the Genesis passage he refers to uses another verb entirely to detail the “manufacturing” of his body.
And this is a major problem for Carrier’s argument because, having established what he thinks is a solid basis for γενομένου to mean here “manufactured” rather than just “becoming”, he launches into even more convoluted reasoning so he can conclude that Paul is saying that Jesus’ celestial body was, quite literally, manufactured out of David’s ancient semen stored “in outer space”.
To achieve this he turns to 2 Samuel 7:12-14:
When your days are done and you sleep with your fathers, I will raise up your sperm after you, which shall come from your belly, and I will establish his kingdom. He will build for me a house in my name, and I will establish his throne forever. I will be his father and he will be my son.
(Carrier’s translation, p. 576)
The reference to how this son of David “will build for me a house in my name” and its general context makes it clear this is a reference to David’s son and successor Solomon. But Carrier proposes that it can also be read as a pesher and claims:
If this passage were read as a pesher …. one could easily conclude that God was saying he extracted semen from David and held it in reserve until the time he could make good this promise of David’s progeny sitting on an eternal throne. … It would not be unimaginable that God could maintain a cosmic sperm bank.”
(Carrier, p. 576)
As odd as this idea may seem, the ancients certainly believed in many things that we find exceedingly strange. But the real problem here is no-one ever talks about God taking “extracted semen” from David and storing it in a “cosmic sperm bank”. This remarkable idea would surely be referred to somewhere in the extensive intertestamental Jewish literature if it existed, but it is nowhere to be found. More importantly, we find it nowhere in Paul’s letters either, despite it – according to Carrier – being a central idea of his. Indeed, absolutely no-one prior to Carrier has ever read Romans 1:3 or 2 Samuel 7:12-14 and concluded that Paul, first century Jews or anyone else believed in this “cosmic sperm bank” storing “extracted semen from David”, let alone in some celestial fleshly body that was “manufactured” from cosmically stored Davidic sperm for Jesus in the heavens.
Despite this fanciful ad hoc construction based on false premises and misreadings being something entirely of his own imagining, in the space of just one page Carrier transforms this idea from merely “not … unimaginable” to actually “not … improbable”:
The notion of a cosmic sperm bank is so easily read out of this scripture, and is all but required by the outcome of subsequent history , that it is not an improbable assumption.
(Carrier, p. 577)
After all, he argues, anyone who accepted the idea of a wholly celestial Jesus who never had an earthly existence “had to imagine something of this kind” to reconcile this with Jesus’ being the Messiah and so having Davidic descent. Of course, Doherty did not think so, but his arguments were very weak. So unless a Mythicist uses the “interpolation” tactic to trim away Romans 1:3 altogether, Carrier triumphantly concludes that the “cosmic sperm bank” theory that he has conjured up out of one (misinterpreted) verb is the best way to go.
Which avoids another and far more parsimonious alternative: realising that Romans 1:3 scuppers the whole “celestial and non-earthly Jesus” idea and leaves us with Paul … accepting an earthly and historical Jesus. Which brings the edifice of Mythicism crashing down.
Even Carrier seems dimly aware that his breezy assurances that this creaking contrivance of an argument is “not … improbable” are not particularly convincing. So he tries to prop it up via a footnote:
In later Jewish legend, the demoness Igrath was believed to collect semen from sleeping men, and once did so from David himself, using his sperm to beget rival kings: G.W. Dennis, Encyclopedia of Jewish Myth, Magic and Mysticism (Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn, 2007), p. 126.
(Carrier p. 576, n. 85.)
Like many of Carrier’s footnotes, this one seems reasonable until you descend into the rabbit warren to ferret out exactly what he is referring to. And discover things are not quite as he claims.
Firstly, if we check Dennis’ Encyclopedia we do indeed find an entry for “Igrat or Agrat” which does mention David:
In the most elaborate account concerning her, she had intercourse with David, and from his royal semen she gave birth to both the gentile kings who would become his enemies (not unlike Morgan LaFaye and Arthur) and to Asmodeus, the King of Demons.
Dennis then quotes from a version of of an account of “two harlots …. Lilith and Igrat”:
“One night King David slept in the camp in the desert, and Igrat coupled with him in his dream. And he had emission, and she conceived and bore Adad [king of Edom].”
Here Dennis gives a footnote for this quote to “Patai, Gates to the Old City“, but with no page number. This is a reference to Raphael Patai (ed.), The Gates to the Old City: A Book of Jewish Legends (1981), which discusses Igrat on pages 459-61, including the story Dennis quotes (p. 459). But this is where the trail goes cold. Dennis source says that David is tricked into impregnating a demon, who then bears a son who is a contemporary of David’s successor Solomon. To describe this sex act as Igrat “collecting semen” is decidedly slippery. More importantly, nowhere in this story is there any “cosmic sperm bank”, just a demon “harlot” who coupled “with [David] in his dream” and so became pregnant. This all happens on earth. There is no “cosmic sperm bank in outer space” to be found here.
And the date of this story? Patai is giving a quote from a rabbinical source called “School of the RaShBa” which his bibliography lists as:
School of the RaShBA (R. Sh’lomo ben Avraham Adret, ca. 1235-ca. 1310). Published by G. Scholem in Tarbiz, Jerusalem, 1948, I 9: 172. Kabbalistic comments.
Which means the “later” Jews who supposedly told this story of a “cosmic sperm bank” (but actually did not) were in the thirteenth or early fourteenth century – a whole thirteen centuries after Paul. After a wild goose chase through Carrier’s footnoted references, we find … absolutely nothing that supports his “cosmic sperm bank” theory.
But no-one can say Carrier lacks conviction or bravado. Despite this “cosmic sperm bank” idea being one that even his most ardent disciples find less than compelling and other Mythicists find downright embarrassing, Carrier is tireless in defending it. And, in doing so, he gets increasingly dogmatic and shrill about it. So he defends it here. And here. And, again, here. And each time he becomes more strident and insistent. You almost have to wonder if he is really convinced himself.
In the first of these defences, Carrier admits that the “word Paul uses can sometimes mean birth in some other authors”, but emphatically repeats his patent error that “it is not the word Paul ever uses for birth (gennaô); instead, it’s the word he uses for God’s manufacture of Adam’s body from clay”. This “manufacture” claim is, as shown above, simply wrong. He also insists that γίνομαι “is the word [Paul] uses for …. God’s manufacture of our future resurrection bodies in heaven”. This last point is a reference to 1 Corinthians 15:35-38:
But someone will ask, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?” Fool! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And as for what you sow, you do not sow the body that is to be [σῶμα τὸ γενησόμενον], but a bare seed, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain. But God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body.
Here we do find a form of the verb γίνομαι – its future participle in the middle voice, γενησόμενον – but nothing indicates it can take Carrier’s strange reading of it as having something to do with “manufacture”. It simply refers to something that will come to be in the future and nothing more. Once again, Carrier is straining to force a very broad verb to fit his highly specific, narrow and specious required meaning.
He then tries to deflect from the problems of his contrived “cosmic sperm bank” theory by noting that in his book he “mention[s] there is another possible theory that does just as well”. This refers to his passing note on Doherty’s tangled arguments whereby “Paul is saying we come from the seed of Abraham allegorically, not literally; spiritually, not biologically.” Unfortunately for Carrier, as already discussed above, this does not work as a way of reading Romans 1:3 because Paul says those who are metaphorically “from the seed of Abraham” are the Gentiles, and he makes these distinct from those who are descendants of Abraham biologically, “according to the flesh” – i.e. the Jews. And Romans 1:3 says Jesus is “of the seed of David” in this way – “according to the flesh”.
Carrier tries to prop up his theory again in his response to the article on Paul’s human Jesus by Gathercole, mentioned above. Again, he simply doubles down on his muddled and erroneous readings of the key words. He insists that “Paul never says Jesus descended from anyone …. [t]he word ‘descended’ simply isn’t in the Greek, despite many modern translations wanting to put it there.” But these translators do not “put it there” on some kind of whim. They do so because it makes the most sense given the consistent way forms of the key word “seed” – σπέρμα/σπέρματος – is used when referring to someone’s ancestor, as it obviously is in Romans 1:3.
Carrier claims that he “shows” that this “cosmic sperm bank” idea is “all derived from 2 Samuel 7.12-14”, despite Paul making no reference to this passage and its supposed connection being a pure supposition by Carrier and not something “shown” at all. Then he argues:
2 Samuel 7.12-14, could not be literally fulfilled except by direct manufacture from David’s sperm (p. 576). Because it says there would be an unbroken line of kings sitting on the throne from David to the Messiah; which historically did not happen. The prophecy was thus false. Unless someone could think of a way to rescue it. The easiest way to? Take it literally.
But given that Paul makes no reference to 2 Samuel 7.12-14, his driving need to somehow deal with this prophecy exists solely in Carrier’s imagination. Given that Jews of Paul’s time had been able to deal figuratively with such references to unbroken Davidic succession for the Messiah ever since the end of David’s dynasty, Carrier’s insistence that a literal reading is “easiest” also falls flat.
Which brings us to Carrier’s third, most recent and most strident defence of his creaking theory, which is in response to me. Ignoring his usual childish smears and tedious misrepresentations (“liar!” etc.), most of what he says is just a rehashing of his original arguments, which have already been dealt with in detail above, though here he declares several of his flawed claims to be “indisputable fact”. No-one could ever accuse him of timidity. One of these “indisputable facts” is:
… that subsequent Christian scribes were so bothered by the above two facts that they tried to doctor the manuscripts of Paul to change his word for “made” into his word for “born” (and did this in both places where Paul alludes to Jesus’s origin: Romans 1:3 and Galatians 4:4).
This is true, but not too surprising. Given the later Christological disputes, which included ones with Docetics who claimed Jesus never had a truly physical, human form, anything in Paul that seemed too ambiguous on this point was sometimes scribally “adjusted” in this way to make his words more “clear” for the orthodox. But Paul’s language makes sense given he believed Jesus had a heavenly pre-existence and took on human form by “coming-into-being [γενόμενον]of/by a woman” (Galatians 4:4). In Galatians as in Romans, Paul uses a form of γίνομαι and, as already noted and as Carrier admits, this can and was used to refer to birth. But it suits Paul’s purposes with Jesus because to Paul he is a pre-existent heavenly figure coming into being as a human. Thus the broader term that can and does mean both “to become” and “to be born”. The broader word suits Paul’s purposes very nicely.
After rehearsing his “indisputable facts”, all of which are either not “facts”, far from “indisputable” or simply not relevant, Carrier then makes a very odd argument. He says that the genealogies of Jesus in gMatt and gLuke both trace Joseph’s ancestry back to David while also saying Jesus was not born from Joseph’s seed.
Therefore even the authors of the Gospels believed either that Jesus’s body was manufactured by God directly out of the seed of David or the “seed of David” prophecy was only meant allegorically. They cannot have understood it figuratively (as meaning biological descent), because they explicitly exclude that in their chosen description of Jesus’s origins.
Leaving aside some problems with Carrier’s reading of the infancy narratives, what has all this got to do with Paul? Apparently, “it cannot be implausible that Paul would mean Romans 1:3 in either of those two senses, since later Christians, the very authors of the canonical Gospels, clearly did as well.” But the problem here is that those later writers were trying to reconcile the tradition of Jesus’ Davidic descent with the much later idea of “the Virgin Birth” based on a reading of Isaiah 7:14 and so get themselves into a tangle. Paul simply did not have this issue, as there is no indication he had a belief in any “Virgin Birth” or saw Isaiah 7:14 as referring to Jesus. For him, a straight claim of biological descent from David had no complications. It is very strange that Carrier thinks the later tangles of the gospel infancy narratives have any bearing here.
Carrier also builds a straw man by arguing that people in the ancient world believed all kinds of strange things, so the strangeness of a “cosmic sperm bank in outer space” is irrelevant:
“So “that’s implausible” simply doesn’t cut it as an argument. Nor does “that’s weird.” Because most ancient Christian beliefs were weird. “It’s weird” in fact was so normal as to be everywhere, in both Jewish and Christian apocalyptic thought. A far cry from improbable.
This is all very true, but totally irrelevant. Nowhere have I said the problem with this “cosmic sperm bank in outer space” argument lies in the implausibility of ancient people believing strange things. I have simply noted that it is highly implausible that Paul would refer to this remarkable concept in such an oblique way in Romans 1:3 and yet we find no reference to it anywhere else; not in Paul, not in any Jewish literature, not … anywhere. I also find it improbable that Carrier – an unemployed blogger and failed academic – would be the first and only person on earth to “discover” this remarkable concept, which has no basis in any other evidence, and do so via a (contorted) reading of a single verb. Carrier, of course, is his own biggest fan and so finds that last remarkable occurrence very plausible. Few others will.
In a further strange flourish Carrier makes a virtue of the fact that even he does not really find his arguments for his “cosmic sperm bank in outer space” theory very likely – he reminds us that in his book “I still counted Romans 1:3 as evidence for historicity!” (bolding in the original). Exactly how noting this is meant to help him prop up his creaking theory I have no idea.
But he continues to struggle to find anything in the ancient world that resembles his imagined “cosmic sperm-banking” (yes, that is a term he uses). So now he gestures towards how “the Zoroastrians had similarly imagined their messiahs to be born from the ancient stored semen of their religion’s founder” and repeats his false Igrat claim, saying “Jewish lore about the powers of demons implied something akin had even already been done to David”. As we have seen, that “Jewish lore” dates to thirteen centuries after Paul and does not refer to any “cosmic sperm-banking”. Neither does the Zoroastrian tale of Zoroaster’s semen surviving in Lake Kiyansiah or Kayanse and impregnating a succession of unsuspecting bathing virgins in future generations. This is hardly “sperm-banking”, given that it is purely accidental. And, like the demoness Igrat’s conception, it is not “cosmic” either, given it happens on earth. But by this stage Carrier seems to have reached the level of “any parallel is good enough” usually found with New Age Mythicists like the notorious “Acharya S”. Which is a sure sign of a contrived, ad hoc and crackpot idea. Carrier fails.
Conclusion
The best reading of Romans 1:3 is that it refers to Jesus being descended from an earthly and human ancestor. This is an unremarkable statement, as this reading is in keeping with how virtually all scholars read Paul’s letters. The tiny and insignificant Mythicist fringe, however, cannot accept this clear interpretation because it spoils their thesis, so they contrive arguments to get around this problem. None of these arguments work. Doherty’s argument is incoherent. The “interpolation” argument has no supporting manuscript evidence and is based on subjective premises with little to no cumulative weight. And Carrier’s “cosmic sperm bank in outer space” theory is so flawed and ridiculous even other Mythicists find it a total embarrassment. The Mythicist readings of Romans 1:3 all fail and are indicative of the weakness of the Mythicist thesis overall.
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