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Bart Ehrman and the Quest of the Historical Jesus of Nazareth: An Evaluation of Ehrman s Did Jesus Exist??
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Carrier is less than delicate in some of his critiques and that is why Bart Ehrman has refused to debate him. His response to Ehrman's ridiculously bad DJE book was well documented in this book.
McGrath says that Carrier accused him of not seeing any symbolic stories in the gospels. Carrier's article did not make that claim anywhere that I saw.
Ehrman called Carrier "mean" and refuses to debate him, and Carrier is highly unlikely to be any easier on McGrath than on Ehrman.
IMHO, Carrier has no need to pander to people who are arguing for a set of presupposed (and disingenuous) "answers" in the field that he himself knows so well.
The scholars who disagree with him mostly complain about his 'style' but really can't demonstrate where he misses being accurate, reasonable and thorough in his analyses.
Ehrman is full of crap on the historical Jesus. He was humiliatingly debunked in:
Ehrman knows better than to use spurious logic and outright falsehood to defend his thesis of a historical Jesus, and he's justifiably taken a salty licking for his malfeasance.
There's no contemporary/eyewitness evidence for Jesus. Jospehus is debunked and Pliny, Tacitus, Celsus et al are far too late and removed to say anything relevant. They merely parrot what their Christian sources are parroting to them from the Creed and the Gospels.
I think the article is brilliant because it is a well constructed survey. I see you have pointed out how he has misrepresented an argument. I hope that if he has, he can learn (as well as myself) to reacquaint himself with the facts and proceed.
> I don't know if I have yet corrected you on this one point: making a distinction between atheists and believers vis a vis historicity is largely irrelevant. In fact it's the genetic fallacy writ large.
Selection Bias doesn't come into play at all? I'm not allowed to look at the atheists for their opinions? I wouldn't wish to exclude theists other than the argument of they may be selectively biased in choosing to believe in a non christ myth. That's the only reason they were excluded, I hardly see how I'm committing a fallacy in that regard.
I guess I'm committing a genetic fallacy by excluding those who identify themselves with a faith. I'm not sure exactly who O'Neill is quoting. But I did compile a list of who I found to be secular. It might not be absolutely correct, but I did flag those who believed Christ as a myth (those beholden to faith I would assume would certainly be beholden to believing in a physical man, so they were excluded to avoid being used as a type of Selection Bias). However... I don't know how O'Neill's two references stack up, which most likely didn't apply similar methods. Point is... there seems to be a majority of non selectively biased individuals who do hold to a physical person named Jesus that these gospels are based on. I could be horrendously wrong, but I have the list of names so it can be checked.
> Louis H. Feldman's Josephus and Modern Scholarship (1984) surveys scholarship on the question from 1937 to 1980 and finds of 52 scholars on the subject, 39 considered the passage to be partially authentic.
> Peter Kirby has done a survey of the literature since and found that this trend has increased in recent years. He concludes "In my own reading of thirteen books since 1980 that touch upon the passage, ten out of thirteen argue the (Antiquities of the Jews XVIII.3.4 passage) to be partly genuine, while the other three maintain it to be entirely spurious. Coincidentally, the same three books also argue that Jesus did not exist."
What makes Price's (year 2000) claims vs these others more valid than recent work? In fact, the most recent work that revisits these issues is a comglomerate that I hear is just a set of essays vs a book; which I hear Acharya's [at least] is full of inerrant arguments, of which Price criticized, then retracted his criticism.
Are Bart Ehrman, Burton Mack, Larry Hurtado not historians who practice methodology in a similar manner?
> The following core principles of source criticism were formulated by two Scandinavian historians, Olden-Jørgensen (1998) and Thurén (1997):[4] > By those measures the argument for historicity is laughable. Fuck, NT scholars had to invent their own ludicrous "criterion of embarrassment" as a way to make it look like they were making actual analyses when all they are doing is wanking to the huge pile of previous wankers.
What about the Gospel of Mark? Biased sure, but that's one source close to the original date. Far off.
What about Josephus and his mention of James? What about the ethnographing study on Tacitus?
What about Origen's used of Tacitus.
What about Arabic and Syriac post 10th century versions of Josephus text?
How can you claim that Josephus was doctored here
> Festus was now dead, and Albinus was but upon the road; so (the High Priest) assembled the Sanhedrin of judges, and brought before them the brother of Jesus, who was called Messiah, whose name was James, and some others; and when he had formed an accusation against them as breakers of the law, he delivered them to be stoned.
when their is no evidence (and you refuse to accept ethnographic evidence?) Instead, one assumes it was altered wholesale with no evidence for it.
> Since it is wholly unlikely that a Christian interpolator invented the whole story of the deposition of the High Priest just to slip in this passing reference to Jesus, Mythicists try to argue that the key words which identify which Jesus is being spoken of are interpolated. Unfortunately this argument does not work. This is because the passage is discussed no less than three times in mid-Third Century works by the Christian apologist Origen and he directly quotes the relevant section with the words "Jesus who was called the Messiah" all three times: in Contra Celsum I.4, in Contra Celsum II:13 and in Commentarium in evangelium Matthaei X.17. Each time he uses precisely the phrase we find in Josephus: αδελφος Ιησου του λεγομενου Χριστου ("the brother of that Jesus who was called Messiah"). This is significant because Origen was writing a whole generation before Christianity was in any kind of position to be tampering with texts of Josephus. If this phrase was in the passage in Origen's time, then it was clearly original to Josephus.
Both second hand accounts yes, but the claim of James is completely aside from any Gospel.
Otherwise one has to assume a conspiracy occurred to insert Jesus into history. How is that more credible? How are these other writers supposedly not practicing history and yet the mythicists are by assuming this conspiracy had occurred? To assume the conspiracy, one has to bring in ethnographers to see if it's plausible, but instead you would have us assume it's a conspiracy without the use of ethnographers (and therefore any backing evidence) than what? What evidence is there? The evidence is on the grounds of interpolation, but what evidence outside of ethnographers is there for interpolation?
> that Tacitus originally wrote “Chrestians” and not “Christians,” which was corrected by medieval Christian scribes back to Christians (there is indeed some evidence of this).
I have heard something about this. That Chrestian means good vs holy, and other people were described as Chrestians than followers of a supposed Jesus; such as Socrates being called Chrestos. I wasn't sure what the ramifications were, unless of course Christ was interpolated. However, one has to assume that modification was made and that there was a vast conspiracy across two sets of documents that just so happened to modify the two working copies that mention a possible Jesus. Still doesn't answer the James, brother of Jesus the Messiah bit.
> That makes his account hearsay at. As historical investigations go, hearsay is damn weak tea.
So his account is hearsay. Which I can't argue with, since it's not a firsthand account; other than his desire not to be hearsay. However, to assume it's hearsay (as if he actually said it). Doesn't make his words have any less meaning, unless of course one interprets it as meaning some other group of people.
> Festus was now dead, and Albinus was but upon the road; so (the High Priest) assembled the Sanhedrin of judges, and brought before them the brother of Jesus, who was called Messiah, whose name was James, and some others; and when he had formed an accusation against them as breakers of the law, he delivered them to be stoned.
and
> Almost without exception, modern scholars consider this passage genuine and an undisputed reference to Jesus as a historical figure by someone who was a contemporary of his brother and who knew of the execution of that brother first hand.
TBH, I think a little bit of both (aside from interpolation) was occurring. It seems a bigger stretch to see no one call into light the historicity of Jesus during Jesus time vs now. Unless of course, such records were wiped from history (evidence of that?). Of course not, it's a negative argument. Lack of proof doesn't make good proof. However, I do think things like the immaculate conception and resurrection may have been overlaid over a historical figure.1
BTW, I was in the Christ Myth camp all of my own accord until people started pointing out that it's not a tenable position anylonger amongst those in the field (at least consensus anyways). So... which is it? Are the other half wrong and the minority right? In reality, I have to go with the consensus if I assume they both have similar qualifications. I feel that I have excluded those who may be selectively biased. I have purchased both sets of books from each side. I think the best explanation is a historical figure existed who had mythical qualities borrowed from graeco-roman myth and supplanted on top over the real events. In fact, I find the fact that the earliest gospel (Mark) doesn't have a mention of a witness of ressurection or virgin birth almost too good to be true. Otherwise I have to assume a widespread conspiracy had been in place by the time of Origen to accomodate for Josephus writing being altered as well as the Gospel of Mark and Paul the Apostle to have been written concerning such a figure (albiet, all second hand accounts).
First, most of our authors were discussed in it (DJE) and we feel obligated to respond, to clear the air of misconceptions and even misrepresentations. Though Professor Erhman is a true scholar, we fear his treatment of our work was, let's say, casual (a euphemism for `slipshod'). - Robert Price in his intro
"Scholarly disaster" is the best way to describe it.
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