"Much simpler to say...

[HitchSlap]

Carrier is a clown!

How about a link to the debate between Richard & Willie?

Have you read On the Historicity of Jesus?

 

[Uber Genius]

How about a link to the debate between Richard & Willie?
Have you read On the Historicity of Jesus?

That took less than 30-seconds to find on Google. I hope this is not a reflection of your scholarly effort to investigate claims.


Not only did I see the debate but I saw how Richard misrepresented fellow atheist Bart Erhman and I will share it.

Carrier, on the rare occasion he argues the evidence, which he dodged completely in his debate with WLC, does so with invective, and fallacious appeals. This is not what scholars do.

I will share an example below.

 

[Uber Genius]

Bart Erhman is an Atheist and a New Testament scholar. He has his own rhetorical tricks that he rolls out for public presentations and publications that he leaves in the bag when engaging professional scholars in his field who know better than to fall for his tricks but here below Erhman response to Carrier's false claims and rhetorical tricks.

"The Tacitus Question

While I’m on the Tacitus reference. At one point in my book I indicate that “I don’t know of any trained classicists or scholars of ancient Rome who think” that the reference to Jesus in Tacitus is a forgery (p. 55). Carrier says this is “crap,” “sloppy work,” and “irresponsible,” and indicates that if I had simply checked into the matter, I would see that I’m completely wrong. As evidence he cites Herbert W. Benario, “Recent Work on Tacitus (1964-68) The Classical World 63.8 (April 1970) pp. 253-66, where several scholars allegedly indicate that the passage is forged.
In my defense, I need to stress that my comment had to do with what scholars today are saying about the Tacitus quotation. What I say in the book is that I don’t know of any scholars who think that it is an interpolation, and I don’t. I don’t know if Carrier knows of any or not; the ones he is referring to were writing fifty years ago, and so far as I know, they have no followers among trained experts today. In that connection it is surprising that Carrier does not mention Benario’s more recent discussions, published as “Recent Work on Tacitus: 1969-1973,” “Recent Work on Tacitus: 1974-1983,” “Recent Work on Tacitus: 1984-1993,” “Recent Work on Tacitus: 1994-2003.” Or rather it is not surprising, since the issue appears to have died on the vine (one exception: a brief article in 1974 by L. Rougé). I might also mention that there is indeed a history of the question that goes before the mid-20th century. I first became aware of it from one of the early mythicists, Arthur Drews, whose work, The Christ Myth (1909) raises the possibility. But Drews did not invent the idea; it goes back at least to the end of the 19th century in the work of P. Hochard in 1890, De l’authenticité des Annales et des Histoires de Tacite. I’m not sure if Carrier is familiar with this scholarship or not. But my point is that I was not trying to make a statement about the history of Tacitus scholarship; I was stating what scholars today think."

This approach by Carrier is known as cherry-picking. In order to support his point Carrier, ignores the last 45 years of scholarship, and goes back to a mid-1960s reference of Tacitus's work being a forgery. That same scholar then reverse his opinion numerous time supporting Erman's statement, and demonnstrating that Carrier was either incompetent as a scholar or more likely (if Carrier is the scholar he claims to be) was knowingly misrepresenting the scholarship hoping no one would check the details.

For context and full details about Carrier's unigue approach to history see:
Fuller Reply to Richard Carrier

My personal opinion, shared by Erhman and many professional historians is that
Carrier is the "Donald Trump" of Historical Jesus Scholarship, but I will let the gentle reader engage the original content and decide for themselves if Carrier has a scholarly inference or is just hand-waving.

 

[Silmarien]

How about a link to the debate between Richard & Willie?

Have you read On the Historicity of Jesus?

Why should anyone read 700 pages of sloppy scholarship by an unhinged atheist propagandist? Reading his incoherent rants when scholars like Bart Ehrman or Larry Hurtado call him out on his nonsense is enough to get a picture of what's really going on here. I've seen his utter lack of reading comprehension when dealing with things people are writing in English in response to him, so I can just imagine what fantasies he'd derive from a Greek or Aramaic text.

Anyone who thinks he's a good authority should really check their biases and emotions at the door and go back to Ehrman.

On the off chance that you care what anyone else has to say, here are Hurtado's responses to Carrier's thesis again:

“Mythical Jesus”: The Fatal Flaws

Why the “Mythical Jesus” Claim Has No Traction with Scholars

 

[HitchSlap]

You linked a blog as refutation, by a guy who hasn't even read Carrier's scholarly tome. Tsk, tsk.

Scoff all you want, but ignoring the elephant in the room doesn't get you any closer to a better understanding of the evidence.

Personally, I'm not a mythicist, I lean towards the Jesus figure as a composite figure that developed over 2-3 centuries.

As an aside, if you're really in the mood to have your head explode, you might bone up on John Marco Allegro's Jesus mushroom cult hypothesis. It's one of the suggestions for the "halo" in early Christian art.

Why should anyone read 700 pages of sloppy scholarship by an unhinged atheist propagandist? Reading his incoherent rants when scholars like Bart Ehrman or Larry Hurtado call him out on his nonsense is enough to get a picture of what's really going on here. I've seen his utter lack of reading comprehension when dealing with things people are writing in English in response to him, so I can just imagine what fantasies he'd derive from a Greek or Aramaic text.

Anyone who thinks he's a good authority should really check their biases and emotions at the door and go back to Ehrman.

On the off chance that you care what anyone else has to say, here are Hurtado's responses to Carrier's thesis again:

“Mythical Jesus”: The Fatal Flaws

Why the “Mythical Jesus” Claim Has No Traction with Scholars

 

[Silmarien]

You linked a blog as refutation, by a guy who hasn't even read Carrier's scholarly tome. Tsk, tsk.

Larry Hurtado is a biblical scholar and historian of Early Christianity, not just some guy writing a blog. He may be too busy with his actual research to read through Carrier's conspiracy theories, but that doesn't mean he's unfamiliar with the underlying arguments. If Philo of Alexandria never said what Carrier is claiming he said, that's a pretty big problem for his theory.

Personally, I'm not a mythicist, I lean towards the Jesus figure as a composite figure that developed over 2-3 centuries.

How does that work? If this composite figure of yours started developing in the year 200 BC, that seems to by definition makes you a mythicist. And if you think the Gospels took 2-3 centuries to develop, you don't know what you're talking about.

30-60 years of oral traditon seems like the most defensible position to me, given the best dates that we have. I have no opinion on whether or not any of the supernatural elements of the story are true, but something clearly set the movement off, and it wasn't the slow development of a legend.

 

[bhsmte]

Right.

Unfortunately for them, Carrier is a "real" historian, with a doctorate from Columbia in ancient history. It's why his book On the Historicity of Jesus hasn't been refuted by anybody with relevant degrees.

Carrier sticks to the historical method, quite rigidly and more so than most NT historians.

Reading the opinions of historians is like watching different lawyers battle it out at trial. They both deal with the same evidence, but they place emphasis on the evidence they choose to and minimize the evidence they want to minimize.

When it comes to the NT, I am still of the personal opinion that there are basically 4 things about Jesus that likely have historical credibility:

-Jesus was a real person
-Jesus was baptized
-Jesus had followers
-Jesus was crucified

Beyond that, it is a crap shoot.