My approach is always to take claims very seriously.
Why? You show no discrimination at all. Not all claims have equal merit, and not all claims deserve to be treated as having equal merit.
A critical step which is completely missing from your process, is checking to see if the author of the new claim has made any effort to address the arguments of the existing body of professional scholarship. In this case, they haven't. Another critical step which is completely missing from your process, is basic '
baloney detection'; testing claims to see whether or not they fit the profile of informed and educated work, or if they fit the profile of junk science and pseudo-scholarship. Here's a brief list, from the link I just gave.
1. How reliable is the source of the claim?
2. Does this source often make similar claims?
3. Have the claims been verified by another source?
4. How does the claim fit with what we know about how the world works?
5. Has anyone gone out of the way to disprove the claim, or has only supportive evidence been sought?
6. Does the preponderance of evidence point to the claimant's conclusion or to a different one?
7. Is the claimant employing the accepted rules of reason and tools of research, or have these been abandoned in favor of others that lead to the desired conclusion?
8. Is the claimant providing an explanation for the observed phenomena or merely denying the existing explanation?
9. If the claimant proffers a new explanation, does it account for as many phenomena as the old explanation did?
10. Do the claimant's personal beliefs and biases drive the conclusions, or vice versa?
Until you've applied a test like this, you are not being objective, you are not thinking critically, and you are just being naive.
A real devil's advocate does not take claims seriously to start with. You can't take claims seriously until they've been proved. A real devil's advocate investigates claims critically, using a 'baloney detection kit' such as I've already described. It's fine to question scholarly consensus (or any consensus), but a real devil's advocate does not treat all sources as having equal authority.
This is nothing to do with personalities or mistaking authority for truth. Checking the reliability of a source is critical to assessing the value of its claims. Refusing to check the reliability of a source demonstrates that you are not interested in whether or not the source is reliable.
No you didn't. Here are the questions and points of mine which you have failed to answer.
1. Read a standard professional Greek lexicon and see what it says about the words 'Christ' and 'Christian'.
1. Pliny's correspondence apparently referring to Christians only survive in one very late medieval manuscript. Because this manuscript is very late, it is unreliable and does not show us what Pliny originally wrote. The original reading was actually 'Chrestians', which was changed to 'Christians' by later Christian copyists.
No evidence is supplied to prove this claim.
2. Most of the New Testament was written by servants of the Flavian emperors. Vespasian and Titus in particular, employed a large number of men to write histories which would become used as the basis of the New Testament documents. The New Testament books could not have been written and distributed without imperial consent and assistance, since 'it was impossible for any philosopher, much less slave, in this period to write, publish and gain a readership outside the authority of the court'.
No evidence is supplied to support this claim.
3. The canonical gospels are 'Roman-inspired black propaganda, belonging to the reign of the emperor Hadrian and published with the approval of the imperial court'.
No evidence is supplied to support this claim.
4. The works of Robert Eisenman ('James the brother of Jesus' and 'The New Testament Code'), and Joseph Atwill ('Caesar's Messiah', referred to as a 'ground-breaking work'), are appealed to as 'modern, scholarly views'. In reality, Eisenman's works are considered highly eccentric by modern scholarship, and Atwill's work is dismissed completely. Even Robert Price (to whom this site appeals as an authority), ridiculed Atwill's work in his review of it.
5. Name three 'revelations' made by Ehrman and price which haven't already been known for at least 100 years.
Where is your evidence for this claim?
Of course you're being fooled. You were told that Eisenman and Atwill are 'modern, scholarly views', and you repeated this claim without knowing it is false. You were given a false etymology of the Greek words for 'Christ' and 'Christians', and you repeated this etymology without knowing it is false.
This is an example of a lack of critical thinking. You are shown one medieval document, which has the word 'chrestians' in a few places (how many places?), which a later scribe changed to 'christians', and you draw the conclusion that the scribe deliberately falsified the manuscript, and you draw the conclusion that subsequent translators and scholars are wrong to render the word 'christians'.
On what rational basis do you draw these conclusions? What is the date of the manuscript? Does it contain any unaltered instances of the word 'christians'? How many copies of the manuscript are there? Are there any earlier copies of the manuscript which contain the word 'christians' in these places? On what basis do professional translators and scholars render the word 'christians' in these places? Are there any other manuscripts, earlier than this one, which use the word 'christians'?
Until you have asked and answered these questions, you haven't been a good devil's advocate, because you are refusing to test the claims of your source.
I will repeat what I said before; you aren't really doing any checking, you're trying to find excuses to support the original source ('history hunter'). When you're confronted with direct evidence which disproves his claims, you just ignore it.
No one has expected you to do any such thing. What I said was that to date you have demonstrated
no interest in reading them, and that you are prepared to believe some crank with a random website is
better informed. In addition, you are failing to address questions and points put to you. This demonstrates you are not interested in intellectually honest inquiry.