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Post by bjorn on Jul 28, 2008 14:42:44 GMT
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Post by TheistusMaximus on Aug 3, 2008 11:31:31 GMT
Most Jesus mythers are essentially creationists---it's ignorance of universal consensus and relevant research.
Carrier is obviously an exception, but likely the only one among contemporary mythicists. Acharya S. and Jordan Maxwell are complete nuts/imbeciles, Price is well-meaning but essentially much the same (can't say less out of someone who believes pretty much all of Pauls' letters are inauthentic), and Doherty did, as Christopher Price notes, an abnormally poor job documenting his claims in The Jesus Puzzle.
What sensible person is there other than Carrier?
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Post by Al Moritz on Aug 3, 2008 20:06:01 GMT
What sensible person is there other than Carrier? Carrier may be sensible when it comes to research on the historical Jesus, but otherwise he isn't. His essay "Why I am not a Christian" is one of the most, pardon me, inane atheist pieces that I have ever read: www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/whynotchristian.htmlHe fights a world view that no Christian that I know of shares. Talking about missing the topic. He has no clue about Christianity, zero, zilch, nada. And this video about the universe being fine-tuned for the production of black holes is a gem of silliness: www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6FQdyHUXwcAccording to him, Smolin "demonstrated" that the universe is fine-tuned for black holes. 1) He did not demonstrate that, he hypothesized about it. As far as I know, there are no mathematical calculations that support the hypothesis (not even speaking of experimental data, observational evidence). But of course, why would someone expect from (most) atheists to know, or respect, how science really works? They always talk about their views being solely based on evidence, but then they gobble up any evidence-less hypothesis that fits their prejudices -- as long as it sounds "sciency". Also, it would be counterintuitive. Shouldn't a universe with much more forceful gravity than ours produce more black holes? Wouldn't ours then, in comparison, be relatively free of black holes? After having concluded that (not too hard, really), I found that the atheist cosmologist Susskind agrees with me: "I have exactly the opposite opinion from Smolin's. If the universe were dominated by black holes all matter would be sucked in, and life would be completely impossible. It seems clear to me that we live in a surprisingly smooth world remarkably free of the ravenous monsters that would devour life. I take the lack of black holes to be a sign of some anthropic selection." (http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/smolin_susskind04/smolin_susskind.html) 2) It is not even known if black holes can produce universes. This is pure speculation. It is one thing to have a singularity, another to have a "fecund" singularity. *** As one relatively rational atheist told me, Carrier strikes him as a "total amateur". Phew, at least some commonsense floating around in the land of atheistia. Al
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Post by TheistusMaximus on Aug 3, 2008 22:15:06 GMT
Lets not trash the guy here, he's at least a credentialed, peer-reviewed historian.
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Post by unkleE on Aug 4, 2008 2:20:37 GMT
Lets not trash the guy here, he's at least a credentialed, peer-reviewed historian. Just curious - is he credentialed and peer-reviewed in the field of Roman Empire or New Testament history? Can you reference a publication? (These are genuine questions, I'm simply interested in knowing.)
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Post by TheistusMaximus on Aug 4, 2008 3:34:32 GMT
I'm neither an atheist nor a Secular Web denizen, so I don't feel particularly compelled to track down his 2007-8 publications. This was the best I could find: www.columbia.edu/~rcc20/pubs.pdf
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Post by Anonymous on Aug 4, 2008 15:24:58 GMT
Re: Richard Carrier 1. Carrier is a legitimate, peer-reviewed authority in the field of Roman History. 2. The field of Roman history would necessarily include "New Testament history." "NT history," by the way, is not a well-defined field. What would be the chronological and geographical boundaries of "New Testament History," after all? We don't know when and where most of the books of the NT were written, and the history in the corpus moves from Palestine ca. 10 BC to AD 60 to Asia Minor and Greece, ca. AD 40-60 to Rome, ca. AD 60-70, back to Syria and Asia Minor ca. 70-100 (where at least GMatt and GJohn were probably written); and what contemporary historical grounds are there for excluding the historical situations of 1 Clement and Ignatius from this collection of Jesus-movement writings? This would be a gerrymandering field of history if ever I've seen one! This is a large part of why you don't really have people calling themselves "New Testament Historians"; scholars are either "historians of the early church," "historians of Greco-Roman Judaism," simply "Roman historians," or something along these lines. (All NT-related history falls into the scope of "Roman history," after all; this is one reason the old opposition between "Jewish" and "Greco-Roman" just makes no sense: everything Jewish that happened in Palestine and west from there after 63 BC was also "Greco-Roman.") Carrier, as a Roman historian, is perfectly qualified to comment on NT-related matters. He knows Greek and Latin, understands methods for dealing with relevant material evidence and has been trained to understand the scholarly debates. Perhaps his one drawback is that he doesn't know the Aramaic that Jesus, the Twelve and Paul spoke. But most "NT scholars" actually don't know the language that well either. 3. But speaking of "peer-reviewed" historians, Carrier's Sec-Web works are not peer-reviewed, unless they've been published in a peer-reviewed journal. His empty-tomb critique, for example, has been published in the Journal for Higher Criticism, a legitimate though marginal peer-reviewed journal (its articles rarely get cited in the acknowledged heavyweight journals I read, like the Journal for Biblical Literature, Novum Testamentum, and New Testament Studies). Just because a historian has legitimate credentials doesn't mean that he speaks within the bounds of what his scholarly subcommunity considers representative of its work. (Popularizing literature would be one example where peer-reviewed historians are not necessarily writing peer-reviewed work: L.T. Johnson, for example, went without peer review when he published The Real Jesus; although James' scholarly credentials are strong, did he get any scholarly peers to look over his book on Medieval Science?) 4. To have a work published in a peer-reviewed journal simply means that the work makes a coherent argument, within the bounds of the particular scholarly subcommunity's standards. It does not mean that any scholars were convinced by the argument. Carrier's work must be read as probingly and critically as any other scholarly work. It is worth reading. But check both his evidence and what other Roman historians and NT-scholars are saying. 5. Has Carrier ever really been a convinced mythicist? My impression is that he simply had not (as of when he reviewed Doherty) seen what he considered an adequate rebuttal of Doherty. But he hadn't really adopted such a position for his own work. 6. Carrier plus Price make two legitimate scholars I know of who have flirted with the mythicist position. The Society for Biblical Literature, one of the premier scholarly associations for NT scholas, has 8,500 members worldwide. This is a tiny percentage of biblical specialists who buy the Jesus-myth. Thanks for your time!
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Post by bjorn on Aug 4, 2008 15:53:09 GMT
And thanks for the info!
I realise now that 2 out of 8 500 is more than zero. It is in fact 0,00023529 (=0,024 %).
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Post by James Hannam on Aug 4, 2008 21:34:34 GMT
5. Has Carrier ever really been a convinced mythicist? My impression is that he simply had not (as of when he reviewed Doherty) seen what he considered an adequate rebuttal of Doherty. But he hadn't really adopted such a position for his own work. That's what I thought, but apparently not: iidb.infidels.org/vbb/showthread.php?p=2551123#post2551123He has come out as a mythicist. Best wishes James
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Post by unkleE on Aug 4, 2008 23:07:46 GMT
Thank you, anonymous guest, for that informative summary for someone like me who knows little about the academic study of history. I have posted elsewhere asking about how laypeople can assess the consensus of historical opinion on contentious matters like the Jesus myth, whose opinion is respected and whose is less so. I think it is important, because anyone can find someone to support their view. You have helped clarify things. (Sometimes I wish there was a credibility index, sort of like the tennis or golf rankings, or Google page rank, based on how many historians quote an author approvingly, so we could know who to most believe, but that's just the engineer in me!)
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Post by element771 on Aug 5, 2008 1:23:32 GMT
I would hardly consider the Journal for Higher Criticism as a legit peer reviewed journal. It was founded and edited by Robert Price. An atheist being published in this journal would be the equivalent of the Discovery Institute sponsoring a journal that routinely published Behe / Demski.
I am not saying that Price and Carrier are not legit scholars but I feel that the mainline opinion does not hold their scholarship in the highest regards.
Carrier's reputation may be misplaced. I think that a certain internet population holds him in high regard and consider him a genius but that is a lot different than one who earns this rep in their field of study. I find it also telling that he is relying on donations to write a book instead of receiving a post somewhere and getting paid to do scholarly research and write books at a legit university. He has stated that he would rather be a contributor to the cause of atheism in this fashion because he can access more of the population....but this seems to be absurd. A man with his "solid" reputation should have no problems getting a position at a university at which he could have access to a lot more of the public than he has with his fan club that visit his blog.
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Post by Anonymous on Aug 5, 2008 3:28:11 GMT
A couple of clarifications. First, thanks to James for providing the Carrier post. I didn't know he'd thought about the question enough to switch positions. Second, it's only fair to say that I haven't kept up with the Historical Jesus debate since I started grad school (longer ago than I'd like to admit!). I find it a waste of time; the only people I know of who persist in it are apologists either of Christianity or atheism. Hence, so few have bothered to answer Doherty: it's really complicated to explain Jesus away, and far more interesting and useful to scholars to assume he exists in order to answer more significant historical questions about the early Jesus-movement, first-century Palestine, Greco-Roman Judaism, etc. Third, no one should take the 2/8500 number to mean anything beyond a general idea. I don't know of any surveys of SBL members on this question. I don't know if Carrier is a member of the SBL (his Sec Web bio page, at least, doesn't list the SBL as one of his professional societies). And Carrier's sec web post that James links to lists some other scholars who he claims (and he's a pretty careful researcher, so I'm not going to dispute it) support his mythicist position. Fourth, I only skimmed Carrier's secweb post, but I don't find it terribly convincing. (And I hope I have read him correctly at this point.): " I am even more certain than ever before that Mark neither intended to make such a historical claim (that Jesus was really born at a real Nazareth) nor would any such claim have been historically true--i.e. I am now more convinced than I was before that a Nazareth attribution more probably than not served a symbolic purpose." Carrier lost me with this fairly sharp (though implicit, if I have read him correctly) line between the "historical" and the "symbolic." Why could Nazareth not be both historical and function on other communicative levels? Any ancient text (or reader) could use any geograpical marker to communicate (or envision) all kinds of other connections. Such hard and fast distinctions between "symbolic" and "historical" are modern. We should not impute them to any ancient author. This kind of exclusivist thinking as to categories of texts vis-a-vis historicity is something I've seen over and over in Carrier's writing: he has, for example, repeatedly separated the literary genres of "hagiography" on the one hand and "history" (or "biography") on the other, and used the former categorization to a priori (for example) diminish the probability of the gospels' purpose. But hagiography and history/biography are exclusive categories are exclusive neither now, nor in ancient times. Examples: Arrian's and Curtius' histories of Alexander the Great's conquests, for example, portray Alexander in a superhuman light in their histories, and Ammianus Marcellinus' portrayal of the emperor Julian elevates him to superhuman status. Were these works hagiographies for the authors' heroes? They have a number of affinities with hagiography; yet the specific propositions expressed in these histores still have to be evaluated to determine how probable those propositions are. The gospels, as biographies in form (see Richard Burridge's magisterial What are the Gospels?, Oxford 1995), deserve the same caution, criticism and courtesy qua historical documents that Plutarch and Suetonius receive. (This, by the way, is one way to respond to arguments on these pages; challenging credentials is the weakest route to go.) Fourth, I have to clarify to element on this one: the Journal of Higher Criticism is not the scholarly equivalent of a Discovery Institute periodical. Robert Price is a qualified New Testament scholar; even if many of his opinions are at odds with a lot of other scholars, he has the credentials, including knowledge of the languages, Ph.D., academic job, and publications. The Discovery Institute denies several fundamental premises of geological research (e.g. the genetic transformation of life and the reliability of isotopic dating); Price (and Carrier) do not deny that scholars can accurately represent ancient historical events and situations through information from ancient literary and material evidence. Even if you disagree with their interpretations, they are qualified to judge the evidence professionally. The JHC is a legitimate scholarly journal because of who publishes it and who reviews it. Off the top of my head, Jacob Neusner, one of the top handful of rabbinic scholars alive today, for example, has published in it. And such a well-regarded scholar would not lend his name to a rag. But I do agree with element to the extent that (1) the JHC has an ax to grind. This in itself is not a bad thing: the famous French historical journal Les Annales was founded with the aim of subverting an transforming the historical profession (and it succeeded, as James will tell you). When I read a JHC article, I expect a challenge to NT historicity. But more importantly (2) like a lot of disciplines, NT studies has several central journals (I named some in my previous post) and a lot of second-tier, marginal ones. JHC definitely resides in the latter category; its articles are legitimate scholarly contributions, worthy of critical reading if they address a question of one's interest; but they're not driving or riveting the field as a whole. Few read it cover to cover, though more consult articles from it where the articles are relevant. Fifth, don't put too much stress on Carrier's lack of an academic job. For every single job in a Classics, History, or Religious Studies department in the US, you see 50 or more applicants; Carrier just happens not to have been one of the lucky few who's gotten hired. I have several colleagues where I attend graduate school (yes, in ancient history) who scrambled for years before getting academic jobs. A lot of things come into play in a job search, especially in a field like ancient history. His work, including his PhD from Columbia, should say more about his qualifications than his lack of a job. I think that James, having just gotten his PhD, would agree on this. On the other hand, I agree that Carrier's web rep certainly does exceed his scholarly laurels; he wasn't featured in the New York Times magazine because of his ancient historical ideas, after all.
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Post by element771 on Aug 5, 2008 12:35:55 GMT
Just wanted to clear up a couple of things....
I did not mean to imply that the JHC was equivalent to a periodical. It was more of a comparison to who would get published IF the Discovery Institute decided to start publishing a scholarly journal. Basically, Carrier's publishing in the JHC should be of no surprise because of the "ax grinding" nature of the journal. Thus, his being published in the JHC should not speak to his scholarship IMHO.
As far as his lack of an academic job, I am also in academics (postdoc at the moment ). I am not too familiar with the difficulty of getting a position in Classics, History, etc. But... If his reputation in academia was a great as his fan club insists, I do not see why he should not have a job. Again, not saying the man is incompetent but more showing that his reputation as a super genius of historical scholarship may be misplaced.
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Post by humphreyclarke on Aug 5, 2008 13:18:43 GMT
5. Has Carrier ever really been a convinced mythicist? My impression is that he simply had not (as of when he reviewed Doherty) seen what he considered an adequate rebuttal of Doherty. But he hadn't really adopted such a position for his own work. That's what I thought, but apparently not: iidb.infidels.org/vbb/showthread.php?p=2551123#post2551123He has come out as a mythicist. Best wishes James I tried reading this post by Carrier and I have to say he lost me completely when he descended into Bayes Probability Theorem. My eyes glazed over by this point: Without adjudicating further, let's run some numbers:
P(H/B) = as low as .51 or as high as 0.70 P(~H/B) = as high as 0.49 or as low as 0.30 P(E/H&B) = as low as 0.20 (model A) or as high as 0.80 (model B) P(E/~H&B) = as low as either 0.15 or 0.19 (on model A) or as high as either 0.70 or 0.79 (on model B)
[Note that for those unfamiliar with Bayes, P(H/B) and P(~H/B) must always sum to 1, but P(E/H&B) and P(E/~H&B) do not have to sum to 1]
P(H/E&B) = P(H/B) x P(E/H&B) / [P(H/B) x P(E/H&B)] + [P(~H/B) x P(E/~H&B)]
Therefore, best case scenario for ~H:
P(H/E&B) = 0.51 x 0.20 / (0.51 x 0.20) + (0.49 x 0.19) = 0.102 / 0.102 + 0.0931 = 0.102 / 0.1951 = 0.523 (rounding up)
That would constitute mythicism being slightly more likely than historicismPerhaps I’m an old fashioned historian, but I think this kind of gibberish has no place in the study of history. I certainly never saw it used in a historical journal when I was doing my MA and I’m not convinced it is helpful. It belongs in the dark decades of the sixties and seventies when the Marxists tried to turn history into a science. I also found his reply to James on the Fine Tuning issue to be mainly waffle. Again, not to be nasty to the guy, just my honest opinion. Being peer reviewed doesn't make you beyond critique.
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Post by Anonymous on Aug 5, 2008 15:24:16 GMT
element, Thanks for the respectful dialogue and for the clarifications; I apologize if my last post came off as condescending--I was consciously trying not to talk down to someone who I thought was a nonscholar, and if I failed, I apologize. By "periodical," I simply meant "collection of articles published at regular intervals" (the German Zeitschrift, which can apply to magazines and scholarly journals, is the best equivalent for what I meant) and wasn't suggesting that JHC was the equivalent of Life magazine or Sports Illustrated. JHC is simply a minor scholarly journal with a particular ax to grind. Where we may disagree is on JHC's legitimacy: unlike the Discovery Institute's attitude toward geology and paleontology, the JHC editors do not reject the fundamental premises of NT scholarship. This leaves their journal within the bounds (though near the margins) of the field. humphrey, I agree fully with you. Carrier loves to quantify probability of his theories using Bayesian numbers. But as you seem to suspect, the methodology of quantifying probabilities is not widely employed in ancient history. (I think James would agree.) Such quantification of probability does indeed smack of the 1960s and early 1970s. But they went out because it is hard for numbers to account for the anthropologically detectable specific nuances of socio-environmentally specific situations by reducing them to numbers. Which is why historians turned more to anthropological theories like those of Geertz and Bourdieu and away from quantification in the 1970s. I find that such quantification reduces historical situations to arbitrary numbers with misleading precision that has little to do with the social and environment. In ancient history, the evidence is sparse and the socio-temporal situations are chronologically remote. It is the last field of history where such numbers are helpful. Thank you all for your time and thoughts!
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