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Post by bjorn on Mar 22, 2012 11:37:12 GMT
Though I did love the bit in Carrier's blogpost where ol'Artie Ziff, like a woolly-haired Harry Potter, waved his Bayer Theorem magic wand and - evidencio transformio! - changed the reference to "the brother of the Lord" in Galatians. He managed to use his pseudo mathematical jiggery pokery to transform it from a reference to one of the siblings of Jesus (multiply attested, in both Christian and non-Christian sources) into a reference to some early initiatory level of the Jesus sect (totally unattested and unknown to any except Jesus Mythers). Perhaps this is just a taste of his amazing upcoming book, in which he completely rewrites how history is done and makes the work of every historian from Thucydides onward redundant. Another (self-described) tour de force from this marvel of a man. He's a wonder indeed. Strange that he can't get a university job. Here is a link to his upcoming book - www.amazon.com/gp/product/1616145595/The first (and so far only) comment made my day - somehow I gather it is not ... quite what Carrier imagined he would be used for ;D
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Post by ignorantianescia on Mar 22, 2012 15:41:25 GMT
Though I did love the bit in Carrier's blogpost where ol'Artie Ziff, like a woolly-haired Harry Potter, waved his Bayer Theorem magic wand and - evidencio transformio! - changed the reference to "the brother of the Lord" in Galatians. He managed to use his pseudo mathematical jiggery pokery to transform it from a reference to one of the siblings of Jesus (multiply attested, in both Christian and non-Christian sources) into a reference to some early initiatory level of the Jesus sect (totally unattested and unknown to any except Jesus Mythers). That is so true. This part was absolutely incredible: All right, call "brothers of the Lord" a cultic title and then announce that reading brothers as, well, the primary meaning of brothers, is an ad hoc explanation. And where does he even use Bayes Theorem in that part? What an amazing chap. It is also amazing that he exactly mirrors the "Teach the Controversy" claim about "persecution". He sounds completely like an anti-evolutionist there. Here is a link to his upcoming book - www.amazon.com/gp/product/1616145595/The first (and so far only) comment made my day - somehow I gather it is not ... quite what Carrier imagined he would be used for ;D Thanks for sharing that, it's great!
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Post by himself on Mar 22, 2012 22:14:13 GMT
I tipped a Baysean statistician on the Carrier book. His reply:
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Post by timoneill on Mar 23, 2012 16:44:44 GMT
Virtually no-one has even read the book yet (mine's still on the way), but the blogging is already getting frenzied. Mainly about the HuffPo article. Not surprisingly, the improbably-named Ophelia Benson at Butterflies and Wheels is unconvinced. What a surprise. Like Carrier, she is torturing one sentence from Ehrman's article until it says what she wants it to say and then objecting to that, rather than to what Ehrman actually says. Even less surprisingly, that mighty historian and expert in the study of the ancient world PZ Myers knows that Carrier is right and silly old Ehrman is wrong: Jesus is a legend, like King Arthur or Robin Hood or Paul Bunyan. There may have been some individual in the past who inspired the stories, but he’s not part of the historical record, and the tall tales built around him almost certainly bear little resemblance to the long-lost reality. It’s simply bad history to invent rationalizations for an undocumented mystery figure from the distant past.So that's settled then. Don't read the comments that follow - they will sap your will to live. James McGrath has written a long and detailed rebuttal to Carrier's sophistry, though the Mythers aren't happy (Neil Godfrey does his Beetlejuice act about four or five comments in - does that man have a life?). He follows up with " Wonka vs the Mythicists" which has some good links. In particular, the Irreducible Complexity post on why Mythicism is not mainstream scholarship and how this is not (as Carrier pretends) some kind of wicked conspiracy is worth a read. And this is just the beginning ... PS Ehrman's book is now available on Kindle.
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Post by ignorantianescia on Mar 24, 2012 15:57:31 GMT
As for Proving History, some might be interested in this interview of mythicist Carrier by non-mythicist Loftus (who linked to it in McGrath's rebuttal). John: In chapter 5 you analyze the various proposed criteria to judge the probability of an authentic saying of Jesus in the Gospels (like dissimilarity, coherence, multiple attestation, etc), and you find them all wanting for various reasons. You spend a lot of time on the criterion of embarrassment. Why is that considered by you inadequate, especially when it comes to the claim that Jesus was crucified?
Richard: Not just sayings, by the way, but all facts, such as actions, events, and facts (like whether he was really ever a resident of Nazareth). I spent the most time on the argument from embarrassment because it is the most used, the most crucial for establishing historicity, and the most important for understanding why it is invalid. It then becomes an excellent model for seeing the deficiencies in all the other criteria, which are often much easier to see the faults of. The basic reason it doesn’t work is that it rests on assumptions that aren’t true most of the time, especially when applied to the documents we have for Jesus. I explain at great length in the book why that is.
Notably, as I was sending in the final proofs of Proving History and had already completed my fully peer reviewed case, I discovered that Mark Goodacre and several other prominent scholars were preparing extensive critiques very similar to mine, to appear in another book that may be out later this year (Jesus, History and the Demise of Authenticity, ed. Chris Keith and Anthony LeDonne), dismantling the entire method of criteria. As I show in chapter one of my book, this adds to a rising trend in the field. Basically, every expert who has specifically examined the validity of the criteria, and published books or articles on them, has concluded they are defective. This is becoming the new consensus. Indeed it already is the consensus, in the sense that all experts who have become specialists in the criteria are in agreement on this point.
When it comes to the crucifixion argument, the basic version you hear is that that was so embarrassing no Christian would claim it unless it were true. But this can be refuted with a single example: the castration of Attis was also embarrassing, yet no one would argue that therefore there must really have been an Attis who really did castrate himself. Arguably this was even more embarrassing than being crucified, as heroically suffering and dying for one’s beliefs was at least admirable on all the value systems then extant, whereas emasculating yourself was regarded as the most shameful of all fates for any man. Yet “no one would make that up” clearly isn’t a logically valid claim here. Attis did not exist, and a non-existent being can’t ever have castrated himself. So clearly someone did make that up. It’s being embarrassing did not deter them in the slightest. And in fact that is true throughout the history of religions: embarrassing myths were (and in all honesty, still are) the norm, not the exception.
There are many other reasons why the argument fails here, but they all reduce to the same Bayesian point: there are other explanations of the evidence (other reasons why a god or hero would be depicted as humiliated and murdered, like the goddess Inanna was, or the god Prometheus was) that are not sufficiently improbable for us to assume “it’s true” is automatically the best explanation. Thus “embarrassment” just isn’t a valid argument. You need to look at all the available explanations and compare their relative probabilities.
...
John: In your forthcoming book you’ll test between two hypotheses: h = “Jesus was a historical person mythicized” and ~h = “Jesus was a mythical person historicized.” Care to give us an advanced introduction to that book and/or where your research has led you so far based on Bayesian methodology?
Richard: It’s no secret that I’ve come to the conclusion that ~h is more likely. And the more I’ve researched it, the more certain I am of that. I keep finding evidence supporting ~h; whereas evidence for h keeps disappearing the more I examine it. However, my conclusion does come close to the Granicus example above. I am not supremely certain. I just think it’s more likely than not. But this won’t be any comfort to Christians, since the next most probable hypothesis is that Jesus existed but we know essentially nothing about him. Which, incidentally, a lot of experts in the field are starting to agree with. It’s slowly becoming the consensus position. There are still hold outs, like Bart Ehrman, but I don’t think their position is going to survive in the long run. There are just too many cats out of the bag at this point. But what will be the fate of the next-step position, that there wasn’t even a Jesus at all? Time will tell. But someone needs to present the case properly before it can be conclusively accepted or refuted. No one has done that yet. My future book On the Historicity of Jesus Christ will. In the meantime Proving History does a good job already of showing why that currently growing consensus is correct; and it’s just one step from there to full mythicism.
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Post by sankari on Mar 25, 2012 10:52:18 GMT
Carrier seems to have missed the point of the criterion of embarrassment:
Firstly, crucifixion was more humiliating than anything in the ANE - yes, even self-castration.
Secondly, the Attis story was not related as history and Attis was not believed to be a human who started a religious movement.
Thirdly, this is not just about 'no one would make that up.' It's about details which would damage the credibility of Jesus as a religious leader. Nobody cared about the credibility of Attis because he was not a religious leader and he didn't teach anyone anything. He was just some guy in a story. This is not a valid comparison.
For an example of the criterion of embarrassment in action, look no further than Akhenaten. This was a Pharaoh who rejected polytheism, introduced monotheism, and established the cult of Aten.
Following his death the Egyptians attempted to destroy every trace of Akhenaten's existence, even to the extent of deleting his name from historical records and refusing to include him on later king lists. Their efforts were so extensive that he was only rediscovered in the 19th Century.
Alternatively, look at ancient records of famous military failures. The Taylor prism relates that Sennacharib won a crushing victory over Egypt's vassal states.
But Herodotus adds that Sennacharib launched an assault on Egypt which was abruptly curtailed by unexpected defeat (he implies divine intervention). Needless to say, Assyrian records are careful to omit this humiliating incident.
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Post by ignorantianescia on Mar 25, 2012 17:49:00 GMT
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Post by fortigurn on Mar 26, 2012 3:46:56 GMT
The battle of Kadesh between the Hittites and Egyptians is another example. Both sides claim a victory, and there is absolutely no physical evidence that this vast battle involving over 50,000 men and some 5,000 chariots ever took place. The criterion of embarrassment is used to differentiate fact from fiction when comparing the two records, though historians have not reached a consensus on the outcome.
The criterion of embarrassment is also commonly used by Old Testament scholars when comparing the textual evidence of the Old Testament to the archaeological record, especially in the histories recorded from Samuel to Chronicles.
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Post by sandwiches on Mar 28, 2012 9:46:33 GMT
J.P.Holding has a review and does not seem impressed. In particular he thinks it compares badly with a work on the same topic by J.P.Holding: tektonticker.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/book-snap-bart-ehrmans-did-jesus-exist.htmlI'll start with what would be the most obvious point from me: No, Ehrman's Did Jesus Exist? (DJE) has no prospect of displacing my own edited volume, Shattering the Christ Myth (STCM), as the most thorough volume on the subject of the existence of Jesus. Far from it. Though Ehrman does cover exactly the same range of subject matter within that question -- everything from "pagan copycat" charges to the "silence of the epistles" canard to the existence of Nazareth -- he does so overall with such breezy incompleteness that we may easily predict that the mythicist crowd will immediately claim he didn't come anywhere close to doing the job.
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Post by timoneill on Mar 28, 2012 10:34:58 GMT
J.P.Holding has a review and does not seem impressed. In particular he thinks it compares badly with a work on the same topic by J.P.Holding: tektonticker.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/book-snap-bart-ehrmans-did-jesus-exist.htmlI'll start with what would be the most obvious point from me: No, Ehrman's Did Jesus Exist? (DJE) has no prospect of displacing my own edited volume, Shattering the Christ Myth (STCM), as the most thorough volume on the subject of the existence of Jesus. Far from it. Though Ehrman does cover exactly the same range of subject matter within that question -- everything from "pagan copycat" charges to the "silence of the epistles" canard to the existence of Nazareth -- he does so overall with such breezy incompleteness that we may easily predict that the mythicist crowd will immediately claim he didn't come anywhere close to doing the job.He's not impressed mainly because Ehrman is not a literalist and therefore has to be substantially wrong. He's also miffed that Ehrman mentions Carrier's book Not the Impossible Faith but doesn't mention the book by Holding that it was responding to. Ehrman was right that his book is not going to be acceptable to the fundies at either end of the spectrum. If both Carrier and Holding think you're wrong you're probably about right. I'm almost halfway through the book and so far it's rather good.
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Post by sankari on Mar 28, 2012 12:24:13 GMT
J.P.Holding has a review and does not seem impressed. Holding is never impressed by genuinely qualified professionals who are regarded as authoritative experts in their field. It's a curious prejudice. Quelle surprise!
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Post by jamierobertson on Mar 28, 2012 17:15:01 GMT
Holding is never impressed by genuinely qualified professionals who are regarded as authoritative experts in their field. Bart Ehrman is an expert historian? I thought he was a textual critic... (NB - I accept that Carrier IS an historian. He's just not an authoritative or expert historian ;D ) He's not impressed mainly because Ehrman is not a literalist and therefore has to be substantially wrong. He also describes Ehrman as "a scholar of great respect" in whose academic work there is "little to find at fault" and whose main case is "a very good one". In major areas of disagreement, other scholars such as Wallace are appealed to - but then, he's a "literalist" and therefore has to be substantially wrong, I suppose...
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Post by sandwiches on Mar 28, 2012 17:46:43 GMT
To be fair I note a reader of both books seems to favour Holding: thepassivehabit.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/review-jp-holdings-shattering-christ.htmlReview: JP Holding's Shattering the Christ Myth
Since my exchange with David Fitzgerald last month, I've been on a Christ-myth bashing streak. And after reviewing Bart Ehrman's new book, I figured I'd round out the festivities with a review of JP Holding's Shattering the Christ Myth (STCM), which I mentioned is probably the best refutation of mythicism in print at the moment.
Furthermore, most scholars and apologists will only go as far as looking at mythicists funny for even proposing that Jesus didn't exist, and rightly so. But realizing how well the internet can enable stupidity, Holding and his co-authors have collected every mythicist argument concocted in the last 150 years and thoroughly refuted itPerhaps Ehrman's heart was not quite in doing something that most scholars would regard as a bit ridiculous? Like proving that Napoleon or Caesar existed?
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joel
Bachelor of the Arts
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Post by joel on Mar 28, 2012 18:22:29 GMT
If Holding has accurately represented Ehrman's treatment of Tacitus, it does seem like Ehrman has made a mistake in conceding so much. But getting indignant over "Ehrman didn't even mention my book" is childish. Holding is self-published, only known on a small corner of the internet, and even there is certainly not as high-profile as Carrier. With that said, Holding's book on the subject is probably good - our James even wrote a chapter in it. But no matter how good it is, plenty of people will pass it by because they find him abrasive. And if you know about the book, chances are you've developed an opinion on Holding's personality too.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Mar 28, 2012 19:28:53 GMT
But getting indignant over "Ehrman didn't even mention my book" is childish. It's not when your book and its thesis are the subject of a book under review. It's Ehrman's blunder not to mention Holding's book.
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