I had someone bring up the PhD holding, neo-atheist Jesus mythicist, blogger, Richard Carrier to me in the ongoing brawls at Religion Dispatches,
Jim Reed Camera Obscura • 15 hours ago
"The epistles of James and I Peter are also oddly silent about a historical Jesus"
Richard Carrier, On the Historicity of Jesus
There was other Christianities distinct from Paul, but the important thing is the gospel stories that were written later were not known in the time of Paul. Christianity was initially a religion based on a Christ found in the old testament, and not based on Jesus of Nazareth, or any historical person. That Jesus was written up and believed in later.
Camera Obscura Jim Reed • 15 hours ago
The Epistle of James was written to people who would already be familiar with Jesus, as were those of Paul which were written to Christian communities. There is nothing odd about them not going over things such people would already have known and could be assumed to know. So, sorry, your point is pointless.
Oh, and Richard Carrier is an atheist hack who has produced multiple debunked debunkings. He is about as reliable as any for-pay ideological hack with a PhD.
I was marginally aware of Richard Carrier a few years back, the great white hope of the "Free Thought" blogs set, someone allegedly with the credentials to put the nail in the coffin of Jesus, even as such people asserted he never lived. I didn't think anyone took him especially seriously, not after his attacks on the previous atheist favorite, Bart Ehrman who committed the unforgivable sin of saying by any standard for believing in historical personages of the ancient past, the case for Jesus having actually lived is extremely strong, surpassing the evidence that many others lived who are not only not in dispute but, also, are used by neo-atheists and other ideologues without any problem. He is also an intellectual hack who makes some incredibly absurd statements which his fans accept on the basis of his academic credentials, though he is a rather weird kind of post-literate scholar who has, as far as I'm able to determine, never subjected his contentions to peer review by competent scholars. A good evaluation of him by an atheist, even humanist, scholar is this one by R. Joseph Hoffmann. You can read Bart Ehrman's response to some of the points Carrier attacked him on here.
There are so many atheist hacks out there that it's impossible to keep up with them all, especially those who construct the most fantastic and tendentious arguments on the thinnest of material and where no real scholar of the material has ever found them. I had taken so little interest in him that I'd never listened to his biggest star turn, his debate with William Lane Craig, in which Carrier did so badly that even he admitted he hadn't done well, even as he claimed that he had an impossible task in debating the Resurrection of Jesus. Oddly, for someone who claims he predicted he had agreed to a next to impossible task in arguing that one aspect of the Gospels, he chose to debate it by trying to debate the far more complex task of totally debunking the reliability of the Gospels in their entirety. Such is the intellectual coherence of neo-atheism that Carrier is held to have gained credibility from his loss to Craig.
But the conduct of Richard Carrier, as Ehrman and Hoffman respond to it, two non-believers, shows something a lot more interesting than just the loss arguments by amateurs as opposed to either real scholars or a brilliant and prepared debater such as Craig, it shows how the internet has elevated hacks who are held as credible by others who have been to college and who have even earned doctorates but who are entirely unaware and unappreciative of the entire range of intellectual methods and tactics that historians (Carrier has a degree in history) and other scholars have developed to deal with the documentary and archeological record which comprises the primary source material that any honest study of the past must rest on and which it always has to take into account. The claims that Carrier uses to debunk the historicity of Jesus are so far removed from those materials that they start out being extremely weak and end up being totally fanciful (you have to hear him say some of that stuff to really believe someone who presents himself as a scholar would say it). Yet for the audience he is appealing to, committed atheists who are hostile to Christianity, uninformed non-atheists who he hopes to convert, he is claimed to be a real scholar of that area of scholarship who must be taken seriously.
I will say that I don't agree with many of the conclusions of either those two scholars or with many of the conclusions of William Lane Craig but I am bound by the reasonableness of their methods to take them seriously, even when I don't like what they conclude and as I disagree with it. If I'm going to argue with what they say I would have to argue on the same bases of scholarly and intellectual engagement that they've fulfilled. That we have hundreds of thousands, millions of people who hold university degrees who don't understand that is a massive scandal, one which is promoted by PhDs with blogs, with publishing contracts and who get on the chat shows on those bases. There is an incredible irony in our time that the standards and practices of scholarship are as high as they have been in any period even as the entire intellectual enterprise is swamped by and defeated in society and a political context by the most vulgar of PR techniques and appeal to prejudice. This is as serious a problem as the similar problem which scientists complain about when Biblical fundamentalists deny the fact of evolution or when those who have been duped by FOX and other networks who make profits out of the oil and other extraction industries in the fact of human-caused climate change. I say it's all the same politicizing of the mechanisms of informing people and the degradation of truth by the techniques of mass media and an appeal to the least common and most heated denominator.
Once before when I talked about the fact that William Lane Craig has repeatedly mopped the floor with even real scholars and scientists who have debated him I got comments angry with me for saying something nice about an evangelical Christian who is a political conservative and who I couldn't agree with on may issues. All of those are true but you don't have to agree with someone to not hold that they are totally depraved, evil and to be rejected on those bases. Adults can agree to disagree about things, though if you're going to enter into debate with someone as accomplished as Craig in public, you'd better come prepared for the barrage of preparation he will have. The same is true when it comes to atheists I have praised, and there have been more of those here than there have been evangelical Christians I have praised and cited positively here.
Craig proves, to me, the limits of "debate" as a way of establishing an abstract (v. concrete) position. Maybe I'm too much of a Platonist to admire rhetoric, but to me Craig's arguments are rather hermetically sealed, and the effort needed to explain why his fun damental assumptions are unsound far outweighs the benefit of proving his intellectual house is built on sand.
ReplyDeleteWhich is not to say no one should ever reference him; it really goes to the purpose of debate, which is merely to sway an ignorant audience to your point of view. Subject Craig to the scholarship I encountered in seminary, and he collapses like a house of cards.
Which is also not to say he is wrong and the atheists are right (why does everything have to be either/or or in the internet? To me that's the graver issue; nothing can be discussed, only positions affirmed). I haven't paid close attention to his work, but I would imagine there is something useful in it. But I would probably start with him where Ehrman starts with Carrier; noting that he is in a certain group ("Mythicist,' for Ehrman about Carrier).
What I wouldn't do is dismiss Craig out of hand because he is an evangelical Christian and a political conservative. I've learned the best course with people you disagree with is to study their argument, and find out why you think it is invalid. To denigrate the message because of the messenger is one of the fundamental errors of logic, although it's an attractive point for debate.
Which is another problem with the "logic" of debate......
I look on debates of that kind as an entertainment, the kind of thing that bored students at the Oxford Union conduct and vote on winners and losers, the kind of thing that they still do on NPR shows like "Intelligence Squared". I've noted that the rather peculiar and even ad hoc standards of them declaring the "winner" sometimes doesn't mesh with the percentages and seldom, if ever, surprises me given my assumptions about the people running the show. The one they did a while back on the death penalty was especially outrageous in that regard - if I hadn't been trying out a new radio at the time I'd have never bothered listening to it.
DeleteI believe because of experience and a far larger and, I'd claim, richer range of information that can be included in any series of debates. I think Craig's ability is far more in demolishing the arguments of his opponents, for example Carrier's absurd habit of finding confirmatory "parallels showing dependence" but then in also claiming that any omissions and non-parallels also "prove dependence". In his debates with cosmologists I find his showing up the discrepancies and internal contradictions of their case far more convincing than the Kalam Cosmological argument can be, though he does a good job of advocating its persuasiveness.
Carrier is a clown, it's a scandal that people who hold doctorates in any field would make those arguments or accept them as valid. Or maybe I just have an unrealistic view of how much about the standards of scholarly method PhDs should know about and observe. I think that those in the sciences, with few exceptions, are some of the very worst based on the pretenses of the universal power and effectiveness of scientific methods of verification. Only science doesn't merely rely on those, it also relies on other methods, including those that are merely persuasive instead of objectively logical.
I happily leave you to your entertainment. My disagreement is not disapproval of your joy.
DeleteAnd Carrier is a joke. Ehrman fillets him in that response; although I'm not a fan of Ehrman's popular works. I don't always agree with him, but that doesn't mean he's an idiot. He makes the excellent point that there is no disagreement among Biblical scholars that there was a person identifiable as Jesus of Nazareth in first century Palestine. It's telling that the critics of that position are all ignorant know-nothings proud of their ignorance and pretending to be scholars in a field where they don't even know the names of the major players.
P.S. Thanks for the link to Ehrman's rebuttal of Carrier. It's satisfying, and I'm glad Ehrman wrote it, but it reinforces my point about never arguing with fools.
ReplyDeleteSo much energy spent on so foolish a person. I understand why he did it, but in pre-internet days, he wouldn't have had to. Such is the value of the "information age."
Having said that, I should be fair, and post this:
ReplyDelete"I am finding, now that I am becoming active on the Internet, that engaging in discussion here can mean entering into a black hole: there is no way out once you hit the event horizon. Many critics of my work have boundless energy and, seemingly, endless time. I myself have lots of energy, but not lots of time. I have had my say now, in an attempt to show my scholarly competence. I do not plan on pursuing the matter time and time again in this medium. My main energies – and my limited time – need to be devoted to the two ultimate goals of my career: to advance scholarship among scholars and to explain scholarship to popular audiences. That requires me to write books, and that takes massive amounts of time. That is where I will be putting the bulk of my energies, not to writing lengthy responses defending myself against unfounded charges of incompetence."
Yup.
D.M. Murdock isn't even an academic fraud, she's just a fraud. Her use of a pseudonym to bulk up the support for her assertions is a dead giveaway for that. Her self-published CV has nothing in it that would prepare her to be taken seriously on the topics she writes about and her assertions are safely dismissed on that basis, alone. Ironically, in looking her up - I'd never heard of her before you made this comment - I came across criticism of her from Richard Carrier, saying that she has misused sources to come up with her theories.
ReplyDeleteAnti-Christian mythicists are a pretty rum lot, all of them with ideological motives but, from the look of it, she is one of the rummiest.