Carrier's most recent blog deserves a mention b/c he gives credit & promotes the work of several people - Matthew Ferguson and his blog (https://adversusapologetica.wordpress.com/), Alice Wheatley, Neil Godfrey, & David Trobisch, John Van Seters, Robert Stewart, Barbara Aland, Sylvie Raquel - as well as presenting & discussing some interesting concepts (eg. Westar Institute on Jason BeDuhn on Marcion: especially Beduhn's The First New Testament: Marcion’s Scriptural Canon).
- (It would be interesting if Carrier addressed the other recent publications on Marcion: Vinzent, Rith, Klinghardt, Moll, Lieu, etc)
eg regarding the 'Testimonium Flavium' -
His introduction goes on -" ...a flurry of positive opinion arose about ten or twenty years ago from excess enthusiasm over the purported discovery of an earlier version of the text in Arabic translation that supposedly “proved” the passage predated Eusebius and said something different. But by 2008 that “discovery” had been debunked in the peer reviewed literature by Josephus expert Alice Whealey*: that Arabic translation was in fact of a Syriac translation of Eusebius, and the changes were thus made after him, either by a telephone game of transmission error or by scribal attempts to make the passage more believable. This means all those published opinions before were based on a falsehood. Those opinions therefore can no longer be cited in favor of the passage. Expert opinion has to be re-polled. And obviously, only experts aware of this development should be polled."
* WHEALEY, Alice (2008) The Testimonium Flavianum in Syriac & Arabic New Test. Stud. 54, pp. 573–590. http://khazarzar.skeptik.net/books/whealey2.pdf
" ...many papyrus fragments, once dated overly early, have been dated decades or even a century later than previously claimed, after the poor logic and unchecked bias of earlier estimates was exposed. This was well reported by Neil Godfrey, in New Date and More on Dating, which articles are also very educational on what the peer reviewed literature says about the problems dating NT manuscripts (btw, Wikipedia will often keep you more up to date than many experts are, with a wonderful catalog of entries on all New Testament papyri, uncials, minuscules, and lectionaries)."
As another example, sixteen years ago David Trobisch published evidence changing the way we understand extant NT manuscripts; and it’s taken a decade for his results to filter into expert knowledge. Interestingly, Trobisch has been tapped to curate Hobby Lobby’s new Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., despite him in no way being a fundamentalist but an actual legit scholar and justifiably renowned expert on biblical manuscripts. Anyway, his book in 2000 presents evidence that makes a significant difference in how we interpret the surviving manuscripts of the Bible.
The sections are -Today this^ [Trobisch] will be my lesson number one. My lesson number two will highlight the similarly field-changing work of paleographers who’ve established that the earliest NT manuscripts were also the least professionally copied, producing a startling fluidity of errors and alterations at a faster pace than was typical for most other books in antiquity, which would more typically be transmitted by polished professionals, often working for supervised publishing houses, a development that would not reach Christian publishing until the end of the third century. My lesson number three will then draw on Ferguson’s article about counting manuscripts, which I just referenced above, thus tying the end of my article to its beginning.
- 1. Everything We Have Comes from the Same Edition
2. For at Least Two Hundred Years, Christian Scribes Were Sloppy Amateurs
3. Counting Manuscripts Is as Useless as Counting Xeroxes
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