The Ehrman - Carrier Spat - Round 2?

Discussion about the New Testament, apocrypha, gnostics, church fathers, Christian origins, historical Jesus or otherwise, etc.
manoj
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Re: The Ehrman - Carrier Spat - Round 2?

Post by manoj »

toejam wrote: Nope. He's not "pretending Carrier was reviewing the book".

From Ehrman's blogpost: "Now to be fair to Carrier, his comment was posted on his blog about a short piece that I wrote for the Huffington Post. In that (very!) condensed version of my views, I pointed out that Pontius Pilate is not mentioned in any “Roman sources of his day.” This sent Carrier ballistic: we have the inscription! We have Philo! We have Josephus! Ehrman is an idiot! But if he had simply waited to read my book before blasting off at me, he would have seen what I meant"
Good to know. Thanks for passing this on.
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MrMacSon
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Re: The Ehrman - Carrier Spat - Round 2?

Post by MrMacSon »

The primary issue is Ehrman's 'arguments' in Did Jesus Exist? are crap and his synopsis in that 2012 Huff Post article is also crap in relation to a reasonable pre-existing bodies of works on the historicity of Jesus; one of the most substantial being those of the Dutch Radicals.

Another of the problems^ Ehrman has created is "he is shifting the argument and framing it as a personal attack". In a May 2012 blog-post
Ehrman claimed to not know of mythicism:
Writing Did Jesus Exist was an interesting task. For one thing, before writing the book, like most New Testament scholars, I knew almost nothing about the mythicist movement ...

... What I was surprised to learn in doing my preparation for the book was just how extensive the research was that mythicists had done, how many arguments they had amassed, how many issues they addressed. Some of their works are voluminous.
Yet, he framed them as being frustrated by not being taken seriously, and presented a strawman red-herring of political motivation
I wonder if that is related at all to the culture wars going on right now over religion. As the “religious right” tries to assert itself increasingly in the public discourse and to foist its moral agendas on the rest of us, the “neo-atheists” have arisen issuing a serious challenge not just to the right but to religion itself. Are the mythicists gaining traction because of the reaction of the left against the right?
Ehrman has failed to engage mythicists arguments: he has, as manoj says, just gone ad hominem. Carrier has muddied the waters, and made a rod for his own back, too.

It is such a pity Ehrman has not engaged mythicists arguments in relation to his own previous good works; particularly those of the Dutch Radicals.
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