Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

In his OHJ, Richard Carrier has a largish chapter discussing the silence about a historical Jesus in Paul and other epistles. He starts that chapter with the following (my bolding, Carrier's italics): Page 515 In fact, as we'll see in this chapter, the only Jesus Paul shows any knowl­edge of is a ce...

I think you may be missing the forest here, GDon. The minimal historical Jesus is one of the hypotheses being examined. To evaluate the strength of hypotheses we have to look at all the evidence. The stories written about Jesus are part of the evidence (or background knowledge). These stories don't...

And actually, there is a more subtle reason why Carrier has to do what he does here. Recall that this Rank-Raglan data is being used to establish a prior probability , one based only on background knowledge. Doing a "deep dive" of sorts into the Rank-Raglan data would require Carrier to r...

So I don't think Raglan's criteria are a case of Texas sharpshooting, although I do think their application by mythicists often are. Also, while I don't think the freudianism by itself discredits the classification in any way, in my opinion the classification is quite sloppy and imprecise. I've don...

I don't believe that Jesus was virgin-born and the Son of God. So I don't see how a prior possibility for such a mundane Jesus can be calculated using a scale whereby the person is supposed to be virgin-born and a son of God. I've gone through Carrier's OHJ and he seems to conflate a historical Jesu...

Does anyone know how angels were supposed to be received? The only example I can think of off-hand is the story of Lot. I'm wondering how Paul was telling us he was received. (Hopefully better than the angels in the Lot story!)

Interestingly, Ehrman's new view seems to be consistent with Carrier's "minimal mythicist" theory, which posits that there were pre-Christian Jews who believed in a Jesus whom was a celestial being.

Can people who have read Carrier's books comment on this? In Carrier's thesis that a divine Christ was believed to have come to the sublunar heaven, and that only later was an earthly biography invented, I had the impression that Paul is supposed to have been the originator. But if Cephas preceded ...

George Wells has his "itinerant Galilean preacher" fused with a Jewish Wisdom figure. Just to expand on that, Wells actually points to Q to the source for details about a Galilean preacher in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke: http://infidels.org/library/modern/g_a_wells/holding.html Some e...

I just want to make a point re the above: I'm beginning to think that what is behind Carrier' misuse of euhemerism lies in his rejection of Q. Without Q he has 'lost' Doherty' Q preacher figure - albeit for Doherty an imaginary preacher figure. Doherty was able to utilize this Q figure, and its com...