Carrier v. Litwa: What Did the “Ascension of Isaiah” Originally Say?
Posted: Tue Oct 18, 2022 8:56 am
Per "How Scholars Know Jesus Lived - Dr. M. David Litwa". YouTube. History Valley. 22 February 2022.
Carrier responds "M. David Litwa is Wrong About The Ascension Of Isaiah w/ Dr. Carrier". YouTube. Godless Engineer. 15 October 2022.
Carrier responds "M. David Litwa is Wrong About The Ascension Of Isaiah w/ Dr. Carrier". YouTube. Godless Engineer. 15 October 2022.
Litwa literally doesn’t know anything he is talking about. Yet he arrogantly—and dishonestly—represents himself as a studied expert. This is shameful and immoral—and extremely angering. He doesn’t even know what Enrico Norelli argued, or my rebuttals to it, despite complaining that one ought to know those things; he lies about my not referencing Norelli or responding to his arguments; he doesn’t know what my thesis is, or anything I argue or documented under peer review about this subject; he has completely garbled and amateur notions about the Ascension of Isaiah as a text; he has completely incorrect notions of how Mythicists see and employ this text; he doesn’t know anything about ancient cosmology, yet pretends to, and in result, lies about it; and he doesn’t know any of the arguments by multiple scholars (including myself) across the peer-reviewed literature, or any of the evidence they rest on, as to why most of us reject Norelli’s fanciful conjectures about this text. I don’t think Litwa even knows what Norelli’s arguments are. He certainly doesn’t know anyone else’s. Scholars ought to be moral and honorable, and skilled and competent, and therefore well know that they should not weigh in on things they know they have not studied, much less make confident assertions about them. As just one more example of countless, this illustrates, yet again, a pervasive lack of ethics, and of epistemic standards, in Jesus studies.
Carrier (16 October 2022). "M. David Litwa, the Ascension of Isaiah, and the Problem of Incompetent Scholarship". Richard Carrier Blogs.