Carrier - Goodacre conversation on the historicity of Jesus

[Giuseppe]

The greatest enemies are the internal enemies in your own camp. The external enemy is the reason for our ennoblement and glory. The enemy within is the cause of our shame.

Terribly true.

[maryhelena]

At the end of the day - however well any Doherty/Carrier mythicists try and interpret the NT story they are left with this problem....

Comment on Mark Goodacre' blog

Mike Gantt said...
gurugeorge,

I have invited Earl Doherty and others to explain just what mythicists believe actually happened. None but Ben Shuldt has been game enough to try, but the vacuity of mythicist case was all it revealed. Perhaps you'd care to take a stab at it.

Again, don't just tell us what you think could have happened, or even what you think happened, but rather how and when you think it happened that a myth became history.

24 December 2012 at 09:24

That's the bottom line for the Doherty/Carrier mythicists - how did a myth become history......Were people so illiterate that belief in the supernatural was allowed to override what they could see before their own eyes. We can all close our eyes to our physical, social and political reality - but living in a bubble of our own imagination does not stop our physical reality from it's own often troublesome progress.

The Jesus historicists have their own bubble of course. Jesus existed as a historical person - end of story. All done and dusted 2000 years ago. Their position is stagnant while the Christian world is almost crawling on it's knees. The world of the Doherty/Carrier mythicists is just a never-ending story, around and around in interpretations of NT stories like a funfair merry-go-around.

[Giuseppe]

hence showing tolerance to the possibility that the historical Jesus existed. A tolerance that is prohibited by Carrier insofar the epistles are placed in the first century, before the 70 CE.

I would like to add: rightly so.

[RandyHelzerman]

If you want to see people snapped like a twig, try scripted professional wrestling.

Actually, that is a very good, (and much less prejudicial) metaphor than I was able to come up with. Carrier *is* doing professional wrestling when he is debating. He *wants* to snap you like a twig, and that's what his audience wants to see too. When Carrier--or William Lane Craig or other pop-apologists--are debating, they are not doing scholarship, or peer review. Its performance art.

Goodacre should have taken about 4 weeks off, read everything that Carrier ever wrote, watched all his YouTube videos, and practiced debating with somebody. Sounds like lot of work? Yeah, but here we are, 10 years later, still talking about it. He should have known all of Carrier's talking points, and have had a short, snappy (as in snapping a twig) reply to all of them, and one that commanded instant consensus. For example:

Marcion : Your gospel is corrupted!!!

Tertullian: Well, if that's true, my gospel met be older than yours--something has to exist before it can be corrupted!!!

See? Instant consensus. He's put Marcion back on his heels, and planted seeds of doubt in the audience's mind. We can't expect Goodacre to be as good as one of he greatest lawyers in history, but he sure could have prepped for the debate better. Instead, what didn't kill Carrier just made him stronger.

[JarekS]

This is where I differ with Hermann. Unfortunately, I didn't solve it earlier and we didn't manage to talk it out. I argued that Marcion's church was in development somewhere around 120 CE and I dated the Corpus Pauline as Zuntz. For Hermann Marcion was an author of Paulineepistles. For me Marcion is a salesman

[JarekS]

Marcion : Your gospel is corrupted!!!
Who told You that? The answer is a key

[JarekS]

The greatest enemies are the internal enemies in your own camp. The external enemy is the reason for our ennoblement and glory. The enemy within is the cause of our shame.

Terribly true.

If it's such a terrible truth, why do you describe Marcion with the voice of his bitter enemies?

[DCHindley]

The greatest enemies are the internal enemies in your own camp. The external enemy is the reason for our ennoblement and glory. The enemy within is the cause of our shame.

Carrier probably does not know that he is offering and developing "communist mythicism", which was the official historical policy in my country for 45 years. It is based on cultural syncretism and the alleged cult of the divine Jesus preceding the Christianity of the historical Jesus. It was created in the 19th century by William Benjamin S[m]ith, Arthur Drews and Frederick Engels. ...

While it appears that you have been monitoring these debates for a while now, you may be interested in some posts (yes, mine, as I seem to be the only one who cares about the socio-economics of that time) that examine the multitude of simplistic "Sunday school" type beliefs about bad ol' Herod and his kin (Antipas & Agrippa I) and the nature of their rules.

Many are quite ready to jump on this "crushing taxation" model, including those who propose a "Q community" or the environment for the development of the Didache, almost always assuming that the former MUST have existed and the latter MUST be genuine. All the while, never mentioning studies of Herod's taxation organization (F. Udoh) and of Herod Antipas (Morten Hørning Jensen).

The former exposes the horrible fact that Herod actually managed to convert a good portion of agricultural taxes to tariffs on luxury goods on way to Rome via caravan routes through his kingdom. Herod once scrapped all his gold and silver ornaments to bullion to buy grain during a famine. Evil man, Eeeeeevil.

Jensen does not find indications that Antipas' taxes were oppressive. Both regions saw an increase in material culture.

As for Agrippa, despite his financially irresponsible earlier days (including escaping the clutches of an imperial procurator), was fondly remembered by rabbinic Judaism as a good ruler, so probably not an excessive taxer of the populace.

viewtopic.php?p=18378#p18378 [links to e-versions (may no longer work since they were hosted by Detering)]

viewtopic.php?p=18404#p18404 [excerpts from English translations including TOCs to show they considered everything you can think of. You just don't see that kind of thing in modern mythicism. Carrier, whose degree is in History of Philosophy, and should know these philosophical influences like the back of his hand, to my recolllection does not cover these things at all]

viewtopic.php?p=64068#p64068 [extensive quotes from Schweitzer's revised E.T. of Quest on Kautsky et al.]

viewtopic.php?p=93074#p93074 [an overview of modern use of Marxist style socio-economics by Sociologist Max Weber, and a variety of "Didache community" and "Q Community" researchers, with citation of sources (collected from Wiki pages, so take with grains of salt)]


DCH

[RandyHelzerman]

If you want to see people snapped like a twig, try scripted professional wrestling.

Actually, that is a very good, (and much less prejudicial) metaphor than I was able to come up with. Carrier *is* doing professional wrestling when he is debating. He *wants* to snap you like a twig, and that's what his audience wants to see too. When Carrier--or William Lane Craig or other pop-apologists--are debating, they are not doing scholarship, or peer review. Its performance art.

Goodacre should have taken about 4 weeks off, read everything that Carrier ever wrote, watched all his YouTube, and practiced debating with somebody. Sounds like lot of work? Yeah, but here we are, 10 years later, still talking about it. He should have known all of Carrier's talking points, and have had a short, snappy (as in snapping a twig) reply to all of them, and one that commanded instant consensus. For example:

Marcion : Your gospel is corrupted!!!

Tertullian: Well, if that's true, my gospel met be older than yours--something has to exist before it can be corrupted!!!

See? Instant consensus. He's put Marcion back on his heels, and planted seeds of doubt in the audience's mind. We can't expect Goodacre to be as good as one of he greatest lawyers in history, but he sure could have prepped for the debate better. Instead, what didn't kill Carrier just made him stronger.

[Giuseppe]

The greatest enemies are the internal enemies in your own camp. The external enemy is the reason for our ennoblement and glory. The enemy within is the cause of our shame.

Terribly true.

If it's such a terrible truth, why do you describe Marcion with the voice of his bitter enemies?

my comment was on a personal experience. As to Marcion, I think that what the his enemies describe about him, i.e. a religion based on the hatred against the god of another religion (YHWH), is basically true. In the sense that I would consider "spiritual" a person who believes sincerely in the marcionism as portrayed by Tertullian etc. just as a sincere Catholic or a Buddhist is "spiritual" for me.