I never was impressed much with "absence of evidence equals no King Arthur as default position. I never was impressed much with "absence of evidence equals no Loch Ness Monster as default position.
For an argument supposedly based only on facts or the lack of same, there is quite a bit of emotionalism from either side...and it seems to me that there has to be a reason why the atheist side invests so much emotion into these arguments. Just what feels so good about your (not you personally,Crash) position, exactly?
Of course there is emotion. What other subject do people accept unquestioningly with a total lack of evidence.
As I have challenged Jon, show us the historical evidence. Not the nonsense gobbledygook, as Jon would say.
Facts don't lie or have an agenda. Facts are just facts
Richard Carrier has now posted a full lengthy review of this book on his website, and it isn't any more favourable than the review of the HuffPo article although he does say that the book addresses most of the issues he had trouble with in the article more effectively .
A small excerpt ...
Carrier writes:
I cannot recommend books that are so full of errors that they will badly mislead and miseducate the reader, and that commit so many mistakes that I have to substantially and extensively correct them. Did Jesus Exist? ultimately misinforms more than it informs, and that actually makes it worse than bad. Like the worst of mythicist literature, you will come away after reading it with more false information in your head than true, and that makes my job as a historian harder, because now I have to fix everything he screwed up. This is why I don’t recommend anyone ever read bad mythicist literature, because it will only fill your head with nonsense that I will have to work harder to correct. Ehrman’s book ironically does much the same thing. Therefore, it officially sucks.
I share in Carrier's disappointment with Ehrman's book.
Did Jesus Exist? could have just as well been written as a standard introduction to the issue of the historical Jesus as a reply against the Mythicist position, which just doesn't get the amount of attention it should get in the book. There are so many really bad arguments made by Mythicists that Ehrman could have easily destroyed the credibility of almost all of them had he chosen to and then argued that Jesus Mythicism is just a nonsense idea popularized by amateurs with little understanding of the topics they are talking about.
Some of the things Carrier bugs on aren't really valid complaints. For example, Carrier makes a big deal out of Ehrmans short response to a point made by Freke and Gandy:
Ehrman declares (again with that same suicidally hyperbolic certitude) that “we simply don’t have birth notices, trial records, death certificates—or other kinds of records that one has today” (p. 29). Although his conclusion is correct (we should not expect to have any such records for Jesus or early Christianity), his premise is false.
Carrier's excerpt is not representative of Ehrman's actual argument. In the sentence previous and in the sentence following what Carrier quotes, Ehrman makes it very clear that he is talking about only the first century (when Jesus would have lived):
quote:Ehrman in Did Jesus Exist? (2012):
If Romans were careful record keepers, it is passing strange that we have no records, not only Jesus but of nearly anyone who lived in the first century. We simply don't have birth notices, trial records, death certificates—or other standard kinds of records that one has today. Freke and Gandy, of course, do not cite a single example of anyone else's death warrant from the first century. (p. 29)
There are so many really bad arguments made by Mythicists that Ehrman could have easily destroyed the credibility of almost all of them had he chosen to and then argued that Jesus Mythicism is just a nonsense idea popularized by amateurs with little understanding of the topics they are talking about.
That's utterly stupid, though, and would have been even a larger crime against reason than the ones Erhman actually chose to commit. How would attacking only the worst positions of the most amateur "Mythicists" have supported an argument that "Jesus Mythicism is just a nonsense idea popularized by amateurs with little understanding of the topics they are talking about"? If an evolutionist tried to provide support for evolution by attacking only the most risible forms of and arguments in Creationism, he'd be pilloried. But that's exactly the "methodology" you seem to believe best suits Jesus Historicism. For that matter, how can the historical Jesus be evidenced by attacking any argument of any "Mythicist"? Even if every single "Mythicist" argument was demolished, that would supply precisely zero proof of, or even an increased probability of, the position that a historical Jesus existed.
The existence of a historical Jesus has to be supported with positive evidence, not by attacking the claims of any "Mythicist."
Carrier's excerpt is not representative of Ehrman's actual argument.
I think you're utterly misrepresenting Carrier, here. There's no evidence in his rebuttal that he thinks Ehrman isn't referring to specifically first-century records, and the examples he gives in rebuttal are first century records, like the birth records for Caligula (AD 12.)
Some of the things Carrier bugs on aren't really valid complaints.
It's certainly valid to complain when a so-called "historian" broadly asserts that we have no first-century Roman birth records when we do, in fact, have first-century birth records.
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