Originally Posted by GakuseiDon

The full story of Priapus-gate, whether you want it or not! Starting from Ehrman's interview on "Unbelievable".

The interview occurred on 03-Apr-2012, several weeks before Carrier posted his review of Ehrman's book. Here is the relevant transcript:

Interviewer: "You get things like Peter's name 'the rock' really means 'cock', and then the author draws a picture of it."

Ehrman: "Yeah, draws a picture of Peter with a nose that is in fact an extended penis -- an erect penis -- the author indicates that this is a statue that is kept in the basement of the Vatican Museum. [laughs] It’s just made up! There is no such [thing?] – it’s just completely made up!"

It is clear that:
1. Ehrman believes that Acharya S is drawing a picture of a statue of Peter with a penis nose
2. Ehrman suggests that Acharya S (or someone else) simply made the statue she apparently represents as a symbol of Peter up.

Carrier makes the reasonable point in his first review blog on 19-Apr-2012 that, though the statue has nothing to do with Peter, such a statue does exist:
http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/1026/

The Priapus Bronze: In response to D.M. Murdock’s claim that there is a statue of a penis-nosed cockerel (which she says is a “symbol of St. Peter”) in the Vatican museum, Ehrman says that “there is no penis-nosed statue of Peter the cock in the Vatican or anywhere else except in books like this, which love to make things up” (p. 24). Ehrman evidently did no research on this and did not check this claim at all... It does not have the name “Peter” on it (Murdock never claimed it did; that it represents him is only an interpretation), but it apparently exists (or did exist) exactly as she describes.

He then goes on to suggest that Ehrman should have investigated further before "arrogantly declaring" the statue didn't exist:

At the very least I would expect Ehrman to have called the Vatican museum about this, and to have checked the literature on it, before arrogantly declaring no such object existed and implying Murdock made this up. I do not assume Murdock’s interpretation of the object is correct (there is no clear evidence it has anything to do with Christianity, much less Peter). But its existence appears to be beyond dispute. She did not make that up.

Fair enough. But Ehrman's point is that there is no statue of Peter the penis-nosed rooster, as he responds here on 22-Apr-2012:

A case in point of my “carelessness and arrogance” is the first instance of an “Error of Fact” that he cites, which I assume he gives as his first example because he thinks it’s a real killer. It has to do with a statue in the Vatican library that is of a rooster (a cock) with an erect penis for a nose (really!) which Acharya S, in her book The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold, indicates is “hidden in the Vatican Treasury” (that damn Vatican: always hiding things that disprove Christianity!) which is a “symbol of Saint Peter” (p. 295).

In her discussion, Acharya S indicates that Jesus’ disciple Peter was not only the “rock” on which Jesus would build his church, but also the “cock.” Get it? They rhyme! Moreover, the word cock is slang for penis (hard as a “rock,” one might think); and what is another slang word for penis? Peter! There you have it. And so when there is a statue of a cock with a rock-hard peter for a nose, this symbolizes Peter, the disciple of Jesus. No wonder the popes have kept this thing in hiding.

My comment on this entire discussion was simple and direct: “There is no penis-nosed statue of Peter the cock in the Vatican or anywhere else except in books like this, which love to make things up.”

Carrier attacks my comments with a rather vicious set of comments: “Ehrman evidently did no research on this and did not check this claim at all…. Indicative of the carelessness and arrogance Ehrman exhibits in his book.” But alas, I am unrepentant and will say it again: “There is no penis-nosed statue of Peter the cock in the Vatican.”

What Carrier wants us to know is that in fact this statue does exist and that it is in the Vatican. It does not take much research to dig out this juicy bit of museum lore. Acharya S herself gives the references in her footnotes. And yes, they are both right. The statue does appear to exist. But it has nothing to do with Peter, as any sophomore in college with one semester of Greek under his belt and a course or two in religious studies could tell you.

On the base of the statue are the words SOTER KOSMOU – Greek for “Savior of the World.” No Christian ever thought that Peter was the Savior of the World. Peter was not portrayed in the early church in ithyphallic form. Let alone has an overly-excited rooster. This statue was considered to be of Peter because of crass and irrelevant modern idle wanderings that have nothing to do with real research (cock/rock; Peter and the cock crows; peter = penis = cock; and so on). It in fact is simply a rather unusual Priapus. There are lots of Priapi that have come down to us from the ancient world, and they tend to arouse the giggles of the middle school students with their first exposure to a classical collection in a museum. Off hand I don’t recall any others quite like this, but they may indeed exist. None of them has anything to do with Jesus’ disciple Simon Peter.

And so my offhand statement about this particular one was that the Vatican does not have a statue of Peter as rooster with a hard cock for his nose. Carrier’s response was that the statue does exist. Let me put the question to him bluntly: Does he think that the Vatican has “a penis-nosed statue of Peter the cock” in its collection? I think we can say with some assurance that the answer is no. As I said, unlike a lot of other mythicists Carrier is both trained and smart. But sometimes he doesn’t read very well.

He makes this kind of mistake routinely in his vicious assault on me and my book. The problem appears to be that he sees something that strikes him as a problem, and he isolates it, dissects it, runs with it, gets obsessed with it, and …. forgets how it was actually said in the first place. Careful reading can solve a lot of problems of misunderstanding.

In the comments section, someone raises that Ehrman should have phrased things differently. Ehrman responds on 24-Apr-2012:

Maybe you’re right: maybe I should have phrased it differently. Everything looks different in hindsight!

Carrier's response to Ehrman's response here on 27-Apr-2012 (my bolding below):

In his second reply he addressed one single point in my review. And here I believe there is reason to suspect he is lying about the Priapus statue. In my review of his book I called him out for saying (certainly very clearly implying) that Murdock “made up” the statue at the Vatican that she presents a drawing of and says is a symbol of Peter. He clearly did not call the Vatican about it or research the claim at all. Because if he had, he would have said what any responsible scholar would have said, which is that yes, the statue she depicts is real and the drawing she provides is reasonably accurate, but her argument that it symbolizes Peter is not credible. It’s just a pagan statue of the god Priapus.

Now in his reply on this point, in “Acharya S, Richard Carrier, and a Cocky Peter (Or: “A Cock and Bull Story”),” he claims I misread him, that he never denied the statue existed nor implied that Murdock made it up. Now let’s look at what he actually wrote in the book. You be the judge:

[Acharya says] “‘Peter’ is not only ‘the rock’ but also ‘the cock’, or penis, as the word is used as slang to this day.” Here Acharya shows (her own?) hand drawing of a man with a rooster head but with a large erect penis instead of a nose, with this description: “bronze sculpture hidden in the Vatican treasure of the Cock, symbol of St. Peter” (295). There is no penis-nosed statue of Peter the cock in the Vatican or anywhere else except in books like this, which love to make things up.

That’s the sum total of what he says about this. It is quite evident to me that when he wrote this, he doubted the drawing came from any source, and believed (and here implies to the reader) that she just made it up. There is no such statue. That is what he is saying. But you can judge that for yourself. Certainly, the one thing this paragraph doesn’t say is that the statue she references does exist, is (or at one time was) at the Vatican, and looks essentially just as her drawing depicts it. It also does not say that she is merely wrong to interpret this statue as being of Peter. To the contrary, all it says is that there is no such statue, she made this up. Which is false. And betrays his failure to even check.

But he now claims he did check. Sort of–he says he saw her citations and assumed there were priapic statues; he did not actually say he checked her sources, or contacted the Vatican. Some commentators on his site have also tried claiming the statue was never at the Vatican, but their misinformation and mishandling of the sources is thoroughly exposed in an extensive comment by an observer at Murdock’s site. The object may have been moved (as I implied was possible in my original review), but Ehrman said it didn’t exist anywhere, so its location is moot. And I should add, this is precisely the kind of source analysis that Ehrman should already have worked through and be able to discuss informedly, yet in comments there he said the original commentator’s findings were “very interesting” and “very hard to get around” (and he likewise mistakenly affirms they are correct in his subsequent post), indicating he didn’t in fact do any of this research and isn’t familiar with the source materials on the statue.

Of course he now claims that he never said the statue didn’t exist. He only said a statue of Peter didn’t exist. That’s right. He parses his words hyper-literally to argue that he said the exact opposite of what he said. You see, when he said the statue didn’t exist, that it was made up, he meant a statue of Peter, and since the statue that Murdock references and presents a drawing of isn’t a statue “of Peter,” the statue doesn’t exist. Get it? This is an amusing case of faux metaphysical deepness being used as an excuse to read a sentence as saying a statue simultaneously does and doesn’t exist, depending on what one calls it. Even if that is really what he was doing when he wrote the book, this is just a variant of a masked-man fallacy (“The statue exists. She says it is a statue of Peter. No statues of Peter exist. Therefore the statue doesn’t exist.”).

It’s bad enough that, even if this is true and he really meant to say the opposite of what he appears to say, he obviously wrote it so badly he not only sucks as a writer but can’t even tell that he sucks as a writer (indeed only after repeated goading in comments did he confess that “maybe I should have phrased it differently”). But trying to use the “I suck as a writer” defense against the much worse crime of careless scholarship requires him to claim the masked man fallacy isn’t a fallacy but a perfectly reasonable way to argue. Which only convicts him (yet again) of not understanding how logic works.

Before I get to the punchline, I really must emphasize this point: even granting his excuse, the fact that the wording is completely misleading and will misinform the public still confirms my point in citing this example, that we can’t trust his book. If he so badly miswrote here that he meant the opposite of what he said, then how many other sentences in this book are as badly written and mean the opposite of what they say? Indeed, that he had to be repeatedly goaded before even admitting that this sentence does that, means he is not even capable of detecting when a sentence he has written says the opposite of what he meant. That entails we should trust his book even less. Because whatever filter is supposed to prevent him making these kind of mistakes is clearly not working in his brain...

... Ehrman is basically saying “I was never wrong. I’m just such a phenomenally lousy writer that things I wrote appear to say what they don’t, and everyone who reads this book will often be misled in result.” Others have noted the problem entailed by his repeatedly careless and irresponsible wording of things, which can completely mislead lay readers of his book. Ophelia Benson (Butterflies & Wheels), for example, found many problems with the way Ehrman’s choice of words misleads, as well as his questionable logic (see: What Ehrman Actually Says, The Unseen, A Small Town Guy).

But I fear it may be worse than that. Because I don’t actually believe him when he says he didn’t mean to say the statue didn’t exist. I suspect that is a post-hoc rationalization that he cooked up in an attempt to save face, after his careless and irresponsible scholarship on this matter was exposed. I suspect this not only because his excuse is implausible on its face (read his original paragraph again, and ask yourself how likely it is that someone who wanted to say “the statue she depicts does exist, but it’s not a statue of Peter” would say instead what he did), and not only because he still doesn’t claim to have researched her sources or contacted the Vatican (in other words, to do what he should have done), but also because, as several people have since pointed out to me, he said in a podcast (before my review and before Murdock herself exposed him on this) that the statue did not in any sense exist.

Carrier then discusses the interview on "Unbelievable":

On Homebrewed Christianity, April 3 (2012), “Bart Ehrman on Jesus’ Existence, Apocalypticism & Holy Week,” timestamp 20:30-21:10: at this point in that podcast, Ehrman says Acharya talks about Peter the cock and shows a drawing of a statue with a penis for a nose and claims this is in the Vatican museum, at which Ehrman declares, with laughter, “It’s just made up! There is no such s[tatue]… It’s just completely made up” (emphasis mine). In context it is certainly clear he is saying there is no such statue of any kind, that her drawing is not of any actual object. (Note that I put the word “statue” in partial brackets because he speaks so quickly he didn’t complete the word but started saying what is obviously the word “statue”; he doesn’t pause to correct himself, though, he just quickly segues to the next phrase in animated conversation.)

Now, I must leave it to you to decide what’s going on here. From both his own wording in the book and this podcast, it certainly seems that Ehrman had no idea the statue actually existed, until Murdock and I hammered him on it. Notably, I had emailed him about this weeks before my review, asking what his response to Murdock was, because I was concerned it didn’t look good. I had not yet read his book, so I didn’t know the whole thing would be a travesty of these kinds of errors. Ehrman never answered me (even though he has in the past). Only after my review did he come out with the explanation that he meant to say the statue existed but wasn’t connected to Peter. And on that point I suspect he is lying.

I can give more leeway to a podcast interview, where we often forget to say things or say things incorrectly, and we don’t get to re-read and revise to improve accuracy and clarity (though this excuse doesn’t hold for a book). But here this does not look like an accidental omission or a slip of the tongue. He really does apear to think (at the time of that podcast) that the statue was completely made up, and that certainly appears to be what he says. Did he really also “mean to say” in that podcast that the statue wasn’t “completely” made up, that in fact it existed, but that Murdock was only wrong about what it symbolized? In other words, did he once again say, as if by accident, exactly the opposite of what he meant? You tell me.

In the Comments section, Carrier writes on what Ehrman could have written:

[Ehrman could have written:] “The statue she refers to is not a statue of Peter, but a statue of the pagan god Priapus, one of many like it. That it ever represented Peter is simply a product of her imagination, with no basis in evidence.”

This is Ehrman's original comment in "Did Jesus Exist?":

'Peter' is not only 'the rock' but also 'the cock,' or penis, as the word is used as slang to this day." Here Acharya shows (her own?) hand drawing of a man with a rooster head but with a large erect penis instead of a nose, with this description: "Bronze sculpture hidden in the Vatican treasure of the Cock, symbol of St. Peter" (295). [There is no penis-nosed statue of Peter the cock in the Vatican or anywhere else except in books like this, which love to make things up.]

(BTW, I recommend reading Jonathon Burke's web articles on this. From here:

Impressed with what he referred to as ‘numerous scholarly references’ provided by Murdock, Carrier ironically decided to trust Murdock’s claims, and the claims of one of her supporters, without checking them. He certainly did not contact the Vatican himself. In fact he did not even check her references at all. An examination of them shows that Murdock failed to provide ‘numerous scholarly references’, contrary to Carrier’s claim...

Carrier was wrong to say Murdock cited ‘numerous scholarly sources’, an error he made because he failed to check the facts. Murdock’s work itself was anything but scholarly, and Carrier (with academic qualifications Murdock lacks), should at the very least have checked Murdock’s sources before describing them so enthusiastically. If he had checked them, he would have realized how wildly inaccurate her claims were, and how poor her research was. This failure of Carrier’s was unfortunate in the context of him criticizing Ehrman for neglecting to check sources and verify claims...

If Carrier had taken the time to check Murdock’s claims against her own sources, he would have discovered that they contradict her. Murdock claimed that the statue is a ‘Bronze sculpture hidden in the Vatican treasury of the Cock, symbol of St. Peter’. But in a book which Murdock does not quote, Knight (the only original source cited for the claim that the statue was ever in the Vatican), states explicitly that the sculpture was displayed publicly in the Vatican palace, not ‘hidden in the Vatican treasury’.

More on his webpage.