Richard Carrier

Thanks for the pledge!

DAZ, and everyone else posting or reading here who has offered or wants to, please also email me with your pledge, so I'll have more direct contact info and a clearer-cut list of pledges I can tally up as time goes on.

I just privately received another thousand dollar pledge, but so far that makes only six $250+ offers out of the 40 that the additional $500 offer requires. So keep the pledges coming if you can!

dog-on

.................................................. ........

Email sent....

renassault

Save those those tears; there will be plenty of time for them at Judgment Day!

Other than that, hopefully the arguments don't include forced judgments, such as claiming Christianity spread (in its earliest days among Gentiles?) due to being seen as an opposition to the Roman Empire and I suppose being one, despite verses like Romans 13.1-4.

fog

I'll give 250... e-mail sent.

judge

I will make a pledge to at least buy your book (maybe more than this) if you foregt about arguing against obviously silly theories such as microscopic writing on coins and take up what in my experience are the weighter arguments that christians today are exposed to. Some of which we looked at in this thread.

GenesisNemesis

I would if I had the money.

Richard Carrier

Absolutely. That is my intention.

But the discrepancy in the nativity dates is not IMO a weighty argument for ahistoricity, especially of the sort I intend to take seriously, which is not the triumphalist theory whereby the Gospels are 100% factually true (and Jesus was mega-famous, etc., which is not a historically defendable theory), but the reasonable theory, adopted by most scholars now, whereby most of the Gospels is not true, but a (more obscure) historical Jesus nevertheless serves as the basis for their embellishments. So my book won't even spend much time on the nativity date issue.

This does give me a mind to ask both sides (and you can spread this request around to wherever interested parties haunt) to produce simple line-item lists of "evidence" for historicity and against historicity. Though I've already gotten something like this from published scholars, it couldn't hurt to have what people here think is a complete list, again on both sides. If you or anyone want to do that, please start a new thread, and cross-link it here (or just announce the thread title), and I'll go look at what develops there. Such a thread should not get bogged down in whether items on those lists have any merit (or how much merit they have), just on whether they actually exist as items (and are not mistakes or forgeries or whatever). I'll look into their merits on my own (if I haven't already).

Zeichman

I've got an article that will (hopefully) be in the Journal of Higher Criticism which discusses Price and Doherty's use of Q. I think there is some good evidence within Q for the historicity of Jesus. While I would significantly nuance and undoubtedly change the tone of my essay were I to revise it, I can send you the word files if you'd like.

Richard Carrier

Yes, please. I am very interested in that.

If you can use word to save the file as a PDF first, that would ensure transfer of formatting (sometimes transferring word files results in weird things like disappearing footnotes and other annoyances). But I can probably receive any file format. Attach it to an email (at my universal address rcarrier at infidels.org).

Ted Hoffman

In my view, some of the issues to resolve would include the existence of Nazareth as a place with thousands of people in the first century and the existence of synagogues as architectural edifices in first century Palestine need to be resolved, or to be indicated as irresolvable.
I know you probably intend to do this already but I will still urge you to ensure experts in archaeology go through your work on synagogues because of the comments (which I shared with you) I got from an expert who perused your arguments regarding this subject some years ago. It's quite easy to think one is on solid ground on these matters while in fact one is not.
Also, a definitive (hopefully) explanation about why the evangelists used the OT in writing the NT (midrash?, historicized prophecies?, scripturalization?, fictionalization?) and why whould help.
And whether Mark knew Paul.

At least those are questions that interest me.