MrMacSon

There are plenty of historians in History Depts in Universities who are christians that push a pro-christian agenda, yet claim to do it primarily as historians.
.

Adam

Yes, recently I posted this in my Post #43 in
GLuke and GMatthew - intended as allegory or literal history?

"Many of the short sage sayings in Mark are Triple-Tradition that is also in gThomas, (see Mark in Robert Funk's The Five Gospels), so must be from a very early source, probably Q. Some not-so-short examples are the Parable of the Sower (Mark 4:3-11) and the Leased Vineyard (12:1-11)."

hjalti

Hoffman has a great response to Carrier (to paraphrase the whole article): Carrier is an amateur and a nutter, and the idea that Jesus didn't exist is a conspiracy theory that the darn new atheists like because they don't seem to get that even though some guy is called a god, that doesn't mean that he didn't exist.

To be fair Richard calls this a rant and says that it "will be followed next week by three essay-length responses to Richard C. Carrier’s ideas: The first by me, the second by Professor Maurice Casey of the University of Nottingham, and the third by Stephanie Fisher a specialist in Q-studies."

Grog

Yeah, Hoffman adds nothing to the discussion. I looked in vain for anything of substance in that blog.

James The Least

I'm not a Carrier fan, but Hoffman is an uber pretentious douchebag.

mountainman

From Hoffman's blog:


Another paraphrase here .... the Biblical Scholars are under attack by the Mythicist Mosquitoes.

Steven Carr

Maurice Casey kindly sent me a verbatim report of what Jesus said at the Last Supper (Jesus's words in Aramaic, of course, kindly translated by Maurice for me).

Gosh, it is as though Casey had been there, taking notes.

CASEY
Thus Jesus ‘took’ the unleavened ‘bread’, and ‘said a blessing’, a blessing of God, not of the bread. He ‘broke’ it and started to share it out, with his interpretation of it. His actual words were something very like this:
nesubhū! denāh hū’ gishmī.
Take! This it/is body-my.


CARR
I think Casey must have bought the commemorative DVD of the event that Jesus was selling to be able to tell us Jesus's actual words in Aramaic.

Or possibly Maurice is just psychic.

Or nuts.

After all, Casey knows not only what Jesus had said, but knows that Jesus waited until they had all had a big drink before saying it.

CASEY
Jesus next took a large enough cup to be passed round the whole group. He blessed God again, and they all drank some of the wine before he interpreted it. Jesus then began the symbolic interpretation of the wine as his blood, probably using the Aramaic words demī denāh, literally ‘blood-my this’. There is again no direct Aramaic equivalent for ‘is’. The symbolic context is too strong for anyone to have seriously felt that they had drunk blood. At the same time, this was a potential problem, sensibly reduced by giving the interpretation after they had all drunk from the common cup.

CARR
This is just nuts.

On related news, Banquo waited until everybody was seated at the table before appearing to Macbeth.

hjalti

Wow Steven! New testament scholarship sure is advanced if it can give us the exact words spoken by Jesus during the last supper!

Steven Carr

No wonder Casey regards Carrier as an amateur.

Can Carrier tell us the exact Aramaic of what was said at the Last Supper? Can he? I think not. Amateur!

There was a lot of fuss recently about newspapers hacking people's phone calls.

Why didn't the newpapers just get Casey to tell them what the alleged hacking victims had said , during their phone calls?

Vorkosigan

Look, this maybe is a very calculated book. I didn't understand it completely until I read Carrier and then the responses to him.

Ehrman simply ignores the existence of mythicism that is not atheist, or when he comments on it, doesn't report that it is atheist. As I recall there's no mention of the religious position of Harpur or Freke and Gandy. The Dutch Radicals, who produced ministers who were also mythicists and felt, like Harpuer and F&G, that historicist Christianity had gone wrong, are ignored (this also reduces the number of mythicist scholars enabling them to look more forlorn). Ignoring the Dutch Radicals also enables him to ignore Hermann Detering, a modern scholar and a devout Christian and mythicist.

The result: he's created an entirely artificial construct: Jesus scholars vs the New Atheists. It's a really brilliant move to discredit mythicism by making it driven by atheism. The crappiness of the book is there to drive responses -- and the insults to provoke rants -- which then discredit the responses. The real question is whether Ehrman did it on purpose.

Carrier fell right into the trap.....

Vorkosigan