Amaleq13

There are as many, if not more, incompatible proposals of a specific Historical Jesus but I don't see this same reasoning applied to doubt the more general assumption.

freigeister

The whole conflict about who Christ is or isn't can best be understood as a meme war. In order to propagate your particular meme, you have to choose a strategy. It seems, for a variety of reasons, good strategy to attack mythicism first, and later go after the various "Jesus God" memes.

andrewcriddle

Obviously there will be differences in detail between different specific Mythical Jesus proposals, that isn't what I meant.

Using the title of this thread as an example, although neither Doherty nor Carotta believe in a Historical Jesus as ordinarily understood, their specific alternatives appear extremely dissimilar.

(Carotta's proposal may be a bad example because of the particularly sloppy scholarship involved, a better example might be comparing Doherty's proposal to that of Atwill.)

Andrew Criddle

Wallener

The world is a big place. Why not pursue the scholarly path as a joint-venture in one of the major non-christian cultures? India and China are chock-full of solid universities.

Peter Kirby

I wonder whether the Scandinavian universities and/or journals would be receptive. (I know that they do publish in English.) And yes, I think it would be a fine idea for Michael Turton, for example, to publish his work in Chinese if he can. I also know that a lot of Russian scientists are highly skeptical of Western European ancient history and are capable in English.

best,
Peter Kirby

Juliana

"All honest scholars reach a point where they say: as far as my area of expertise is concerned the information is correct, but I cannot speak for the other areas involved. This, of course, allows the dishonest the opportunity to appear as if they know better and claim that everything rests on shaky foundations, giving overly cautious decision makers on historical and religious questions in the media an excuse for not touching that hot potato themselves, but leaving it to others." (from the Introduciton to 'Jesus was Caesar')

Apart from having studied philosophy and linguistics among other things Carotta speaks 10 languages fluently and has good proficiency in 10 more.
I'd really like to know who you people here think you are make judgements like the one above?

Chris Weimer

Speaking 10 languages (especially since most of them are modern) has nothing to do with how well your scholarship is.

Amaleq13

As Carotta has chosen to write a book for public consumption, as opposed to scholarly consideration, it would seem that any member of the public capable of reading it should be considered qualified to render a judgment.

Since Mr. Criddle is a published biblical scholar, that actually makes him overqualified.

Juliana

Mr. Carotta has chosen to write a highly learned book which can be understood by the interested lay-person nevertheless. And different from many uninspiring books written for a small circle of adepts who consider themselves oh-so-prudent this one is written entertainingly at the same time. Few are able to do that, that is a sign of true education. But don't worry, it is scholarly enough, obviously it is too much already for wanna-be experts like our Vorkosigan (who doesn't even know Greek, how is one supposed to do serious NT-studies without mastership in that language? Why didn't he learn that language before he started messing around with Mark?). Much of the scholarly part is in the notes. Go ahead and read them if you can, they are online, before commenting on things you have no clue of.

Vorkosigan

Hey, great, my wife speaks 14. Does that qualify her to write a book about Jesus? I mean, she knows as much about the scholarship as Carotta apparently does -- nil -- and speaks even more languages.

I'm someone who took the time to interact with the scholarship -- unlike Carotta -- and focus strongly on methodology -- again unlike Carotta.

But you know, my entire book is online. Carotta is welcome to annihilate if he likes. The index page is at:

http://users2.ev1.net/~turton/GMark/GMark_index.html

Vorkosigan