Eckz

Uh I'm not sure about the accuracy of some of your statements, but you forgot to address the point he made about Paul not thinking of Jesus as a real person.

Yeah I don't think that's accurate, can you give me some examples? Even if a few things were written down much later, I would guess that the average was much less than 200 years.

Ted Hoffman

luvluv,
You are the first individual that I have encountered who bases the validity of a theory based on the duration of life of the people that favour the theory. You might as well go to an old citizens home and cobble all the theories you find they espouse.

It would look like a waste of bandwidth for me to say this but I have to: the strength of a theory must be determined on the merits of the theory itself.

And you are also wrong about the ages of the people that are mythicists. Thomas L Thompson, author of The Messiah Myth (2005) is hardly ÿoung. Neither is Price, author of Incredible Shrinking Son of Man (2003), who is, for all intents and purposes, a mythicist, though he has not stated it openly, and many more.

Carrier's brilliance and erudition has made him gain deserved respect even among scholars. Your presumption that because one is young they are likely to be impressionable or inattentive to detail is in fact wrong. Being young actually means that one is not weighed down by old paradigms that they have been comitted to for a lifetime and a young person is therefore much more easily able to weigh the evidence more objectively. In this light, being youthful is therefore is actually a strength, contrary to your belittling dismissals.

Plus, junk theories emerge from 'óld' people every day. So age has got nothing to do with it. Shut up old man, many an ancient hero spat to a babbling old man. The implication being that old people had infirm minds, so you are swinging a double-edged sword by attacking the ages of people advancing a theory and leaving the theory intact. We here prefer to weigh the evidence against the theory, not the ages of proponents. If you have an argument, bring it.

Q does not say any such thing. Q is, by definition, a sayings source. There are only two earthly places mentioned in Q: Jerusalem (Q 13:34-35) - which is mentioned in a lament and the placement of John the Baptist's activity in the area of the Jordan (Q 3:3).
Wrong.
That would be QS28. Do you understand what a sayings source means?
Do you understand what a sayings source means?

freigeister

Paul did indeed think of Jesus as a real person, as I and many other people on this forum have argued many times (link). Please review previous discussions before assuming arguments have not been addressed.

I'm talking about the Talmud. Again, please review earlier discussions.

luvluv

Teddy Pender-Hoffman:

I was just kidding about the age thing. I don't think I ever said that mythicism was a young-man's position, I was only noting how young some of the famous young skeptics and Christian apologists are/look. Methinks you overreact a bit. (Did you read the bit where I said that I am myself younger than everybody I was talking about?)

I must not if the instances I link don't count. In my copy of Q, there are big portions where Jesus is said to do things and talk to people, most notably John the Baptist.

Why doesn't this count as biographical information?

freigeister

What is the source for this statement by Epictetus?

luvluv

Interesting, Mr. Doherty. I'm not going to tie you down with responses, I'm really behind on this. Suffice it to say I don't buy it. I don't think there are any problems that you mention that are truly serious enough to go the step of saying there was never any Jesus at all, as opposed to a developing tradition around Jesus. In a place where you couldn't throw a rock without hitting a wiseman/prophet/messiah/savior/cult god, it's hard to believe anybody had to go to the trouble of inventing a man out of whole cloth. I do intend to give your book a read one day. One final question when you get the chance, why do you think that few scholars even seem to think your thesis merits rebuttal? I don't buy it, obviously, but from what precious little I know, I think it deserves to be rebutted by the big names.

Amaleq13

Jesus never speaks to John in Q. He speaks about John in passages intended to establish that John thought Jesus might be "the coming one". The first reference to John has him preaching this "coming one" but some scholars suspect that this may have been borrowed from a story/text belonging to followers of the Baptist and that John was actually referring to God as opposed to the Messiah. Since the questioning scene is based on this preaching, the reliability of the Christian interpretation is crucial.

If it is correct that the preaching of John had nothing to do with the Messiah, then the questioning scene can only be fiction presumably intended to sway followers of the dead Baptist to switch teams.

Wads4

I agree; I got my copy via the National Secular Society (U.K.)--and the sound -track is loud and off-putting. ( and Richard Carrier is so young!)

luvluv

Yeah, well, regardless of whether he's talking to or about John, he's talking. And you have to exist to talk, is my point. But my biggest problem about all of this stuff is that there aren't any checks and balances to it. With science, you can speculate a bunch of crackpot theories but eventually you have to test them against some kind of empirical experiment. As a layman, what strikes me is how much the "experts" disagree with each other, that all their interpretations of the documents line-up fairly well with their prior metaphysical biases, that there's no real independent resource to see who's right and who's wrong, and that basically, everybody ends up with the Jesus (or lack thereof) they desire.

I'm of the opinion that there's enough data out there and enough plausible interpretations of it to satisfy everybody's pet theories without anybody being irrational or anybody really being able to prove their theories are correct or anybody else's wrong.

Chili

A mystic has lyrical vision and Jesus was a gnostic with noetic vision. He had the mind of Christ, let's say, and was able to call a spade a spade if he wanted to.