aa5874

But that is precisely the problem. You have NOT read the books yet is making comments.

stephan huller

There certainly was no cock worship in the Christian church. Nor was this object important in the religion. I needn't read the Kebra Negast to help determine that Rastafarianism is silly. I have taken enough Caribbean vacations to get a grasp of this smoke-induced delirium.

Sheshbazzar

What then, is the official Stephan Huller explanation for what this object actually is?

where and when it originated?

what it represents?

And WHY for heavens sake, is it in the possession of the Church?

Is there any evidence that it has ever belonged to any religious organization other than the Catholic Christian Church?

Once these questions are actually satisfactorily answered, then there will perhaps be reason to ignore it.

Until then it is going to continue to stand out like a Priest with a unconcealed hard on.

Iskander

Academics in the field of religion are all, apparently, indistinguishable.


,
“We all knew Carrier was cocky and overly sure of himself. However, publicly denigrating the paper of professional scholars in an area in which you yourself are a rank amateur with demonstrated incompetence disqualifies you from consideration as a serious intellectual....................

But there's another problem with Carrier, and that is that he's just plain wrong, and is an amateur hack who doesn't know what he's doing but pretends he does. Tim McGrew demonstrates Carrier's incompetence in probability theory on a thread here:”


http://www.amazon.com/Richard-Carrie...sin=055277331X

GakuseiDon

It appears to have been collected by Cardinal Albani, an 18th C "patron of art and artists", who "built the Villa Albani (1760) and filled it with treasures of antique sculpture and other precious relics of Greek and Roman art". Looks like he left some of his collection to the Vatican; presumably this was one of them. This link discusses Priapus generally, and also briefly mentions the "Savior of the World" item.

Sheshbazzar

And the reason the Church has not simply turned this particular non-Christian relic over to a secular museum?

GakuseiDon

That's not the weirdness. Acharya S actually apologies for the ambiguity of her statement. She says that the Priapus image has nothing to do with Peter (though all that other text associating Peter to 'peter' and 'cock' seems to suggest otherwise). The weirdness is that Carrier agrees that Acharya S appears to be making that interpretation, and then he misreads Ehrman's response, even though Ehrman is making the same conclusion as Carrier.

Here is what Carrier writes again:

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)...

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).

Leaving aside Acharya S's admission of ambiguity for a moment, look at what they are both claiming. Carrier thinks that Acharya S's interpretation of the object itself to be a symbol of Peter. Obviously Ehrman has come to the same conclusion. Carrier states that the statue exists, but it has nothing to do with Peter. Ehrman says that there is "no penis-nosed statue of Peter the cock". Both views are correct. Even Acharya S believes the same! And that's all there is to it, as far as I can see.

Carrier goes on to write:

But it’s existence appears to be beyond dispute. She did not make that up. The reason this error troubles me is that it is indicative of the carelessness and arrogance Ehrman exhibits throughout this book: like Freke & Gandy, he often doesn’t check his facts, and clearly did little to no research. This makes the book extremely unreliable. A reader must ask, if he got this wrong, what other assertions in the book are false? And since making sure to get details like this right is the only useful purpose this book could have had, how can we credit this book as anything but a failure?

As much as I respect Carrier, he can make some bone-headed errors at times. This is a non-issue. It would be easy enough to rejig the quote above to make it reflect Carrier's review.

jdl

The review did read more like a laundry list of Ehrman's errors than a critique of his larger arguments. But I suspect his purpose was mainly to discourage people from reading the book, and in that respect it's probably an effective review.

Anyway, if we're still talking about our favourite lines from the review, the one I thought was an absolute howler was:

Substitute “Jew” for “Christian” and Ehrman just refuted himself.

The succinctness brings a tear to my eye.

Joseph

aa5874

Whatever Carrier thinks of AS is already known but now Carrier is dealing with Ehrman and states Ehrman is incompetent.

This is extremely devastating when Carrier claimed he expected Ehrman to produce a good book.

Adam

Yes, that quite surprised me as well. I immediately posted #121 to
Bart Ehrman's new book - did my prophecy come true?

in which I speculated that Ehrman had been reading several of my recent posts harking back to my thread on Gospel Eyewitnesses. I soon recalled that several academics (that Ehrman did not bother to cite) were saying that, Maurice Casey and James Crossley.

See also my #54 in Richard Carrier blogs about Ehrman's article for three early sources in Aramaic.

Also my #113 in Abe reviews Ehrman's "Did Jesus Exist?":
Ehrman is saying there are seven sources, without ever committing to my thesis that there are seven eyewitnesses. He even says three may be from the 30's. My thesis on my Gospel Eyewitnesses supports that. See my summary in Post #526 in the first five paragraphs:
Gospel Eyewitnesses #526