Steven Carr

'About' Peter?

But Ehrman claimed that Archarya says it was a statue of Peter himself.

Don is making himself look very foolish.

Toto

Carrier has written two books, one of which will be published tomorrow IIRC, to explain why Ehrman's evidence is not as compelling as mythicist arguments.

Carrier is a professional historian, and his judgment is that the mistakes are not inconsequential. Each one by itself might be corrected, but the pattern shows a lack of research and attention to detail.

Evidently, there weren't any, in a book that was supposed to put the matter to rest.

GakuseiDon

Okay.

hjalti

I haven't read Ehrman's book (or, Odin forbid, Acharya's book!), but from what I've seen you could interpret him as saying that Acharya made up the statue's connection with Peter but not the existence of the statue itself.

Gakuseidon, you have read Doherty's works carefully, what do you think of this point:

aa5874

Ehrman has inadvertently brought the Third Quest to an end. It is clear the HJ experiment is a complete disaster.

Ehrman has shown in his book that the HJ argument is merely an attempt to demonise his opponents instead of presenting credible sources and evidence for an historical Jesus.

An HJ cannot be defended. Ehrman has proven it.

For the years I have been on this forum, Ehrman's book has received probably the very worst review from PEERS that I have ever seen.

When Carrier stated that Ehrman was incompetent then I was vindicated.

The Third Quest for an HJ has come to an end in disaster, finally. Ehrman ended it.

I am extremely delighted that Ehrman wrote his book that ended the HJ charade.

Zaphod

I see the Historicist Polemics Collective is already in full triage mode!:devil1:

And, contrary to Stephan's rather generous characterization that Carrier is merely "gnawing at the margins", the carnage that I witnessed is a spine-scraping evisceration of the very bona fides of Biblical Studies as a serious discipline in general and Bart Ehrman as a professional scholar in particular.

Ehrman was exposed not as a "heavyweight fighter" who's half-hearted effort was merely sloppy or careless, but rather as a spectacularly uninformed and intellectually-irresponsible apologist.

Indeed, this single effort of Ehrman - who was as highly-regarded and esteemed as anyone in his discipline - calls into question the very academic legitimacy of Christian education institutions ( Ehrman has a BA (1978), MDiv (1981), PhD (1985) from the Moody Bible Institute, Wheaton College, and Princeton Theological Seminary) and whether the entire field of Biblical Studies, as Hector Avalos questioned, even meets the academic standards of the secular university tradition.

Ehrman, a Biblical scholar, who, like his sometime partner in crime, James McGrath, has no qualms about claiming the mantle of historian when it suits him, has had the paucity of his methods, and the sheer, rank hypocrisy of his disdain for the bona fides of mythicists like Earl Doherty, exposed for all the world to see by a real historian, Richard Carrier.

I don't imagine that Ehrman will characterize him as merely having a degree "in Classics" again.

Seriously, those of you with academic positions - if you were the Dean at UNC (where Ehrman is currently the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies) and happened to be following this exchange - would you have Ehrman into your office for a serious chat about the university's reputation?

GakuseiDon

Yes, it is clear what Ehrman is stating. It is bizarre that Carrier would jump on such a point, since Acharya S did the same thing to him recently.

I haven't read Ehrman's book, so I'd have to see the context. But it sounds close to the same criticism that I made in my review of Doherty's "Jesus: Neither God Nor Man". Readers of Doherty's books come away without realising how controversial Doherty's views are, on pagan beliefs about a "World of Myth", on mystery religions, etc. If that is what Ehrman means by "not a single one of these scholars agrees with his overarching thesis", then I would agree with Ehrman. Doherty does not state that there is not a single scholar of pagan thought or mystery religions who agrees that the pagans thought the way he needs in order for his theories to fly. Since such scholarship has nothing to do with the historical Jesus, it is a big strike against him, in my view.

Neil Godfrey seems to think that Ehrman uses "overarching thesis" to mean "no historical Jesus", which seems unlikely to me. But if Godfrey is correct (and he has read Ehrman's book where I have not), then Ehrman is wrong. Doherty does note that the authorities he uses believe in a historical Jesus (though to me it is usually to downplay their scholarship where they don't agree with Doherty.)

aa5874

I have Ehrman's book and it is AWFUL, and full of logical fallacies. Carrier is absolute correct. "Did Jesus Exist?" is a product of incompetence.

Grog

I'm surprised that there has been so much focus on the [peter/~peter] statue [in/~in] the Vatican. Actually, I was surprised that Carrier devoted any space to it at all. That points seems to me to be entirely a side issue. To me, Carrier's most damning arguments are:

Carrier makes this point late in his review (maybe read down a bit farther for the good parts), which is his general style.

When I read this claim about "aramaic sources" in the HuffPo piece, I literally fell out of my chair. Aramaic sources written down within a few years of the crucifixion?

Carrier highlights Ehrman's use of a fictional story--a story that is considered by HJ scholars themselves to be fictionalized--to make a case for the HJ. This is absurd method.

I do wish Carrier would have mentioned in his review the way Ehrman misleads readers into thinking that only the last line of 1 Thess 2:13-16 is considered questionable by scholars, when in fact, the critical piece on this was by Pearson who argued that the whole of 1 Thess 2:13-16 is an interpolation. Ehrman only asserts a minimalist case (borrowing from the tactic used, I imagine, by those hoping to save the TF from the dustbin), leaving lay readers to believe (and I've encountered already here on freeratio such lay people) that it is only the very last line of this passage that is questionable. Ehrman does not engage Pearson, he only asserts against consensus his view in this instance.

Nor does Ehrman engage Ehrman on the Kephas/Petros question in Galatians, other than to say he has changed his mind due to the probability of the coincidence. Yes, I agree. But that still leaves open the Kephas/Petros question with no resolution. Ehrman was entirely correct in his previous view that these passages are not related, that one can easily read them as relating to different people. So what happened here? This seems to suggest the fingerprints of interpolator. AT least, it seems to me, the question ought to be open. That alone should cause us to question the integrity of this document, lessening the importance of the "brother of the Lord" descriptor for James. Not that I hold an interpolationist view here, but it is certainly a possibility. (Weighing that vs. Carrier's argument that it is a simple designation for "Christian," I lean toward the latter, but it is important to point out that these are mutually exclusive. IF this is an interpolation then it can't be that it just is meant to be "Christian." So, if Carrier is right, it seems to me to rule out the possibility of interpolation in this case). At any rate, Ehrman, in his case, is just sloppy, not closing the logical loopholes he opens up.

So I think Carrier could have gone further down the road in his review of Ehrman, but I think what he demonstrates is sufficient to conclude that Ehrman's book is next to useless. USEFUL maybe for the purposes of holding it out as thebest the HJ hypothesis has to offer as a rebuttal to mythicism. There are better HJ books out there. In this, I rather follow aa. I think, as I have said, this is a watershed moment for Jesus studies. I gave one of my previous posts the title "Paradigm Lost." Of course, it is far too early to call that game, but I think the first shot has been fired and after some funerals here and there, we will see things start to shift.

I really don't know how Ehrman recovers from this. Does he just ignore this embarrassment and move on? Does he entrench and defend his claims for "Aramaic Sources?" I think that would put him on the level of some of the worst apologists. I would like to see him publish that one in the HTR or JBL.

AHH--I didn't mean to make this a response to AA, but to the OP. my mistake.

Solo

A champ beating up on an invalid, hmmmm.. :constern01: an interesting way of identifying oneself with the aggressor; can you make something up about drowning kittens, Stephan ?

Best,
Jiri