Wallener

As someone with no dog in this fight I have to say - Juliana, you are presenting a very negative view of Carotta and his work. If your purpose is to promote the book, this potential reader (at least) is getting quite turned off by the tone and (lack of) content of your posts.

Carotta is web-savvy enough to put up a website. Why does he not come here himself and explain/defend his own work?

Juliana

I came here to point to and then discuss this epochal discovery because I though there might be interested people especially on an Infidels' board.
As for my tone, well read Vorkosigan's posts. He was the one who without reading Carotta's work, used words like nonsense, cr**, incompetent etc.
But by now people have seen what his "expertise" is. Is this website a Vork fan club?

I guess he has better things to do. And why should he come here to explain or defend it. There doesn't seem to be much interest here and nobody attacked it.
It is impossible to talk about his work without people reading the book. More than half of it is online. When you read that and don't find it interesting, fine. If you do you can either get the book immediately or wait until next year and read the rest of it online. Then there is a basis for discussion.
So maybe I'll look in on here next year again.
For those who have specific questions Carotta has a Forum and he can also be contacted by email.

Dominus Paradoxum

Um, waa... ?

Under the assumption that the historical Jesus was not really a divine miracle worker, how are we to understand that he launched a religion that spanned the Roman Empire in so sort a time, and that, if Bart Erhman is to be believed, had an extreme diversity of beliefs as far back as the records go? It seems to me that one of the best arguments for mythicism is that there's no plausible scenario for how relatively unremarkable man could have started such a widespread and diverse movement.

freigeister

Turn this around and you have the answer: the only plausible scenario for how such a widespread and diverse movement got started is an absolutely remarkable man.

Wallener

I see it the other way around: the only way a story lives this long is if it is ungrounded.

Plausibility allows for refutability. Something originated in myth is free from the clutches of historicity, no matter how many holes are dug in the ground. The odds are extremely remote anyone will ever prove Moses or Abraham did or didn't exist and did or didn't do the acts attributed to them. That's one reason why those stories live, while Zeus died the moment someone climbed Mt Olympus and found it deserted.

Where a certain vociferous segment of Christianity goes of the rails, IMO, is in trying to literalize or de-mythicize the Jesus figure.

Dominus Paradoxum

Two problems:

a) The Gospel accounts, especially the resurrection narratives, are contradictory. b) According to Price and others, the ethical teachings teachings were not that novel.

Also, why would such a figure spark so many contradictory beliefs concerning himself? According to Ehrman, there was no was no consensus on orthodoxy in the early centuries, and in some places "heresies" were the most prevalent from the beginning. Why would this be so, especially if Jesus himself prayed for a unified flock? If anyone's faith is even as great as a mustard seed, their prayer is supposed to be answered. Was Jesus's faith not as great as a mustard seed?

Amaleq13

You contradict your first sentence with your second. The origins scholarship really doesn't help the HJ quest. If anything, it tends to undermine the notion that anything historically reliable can be obtained from the Gospel stories. Neither you nor the portions of Carotta available online exhibit an awareness of the content of the scholarship relevant to Vorkosigan references in his critique of Carotta's efforts.

Amaleq13

There was interest until some of the specifics available online were considered and found to be poorly supported by evidence as well as failing to address the existing explanations for the origins of the text.

No, it is a forum that respects well-structured arguments based on solid evidence and an adequate grasp of the relevant research.

That makes no sense if each piece of his total argument is sound. I don't know of any credible work that cannot withstand having its parts examined outside of the entire argument. If the parts aren't sound, the conclusion cannot be reliable and the parts we've seen are clearly not sound.

Yuri Kuchinsky

YURI:
This is what I've been telling the Mythicists for a long time already. The ultimate challenge for them is to produce a believable story of how the early Christianity came to be, if one assumes there was no HJ.

So far, they failed miserably, including Doherty...

This is why I don't take the Mythicists seriously. It is all hot air, AFAIAK.

You don't address my point at all, but instead trying to change the subject.

The conventional story is that of a man starting a cult movement, getting killed, with his cult continuing to grow after his death. This happens all the time in the real world. No need to explain anything.

But the Mythicists sure need to do a bit of explaining... They haven't even started to produce a coherent story of how the early Christianity came to be.

Yuri.

Dominus Paradoxum

All the time eh? Try giving me some examples. The only cult movement to come close to Christianity is Scientology, and they had the benefit of printing presses, videos, and other paraphenalia unavailable to the early Christians. And most cults have pretty "distinctive" beliefs, such as flying saucers trailing the hale bopp comet. According to Price and Thompson, nothing Jesus taught was very distinctive; most of his teachings had parallels in culture of that time.