Originally Posted by Toto

My impression is that Carrier wants to stick as far as possible to credentialed scholars.

Originally Posted by Toto

The title does not give us enough to work with. What difference would it make?

Are you thinking of the different dating of Paul? or Mark?

My impression is that Carrier wants to stick as far as possible to credentialed scholars. Doherty relies on mainstream scholarship for the most part. If you can construct a case for mythicism based on mainstream scholarship, why go out on a limb?

Originally Posted by outhouse

Carrier has always ran the middle of the road, and just now departing from the safety of the middle.

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Originally Posted by Toto

What is this based on?

Originally Posted by Bingo the Clown-O

The title says it all.

Originally Posted by Carrier

Thank you for cross-posting the whole text of that (I am not a Yahoo Groups member and do not dig through other threads for arguments anyway, so this is the best way to get me to consider it; although I am familiar with similar arguments from Price against the authenticity of Galatians as a whole).

I would prefer to see a peer reviewed article claiming this before taking it seriously. If it has not gone through peer review, then I have to vet the whole thing myself, and that’s a huge task (for example, I have not read the entire works of Tertullian and Irenaeus back to front checking whether this specific claim holds up), and I don’t have the time to undertake a thousand huge tasks like that. I have to be very selective as to which arguments I will vet and reconstruct my own defense of.

Indeed I prefer to rely as much as possible on established or indisputable facts or peer reviewed work. That doesn’t mean I reject all else as false, it just means I don’t think mythicism should require anything else at this point.

So I can only briefly vet an argument like this…if I see too many things wrong with it, I see it as inefficient to spend any more time examining it. And this has too many things wrong with it.

First, I know it was only an aside, but I don’t find very persuasive arguments like “Me thinks he doth protest too much,” precisely because many a writer who finds himself in a corner does indeed protest too much. Paul has clearly been accused of something, and he is very keen to defend his account against that accusation. I don’t see his protests as out of joint with the obvious aims and context of that chapter.

Second, Tertullian is not talking about “seeing” Peter but about Peter’s support of Paul’s position on circumcision, and not just Peter’s, but all the apostles. Thus Paul’s previous visit to Peter has nothing whatever to do with that, and so there is no reason for Tertullian even to allude to it. Likewise Irenaeus.

Third, I do not find it implausible that Paul, then just one apostle among many, might have visited Peter and James alone for only a fortnight. Particularly if Paul was avoiding the Jewish authorities (who might have it in for him owing to his apostasy from their prosecution team over to helping the prosecuted; Paul sometimes had to sneak around in Damascus, his own home town, for much the same reason: 2 Cor. 11:32-33).

Originally Posted by Toto

My impression is that Carrier wants to stick as far as possible to credentialed scholars. Doherty relies on mainstream scholarship for the most part. If you can construct a case for mythicism based on mainstream scholarship, why go out on a limb?