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Richard Carrier's "On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt" is great. He wrote about Q (he isn't a fan) in his blog, which seems to be s

Richard Carrier's "On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt" is great. He wrote about Q (he isn't a fan) in his blog, which seems to be struggling at the moment. https://www.richardcarrier.info https://www.richardcarrier.info

nemo 2y ago
For the record, Carrier is a crank who you should have also many good reasons to doubt his word on topics in ancient history since he always works with an agenda, evidence for him is only useful when it fits. Contemporary historians don't take him seriously, and no one really should, his work isn't serious.
PittleyDunkin 2y ago
No serious historian of which i'm aware questions the existence of Jesus despite the apparent dearth of any contemporaneous evidence. His divinity? Sure, absolutely. But he's hardly the only radical eschatological/messianic jew to emerge from the period, and believing he was fabricated involves making even larger assumptions that there also isn't contemporaneous evidence for. Occam's razor points pretty clearly towards a historical Jesus (as unsatisfying as that answer is).
- azangru 2y ago
  > No serious historian of which i'm aware questions the existence of Jesus I am not sure what makes Carrier a non-serious historian. He is trained in ancient history and applies conventional historical methodology to his studies (perhaps the only non-conventional addition is that he tries to add Bayesian statistics to it). He studies and cites the available primary sources. He researches and cites the available scholarly literature. He lays out his arguments both in his book (published under peer review, which he will be the first to inform his audience :-) and now in its second edition) and in various talks. He has participated in a number of debates, in which supposedly serious historians had a chance to demonstrate, with evidence, the error of his ways; yet, to my knowledge, none ever did. Bart Ehrman refuses to engage with him directly; so they resort to sniping at each other in their blogs or youtube appearances. > But he's hardly the only radical eschatological/messianic jew to emerge from the period, and believing he was fabricated involves making even larger assumptions that there also isn't contemporaneous evidence for. As Carrier would point out, Jesus wouldn't be the first figure thought to be historical, who, upon further scrutiny, would turn out to be fictional. Moses is one example of such a figure who was believed to have existed; yet, it seems that the consensus among modern historians is that he was an invention. Another example much closer to us is Ned Ludd, the supposed originator of the Luddite movement, whom many treated as historical (see e.g. Encyclopædia Britannica from 1911), yet who now, historians agree, was fictional. Also, Carrier doesn't claim to have disproven the historicity of Jesus. What he is saying is that he thinks there is a pretty strong case to be made against it, and that he would give about a 60% chance to him being a myth.
- azangru 2y ago
  > Occam's razor points pretty clearly towards a historical Jesus Too late for me to edit my sibling comment; but it just occurred to me that you are using the same methodology as Carrier to come to conclusions about historical facts. You call it Occam's razor. Carrier calls it Bayesian probability. But the idea is the same: what is the most likely (most probable) interpretation of the presented evidence. It is funny that, appealing to the same methodology, you arrive at different conclusions.
  - PittleyDunkin 2y ago
    Occam's razor is not an argument from probability, it's an argument from simplicity. Why invent a conspiracy (or a myth) when it's easier to accept the well-propagated narrative emerging from a single point in time and nothing about the situation indicates conspiracy (or myth)? The idea of assigning probability to any aspect of this question is ridiculous. He's called a crank because the consensus historian opinion is that he'a a crank.
    - azangru 2y ago
      But the argument from simplicity is the same as the argument from probability. The reason that a complex explanation is less probable than a simple one is because a complex explanation contains multiple parts (which is what makes it complex), and the probabilities of each of these parts multiply to produce the probability of the whole, which of course quickly makes this overall probability very small.
      - PittleyDunkin 2y ago
        > But the argument from simplicity is the same as the argument from probability. No, it's not. One is a argument about the semantics of the rhetorics and the other is quantitative dealing with lists of claims about the world. > The reason that a complex explanation is less probable than a simple one is because a complex explanation contains multiple parts (which is what makes it complex), and the probabilities of each of these parts multiply to produce the probability of the whole, which of course quickly makes this overall probability very small. There is no straightforward connection between probability and the complexity of a set of claims. Sometimes probable events are very complex to explain; sometimes highly unlikely events are simple.
nemo 2y ago
This is not taken seriously by most historians because there is some very significant evidence you have to discount in Josephus. He was a Jewish general born right around when Jesus was crucified who worked with sources in Judaea to write his history and he refers to Jesus twice. The first passage is clearly corrupted, but the existence of the corrupted passage is not a random insertion but a replacement of Joesphus' original writing about Jesus. That in itself is still notable as a kind of evidence, even if the original text is lost. The second is a description of the crucifixion of James, Jesus' brother. The second passage is consistent stylistically and isn't doubted as authentic by experts. I believe that Carrier tried to claim it was some other James brother of Jesus whose stories match, but by coincidence or something, I mostly only recall feeling pity for Carrier when I saw what he'd sunk to there. Anyway, the question of historicity is not really important, but sometimes atheists who take on atheism as a new religion rather than dropping a religion will get zealous about arguing about Jesus's historicity. No current working academic historians in ancient history I'm aware of take the position seriously since the Jesus Myth argument is a conspiracy theory that has to explain away a lot of evidence rather than an account that uses the available evidence.
- azangru 2y ago
  Carrier addresses Josephus, both in the On the Historicity of Jesus [0], and in his blog posts [1]. His points, as I understand them, are that: 1) The first Josephus passage — the so called Testimonium Flavianum — is an insertion by Christian scribes. He gives stylistic arguments for why this is the case: both by how dissimilar this passage is from Josephus's style, and by how similar it is to the Gospel of Luke; and 2) In the second passage, which mentions James, "the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ", the reference to Jesus had originally been a marginal note by a Christian scribe that subsequently got interpolated into the main text. This idea of an interpolated marginal note is Carrier's own contribution, first published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Early Christian Studies in 2012. While elegant, is not the only explanation. In his blog [1], Carrier references several recent publications (peer-reviewed, as he likes to emphasize), including one published in Journal of Early Christian History in 2017 by a South African historian Nicholas Peter Legh Allen, who argues that the James passage is a forgery, of which his prime suspect is Origen [2]. So, you can see that Carrier isn't the only one among modern academic historians of antiquity who casts doubt on Josephus passages. --- [0] Josephus and the Testimonia Flaviana in On the Historicity of Jesus, 2014, p. 332-342 [1] https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/12071 https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/12071 [2] Abstract at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/2222582X.2017.1317008 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/2222582X.2017.1.... Full text can be found in: Christian Forgery in Jewish Antiquities: Josephus Interrupted, 2020, of which a pirated pdf exists online

nemo 2y ago

For the record, Carrier is a crank who you should have also many good reasons to doubt his word on topics in ancient history since he always works with an agenda, evidence for him is only useful when it fits. Contemporary historians don't take him seriously, and no one really should, his work isn't serious.

PittleyDunkin 2y ago

No serious historian of which i'm aware questions the existence of Jesus despite the apparent dearth of any contemporaneous evidence. His divinity? Sure, absolutely. But he's hardly the only radical eschatological/messianic jew to emerge from the period, and believing he was fabricated involves making even larger assumptions that there also isn't contemporaneous evidence for. Occam's razor points pretty clearly towards a historical Jesus (as unsatisfying as that answer is).

azangru 2y ago
> No serious historian of which i'm aware questions the existence of Jesus I am not sure what makes Carrier a non-serious historian. He is trained in ancient history and applies conventional historical methodology to his studies (perhaps the only non-conventional addition is that he tries to add Bayesian statistics to it). He studies and cites the available primary sources. He researches and cites the available scholarly literature. He lays out his arguments both in his book (published under peer review, which he will be the first to inform his audience :-) and now in its second edition) and in various talks. He has participated in a number of debates, in which supposedly serious historians had a chance to demonstrate, with evidence, the error of his ways; yet, to my knowledge, none ever did. Bart Ehrman refuses to engage with him directly; so they resort to sniping at each other in their blogs or youtube appearances. > But he's hardly the only radical eschatological/messianic jew to emerge from the period, and believing he was fabricated involves making even larger assumptions that there also isn't contemporaneous evidence for. As Carrier would point out, Jesus wouldn't be the first figure thought to be historical, who, upon further scrutiny, would turn out to be fictional. Moses is one example of such a figure who was believed to have existed; yet, it seems that the consensus among modern historians is that he was an invention. Another example much closer to us is Ned Ludd, the supposed originator of the Luddite movement, whom many treated as historical (see e.g. Encyclopædia Britannica from 1911), yet who now, historians agree, was fictional. Also, Carrier doesn't claim to have disproven the historicity of Jesus. What he is saying is that he thinks there is a pretty strong case to be made against it, and that he would give about a 60% chance to him being a myth.
azangru 2y ago
> Occam's razor points pretty clearly towards a historical Jesus Too late for me to edit my sibling comment; but it just occurred to me that you are using the same methodology as Carrier to come to conclusions about historical facts. You call it Occam's razor. Carrier calls it Bayesian probability. But the idea is the same: what is the most likely (most probable) interpretation of the presented evidence. It is funny that, appealing to the same methodology, you arrive at different conclusions.
- PittleyDunkin 2y ago
  Occam's razor is not an argument from probability, it's an argument from simplicity. Why invent a conspiracy (or a myth) when it's easier to accept the well-propagated narrative emerging from a single point in time and nothing about the situation indicates conspiracy (or myth)? The idea of assigning probability to any aspect of this question is ridiculous. He's called a crank because the consensus historian opinion is that he'a a crank.
  - azangru 2y ago
    But the argument from simplicity is the same as the argument from probability. The reason that a complex explanation is less probable than a simple one is because a complex explanation contains multiple parts (which is what makes it complex), and the probabilities of each of these parts multiply to produce the probability of the whole, which of course quickly makes this overall probability very small.
    - PittleyDunkin 2y ago
      > But the argument from simplicity is the same as the argument from probability. No, it's not. One is a argument about the semantics of the rhetorics and the other is quantitative dealing with lists of claims about the world. > The reason that a complex explanation is less probable than a simple one is because a complex explanation contains multiple parts (which is what makes it complex), and the probabilities of each of these parts multiply to produce the probability of the whole, which of course quickly makes this overall probability very small. There is no straightforward connection between probability and the complexity of a set of claims. Sometimes probable events are very complex to explain; sometimes highly unlikely events are simple.

nemo 2y ago

This is not taken seriously by most historians because there is some very significant evidence you have to discount in Josephus. He was a Jewish general born right around when Jesus was crucified who worked with sources in Judaea to write his history and he refers to Jesus twice. The first passage is clearly corrupted, but the existence of the corrupted passage is not a random insertion but a replacement of Joesphus' original writing about Jesus. That in itself is still notable as a kind of evidence, even if the original text is lost. The second is a description of the crucifixion of James, Jesus' brother. The second passage is consistent stylistically and isn't doubted as authentic by experts. I believe that Carrier tried to claim it was some other James brother of Jesus whose stories match, but by coincidence or something, I mostly only recall feeling pity for Carrier when I saw what he'd sunk to there. Anyway, the question of historicity is not really important, but sometimes atheists who take on atheism as a new religion rather than dropping a religion will get zealous about arguing about Jesus's historicity. No current working academic historians in ancient history I'm aware of take the position seriously since the Jesus Myth argument is a conspiracy theory that has to explain away a lot of evidence rather than an account that uses the available evidence.

azangru 2y ago
Carrier addresses Josephus, both in the On the Historicity of Jesus [0], and in his blog posts [1]. His points, as I understand them, are that: 1) The first Josephus passage — the so called Testimonium Flavianum — is an insertion by Christian scribes. He gives stylistic arguments for why this is the case: both by how dissimilar this passage is from Josephus's style, and by how similar it is to the Gospel of Luke; and 2) In the second passage, which mentions James, "the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ", the reference to Jesus had originally been a marginal note by a Christian scribe that subsequently got interpolated into the main text. This idea of an interpolated marginal note is Carrier's own contribution, first published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Early Christian Studies in 2012. While elegant, is not the only explanation. In his blog [1], Carrier references several recent publications (peer-reviewed, as he likes to emphasize), including one published in Journal of Early Christian History in 2017 by a South African historian Nicholas Peter Legh Allen, who argues that the James passage is a forgery, of which his prime suspect is Origen [2]. So, you can see that Carrier isn't the only one among modern academic historians of antiquity who casts doubt on Josephus passages. --- [0] Josephus and the Testimonia Flaviana in On the Historicity of Jesus, 2014, p. 332-342 [1] https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/12071 https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/12071 [2] Abstract at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/2222582X.2017.1317008 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/2222582X.2017.1.... Full text can be found in: Christian Forgery in Jewish Antiquities: Josephus Interrupted, 2020, of which a pirated pdf exists online