Re: Bart D. Ehrman books - highly recommended
Laura, caution, caution!
I am sure you have heard of Richard Carrier. Surely, you have read his (in/famous) dissection of Ehrman which started when Carrier called out Ehrman in the Huffington Post for egregious errors and inaccuracies? Ehrman's response to Carrier's critique has been continuously dismal. Ehrman has shown no indication he is prepared to correct his errors.
Carrier recommends
Jesus Interrupted but lambastes
Did Jesus Exist:
Ehrman’s book was so full of gaffes it is simply unsalvageable, and as I said, it resembles in this respect some of the worst Jesus myth literature, which I can’t recommend to people either, as it will misinform them far more than inform them. (Scholars can also correct their errors. If they are inclined to. Ehrman, so far, does not seem at all inclined to.)
I could not list all the errors, fallacies, and misleading statements I marked up in my copy of his book. There were hundreds of them, averaging at least one a page. This shocked me, because all his previous works were not like this. They are superb, and I still recommend them, especially Jesus Interrupted and Forged. Their errors are few, and well drowned out by their consistent utility and overall accuracy in conveying the mainstream consensus on the issues they address (Interrupted is an excellent primer to get anyone up to speed on where the field of New Testament Studies now stands, and Forged is an excellent summary of why that mainstream consensus accepts that many of the documents in the New Testament are forgeries, and why that was known to be deceitful even back then, despite attempts to claim the contrary).
But Did Jesus Exist? was a travesty. In my review I chose a representative selection of the worst mistakes, in order to illustrate the problem. … Those errors are examples of consistent trends throughout the book, of careless thinking, careless writing, and often careless research. Which means there are probably many more errors than I saw, because for much of the book I’m trusting him to tell me correctly what he found from careful research, but the rest of the book illustrates that I can’t trust him to correctly convey information or to have done careful research.
Carrier calls Ehrman out on lies, false claims, umpteen logical fallacies, all individually exposed, ignoring of relevant scholarship, bungling a treatment of a key source. Carrier is meticulous in detailing the reasons for his positions, his whole method is exemplary of the way such discussion - any discussion - should be conducted. He keeps up the same level of excellence throughout the comments section on his blog, replying to anyone who writes in, whatever their level of informedness.
I thoroughly recommend: http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/1794. This page logs the entire saga of their interaction, which is ongoing (Ehrman only dares to reply behind the paywall on his own blog!)
If you haven't come across this, I'm sure you're going to love it. It's continuous coruscation. I was held up for weeks in the pages of that blog.
As for Maurice Atwill… Scholarship operating at a crank level. And this is not a casual term of abuse, it's objective:
Carrier said:
Joseph Atwill is one of those crank mythers I often get conflated with. Mythicists like him make the job of serious scholars like me so much harder, because people see, hear, or read them and think their nonsense is what mythicism is. They make mythicism look ridiculous. So I have to waste time (oh by the gods, so much time) explaining how I am not arguing anything like their theories or using anything like their terrible methods,
Atwill is best known as the author of Caesar’s Messiah (subtitle: “The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus,” Roman meaning the Roman imperial family…yeah). In this Atwill argues “Jesus [is] the invention of a Roman emperor” and that the entire (?) New Testament was written by “the first-century historian Flavius Josephus” who left clues to his scheme by littering secret hidden coded “parallels” in his book The Jewish War.
… Historically, Atwill’s thesis is more or less a retooled version of the old Pisonian Conspiracy Theory, by which is not meant the actual Pisonian conspiracy (to assassinate Nero), but a wildly fictitious one in which the Piso family invented Christianity (and fabricated all its documents) through its contacts with the Flavian family, and thence Josephus…
This pseudo-historical nonsense is over a century old by now, first having been proposed (in a somewhat different form) by Bruno Bauer in Christ and the Caesars in 1877 (Christus und Caesaren). It has been revamped a dozen times since. Atwill is simply the latest iteration (or almost–there is a bonkers Rabbi still going around with an even wilder version). Atwill’s is very much like Bible Code crankery, where he looks for all kinds of multiple comparisons fallacies and sees conspiracies in all of them, rather than the inevitable coincidences (or often outright non-correspondences) that they really are. Everything confirms his thesis, because nothing could ever fail to. Classic nonfalsifiability. He just cherry picks and interprets anything to fit, any way he wants.
Why the Priors Are Dismally Low on This
There are at least eight general problems with his thesis, which do not refute it but establish that it has a very low prior probability, and therefore requires exceptionally good evidence to be at all credible:
And so to Atwill's Cranked up Jesus - http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/4664.
Which is as thorough a demolition of a hypothesis as you could wish for. Carrier includes the multipart conversation he carried out with Atwill himself. Atwill makes an increasing hash of defending his position and digs himself a hole so deep he gets to Australia and falls out the other end.
MacDonald gets a thumbs up from Carrier: His review of
The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark - http://infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/homerandmark.html.
carrier said:
I assumed it would be yet another intriguing but only barely defensible search for parallels, stretching the evidence a little too far-tantalizing, but inconclusive. What I found was exactly the opposite. MacDonald's case is thorough, and though many of his points are not as conclusive as he makes them out to be, when taken as a cumulative whole the evidence is so abundant and clear it cannot be denied. And being a skeptic to the thick, I would never say this lightly. Several scholars who reviewed or commented on it have said this book will revolutionize the field of Gospel studies and profoundly affect our understanding of the origins of Christianity, and though I had taken this for hype, after reading the book I now echo that very sentiment myself.
…What is especially impressive is the vast quantity of cases of direct and indirect borrowing from Homer that can be found in Mark. One or two would be interesting, several would be significant. But we are presented with countless examples, and this is as cumulative as a case can get.
… Having read this book, I am now certain that the historicity of the Gospels and Acts is almost impossible to establish. The didactic objectives and methods of the authors have so clouded the truth with literary motifs and allusions and parabolic tales that we cannot know what is fact and what fiction. I do not believe that this entails that Jesus was a myth, however-and MacDonald himself is not a mythicist, but assumes that something of a historical Jesus lies behind the fictions of Mark. Although MacDonald's book could be used to contribute to a mythicist's case, everything this book proves about Mark is still compatible with there having been a real man, a teacher, even a real "miracle worker" in a subjective sense, or a real event that inspired belief in some kind of resurrection, and so on, which was then suitably dressed up in allegory and symbol.
However, the inevitable conclusion is that we have all but lost this history forever. The Gospels can no longer support a rational belief in anything they allege to have occurred, at least not without external, unbiased corroboration, which we do not have for any of the essential, much less supernatural details of the story … so long as it remains possible, even plausible, that the bulk of Mark is fiction, the contrary belief that it is fact can never be secure.
Carrier is a champion of critical thinking: he argues with every breath that familiarity with cognitive biases, memory errors, fallacy detection and avoidance as working tools is essential for every historian.
For what it's worth, he argues that hitherto the field of biblical study has lacked a methodology that can produce results that survive the closest rational examination, like findings in the field of science. And has evolved a method, based on Bayes mathematical theorem, which can be applied to historical questions in general, but specifically to knotty details in the field of scriptural studies. His Bayesian method is essentially a way of sifting all available evidence, to exclude logical impossibilities, and calculate resultant probabilities to produce an answer with a definite probability weighting. As near to certainty as you're going to get in the field of bible studies?
Carrier documents how he moved to an extreme mythicist position: there is no proof for a historical Jesus that he can see that withstands examination. The wider Christian world is blithely unaware that the evidence of for Jesus's existence hangs by the merest thread. To be precise: evidence of historicity hangs on a reference to Jesus via a reference to James being his brother.
The statement is in Mark, which is itself an inherently doubtful source - a hagiography full of fictions, which claims the 'sun was deleted for three hours'.
Carrier said:
Ironically, McGrath is only digging the grave of historicity. By demonstrating that it can only be defended by illogical and disingenuous argumentation devoid of any coherent relation to what historicity’s critics actually say, eventually people will notice that this means historicity cannot be defended by any honest and competent argument.
Just look at all the evidence:
Josephus - forgery + hearsay = 0
Tacitus - hearsay + possible forgery = 0
Gal. 1:19 - possible interpolation + possible misinterpretation = 0
0 + 0 + 0 = 0
See, absolutely no room for doubting the existence of Jesus at all..."He most certainly did exist" - Bart Ehrman.
It sounds as if you have been trending in the direction of a Jesus story which is myth deriving from a person whose existence is well attested. Julius Caesar… Hm… Have you considered having your synopsis peer-reviewed for basic plausibility? It could literally save you years of work.
