Bart Ehrman has finally composed an extensive response to my critical review of his book. But before that came out, he composed two briefer responses, one to my review of his Huffington Post article and another to my subsequent review of his book. He also briefly punted to another blogger, R.J. Hoffman. In this post I’ll address those latter items. Next I’ll reply to the longer piece (I’ve nearly finished my reply to that, but as I’m now at the Madison Freethought Festival with tons of amazing speakers and excellent liquor, I won’t be able to proof that and post until Sunday evening).

The strangest thing about those latter items is not the alarming-enough fact that they ignore nearly every substantive point in what they are responding to, and focus each on only a single issue, and that one of the least importance (the Hoffmann piece likewise doesn’t address anything I actually said). That is strange. But stranger still is that they do not look entirely honest to me. But I’ll just present the evidence and you can decide.

The Deflection Tactic

Ehrman does appear to want to hide the substantive errors and mistakes and fallacies I document, and one strategy he uses to do that is to deflect it all by reframing the debate as being about personal attacks and my being mean to him (when he was so nice to me). This of course has nothing to do with what really matters and just serves the purpose of trying to convince people that all my substantive points about his scholarship are really just personal attacks and since personal attacks are fallacious (being the fallacy of ad hominem), all my points can be dismissed as fallacious. Which may be the first time I’ve ever seen an actual ad hominem fallacy used to rebut a non-existent ad hominem fallacy. He attacks me personally, by claiming I attacked him personally, which I didn’t, and has the gall to then say (correctly) that personal attacks can be ignored as fallacious. Yeah.  Think about that for a minute.

As Dan Finke (Camels with Hammers) observes in “Ehrman Evades Carrier’s Criticisms,” “Ehrman is misrepresenting Carrier’s criticisms as merely personal in nature,” when in fact they were all professional in nature. I pointed out failures of wording, failures of fact, and failures of logic, and showed why these all entail his book cannot be trusted, that his research and writing of it was sloppy and careless, that it fails at its every professed aim, and that he (professionally) doesn’t know what he’s doing here–ironically, considering how much hay he tries to make over the point that the rest of us can’t know what we’re doing because we have the wrong degrees (see the very next point on the Thompson Affair: making hay of this is practically the whole point of that post).

The Thompson Affair

In “Richard Carrier on The Huffington Post Article (1)” (I can no longer find an active link) Ehrman accuses me of being outraged by his daring to defend historicity, which is silly (it’s not like I was surprised he was going to, or that I haven’t read such defenses before from scholars no less prestigious; to the contrary I was, as I said, happily anticipating a really good defense of historicity). This I suppose cures his cognitive dissonance by allowing him to pretend I wasn’t outraged by what I actually said I was outraged by, which was his factual errors and gross misstatements, and how these ensure his article can only seriously misinform the public, the one thing a scholar should aim never to do and should care most about correcting. That he won’t even own up to his errors says more than my article did about our ability to trust him on this issue.

But the main thrust of his piece is an extended chastisement for suggesting Thompson was a New Testament scholar. Let me quote to you Ehrman’s exact words (and those of you who read my article might already notice something odd about this; emphasis added):

Me: “there is not a single mythicist who teaches New Testament or Early Christianity or even Classics at any accredited institution of higher learning in the Western world.” Carrier: Ehrman’s claim “is false: mythicist Thomas Thompson meets every one of Ehrman’s criteria.” So on a very simple level, one might just ask: is it true that Thomas Thompson teaches NT or Early Christianity at an accredited institution? Well, no, he does not. He is an expert on the Hebrew Bible. His books are on the Pentateuch, the history of Israel in the Bronze Age, the alleged lives of the Jewish patriarchs. Now, I suppose someone from outside the field of NT or Early Christian studies might mistake someone with those kinds of expertise as being qualified to address, authoritatively, something having to do with early Christianity. But no one actually in the field would make that kind of mistake. Carrier too, of course, is not trained in these fields and is an outsider to them, so possibly that is why he doesn’t understand the difference.

Okay. Get his point? Now, read the sentence he quotes from me…the full sentence, including the half he mysteriously left out (I have marked it in bold; I provide the rest to show the context, which was more than just this sentence):

[M]ythicist Thomas Thompson meets every one of Ehrman’s criteria–excepting only one thing, he is an expert in Judaism rather than Christianity specifically. And I know Ehrman knows of him. So did he just “forget” when he says he knows of no one who meets his criteria? Or is he being hyper-hyper specific and not allowing even professors of Jewish studies to have a respectable opinion in this matter?

So Ehrman writes an entire article attacking me for not knowing a difference that in fact I explicitly stated in my article and thus clearly fully understood; and Ehrman predicates this attack on a quotation of me that conveniently omits the very material that proves his point moot, or at least misdirected.

Perhaps he has deliberately misquoted me, to make me appear to not know something that in fact I actually stated. My alternative hypothesis is that he misspoke and (yet again) really meant to say that I did indeed recognize and concede this diffence and had instead asked Ehrman for why we should dismiss everything Thompson says on such an account, to which this article is Ehrman’s answer to that question. But then he repeats his misrepresentation of my credentials, suggesting I don’t know the period in question, or the languages, or the documents or the literature on early Christianity. Which is all false. I am adequately trained in all of these. And it is disingenuous of Ehrman to assume Thompson is not, simply because he has a different specialty than Ehrman.

Indeed, contrary to Ehrman’s claim, every historian in my field that I know publishes on all manner of diverse subjects. The idea that (to use Ehrman’s own example) hyper-specializing in “Herodotus” disqualifies you from being competent to research and publish on other authors or subjects is ridiculous, and easily refuted by perusing the teaching subjects and cv’s of prominent historians like W.V. Harris, Erich Gruen, Alan Cameron, or, to pick actual specialists in Herodotean studies, Donald Lateiner or James Romm. Romm, for example, is a specialist in Herodotus and Arrian (among much else), authors 600 years apart, one Greek, one Roman. According to Ehrman, we should ignore Romm’s work on Arrian as being out of his field. Which would be news to Arrian specialists, who all value Romm’s work. When my dissertation advisor, William Harris, wanted to publish a book on Roman anger, he did not say to himself “I have never published on that before, or taught it before, and did not specialize in it when I got my degrees, therefore I am not competent to research and publish on this subject so I should just shut up then.” No, he applied his skills, degrees, and background knowledge to the task of thoroughly researching the subject and publishing a major authoritative work on it. That’s what ancient historians do.

What is alarming is that Ehrman doesn’t know that. For him to claim I don’t “know” that it’s the other way around is just appallingly rich: he is simply proving my point for me, that he really doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and prefers instead to disparage almost all modern scholarship in my field because it is produced by people who don’t specifically teach those subjects and have not gotten hyper-specific degrees in them. His depiction and denunciation of nearly the whole of historical academia is simply absurd. All in his desperate attempt to justify the fact that he misleads his readers and misrepresents his opponents, all in defense of a dogma that he is certain cannot possibly be false, therefore he doesn’t need to take us seriously (despite pretending to). If Romm can do good work in both Herodotus and Arrian, Thompson can (in principle) do good work in both OT and NT studies (the study of the OT does, after all, involve knowledge of second temple Judaism, the very context in which Christianity arose).

Never mind, of course, that all this looks like one big evasion: choosing to respond to my rebuttal to his HuffPo article by addressing this and only this point, which wasn’t even a major point I raised but merely a single aside in my remarks about Ehrman’s chilling remarks against academic freedom (the issue of that section, how his remarks can threaten academic freedom, he completely ignores). What is most galling about this is that my article demonstrates that it is Ehrman who hasn’t done the work necessary to be qualified to discuss this question competently, and unlike Ehrman I did not base this conclusion on what degree he has (I think his degrees should be fully sufficient to make him competent to research and write authoritatively on this), but on the actual evidence of his incompetence. In other words, he has the qualifications, he just didn’t use them. His book is carelessly and irresponsibly and illogically written. But instead of addressing my evidence and arguments proving that, Ehrman keeps harping on the matter of what degrees people have, making distinctions that do not carry his point, and now making claims about the publishing practices of historians that aren’t even true.

Whether he is honest and well meaning or not, he’s just digging his grave deeper with this kind of reply. It is making him really look like he doesn’t know what he is talking about, can’t reason logically, avoids every substantive issue possible, and isn’t keen to accurately represent what his opponents have said. At least he redeemed himself by publishing a subsequent fuller reply to my review of his book; but still nothing in reply to my critique of his article,* which far more people will read, and thus whose mistakes and misstatements will do far more damage to public understanding of the facts and issues.

The Priapus Affair

In his second reply he addressed one single point in my review. And here I believe there is reason to suspect he is lying about the Priapus statue. In my review of his book I called him out for saying (certainly very clearly implying) that Murdock “made up” the statue at the Vatican that she presents a drawing of and says is a symbol of Peter. He clearly did not call the Vatican about it or research the claim at all. Because if he had, he would have said what any responsible scholar would have said, which is that yes, the statue she depicts is real and the drawing she provides is reasonably accurate, but her argument that it symbolizes Peter is not credible. It’s just a pagan statue of the god Priapus.

Now in his reply on this point, in “Acharya S, Richard Carrier, and a Cocky Peter (Or: “A Cock and Bull Story”),” he claims I misread him, that he never denied the statue existed nor implied that Murdock made it up. Now let’s look at what he actually wrote in the book. You be the judge:

[Acharya says] “‘Peter’ is not only ‘the rock’ but also ‘the cock’, or penis, as the word is used as slang to this day.” Here Acharya shows (her own?) hand drawing of a man with a rooster head but with a large erect penis instead of a nose, with this description: “bronze sculpture hidden in the Vatican treasure of the Cock, symbol of St. Peter” (295). There is no penis-nosed statue of Peter the cock in the Vatican or anywhere else except in books like this, which love to make things up.

That’s the sum total of what he says about this. It is quite evident to me that when he wrote this, he doubted the drawing came from any source, and believed (and here implies to the reader) that she just made it up. There is no such statue. That is what he is saying. But you can judge that for yourself. Certainly, the one thing this paragraph doesn’t say is that the statue she references does exist, is (or at one time was) at the Vatican, and looks essentially just as her drawing depicts it. It also does not say that she is merely wrong to interpret this statue as being of Peter. To the contrary, all it says is that there is no such statue, she made this up. Which is false. And betrays his failure to even check.

But he now claims he did check. Sort of–he says he saw her citations and assumed there were priapic statues; he did not actually say he checked her sources, or contacted the Vatican. Some commentators on his site have also tried claiming the statue was never at the Vatican, but their misinformation and mishandling of the sources is thoroughly exposed in an extensive comment by an observer at Murdock’s site. The object may have been moved (as I implied was possible in my original review), but Ehrman said it didn’t exist anywhere, so its location is moot. And I should add, this is precisely the kind of source analysis that Ehrman should already have worked through and be able to discuss informedly, yet in comments there he said the original commentator’s findings were “very interesting” and “very hard to get around” (and he likewise mistakenly affirms they are correct in his subsequent post), indicating he didn’t in fact do any of this research and isn’t familiar with the source materials on the statue.

Of course he now claims that he never said the statue didn’t exist. He only said a statue of Peter didn’t exist. That’s right. He parses his words hyper-literally to argue that he said the exact opposite of what he said. You see, when he said the statue didn’t exist, that it was made up, he meant a statue of Peter, and since the statue that Murdock references and presents a drawing of isn’t a statue “of Peter,” the statue doesn’t exist. Get it? This is an amusing case of faux metaphysical deepness being used as an excuse to read a sentence as saying a statue simultaneously does and doesn’t exist, depending on what one calls it. Even if that is really what he was doing when he wrote the book, this is just a variant of a masked-man fallacy (“The statue exists. She says it is a statue of Peter. No statues of Peter exist. Therefore the statue doesn’t exist.”).

It’s bad enough that, even if this is true and he really meant to say the opposite of what he appears to say, he obviously wrote it so badly he not only sucks as a writer but can’t even tell that he sucks as a writer (indeed only after repeated goading in comments did he confess that “maybe I should have phrased it differently”). But trying to use the “I suck as a writer” defense against the much worse crime of careless scholarship requires him to claim the masked man fallacy isn’t a fallacy but a perfectly reasonable way to argue. Which only convicts him (yet again) of not understanding how logic works.

Before I get to the punchline, I really must emphasize this point: even granting his excuse, the fact that the wording is completely misleading and will misinform the public still confirms my point in citing this example, that we can’t trust his book. If he so badly miswrote here that he meant the opposite of what he said, then how many other sentences in this book are as badly written and mean the opposite of what they say? Indeed, that he had to be repeatedly goaded before even admitting that this sentence does that, means he is not even capable of detecting when a sentence he has written says the opposite of what he meant. That entails we should trust his book even less. Because whatever filter is supposed to prevent him making these kind of mistakes is clearly not working in his brain.

As Kim Rottman says, an observer of this whole affair:

The issue is what the average reader of Ehrman’s book is going to think he means. Ehrman’s statement may be strictly true but I sincerely doubt that a lay person reading that sentence is going to take it to mean something like “there is such a statue but it’s not a statue of Peter.” They’re going to think he means there is no such statue. Period. They’re probably also never going to see Ehrman’s rebuttal of Carrier’s review and thus never know he corrected himself. … Then he acts like this is representative of all the examples Carrier gave; as if the rest can also be explained away as poor wording and that none of them were anything that’s relevant to his overall argument. This response wasn’t successful at all. If anything, he’s dug himself in deeper.

Indeed. Ehrman is basically saying “I was never wrong. I’m just such a phenomenally lousy writer that things I wrote appear to say what they don’t, and everyone who reads this book will often be misled in result.” Others have noted the problem entailed by his repeatedly careless and irresponsible wording of things, which can completely mislead lay readers of his book. Ophelia Benson (Butterflies & Wheels), for example, found many problems with the way Ehrman’s choice of words misleads, as well as his questionable logic (see: What Ehrman Actually Says, The Unseen, A Small Town Guy).

But I fear it may be worse than that. Because I don’t actually believe him when he says he didn’t mean to say the statue didn’t exist. I suspect that is a post-hoc rationalization that he cooked up in an attempt to save face, after his careless and irresponsible scholarship on this matter was exposed. I suspect this not only because his excuse is implausible on its face (read his original paragraph again, and ask yourself how likely it is that someone who wanted to say “the statue she depicts does exist, but it’s not a statue of Peter” would say instead what he did), and not only because he still doesn’t claim to have researched her sources or contacted the Vatican (in other words, to do what he should have done), but also because, as several people have since pointed out to me, he said in a podcast (before my review and before Murdock herself exposed him on this) that the statue did not in any sense exist.

That’s right. On Homebrewed Christianity, April 3 (2012), “Bart Ehrman on Jesus’ Existence, Apocalypticism & Holy Week,” timestamp 20:30-21:10: at this point in that podcast, Ehrman says Acharya talks about Peter the cock and shows a drawing of a statue with a penis for a nose and claims this is in the Vatican museum, at which Ehrman declares, with laughter, “It’s just made up! There is no such s[tatue]… It’s just completely made up” (emphasis mine). In context it is certainly clear he is saying there is no such statue of any kind, that her drawing is not of any actual object. (Note that I put the word “statue” in partial brackets because he speaks so quickly he didn’t complete the word but started saying what is obviously the word “statue”; he doesn’t pause to correct himself, though, he just quickly segues to the next phrase in animated conversation.)

Now, I must leave it to you to decide what’s going on here. From both his own wording in the book and this podcast, it certainly seems that Ehrman had no idea the statue actually existed, until Murdock and I hammered him on it. Notably, I had emailed him about this weeks before my review, asking what his response to Murdock was, because I was concerned it didn’t look good. I had not yet read his book, so I didn’t know the whole thing would be a travesty of these kinds of errors. Ehrman never answered me (even though he has in the past). Only after my review did he come out with the explanation that he meant to say the statue existed but wasn’t connected to Peter. And on that point I suspect he is lying.

I can give more leeway to a podcast interview, where we often forget to say things or say things incorrectly, and we don’t get to re-read and revise to improve accuracy and clarity (though this excuse doesn’t hold for a book). But here this does not look like an accidental omission or a slip of the tongue. He really does appear to think (at the time of that podcast) that the statue was completely made up, and that certainly appears to be what he says. Did he really also “mean to say” in that podcast that the statue wasn’t “completely” made up, that in fact it existed, but that Murdock was only wrong about what it symbolized? In other words, did he once again say, as if by accident, exactly the opposite of what he meant? You tell me.

[P.S. After publishing this post, it occurred to me to mention as well, that in fact he gives no argument at all in his book for why Murdock is wrong to conclude this is a statue of Peter. His only argument is that the statue doesn’t exist. Which only makes sense as a rebuttal if indeed he meant the statue wholly did not exist. Otherwise, why is she wrong to conclude it symbolizes Peter? Ehrman doesn’t say. This seems to me strong evidence that he is now lying about what he really thought and meant when writing the book. Because surely he would give a reason why she is wrong. So what reason did he give?]

The Hoffmann Madness

While still composing his fuller reply to me, Ehrman punted to R.J. Hoffmann. Ehrman evidently doesn’t know that in my opinion Hoffmann has gone insane. I’ve documented the evidence of this before. Hoffmann has a history of lying about me, for example once claiming I am in the financial employ of his enemies and was paid to attack him (arguably an outright libel). Hoffmann also has a history of reversing his opinions without explanation. He praised and loved my work before, but now says the very same work sucks. With no acknowledgment of having changed his mind or why.

Quoting myself from my previous blog on the Hoffmann matter:

It’s strangely amusing (and exactly how he started behaving once I started criticizing him–he never acted this way toward me before) that he now slags off my chapter as vacuous and irrelevant when in fact he invited me to deliver that very talk at the conference, read it in advance of the talk, and it received a standing ovation at the conference, with nary an objection from him. Quite the contrary: his response was to say “I think personally you should be the conscience or historiographer in chief!” (email of 10 Dec. 2008) and “It would be to my liking if you would take the lead-role in the historiography area…in my opinion we need someone with fresh ideas who can keep them honest about the kind of history they (often) are doing” (email of 18 Dec. 2008). (The conference was held the weekend of December 5.) He never said a negative word until now.

Hoffmann also once insisted Jesus didn’t exist. In a podcast of 2007, talking to D.J. Groethe about the Jesus Project (on Point of Inquiry), Hoffmann said “I happen to believe that Jesus of Nazareth did not exist–I happen to believe that” (timestamp 22:44; see also his remarks at timestamp 14:13-16:15). Now he insists such a notion is absurd and no respectable scholar could believe it (which evidently means he wasn’t a respectable scholar five years ago). He also in that podcast defended the dying and rising god mytheme: “gods and sons of gods populating the world, dying, rising, saving the world, which we’ve known about now for the better part of 200 years…it’s not new” but is established scholarship (timestamp 4:20).

In the post Ehrman punts to, Hoffmann tells another lie about me, a really weird one in fact: “He [i.e. me] is about to re-publish (he had vanity published it already) his ‘research’ on this subject with Prometheus Books.” I can’t fathom what book he means, as there are only two he could mean: one (On the Historicity of Jesus Christ) that hasn’t even been completed and won’t be published until next year (I have never published a book arguing Jesus didn’t exist; that will be my first one), which does not consist of material I have published before but is almost entirely new research; and Proving History, which was scheduled for late April release but dropped early and is available now.

If he means the first of these, he would be lying about its contents, since he has no way of knowing what those contents are, or that they duplicate anything I’ve published before (and since I haven’t published on the historicity of Jesus before, that would be impossible). If he means the second of these, then he is really shooting himself in the face here. Do you know what the “vanity press” was that previously published my work before I published it with Prometheus? Prometheus. That’s right. And you know what book that was? Sources of the Jesus Tradition. Do you know who edited that book, and selected the chapters to include in it? R.J. Hoffmann.

Yep. That’s right. Do the math on that. That chapter was also, incidentally, a paper I delivered at an academic conference organized by R.J. Hoffmann and to which I was invited by R.J. Hoffmann.

It’s shit like this that convinces me Hoffmann is off his rocker. Ehrman might want to steer clear of him in future.

Rhetoric as a Means to Avoid Argument

In his article on the Priapus case, Ehrman says things like this:

One of the things Carrier laments is that I don’t deal with the various mythicists all at length – even (this is a special point he presses) those who cannot be taken seriously (he names Freke and Gandy). My view is that there is no reason to take seriously people who cannot be taken seriously: a few indications of general incompetence is good enough.

First, note that about his scant treatment of bad mythicists I actually said “That alone I could live with (although I would have rather he not addressed them at all if he wasn’t going to address them competently).” Notice how the paragraph above assumes I didn’t say this, and fails to address what I actually said (that if he was going to just dismiss them so briefly, he should have done so competently or not at all).

But then notice how he asserts a principle in his own defense (“a few indications of general incompetence is good enough” reason to dismiss an entire book as unworthy of further attention) which is precisely the principle I applied to his book (I found more than a few indications of general incompetence). Which leads me to wonder: does he regard his treatment of them as an inappropriate personal attack that they didn’t deserve? Or as simply a demonstration that the books he examined are incompetently researched and incompetently written, a perfectly valid thing to point out and say, and exactly what I did (but that he in his response attacks me for doing).

But even more alarming than his misrepresenting what I said, avoiding answering what I did say, and applying a double standard in his own defense, is the rhetorical trick he just pulled here. Did you notice it? Let me walk you through it. He says “One of the things Carrier laments is that I don’t deal with the various mythicists all at length,” and then adds an aside that I “even” say so regarding the bad mythicists (although, as we just saw, that is not exactly what I took him to task for). Then he gives a defense for not addressing the bad mythicists (beyond cursorily). And then…he moves on. Wait a minute. Where is his defense for failing to properly address the good mythicists?

Here is what I said, regarding the good mythicists:

He treats our arguments only selectively, never comprehensively, and I never once saw him actually engage directly with any single mythicist case for their theory of Christian origins–as in, describing the theory correctly, listing the evidence its proponent offers for each element, and then evaluating that evidence and the logical connection between it and their conclusion. You won’t find this done once, anywhere in this book, for any author.

On his failure to do that, Ehrman has nothing to say. But the one failure of this book I said I could live with, that he defends. Really.

Is this where historicity is going? Is this how we are to be treated? And Ehrman has the gall to say we are the ones behaving inappropriately?

Closing Nonsense

Ehrman ends his defense of the Priapus debacle with some rather astonishing remarks. First, he says:

Let me say, in addition, that this comment of mine was made very much in passing.  No major point was being made, other than that Acharya S was not a scholar who could be trusted (in part because she is not a scholar) in the context of eleven rather egregious mistakes that I picked out, more or less at random, in her book. Carrier does not object to any of the other ten. Which means that he appears to be on board with all eleven. That means that his cavil has no effect on my overall argument at this point.

First of all, dismissing this as a remark in passing that didn’t make a major point is extremely disingenuous. It is not a passing remark but an integral piece of evidence he produces to argue a conclusion so significant it justifies him dismissing the rest of Acharya’s work. That is not only a major point, it’s the major point of his entire treatment of her. Secondly, I explicitly said I was only producing examples, not comprehensively vetting every statement he made, so for him to conclude I agree with everything else he said about Acharya is obviously fallacious reasoning, and again demonstrates he doesn’t know how logic works.

I actually found two other misleading statements among his list of evidence of Acharya’s incompetence. I do agree with his conclusion (I do not think her work can be trusted on this subject, as I also conclude now of Ehrman’s work on this same subject), but I am already well known for saying that, and that wasn’t the issue I was raising in my review. Rather, my point was that, if he was going to treat the bad mythicists at all, we needed a book that did a competent job demonstrating the unreliability of work like this. And he did not give us one.

Since he brings it up, let me list the other problems I found here (written in the margins of my copy of his book, p. 24):

(1) Ehrman’s statement that there weren’t “many councils” to decide the NT canon is, read literally, false. There were in fact several councils ruling on the canon, and indeed the canon was never truly settled until the 16th century. Someone who tutored under Metzger, who extensively documented these facts, should know that. I can only assume he meant to say that the canon proposed by Athanasius in 367 (in a letter, not a council ruling) was repeatedly affirmed by every subsequent council convened to decide on the canon (although the fact that they had to keep meeting to do that means there were repeated attempts to change it). Acharya’s own characterization of the matter might also be accused of being misleading. But Ehrman’s wording is going to seriously mislead and misinform the public even more, not only as to the actual history of the canon, but also as to Acharya’s knowledge of the facts.

(2) Ehrman correctly says the Acts of Pilate was never canonized, but this conceals from the reader the fact (which could be what Acharya’s argument was actually premising) that it was by many regarded as authoritative. Tertullian, for instance, cites it as authoritatively establishing facts about Jesus, which is late second century, and thus relevant to the matter of how well Christians could be trusted at the time to really tell the difference between reliable and unreliable source materials when aggregating their canon. Thus here Ehrman doesn’t say anything that’s literally false, but his statement does mislead the reader on the most relevant point Acharya may have actually been making.

Note also that these are just details I detected right away. His other remarks against her are true as stated, but I did not actually check in each case whether he accurately represented what she said. From my experience here and with the whole book, I cannot implicitly trust that he has. Which only further illustrates the overall point of my review.

Ehrman concludes with this:

Carrier appears to want to show that he is very much a better historian than I am. This is a repeated theme throughout his scathing critique. I, frankly, did not realize that this was supposed to be a contest between the two of us, and am not interested in the question of who wins. My interest in the book is to discuss whether Jesus existed. I give mounds of evidence to show why he did, and to show why mythicists’ views are almost certainly wrong. The majority of Carrier’s ”errors in fact” are this kind of cavil, in which he sees trees (often incorrectly) while missing the forest.

Notice the rhetorical trick here: “the majority” of my points are a list of errors, therefore I missed the point of all the evidence he presented. Go read my review. You will notice I made a particular point of addressing the latter by demonstrating the doomed fallacies in his methodology. So in fact I did not miss the forest. I deal with the trees in part one, the forrest in part two, all in the same post. He says nothing about that. You decide who then to trust on this issue.

It is also amusing that he uses the quantity of my examples of his mistakes as an argument to dismiss them as taking up too much of my article, when in fact I am sure he would have accused me of having too few examples if I’d given fewer. In other words, I made a general point about the unreliability of the book and gave a large enough number of examples to make sure the point was solidly proved. And he then charges this as a failing in my review. Once again demonstrating that he doesn’t know how logic works.

He also returns to the ad hominem deflection here, by alleging I am making this into a pointless contest over who is the better scholar. Yet he is the one who made it about that. As we saw in his article about the Thompson affair (and as I showed regarding his HuffPo piece), he attacked my credentials and argued that he is qualified to discuss this issue and I am not (likewise Thompson and others). For him to now say he is not interested in this comparison is massively disingenuous. It’s his comparison, which he has pressed several times, and it was that that forced me to respond by pointing out that the facts seem to point to the reverse. For him to claim I am the one who brought this comparison up is simply absurd. All I did was take his own argument and defend it properly: instead of making fallacious and irrelevant points about the hyper-specifics of what degrees we have (as he did), I tested the comparison he himself started by actually looking at the quality of our work on this subject. A comparison in which he came out very badly.

I do not see this as a competition between us as to who is the better scholar, but as simply a matter of who to trust: someone who presents carefully researched, carefully worded, carefully reasoned work on this subject, with a minimum of mistakes (because as I’ve said, I make them, too), or someone who doesn’t.

[For my reply to his “fuller response” see Round Two.]

* After I wrote this, he responded in April of 2014 to one trivial item, and that disastrously.

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