As I understand it, he has refused even ten thousand dollars to debate me. So, sounds like not. But if someone in his circle persuades him to, I’d do a written debate with him for free.

I see that Bart has announced his retirement from academia, and that he will consequently have a lot more time for his non-University pursuits in the field.

I wonder if that makes room for a moderated written debate on historicity?

See Blom on the Testimonium Taciteum. I also discuss the real scholarship on this in On the Historicity of Jesus, Ch. 8.10 and Hitler Homer Bible Christ, Ch. 20.

Note that Christian apologetics websites are predominately bullshit. You shouldn’t trust them. You can tell, when they make wild claims yet cite no sources for any of them; and never actually discuss the real arguments they claim to be responding to.

That website for example is full of false claims. And yet it cites no sources for any of its claims. Standard. For example, it claims Tacitus was a perfectly reliable historian who always checked his facts. This is false. All studies of his work point out he was frequently prone to reporting rumors and legends and making mistakes, especially in matters scandalous like this, where he wouldn’t have any reliable sources and wouldn’t care if he got any of it wrong (see, for example, Michael Grant’s Greek and Roman Historians: Information and Misinformation; Sinclair’s Tacitus the Sententious Historian; and the Cambridge and Blackwell Companions to Tacitus; there is also study due out later this year that will probably cover this point well: Bram ten Berge’s Writing Imperial History: Tacitus from Agricola to Annales).

It also straw mans the counterarguments, so it is avoiding the real arguments and evidence against them. Also standard. For example, nowhere on that page is the actual multiply-peer-reviewed case against the passage ever even mentioned, much less answered (to see the actual, real discussion, see my discussion on Blom).

I’m a starter in this field and love reading about such things. I appreciate many of your logical way of thinking. Especially, I wanted to hear your opinion about why Tacitus’s mention could be forgery. I’d write my reasons why It’s not a forgery, but I found a great link where I couldn’t say it better.

https://crossexamined.org/tacitus-ancient-roman-historian-reports-on-jesus/

Which one do you not agree and why ? Thank you in advance.

I have since read and reviewed How Jesus Became God.

Excellent. Thank you.

I think we can exclude that from the grammatical construction of Galatians 1:19 (as explained in Ch. 11.10 of OHJ). Whatever “Brothers of the Lord” are, they are not Apostles. This is specifically what Paul is saying: owing to an unusual grammatical construction most translators gloss over and render incorrectly, Paul means he met at that time only one Apostle, Cephas, and someone in some other category, a Brother of the Lord.

The phrase “James the brother of the Lord” is no more restrictive than the phrase “Peter the apostle.” Does the latter mean that Peter was an apostle to the exclusion of other claimants? It would seem to me that “the brothers of the Lord” were a specific group of leaders in Jerusalem that were important in the establishment of the Christian faith. Perhaps these are those that Paul called “pillars” and “those who seem to be something.” It is entirely possible that these leaders were a subset of the apostles, those who claimed to have had a visionary experience of the risen Christ.