Sorry, I meant to say that growing old without consent is considered immoral on this theory. Still bat shit crazy. Not sure who you are supposed to give consent to nor am I aware of any evidence of this mysterious law of nature that determines morality. I think he finds this theory appealing because it’s probably the only secular theory where morality is objective.

I’ll tell you why I think he’s worth debating. He has a subscriber baser of about 30k, which isn’t great but it’s not terrible either. He has some influence. He’s been invited on multiple secular YT channels, like Mythvision and Pinecreek, etc., and has made a tone of appearances on Modern-Day-Debate. He’s been around a lot and I have seen comments on YT call for a debate with you so I think it would attract some decent amount of attention.

Moreover, he’s debated on the same team as Matt Dillahunty https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lcp2l8IsJA&ab_channel=Modern-DayDebate and has beaten Aaron Ra in a debate https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2JSauTWOeM&ab_channel=Modern-Day Debate. He’s skilled debater. I wouldn’t dwell too much on his lack of credentials in philosophy.

However, I would understand why you wouldn’t want to debate him on the historicity of Jesus since I don’t think he knows how to do proper historical research. Perhaps you would get frustrated by his ignorance but on the other hand you could educate his audience and anyone else watching the debate.

But at the end of the day you can be as selective as you want and do what you think is worth your while.

That certainly sounds weird. But I am unlikely to debate moral theory with a transphobic racist (however mild of one he might be). That suggests a catastrophically broken epistemology. Debates with such people are a waste of time generally.

So there would need to be a particularly good reason why he’s worth any such bother. And I am not aware of one. He is not qualified in any pertinent field; he hasn’t published anything properly academic; he doesn’t have a reputation for being especially empirically reliable or sharp in his logic; he isn’t an influencial voice with a six-or-seven-figure subscriber base (and thus whose audience is worth the vexation of reaching). So, why would anyone debate him on anything?

I haven’t been given a good answer to that question yet.

I would be surprised if TJump wanted to debate you on the historicity of Jesus. He’s a great debater but to debate historicity/mythicism requires thorough historical research which I don’t think he’s done or even knows how to do. If you ever did debate him on this topic, I predict he would bring up the concensus a lot.

I’d rather see you debate him on SJ or philosophy; particularly moral philosophy since he’s a proponent of a really bizzare moral theory (it hypothsizes that anything that happens to you without your consent is always immoral, and that this is based on some undiscovered law of nature. On this theory, even growing old is immoral).

Yeah, what bothers me about this so much is that we’ve all seen this use by Christians . The way the Amish call each other Brother, “Christian brothers”, Mormons… this fictive kinship idea isn’t one of the ones that died an early death for being inconvenient, it’s stuck around for so long. Even today , if a Christian says that they met someone’s brother, you actually may need to check, especially if they’re in one of the more extreme groups. So the idea that, early on, when that idea would be especially pronounced and people would be getting used to it when it was a fringe cult, Paul basically had to say “Yeah, I met no Christian, except Brother James, you know that weird guy”… it’s not implausible at all. Within the context of the conversation, it actually makes no sense that Paul was talking about anything but a fictive brother, because Paul would have had to defend that a biological brother of Jesus couldn’t have given him any spoilers. But Richard counts this as evidence for the historicist position a fortiori.

Plus maybe you get Bart Ehrman to come on and grind his ax again!

Note that the Judas story being true entails the twelve are the Disciples. So from within the framework of anyone arguing Judas was historical, the twelve must have included him. That is why the two data points are incompatible (they at least strain against each other and thus lower the probability of the Judas story).

Of course I don’t believe either is true. That is what opens up the possibility that the twelve are something other than depicted in the Gospels.

IMO, they were a leadership council for the sect Peter was heading or took over to sell the new gospel, on the same lines as the council of twelve we know led the community at Qumran.

More speculatively, even at Qumran, they probably were meant to represent the heads of the twelve tribes, to reconstitute Israel after the apocalypse, and this may have been a common feature of counter-cultural fringe apocalyptic sects generally. Mark then invented “twelve Disciples” from this concept and the line in Paul.

Maybe. There is also a click mongering effect. It has become fashionable (it draws clicks and subs) to be a rabid anti-mythicist atheist. Gnostic Informant practically said this is what he was doing; DadPool might be chasing the same dragon.

No such debate has ever occurred or been scheduled. I think this is a telephone game that started with TJump wanting to debate me. If he ever even asked me about the prospect it was so many years ago I have no recollection.

I am on the fence as to whether I even would debate him, however. He’s something of a manosphere bigot (his views on race and gender are definitely in that vein). I haven’t seen any demonstration of his having any relevant qualifications in this subject to warrant setting that aside. So I’d have to be convinced it was worth any bother.

I think you are conflating two different uses of the term “consensus.” There is the “brute consensus” which includes the votes of raging fundamentalists. And there is the “mainstream consensus” which excludes them.

I usually qualify my statement as “mainstream” consensus, i.e. scholars who aren’t fundamentalists (so I am not including most scholars, but only referencing secular and liberal scholars, the ones who write most of the mainstream reference books and textbooks in the field, who populate the Westar Institute, e.g. the Jesus Seminar, who run the SBL, etc.); and I am only speaking of consensus as to what history can establish.

For example, the late great Raymond Brown was a devout Catholic but made clear the resurrection of Jesus could not be established as a fact of history through historical methods, it could only be believed on faith. This contrasts with demagogues like William Lane Craig who falsely claim the resurrection can be proved with standard historical methods. Many scholars who believe in the resurrection will admit that that cannot be done; that, as Brown maintained, it could only be an article of faith.

Those are mainstream Christian scholars. Many of them are included in my list of forty scholars who concede doubting even historicity altogether is credible; they don’t mean they believe Jesus didn’t exist, they are simply honestly describing the state of historical evidence, and correctly maintaining their beliefs on faith or other evidence, not historical.

Some scholars will straddle that line because they know they have to to be taken seriously, e.g. Craig Evans will admit doubting the resurrection is a credible, mainstream conclusion of history, while still attempt to argue for it on historical grounds, keeping the two activities distinct. That is also him trying to participate in the mainstream of history, even as in fact he is a fundamentalist apologist, and thus really a propagandist. So I would count his non-explicitly-apologetics work as mainstream (though warrant caution as to its biases). Everything else is propaganda.

Mike Licona means the same thing I do: he is not counting fundamentalists. He is describing the mainstream consensus. Which is at least that the resurrection is doubtable on historical evidence alone (so, Licona might have counted Brown as a doubter of the point even though he believed in the resurrection, because he held one could only do so apart from the historical evidence).

Ehrman is engaging in hyperbole (as he often does), but there is a legitimate point under that, which is that if you ask about the “brute consensus,” he’s in the minority, and even if you ask about the “mainstream consensus,” he’s still in the minority with respect to belief, and thus with respect to biases, but that does not mean he is in the minority in respect to admitting historical evidence is insufficient to justify belief. Well half of Christian scholars in my observation admit that; and argue their belief requires non-historical evidence (faith, religious experience, theological arguments).

As to “40 out of how many” I do not know of any data by which to answer that question. And you’d have to specify a metric. Who counts? Relevant PhD’s only? What kinds of PhD’s count? Are we including propagandists (fundamentalists and apologists), or only mainstreamers? Are we including fence-straddlers? (propagandists who try to separate that activity from their “mainstream” work)

The ratio also won’t be helpful because most scholars don’t know anything about this debate, and most by far have never even read the pertinent studies (now Carrier and Lataster), so over 99% of scholars have no usable opinion on this matter (see my discussion in On Evaluating Arguments from Consensus).

The only ratio that would be informative is the ratio among scholars who read the studies; or the larger ratio among scholars who are at least aware of enough of the evidence on both sides to have any useful opinion at all, but lack a propagandistic bias (i.e. non-fundamentalists and maybe not even most apologists).

Indeed, David Fitzgerald (in Mything in Action) determined at least a third of Biblical scholars are under contractual obligation to never admit doubts about anything (lest they be fired and disbarred from their professional societies). So we definitely have to exclude their “opinions” in these matters. And since schools and scholars hide this fact as much as possible (Fitzgerald also documents that), we have no way of finding out truly who these scholars are (and thus who actually has the academic freedom even, much less the personal objectivity, to publicly admit even the possibility of their faith being false). Indeed, it is difficult even to find out which scholars are even just believing Christians (much less of what variety, liberal or fundamentalist). Because this information is actively concealed a lot of the time. There is certainly no vetted database to consult.

So data like that the Society of Biblical Literature has a membership of 8300 people is useless. A lot of those are amateurs and undergraduates, and a lot in turn are fundamentalists, and not every qualified scholar is a member (although the total probably is in this order of magnitude, i.e. thousands, not tens of), and almost none will know much or anything about these debates, much less have read the studies so as to have any usable opinion on them (this is true even of the resurrection; most scholars, even believers, don’t concern themselves with a historical study of that subject).

You might be closer to utility using the Westar Institute Fellows as a metric (not to be confused with their Associates, which can be almost anyone). Those tend to be mainstreamers (many fundamentalists boycott joining the organization for that reason), and you have to have some real qualifications to be among them. This is more popularly known as the Jesus Seminar, although that’s a misnomer (that was just their inaugural project, which was completed long ago; they are on other projects now). I’m a fellow. But its fellows number only around 140 and so are only an elite sub-sample of any pertinent population. Ehrman, for example, has never bothered to join (probably too busy to care).

Note I have a paragraph on that alternative approach (saying the witnesses are made up).

This article isn’t about arguing that point. It’s about how any such point would be argued—by an apologist rather than a rational, objective, honest scholar.

My own view of what Paul said and meant is much more complicated (I think Paul wrote “all the brethren at Pentecost,” not “more than five hundred brethren,” and that he was referring to an ecstasy such as Acts 2 depicts, indeed probably the very event Paul means). But it doesn’t matter. Because the point here is that no matter what argument you made, the Christian responses would be identical, and reflect the exact same strategies DadPool deploys on defending historicity that they deploy defending the resurrection.