Indeed. I concur.

There is even more than that, of course, like my entire chapter on Docetism, and my treatment of the Gregor studies.

But it is evident the reviewers didn’t even read the book. They cobbled together a subjective list of reasons at the last minute that didn’t correspond to the contents of the book at all. We cover that point by peer reviewing the peer reviewers with several peers on MythVision. So folks can get an objective expert third party account of how egregiously impertinent and unprofessional they were, and how they found no errors in the book to correct, the only actual point of peer review.

Simeon and Levi is just overwrought hogwash.

Extensive evidence and argument establishes that comparison, both here and under peer review.

So, can you point to any fallacy or factual error that converts these otherwise solid arguments into “hogwash”?

Finally, the attack on Luke as just making things up for Jesus to say is bizarre.

It’s actually mainstream, the opposite of bizarre. All mainstream scholars (including Bermejo-Rubio and Meggitt) agree Luke (as all the Evangelists) made things up for Jesus to say. The only disputes that exist are as to which things and why. And the widest consensus is that most of what the Gospels claim Jesus said is made-up and not what he actually said.

You also seem unaware that the mainstream consensus (again on a very strong basis of evidence) is that Luke is “close” to Mark and Matthew (or Q, if you believe in that) because he directly copied them, and occasionally edited their text as he pleased—sometimes artistically, sometimes to suit his specific agenda.

You also seem confused. I have never said the Gospel authors “invented Christianity.”

So you seem way behind the curve here. You do not appear to know what you are talking about.

In any event, you need to identify flaws in an argument, not just claim they exist. So your comment is not only uninformed, it’s useless. It ignores the mainstream consensus, which is the baseline we should be operating from. And it ignores the actual arguments at issue (their structure and premises). So it is completely unhelpful to our readers. You should endeavor to improve on both points.

But the comparison to Simeon and Levi is just overwrought hogwash.

Finally, the attack on Luke as just making things up for Jesus to say is bizarre. Luke was almost certainly a Greek convert after the events of the life of Jesus. The Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles are historical efforts by Luke to understand the history of the life of Jesus of Nazareth and the expansion of the early Christian church. He, like any historian, is going to pick and choose what events he emphasizes in order to tell the story he wants to tell. That is just the work of history. It is why a book about how Thomas Jefferson was great and another about how he was terrible are equally valid products of historical research.

What is interesting in Luke is how close, but not exact, his quotes are to the other Gospels. Far from suggesting he was just making stuff up, it suggests he was doing historical research independent from the already existing Gospel texts of Matthew and Mark. Luke could have just quoted them directly and been done with it. Instead, he seems to have investigated the events himself, interviewed people on his own, and produced a text that is extremely similar to the other Gospels as a result. At the very least this tells us that there was a powerful and well established oral history of Jesus before the writing of the Gospel texts, situated well back into the first century AD.

None of this is revolutionary. Historians have largely accepted the idea that Christianity wasn’t invented by the Gospel writers. But it does show us that the story and teachings of Jesus were not invented later in the second century, but are of first century origin, extremely close to the life of Jesus of Nazareth. Which is extremely close in terms of ancient history.

Richard is right, of course, but you need to know that parthenogenesis in humans can only result in female offspring.

More recently, anther scroll seems to have revealed the location of Plato’s burial.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/platos-elusive-grave-located-after-bionic-eye-penetrates-2000-year-old-papyrus-180984221/

Jeremy has pretty well nailed it.

This is typical I find. They don’t actually read the text they claim to be responding to or describing, and what they skim in it they make no effort to even understand. The result is impertinent timewastes like this. In all the precise ways Jeremy just documented.

The question now is: why is this all that we ever get across an entire ten years at bat?

There does not seem to be any honest defense of historicity to make.

And that alone pretty much kills it as a sound model.

It’s a zombie theory now. In every real sense dead, but still shambling along.

Quite a good overview article for the most part – but it completely drops the ball as soon as it tries to grapple with Carrier’s arguments in even the most minimal detail.

Their own methodology has been criticised, not least their use of Bayesian methods. Bizarrely, Carrier offered odds to his readers

Bizarre indeed : a probabilistic approach developing probabilities for its conclusions.

concluding that the likelihood of a real-life Jesus was no better than 33 per cent (and perhaps as low as 0.0008 per cent) depending on the estimates used for the computation, which illustrates the wooliness of this use of Bayes’ theorem.

Or rather, which illustrates quite precisely the wooliness of the available evidence.

Carrier and his comrades do a fine job poking holes in the methods of historicists but what they offer in exchange seems flimsy. In particular, they have found no clear evidence from the decades before the gospels to show that anyone believed Jesus was not human.

Bzzzzt. There’s copious evidence they believed he was human. The question is ‘where’.

Each reference in the epistles can be explained away as referring to a celestial saviour, but it all feels like a bit of a stretch. Paul frequently refers to the crucifixion and says Jesus was ‘born of a woman’ and ‘made from the sperm of David, according to the flesh’.

Bzzzzt. At least the author got ‘made’ right regarding David – but (allegorical mothers aside) why ‘born’ of a woman here, when Paul uses the same word in both cases?

But of course, no mention that Carrier counts both of these as evidence for historicity.

He also refers to James, ‘the brother of Christ’.

Bzzzzt. Brother of ‘the Lord’. Like all Christians, including Paul himself. And once again counted toward historicity.

Using these examples, Ehrman says there’s ‘good evidence that Paul understood Jesus to be a historical figure’.

Bzzzzt. There’s also good evidence Paul understood Satan to be a historical figure.

Which was certainly the view of the writer/s of Mark, a gospel begun less than two decades after Paul’s letters were written.

Bzzzzt. There’s nothing in Mark that makes it ‘certain’ its author(s) thought their Jesus to be a historical figure, rather than a character in their fiction.

And that second last sentence is where the author shows that he hasn’t read OHJ, nor even a reasonable summary of its arguments. He’s going by Ehrman’s shabby rebuttal, which misrepresents Carrier’s arguments in almost every respect.

Poor show, even for an overview article such as this.

Thank you. That’s a good example of the point.

This “getting it” could work in a spanish translation, as “quien tenga capacidad” meaning “who has capacity/capability” can imply monetary and physical means, but also mental or intellectual understanding.

Interesting how in the attempt to expand reach through translations, meaningful wordplay and phrasing gets lost.